"Costs" versus True Costs

I've found Edspresso's recent series of posts by contributor Michael Strong on "How to Give Your Child An Expensive Private Education--for Less than $3,000 A Year" quite interesting. It's based on some pretty "progressive" ideas about education and wouldn't be my cup of tea, but I can see how a kid who went through the program would probably be both decently educated and a pretty neat kid. But Strong shouldn't claim it only costs $3,000 a year, because that ignores the major cost of the program: The significant opportunity costs for the labor of parents who must opt out of fulltime paid employment to deliver such a program for their child. An adult who has the verbal, literacy, writing, math skills and personal discipline to shepherd their child through such an educational experience would be a valuable employee for a variety of organizations and, barring significant health or emotional problems or living in an extraordinarily deprived area, it seems reasonable to assume such a person could earn, at minimum $25,000 a year in full-time employment. That opportunity cost brings the true cost of such a program to at least $28,000 a year, which is more expensive that many elite private schools. Now, obviously many parents choose to stay at home with their children for a variety of reasons and that's a perfectly valid decision that I in no way mean to imply anything negative towards. But opportunity costs should always be counted as part of the costs of any decision, whether it's about education policy or homeschooling one's child.

STRIVE Act Includes DREAM

Reps Gutierrez (D-IL) and Flake (R-AZ) introduced the first bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill of the 110th Congress. The Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy (STRIVE) Act is a huge deal and, if passed, will change our nation's approach to immigration. It's already controversial, as expected. Full text isn't yet posted but here's the synopsis. It includes the DREAM Act- see Title VI under "other"- for folks who got here at least 5 years ago at the age of 15 or younger and have graduated from high school.

For more on immigration policy, education-related and otherwise, check out the Migration Policy Institute, an independent think tank out of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Some great pubs, upcoming events, and other links.

Hearing on English Language Learners

There was a hearing on the hill this morning on English Language Learners and NCLB. Good for a basic review of key concerns- poor quality data and instruments for counting ELLs and measuring their language proficiency, and how to ensure effective teachers for this population- but not so illuminating if you're looking for new ideas on what to do about all of this. List of witnesses and the archived webcast posted here.

Foreign Policy and Five-Year-Olds

My friends in the pundit class tell me Bill Richardson is a super-accomplished guy with lots of foreign policy expertise. As AFTie Ed notes, he's also racked up some domestic policy accomplishments in New Mexico, including on education. Kindergarten-plus, which gives at-risk kids a jump start on kindergarten during the summer, is a great program, especially for places that lack resources for larger pre-K investments. The late Sandra Feldman was a champion of the idea, and AFT does good work promoting it.

Educational Markets Need Better Information

Rory Hester writes about the challenges of getting good information to pick a school for his children in the Anchorage area. Ryan Boots piggybacks on this with some more general comments about why educational markets need better, comparable sources of information to help parents seach for schools.

Going back to my vouchers posts earlier this week: Voucher proponents say markets and parent choice will improve educational accountability. But they never really engage with the informational obstacles parents--even really smart, committed, educated parents--face to making good choices here. For educational markets to work effectively, all schools receiving public funds must be required to take the same test so that parents at least have comparable information about student performance (preferrably in both absolute and growth or value-added terms) across all school options.

Public entities should also do more to provide relevant information to parents in accessible, easy-to-use formats. Sites like schoolmatters.com and greatschools.net provide some test score and school environment information, but it's not always easy to use and there are often gaps. The best charter school authorizers provide good information about the performance and characteristics of schools they charter, but there are no comparable sources for district schools or schools chartered by other authorizers. I think this idea from the British think tank ippr for locality-wide "admissions authorities" has interesting potential for U.S. cities with significant, multi-sector publicly-funded school choice, as a way to provide parents with better information and smooth the logistics of choice across multiple sectors.

Even Tai Shan's Off to China Soon...

