USA vs. The World

United States schoolchildren are not the highest performing in the world, on average. This is well known and constantly cited in various calls-to-arms, from the memorable "hostile foreign power" rhetoric of A Nation at Risk to garden-variety speeches warning of economic threats from brainy children in Beijing and Bangalore. The track record is spotty, to be honest--remember when the 240-day Japanese school year was going to lead to total American subservience under the yoke of the Rising Sun by the mid-1990s? There's also plenty of controversy over tests and methods. But the underlying point seems fairly indisputable--children in some other countries learn more. For example, here's how things look on the 2007 TIMSS 4th grade math test:



We do okay, indistinguishable from the mean among OECD countries and better than the average of all countries, but substantially worse than Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, Japan, Russia, England and a few others. Eighth grade scores look much the same.

But the tricky thing about looking at average performance in the United States is that our education system is unusually large, diverse, and decentralized. Parts of it are really good. Other parts are shamefully bad. And in a number of important respects, we can only improve the system part by part. So it's worth knowing just how well those parts are doing. Thankfully, Gary Philipps of the American Institutes of research has done a service by converting state and city-level scores on the NAEP to TIMSS equivalents. Here's what he found:



Turns out that a few of our states are on par with the world's highest performing countries when it comes to educational achievement. Massachusetts in particular stands out, and four other states--Minnesota, New Jersey, New Hampshire, and Kansas--received grades of "B," up there with the likes of Japan. On the flip side, there were a bunch of C's and one D+ in, of course, Washington, DC, where fourth graders learn math at the same level as Ukraine.

This is useful information. International comparisons are often shot down on grounds of fundamental non-comparability. After all, Singapore and Hong Kong are tiny little bits of Asia that just happened to have been sequestered into autonomous political entities by the British because they were advantageously located for international commerce. Countries like Japan and Finland (which tops the PISA test but doesn't participate in TIMSS) have unusually homogeneous populations and strong cultural ties among citizens as well as other beneficial non-education factors--strong social safety nets, low crime, school-oriented cultures, etc. They're just not like us, the thinking goes, so it's unreasonable to compare us to them.

But New Jersey isn't an autocratic city-state on the tip of the Malay peninsula or a Nordic socialist paradise or anything like that. Nor is Massachusetts (well, maybe the socialist part) or Minnesota or New Hampshire or Kansas. They're all medium-sized states in America, subject to American laws, filled with lots of Americans in all the diversity that makes this nation great. Massachusetts in particular, the highest performing state, is full of people from all manner of racial, ethnic, religious, and economic backgrounds. It has relatively high business taxes and relatively good social services compared to other American states but it's far from France or Finland or Japan.

One the hand, this should make us optimistic. American schools systems can in fact compete with the world's best--some of them measure up very well right now. One the other hand, we should be sobered and far less willing to explain away the inadequacies of our worst-performing states on the grounds of vast, irreconcilable differences of politics and culture.

How To Not Waste $2.5 Billion

President Obama has proposed creating a $2.5 billion "College Access and Completion Fund." This is a terrific idea, given the huge problems we have (see here and here) with college completion. But there are good and bad ways to spend $2.5 billion over five years. As Congress considers the proposal, it should keep them in mind:

Bad Ways

1) Paying off state guarantee agencies. The $2.5 billion will come from savings realized by cutting the middlemen out of the federal student loan program. Many of those middlemen are, unsurprisingly, opposed to this idea. While lending giants like Sallie Mae and huge, world-destroying banks have gotten most of the attention, a bunch of ostensibly non-profit agencies also stand to lose out, including state guarantee agencies, which occupy an arcane and largely vestigial role in the loan process. If they're still going to get paid, it should be for something of actual value, like servicing government loans. Giving them a chunk of this money for ill-defined "counseling" purposes or whatnot would waste scarce resources. 

2) Straight formula distributions. The easiest and most politically expedient way to divvy up this money is via a simple funding formula: every college gets an amount equal to their share of all Pell grant students or something similar. Formulas are objective, consistent, easy to explain, and guarantee that nearly every Congressional district gets a taste. They're also a surefire method of ensuring that dollars do little good. The federal government has a long, ignoble history of distributing K-12 funding this way, spreading Title I allocations that amount to only a small fraction of total education spending far and wide to nearly every school district in the nation with little attention to need or whether the money actually does any good. As a result, much of it did little good. There have been improvements to the Title I formulas in recent years, but much of the money is still shot out via a method that (no lie) gives anti-poverty money to schools in Beverly Hills. Formulas are like bamboo: once they take root they're nearly impossible to eradicate. Let's not make the same mistake twice.

