The Special Education Accountability Debate

Today’s Ed Week article on NCLB and special education accountability is a great discussion of the two sides of this debate: states want more flexibility under NCLB to establish different standards and assessments for special education students, and special education advocates want NCLB to stay where it is—holding states accountable for getting special education students, with a few exceptions, to the same grade-level standards as other students.

I’m siding with the special education advocates on this one.

This report from the National Center for Learning Disabilities outlines the big reason why—most special education students aren’t diagnosed with a disability that precludes them from reaching grade-level standards. Instead, the diagnosis is meant to ensure that students receive the supports they need to achieve at grade-level. In addition, the current flexibility under NCLB already excuses approximately 30 percent of special education students from regular state assessments and standards. That’s already a higher percentage than the Aspen Commission on NCLB found reasonable.

Making this debate stickier is the fact that minority and low-income students are overrepresented in most disability categories. Studies have shown that the process of diagnosing a disability isn’t color-blind, and minority student have a higher chance of being diagnosed with a disability. This makes reducing the accountability for educating special education students an even riskier proposition, because it will disproportionately reduce accountability for minority and low-income students.

More to come from ES on this topic, but this Ed Week article makes a great primer.

Another Student Loan Scandal? Or Not?

In a fresh blow to the beleaguered student loan industry, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has charged some companies in the fast-growing private student loan market of charging students higher interest rates because they attend colleges where students are more likely to default on their loans. In uncovering yet another scandalous lender practice, Cuomo...

Hey, wait a minute.

Isn't that what lenders are supposed to do, price their loans based on risk? InsiderHigherEd reports,

Taking a specific college, or type of college, into account as a factor in determining a credit score could theoretically mean that loans to students at, say, Harvard could be seen by lenders as less risky and therefore more desirable than those made to students at community colleges, for-profit institutions and historically black colleges.

It's not a matter of lenders "seeing" anything, Harvard students are less risky and more desirable than other students, obviously so. Yet Senator Dodd has responded by introducing legislation to "Prohibit lenders from using any data in their underwriting that may have disparate impact on the loan products, terms, or conditions available to student borrowers based on race, age, and other personal factors, or the institution they attend."

So if you're a poor student with an IQ of 180 who gets into Harvard and you need a private loan to make ends meet, you have to pay above-market interest rates in order to subsidize the rates other, riskier students? Is that fair? Are we going to make that student pay higher rates on her Visa bill too, to avoid "disparate impact" in that credit market?

Clearly, it's important to give people a way to borrow money for college without having to pay usurious interest rates that will limit their choices later in life. But that's why we already have a massive, federally subsidized student loan program, where everyone pays the same interest rate regardless of race, age, personal factors, or the institution they attend. Cuomo is going after the private loan market, the whole point of which is to offer credit as credit is due. As the article notes, tying loans to institutional default rates will disadvantage the credit-worthiest students at high-default institutions, but in the long run a private market should be expected to sort that out, because it's in the lender's financial interest to do so.

The student loan industry has been subject to plenty of harsh, deserved criticism of late. But this seems like crossing the line into political opportunism.

Moderate Democrats' Original Sin

In his Post column today, Richard Cohen commits the original sin of moderate Democrats writing about education.

Cohen slams the Democratic candidates in last week's DC-based presidential debate for calling for more school funding without acknowledging that the DC school system is reasonably well-funded and still does a terrible job. Fair enough. But then he continues:

The litany of more and more when it comes to money often has little to do with what, in the military, are called facts on the ground: kids and parents. It does have a lot to do with teachers unions, which are strong supporters of the Democratic Party. Not a single candidate offered anything close to a call for real reform.

The salient fact about DC is not that it has education problems. Every big city in America has those. The overriding issue is that our schools are worse than other big cities that also have kids, parents, and teachers unions. In fact, the Washington Teachers Union has kept a pretty low profile since being humbled by a massive corruption scandal a few years back. In DC at least, they're not the big issue.

But that kind of nuance is lost on Cohen. He's doing what far too many center-left types do when discussing education: playing off the conservative agenda, rather than taking time to come up with an agenda of his own.

The standard right-wing education agenda has three and only three principles, which have stood unchanged for decades:

1) More money won't fix education.
2) Teachers unions are the problem.
3) Vouchers are the solution.

The great advantage of these principles--in addition to being easy to remember--is that they fit like a glove with, respectively, conservative anti-tax, anti-labor, and anti-government principles. And since this country is never going to actually de-fund and privatize public education while breaking the teachers unions, you never have to come up with something new to say. George Will, for example, clearly has a column on each of these topics on file, which he republishes once a year after a few minutes of updating names and dates with, one assumes, the "find and replace" function in Microsoft Word.

