Standards

The DC Board of Elections publishes a voter guide that includes brief statements from each of the candidates. Here's one from a Ward Eight candidate for the State Board of Education. Ward Eight is the poorest area in the city. 

The statement of a candidate that declares my information deemed necessary to protect the qualified experiences of/and the integrity for the School Board's Participation are the 10 years of experience Teaching in the Public Schools and the priorities which process the stature of qualified participation to support the focus of the school's mission and accomplishments that defend the appropriate education-with rights to an adequate education.

Another begins like this:

Hello, I am...an inspiring, intelligent, phenomenal Washington with great ambitions, infinite achievements and life long experiences. I was a student in the DC Public School system.

Let me be the first to note that this post is immediately preceeded by one in which I condemn the practice of mocking DCPS employees whose jobs are much harder and more important than mine. But there's nothing funny about this, not for DC teachers, graduates, or students currently enrolled. It's deadly serious -- we need to do better. 

Helping

A couple of weeks ago, Eduwonkette wrote a long snarky post about job openings in the NYC and DC school chancellor's offices, challenging her readers to propose absurd titles like "Senior Finder of Efficiencies," "Senior Blackberry Correspondent" etc. It included the following:

Do all superintendents of big districts get drivers? I had no idea. But just think about the splashy, tell-all book you could write! I'm out of the running as I have no license, but you can find the job posting here. Or if you're in the market for something different, you might apply for the "Critical Response Team."

As it happens, I spent some time at the DCPS offices earlier this year, following members of the Critical Response Team around to see how they work. You can read the story I wrote about it here. In short, their job--their only job--is to help people, all day long, from the crack of dawn until late at night. Most of the people they help are teachers and parents.  They also work with administrators, vendors, members of the general public--anyone who picks up the phone or writes an email, they listen to and try to assist. As a result, they deal with literally every thorny, intractable, heartbreaking problem a struggling urban school district can encounter. They work much harder than any Ivy League graduate student, think thank analyst, or blogger I could name. They deserve appreciation, not cheap mockery at the hands of people who should, but don't, know better. 

A Fox Guarding The Hen House

Paul Basken's article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education does a great job of laying out the conflicts of interest and perverse incentives in the student loan industry that can lead to unsavory business practices.

As the article describes, a former Sallie Mae employee has filed a lawsuit alleging that the company engaged in fraudulent debt collection practices resulting in ballooning debt for some students. At the heart of the issue is the increasingly interwoven relationships between guarantee agencies and loan companies. Guarantee agencies are supposed to be independent entities that oversee the collection activities of loan companies like Sallie Mae in order to protect both students and the federal government from fraud. But, at least in Sallie Mae's case, this relationship has gotten a little too close for comfort:

Most guarantee agencies are independent of the lenders they oversee. Sallie Mae, however, has a contractual arrangement with USA Funds, the nation’s largest guarantee agency, that gives Sallie Mae extensive financial and operational control over the guarantor that oversees its work. USA Funds, with only about 75 employees of its own, pays Sallie Mae about $250-million a year to provide hundreds of workers to perform most of its guarantor operations. That effectively has left Sallie Mae since 2000 in the role of overseeing its own lending activities.

Whether the lawsuit is legitimate or not, it's clear that the safeguards and oversight in the federal loan system designed to protect students and taxpayers have broken down, putting everyone at risk. And this guarantee agency-loan company entanglement is only the beginning - to understand the extent of the troubles, read the whole article here.

Governor Palin and Higher Education

Over the last seven weeks, numerous people have tried to find meaning in Governor Palin's college career. Being mindful of the likely 13-day expiration date on this particular conversation, let me summarize and offer a few thoughts. We know that over five years Palin came in contact with five different colleges, enrolled in four, and transferred four different times before earning a bachelor's degree in 1987. The order goes like this: 

1) University of Hawaii - Hilo (never enrolled)

2) Hawaii Pacific University

3) North Idaho College

4) University of Idaho

5) Matanuska-Susitna Community College, Alaska

6) University of Idaho (2nd time)

Some have suggested that there's a relationship between the relatively non-selective, non-elite nature of these institutions and Palin's much-noted struggles in television interviews. That's nonsense; lots of articulate people graduate from public universities. Sarah Vowell graduated from Montana State, and let's face it: Idaho, Montana, tomato, tomahto. 