3) Data systems, college preparation, and other things that seem perfectly reasonable but aren't actually about directly helping college students earn degrees. Some people have proposed giving states and institutions wide latitude in spending this money, including building data systems to track completion. But there's money elsewhere in the federal budget for that, as well as for improving college preparation through programs like GEAR-UP, etc., etc. This money should be for directly helping college students complete college.

Good Ways

1) Competitive Grants.  Some states and institutions are well-positioned to use this money. They have solid programs in place, good people on the ground, and accountability systems that track success.  Other states and institutions have no idea, but will be happy to cash the check, hire a new administrator, and shuffle the rest of the money around behind the scenes to use for the things they actually care about. Per above, formulas by definition make no distinction between the institutions that are best prepared to use funding and those that are least prepared. $500 million a year isn't much compared to the $400 billion we spend on higher education annually. If this money isn't focused on those who can spend it well, it will be wasted, and students will bear the brunt of that failure. 

2) Partnerships: There's a tricky balance to strike in any grant program. On the one hand, it's madness to try and legislate the who's and how's of a specific completion initiative. Colleges have diverse missions and student bodies--the best approach at a small community college might be entirely different than the most successful strategy at a big research university. But dispersing the money to thousands of disconnected efforts, each trying to independently re-invent the wheel, isn't a good idea either. Preference should be given to coalitions of institutions, systems, or even states that are prepared to help and support one another in pursuing larger completion goals over multiple years. 

3) Accountability. The good thing about college completion is that it's relatively easy to measure. Funds should be distributed with the understanding that grantees will need to show improved results if they expect to come back for more. Completion numbers should be broken down by students' race/ethnicity, gender, and income status. Part-time and non-traditional students should be included. Students should be followed along extended time horizons as they move and transfer. If someone enrolls in a community college part-time for a couple of years, earns 30 credits, transfers to a four-year institution and ultimately earns a degree, that's a success for all concerned. Grantees should be evaluated for effectiveness and efficiency. If you walked up to a man on the street and said, "Hey, if you complete college within six years, I'll give you $500 million," that would probably work. But it wouldn't be a good use of taxpayers' dollars. 

4) Evaluation. Typically, government programs are evaluated as follows: A) Enact program. B) Worry about other things for awhile. C) Come back a few years later to consider re-authorizing program. D) Try to figure out if program worked. But by then it's far too late--to properly evaluate a program, evaluators needs to be involved up-front. Researchers should be hired from Day One to study all the different ways the funding was used and figure what worked best. 

Iowa's Charter Schools

I'm proud to say I attended Iowa public schools from kindergarten through college, and it so happens that my education almost perfectly corresponds to the heyday of Iowa's education system.

In 1992, when I was 8, Iowa's fourth-graders scored higher than all but one state in math and all but four states in reading on the National Assessment of Educational Progress. Unfortunately, today's Iowa's children face a gloomier future than I did. Over a 15-year period ending in 2007, only three states had lower academic gains than Iowa, and Iowa now trails 14 states in both subjects.

These data are important to consider against the backdrop of a recent Des Moines Register piece on charter schools in the state. It found little drive for innovation in Iowa's public-school system, no surprise given its ranking from the Center for Education Reform that placed its charter law 40th out of 41 states.

Iowa's charter law earned this low ranking by placing an artificial cap on the number of charters that could open in the state and limited charter-school management to current districts only. Rather than accommodating growth and demand, Iowa's 370 school districts were arbitrarily limited to a total of 20 charter schools. Moreover, the law limits each district to only one charter school, so Des Moines, which enrolls 29,000 students, is limited to the same number of charters as Dows, which enrolls 65.

The second problem is the law's provision that only current districts can open charters. This is the primary reason Iowa's charters have struggled to innovate. They're run by traditional school districts, so it's no surprise they look more or less like traditional public schools. The most successful and innovative nonprofit charter networks operating in other states - such as the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), Achievement First or Green Dot - are legally barred from opening schools in Iowa. This is a major loss for Iowa's children.

More charter schools will not be a panacea for Iowa's schools, and the evidence on their effectiveness remains mixed (even after yesterday). To read more about Iowa's law and my suggestions for improvement, read my op-ed in today's Register.

Do Full-Time Faculty Help Students Complete College?

This morning I moderated a panel discussion at the Library of Congress focused on college completion. When we came to the Q&A, Cary Nelson, President of the American Association of University Professors, posed a question (I'm paraphrasing from memory):

"One thing nobody on the panel has mentioned is that fact that colleges with higher completion rates also have a larger percentage of their classes taught by full-time professors. So that's one thing we could do: give colleges the resources to employ a stable, full-time faculty."

