Malcom Gladwell's Outliers, Part 2

Continuing from yesterday's post about Gladwell's new book, which is basically an inventory of all the things besides individual talent and initiative that lead to unusual success. Put another way, it's a book about unequal opportunity--how individual success and failure are a product of external circumstances, much more so than people like to believe, and how those circumstances vary profoundly among people in complex, inequitable, and often random ways. 

In the chapter on expertise--a concept that has (justifiably) gotten a lot of attention from cognitive and education researchers--Gladwell asserts that there's essentially no such thing as great accomplishment without long, hard work. You need roughly 10,000 hours of practice at something to be really good at it, he says, and what distinguishes people like Bill Gates from others isn't fantastic intellect--although Gates certainly has that--but rather the fact that he had an exceedingly rare opportunity to accumulate those hours early in his career, at exactly the right moment in history. Which leads to another of Gladwell's main themes: timing. The 20th century's software titans were all born around 1955, he notes, just like the 19th century's industrial giants were born near 1834 and the most successful Manhattan lawyers were born in a few years bracketing 1931. All of these people had the intelligence and courage to take advantage of a rare opportunity created when the circumstances of their business fundamentally changed. But the fact that the opportunity presented itself in the first place was just luck. Men (and women) need their moment in order to succeed. 

From there Gladwell moves on to family background and culture, with a side conversation about IQ. He notes the lack of correlation between extremely high IQ scores and success in life, and offers the sad example of one Chris Langan, IQ of 190+, who grew up with an abusive father in a broken home, dropped out of college due (he claims) to some truly incompetent and uncaring financial aid officers, and currently lives on a horse farm in rural Missouri, working in solitude on a theory of the universe that nobody will ever read:

He knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world, but he didn't know how...These were things that others, with lesser minds, could master easily. But that's because those others had had help along the way, and Chris Langan never had. It wasn't an excuse. It was a fact. He'd had to make his way alone, and no one--not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses--ever makes it alone.

Gladwell devotes most of the rest of the book to culture. Appalachian blood feuds, Korean airline crashes, successful Jewish lawyers, and the tendency of Asians to be good at math, he says, can all be explained by the particular values, attitudes, and inclinations of different cultures. Asian agricultural societies are built around rice cultivation, he observes, which requires entrepreneurial ism, attention to detail, complex management, perseverance, and phenomenal amounts of work, all year long. European-style wheat cultivation, by contrast, is much simpler, amenable to mechanization and unskilled labor, and lets you take half the year off. The things you need to do to cultivate rice are the same things you need to do to learn math, he says, noting:

When students sit down to take the TIMMS exam, they also have to fill out a questionnaire. It ask them all kinds of things, such as what their parents' level of education is, and what their views about math are, and their friends are like. It's not a trivial exercise. It's about 120 questions long. In fact, it's so tedious that many students leave as many as ten or twenty questions blank. Now here's the interesting part. As it turns out, the average number of items answered on that questionnaire varies from country to country. It is possible, in fact, to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire. Now, what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings on TIMMS? They are exactly the same. In other words, countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems. 

The book also has a whole chapter about KIPP, and this is where the flaws in Gladwell's way of writing are most glaring. He cites Karl Alexander's well-known "summer learning loss" research of students in the Baltimore public schools. Low-income students actually gained more during schools than their well-off peers, Alexander found, but fell back over the summer while the rich kids moved ahead. It's an important point, and has led to a lot of discussions about the use of time in school. (See an ES report on the subject here.) But this leads Gladwell to say the following:

What Alexander's work suggests is that the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards. An enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size, rewriting curricula, buying every student a shiny new laptop, and increasing school funding--all of which assumes that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing. But look back at [Alexander's data]. Schools work. The only problem with school, for the kids who aren't achieving, is that there isn't enough of it...For it's poorest students, America doesn't have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem, and that's the problem the KIPP schools set out to solve. They decided to bring the lessons of the rice paddy to the American inner city. 

The weird thing is that Gladwell goes directly from here to a description of the KIPP Bronx Academy, which indeed provides students with more time. But, as Gladwell himself notes, it also has a culture that demands a lot of effort from students. The KIPP teachers emphasize discipline, self-control and respect for authority, peers, and oneself. They explicitly teach students how to listen and respond in class. They consider every student, no matter how disadvantaged, as bound for college. Does Gladwell really believe that most inner city schools work this way? That the only difference between KIPP and regular public schools is time? Long hours are far from the only "lessons from the rice paddy," as Gladwell more than adequately describes.  