That said, there are elements of truth in each case. Money obviously matters in education, but many public school systems, like the DC schools, are terribly inefficient. Teachers unions are strong advocates of public education and protect rights that teachers deserve, but they also stand in the way of sensible ideas like tying teacher pay to performance. And issues of constitutionality and larger public policy concerns aside, there are plenty of disadvantaged students in bad public schools who would, in the short term, be much better off in a private school.

This, in turn, creates space for people with an independent image to maintain--your Cohens and Mickey Kauses--to burnish their street cred by selectively adopting one or more of the conservative education principles. So Cohen denounces calls for school funding, Kaus is always looking for a chance to take shots at teachers unions, contrarian-by-design publications like The New Republic trumpet their support for vouchers, etc. As with the three principles themselves, little of this is about education policy per se. Rather, it's about using education policies as a proxy for other things. Maybe there was a time when this came across as gutsy truth-telling, but at this point it all feels like pro forma gesturing and nothing more.

The sad thing is that there are plenty of ways to apply the center-left mindset to education without simply adopting simplistic right-wing bromides. Instead of simply supporting or denouncing more school funding, reform the way funding is distributed within school districts, or adopt a "weighted funding" approach where money follows the student. Instead of being for or against vouchers, support expanded choice in the context of public education, with charter schools. Instead of being reflexively pro- or anti-union, work with unions to reform things like teacher pay and help create a labor-management relationship for 21st century schools.

There are ways to do all of these things, and to talk about them sensibly. But that would mean paying attention to education for its own sake, something too few pundits and politicians seem willing to do.

CNN, So-Called Legitimate News Organization

Cnn.com has revamped its site, including a shakeup of its front-page news categories. "Education" has traditionally had its own spot, usually--this being America--near the bottom under Celebrity News, but still on par with Science, Health, etc.

Well, no more. Education has been nixed as stand-alone category and has been replaced by "Funny News." As of this writing, 2:20 PM EDT, the two stories in this new category are:

"Stealing Another Man's Wife Costs $4,802"

and

"Larry the Cable Guy Gets Own Beer"

As a wise man once said, it's not that you can't make this stuff up, it's that you wish you had to.

A School By Any Other Name...

Researchers have discovered a new culprit for low academic achievement: school names. The Salt Lake Tribune reports, “in Florida, five schools are named after George Washington although 11 honor manatees, also known as sea cows.”

God forbid that schools be named after animals known as sea cows. Let’s hope that no manatees read the Salt Lake Tribune this morning – probably a safe bet, but who knows what will happen if the story gets picked up on the Atlantic coast.

The article describes a study that found that schools are less likely than ever to be named after civic heroes and more likely to be named after natural features. The authors think this trend may be linked to poor civic education.

Does the name of a school really affect the education of its students? I don’t know, and I don’t think there is any research on the question. But if the connection does exist, wouldn’t Manatee Elementary do a better job educating its students about biology and sea life than Jefferson Elementary?

I guess the real way to fix American education is to name schools like this: “Roosevelt Amino Acids a² + b² i-before-e Hyperbole High School”

NCLB (R)Evolution?

The SCOTUS desegregation decision sucked up all the ed policy air last week, but other issues still moved ahead, e.g. NCLB reauthorization (subject of today's lead WaPost editorial), to which Sec. Spellings added some new ideas as reported by USA Today's Greg Toppo:

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Wednesday proposed "a more nuanced" way of evaluating schools under President Bush's No Child Left Behind school reform law — one that would differentiate between schools that are close to meeting state math, reading and science standards and those that are "chronic, chronic underperformers."

Under the proposed change, public schools with just a few struggling students could help students without being labeled underperforming. In the bargain, they'd avoid sanctions that can include firing staff, privatizing or even closing their doors.

A lot of the discussions around changes to the core AYP formula have focused on the "growth model" concept currently being piloted in some states, whereby schools are rated not by the percent of students meeting an absolute standard but by the percent of students on a growth trajectory to meet the absolute standard at some point in the future. The idea is to give schools credit for making a lot progress, even if the end result is still below par.

Spellings is talking about a different idea: creating nuance around the degree and scope of underperformance. A common--and essentially correct--criticism of NCLB is that it treats schools that miss the bar by a little with a few students in the same way as schools that miss the bar by a lot with a whole bunch of students. This proposal would make life easier for schools in the former category.

Probably a good idea, as approving quotes in the article from various NCLB proponents suggest. However -- We need to make sure that achievement gaps for vulnerable student subgroups -- low-income, minority, special ed, and LEP -- can't be tolerated indefinitely. Moreover, if we're going to go down this road, there should be a corollary: if we're going to go easier on the schools that miss by an inch, we need to do more, sooner, for students in schools that miss by a mile. If a school is far below the proficiency line with little growth for nearly all of its students, then there's no point in waiting six years to take action. Those kids need something different and better today.

.