There are some obvious correlation / causation issues to resolve here. Because full-time faculty are more expensive than contingent faculty, the colleges that tend to employ a lot of them tend to be wealthier than those that don't. Wealthy colleges also tend to enroll a disproportionate number of wealthy, academically well-prepared students, who are more like to complete college. So yes, colleges with stellar college graduation rates are more likely to hire full-time, well-credentialed, tenure-tack professors to teach. But they're also more likely to have lots and lots of other things that also independently improve graduation rates. Resource advantages in higher education tend to be highly co-linear.

So I'm curious: Is there any good research out there that properly explores the relationship between full-time / tenure track status and student outcomes like retention, completion, and learning? Most of what I've seen on the subject only speaks to things like student - faculty interaction and doesn't really get to outcomes. The answer seems non-obvious to me: one the one hand there seem to be obvious advantages to being taught be experienced, knowledgeable professionals who are well-integrated into the university community; on the other hand tenure-track faculty are subject to some pretty severe professional incentives related to publishing that actively push against the time available for helping students learn, earn degrees, etc.

More broadly, given that our vast, world-beating higher education system is populated with many thousands of people who have been highly trained to unravel complex phenomena, and that the subjects in questions aren't located in some distant land nor are they indiscernible without complex scientific equipment but rather are right there on the campuses where all of our researchers live and work, and this is a subject that clearly arouses a lot of strong feelings and is thus in sore need of more empiricism, why isn't there more research in this area?

The New Charter School Study

Macke Raymond, the lead author* for CREDO's new study of charter school performance, emphasized on yesterday's conference call about the report the importance of the word "variability" when discussing the study's results. And there is a lot--among schools, among states, and among the students. In the end, the study (as most good research does) raises more questions than it answers.

The top-line result from the study, and the one most likely to get press attention, is that charter schools are not performing as well as equivalent traditional public schools--17 percent of the charter schools outperformed their traditional public school equivalents, 46 percent were indistinquishable, and a disturbing 37 percent performed significantly worse. That result isn't great for charter advocates - 15 years into charter schooling and one would hope that aggregate analysis of charter school performance would at least be on-par with traditional public schools, if not slightly better.

But that one result doesn't really tell the story of charter school performance--instead, it is that key word "variability" that starts to get at what is happening.

Charter elementary and middle schools actually performed better than their traditional public school peers overall, while high schools and multi-grade schools did worse. Black and Hispanic students showed significantly lower gains than their matched traditional public school students. But low-income and English Language Learner students posted larger gains than their traditional public school peers.

And then there is the variation among states. The report examined results from 16 states and found that in math, for example, 5 states showed higher gains among charter school students: Illinois (Chicago), Colorado (Denver), Louisiana, Missouri, and Arkansas. In 9 other states, charter school students performed worse, including Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Minnesota, New Mexico, North Carolina, Ohio and Texas.

The CREDO researchers also drew some conclusions about state charter school policy from this variation in state results. They looked at state caps on the number of charter schools, the availability of multiple school authorizers, and whether the state has an appeals process for new charter proposals. Both the presence of caps and availability of multiple authorizers were associated with lower charter school performance, while an appeals process was associated with higher performance. The results for multiple authorizers is surprising and runs counter to the thinking of many organizations, including Education Sector. Perhaps 'multiple authorizers' isn't the best way to frame a state's policy--instead the difference is likely in how well authorizers are held accountable for their work and whether the state has statewide, professional authorizers that are able to focus sufficient resources and attention to the job of monitoring school quality.

In the end, this report is a good discussion starter. Why would charter schools in Louisiana show significantly positive growth while charter schools in Texas show significantly negative growth? Why would charter schools serving elementary and middle grades separately do better than traditional public schools, while charter schools serving those grades under one roof do worse? And what is it about charter schools that is beneficial to low-income and English Language Learner students, but isn't for Black and Hispanic students?

I'm looking forward to the next report, which promises to dive into some of these questions. In the meantime, the policy recommendations from this first report underscores that the current shift in discussions of charter school policy, from a focus on the quantity of charter schools to emphasizing the quality of those schools, is precisely where the charter school movement needs to go.

* And ES board Vice-Chair

Arts, Continued

Per Chad below, new results from the NAEP 8th grade Arts & Music test show very little change over time. So little change that's it's really kind of fascinating. In 1997, respondents got 42 percent of the art questions right. In 2008, they also got 42 percent of the questions right. Of the 12 listed questions / tasks, there was no statistically significant change on 11 of them. The only difference: "Identify a compositional feature of a medieval artwork" dropped from 39 percent to 32 percent. Music was a little worse but still very similar. Overall the, the percent correct dropped from 53 to 51 percent, a small but statistically significant difference. Of the 21 questions / tasks, there were statistically significant changes in only six -- five down, one up. All of this is with the caveat that only the multiple choice questions are comparable across years--the constructed response portions of the tests are not.