Gladwell is often characterized as public intellectual, and he's clearly a very smart guy. But his real genius lies in explanation. His 10,000 hours of expertise came not in sociology but journalism, at the Washington Post. He's a master of marrying compelling anecdotes with important ideas. The world is a complicated, confusing place, and Malcolm Gladwell makes it understandable by telling stories that are fun to read. This is an extremely difficult thing to do, and nobody does it better. But there's a temptation in this kind of writing to sand down the edges of things to a bright polish and summarize complex issues in a pithy phrase. It's a comforting, attractive message--things are simpler than you think. But it's not always true. Saying that school time matters is one thing--saying it's the only thing that matters is something else entirely. 

That said, I admire the spirit of Outliers and really enjoyed reading it. It's rooted in compassion and a belief in the possibility of a better world. Gladwell thinks that if people really appreciated all the dimensions of opportunity, they'd be more likely to support ideas and policies designed to expand opportunity to more people. Gladwell himself is an outlier, and the book is a worthy way to use the influence that position affords. 

Malcom Gladwell's Outliers,, Part 1

Malcom Gladwell's new book, Outliers, was released last week. I read it over the weekend, on the theory that I had roughly 60 days--90 at the outside--before I'd heard it referenced at so many conferences that mere mention of the central anecdotes would cause me to reach for a hotel pen and stab myself in the eye as a distraction from the pain. I believe the medical term for this is "Thomas Friedman Syndrome."

Outliers is a good book in many ways, and says a lot about education. It's a critique of the standard narrative of extraordinary success, those inspiring tales of hard work and gumption that are often used to explain the achievements of sports stars and CEOs. The Bill Gates's of the world, in other words--and the Malcolm Gladwells. These stories are badly incomplete, Gladwell says, because they ignore context. Success is not just a matter of who people are, but where they come from, along with countless instances of plain luck, for better and for worse. 

The first chapter deals with the fairly well-known phenomenon of birthdays and Canadian hockey players. A hugely disproportionate number of elite hockey players have birthdays in January, February and March. That's because the age cutoff for entry into junior hockey leagues is January 1. A five-year old hockey player born on that day (they start early in Canada) could be as much as 25 percent older than his youngest competitors, giving him a major advantage in size, strength, and coordination. Since junior league hockey is a ruthless meritocracy, that success would lead to selection in more elite leagues, and thus more opportunities for practice, better coaching, more success, even more elite leagues, and so on. What begins as an arbitrary age-based difference evolves into actual differences of skill and technique, masking the original injustice. 

Gladwell notes that this problematic in two ways. First, it's patently unfair to children born at the end of the year, who have virtually no chance of advancing to the highest hockey ranks. Second, it's really inefficient as a means of matching training with talent. Canada has effectively cut its pool of potential hockey stars in half. 

The parallels with higher education are obvious. Earlier this week, David Brooks wrote:

Jan. 20, 2009, will be a historic day. Barack Obama (Columbia, Harvard Law) will take the oath of office as his wife, Michelle (Princeton, Harvard Law), looks on proudly. Nearby, his foreign policy advisers will stand beaming, including perhaps Hillary Clinton (Wellesley, Yale Law), Jim Steinberg (Harvard, Yale Law) and Susan Rice (Stanford, Oxford D. Phil.).

The domestic policy team will be there, too, including Jason Furman (Harvard, Harvard Ph.D.), Austan Goolsbee (Yale, M.I.T. Ph.D.), Blair Levin (Yale, Yale Law), Peter Orszag (Princeton, London School of Economics Ph.D.) and, of course, the White House Counsel Greg Craig (Harvard, Yale Law).

This truly will be an administration that looks like America, or at least that slice of America that got double 800s on their SATs. Even more than past administrations, this will be a valedictocracy — rule by those who graduate first in their high school classes. If a foreign enemy attacks the United States during the Harvard-Yale game any time over the next four years, we’re screwed

As a Democrat, and as someone who thinks smart people should be running the country, I'm thrilled. But the assumption that a true valedictocracy would naturally lead to an administration staffed exclusively by the graduates of a tiny handful of private universities is wrong. The process by which students end up at Harvard and then the upper reaches of government is nothing close to a pure merit-based sorting process. First, all kinds of educational resource misallocations at the K-12 level give greater opportunities to upper-income students. Then elite colleges add admissions preferences for legacies, donors, the children of the rich, famous and powerful, and graduates of long-established networks of elite private secondary schools. From there it's a short distance--via alumni, social and recruiting networks--to the seats of power in finance and government, which, like many elite colleges, are on the East Coast.

