Charts You Can't Trust (continued)

When done well, graphs and charts tell a story or make a point quickly and coherently. Education Sector has a regular feature we call Charts You Can Trust, where we use a new data source to make a point about the state of education policy. You can read them all here. Despite Kevin's best intentions, we've never actually run one you can't trust. That critique is left for The Quick and the Ed.

Look at the chart below*. It measures the changes in the University of Georgia's undergraduate female enrollment (a pretty hot issue right now).
The chart makes it seem like some big changes were occurring down in Athens. But in reality, if you took the time to calculate the difference between the Fall 2002 and the Fall 2006 female enrollments, you'd find a change of 521 students, or a little less than 4%. To show this reality, the chart should have looked something like this:I suppose we could quibble about whether you should always make 0 the baseline for graphs, but I think we can all agree on the need for honest visual presentations.

*You can find this chart or make your own at the University System of Georgia website here. I made several; some were normal, but quite a few looked like the one above.

HEA, at Long Last

Congress passed a new version of the Higher Education Act yesterday, which President Bush is expected to sign. This is a real milestone -- it's been ten years since the last reauthorization, which is supposed to happen every five years. There's a lot in there to discuss, but in my mind the most disappointing thing is that even as InsideHigherEd calls it a "Huge, Exacting Accountability Bill," and institutions begin complaining about various onerous reporting requirements, the legislation is arguably a step backward on the kind of higher education accountability that matters most.

Basically it increases accountability (via public reporting and "shame lists") for a pretty meaningless measure (year-over-year percentage increase in tuition) while reducing the ability of the U.S. Department of Education to increase accountability for what really does matter--student learning--via the accreditation process. It also prohibits the department from modernizing its data reporting system, basically an anti-accountability measure passed under the guise of bogus arguments about student privacy. The irony is that, as I've written previously, holding down the cost of college--the one thing everyone in Congress seems to cares about--actually requires greater accountability for results, because one of the big things driving up costs is the current perception that price and quality are one and the same.

This is a short-term victory that will exact a long-term cost, not just to students and the public treasury, but to colleges and universities themselves. The vast majority of institutions would be better off in a world where perceptions of higher education quality are more closely tied to their core educational mission. But they're stuck playing a game they can't win, where perception of quality and the resulting rewards are all defined in terms of wealth, status, and exclusivity. Exclusivity is a zero-sum game, while wealth and status involve massive early-entrant, rich-get-richer advantages--basically if you're an old, famous, and rich university today, the odds are exceedingly high that you'll remain so, and probably become more so.

Your typical community college, regional private college, or public university--i.e. where the large majority of Americans actually go to college--would benefit from very different status signifiers that gave them points for being good at what they were designed to be--places that teach students. But they can't change the rules--that's what the government is for. And now the government has caved into the interests of institutions at the top of the status pyramid, leaving all the rest, and their students, and the public at large, out in the cold.

Five years from now--let's hope it's not ten--when all the new measures have utterly failed to hold down rising costs, student debt is still growing at a rapid pace, and policymakers still have no idea whether or not colleges and universities are doing a good job, let's hope Congress makes different, better choices.

Update: See also New America's comprehensive run-down of the best and worst of HEA.

Wholly Anecdotal Sign of the Education Apocalypse

In a taxi on the way to the Miami airport yesterday, talking to the driver, a part-time student at Florida International University, 25 years old, working on an accounting degree, family came to the U.S. from Dubai, born and raised in Miami. Seems perfectly nice, reasonably smart, etc. Asks me where I'm from: Washington, DC, I answer. The capital, right? he asks. How's George Bush? Then he remarks: My sister lives there, her boyfriend was transferred to Seattle. There are two Washingtons, I remind him. Right, right, he says--I always get that confused. So it's cold up there now, right, not all hot and humid like here? Because you're so close to Canada?

Carey / Pipp / Rivers

In my continuing effort to be Joan Rivers to Rick Hess' Johnny Carson -- or perhaps Wally Pipp to his Lou Gehrig -- I again did the Fordham Institute's Gadfly podcast today along with host Mike Petrilli (who, incidentally, does a good job of unpacking the tensions between achievement gaps as measured by relative- vs. criterion-referenced measures here).