The Los Angeles Times made a big deal about the fact that nobody at those colleges seems to remember much about Sarah Heath circa 1982-87, as if that's somehow strange or even vaguely sinister. As Sherman Dorn rightly notes, it's actually completely typical. Public universities tend to be large and impersonal and often do a poor job of engaging their students. "I don't remember her," said Roy Atwood, Palin's academic advisor at the university. I guarantee you my academic advisor doesn't remember me, because we never once met. He (she?) was just a name and a phone number that I could call if I wanted advice, and I never did. Colleges that have succeeded in boosting student retention rates talk a lot about "intrusive" advising, reaching out to students proactively, but that clearly wasn't happen back at the U of I in the mid-80s. 

The LA Times also notes:

Palin's parents -- a high school science teacher and school secretary -- could not afford the college tours so common today. Their four children were expected to, and did, work their way through college."We didn't have the luxury of spending a week driving around visiting universities to see what they're like," said Kim "Tilly" Ketchum, a high school friend. "We were looking at pictures of campuses."

Palin and Ketchum picked the University of Hawaii at Hilo from a brochure. Only after arriving in Hawaii did they realize that Hilo had rainfall approaching 100 inches a year. "The rain," Ketchum said, "was disturbing.

This is right, except for the part about "so common today." Remember those weekends when you and your parents spent all that time driving around visiting colleges, getting on each other's nerves? Most people don't, because most students don't apply to lots of colleges, and that's as true now as it was then. In this sense, Palin is just guilty of being an average American college student. (And it does rain a lot in Hilo; I've been there. The Big Island of Hawaii is the most climactically diverse place on the face of the Earth. In a few hours you can drive from the beach through a desert that gets less than 10 inches of rain per year, over a 14,000 foot lava-spewing volcano, through a rain forest, to an area that gets over 125 inches of rain per year--Hilo.) 

Governor Palin worked in food service jobs over summers to help pay college expenses, and again that's very typical; most college students work. Most don't make money from beauty pageants, but heck, that sure sounds a lot better than the night shift at Kinko's. 

Palin's transfer activity was definitely above the norm, but as Sara Goldrick-Rab notes, it's hardly unheard of, and that includes transferring down from a four-year institution to a two-year community college, which happens more than you might think. What's a little more unusual is then getting back to a four-year institution and managing to complete the whole process within five years. Only 41 percent of all students who start college at a four-year institution earn a bachelor's degree within five years, whether they transfer or not. 

This suggests an above-average level of discipline and determination on the governor's part, which certainly isn't inconsistent with her subsequent career. As to what she learned there--who knows? Nobody really understands how much students at any college learn, since as a rule colleges don't try to measure that sort of thing, and if they do they don't make the results available to the public. In any event, it all happened over 20 years ago, and like most other professional people her age, most of what Governor Palin has--or hasn't--learned in life came outside the walls of an educational institution.  

In other words, Governor Palin's college career doesn't really tell us much about her, other than reinforcing her goal-oriented-ness and supporting her claims of being in touch with the average American experience. 

Double-Take

Kevin yesterday posted a nice piece on Colorado's innovative new strategy of rating schools both by the percentages of students who meet the state's achievement standards in math and reading (required by NCLB) and by individual student achievement gains over the course of a school year (a "value-added" approach).

Combining the two school-rating strategies is the only way to accurately reflect schools' contributions to student learning while preserving the law's commendable commitment to getting low performers up to proficiency and giving schools meaningful incentives to improve the achievement of all students.

Doug Harris of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and I discuss the two-track accountability concept in a commentary we did for Education Week a couple of weeks ago.

Dreary News on Student Debt

The Project on Student Debt just released its third annual report on student debt trends, this one looking at the Class of 2007. Not surprisingly, student debt loads continue to rise—the report found that debt levels rose 6 percent from 2006 to 2007 to an average debt load of $21,900. This report, though, includes a data point that should worry students more than just the cost of college or their total student loan bill: while debt levels rose 6 percent for recent graduates, salaries only rose by 3 percent.