A lot has changed since 1997. Eighth graders then were only dipping their toes into the Internet then; now they don't know anything else. And of course, eighth graders in 2008 bore the full brunt / enjoyed the full benefit of No Child Left Behind, having completed six consecutive years in which their schools were tested and rated under NCLB. During that time, roughly 6.8 billion articles and news stories were published stating unequivocally that NCLB is responsible for a drastic narrowing of the curriculum, arts teachers being taunted by students and beaten up in the faculty lounge, etc., etc. And yet arts and music scores stayed virtually the same.

I'm not even sure these unchanged numbers are obviously a good thing. Shouldn't there have been some tradeoffs, some substitution of results in focused-upon subjects like reading and math for everything else? Math results for 13-year olds got better during roughly the same time period while reading results stayed flat. In some ways this is all an argument for humility among federal policymakers in their aspirations for magnitude and pace in changing a massive, decentralized K-12 education system.

New Report: NCLB Did Not Narrow Arts Curriculum

Under the headline, "Frequency of arts instruction remains steady, " a new report from the National Assessment of Education Progress concluded:

In 2008, fifty-seven percent of eighth-graders attended schools where music instruction was offered at least three or four times a week, and 47 percent attended schools where visual arts instruction was offered at least as often. There were no statistically significant changes since 1997 in the percentages of students attending schools offering instruction in music or visual arts with varying frequency.

There were also no significant differences found between the percentages of students in different racial/ethnic or gender groups attending schools with varying opportunities for instruction in either music or visual arts in 2008.

Does this mean the NCLB-negatively-impacted-arts-curriculum meme is done? Perception feeds reality, except when facts rear their ugly head.

Starting Over

Radio station WAMU in Washington, DC, today aired the final installment of journalist Dan Charles's impressive four-part series on a year in the life of an urban school trying to leave its dismal history behind. Listen here.

Gremlins!

The Project on Student Debt has a new video out to help student loan borrowers ditch their "debt gremlin" with the new income-based repayment plan option available for federal loans. It doesn't take much to go from manageable debt to a debt gremlin (losing a job, feeding it after midnight...), but this new federal repayment option promises to provide some relief--and, given the current economic situation, the timing couldn't be better.

FIPSE, Failure, Fraud

The United States of America spends something like $400 billion per year on post-secondary education. That's a lot of money. Yet we don't know as much about the higher education sector as we could, or should. While Clemson has justifiably taken heat for cynically manipulating the class size component of the U.S. News rankings, few people have noted that there's actually very little evidence about the impact of class size on learning in college, one way or another. The class size literature in K-12 education is exponentially richer, despite the fact that class size varies much more in higher ed.

Fixing this problem is a perfect role for the federal government, which sponsors high-level research in health, the sciences and elsewhere. And indeed the U.S. Department of Education has long maintained a Fund for the Improvement of Post-secondary Education (FIPSE), which is gets roughly $130 million per year -- not exactly NIH or DARPA money, but enough to sponsor some solid research. Once upon a time, that's exactly what it did -- applicants were subject to a rigorous review process and the imprimatur of an award often helped raise matching funds from foundations and elsewhere.

But as InsideHigherEd reports, there will be no FIPSE competition this year, because Congress has sucked up nearly all of the money for pork projects. This works about they way you'd expect: Some of the money probably goes for worthwhile purposes. Some of it, like $238,000 for "technology upgrades, including purchase of equipment" at Troy University, is probably better than burying the money in a hole in the ground but wouldn't exactly rise to the top of a rigorous review process.

And then you have people like Robert D. Felner, former dean of education at the University of Louisville, who allegedly($) took $694,000 earmarked for "Support and Continuous Improvement on No Child Left Behind in Kentucky" and promptly funneled it into a shell non-profit think tank run by a buddy who then disbursed the money between them. At least, that's what the federal indictment for mail fraud, money laundering and tax evasion says. Felner--who, incredibly, was about to leave for new gig as chancellor at UW-Parkside before his arrest--appears to have been comfortably operating as a con man within academia for most of his career.