So while the President-elect himself comes from famously humble origins, the family and educational backgrounds of the advisers Brooks mentions contain a vastly disproportionate number of elite university professors and administrators, wealthy families, and exclusive private high schools, when compared to the population at large. That doesn't mean those people aren't brilliant, talented and hard-working. They are, in the same way that NHL hockey players are. But in both cases they're products of an inefficient and unfair system. In any given year, the 50 smartest public high school graduates from the state of Florida will surely have more raw intellectual ability than the 50 smartest graduates of Phillips Exeter Academy, but members of the latter group are much more likely to end up in the West Wing someday. 

More on Outliers, KIPP, why Asian students are good at math, and K-12 education generally tomorrow. 

Time Matters

Last month Seattle parents released an analysis of student learning time (defined as time students actually spend in class) at the city's ten high schools. They found large discrepancies:

At Garfield High in Seattle, classes last at least 55 minutes. At Nathan Hale High, they're often 50. Garfield has eight short days when students arrive late or leave early so teachers can collaborate and train. Nathan Hale has 40, and schedules 100 minutes each week for students to simply read.

At the end of the year, that means students at Garfield spend about 23 more hours in each academic class — roughly the equivalent of four more weeks of instruction, according to an analysis done by a parents group in West Seattle.

The article follows with a dramatic "does it matter" without ever answering the question. Like money, education commentators tend to look to the research without thinking about common sense. Do time and money matter in education? The logical answer is of course they do, but there might not be a direct linear relationship between the two inputs and educational outcomes. There are always confounding variables--things like central office inefficiencies cutting down on the impact of money or a teacher not using her time effectively.

But we should not dismiss inputs as completely irrelevant, especially in the case of these two high schools. Students at Garfield High School spend 23 hours more in class than their peers at Nathan Hale. That's about four weeks of extra schooling.

That lost time matters. Nathan Hale has lower percentages of white and low-income students than Garfield, yet it has lower test results in reading, writing, math, and science. Despite having greater diversity, Garfield has lower achievement gaps in reading between men and women, whites and blacks, students on free and reduced lunch and those who are not, and students in special education. Nathan Hale is a good school, but Garfield outperforms it across the board despite a harder assignment.

State and district officials don't seem to see the link between Garfield's success and its additional time. The article quotes Kathe Taylor, policy director at the State Board of Education, wondering if counting minutes is like missing the forest for the trees, saying "If one school district can do in two hours what it takes another six hours to do, and the students achieve equally well, then you have to ask what difference does it make." Nathan Hale's principal chimes in to say, "Raw minutes is nowhere near the whole story."

Not the whole story, maybe. But not one to ignore either.

Hat tip to NCTQ.

Student Loan Shenanigans

Sherman Dorn blogged today about the difficulties his wife has had getting Nelnet (a loan company that has engaged in nefarious practices in the past) to process her paperwork for the federal loan forgiveness program. The program provides loan forgiveness up to $17,500 for teachers who teach in hard to staff subject areas, like special education.

Dorn wants to know if anyone else has had similar troubles getting their loan forgiveness paperwork processed. My guess is that yes, there are others out there with the same problem.

High School Seniors Are Like Opilio Crab

I love the Deadliest Catch, an action filled Discovery Channel show about Alaskan crab fishermen. I might just eat crab instead of turkey this year because Captain Phil asked me to. But I've never been able to find the education connection I needed to write about the Deadliest Catch on Quick & Ed--until now (not that that stops some of us). And I'd like to say thanks to Inside Higher Ed for giving me the opportunity.

Kent Barnds writes in a column for IHE today about how the tough, hard bitten job of a crab fisherman is like, well, a college admissions officer. Ignoring, of course, the admissions officer's climate controlled office and cushy chair.

Here are a few of the parallels Barnds draws: the unwanted commentary both admissions officers and the now famous fishermen receive from those who haven't actually done the job; the need to catch just the right amount of crab, or students, to meet the quota; and the anxiety of watching the pot come out of the water wondering if it'll be full of crab or just contain a dead fish--much like the anxiety admissions officers face as they get replies from admitted students. Hauling a 700-pound pot filled with crab and risking a paper cut: it all has drama.