It turns out we're not the only ones concerned about attracting top international college students. China has taken a major interest in this topic as well, and perhaps could give the U.S. some pointers. They've already reached a goal of attracting 120,000 foreign students by the 2008 Beijing Olympics and have set a new goal of 300,000 by 2020, more than double today's levels. They're serious too, and have started handing out more government scholarships and encouraging private colleges to recruit foreigners. Since most students who study in China come from the same countries that send large numbers of students to the United States, we could feel the impacts of their efforts. Also, like Korea, China is concerned about brain drain, and trying to convince its own students to stay put. Just more evidence that the market for international students is indeed hotter than ever. Find out more about how we're doing here.

Vouchers: Building New Opportunities or Just Shuffling Students?

Andrew Coulson responds to my post below about the limitations of the vouchers-based market approach for improving the education of disadvantaged students. Coulson asserts I'm overlooking important evidence that vouchers can substantially expand the supply of quality schools serving disadvantaged students. I'm not unaware of this research, but I do not think it shows what Coulson believes it does. He points primarily to the experience with vouchers in Chile and the Netherlands.

Chile's experience does seem to show that the creation of vouchers can, under certain conditions, lead to the creation of significant numbers of private schools. But it doesn't show that vouchers lead to the creation of a significant numbers of new, high-quality schools serving poor students. The use of vouchers and growth of private school enrollment in Chile is disproportionately concentrated among high- and mid-range SES children and does much less to help poorer children: A higher percentage of children from the top SES quintile use vouchers than from the bottom two quintiles. And, the implementation of these vouchers did not improve educational outcomes in Chile, while there is some evidence suggesting that achievement of low-income students in both public and private schools declined in the 1980s following implementation of vouchers.

The example of the Netherlands is even less relevant here. In the early 20th century, when a lot of Western nations were expanding their public education systems, the Netherlands decided to deal with religious differences by creating a system that included non-government run religious schools for children of different religions. These religions schools are run by independent non-profit boards and much comply with a variety of regulations. The fact that a significant number of Netherlands kids go to privately-run schools today says nothing about the probability that implementing a voucher-like system in the U.S. today will expand high-quality educational options for low-income kids.

I will admit that I'm less familiar with the more recent programs in Denmark and Sweden, although given their age there obviously is not "decades of research" on them. If Mr. Coulson sends me a copy of his book and any other relevant materials, I would be happy to learn more about this. As regular readers of this blog know, I'm far from opposing choice, but the existing evidence I'm aware of does not bear out assertions that an unrestricted market, alone, will create significant new high-quality options for poor kids.

It's telling that Mr. Coulson had to look so far and wide to find examples here. Sure, experiments with vouchers in the U.S. have been small and few, but the evidence that is available from existing programs--including privately-funded scholarship programs--is pretty unconvincing here. The existing programs, by and large, just change where pupils are allocated among existing schools, and create modest amounts of additional space in existing schools on the margins. In particular, existing evidence suggests that, even with a huge expansion in vouchers, the profit motive is just not going to drive a lot of high-quality new schools for poor kids, because there's just not a lot of profit to be made educating poor students in the U.S., particularly if you do it well. In contrast, the charter school movement has created 4,000 schools in the past 15 years that now serve more than 1 million kids, who are disproportionately low-income and children of color.

Boon for D.C. Scholarships

The Gates Foundation is commiting $122 million to college scholarships and mentorships for D.C. students, to give them an incentive to stay in school, help them afford college, and help combat the District's high dropout rate. Unlike some major universities located in the D.C. Metro area, the Gates Foundation clearly seems to understand that D.C.'s public charter schools are public schools, too: students from Anacostia, Ballou, H.D. Woodson, Friendship Collegiate, Maya Angelou-Evans and Thurgood Marshall Academy will be eligible for scholarships. All of these schools are located in Wards 7 and 8, and three of them are charter schools.

Fun with Hypotheticals

So, if you were a major urban school board, and were trying to fend of a mayoral takeover of the schools your currently control, do you think that failing to submit a budget proposal for the coming fiscal year in a timely fashion, and then insisting at the last minute that you need a much larger funding increase than the mayor's budget includes, despite enrollment declines, would really be the best course of action to win support for your case here?

