Enjoy It While It Lasts

The Post reports a huge influx of highly-qualified students from China applying as undergraduates to elite American universities. At the University of Virginia, the number grew from 60 in 2005 to 816 in 2009. At Brown University, 166 to 500, and so on. This shows, once again, the huge advantage we have in being home to lion's share of the world's top-notch colleges and universities in the era of globalization. Assuming U.S. / Chinese relations stay reasonably stable and anti-immigration crazy people don't get their way, increasing numbers of very smart, motivated students from the other side of the world will come to America to live, learn, start businesses, make important discoveries, and otherwise improve our way of life.

But it won't last forever. It's clear that, given the opportunity, elite American universities are prone to implement discriminatory admissions policies that artificially limit the number of American students of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese descent. So I'm pretty sure that the number of Chinese students of Chinese descent who are admitted will only grow so much. Hard quotas will be implemented, and most of the best and brightest Chinese undergrads will have to look elsewhere. There's just no way to get around the numbers:  China alone is nearly 4.5 times larger than the U.S. and the percent of Chinese students with access to an education pipeline that can bring them to college is growing. 

Eventually, other colleges and universities will find a place for them and their peers from India, Africa, South America, and elsewhere. Some of those institutions could be American, but many will be in Europe or elsewhere. Filled to the brim with the world's smartest students, their academic reputations will rise relative to elite American institutions that are hamstrung by narrow-minded admissions policies and an unwillingness to grow to meet surging demand. Eventually, someone's going to realize that it's perfectly feasible to build an institution of higher education that can, with a combination of physical infrastructure and technology, serve several hundred thousand undergraduates from around the world, all admitted purely on their merits, at once. Whatever nation gets there first will enjoy all the benefits that we do today. 

The Realities of Disruptive Innovation

Many thanks to Cathy Cavanaugh and Erik Black for their thoughtful guest post below reviewing Gene Glass's policy brief, "The Realities of K-12 Virtual Schooling." As virtual schooling becomes increasingly prominent, it will rightfully deserve increasing amounts of scrutiny and attention. This is all good if the focus is on ensuring good outcomes for the increasing numbers of students taking virtual courses, hybrid courses, and any of the thousands of variations to be developed.

But it's not at all good if researchers and advocates just use virtual schooling as a new venue to play out old ideological or political battles. My only addition to Cavanaugh and Black's review is my concern that the article tries to assess a new model with a very fixed notion of school. To be clear, I don't at all object to many of Glass's specific concerns -- I also share his concerns about financial incentives to lower quality, poor student outcomes, and abuses by fully-online cyber schools. But rather than see these as a part of a whole new, large, and varied mode of education, his conception that "traditional" norms and bureaucracies are the only "real" school limits his analysis.

My motivation for writing the cover feature on Florida Virtual School in the new edition of Education Next was to tell the story of a reform endeavor that has not fit neatly into these prevailing norms:

To accomplish this rare feat, the school has adroitly walked a fine line. It has built a distinct educational philosophy, approach, and culture. At the same time, it has maintained its identity as a public school and remains part of the system. This unique positioning, far enough outside to do business in a different way yet sufficiently inside the system to avoid political backlash, has been a key element in the school’s success. Mark Pudlow, spokesperson for the Florida Education Association, the teachers union that has fought pitched battles against many of Florida’s recent initiatives, acknowledges the result of Florida Virtual School’s approach: "[It] never developed the kind of mistrust that tends to be associated with other reform ideas." Savvy leadership, strong political support, and a series of well-timed decisions around growth have helped FLVS become the country’s most successful virtual school, and perhaps one of its most important reform stories as well.

My article ends before the current legislative battle in Florida over the state's virtual school, but I've learned quite a bit from the episode. One big take-away is that for all the interest in the book Disrupting Class and the theory of disruptive innovation, the reality is that it is, well, disruptive.

We all talk about wanting to go to scale with innovation. Many people also want to promote competition in education. But very few are really prepared to deal -- particularly if a non-traditional, but still public, entity like Florida Virtual School competes and wins big -- when the results from competition at scale don't fit into the dominant narratives of public vs. private, reformer vs. status quo, what's good for teachers, etc. In this case, legislators are complaining because the school is too successful at attracting students that are engaged and want more than their prescribed allotment of education. The private sector lobbyists are complaining about too much competition and attempting to use the political process to carve out their protected niche. And it's a subset of public sector folks complaining that Florida Virtual is too successful because the school is winning enrollments from home and private school parents who are opting back into public education. Strange days indeed.

Truth Hurts

In a story about college admissions rejection letters and where they fall on the nice-to-mean continuum (really), the Wall Street Journal reports: 

Most Discouraging: Boston University. To students who have family ties to the university, its letter begins: "We give special attention to applicants whose families have a tradition of study at Boston University. We have extended this consideration in the evaluation of your application, but I regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you admission." Consideration of family legacies is common practice at many universities. But Rob Flaherty, 17, a North Reading, Mass., recipient, said he felt the wording in BU's letter translated to "we made it even easier for you and you STILL couldn't get in."

Well, yeah, that's exactly what it means. Legacy admissions policies are morally unjustifiable. They're basically a way for colleges and universities to cash in a portion of their academic integrity in exchange for the substantial financial benefits that come with telling alumni that if that if they play their cards right, they may be able to give their children a leg up come admissions time. And admissions preferences only matter at the margin. If you apply to a college as a legacy, then what you're doing is saying "If it comes down to a choice between me and a non-legacy candidate who's more qualified, please pick me." That's a lot to ask. Now colleges are supposed to lie about it too, so people don't feel bad? 