Who Watches the Watchmen? Hopefully, Me

Lost in the generally well-deserved praise for The Dark Knight and the subsequent chatter over the million kabillion dollars it's raking in at the box office is the fact that it featured a trailer for Zach Snyder's Watchmen. Interestingly, it looks like the long-awaited/feared adaptation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's seminal 80's graphic novel (which is generally--all though by no means universally--regarded as the greatest comic book ever made) may not suck. If that turns out to to be the case, I'm guessing this is why:

Many in Hollywood have tried to get Watchmen on the screen and failed, including directors Terry Gilliam (Brazil), Darren Aronofsky (The Fountain), and, most recently, Bourne Supremacy director Paul Greengrass. In 2005, Greengrass was deep into preproduction on a present-day, war-on-terror-themed adaptation by David Hayter (X-Men), when a regime change at Paramount Pictures led to its demise. Enter Warner Bros., which acquired the rights in late 2005. Snyder was working on 300 for the studio at the time, and he was alarmed when he heard about the deal. After some soul-searching, his fear of seeing a bad Watchmen movie trumped his fear of trying to make a great one. ''They were going to do it anyway,'' he says. ''And that made me nervous.'' Over many months, and many meetings, Snyder persuaded Warner Bros. to abandon the Greengrass/Hayter script and hew as faithfully as possible to the comic.

Debates over fidelity to source material in adaptation have been around about as long as the movies themselves. The filmmakers' position has always been: "the logic of what makes a good movie isn't necessarily the same as what makes a good (fill in source, usually a book). My first obligation is to the film and the viewer, not the author or the fan." And properly so, there are plenty of examples of adaptations that not only honored the original but transcended it. Often, the need for filmmakers to veer from the source stems from inherent differences in media: books are made of words, while movies are made of sounds and images. You can linger over words, which excel at revealing the inner lives of characters, while the sounds and images in movies force their pace upon you, and excel at evoking an emotional response in the viewer. Experiencing them is different, and so translation can be hard.

Comic books occupy a middle ground between books and movies: they're about words and images. This argues for a default filmmaking approach closer to faithful adaption, since presumably the unusually compelling or skillful use of sequential images is one of the big reasons the comic book is adaptation-worthy in the first place. The extent to which this is true, however, will vary by comic book. As we discussed previously, work by a primarily visual and purposefully cinematic creator like Frank Miller more or less demands panel-by-panel adaption, an approach Snyder used to great effect in 300. Alan Moore is a more interesting case. His particular genius is for understanding and manipulating the way readers experience words and pictures simultaneously, or in extremely close proximity. In most comic books, the words simply communicate what pictures can't: human dialogue. In Watchmen there's a constant and often subtle interplay between the words on the panel and the images behind, before, and after them, and that extends to both the foreground action and background settings. A lot of this isn't obvious on the surface; like most great books, Watchmen benefits from multiple readings. That's why Moore said "'There are things we did [in Watchmen] that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off the things that comics can do that other media can't.''

That's also why the greatness of Watchmen is kind of hard to explain; Maureen asked me about it while we were walking out of Dark Knight, and I was reduced to something along the lines of "Well, it's nominally a murder mystery but really kind of an exploration of the underlying tropes and themes of traditional super-hero comics seen through the lens of real-world cold war paranoia...ah, you really have to just read it."

And it's why there's never been a really good Alan Moore comic book adaptation to date. In League of Extraordinary Gentlemen they took the basic premise, threw out half the characters and all of the story, and made an phenomenally bad film. Their mistake was thinking that--as with Superman, Batman, and Spider-man--the premise was the thing. It's not; it's what Moore and Kevin O'Neil did with it, and what they did is close to untranslatable. From Hell, by contrast, was a pretty decent movie (scripted by Matt Yglesias' father, if I'm not mistaken), because the filmakers realized that the extremely long, dense, visually stylized (and tremendously good) comic book is wholly infilmable, while the premise (Jack the Ripper) is very strong. So they made a semi-adaptation that works pretty well on its own terms. V for Vendetta was more faithful, and thus was pretty good; there I think many of the shortcomings derive from the source material itself.

The value of Watchmen is clearly not the premise (see my lame explanation to Maureen above). Thus any huge divergence from the source, e.g. a "present-day, war-on-terror-themed adaptation" is doomed to fail. But unlike From Hell it may actually be filmable, and if so the key will be the work of artist Dave Gibbons. Like many of the best British comics artists (Preacher's Steve Dillon is another good example) Gibbons is first and foremost a great storyteller who avoids the temptations of stylistic flashiness and focuses on composition, drama, character, inter-panel transition, background detail, etc. And back in the 80s, Moore himself (who provides elaborate descriptions of every panel; the Absolute edition of Watchmen contains his script for the first page, which consists entirely of a single seven-panel fixed tracking shot, and yet the script is like 2,000 words long) was still writing comics using more traditional visual grammar.