It hasn’t always been this way—in the past, salaries helped to mitigate the impact of increases in student debt. According to this report by NCES, while debt levels rose substantially between 1993 and 2000, the monthly payments students were making didn’t take up a significantly higher percent of their salaries, mostly because salary increases were able to keep pace with debt levels. But that’s old data, and it’s likely that students’ debt burdens have increased recently and will only get worse as the economy slows down.

According to FinAid.org’s loan repayment calculator you need a minimum salary of $30,243.60 to afford to repay the average $21,900 loan of a student graduating in 2007. Considering that the average starting salary of a liberal arts graduate in 2007 was $30,502, a lot of graduates will need to consider alternative repayment options to afford their monthly payments. Fortunately federal loans provide those options—income based repayment schedules, extended repayment terms, and graduated repayment. Unfortunately, private student loans don’t, and as students continue to rely on private loan debt, a larger share of their monthly income will be going to pay for their college education.

And alternative repayment plans aren't intended for the average student. According to this NCES report, only 11 percent of 1993 graduates repaid their loans with an alternative repayment plan. The remaining students were on the typical, 10-year schedule. Longer repayment schedules are a great option for students entering low-paying careers, but they also have their downsides—for one, students are repaying loans for up to 30 years of their working lives, they end up paying more in interest, and longer repayment schedules have the potential to make the federal loan program more expensive by extending the amount of time the federal government is subsidizing student interest rates.

As the credit crunch worries higher education administrators, parents, and students about access to loans to attend college, the larger economic woes we’re facing should worry the country about students’ abilities to meeting their growing debt obligations. College graduates are supposed to be one of the biggest economic engines in this country—excessive student loan debt hinders graduates’ abilities to fulfill that role.

A Thousand Words

The graph above shows a group of schools in Denver, Colorado, courtesy of the State Department of Education. The numbers have some interesting implications for how to think about poverty, achievement, growth, and accountability in K-12 education.

Each of the circles represents an individual school. The size of the circle is a function of enrollment--the bigger the circle, the more students enrolled. The color is tied to poverty, with blue schools having less than 20 percent of students eligible for free or reduced price lunch, red schools more than 80 percent, and green, yellow and orange in between.  

The Y-axis represents a snapshot of achievement, based on the percent of students who scored as proficient or advanced on the state test. Schools closer to the top scored the highest. The X-axis represents yearly growth in achievement for the students in the school, in percentile terms, compared to other students who started the year in the same place academically. Schools farther to the right on the X-axis saw more achievement growth than most of their peers. 

What does the graph suggest? Several things. First, a clear relationship between poverty and overall achievement. All of the lowest-poverty schools (which presumably have a disproportionate number of high-income students, although this isn't always the case) have above-average achievement, and most have above the median growth. The high-poverty schools, by contrast, are closer to the bottom.  This shouldn't surprise anyone; most such education graphs look like this in some way, which leads many people to see poverty as determinative. 

But look closer. What this really suggests is the income is indeed pretty determinative--but only at the top of the income distribution. In other words, if you put a bunch of well-off students together in a school with few or no poor students, it's extremely likely that they'll do well. They have a lot of advantages outside of school, and their schools tend to be better-funded and staffed. One would be hard-pressed to find the inverse of the classic "beating the odds" school--someplace where, despite high income and low poverty, achievement is terrible. They just don't exist. 

Among high poverty schools, by contrast, there's a lot more variation. In terms of absolute performance, some are at the bottom, many are in the middle, and a few are closer to the top. And in terms of variation in growth, they're all over the map, from below the 20th percentile to above the 90th. 

In other words, it'd be tough to blunt or reverse the impact of socioeconomic status on educational achievement at the top of the income spectrum. But that's okay--why would you want to? On the other hand, there's a lot of potential to help high-poverty schools, particularly if we look at overall achievement and growth simultaneously. 

Graphs like this also point to the need to react to achievement data in a more sophisticated way. Under NCLB, all of the schools near the bottom of the distribution get treated the same, regardless of growth. That doesn't make much sense. Instead what we need to do is take the schools on the bottom left, the low-achieving / low-growth schools, and accelerate the process by which they either improve or are shut down. There's no point in waiting six years to close a school where achievement is low and students are learning less during the year than most other students who also started the year with low achievement. 