Colleges Continue to Raise Tuition, Squander the Money on Sports

We all know the drill by now: Faced with a major financial shortfall, the university announces that it has no choice but to sharply raise student tuition once again. "We remain committed to providing an affordable education for all," says the university president, in somber tones. "But we will not degrade the high academic standards that make this institution great. We continue to provide an excellent value to our students, and we call on all members of the university community to come together in this difficult time of shared sacrifice." Students complain, while some of the more outspoken members of the faculty wonder aloud why "high academic standards" never seem to involve "paying professors more money." They are ignored.

I think this standard line of rhetoric is growing less persuasive by the year. And it's really hard to pull off in light of the new NCAA report detailing the recent orgy of spending on college sports. A few years ago, the NCAA put some numbers on a fact that had long been suspected: the vast majority of big-time college sports programs lose large amounts of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. A handful turn a profit, but most run big deficits that have to be made up with funds from student tuition, state appropriations, layoffs, salary freezes and elsewhere. 

Faced with this harsh reality and an uncertain economic future, the nation's most prominent Division I institutions naturally decided to further ratchet up sports spending by nearly 11 percent per year, from an average of $31 million in 2004 to over $42 million in 2007. 

Of course these types of studies are always shrouded in anonymity, so there's no way to pick them up and compare your university's annual sports deficit / major spending increase and compare it to new student charges and departmental budget cuts elsewhere. But given the scarce number of universities that turn a profit, the odds are high that if your institution has aspirations of playing football in January, it's somewhere on the list. 

Guest Blog: The Realities of K-12 Virtual Education

"The Realities of K-12 Virtual Education" is a policy brief released this month (April 2009) by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. Written by education policy expert Gene Glass, the brief summarizes the growth in virtual schools over the past decade and discusses questions of costs, funding, and quality before recommending regulation, audits, accrediting and assessment in virtual schooling.

While we agree with the four policy recommendations offered in the brief and we share the author’s concern about the preponderance of private commercial involvement in virtual schooling, we call for a more thorough examination of the complexities in virtual schooling and a recognition of the great many high quality virtual school programs serving students. The brief paints virtual schools with a broad brush on the basis of a small number of studies and reports, many of which are outdated.

The brief’s statement that virtual schools require special attention because they are new implies that more traditional practices can expect protection from examination, without regard to quality and relevance. We welcome discussions of quality in virtual schools. We see a baby/bathwater problem in Glass’s discussions of quality, beginning with the definition of virtual schools as simulations of "real schooling." This definition of virtual school ignores both the labels developed by the virtual schools community and the millions of students and teachers who do very "real" teaching and learning without being in the same time and the same place, especially students who succeed in virtual schools after failing in "real" schools.

Glass makes the accurate assertion that virtual schools take a variety of forms and types. Unfortunately, the paper responds to that complexity by oversimplifying many key issues based on either outdated or incomplete sources. After a thorough description of the growth trends over the past decade using recent and credible sources, and a fair summary of the early effectiveness studies, the brief deviates into opinion studies involving surveys of populations who may or may not have first hand experience with quality virtual schools. We disagree that public acceptance of virtual schools can be used as a measure of their effectiveness. A great many data-driven measures of effectiveness are available. Such measures are included in studies of successful humanities courses in virtual schools, which refute the brief’s claim that "more complex areas of the curriculum (e.g., the arts) are beyond the reach of" virtual schools. For instance, the Florida Virtual School teaches several courses in the arts, including 2D Art for Middle School Students, Art Appreciation and AP Art History, some of which have been studied closely by researchers and were found to demonstrate high quality according to the standards of the art education community. It may be that Dr. Glass’s perspective of art education is limited to traditional media rather than the rich digital media now used in arts curricula. Seeing artists working with sophisticated computer-based tools to generate a wide range of digital media in most any graphic arts studio or modern art classroom would broaden this perspective. Given the trend of school boards and state boards of education to make budgetary cuts to the arts, online art programs provide a sanctuary for students who might not have the ability to develop their expressive talents in their local classrooms.

The policy brief accurately assesses the importance of online credit recovery courses for students who have not found success in their classroom courses. Indeed, credit recovery plays a very important role in K-12 virtual schooling, though it should be noted that there has been no national assessment conducted of student motivations for participating in online learning. State level data gathered in two states in the Southeastern United States through the UF Virtual School Clearinghouse program indicate that an overwhelming percentage of students utilize virtual schools to enable flexibility in their daily schedules or to accelerate their academic progress. In the states surveyed, student course retention and recovery was the 3rd most often cited reason for participation in a virtual school course.

It is unfortunate that Glass seems to assert online learning for credit recovery purposes may constitute a misallocation of resources. This couldn’t be further from the truth; several education programs in the United States utilize online courses to meet the needs of individuals who dropped out of high school. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, in California alone, each year 120,000 individuals fail to earn a high school diploma by age 20. Those without high school diplomas are more likely to be unemployed, engaged in the criminal justice system and in receipt of state medical benefits. By providing flexible, differentiated online learning, it may be possible to reach individuals who have not been successful in traditional face-to-face classroom environments. The U.S. could learn a lesson from Mexico in this regard: a network of Mexican universities has launched a nation-wide system of virtual schooling specifically to increase the level of workforce productivity by making high school completion available to all adults, thus increasing the college-ready population.

According to Glass, "Whenever teacher and learner are not in a face-to-face relationship, suspicions run high that all or much of the work being assessed may not be that of the learners themselves." But research by University of Florida researchers in 2008 indicated that students do not perceive a greater level of academic dishonesty in online classes as compared to face-to-face. As any experienced online teacher knows, content and curriculum must be adapted for use online. In highly moderated online courses, teachers have far more personal interaction with students and their parents than they do during the traditional classroom course, and many effective virtual schools depend on partnerships with site-based guidance counselors and tutors for added assurance that students do their own work. Many virtual courses are project-based, relying on open-ended qualitative assessments of learning rather than tested skills. A formative evaluation provides a much richer and more personal opportunity for the student to convey understanding of a topic or concept. Given a rich dialog between learner and instructor, it becomes quite evident when a student receives external aid on a formative assignment.