Barnds says, "Jonathan Hillstrand, who captains the Time Bandit, once declared “We’d rather be lucky than good any day.” Let’s be candid — it takes quite a bit of luck to predict and “know” where the crab will be and takes just as much to predict and “know” what 17-years olds will think and do." So the end lesson is that, like opilio crab, 17-year old high school seniors are running in herds along the ocean floor and admissions officers are in boats, developing a strategy to find them and figuring out the right bait to haul them in.

At least the admissions officers don't have to toss the females back into the ocean anymore.

Admired, Not Read

Last year, I was invited to Dickinson College in southern Pennsylvania to debate the meaning of success in higher education. My counterpart in the discussion was Christopher Nelson, president of St. John’s College, a small liberal arts school in Annapolis, Maryland. We were introduced by our host, and Nelson went first. His speech was erudite, passionate, and replete with classical references. He waxed eloquent about the meaning of knowledge, and how teaching as an enterprise was central to the St. John’s philosophy. I found myself glancing uneasily at my own notes, which had always served me well in the past but suddenly seemed paltry by comparison.

I didn’t realize it then, but I had run headlong into the Great Books of the Western World, the subject of a smart, engaging new book by Alex Beam, a columnist for the Boston Globe. In A Great Idea at the Time: The Rise, Fall, and Curious Afterlife of the Great Books, Beam traces the history of a peculiar moment in the development of America’s striving middlebrow culture, when hundreds of thousands of families across the nation decided to spend a lot of money on ancient texts that few would ever read. It’s also a story of higher education, and a 140-year-old argument about the responsibilities that colleges have to students.

Beam’s narrative begins in 1869, with the appointment of Charles Eliot to the presidency of Harvard University...[for more, in which I argue that the great books matter and liberals need to reclaim the liberal arts, click here]

EVENT: Computers, Professors, and the Cost of Higher Education

Note: Pushing this back to the top as a reminder to sign up, and also because the magazine article in question is now live to the world, here. Read it! Right now!  

It's commonly believed that higher education suffers from an acute case of "Baumol's Cost Disease," an affliction that causes labor-intensive industries to become less productive over time. It takes a professor just as long to deliver a 90-minute lecture today as it did 100 years ago, the thinking goes. But other industries have radically increased productivity in the meantime, often via use of technology, driving up the cost of highly-skilled labor across the labor market. In other words, colleges have to pay a premium for productivity increases they don't actually get, which is why tuition is now a zillion billion dollars and anyone planning to send their kids to a private college should expect to be in in debt for the rest of their, and their children's children's, natural lives. 

In fact, this is wrong. Colleges are perfectly capable of becoming more productive in the same way that lots of other industries have--by substituting capital for labor and replacing lots of expensive employees with less-expensive computers. It's not a theoretical idea--hundreds of colleges are doing this right now and more are jumping on board every day. Given that colleges are about to be mightily screwed by recession-induced budget cuts, this trend is likely to accelerate. But you haven't heard about it, in part because the significant cost-savings aren't being passed on to consumers in the form of lower prices. This is the subject of new article I've written for Washington Monthly which you can--nay, must--read here. 

And to see a sure-to-be-fascinating discussion of these issues, live and in person, featuring a panel full of experts, plus myself, sign up for and attend this Education Sector Event, to be held on the morning of December 2nd here in Washington, DC. Ask questions, heckle, throw things, get free magazines and related materials--it's sure to be a great time. 

Philadelphia Public Schools Gain Market Share, Blames Charters

In the private sector when an enterprise gains customers it's a good thing. Apparently that is not the case in Philadelphia School District, where their chief budget officer says charter schools are costing the district $105 million because 27% of their students were previously home-schooled or educated in a private school. Putting aside the idea that a 5% increase in market share is a bad thing, let's do some math. Stay with me here.

The city's chief budget officers claims charters, because of increased market share, are costing the city an extra $105 million. Charters educate 34,4000 students in the city and receive $320 million in reimbursements (including some state funds) for a total per-pupil expenditure (excluding private money) of $9,302.33.

The city reimburses charters $8,088 for every student in general education and $17,658 for every student in special education. Assuming charters took the same percentage of special education children as traditional public schools (13.2% in Philadelphia), how much should the city be spending on these new charter students?

13.2% of children in special ed. * $17,658 per student = $2,330.86
86.8% of children in regular education * $8,088 per student = $7,020.38
$2,330.86 + $7,020.38 = $9,351.24

So charters are actually getting less than they should. More students, less money, and the city complains?

Bailout Back and Forth

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson set off a flurry of activity when he suggested last week that some of the $700 billion bailout money might go to help companies issue private student loans. Higher Ed Watch explains in this post why Paulson's plan is a bad idea.