At the same time, we should be pouring resources into the high-poverty, high-growth schools, so we can support success and build on it.  Labeling is important, too: NCLB doesn't actually label schools as "failing" despite what you read in the newspaper, but it ought to for low-status/low-growth institutions. On the other hand, high-growth schools should be complimented and described in very different ways. 

Missing the Big Picture

In comments below, a reader trots out a main pillar of the Sol Stern Ayers-does-too-matter argument: "Ayers serves a prestigious role in THE association for education professionals." By which Mr. / Mrs. Anyonymous means: Bill Ayers was recently elected "Vice President of Curriculum Studies" for the American Education Research Association. 

Let's be sure to clear this up in the short time we have left before everyone suddenly stops caring: AERA is THE association for education researchers. Thus, the "R." It's large and conducts an annual meeting every year in which lots of research is presented, some of it good, some not.  I've been several times and always learned something. But while they pick a different annual "theme" (2008: "Research on Schools, Neighborhoods, and Communities: Toward Civic Responsibility," 2007: "The World of Educational Quality," etc.) the real big theme every year is actually "How Can We Get Policymakers and Pratictioners to Pay More Attention to Our Research?"

The truth of the matter is that the VP of Curriculum Studies at AERA has about as much influence over your average public school classrom as the VP of Whatever for the American Political Science Association has over your average Congressional committee hearing. I'm not saying that's good or bad (probably both, depending on the circumstances), but that's the way it is. 

Waiting for Sputnik

Over at Flypaper, Stafford Palmieri asks, "What will be the next Sputnik?" Readers who aren't full-time policy types may not realize just how often this question is asked in education circles. The story, as it's (endlessly re-)told, goes like this: American schools were soft and complacent in the 1950's until the nation was shocked into attention by the launch of the 1957 Soviet satellite, whereupon President Eisenhower pushed through a series of teacher training and curricular reforms designed to breed a new generation of scientists so the United States would never be caught so unawares again. Sputnik became synonymous with "Huge important event that suddenly causes the general public to care a whole lot more about K-12 education than they did."

The answer to Stafford's question, however, is pretty obvious: Nothing. Sputnik was a once-in-a-lifetime happening, as evidenced by the fact that we're still waiting for the next one, most of a lifetime later. It was, almost literally, a deux ex machina event.  The "whither Sputnik" question tends to come at the end of a long process whereby a person or group of people chooses to tackle a particular education problem, spends a lot of time and effort arriving at a series of preferred solutions, tries mightily to enact that agenda, and fails. Having failed, they appeal to the heavens for help, which never comes.

Waiting for Sputnik is a waste of time. If the public won't embrace certain ideas, then the ideas need to be improved, or the communications effort augmented, or the political environment changed. These things are difficult and frustrating and take time--but not as much time as waiting for deliverance from God and/or a machine. 

Supply and Demand in D.C.

I’m finally getting around to reading the full version of the research report, “Quality Schools and Healthy Neighborhoods,” that the Washington, D.C. Office of the State Superintendent of Education put out in September. And it’s good. Based on research conducted by the 21st Century Schools Fund, Brookings Institution, and the Urban Institute, the report takes a broad look at the impact of school choice on school demand, housing markets, and school quality. The authors are careful not to overreach in their conclusions, but just observing the interaction of these variables is informative and raises some great questions around supply and demand in a choice-driven education system.

But, beyond charter schools and intradistrict choice, what really caught my eye in the report was this chart on private placements for special education students:
While only 6 percent of white students are identified for special education, 50 percent of those identified end up in private school placements. This is compared with 17 percent of Black special education students and 10 percent of Hispanic special education students.

And this trend appears to be related to wealth—the report found that almost half of public special education students in Ward 3, one of the higher-income areas of D.C., attend a private school paid for by the school district. In the other seven wards, this number is only 15 to 20 percent of the special education population. Regardless of the legitimacy of these placements, it’s clear that the money going to support private school tuition for special education students is not distributed equitably across the city.