The brief’s sections on cost, accreditation, and teacher certification are useful overviews of these critical issues, bringing to light important cautionary cases. Cost in virtual schools is a complex issue that has been reduced in the brief to three factors, masking important forces that vary by state and LEA. A more comprehensive analysis is needed.

We urge readers of "The Realities of K-12 Virtual Education" to take its policy recommendations seriously, become informed about issues of virtual school quality, and to learn from the cases of abuse of power. But these issues, like most of the issues addressed in the brief, apply to all forms of schooling. When assessing the effectiveness of any school or model, we should not assume that all schools in a category as broad as virtual schools resemble each other. Understanding of schooling models must be based on an understanding of the variety of forms and a recognition that schools, in particular online schools, undergo rapid evolution so that even the same school may not resemble itself after just a few years.

--Dr. Cathy Cavanaugh, Associate Professor of educational technology in the School of Teaching and Learning at the University of Florida and Erik W. Black, doctoral fellow at the University of Florida in the educational technology program. Both are affiliated with the University of Florida's Virtual School Clearinghouse research project.

Dear Rejected Student,

It is with deep regret that I write to inform you we are unable to offer you a spot in the class of 2013 at Desired University. You may be asking what was lacking in your application; for most of our applicants the honest answer is nothing. We received thousands of applications from incredibly talented individuals, and unfortunately space restrictions dictate that we are able to admit only a tiny percentage of applicants. In part this is because so many of your peers now elect to apply to so many more colleges. But, in the end, our decisions came down to chance, because the deans were obliged to select from among candidates who clearly could do sound work here. We regret to inform you that you have lost this lottery.

If you are receiving this letter, please take heart that our past experience suggests that a particular college a student attends is far less important than what the student does to develop his or her strengths and talents over the next four years. Chances are you got in to another school that is equally or almost as good, and you control your own destiny once there. We appreciate your interest in our school, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavors (hint: we have great law/business/medicine post-graduate programs).

Sincerely,
Overworked Admissions Office

(Above portions in bold are excerpts from real rejection letters sent to the class of 2013.)

Real Conversations

Higher Ed Watch writes today about one of the arguments private lenders are using in support of the FFEL program, and against Obama's proposal to provide all loans through the federal government's Direct Loan program: that the profits the government will make on loans to primarily middle class students will be used to subsidize increased Pell Grants to lower-income students. This is, they argue, a tax on the middle class to help poor students attend college. As Higher Ed Watch explains, that argument twists the truth about where the money for increases in Pell Grants is coming from.

But, what is even more disturbing, is that lenders are using that argument in the first place, rather than having a real discussion about how students might benefit from keeping private providers in the federal loan system. It's a sign of how far this conversation has gotten from students' experiences and what policies are most likely to benefit them, as borrowers.

I just returned from a conference held for financial aid officers by Texas Guaranteed, one of the 35 guarantee agencies in the country. The conversation at the conference was not generally about FFEL vs. Direct Lending (although there was certainly some of that). Among the financial aid officers it was, refreshingly, about what makes it easier for students to both get and repay student loans, and also what makes it easier for schools to do their job in getting financial aid to students.

From those conversations, a few key qualities emerged which any new loan program, whether it is FFEL, Direct Lending or some 'third way ' approach should have, including clarity on where students can get loans and who they need to repay, good communication between lenders and schools and lenders and students, and strong default prevention activities, which includes letting schools know when their students are behind on loan payments and supporting schools in providing good loan counseling and financial literacy instruction during school.

These are all areas where lenders and guarantee agencies can contribute to conversations about their role in a new loan system and how that system can best support students. Texas Guaranteed, for example, provides some great (free) resources to schools, including technology that allows them to track loan repayment, financial literacy presentations and course materials, and default prevention consultants that can work individually with schools to improve their default rates. But I haven't heard about how those resources will be kept, replicated, or improved under a new system. Instead, we get to hear the usual rhetoric pitting one group of students against another group of students in a debate that should be leading to a better financial aid system for all groups of students.

Charter Schools Feel the Squeeze As Belts Tighten In D.C.

The D.C. City Council held a press conference today announcing that the council would support a $309 cut to the per-pupil facilities funds provided to charter schools - for charter schools, that's an improvement from potentially bigger cuts in Mayor Fenty's budget. This cut in facilities funding clearly poses some large problems for charter schools in DC, but it could also be a warning sign for charter schools in other districts around the country.

For DC charter schools, the cut in facilities funding means needing to reevaluate lease terms on facilities to ensure they can afford the rent, or, if the school owes money on a facility loan, it might mean reallocating budget dollars to ensure they don't default on that debt. More broadly, it introduces political risk to facilities funding - what bank will lend to a school if their facilities allotment might be cut in half next year? See this article in the Washington Times for more on how this impacts DC charter schools.

In the bigger picture, states and districts everywhere are trying to find ways to cut budgets, and charter schools present a potentially easy target. They're not seen as part of the public school system in many areas, allowing political leaders to make cuts without seemingly cutting public school funding. And, they're not always very popular. Particularly in states like Ohio, where charter schools have been facing increasing resistance and efforts to restrict growth, the tightening fiscal situation only adds fuel to arguments that charter schools siphon money away from public education and are an unnecessary extravagance in a time of limited resources.

It's possible that President Obama's support for charter schools and the 'race to the top' funding may stem some cuts to charter schools. But as school district leaders look at their budgets, charter school advocates will need to lobby hard and may need to make some deals to maintain their funding levels.