The Case for the Starbucksification of Public Education

Traveling yesterday, so I'm late to comment on the page one Post piece about KIPP expansion. As KIPP continues to grow in size and prominence, some interesting things are becoming apparent. While KIPP is a reform model, it's also a brand, one that is being franchised around the country. Talking about brands and franchises in the context of public education tends to make people nervous, and often leads them to say things like "We don't want the equivalent of Starbucks for public education."

I, on the other hand, think it would be great if we Starbucksified the public schools.

I’ve said this around the Education Sector offices on more than one occasion, and the reaction has always been silence and arched eyebrows, the kind of look people use to signal that they are waiting for you to say you’re kidding.

Of course, most of the eyebrow-raisers drink coffee and thus go to Starbucks on a regular, sometimes daily basis. That’s because our offices are located on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington, DC, where there is—literally—a Starbucks every block for as far as the eye can see. (When I was a kid I used to hike the Appalachian Trail with my father. The AT is marked with white blazes, and the idea is that when you stand next to a blaze, you can always look ahead to see the next one. I’m pretty sure DC Starbucks deployment works the same way.)

While I am also a Starbucks drinker, if I had my druthers I would buy my afternoon cappuccino from a quirky, independently owned coffee shop where they roast their ethically purchased beans themselves and the barista is always that cute girl with the short hair that you suspect / hope plays bass in a great indie rock band on weekends.

But I don’t have that choice, and never will. Only an organization with the money, discipline, and will-to-power of a giant corporation like Starbucks can manage to make high-quality coffee drinks unavoidable to a point that borders on the absurd. That inevitably involves certain compromises, both in terms of the quality of the coffee and the general sense of corporate sameness that degrades our quality of life in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

That said, the ultimate effect of Starbucks' world domination has been a huge net increase in the quality of coffee, distributed broadly among the populace. This is true both because of the growth of Starbucks itself, and because of the competitive response: other franchises like Caribou Coffee (which I prefer, in only because they call their medium-sized coffee "medium," not "grande") have sprung into action, and everyone from McDonald's to Dunkin Donuts has upgraded coffee quality. While Starbucks might have run some locals out of business in a few coastal, blue-state enclaves, in most places it just means that you can buy good coffee that you could never buy before. The people who want Starbucks the most are often the farthest from centers of money and culture, and that distance is precisely the reason. Getting a Starbucks signifies that a place is Starbucks-worthy.

I'd like the same thing to happen to public education. A lot of local, independently-run schools aren't the equivalent of the cool coffee shop with the bass-playing barista. They're more like a mom & pop store with two pots of coffee on the back counter, decaf in the one with the orange rim. Starbucks—corporate sameness and all—could be a whole lot better.

Andy Rotherham correctly notes that KIPP isn't for everyone, and it might be reasonable to think that no organization, no matter how great, could successfully franchise more than, say, 2,000 schools. Maybe more, maybe less, nobody really knows at this very early point in the expansion of public school choice and non-governmental organizations running schools. But if one organization could run 2,000 really good schools, there's no reason that 10 or 15 couldn't do the same, each with a specific model tailored to a specific problem or population of students. That would be 30,000 schools, one-third of the 90,000 nationwide. Taking into account the additional benefits of competitive response, that would be a whole lot of progress.

In the end, much of the argument against Starbucks is aesthetic and—let's be honest—fairly elitist. The argument for Starbucks is utilitarian, and utilitarian values deserve a great deal of deference when it comes to matters of education policy. If every student deserves a high-quality education, then a policy or course of events that results in a large net increase in student learning sets a very high bar to dispute. Particularly if the people who would happily take a cup of high-quality soulless corporate coffee are drinking a much weaker brew today.