All of which makes Snyder's decision to hew closely to the source look like a good one--those shots of Dr. Manhattan striding across the killing fields of Vietnam and his glass palace rising from the sands of Mars look pretty darn cool. Maybe, just maybe, Watchmen will be worth watching.

Boundary Changes

This situation in Fairfax County, VA has some relevance to recent discussions about socioeconomic desegregation plans (see also here and here).

In Fairfax, kids aren't being transported away from their neighborhood school for integration, but the school board did decide to change attendance boundaries to balance enrollments among schools, and took socioeconomic integration into account in its decision. Many of the parents whose children were assigned to South Lakes High School were not happy. South Lakes is under-enrolled by 700 students and has a newly remodeled facility, but it also has a higher percent of low-income students.

Parents filed a lawsuit to stop the school board, arguing, among other things, that the school board overstepped its bounds in trying to balance socioeconomics among the schools. After losing the lawsuit, parents have been requesting transfers to get their kids into their old assigned schools. Many parents are citing the lack of AP classes at South Lakes as a reason for their transfer requests.

As this situation makes clear, changing attendance boundaries is politically difficult, particularly when it increases socioeconomic integration. But this situation also illustrates why socioeconomic integration may be important - if these parents can raise $125,000 to sue the school board, they probably also have the clout to get more AP classes into South Lakes High School, and that's the kind of parental involvement that improves the quality of education for all students.

Economic Theory in Teacher Salaries: Why the ProComp Negotiations Matter

Imagine you have complete control over a new school district. You need to design a salary structure that fits what we know about education. Empirical evidence suggests that:

1. Teachers have steep learning curves, making dramatic improvements in the first few years, but showing few gains, or possibly even slowing, as they near retirement.
2. Teachers, as public employees, often have enormous retirement incentives to stay in their job near the end of their career to max out their defined benefit pension plan.
3. After teachers earn tenure, they secure due process rights that make it difficult for them to be removed.
   
4. The true value of teachers is difficult to measure, and while we've gotten much better at assessing merit, no one indicator, and certainly no proxy, has proven to be sufficient.
   
5. Teacher quality, as measured by college GPA, college selectivity, and SAT score, has declined over time.
   
6. Teachers with higher academic credentials, measured by college GPA, college selectivity, and SAT score, leave the profession earlier and in greater numbers.
7. Teacher quality varies widely by school and subject, with younger and less-credentialed teachers concentrated in high-minority and -poverty schools.
   

Knowing these things, you must create a system for compensating teachers. There's a finite amount of money, so you can't just give all teachers what they deserve $100,000 and call it good. Instead, you have to use what you know to structure a salary system that is empirically based and fair.

You'd want to have a reasonable but not exorbitant starting salary, followed by a dramatic rise for teachers who have proven themselves on the job. Over time you would want to provide incentives for good teachers to stay, but you'd also want to make them demonstrate their merits through rewards for attaining greater educational achievement, working in high-needs schools or high-needs subjects, earning satisfactory evaluations, and for demonstrated value-added student growth.

In other words, you'd want a system like Denver's Professional Compensation System for Teachers (ProComp). Crafted after a four-year pilot program and a mixed teacher-administrator task force, ProComp, unlike most performance pay plans across the country, got funded through a citywide vote.

Union and district officials are currently negotiating the future of ProComp, and news reports ($) are showing the union taking particularly polarized positions. Union officials want a 3.5% across-the-board raise, but across-the-board raises have little empirical support. Worse, they're threatening a strike to get what they want, and to time the strike to correspond with the upcoming Democratic National Convention in the city.

District officials are asking for two main changes. They want to increase the starting salary $9,000, to $44,000, and they want to almost triple the amount, from $1,067 to $2,925, for teachers in high-needs schools and subjects. Those requests align well with the empirical lessons above. If evidence matters at all in education, it should help the district's objectives drive these negotiations.

The Libertarian Conspiracy to Destroy Public Education

Occasionally I'll use phrases like "conspiracy to destroy public education" in these pages, and you, faithful reader, may reasonably wonder whether I'm exaggerating for dramatic effect. I wish I were. But no, there really are people out there who simply want to dismantle the entire enterprise, despite evidence of public education's benefits so obvious that David Brooks wrote a whole column about them this morning. People like Neil McCluskey, associate director of the Cato Institute's "Center for Educational Freedom," who recently published a new policy brief explaining why public education is intrinsically un-American. Again, that's not bloggerly snark, it's the actual thesis: McCluskey believes that public education is a "fundamentally flawed--and un-American--institution" and a later subhead describes "Public Schooling's Un-American Ideals." Basically he argues that we had a perfectly swell free-market system of private schools in the first half of the 19th century which gave a great education to the small fraction of people who were legally allowed to vote, own property, etc., until that proto-communist bastard Horace Mann came along and ruined everything. Because, as we all know, American-ness is wholly a function of the political and social arrangements that prevailed in the years immediately following the founding of the Republic and any deviation from such clearly represents a grave national threat to be destroyed at all costs.