I realize that this problem is nothing new for D.C., and the school district is not serving special education students as it should, leading to high private school placements rates. But based on this chart, it looks like private school placement isn't just a matter of having a child who isn't being served in a public school--it's also a matter of having (or affording) a good lawyer. And the supply of lawyers in D.C. is more than enough to meet demand.

Update: Our own Tom Toch actually wrote about this issue ($) for the Washington Post back in 1995. From the article preview: "Thomas Toch discusses the fact that the city of Washington DC is paying $13.5 million to educate 624 students in private special education schools, despite the fact that many of them have parents who are well-off financially."

Paying for College

I'm sure it's true, as the Times reports, that the economic downturn is making it harder for people to pay for college, in that this is true for anything expensive and the cost of college in real dollars is growing robustly every year. But it's important to remember that the example around which the story is framed--a family sending two children to private colleges that each charge $30,000 per year to attend--is not at all typical. 73 percent of all college students are enrolled in public institutions that typically charge far less. Instead of borrowing tens of thousands of dollars, this family could consider fine public universities like Indiana University -- Bloomington, which is only about 50 miles from Salem, where they live, or IU-Columbus, which is about the same distance, or IU-Southeast, which is even closer. 

Indeed, this is the most likely result of a serious recession--not fewer students going to college (higher education attendance can be counter-cyclical) but students going to different colleges than they would have otherwise. Public universities that were anticipating an easing of enrollment pressure as the current demographic wave crests will need to keep finding dorm and classroom space, while small, non-elite, non-wealthy private colleges like Hanover and Franklin (which enroll the two students in the story) are going to be at serious financial risk. More worrisome would be an acceleration of the existing trend whereby the proportion of poor college students who beging their careers in community colleges is steadily increasing. Given the disparities in degree completion among such students, this will exacerbate education-driven income inequality. 

Update: Moody's is also sounding the alarm about the financial vulnerability of small colleges. At the bottom of the article, one commenter proposes what would amount to a luxury tax on college endowments, with some kind of extra levy on earnings from endowments larger than $500 million, the proceeds of which would be distributed to less-wealthy institutions. This strikes me as kind of a good idea. As with baseball, it wouldn't be severely redisributionist--the Red Sox are still the Red Sox, and Harvard would still be Harvard--but it would give the Tampa Bay Devil Rays of higher education a fair shot at competing--or at least staying in business.

The Old New Thing

Education entrepreneur Chris Whittle is out of work again. Ousted last year from Edison Schools, where he spent sixteen years and upwards of half a billion dollars trying to turn a profit running public schools, the Channel One founder and former Esquire publisher recently cleared out his Midtown Manhattan office at Nations Academy, an international chain of elite private schools that he launched 18 months ago with Dubai businessman Sunny Varkey.

Insiders say that the deep-pocketed Vakrey poured money into the venture after Whittle struggled to find outside investors in the wake of the financial markets’ collapse, and that Varkey demanded a big role in the running the company in return. Whittle, who had spent his last years at Edison under the thumb of new company owners, balked, sources say.

Varkey, who runs an expanding network of proprietary schools in the United Arab Emirates, Great Britain, Australia, and his native India, has pulled the plug on Nations’ first two schools—hundred-million-dollar projects on far West 57th Street and in Bethesda, Maryland, that were scheduled to break ground next year.

But he’s reportedly sticking with the Nations upscale school model and he also wants to open less toney private for-profit schools in the U.S. He has hired Manuel Rivera, twice superintendent of the Rochester, New York, public schools and former Gov. Eliot Spitzer’s education advisor, to scout deals.

Whittle is reportedly planning a new for-profit private school company.

Accuracy

I assume that when major network news anchors are asked to moderate presidential debates, they sit down and work out the questions ahead of time. I imagine they even go to the trouble of writing them down, so they can then read them verbatim and not get stuff wrong. So Bob Schieffer really has no excuse for this, from last night's debate:

The U.S. spends more per capita than any other country on education. Yet, by every international measurement, in math and science competence, from kindergarten through the 12th grade, we trail most of the countries of the world.