I Should Know Better than to Argue with Libertarians About Vouchers, But I Don't

I've resisted commenting on Megan McArdle's recent foray into pro-voucher blogging, because Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum have been doing an admirable job making the basic relevant points, but I wanted to highlight a few points from a slightly different angle. Referring to poor performance of schools serving disadvantaged urban students, Megan writes:

I have a novel approach to solving this problem: I propose we . . . pay schools on the basis of their ability to educate these children. I plan to call this system something nifty and new-economy, like . . . a market. That has an edgy, new-millenial kind of feel, doesn't it? I think it's the juxtaposition of the hard-edged k and t sounds with the soft, sensuous labials of the first syllable.

The trouble is that the market alone isn't adequate to address the problems she sees in public education.

Kevin and Matt both raised this issue of accountability and quality. As anyone who loves the critically acclaimed but criminally underviewed Veronica Mars or Friday Night Lights knows, market success is not always synonymous with product quality. There are good reasons to believe that markets alone, in the absence of good information and public accountability, won't allocate children and resources to the schools that do the best job educating them. When public funds are used for public education, there is a public oversight responsibility to ensure that the schools receiving those funds—private, charter, public, what-have-you—meet basic standards of safety, quality, and student performance. That requires a public oversight role—some kind of quality-based entry barrier for participating schools, some kind of test-based accountability for student performance, the ability to prevent schools that consistently produce poor results from accepting voucher students—that most voucher proposals, in practice, lack. This kind of accountability isn't just about ensuring the public interest, though: It's also critical to provide parents with the kind of high-quality, comparable information they need to make good, informed choices among educational options. In the absence of such information the market won't be effective.

There's actually a basic contradiction in Megan's argument: Paying schools based on their ability to educate children is not the same as a market. There's no guarantee, for the reasons mentioned above, that a market would result in schools getting paid based on their ability to educate children. And it's certainly possible to imagine a financing scheme within the existing public school system that allocates resources to schools based on student performance. The latter would be an example of injecting market incentives into the educational system without actually creating a market. But there are obvious moral/practical complications to such a scheme because, in practice, it would exacerbate economic inequities and take resources away from schools that actually need additional support to help them improve. Performance incentives alone don't work when people in a school honestly don't know how to improve their student performance. When that's the case—as the experience of NCLB reauthorization suggests it is in many places—you need to either build the capacity of existing organizations or create new ones to replace them that do have capacity.

Which brings me to what I think is really the more significant limitation of voucher proposals: Vouchers are all about allocation of children amongst spaces in existing schools and do almost nothing to expand the supply of high-quality options. Spaces in existing schools are inequitable allocated, with poor kids having much less access to good schools. But more basically, the problem is that there's a severe shortage of high-performing schools in the geographic areas in which disadvantaged kids tend to be concentrated. Any serious approach to improving education for disadvantaged youngsters needs to create a lot more good schools in the places where these kids are. But vouchers just tinker in the margins of getting poor kids into the limited space available in decent (and sometimes not so decent) private schools that do already exist. Megan at one point paraphrases Matt's argument as "Therefore maybe we can muck around with charters, but don't go crazy!" But in terms of potential to radically change the educational system and options available to poor kids, charters are actually a much more radical approach than vouchers.

Some voucher proponents claim that making vouchers available will create market incentives that expand the supply of high-quality schools in these communities, but there's not really evidence to bear that out. In some of the places where vouchers exist, new schools have sprung up, but many of them have been shady operations that did a poor job educating kids, had financial improprieties, and/or went out of business. There's a basic economic problem here: As the experience of EMOs that have struggled to make a profit operating charter and contract schools shows, it's just really hard to make any kind of profit educating disadvantaged kids; people whose primary interest is profit are much better advised to pursue other avenues.