This is what happens with pork. The U.S. Department was exercising minimal oversight because, hey, it's not really their project, is it? They'd rather decide how to disburse FIPSE money but Congress won't let them. There are are hundreds of FIPSE earmarks--how much sense does it make to spend lots of time and effort monitoring the purchase of new laptops at Troy University or what have you? But Congress--in this case, Representative Anne M. Northrup (R-Kentucky), who wangled the money--isn't set up to monitor grants. Nor do they have any incentive to root out corruption and incompetence for their own earmarks--that would just expose the underlying selfishness and disregard for the public interest that pork represents. Colleges, meanwhile, are culpable as they've increasingly decided to play the game along with everyone else by hiring special pork lobbyists etc. etc.

Testing Dropouts

Evidently, there’s a run on GED classes. Some say this is because the economy is so bad that 16-21 year old dropouts are making the rational choice for education over unemployment. Others say it’s b/c getting the GED is easier than finishing high school (and in some cases taking state exit exams). An NCES report on late dropouts shows that this view of the GED as the easier alternative to high school is one reason they leave.

On the other hand, if you talk to recent dropouts and those on the cusp of dropping out you might hear another part of the story: they're jumping in line to finish the GED because they think it's going to get harder. And they are probably right. They don’t necessarily know when the change is happening (American Council on Education, or ACE, updates the test every so often and is scheduled to do so again for 2012) or what the details are (by Dec. 31, 2011 GED-takers need to have completed and passed all five content area assessments or they need to take the whole battery of tests—about 7 hours worth in all--over). But they do seem clear on one message—if you wait another year or two, you may have to start all over with a new version that’s sure to be more difficult. Hey, it might even be faster and cheaper to re-enroll in high school and get the diploma.

Speaking of, there's a proposal called HOPE USA for ~$2 billion for locally designed small-school slash real-world learning programs to get dropouts back in the system. Described here in the same report that illustrates the scope of the dropout crisis: more than 6 million 16-24 year olds are high school dropouts (60% are men and a disproportionate percent are Black and Latino--18% and 30%).

Besides the re-enrollment approach, which is good but circles back to some testing questions, the dropout crisis has brought a lot of attention to “early warning signs” that might help predict who’s likely to drop out. This seems like the better place to start. There are long lists of early indicators, and some debate over which ones are really predictive. Personally, I’ve found that the straight question: “do you know what grade you’re in?” can cast a good early signal—any response resembling my neighbor’s “I’m not sure, I don’t know if I passed English last year” should serve as a bright red flag.

Bankrupt

"We're looking into whether California can renege on its commitment"

--Diana Fuentes-Michel, executive director of the California Student Aid Commission, in regards to a state program to repay the college loans of nurses and teachers who agree to work in-state.

The programs sound like a win-win for all sides. A student gets a portion of his or her student loans written off if he or she agrees to work in a high-need field. A state gets to direct students into fields that otherwise might not be filled, while they simultaneously reduce general fund support for colleges and universities. It's a win-win all around, except when states go broke and decide to backtrack on their promises.

Similar programs exist for other professions, but teachers are the primary targets. Teacher participants in Alabama, Alaska, California, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Virginia face either partial cuts or worse. Many more states are considering freezing their programs from new applicants.

Success or failure of these types of programs depends largely on their durability. A state is asking a participant to begin a career they might not otherwise pursue and, in turn, the state promises some financial assistance to do so. If states fail to uphold these promises, future students will be far less likely to participate. This is important, because if the programs are designed to attract the marginal students--the ones who need a little extra push into a given field--and not just supplement the salaries of ones who would do so anyway, the programs need prospective applicants to believe the money will actually exist down the road.

That, in fact, is the real problem with these programs: they're not really designed to affect the overall supply of teachers, even for specialty areas. They're just too small. Really they're designed to show the public that state leaders are doing something for certain underpaid and under-supplied professions. State leaders can't force school districts to modify their salary schedules to accommodate the laws of supply and demand. Legislatures have been unwilling to throw more money at colleges and universities and dubious that the postsecondary institutions would use additional money to follow state priorities. What we're left with are boutique programs that made their political point and now can fall by the wayside and only harm a few thousand teachers. That's not just financial bankruptcy; it's of the moral variety as well.

Ranking Secrets Revealed!

College rankings are an interesting business, if for no other reason than the public loves them and the higher education intelligentsia hates them. Take the ongoing scandal at Clemson University. When it came out recently that Clemson has made increasing its US News & World Report ranking from 38 to the top 20 its sole focus, it provoked gasps and outrage in the higher education world, but barely a ripple elsewhere. To be sure, the stunts Clemson has pulled are pretty outrageous and do little to enhance the instituton's quality, but rankings are here to stay; the only question still in doubt is whether those rankings will reflect things that actually matter.