NASFAA (the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators), though, seems to think it's a great idea, saying that "stricter loan eligibility requirements and higher interest rates and fees on non-federal loans are jeopardizing educational opportunity." A letter sent Wednesday from representatives of colleges, students, and organizations like the Project on Student debt explains why NASFAA is wrong, and Higher Ed Watch explains what colleges can do to ensure educational opportunity without any government bailouts. Inside Higher Ed has all the back and forth here.

But while everyone has been talking about private loan eligibility, one of the biggest, most genuine threats to college access--reductions in public college funding--has actually been happening. The California State University system got approval on Wednesday to turn away at least 10,000 eligible students next fall because of overcrowding and underfunding.

Cash-strapped Colleges

With headlines predicting a steep recession, colleges and universities are already making budget cuts. Compare what some schools are saying about the financial crisis:

Morton Schapiro, president of Williams College in Massachusetts, which has long had a commitment to accepting students without considering their financial situation, said he doubted that all colleges with such full need-blind policies would be able to hold to them.

“The major dial you turn for most financial crises is that you admit more students who can pay, as a way of increasing revenues,” Mr. Schapiro said. “With the tremendous decline in wealth, I think fewer people will hold on to needs blind.”

with what others are already doing:

In October, Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., increased its fund-raising campaign goal for undergraduate scholarships to $350 million from $225 million, which has "helped reinvigorate giving" specifically for this priority, says Simeon Moss, press office director at Cornell. While overall giving is down, donations directed toward undergraduate aid have soared to $63.4 million in fiscal-year 2008, from $13.7 million in fiscal-year 2007, he says.

There are good and bad ways colleges and universities can manage their budgets during tough times. Tying fundraising efforts to student financial aid seems to be one of the good ones. Kudos to Cornell for taking proactive action.

Stalking the Iron Sheik

Last night I saw an advance screening of Darren Aronofsky's new movie, The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke as an aging, down-on-his-luck professional wrestler and Marisa Tomei as a local stripper who may or may not have a heart of gold. It's a very good movie that you should definitely go see when it's released in theaters next month. The Wrestler is a human drama first and foremost, but it's also about the cold reality of working life, the aesthetics of late-80s hair metal (musical and otherwise), and the strong bonds of subculture brotherhood. It was shot on a shoestring $6 million budget in hand-held documentary style, and the contrast with the precise, controlled visuals of Requiem for a Dream and the criminally-underrated The Fountain is pretty amazing. 

I'm not giving much of the plot away in revealing that the movie revolves, in part, around the possibility of the protagonist, one Randy "Ram" Robinson, participating in a 20th anniversary rematch of an epic 1989 pay-per-view showdown with a wrestler named "The Ayatollah." As we all know, this is a thinly-veiled reference to the classic 1984 title bout between Hulk Hogan (Randy basically looks what Hogan would have looked like if he'd spent the last 20 years on a crystal meth bender, or living the life that Mickey Rourke actually lived) and Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri, a.k.a The Iron Sheik. And this, in turn, is all the excuse I need to tell my Iron Sheik story.

The Sheik, now retired, was born in Iran and had real wrestling skills, competing on the national team (Iran has some of the best wrestlers in the world) in the late 1960s. By the 1970s he had moved to the U.S., where he wrestled under names like The Great Hussein Arab (insert joke about McCain campaign rallies here). Certain contemporaneous developments in geopolitics made his status as the designated "heel" or bad guy in the pro wrestling ring more or less inevitable, and he went on to a successful career, winning the heavyweight title before losing it to Hogan while awing fans in mid-sized regional municipal auditoriums across the land with the power of his patented finishing maneuver, the "camel clutch." 

Anyway, it was some time in the late 1990s, and I was in the Indianapolis airport waiting for an outbound flight. I was hungry so I went to the scary food court, grabbed something greasy and marginally edible, and went to find a table--only to see, sitting right in front of me, the Sheik himself, amiably chatting with another really large dude who was obviously a fellow wrestler. They'd been in town the previous night for a match at the since-demolished Market Square Arena (site of Elvis' last concert, fyi). I didn't want to interrupt them--the 12-year old in me still found him extremely scary--so I sat nearby to eavesdrop. Their conversation went something like this:

Another Really Large Dude: "Hey, did you hear that The Undertaker bought a place on a golf course in Myrtle Beach?"

Sheik: "Real estate is always a smart place to invest."

ARLD: "Yeah, Hacksaw Jim Duggan told me he cleared $100,000 on his place in Florida last year."