When it comes to creating new high-quality options for disadvantaged kids, the charter school movement seems to hold much more promise than vouchers. Even there, though, there are significant obstacles to building quality new schools at a scale sufficient to impact outcomes for a significant number of disadvantaged children. Partly, this is because of artificial barriers created by state policy: State charter school caps, inequitable funding, zoning and other regulatory limits, etc. But it's also simply the case that building new schools is incredibly difficult, that making them good is even more so, and that ensuring quality at any kind of scale is even harder. Getting there is going to require identifying and developing new sources of high quality human capital, building new organizations that are able to support new high-quality schools in new ways, etc. The charter movement is doing some of this. Philanthropists have played a key role in starting to build this infrastructure, but government has been an important player, too: The federal charter schools program is a key source of start-up funding for charter schools. And getting to the point where all disadvantaged kids have access to a high-quality school is going to require a much more concerted government effort to support and incentivize individuals and organizations to create and run these schools.

Just cutting poor parents a check for a few thousand dollars and sending them on their way--as most voucher proponents recommend--isn't going to cut it, and proposals to do that, without ensuring public accountability for schools, and without accompanying efforts to dramatically expand the supply of good schools that are available to poor parents, would be every bit as much of an abdication of society's responsibility to these kids as what's happening now.

I've gone on long enough, but two more points:

Like many voucher proponents, Megan says many times that we should implement a voucher system because it couldn't possibly be any worse that what we have now. This strikes me as a wierd bit of reasoning. The fact that some existing schools are bad (and, in contrast to Megan, I do believe the situation many places could be made worse), doesn't mean some proposed reforms to improve them aren't better than others. The choice policymakers face on education is not between vouchers and the status quo, but among a wide array of education reforms, including charters, vouchers, small autonomous schools within districts, weighted-student funding, injecting market incentives into the existing system, top-down regulatory reform approaches, etc., some of which are better than others, and the best reform approach is probably not going to be the same everywhere.

More tangentially, this entire exchange started out with a discussion about similarities and differences between health care and education and why the left and center-left embrace seemingly different policy prescriptions in the two fields. I find comparisons of health and education policies fascinating and wish there was more cross-talk between the sectors. This interview I did with Sir Michael Barber, the architect of Tony Blair's education reforms who has also played a key role in driving reforms to the NHS there, gets into some of the similarities and differences in ways that are very relevant to this conversation, and I strongly encourage everyone to read it.

Why You--Yes, You, Suburban Business Person/Parent/Professional--Should Care About Lousy Urban Schools

Via DCedblog, WaPo business columnist Steven Pearlstein makes a very strong case for why affluent and middle-class Washington-area suburbanites should care about the dismal performance of the D.C. and PG County Public Schools. Money quote:

Put another way, if the Washington area economy is going to continue to grow, much of the growth will have to be in the District and Prince George's County, which won't happen as long as the schools are inadequate.

This isn't just true locally: You could make the same case for why affluent and middle class Americans and American business nationally must care more about the fate of kids in our troubled urban schools. Our depressed urban areas and inner cities are the frontier of development and economic growth in this country, and as the housing market slows down it's increasingly clear that gentrification and new condo developments aren't a long term strategy for lifting the fortunes of our cities. Doing a better job of educating the kids in disadvantaged communities is the best way we can build the supply of quality human capital needed to power our nation's economy into the next generation and through the massive economic challenges facing us in the next several decades as the baby boomers retire.

Pearlstein's also got some pretty sound commentary on Mayor Fenty's proposal to takeover the DC public schools.

Challenging the Challenge Index--With Data

Jay Mathews' online column today focuses on Andy's and my debate with him about whether his "Challenge Index" method is the best way to identify America's best high schools. Andy gets to the crux of the issues and notes that some of the schools Jay lauds are actually doing worse than the statewide averages for certain subgroups.

Take a look, for example, at Tampa's King High School, #73 on the list last year: Only 13% of the school's disadvantaged 10th graders scored proficient on the state reading test in 2006, and 40% scored proficient in math. Both rates are lower than the statewide pass rates for disadvantaged students, which were 17% and 49%, respectively. The school's economically-disadvantaged 9th graders also performed below statewide average for disadvantaged students. Jay also mentions Pensacola High School, also in Florida, #39 last year. Similar story: In 2006, 13% of its disadvantaged 10th graders scored proficient in reading and 30% did so in math. Its economically-disadvantaged 9th graders also passed at lower than statewide average rates for disadvantaged students. Its black 9th graders lag statewide pass rates for black students in reading and math, and its black 10th graders do so in reading. (In both schools, white and non-disadvantaged students passed state tests at higher than state average pass rates for their subgroups.)