Clemson's actions are all quite rational given the incentive structure colleges currently operate under. The state of South Carolina provides little oversight to its public colleges and universities, and the federal government has few levers to demand quality. That leaves individual institutions to determine their own measures of success, and Clemson found a numeric benchmark on which it could measure itself: college rankings. The ranking magazines sell millions of copies each year, which drive applications, which in turn boosts prestige. If you're Clemson, you'd be a fool not to do everything in your power to increase your ranking.

And that's exactly what they did, in pretty stark ways. US News gives a large preference to class sizes between 1-19 students, so Clemson did everything in its power to reduce classes that were in the 20-25 range down to the magic number of 19. In turn, Clemson let every class over 50 students grow indefinitely. The magazine didn't value average or median class size--it valued the percentage under 20 and the percentage over 50. Nevermind that no good research would suggest that's in the best interests of students.

Next, because the rankings value wealth and exclusivity, Clemson raised tuition sharply and sought to increase the academic credentials of its incoming students. South Carolina is a poor state with low educational attainment; Clemson's policies made it more elite and less accessible to first-generation, minority, and low-income students.

The thing that's so galling about all this is what comes next. Despite constant criticism and constructive suggestions on how to improve, US News continues to give 25 percent weight to a peer assessment survey that's really nothing more than a measure of fame. This is by far the single most important category in the rankings, and Clemson, pursuing its own best interests, deliberately scored its peers lower. InsideHigherEd found Clemson President James F. Barker's survey response, and he rated Clemson as the best university in the country, above the likes of UC-Berkeley, Michigan, UNC-Chapel Hill, Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, and Yale.

There are two things that continue to baffle me about all this. One, that the magazine continues to use such a flawed measure when it's in every institution's best interests to rate other ones poorly. The surveys are based purely on reputation and have next to nothing to do with quality. Two, that institutions have not seized the opportunity to create something better. They've focused mainly on attacking rankings themselves rather than seeing that the American public wants some objective system to evaluate colleges and universities, a system that would fairly evaluate how well a college educates the students it starts with. Until we get something better, we're left with glossy, silly, status-based nonsense. Institutions, act accordingly.

Positive Reinforcement

The ES on-line discussion on positive incentives continues today (here). Join Michael Barber, Sandy Kress, Dominic Brewer, Andy Rotherham and myself in discussing the role of positive incentives in our school system. While the conversation started off focused on positive incentives and school reward programs, we quickly broadened the scope. This is in recognition that positive incentives need to be a part of a more comprehensive education reform approach. These thought leaders saw strong ties between school rewards and performance pay. For performance pay approaches to be successful and sustainable, there needs to be significant improvements in teacher evaluation processes. The discussion has touched on national standards, quality assessments and measurement tools, school autonomy, serving special need populations and how these issues relate to positive incentives. Sandy informs us about the new Texas accountability system just adopted by their Legislature and the role of positive incentives in it. Michael and Sandy discuss the importance of positive incentive in media relations. Plus as a bonus, Michael provides some marital advice. I started applying his sage words this morning in my house. So join the discussion and get your questions answered as well.

Charter Schools and Budget Battles

ConnCAN sent out an alert last Friday about Connecticut's Governor Rell's latest budget, which includes substantial cuts to the state's charter schools. Nevermind that Connecticut's charter schools already receive less per-student than traditional public schools and face caps on the number of students they can enroll. Or that, according to this report, they have greater student achievement gains than traditional public schools. Still, charter schools are singled out for cuts in the budget.

And Connecticut charters are not alone. Charter schools in Washington, D.C., which educate 36 percent of the city's public school students are facing cuts to their facilities funding - cuts the traditional public schools are not facing. Earlier this year, charter schools in New York faced a similar fate. And the New Hampshire legislature is debating a proposal to cap the number of students enrolled in charter schools (and I thought the state motto was "Live Free or Die"?) below current enrollment levels, meaning some students would have to leave their schools.

States are facing hard times right now, and Governors and state legislators must make difficult choices, including cutting public school budgets. But, these cuts should not hurt some public schools (and charter schools are public schools) more than others - as part of the public school system, charter school students deserve the same levels of public funding and support as their traditional public school counterparts. It will be a sad day if Governors and state legislatures across the country decide to use charter schools, and the disproportionately low-income and minority students they serve, as an easy out for difficult budget decisions.

Diplomas and Dropouts

Postsecondary institutions with similar student bodies do not achieve similar outcomes. Even among the most competitive institutions, where entering students must be in the top 10-20 percent of their high school class and score above 655 on each section of the SAT or above 29 on the ACT, graduation rates vary widely. These institutions accept only about 30 percent of their applicants, yet completion rates range from 60 to 97 percent. This the variance for the top high school students attending the most presitigious colleges and universitieis; it gets much worse for less qualified students and less prestigious institutions.