Republican Vice Presidential Picks and Education

While the edublogosphere has analyzed the candidates positions on education, speculated on various Secretary of Education possibilities, and commented on education spokespersons, it has yet to produce anything substantive on the policies of likely vice presidential picks. In order to keep the list manageable and relevant to TQATE, this discussion is limited only to widely speculated picks who also have an interest in education, our chosen issue. Let's start with the Republicans:

- Bobby Jindal, 37-year old governor of Louisiana, would bring spice to a McCain ticket. The son of Indian immigrants, Jindal has been called the "next Ronald Reagan" by Rush Limbaugh. Jindal has shown strong interest in education, serving from 1999-2001 as the president of the University of Louisiana System. During his tenure, he encouraged each school to develop one area of expertise and he got the eight state universities, as one, to recruit high schoolers to stay in-state. Governor since only January, Jindal has already touched some hot education issues, signing a modest voucher law and a law focusing on critical thinking skills, particularly towards evolution, cloning, and global warming.

Bottom line: Last week's joint McCain-Jindal events being disrupted by an oil spill and inclement weather could be the key omen. Plus, Jindal's youth weakens any McCain critiques on Barack Obama's inexperience. His education credentials are still a little thin to help or hurt John McCain this fall, but Jindal is a man to be watched.

- As a very good friend of John McCain, and governor of swing-state Minnesota, Tim Pawlenty has been and continues to be a favorite for the spot. Pawlenty has consistently chosen to make education one of his chief issues. He served 10 years as an attorney for the Minneapolis school district. As governor, Pawlenty chaired National Governors Association's education committee (before leading the whole organization), and in March he assumed the head of the Education Commission of the States. Most widely known is his passage of QComp, a statewide performance pay plan rewarding teachers for positive evaluations and student and school achievement scores. Pawlenty has also proposed summer teacher training academies that look similar to Teach for America's.

Bottom line: Pawlenty's a real contender for the spot, not least because of his strong friendship with McCain. His strong advocacy in education would supplement McCain's seeming disinterest in the topic.

- As governor of Massachusetts and as a candidate for President, Mitt Romney has taken education stands on many issues. An advocate for testing and accountability, Romney implemented Massachusetts' high school exit exam, and, during his campaign, was not shy about taking credit for his state's high NAEP scores. He successfully fought an attempt to stop the expansion of charter schools, but failed to pass performance pay or legislation granting the state a larger role in turning around struggling schools. His effort to increase students' time in schools became a small pilot program that has shown early, limited results. Romney successfully passed a large merit scholarship program, but failed spectacularly in a short-lived effort to restructure the governance of state colleges and universities. On the campaign trail he advocated for school choice and tax credits for home schooling and strongly opposed tuition support for children of illegal immigrants.

Bottom line: Romney is considered to have the best fundraising prowess of any on this list. That alone could be a big reason to call on him in a campaign against Obama's small donation machine. His ties to Michigan don't hurt either. On education, like his stances on other issues, Romney seems to be everywhere. Not necessarily in a good way.

- Another education-minded governor is Florida's Charlie Crist. He served as State Education Commissioner prior to winning the governorship in 2006. Crist has overseen major strife in his state's higher education governance structure. A 2007 report suggested a three-tier system with better defined mission focus. Third-tier schools would focus on undergraduate education, leaving the top tier to address graduate education and research. Its blog has only one post, but 2,752 comments. Starting in 2008, Crist-signed legislation that will allow state universities to charge different rates of tuition. Crist is also a supporter of the 65-cent solution to public education funding.

Bottom line: Crist is credited as almost single-handedly winning the Florida primary for McCain. It was a huge win, and geography alone could lead McCain to pick Crist. Crist's education platform looks similar to McCain's; here's hoping McCain does not take that as a good thing.

IKEA-Operated Schools?

The Associated Press writes about school choice in Sweden, where students and parents have, since 1992, been able to attend publicly financed, privately run schools of choice (they sound a lot like charter schools to me). And it's popular - 17 percent of high schoolers are now enrolled in one of these independent schools.

The article posits this as a radical change for Sweden, "that paragon of taxpayer-funded cradle-to-grave welfare". But 17 percent enrollment in privately run public schools would be pretty revolutionary for the U.S., too, and this isn't exactly a "cradle-to-grave" country.