No Frills (Including Fact Checkers)

Newspapers are hard hit during these financial times. They're simultaneously cutting staff and raising workloads, so I can understand if a few stories go uncovered. But apparently they're cutting back on fact checkers, too, at least at the Christian Science Monitor. Here's a quote from an article yesterday on no-frills higher education:

A main factor driving up tuition at public universities is the reduction in state funding. In the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, for instance, appropriations per student slid 20 percent in the past decade, says chancellor John Cavanaugh. During the same period, however, the system found ways to save, so tuition went up just 16 percent.

This is an oft-repeated line, but it's not really true nationally or in this case. The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education's 2007-8 Fact Book shows why. Some quick math from Table C.2 finds that in-state undergraduate tuition, fees, room and board increased from $8,089 to $13,184 between 1997-8 and 2007-8, a 63 percent rise (if you focus on tuition only, as Cavanaugh did, it would lower the percent to 49.3, still far higher than the 20 percent quoted by the chancellor). Compare that to Table G.1, which shows that system appropriations per student actually increased by two percent over the same ten-year period. The state was not overly generous, sure, but for every additional student that enrolled, it provided additional funds to compensate. The national trend tells a similar story: in constant dollars per student, at public four-year institutions between 1983 and 2008, tuition more than doubled while state appropriations were up about nine percent.

A Quick History Lesson

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, would-be commerce secretary Senator Judd Gregg evokes a revisionist history of the FFEL (private lenders) vs Direct Loans (government as lender) debate as evidence of Democrats' intentions to move to a single-payer, government-based health care system. I can't comment on Democrats' future plans for health care, but his comments on the history of student loans require some correcting.

From the article:

...Mr. Gregg argues that he has history on his side. The Democrats, he says, pulled the same public-private switcheroo before with student loans for college. Back in the late 1990s, "there was a huge debate in the committee . . . between myself and [Senator Ted] Kennedy over a private plan versus a public plan." In the end, they compromised -- the government would offer loans directly to students, but that program would have to compete with private-sector lenders. "And the agreement was very formal, and the record shows this very clearly. We agreed to level the playing field, put both plans on the playing field at an equal status and see who won. Well, private plans won. Big time."

Given the choice, most borrowers went to the private sector for their loans. But the Democrats who wanted to nationalize the student-loan market did not take defeat in the marketplace gracefully. "They didn't like that," Mr. Gregg says. "So ever since then they've tilted the playing field back and now they're going to wipe out the private plans in their budget."

Given the current situation of private lenders, it's hard to say that they won "big time"in the competition with the Direct Loan program. But, even more important to correct, is the allusion that all private lenders wanted to do was compete in a true marketplace until the Democrats came along and tilted the playing field. From the beginning, private lenders sought to limit the impact of Direct Lending through legislation. Private lenders got a legislated cap on the market share of the direct loan program for its first five years, ensuring that they wouldn't be out-competed entirely. And lenders sued when the federal government tried to lower fees in the Direct Loan program to compete with private lenders, saying that the Department of Education did not have the authority to make those changes.

And early evidence indicated that private lenders were not competing successfully with the Direct Loan program - in its first years, Direct Loans grew to a third of the student loan market. But that market share dropped as lenders competed aggressively (sometimes too aggressively) for schools' student loan business. Contrary to Senator Gregg's comment that borrowers went to the private sector, students rarely get to choose between the Direct Loan program and private lenders - schools make that decision and offer students one or the other. Lenders know this, and targeted heavy marketing to financial aid offices. This New York Times article from 2007 sums up the history of competition between private lenders and the federal government pretty well.

Mayoral Control is, in Fact, about Style

Secretary Duncan’s public endorsement of mayoral control in New York City this month comes on the heels of months of controversy for the city’s chancellor Joel Klein, whose tenure seems to be endangering not only NYC’s mayoral control but the viability of Mayor Bloomberg’s entire reform agenda. The allegations driving the calls for Klein to quit have little to do with whether Klein is right, and everything to do with who he is. “He’s a great litigator, he’s probably the smartest person I’ve met,” Randi Weingarten says, “But his view is it’s my way or the highway.” In systems with mayoral control in particular, conventional wisdom and leadership style matter as much, if not more, than winning policy arguments.

School systems are essentially “people [administrators] working with and through people [teachers] to influence people [students].”* For better or worse, politics are inherent in any school system, especially one which gives so much power to one directly-elected mayor and his hand-picked chancellor. These kinds of problems led authors William Sharp and James Walter to advocate participatory decision-making for urban superintendents in their 2004 book The School Superintendent: The Profession and the Person. Neither individual nor group decision making will advance the best reforms: while individuals are subject to bias and overconfidence, groups are impossibly slow at deciding. Perhaps most importantly, participatory decision-making can allow Bloomberg and Klein to preserve the executive power they need to effect real change while cultivating the social capital with teachers, parents and students to keep their political agenda from falling apart in the mean time.

One person in the position to learn a lot from Klein’s troubles is DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Kevin Carey is right to reject Nick Kristof’s questions about Rhee’s bedside manner: union leaders are hard-headed, and Rhee’s staffing policies should be judged by public debate, not by backroom placation. Still, Rhee’s challenges on discipline, attendance and standards will still be there even after the immediate fight over firing is fought and won. Whether legitimate or not, decisions to withhold information about the budget or firing her own children’s principal run the danger of appearing arbitrary and capricious. By letting teachers set some (but not all) of the agenda and making obvious that she values their input, Rhee can make the person-to-person connections she needs to overcome her image and preserve the political prerogatives of her office. In particular, Rhee will have to build systems to protect against truly arbitrary firing and create a rigorous system of professional development (the first signs of which are here) in the District before she pushes for greater firing rights. Fear, in this case, will not motivate teachers to get better but only motivate them to dig deeper into cynicism and complacency.