These differences show that improving graduation rates is not just about lack of money, student motivation, or adequate high school preparation; institutions matter too. Read this article to find out more about institutional differences, and read Kevin Carey's suggestions on how institutions can improve.

Dancing Around the Elephant in the Room

A few weeks ago,  conservative education historian / contrarian Diane Ravitch was asked to judge a "best education reform idea" contest. The first entry came from the "Center for Union Facts," a sort of clearinghouse for union-hating agitprop. The "Center" proposed to--and I'm not paraphrasing here--"demonize" teachers unions. With billboards and radio and stuff. Ravitch noted that the highest-performing state in the nation is, by a wide margin, the strong union state of Massachusetts, and that the highest performing nation in the world is heavily unionized Finland, and concluded that the "kill the unions and everything will be great" strategy of education reform didn't seem to hold much water.

This set off a lengthy roundabout on the right side of the edublogosphere featuring a wide range of opinions, everything from "No, teachers unions are always terrible and must be stopped" all the way to "Yes, teachers unions are always terrible but it's possible to have a good school system anyway, although not as good as it could have theoretically otherwise been." 

At no point did anyone note the other thing Massachusetts and Finland have in common: they're both chock-full of socialists. 

Seriously, who thinks this is a coincidence? Massachusetts is a famous bastion of liberalism while Finland is a Nordic welfare state. According to the anti-tax Tax Foundation, Massachusetts has the fourth-highest corporate income tax rate and the second-highest unemployment insurance taxes. According to the pro-health Kaiser Family Foundation, Massachusetts is one of a minority of states to extend federal SCHIP health insurance benefits to tens of thousands of students from families with income above 200% of the federal poverty line. Finland, meanwhile, cheerfully provides universal daycare, healthcare, and massage therapy for all I know. It's so egalitarian that taxes are 150% of income and everyone is legally required to be friendly, Lutheran, and of equal height. 

Which is not to say that teachers unions aren't sometimes--even often--barriers to smart policy. Bob Costrell, who was there, convincingly recounts the Massachusetts teachers unions' opposition to MCAS exit exams. Readers of this blog know that I disagree with teachers unions--particularly the NEA--on a host of policy issues including teacher pay, certification, schools of education, Teach for America, and No Child Left Behind. 

But I've also been to Finland, and my best guess is that Finnish success is a function of four main factors: fair distribution of school funding, a strong social safety net combined with high-quality family services for all, an unusually smart and well-trained teacher workforce, and a standard, high-quality national curriculum. American teachers unions are, as a rule, in favor of the first two of these things and may yet come around on the fourth.   

In other words, strong unionism may make it harder to implement good education policies, but it may also be the natural outgrowth of political and social attitudes that make children easier to educate. That doesn't mean we can't have it all--without it all, the odds of really making a dent in the achievement gap are long. But that means engaging teachers unions, not pursuing futile dreams of tearing them down.  

Mine News

Newspapers, and to a lesser extent magazines, are in a downward spiral. Readership is down so they cut staff. Quality suffers so readers quit subscribing. Advertisers see dwindling readers and go elsewhere. There's a debate about where this all leads--Are we just going to rely on a mass of citizen of bloggers/ journalists? Will the government or private foundations have to step in to finance a dying industry?--but the downward spiral is not likely to stop until news outlets begin to think less about their medium and more about delivery of their content.

Increasingly we rely on RSS feeds, Twitter, Facebook, StumbleUpon, and blogs to get our news. I don't read one newspaper in the morning; I read six, sometimes more, but only the sections and articles I care about. In other words, it's not that I'm not reading, it's that I don't count any single outlet as indispensable. If one starts charging for features that I want or need, I will take my eyes elsewhere.

Some traditional media outlets are experimenting with hybrid blends where they charge for some content and not for others. Others give free preview periods, presumably to drum up interest, where users can view the article(s) during that time only. Both of these routes are destined for failure, because all it takes to subvert them is one enterprising person who copies it, emails it to their friends, or posts it on their blog. The New Yorker blocked an article on Steve Barr, the founder of Green Dot charter schools, but the author made it available elsewhere. Mother Jones gave a free preview for Dana Goldstein's sensational article on Democrats and education. The magazine has it blocked now, but Google cached the entire thing.