It's a provocative statement, in part because it's full of lies. It's true, of course, that the U.S. spends more per capita than most other countries and does worse on some international tests in some subjects and some grades compared to a significant number of other countries, particularly our industrialized competitors. But there are 192 countries in the world and I'll eat my shoe if we're trailing more than 96 of them on any legitimate educational measure. For example, on the 2004 PISA test, "Of the 45 countries ranked in the eighth-grade survey, the United States was 15th in math and 9th in science; among 25 countries in the fourth-grade rankings, it was 12th in math and 6th in science." And that's not a random distribution of countries; PISA tends to undersample nations that lack functioning governments, universities, developed economies, etc. Similarly, according to the OECD countries including Norway and Switzerland spend more per-student on high school, others spend more on elementary school, and a fair number are within 10 percent or so of U.S. levels. 

Now, one could say that Scheiffer's overall point about spending and achievement is valid and the question would have been less clear with the appropriate caveats. But I say: too bad; sometimes the world is complicated and your job is to figure out how to be clear and accurate when you talk about it. There's plenty of legitimate data to suggest that the American education system needs to be better; there's no reason to make stuff up or exaggerate for effect. Indeed, this kind of doomsaying tends to undermine the whole effort to improve education because people think if it's really that bad it must be essentially unfixable. 

Baylor's Spending Spree

There's been fair amount of discussion and derision over Baylor University's decision to pay already-admitted freshmen to retake the SAT. What's been less prevalent is an analysis of what they paid and what they got for their money. Here's what they paid:

- 861 students retook the SAT and earned $300 bookstore credits. Cost: $258,300
- 150 students raised their score by at least 50 points, earning a $1,000 scholarship. Cost: $150,000
- Total cost to the university: $408,300

And here's what they got in exchange:
- a 10-point jump in their average SAT score. It went from 1200 to 1210.
- a mountain of bad publicity

Why would a college pay already-admitted students to retake a college admittance test? Because our reward structure is out of control. Because we use magazine rankings based on prestige and money as our most important measure of higher education quality. We could argue over whether it was logical for Baylor to devote its time and resources (spending time to create the program and spending $40,000 per point increase), but they were responding to a particular incentive. They were trying to game a flawed system, just as other universities have.

Baylor could have used the same amount of money to re-design their pre-calculus, psychology, or Spanish programs to enhance student learning and cut costs long-term. Instead, they took a short-term solution that has no added benefit to student learning or college quality.

Update: Baylor is abandoning the payments, because it had the "appearance of impropriety." It's not actually that the payments were improper, no, it's because they appeared that way.

Ayers Ad Infinitum

At the Wall Street Journal, Sol Stern contends that the real Bill Ayers scandal lies not with his unrepentent domestic terrorism but rather his Marxist school reform ideas. And on some level, that's logical: the Annenberg challenge was an education effort, after all, not a commission to overthrow the United States government. But on pretty much every other level it's complete nonsense, and here's why: there's just very little evidence that the extreme elements of Ayer's education ideology have had much of an impact on anyone with influence, much less Obama. 

It would be safe to assume, for example, that if Ayers' ideas were going to gain a foothold anywhere, it would happen in Chicago. He lives there; he's seen as a respectable citizen; the mayor apparently gave him some kind of award, etc., etc. Chicago has a big distressed urban school district that the Secretary of Education once labeled the worst in the country. I imagine the citizens of inner-city Chicago would be more open to arguments about the evils of the global capitalist system than those of, say, Kenilworth or other suburbs on the North Shore.

Yet I don't see Arne Duncan, an Obama friend and the superintendent of Chicago Public Schools, running around quoting Paolo Friere. Instead he hews pretty closely to the policies and ideas that most reformist urban superitendants are adopting these days--ideas that Ayers-ish ed school types tend to hate.  Stern says "I've studied Mr. Ayers's work for years and read most of his books." My question is: Why? It would make a lot more sense to look at Joel Klein's bookshelf and figure out who his influences are. I'm pretty sure Bill Ayers won't make the list.

Stern is just using the Ayers affair as a way to re-litigate the culture wars. Thankfully, the people actually running our public schools have more important things to do.

Baylor, the SATs, and "Merit Aid"

In a move that raises the cynicism and gamemanship bar for college and universities across the land, Baylor University is paying freshmen it has already admitted $300 to re-take the SAT and giving them an additional $1,000 "merit" scholarship if they bump their scores up by 50 points or more. Then it reports their higher scores to U.S. News & World Report, helping Baylor reach its goal of being a "first tier" university on the magazine's annual rankings. 