Rhee knows she can’t fix DC alone: she frequently makes statements like “teachers are the solution” to urban education woes or teachers are “the agents of social justice” in the District. By forming personal relationships open to mutual criticism with as many teachers as she can, Rhee can avoid the breakdown in trust, confidence and collaboration which have derailed Klein’s agenda.

By Chase Nordengren.

---

* Ellen Goldring and William Greenfield, “Understanding the Evolving Concept of Leadership in Education: Roles, Expectations, and Dilemmas,” in The Educational Leadership Challenge: Redefining Leadership for the 21^st Century, ed. Joseph Murphy, Vol 101, no 1, Yearbook of the National Society of Education. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3.

Things I Learned in Madison, Wisconsin

* The UW campus and state capitol are located on an isthmus between two lakes with confusingly similar names, Mendota and Monona. My brain keeps translating both into "Mendoza." 

* In April, a single day can feature three full seasons worth of weather, going from freezing rain to collar-loosening sunshine in the space of a few hours. To adapt, many students have set their minimum temperature threshold for cargo shorts and flip-flops at roughly 15 degrees Fahrenheit.

* UW students and faculty are interested enough in higher education policy to not only show up in good numbers for my lecture but indulge a lengthy analogy between the educational practices of the Ottoman Empire in the 15th and 16th centuries and America in the present day. And let's face it, I'm not exactly David Sedaris when it comes to wit and drawing a crowd. The WISCAPE program here does a lot of interesting work and they're not afraid to ask tough questions, even when those for whom the questions are tough includes the Madison campus and UW system itself.  

* The good local CD store (you know the one I'm talking about) is still in business! I buy a Rodriguo y Gabriela live album that I didn't know existed, which of course is the whole point of the good local CD store.

* Students today: more socially aware or more debauched than ever before? Judging by the place I had coffee, both. On the one hand, the woman sitting next to me laughingly tells her friend an alcohol poisoning-related story from last weekend that was so outrageous I can only assume it's entirely true. On the other hand, here's a verbatim sample of restroom graffiti:

WE NEED:

 (not prioritized numerically)

1) A vast, new deal-type public works program

2) Stop wasting $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan

3) Increase the tax burden on $250,000 plus incomes

4) Repeal tax breaks for corporations that ship jobs abroad

5) 5 million TRULY green jobs.

The "not prioritized numerically" qualifier makes this twice as awesome. 

* Judging from what stores on State Street are selling, here's what today's college students like to buy: Beer, coffee, used books, sandwiches, posters, ice cream, university-themed T-shirts, video games, CDs, sneakers, elaborate paraphenalia for smoking "flavored tobacco," beer.

* Get up early and you can watch the crew team practice on Lake Mendoza Mendota. This is so pleasingly collegiate that I think all colleges should subsidize crew, if only for purely aesthetic reasons. 

* I spent a free hour in the campus art museum, which is first-rate. Highlight: Peter Gourfain, "Fate of the Earth Doors," and contemporary sculpture generally, as well as Dutch painting from the 17th Century. I pretty much had the place to myself until 70 local high school students arrived to learn in small groups, one of which was conducted in French. Clearly they didn't get the memo about No Child Left Behind outlawing art and foreign language.  

* The campus contains not one but two buildings that were designed to repel violent assault by people pursuing a progressive agenda. The "Red Gym" opened in 1894 as a combination gymnasium / armory. In 1886, a Chicago rally in support of striking workers turned into a deadly confrontation with police, which became known as the Haymarket Affair (or Riot, or Massacre, depending on your point of view.) Nervous about worker uprisings, the Wisconsin legislature (located less than a mile away) decided that the thing to do was train male college students into a local militia and house them, along with their weapons, in a massive, medieval-style castellated fortress, complete with those little slots in the top of the walls, presumably so laborers advocating for an eight-hour work day could be shot down with crossbows and the like. (Later, the Gym hosted key meetings of the Wisconsin Progressives led by Robert LaFollete.) 

Similarly, the Mosse Humanities building was constructed in the brutalist style in the late 1960s, when Madison, like many campuses, was wracked by demonstrations against the Vietnam war. The windows are narrow, shielded, and 20 or so feet off the ground, above concrete embankments tilted in a sharp, hordes-of-students-repelling angle. (Fears of violence weren't entirely unjustified; on August 24, 1970, a group of anti-war activists exploded a huge car bomb in an attempt to destroy Madison's Army Mathematics Research Center, killing a research scientist (and father of three young children) named Robert Fassnacht who was working late at night in a non-AMRC part of the building.) The Mosse building is unpopular and hasn't aged well and they're thinking about tearing it down. 

* Vitamin D is naturally produced when people are exposed to sunlight. Without it, they're prone to rickets and other diseases. In 1923, a UW-Madison professor named Harry Steenbock discovered that Vitamin D could be produced in food, including milk, by irradiating it with ultraviolet light. After patenting the process with his own money, Steenbock was offered a huge payout from the private sector. Instead, he helped found the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, the first such "technology transfer" entitity, which splits revenues between researchers, industry and the university. Vitamin D soon found its way into cereal bowls everywhere and rickets was cured. Steenbock's original work has been extended and refined by Madison researchers over the decades, and Vitamin D has generated literally hundreds of millions of dollars for the university. 

Can you Get Seniors to Work Harder?

Many high school students headed to college tend to check out during their senior year, especially the second half of their senior year. By that time, they have applied for colleges and will either get accepted or not based on the work that they have already done, but the work that they do in their senior year does not matter much in that calculation. Yet, many of these same students then enter college unprepared and have to spend their first term taking remedial courses in math and language arts. Beside driving up the cost of a college education for the state and the individual, those taking remedial courses are also less likely to make it through to graduation. In California over half of students entering the state university system (CSU) have to take either remedial math, remedial English or both.