Jay says these schools deserve credit for their high AP and IB participation rates--despite poor state assessment performance--because the population they educate includes a significant percentage of disadvantaged students who are more likely to do poorly on tests or drop out of school. But even if you buy that argument, shouldn't a school that we're saying is one of the very best less than one percent in the country be able to get its disadvantaged students to pass state assessments at at least the statewide average pass rate for disadvantaged students? It's not as if Florida as a whole is know for doing an awesome job educating disadvantaged students; we're talking about a fairly low bar here. And these are not the only schools on the "Top 100" list that are failing to get subgroups of disadvantaged and minority kids up even to state averages for their subgroups.

Davidson says goodbye to loans (well, mostly)

Davidson may have lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament, but it is winning headlines with today’s announcement that it will eliminate loans from its financial aid packages. Effective this fall, students will no longer need to borrow to afford a Davidson education (but "families may still choose to take out education loans"). As the first small, liberal arts college to propose this, Davidson is taking the lead--we’ll see who, if anyone, follows.

In fact, "we'll see" is probably the best approach to the announcement. Some have applauded this, while others remain skeptical, wondering if there is another angle from which this isn't as generous or straightforward as it seems. I'm not willing to join either camp yet. As they say, the proof is in the pudding, and if Harvard's experience is any indication, Davidson should see pretty quickly if its new policy actually increases the number of low and moderate income students who apply and attend.

Head Start Moves Ahead--Without National Testing

WaPo article over the weekend says Congress's Head Start reauthorization will likely discontinue the National Reporting System, a Bush administration-created test of all Head Start four- and five-year-olds that has been very controversial. Under the NHS, several small tests, measuring English language skills, vocabulary, letter recognition and early math skills, are administered to all four- and five-year-olds in Head Start every spring and fall, to assess how much Head Start programs are helping children learn. This is not a bad idea: Accountability has become a key education reform principle, policymakers are increasingly focused on early learning and therefore increasingly concerned about the educational aspect of Head Start, and there are concerns about the quality of some Head Start programs. All these factors support an increased effort to collect more systematic information about student learning in Head Start programs.

But the NRS has lots of problems. If you think educational accountability is complicated at the K-12 level, it's much more so with preschool-aged youngsters, whose development is more sporadic and whose skills are less stable. The NRS was implemented in a rush and there were a number of implementation problems. It's comprised of snippets from several other tests that are valid, but the NRS itself has never been validated. It's focused on a narrow range of early literacy and math skills and does not include important issues of social, emotional and motor development. Some questions have problems of class/cultural/racial bias, are developmentally inappropriate, or measure the wrong things. It doesn't include accommodations for students with disabilities, even though Head Start programs are mandated to serve 10% students with disabilities, and there are also problems with its treatment of non-English speaking children.

On top of these practical and technical concerns, which have been raised by such uninterested parties as the GAO, you have predictable political opposition to the NRS from people who oppose testing and academic instruction for young children on ideological grounds, from Head Start interests that do not want to be held accountable for their performance, and from those who fear, not without reason, that the NRS is part of a scheme to cut Head Start or to defund existing programs and give the money instead to states and/or faith-based groups.

The Bush administration didn't need to get Congressional approval to implement the NRS in 2003, but Congress can pass legislation blocking continuation of the NRS or forcing changes in it. Differences between the parties and houses about what to do about NRS were a major stumbling block to Head Start reauthorization in the previous two Congresses. With Democrats controlling both legislative houses now, it appears likely Head Start will be reauthorized this year. Last week the House Committee on Education and Labor passed legislation to reauthorize Head Start that included a provision suspending implementation of the NRS.