Sheik: "If Jake the Snake had at least put his money in T-bills like I told him to, he could have retired five years ago."

And so on and so forth, the most mundane conversation imaginable, except they referred to everyone, and each other, by their stage names. It was surreal. Eventually they finished their burgers and walked to airport security, at which point the security guys started jumping and down, pointing, and yelling "the Iron Sheik!" (airport security jobs were close to minimum wage gigs back then, as you'll recall). We ended up on the same plane, but the Sheik and ARLD were in first class so I didn't get a chance to hear more.

No real point to this story other than a brush with semi-greatness, and you should really go see The Wrestler.  

Dear President-Elect Obama...

NCLB reauthorization may not be at the top of the next administration's to-do list, what with the economic meltdown and two wars, but President Obama will need to tackle President Bush's signature education law eventually. And he'll need all the good ideas he can get.

Today, ES releases two briefs offering ideas on how the Obama administration can reform NCLB. Title 2.0 focuses on how President Obama can revamp the federal role in human capital by focusing Title II dollars on higher impact reforms. And In Need of Improvement offers a number of steps Congress and the Obama administration can take to strengthen NCLB's choice provision.

Not-So-Great Expectations

Higher education is haunted by a formula, which goes something like this: P/R=G.

The P stands for student preparation, broadly defined — the combination of innate ability and elementary-school and secondary-school preparation that students bring to college. Imagine those attributes normalized on a scale going from 0 to 1, with 1 describing the smartest, most well-educated student in the world.

The R stands for rigor, defined by individual colleges and universities — academic requirements, placement-exam cut scores, and the general difficulty of the work. R increases as standards become more rigorous, with the top values at places like the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The G stands for the odds of a student's earning a degree. An intelligent, well-prepared student attending a college with typical standards would be very likely to graduate. An ill-prepared student who enrolls somewhere with unusually tough standards would not.

The P/R=G formula dominates the way people think about college graduation rates and student success. And, not coincidentally, it puts colleges in the position of having no real responsibility or efficacy when it comes to making G higher. They can't make P higher, because raw ability is what it is, and the elementary and secondary schools are someone else's problem. And they can't make R lower, because that would betray their scholarly ideals and dumb things down for the best students. A low G is regrettable, but really, what can be done?

It's a pretty depressing conclusion. So I was glad to read a report on the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, known as Cessie, which says that the formula is all wrong. 

Read the rest of this column at the Chronicle of Higher Education here. 

Hot Boys (With Audio)

If you missed Education Sector's talk last week with author Peg Tyre you can listen to it below. The discussion features Tyre, best-selling author of The Trouble with Boys, New America Foundation Senior Analyst Sara Mead, and USA Today columnist Richard Whitmire. Topics ranged from gender differences in NAEP scores and ADHD diagnoses to boy-girl brain differences and why boys like the video game World of Warcraft.

Last Week, Next Up on Testing

The paper we released last Monday is the first in a series to explore what the next generation of assessments might look like. I received many many emails and comments over the past week, some via our online discussion. A quick recap from all of that:

First, there is a surprisingly strong reaction to the term “21st century skills.” Most wanted to say something about how important and significant these skills are to the students they teach or know. And in general there was agreement that there is a set of “21st century” skills that students need more now than before. But the term “21st century skills” seemed like an unpromising default to many, a way of avoiding specificity. One comment was particularly pessimistic but perhaps a fair point: “It’s a meaningless term—by the time we figure out what it means, it will be the 22nd century. Then what?” As an aside, I initially avoided the term but decided to take it on to see if I could push past the platitudes.

Second, there is a lot of interest at the local level in the new assessment tools and quite a few questions came in about which ones worked best, which ones should teachers/schools/districts use. My response is that there isn’t one tried and tested (sorry for pun) assessment that districts and schools should adopt and start using. The CWRA, which I profiled in the report, is one example—and I think a good one—of how schools are trying out new forms of assessment that measure reading, writing and math skills and problem-solving, inquiry and decision-making skills. The larger point is not that this is the right test for every school or district, but that this is the right direction for assessment.

Related to this is the problem of cost. There was a lot of concern about finding funds for assessments like the CWRA. “Even if my school wanted to try this,” wrote one teacher about the CWRA, there’s no way they would spend any extra money on it. This isn’t surprising, wrote Jack Beirwirth, who is the superintendent of Long Island’s Herricks Public Schools, the first public school district to use the CWRA. We’re all cutting back, he said, on programs, services and jobs. But the CWRA is well-worth the extra cost--teaching and measuring critical thinking and analytical reasoning are among our goals, he explains. Herricks also became one of four school districts participating independently in the 2006 PISA.