So several years back, the CSU system partnered with K-12 to see if they could identify students at risk and help them avoid remediation. The Early Assessment Program created an augmentation to the 11th grade standard assessment that students could take to see if they were ready for college work. If a student passed this test then they would not have to take remediation in college. If they failed the test, they had their entire senior year to fix their issues before they get to college.

So, can you get seniors to work harder? Early results on the program are just starting to be available. The early results suggest that the program was able to reduce the probability of needing remediation by 6 percent in English and 4 percent in math (news article on study). Not off the charts, but this is enough of an improvement that the program probably paid for itself. It will be interesting to track this work to see if the reduction in remediation also helps increase college graduation rates.

Stimulating Stimulus Discussion

The Department of Education is in the process or has distributed the first $44 billion of K-12 stimulus funding. Most of this funding will flow to school districts based on established formulas. Clearly this funding provides a great opportunity for local education leaders to do the right thing with the funds and make investments that will improve educational opportunities for students. But, many in the education reform community fear that most of this funding will be used to support business as usual. This should not be surprising especially in states where the new federal funds will largely be used to backfill reductions in state and local school funding. Yet, the educational investments made in the stimulus package have been marketed as supporting both jobs and reform. Round 1 has been heavy on the jobs, and light on reform. But in Round 2, the reformers get their shot.

The Department of Education has $4.3 billion in Race to the Top and $650 million in What Works Innovation funds which provide a historic opportunity to reward states, school districts, and entrepreneurs doing good work for kids. The stakes are extremely high for these pots of fund because this might be the most important opportunity school reformers get in the foreseeable future to make a difference. (If the Administration is serious about beginning to balance the federal budget, then there is not likely to be a lot of discretionary funds for the education world. And, without additional funding, the NCLB reauthorization debate may not be able to buy desired reforms like previous reauthorizations.) So this may be the education reformers shot. As some have questioned, can $5 billion leverage a $600 billion industry to change?

For these two pots us funds to leverage the types of changes necessary, the Secretary will need to ensure that he gets the governance and accountability structures accompanying these funds right. Here are some of the questions the Secretary will face. How should the department distribute these funds? What criteria should be used? How should the department evaluate recipients and ensure that the process is fair and transparent? And, importantly, how can the administration support educational entrepreneurs without the perception of cronyism?

Hear the answers to these questions and more! Join Education Sector next week, Weds. April 29 10:30 – 12:30 for:

Ensuring Accountability for Federal Incentive and Innovation Funds.


Panelists include: Ted Mitchell, CEO of NewSchools Venture Fund; Frederick Hess, director of education policy studies at AEI; and Andrew Rotherham, Education Sector co-founder. Education Sector Senior Policy Analyst Rob Manwaring, as moderator. To be held from 10:30 AM to 12:30 PM at the Capitol Hilton (16th and K Street, NW) in the South American Room. To attend you must RSVP to: http://www.educationsector.org/events/events_show.htm?doc_id=863218

Teach For America Growth

There's a cottage industry of journalists and commentators who criticize Teach for America (TFA) as being unscalable. Their main complaint is that, while a worthy program (and they always acknowledge TFA's success), the number of teachers entering the profession through this route is tiny compared to the total workforce. In a piece that is typical of this view, Dan Brown writes in today's Huffington Post (emphasis his):

Over 99.8 percent, a near-total, of America's teachers are not part of Teach For America. If we are serious about repairing our education downslide-- and I believe President Obama is-- we cannot look to TFA as our crucial beacon. Teach For America is a triumph of private sector innovation that should continue to be heartily supported and responsibly expanded, but its embedded exceptionalism innately limits it from modeling nationwide reform.

This type of logic has several errors. First, the TFA-phenomenon is not just exclusive to TFA. TFA has also spawned New Teacher Project (TNTP) programs currently operating in 18 cities. These must be counted in any honest assessment of TFA's impact, because they are essentially individual districts that have decided to run their own TFA-like programs.

Second, TFA has only been in existence since the early 1990s. There are teachers in the classroom who've been teaching for 40 years. So no, TFA teachers do not represent a large portion of all teachers. A proper metric would be to look at the percentage of all new teachers entering through TFA, and on that measure, it has a larger market share. Approximately 170,000 teachers left the profession altogether in 2002. They were replaced, in part, by 3,300 TFA and TNTP teachers. This is only two percent of new teachers, but ten times higher than Brown's .16 figure for all teachers.

Third, Brown ignores growth and demand. TFA and TNTP roughly tripled their numbers between 2002 and 2008, a time when the size of the teaching workforce stayed relatively constant. We don't have great data on the number of new teachers every year, but TFA and TNTP could have supplied up to five or six percent by now. And this year, applications for the programs are up 42 and 44 percent, respectively. College graduates from our nation's elite postsecondary institutions are clamoring to get into teaching through these programs, to the point that their acceptance rates are now down to 15 percent. That's a big deal, and suggests there's room for expansion.

Fourth, as evidence mounts that these programs work, there will be an even greater push for expansion. In a large sample of North Carolina teachers, researchers found that the effect of having a TFA teacher was greater than the effects due to experience. It concluded that, "programs like TFA that focus on recruiting and selecting academically talented recent college graduates and placing them in schools serving disadvantaged students can help reduce the achievement gap, even if teachers stay in teaching only a few years." Such findings matter, and they'll only propel the growth of TFA and TFA-style programs faster. We should be careful not to underestimate its growing impact.