This should confirm how self-serving and intellectually bankrupt the "merit aid" label has become. Basically, it's used by colleges to describe any kind of financial aid that's not based on financial need.  The phrasing is deliberate; Americans believe in merit and things base upon it, so they approve in principle without bothering to ask what, exactly, the criteria for merit are. Colleges are increasingly granting so-called "merit" scholarships to academically deficient students because they know their parents are wealthy and can afford to pay full tuition, plus donate to the next fundraising drive. (While most transactions in a free market are at arms-length, in higher education the seller forces the buyer to disclose how much money he or she has before deciding how much to charge.) Or they use "merit" aid to buy higher scores on the SAT--a test that higher education leaders routinely condemn. 

It also shows how much colleges and universities care about how much students learn after they enroll: not much. For example, instead of spending hundreds of thousands of dollars in a futile bid to become a Tier One school, Baylor could have spent less than $30,000 to administer the Collegiate Learning Assessment, which tests a sample of freshmen and seniors in critical thinking, analytic reasoning, problem solving and communication skills, in order to see how much progress they made at Baylor. Or they could have given the money to students who are standouts in their field in college, or who served their community, or who actually need the money. Almost anything else would have been better than this. 

An Education Mandate?

Over at Flypaper, Mike Petrilli asks, "Will Obama have a mandate on education?" His answer is: "not really," and I think he's right. In general I think Obama's education plan hits the right notes: early childhood education, human capital, support for charter schools, willingness to talk seriously about thorny teacher pay issues. Just as importantly, he hasn't promoted any really bad ideas or put himself in a box on No Child Left Behind reauthorization. But as for a mandate -- to me, that's what happens when politicians stake their candicacy on an issue and voters respond. You make a big promise, it gets you elected, and that creates both the opportunity and obligation to follow through on the promise. And I don't think education really plays a major role in the Obama political equation in that respect. Obama has put himself in position to do some good and smart things on education if he so chooses, but he won't be able to draw on mandate-y energy to do so. The current massive financial crisis is undoubtedly changing a lot of bedrock assumptions about the viability of various ideas involving regulation and perhaps even the broader relationship between government, capital, and industry, but those aren't education concerns--indeed, they'll probably make it more likely that education gets shoved to the side for a while. All of which is to say, regardless of what happens next month, the immediate future for education will likely be a lot like the present and recent past. 

Diane Ravitch Gets Her Snark On

Politico's doing this new section where it gets snippy one-liners from behind-the-scenes bigwigs. Today's question asked what zinger they'd suggest Obama or McCain launch in tonight's final debate. As I read through them, mildly amused, I came across (surprise!) one from esteemed education historian Diane Ravitch:

McCain to Obama: These are dangerous times, this is no time for on-the-job training.

Obama to McCain: You are old and tired, and so are your ideas.

The first one, that's a little trite. Pretty sure Hillary used that line almost verbatim. Probably multiple times. McCain's never said it that directly, but he's called Obama naive several times to his face. The line Ravitch suggests for Obama, though? That one's biting.

Picasso and Cézanne

If Kevin needs any help refuting Charles Murray, I'd suggest he use this week's Malcolm Gladwell piece. Gladwell takes to The New Yorker to discuss genius, arguing that we typically (and Murray especially) conflate genius--someone who demonstrates exceptional capacity in some field--with precocity--someone who demonstrates exceptional capacity in some field at a young age:

A few years ago, an economist at the University of Chicago named David Galenson decided to find out whether this assumption about creativity [that all the best creative work is done at a young age] was true. He looked through forty-seven major poetry anthologies published since 1980 and counted the poems that appear most frequently. Some people, of course, would quarrel with the notion that literary merit can be quantified. But Galenson simply wanted to poll a broad cross-section of literary scholars about which poems they felt were the most important in the American canon. The top eleven are, in order, T. S. Eliot’s “Prufrock,” Robert Lowell’s “Skunk Hour,” Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening,” William Carlos Williams’s “Red Wheelbarrow,” Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” Ezra Pound’s “The River Merchant’s Wife,” Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” Pound’s “In a Station of the Metro,” Frost’s “Mending Wall,” Wallace Stevens’s “The Snow Man,” and Williams’s “The Dance.” Those eleven were composed at the ages of twenty-three, forty-one, forty-eight, forty, twenty-nine, thirty, thirty, twenty-eight, thirty-eight, forty-two, and fifty-nine, respectively. There is no evidence, Galenson concluded, for the notion that lyric poetry is a young person’s game. Some poets do their best work at the beginning of their careers. Others do their best work decades later. Forty-two per cent of Frost’s anthologized poems were written after the age of fifty. For Williams, it’s forty-four per cent. For Stevens, it’s forty-nine per cent.

The same was true of film, Galenson points out in his study “Old Masters and Young Geniuses: The Two Life Cycles of Artistic Creativity.” Yes, there was Orson Welles, peaking as a director at twenty-five. But then there was Alfred Hitchcock, who made “Dial M for Murder,” “Rear Window,” “To Catch a Thief,” “The Trouble with Harry,” “Vertigo,” “North by Northwest,” and “Psycho”—one of the greatest runs by a director in history—between his fifty-fourth and sixty-first birthdays. Mark Twain published “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” at forty-nine. Daniel Defoe wrote “Robinson Crusoe” at fifty-eight.

The examples that Galenson could not get out of his head, however, were Picasso and Cézanne. He was an art lover, and he knew their stories well. Picasso was the incandescent prodigy. His career as a serious artist began with a masterpiece, “Evocation: The Burial of Casagemas,” produced at age twenty. In short order, he painted many of the greatest works of his career—including “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” at the age of twenty-six. Picasso fit our usual ideas about genius perfectly.

Cézanne didn’t. If you go to the Cézanne room at the Musée d’Orsay, in Paris—the finest collection of Cézannes in the world—the array of masterpieces you’ll find along the back wall were all painted at the end of his career. Galenson did a simple economic analysis, tabulating the prices paid at auction for paintings by Picasso and Cézanne with the ages at which they created those works. A painting done by Picasso in his mid-twenties was worth, he found, an average of four times as much as a painting done in his sixties. For Cézanne, the opposite was true. The paintings he created in his mid-sixties were valued fifteen times as highly as the paintings he created as a young man. The freshness, exuberance, and energy of youth did little for Cézanne. He was a late bloomer—and for some reason in our accounting of genius and creativity we have forgotten to make sense of the Cézannes of the world.

The trick for policymakers is to reward and encourage Picassos to do their style of work while also having a system in place to support the Paul Cézannes. Murray's idea to eradicate the bachelor's degree supports only the former.

The Crisis in Urban Higher Education

As a resident of the District of Columbia, it’s been fascinating to watch the ascendant rock star-dom of Michelle Rhee, the D.C. public schools chancellor. A 38-year old Harvard grad and single mother of two, she’s been profiled in Newsweek, interviewed by the Wall Street Journal, and featured on Charlie Rose. Her panel at the Democratic National Convention drew capacity crowds. All because she’s trying to reform an urban school system legendary for incompetence, corruption, and failure. And she’s not alone: Big city mayors across the country have seized control of their school systems in recent years, risking political capital on the premise that schools can serve predominantly low-income and minority students far better than they have in the past. Those schools and students have become the central K–12 education challenge of our time.

Washington’s public school system is not, however, the only public education institution in the city. There’s another with very similar problems: deteriorating facilities, shrinking enrollment, rock-bottom graduation rates, and a troubled history rife with tales of mismanagement and worse. It’s the University of the District of Columbia. But while the recent announcement of a new UDC president garnered respectful coverage in the local newspaper, it’s a safe bet that Allen Sessoms — a Yale-educated physics professor and former leader of Delaware State University and Queens College — won’t be making the national media rounds anytime soon. Urban higher education simply doesn’t generate the urgency and attention directed to K–12, even though it faces many of the same challenges and educates many of the same students. This is a huge problem, and a quick look at graduation rates for the less selective public urban universities on the table below shows why.

To see the numbers and read the rest of the column in InsideHigherEd, click here.