There were also a lot of comments about breaking down the distinction between instruction and assessment. Can we “embed” assessment in teaching, so that teachers can learn how their students are doing and improve their practice at the same time. So that assessment is not seen as a series of burdensome tests but also a tool for continuous learning. This isn’t easy—it requires teachers who know how to use assessment both for generating summative information and to inform their daily practice. But it can be done--see Paul Curtis’ description of New Tech High's approach.

Emerging technologies play a big role in this (I received several emails asking “what about technology?”). Our next paper on assessment--this one by Bill Tucker-- will examine how information technology can be used to improve assessment.

A Financial Aid Shake Up

Last Friday, FastWeb, a free, online scholarship search service, released the results of a survey it conducted on student borrowing, showing that half of students applying for private loans, parent PLUS loans, and home equity loans were denied access to funds. If this number is accurate, it means that a large number of students will need to adjust their college choices--from a private to a public institution and from a 4-year to a 2-year institution--because of financial constraints.

There's good reason to be skeptical of FastWeb's high numbers--the survey was sent out to users of the website (people already looking for additional financial aid) and the response rate was low (1,202 responses out of 7 million invitations). It's likely that those who took the time to fill out the survey were also the ones having the most trouble finding financial aid.

But we do know that private student loans, because of the tightening of credit markets, are more difficult to get. While the actual percentages of students being denied private loans may not be as high as FastWeb reports, it's still higher than in previous years, when easy access to credit helped fuel a boom in private lending.

So what are policymakers to do?

Tuition levels have risen to the point at which federal lending limits are insufficient to cover tuition at pretty much all private colleges and even some public, 4-year institutions. As a result, some congressional members are talking about raising federal loan limits again to make up for some of the lost private loan dollars. But that would be a mistake.

Tuition levels were able to get as high as they are partly because of easy debt--in an era of loose borrowing requirements, students were able to access large amounts of private loans. This was a great situation for colleges--students took out large amounts of loans, the institutions got paid, and students were left to bear the debt burdens. While lip service was paid to the need to reduce tuition prices, there wasn't much real pressure - enrollments stayed high and tuition bills were paid. Now that private lending is more limited, there may be some real price pressure on colleges to reduce tuition rates, or at least limit increases.

Adding to the argument against raising federal loan limits is a recent admission by the University of Phoenix that it sets tuition partly based on federal loan limits. And it actually cut tuition in its two-year Axia college division after seeing that students were dropping out because they maxed out their loan eligibility. So maybe less borrowing and more pressure to lower prices isn't such a bad thing in higher education, and could lead to more reasonable tuition rates.

Even when the credit markets loosen up, we (hopefully) won't return to the wild west days of lending that led to our current problems. Just like subprime mortgates aren't really good for home ownership, subprime student lending isn't really good for college access or success. Tighter private loan markets might result in a more cost-consciousness, on the part of students and parents, and institutions.

Stop the Violence

Last Sunday, the Washington Post ran a story about the recent surge in school violence at Hart Middle School, where, in the past several weeks, three teachers were assaulted, a 14-year-old was charged with carrying a shotgun and students discharged fire extinguishers throughout the building.  Hart, a school currently placed on “restructuring” status under NCLB due to its repeated failure to make adequate academic progress, has made little headway in its attempt to raise achievement despite the installment of a young new principal and the promise of additional interventions to support students and families.

Little headway, that is, until a few day ago, when DC schools’ Chancellor Michelle Rhee fired Hart principal Kisha Webster, supplanting her with a central office administrator. In recent coverage of this sure-to-be controversial firing, the Post gives Ms. Webster’s take on the firing.  Claiming to have been “set up,” Ms. Webster blamed her downfall on a lack of resources, second-tier teachers, and an unsupportive central office. She then went on to assert that publicity led to her demise. She is quoted here as saying: "If I had been able to keep things quiet, I'd still be [at Hart].”

Never underestimate the power of a headline. It seems, at least in the case of Hart, DCPS is more responsive to external coverage than internal warning signs and threats of disaster. From what I can gather, the problems plaguing Hart had taken root long before Webster took over in September. And DCPS knew of Hart’s struggles and should have done a better job of supporting the school and its staff from the beginning, rather than waiting for a Post exposé to prompt swift action. Regardless of central office’s failure to intervene, as school leader, Webster had a responsibility to create a safe atmosphere and climate of learning. And it is apparent that in her short tenure, neither goal was accomplished.