State DREAM Acts Work

Two forthcoming journal articles show that controversial policies allowing illegal immigrant high school graduates to attend college at in-state prices work. In the nine states with policies (a tenth, Nebraska, did not have theirs in place long enough to study), foreign-born noncitizen Latinos were 1.54 times more likely to enroll in college than peers in states without such assistance. And, despite being ineligible for federal financial aid and legally prohibited from working after they graduate, they persist in college at rates similar to Latino peers with citizenship. Now, if only there was something Congress could do...

Another Piece of Evidence for Mayoral Control

There's a short video going around the Internets of Michael Bloomberg speaking about mayoral control of a city's public education system. Here's the video in full:



Most of it is general arguments for mayoral control, bolstered by Bloomberg's claims at the beginning about rising test scores in New York City. Whatever you feel about the authenticity of those, I'm most struck by this passage that starts at the :16 mark:

When I came into office we had 12,000 teachers quit on a base of 80,000 every year. Today that's down to 5,000 teachers that quit or retire. In the old days, seven years ago, we couldn't recruit enough teachers to fill those slots. Today between 50 and 60,000 teachers apply for those 5,000 slots.

If true, those teacher retention numbers are pretty striking. They say something about teacher satisfaction. And, since it costs a lot of money to recruit and train a new teacher, the district is experiencing some savings there. Not to mention the benefits to student learning of having less teacher turnover. Bloomberg doesn't cite the starting numbers of teacher applicants, but it's a good thing that the district now has a larger pool of applicants to choose from. Instead of evaluating a district leader solely on the basis of student test scores, it would be nice to know more information like this, on the quality of the work force.

Goldilocks and Pell Grants

It's hard to make everyone happy on federal financial aid. Postsecondary institutions and state legislators decry the declining value of the Pell Grant over time. They're right; it does buy less than it used to. But, federal legislators argue the Pell, the primary vehicle for student aid for low-income students, has been regularly increased and it is tuition increases that have caused its value to decline. For a vibrant discussion on whether colleges and universities desperately need new federal funding or simply absorb it, see the comments section from this article. The only group that's left out of this discussion is students.

In February I wrote about a smart new proposal in President Obama's budget that would have guaranteed Pell Grant funding and indexed them to the consumer price index (CPI), a Bureau of Labor Statistics calculation based on the change in price of common goods and services, plus one percent. I wrote that such a step would curtail political debates and ensure stability for a program that should not be subject to annual haggling. And the one percent above the CPI is an allowance that higher education suffers from Baumol's cost disease and thus faces some additional costs that other industries might not.

Yet, somehow, no one seems to be fighting for this proposal. Congress doesn't like it because it takes away their annual authorizing power (even though they've already given away much of their power by approving non-discretionary tuition tax credits that primarily benefit middle- and upper-income families). Tax hawks don't like it because it makes another program an entitlement, even if it's one we approve every single year anyway.

Most puzzling, voices representing colleges and universities, and their interests, have been mostly silent. Until today, that is, when the Chronicle of Higher Education ran an article titled, "Even Under Obama's Plan, Pell Grants Trail Tuition." In says even the Obama plan, which would raise the Pell one percent more than the consumer price index would still lag behind the cost of tuition, fees, room and board. It says, instead, "A simple solution would be to index the maximum award to tuition growth." Simple, yes. Smart, no.

The chart below shows the Pell's actual value over time and what it would have been had it been indexed to inflation, compared to tuition increases by sector. Had the Pell been indexed to inflation, it would indeed be higher than it is today. But it would not have been nearly enough to cover college tuition costs, because those have outpaced inflation by enormous amounts. Unlike the article would have us believe, that's not the fault of the Pell, or federal legislators. It's the fault of colleges and universities that have been unable and unwilling to control costs.

The Oddly Selfless Use of University Endowments

Like many organizations, colleges and universities are feeling the effects of the battered economy--revenues are down or growing less quickly, forcing higher education leaders to confront the possibility of layoffs and other painful austerity measures. A relatively small number of institutions, however, have the good fortune to be sitting on gigantic piles of money in the form of endowments that swelled to record size when times were good. There's reason to think that, for some, the aggressive investment strategies that added so much lucre to the treasury are now shrinking the hoards of cash at an equally rapid rate. But they still have a lot of money left, much more than they had even 10 years ago. Yet, as Harvard freshman and ace blogger Dylan Matthews writes (via Matt Yglesias, an alum):

Harvard has tens of billions of dollars. How many tens of billions they won't say, but it's in that ballpark. However, because they're slightly less obscenely wealthy than they were before the economy went to hell, the Harvard administration has started laying people off without cause. Some students, like the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM) and its supporters (like me and Perspective), think that this is uncalled for. We think that Harvard should be more forthcoming about its financial situation, so that students and other members of the community can evaluate whether we really need to lay off workers to weather the recession. And until Harvard releases the information that would allow such a debate to take place, it should stop cutting jobs and find other ways to make up the shortfall. After all, if they're going to cut the jobs of valued members of our community, we have a right to know why that's happening, and how necessary or unnecessary that is. I, for one, kind of doubt that a university that can pay for massive concerts/carnivals can't cough up the cash necessary to pay its workers.

This raises a larger, intriguing question of how university administrators and trustees balance their personal interests against the long-term welfare of the institution. From a selfish perspective, it's in the best interests of college leaders to aggressively spend the endowment in the short term--to avoid layoffs and angry students when times are bad, and to pay for new buildings and famous professors and various other things that cover the institution--and thus the leaders--in glory when times are good. 

And yet, this doesn't tend to happen. Instead, most institutions are pretty conservative when it comes to endowment spending--to the point where they had a tremendous conniption fit when Congress mulled over the idea of requiring them to adhere to the modest five percent annual payout requirement currently imposed on other non-profits. Even when the investment and donor dollars were pouring in, the typical university only spent about 3.9 percent of its endowment on actual stuff other than the cost of managing the endowment itself.