As bad as those experiments are, one from Time has promise. It's called Mine Magazine, and it lets users select their favorite (Time Inc.) magazines, has them answer a few questions, then signs them up for their own personalized magazine. The first 31,000 "subscribers" got a free print edition, and the first 200,000 got an online version. This trial run has only one sponsor, Toyota, but there's no reason it couldn't be rolled out on a larger scale with more participating publications and advertisers. My personal magazine would have exercise tips from Men's Health and Runner's World, recipes from Gourmet or others, news from the New York Times and Washington Post magazines, and the articles (yes, articles) and jokes from Playboy. It would have sports stories from Sports Illustrated and ESPN, but also from non-traditional sports outlets like The New Yorker. I currently pay for none of these, and probably won't in the future, but I have to think advertisers would pay for the cost to publish Mine Magazine if they knew my demographics and knew I'd read it.

We're not going back to a world where the majority of people subscribed to their local daily newspaper. Most of us have our own personalized information-gathering system already; media outlets who fail to see that will continue their decline.

Think Positive

You get more flies with honey than vinegar. In Psychology 101 you learn that people are more responsive to positive reinforcement than negative reinforcement or punishment. While both positive incentives and punishment can be effective at modifying behavior, punishment tends to lead to other negative responses like anger and resentment. Yet, much of our current federal education policy emphasizes the negative. And, as Psych 101 predicts there has often been a lot of anger and resentment about the law. NCLB requires states to develop an accountability system that has both sanctions and rewards. Specifically,

“Each State accountability system shall … include sanctions and rewards, such as bonuses and recognition, the State will use to hold local educational agencies and public elementary schools and secondary schools accountable for student achievement and for ensuring that they make adequate yearly progress in accordance with the State’s definition.”

Yet, the focus of NCLB has been on failure – student failing to achieve proficiency, schools failing to make AYP, interventions and sanctions. States have spent little time if any on the positive incentive side of the discussion. Why have educators ignored this basic lesson of psychology?

The Department of Education's $5 billion in "Race to the Top" and innovation funds has reignited a discussion of the role of positive incentives in motivating and supporting school reform efforts. With this boost in funding, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan has a chance to reward what he refers to as "islands of excellence" in school achievement and build on those proven success stories. Join us starting tomorrow through Friday (June 3–5) for an online discussion on how policymakers can use rewards and positive incentives to encourage excellence in schools. This discussion will feature: Education Sector's Andrew Rotherham and Robert Manwaring, and experts Sir Michael Barber of McKinsey & Company; Sandy Kress, a key architect of NCLB; and Dominic Brewer, associate dean and professor at the University of Southern California. Submit your questions starting June 3, and join the conversation!
More info here.

The Condition of Education: Master's Degrees in Education

Over the last decade, the number of teachers in this country has increased faster than student enrollment. This is due almost exclusively to class size reductions at the elementary level: while the student/ teacher ratio in secondary schools was almost identical in 2006 to what it was in 1990, in elementary schools it has fallen by 14 percent. Since teacher salaries are by far the largest expenditure in schools, the drop in class size equates to a sizable sum in total expenditures on schools. None of this is new to someone who follows education policy closely. What is new is that teachers increasingly possess not just the traditional bachelor's degree, but many more now possess Master's degrees in education. That has significant consequences for the field.

The Condition of Education published a chart showing common undergraduate degrees awarded in 1996-97 and 2006-07. Of engineering, visual and performing arts, psychology, health professions, education, social sciences, and business, education was the only field with flat growth. A grand total of 525 more students graduated with bachelor's degrees in education in 2007 than did in 1997, a growth of 0.5 percent. This compared to 101,597 more business students, a growth rate of 45 percent.

For Master's degrees the story is the opposite. Education had the highest growth rate of all fields, with 62 percent more graduates in 2007 than in 1997.

At first blush this might seem like a good thing--more qualified people entering an important profession is a good thing, right? The trouble is that the research on the value of a Master's degree in the classroom has consistently shown little to no effect. In other words, these degrees are little more than additional credentials, credentials that cost districts around the country a lot of money. How much money? Below are the salary schedules for teachers in Santa Ana, California and Omaha, Nebraska. Scroll over the dollar signs to see how each of these districts has opted to compensate teachers according to their years of service and credentials.

Fortunately most districts pay their teachers more like Omaha than Santa Ana. Santa Ana's mountain is an extraordinarily strong incentive for teachers to earn a Master's degree, a degree that has been shown to matter little in educational effectiveness. Yet, even Omaha's more modest bonus for Master's degrees is an incentive that costs the district millions of dollars each year (not to mention the fact that most districts subsidize the cost of teachers going back to school to earn those same higher credentials).

At a time when district budgets are under strain, the Master's bonus should be reconsidered. If you want to learn more about how this can be done and the impacts of the way districts structure their salary schedules, read my recent report on the topic here.

More on the "Condition of Education" here, here, and here.