Hopefully, the lesson learned from Hart is that DCPS can no longer afford to reactively put out fires across the district. A change in principal may have the desired effect of ending the recent surge in violence, but unless it is coupled with better policies and practices, we’re unlikely to see systemic improvement. A well-developed and thoughtful set of policies should be crafted and put into place in each school, accompanied by a cadre of prevention programs.

Unlike a decade ago, we now have considerable evidence for successful, innovative school-based prevention programs that enhance the ability of schools to function properly, and, in turn, reduce incidences of violence and discipline considerably. See here and here for some good work being done on this front. Let’s not wait for the next Post headline to begin exploring these programs and implementing them in our schools. Instead, let’s think about some ways in which we can use the evidence base to inform both and practitioners and policy makers. 

The research around school-based prevention programs suggests that more important than specific programs or curricula are the principles upon which effective strategies are based and the fidelity with which they are implemented.  Schools can decrease problem behavior by organizing and managing themselves effectively, creating environments that support prosocial behavior, instituting clear rules and expectations, and creating structures and supports that help administrators, teachers, and students work together to meet those expectations. Yet these supports are often symbolic (e.g. behavioral contracts) or entirely lacking in the most troubled districts. It is encouraging to know that in some districts (like D.C., according to a draft five-year action plan), strategies are underway to bolster Student Support Teams (SSTs) to better coordinate academic and behavioral interventions for at-risk students. I’d like to see SSTs expanded to become a more universal approach, especially in urban districts where the vast majority of kids can be categorized as at-risk.

From a policy standpoint, more dollars should be appropriated for school-based prevention – despite the relative cost-effectiveness and proven success of school-based programs, they only receive an estimated $6-$8 per pupil per year in federal expenditures, not enough to be widely and properly implemented. Federal dollars should be targeted towards high-need districts in low-income, urban communities that exhibit a disproportionately high rate of violent and disruptive behavior and yet have the least capacity for solving such problems. And because research suggests that the quality of implementation is at least as important as the type of program, monitoring and technical assistance to districts and schools should be ramped up. 

- Posted by guestblogger Sara Yonker

Dispatch from the Front Lines

Policy types debate whether school systems should try to fix failing public schools or close them and replace them with charters or other types of new schools. Answer: it's a lot easier to create a constructive school culture with a new team than having to change the hearts and minds of existing staff. But sometimes the reality on the ground, to use the cliche, makes school reform a little trickier. In Chicago, school authories have opted for trying to turn around six failing high schools rather than closing them down because moving students to new schools would cause them to cross gang boundaries.

Secretary Spellings, Blogger

Margaret Spellings, the United States Secretary of Education, is guest-blogging today at our fellow institutional blog, Eduwonk. (She must have missed the memo that bloggers are all a bunch of unshaven, pajama-wearing D&D players living in their parents' basement.) Education Sector is, of course, very pleased to host her discussion of education and technology. On a larger note related to all the current discussions of the new administration's education policies: I think the Secretary and her staff have done some important work over the last three years in the higher education realm and I hope it continues in the future. 

Perspective

Alan Odden says that Michelle Rhee's proposal to give DC teachers the option to trade job security for a lot more money, if they want to, or not, if they don't want to, "would raise eyebrows everywhere, because that would be a gargantuan change."

The only real eyebrow-raising element of this is that it's national news. Here you have someone who was brought in to reform an organization that everyone--everyone--agrees was terribly dysfunctional, and her response has been, in part, to identify the employees who aren't doing a good job and replace them with better employees. This isn't just obvious and rational; it's ordinary. It happens all the time, particularly in organizations that are labor-dependant. And that's a good thing, because we're all much worse off when low-performing organizations stay chronically unreformed and low-performing. 

Which raises a broader point: from a p.r. standpoint, taking a stand here and now on this issue is a terrible decision for the American Federation of Teachers.  Teachers have a very good case to make when they say that, compared to other professionals with comparable levels of education who work at similarly difficult jobs, they're underpaid, disrespected, and forced to work in conditions that most people wouldn't tolerate. Fair compensation, dignity, and a basic quality of working life are things that all people understand and have a right to expect in their jobs.

Permanent job security regardless of performance, by contrast, is enjoyed by a small and shrinking portion of the workforce. Most people can't relate to tenure. They've never had it, they never will, and they understand why. Drawing the line there is a strategy of alienation for a group that has fewer friends than it understands and fewer than it needs.