Partly, I imagine even the wealthiest universities haven't quite come to grips with the reality of owning assets larger than the annual GDP of a typical developing nation. But mostly I think this is just one symptom of a larger way of thinking that seizes the minds of college leaders everywhere--a kind of institution-centric view of things that dominates their thinking in profound and important ways.

By that I mean: the institution comes first--before the students, before the faculty, before even the people in charge. In many ways, it's an admirable way of doing business. Universities are among the most long-lasting, essentially virtuous institutions in all of human society. They've preserved crucial values and knowledge in times of great unrest, adapting and improving along the way. The particularly American philosophy of institutional self-reliance--foreign universities often get proportionately larger state subsidies but are more tightly regulated and have far less capacity to raise money on their own--has resulted in an elite higher education sector of great standing, longevity and wealth. For example, I'm writing this from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I'll be knocking around for the next couple of days and speaking on Thursday. The university is really kind of awesome, full of museums and theaters and grand buildings, packed with bright, energetic people trying to make the world a better place. 

But there's a downside to all of this: Institutional and societal interests aren't always aligned. For example, it's good for a university's reputation and bottom line to focus on enrolling lots of rich smart kids, but frankly what we need are more colleges that are good at, and want to be good at, teaching students at the median (among the population of potential college students, which isn't the whole population) or below. Institutions tend to want to grow into fully autonomous city-states when we actually need a more interconnected, cooperative higher education community. Institutions often take a dim view of employee unionization. Belief in the greatness of the institution can also become a little cultish and weird, disconnected from the day-to-day reality of the outside world. And so on. 

And I suspect the perpetual building of the institution causes college leaders to inappropriately discount the urgent needs of today in favor of a more abstract tomorrow. Which isn't to say that universities should blow out their endowments for short-term benefit, but there is a balance to be struck. Harvard's been around for over 370 years. It's future is pretty secure. It's gotten steadily richer and more famous over time, and those long-term trends will probably continue. Future leaders will likely be better positioned to deal with future crises--just as the university today is better off than it was 25 or 50 or 100 years ago.  But the people the university employs today need jobs right now. Universities might be among the few--perhaps the only--institutions that have become too adept at taking the long view. 

Salary Schedule Slopes

At the 2008 annual meeting of the National Education Association, the nation's largest teacher's union, then-Senator Barack Obama endorsed changing teacher compensation structures from traditional single salary schedules—where teachers are paid based only on their educational credentials and years of experience—to one reflecting the performance of individual teachers in the classroom. His mention of pay for performance elicited boos from the assembled members of an organization that eventually endorsed his candidacy for president. Proposals for performance plans have caused controversy in cities like Washington, DC, but, while it's a worthwhile goal to more directly link individual performance to individual pay, traditional single salary schedules are likely to remain in place for some time. Some reflect what we know about teacher effectiveness, but many do not.

Research shows that teachers have steep learning curves—they become much more effective in their first few years on the job and then level off. And a great deal of research shows the link between teacher effectiveness and educational credentials to be minor or nonexistent. A district designing their salary structure based on these findings can more effectively attract and reward high-quality teachers without increasing the overall amount of money spent on compensation.

The slope of teacher salary schedules is likely to have a significant impact on the quality and character of the teacher work force in any given district. Higher starting salaries are more likely to attract high-quality candidates into the profession. A district with only small returns for experience is likely to face retention issues as teachers leave for more lucrative positions or grow frustrated because their pay increases aren't commensurate with their increasing effectiveness in the classroom. Each of these decisions, made at the local level, helps shape a district's teacher work force by influencing its ability to attract and retain quality teachers.

New York City is an example of a city that rewards teachers with large raises when they meet certain experience milestones (teachers earn large raises at seven, 10, 15, 20, and 22 years) and smaller or nonexistent raises in other years. Such policies are likely to distort teacher decision-making, giving teachers too little reason to stay when they are far from the "step" and too much reason to stay when they are near—a teacher in New York is unlikely to leave after 19 years, for example, because they stand to earn an 11 percent raise, more than $8,000, if they stay one additional year.

The chart below compares New York City's current schedule to one that's based on what research says about teacher effectiveness in general. (Scroll over the dollar signs embedded in the chart to read descriptions of the differences between the current system and the proposed schedules). The costs of these schedules are comparable, in that they generate the same total expenditures on teacher salaries, assuming the national averages of the percentage of teachers who have bachelor's and master's degrees and who are in various stages of experience in their careers. The schedules are in present dollars and would be adjusted annually for cost of living increases.



The proposed salary schedules begin with a relatively high starting salary in order to recruit high-quality candidates into the field. They front-load salaries so as to reward early career gains to teacher effectiveness and to provide financial rewards to the teachers most likely to leave the profession. But, unlike districts with hard plateaus, the proposed schedules reserve small bonuses from years 11-25. And, instead of large arbitrary increases before and after multiple years of stagnation, the new schedules follow a gentle, predictable curve that places no extra emphasis on any one year. Teachers who felt burned-out after year 19, for example, would feel no strong financial compulsion to stay an additional year.

Because there is little compelling evidence suggesting teachers with master's degrees outperform their bachelor degree-holding peers, the proposed schedules eliminate the more than $5,000 in bonuses New York awards for master's degrees. Instead, the proposed schedules give only a small bonus to teachers with master's degrees—calculated to cover the cost of obtaining 32 graduate-level credits at the nearby Teachers College at Columbia University.

With finite resources, these choices matter. Single salary schedules will likely continue to be used in most school districts for some time. Districts should construct these schedules in a way that will attract and retain the most effective classroom teachers. To read more about the ways districts structure their teacher salary schedules and to see more cool charts, check out the full report here.

Many thanks to Abdul Kargbo for creating the interactive charts like the one you see above.