It's worth noting that just because the NRS is flawed, that doesn't mean all standardized testing of young children is bad, as some opponents contend. If assessment results are used carefully and the assessment tool used is appropriate to the assessment's purpose, standardized testing can play an important role in program self-assessment, research, and even accountability for early childhood programs. For example, the preschool on whose board I serve, Appletree Early Learning Public Charter School, regularly administers to its students certain standardized assessments that help us to track their progress and also provide valuable information we can use to improve our practices and curriculum, as well as to demonstrate our effectiveness to parents, our charter authorizer, and funders. These are not pen and paper tests, which, as Alice in Eduland points out, are often foolish as a way to measure what young children know. Instead, the child sits down with a friendly adult (often someone she knows) and participates in a variety of tasks, such as selecting the correct object or picture from an array in response to a question from the assessor. And there's nothing inherently cruel about this, either. Many people I've talked to who administer these tests to children say the children often find them fun, like a game. (To reiterate: How children respond to testing depends almost entirely on the attitude of the adults administering the test. There is no natural, in-born fear of tests.)

We're going to see a lot more talk about what accountability means in early childhood education in the very near future, as states continue to expand their investments in pre-k programs. The preschool movement has focused very heavily on inputs and a regulatory approach, such as requiring teachers to have bachelor's degrees, to ensure preschool quality. But the experience of K-12 education reformers over the past several decades has shown that regulation alone doesn't get you to good outcomes for kids. Incentives matter; accountability matters. And, as a practical matter, states that invest a lot in large-scale pre-k initiatives are going to want hard evidence they're getting something to show for it. That's going to mean more conversations about how do we assess learning with young kids. It will also mean developing new tools, similar to those described here, that look neither at inputs nor outcomes but at what actually goes on in classrooms. Hopefully, it will also mean states work to create integrated longitudinal data systems that allow them to track individual children from pre-k all the way through K-12; such systems would help with the growth or value-added analysis lots of people want to see integrated into accountability models ad the K-12 level, and would also allow states to track what we REALLY want to know when we talk about whether or not preschool works: Are the kids who participate in such programs doing better 5, 10, more years down the line?

College Rankings for Fun and Profit

InsideHigherEd reports that the President of Arizona State University will get a financial bonus if ASU climbs in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. If the rankings were based on measures that actually had anything to do with student learning, this might not be a bad idea. But as it stands, the most likely outcome will be to further drive up student costs. Why? Because of the way the U.S. News rankings are constructed.

95% of the rankings are based on measures that are, in whole or in part, a function of three things: wealth, prestige, and selectivity. Prestige is tough to change in higher education; institutional reputations are all but written in stone and difficult to move. Increasing selectivity can also be challenge, particularly for big state universities like ASU, because the pool of students to recruit is fixed, and because state legislatures don't like angry calls from taxpayers wanting to know why they're supporting public universities their kids can't get into.

Wealth, on the other hand, you can always get more of. So if the ASU President wants to earn his rankings bonus, the smartest course would be to spend every waking moment on the phone hitting up rich alumni for donations, and to figure out a way to raise tuition as much as possible. Then he should spend all that new money on...well, on anything really, it doesn't much matter what. If spending goes up, the U.S. News rankings will go up too, irrespective of whether the money is spent well.

Distorting RAND

About a month ago, I wrote a long post on the topic of "value-added" measures of teacher effectiveness. With such measures getting a high-profile endorsement from the Aspen Commission on NCLB, I wrote, it was a safe bet that opponents of tying teacher evaluation to student tests scores would be mischaracterizing the conclusions of a book published by the RAND Corporation on the topic. Sure enough, in the paid "What Matters Most" column published in yesterday's New York Times, UFT President Randi Weingarten wrote:

"..most experts, including the well regarded RAND Corporation, recommend against using "value-added" analysis for evaluating teachers."

This is just wrong, an example of simplifying conclusions and recommendations in a way that distorts their meaning to the point of inversion. Taken at face value, Weingarten's characterization suggests that RAND has rejected value-added methodologies as a whole. This is absolutely not true, as the previous post explains.