Don't Waiver

The National Governors Association lobbied hard against the "maintenance of effort" provision included in the recent Higher Education Act reauthorization. It should come as no surprise then that the NGA has already asked for an across-the-board waiver, citing the recent economic crisis and expected state government shortfall. The law does include a waiver provision for, "a natural disaster or a precipitous and unforeseen decline in the financial resources of a State or State educational agency," but a recession does not exactly count as unforeseen, and nowhere is the plural used, meaning all states cannot be granted one en masse. Besides, not all states are experiencing budget shortfalls; energy-intensive states are actually doing well ($).

What's really important to understand is the federalism at play here in higher education finance. The maintenance of effort provision applies only to public institutions, so let's stick with a discussion of them. Public sector tuition gets set in different ways depending on the state. Some states let institutions set tuition rates either outright or by default. Some have governor-appointed boards do the rate-setting, and some state legislatures even do it themselves. The point is that legislatures and governors have a lot of say in tuition policy, even if they prefer to play the part of unwilling accomplice. In my home state of Iowa, we have a Board of Regents that is governor-appointed. They set tuition policies for the three state universities. They end up caught in the middle of a constant push and pull for power by the universities and the legislature. The legislature thinks the Regents coddle the universities, while campus officials cry out that the Regents are in the bag for the legislature.

These things matter when it comes to something like the maintenance of effort provision, because state governors and legislatures are crying bloody murder that the feds are having too much of a role in higher education. See the NGA's press releases opposing the provision before it became law here, here, here, here, and here. Their opposition almost killed it entirely, and they are certainly the reason it became almost entirely toothless. The law always had a provision allowing states to use five-year rolling averages in its calculation (so states, your budget cuts of the early 2000s actually lower that average now), but it got tied to such a tiny tiny sum of money that it became effectively meaningless. The total money at stake for 2008 is $66 million, a drop in the bucket when you consider that we spend 242 times that, $16 billion, on the federal Pell Grant program. State governments spend much more than that.

Governors and legislatures are the willing victims in this instance. States would like federal policymakers to believe they've done their share in funding higher education. And it's partly true. An unreported fact is that states provide almost exactly the same revenue per full-time equivalent student that they did in 1980 (in constant 2007 dollars). Of course, this does not account for rapidly expanding costs in other areas, especially health care, but the problem isn't just state spending, as is commonly reported elsewhere. The real problem is tuition.

While states have managed to hold the line on state expenditures, they have been unable to hold back tuition at public colleges and universities. According to the states' own numbers, from 1982 to 2007 tuition increased 190% over inflation. Much as we'd like to blame institutions for coddling undergraduates with fancy dorms and expensive perks like chefs and new-age gyms, state governments have been complicit as well. Their desire to compete with private institutions has caused them to ignore equity concerns and spend scarce funds on ever-increasing merit aid, which quadrupled from 1996 to 2006.

Enter the feds. The federal government has no role in setting tuition whatsoever. Its role in higher education is limited to providing financial aid for needy students, getting dollars into the hands of researchers, and providing tax breaks for donations to non-profit foundations that are more and more essential to higher education. But they feel the pressure of rising tuition costs nonetheless. They feel it from parents during election time, but they also feel it from organizations like the NGA, which is critical of how little a percentage of tuition Pell Grants now cover.

The meager maintenance of effort provision is a good start. Secretary Spellings should quickly dismiss this latest attempt to skirt responsibility.

Schools left out of technological innovation?

If it takes a village to raise a child, that village might become increasingly virtual. Technology is making it easy to create learner-centered networks. Several developing projects aim to maximize the power of networks and improve learning. TeamPlay Foundation uses software to link students with a network of mentors. The mentors help students set goals and “see the path from here to there,” says co-founder Gunnar Counselman. In Chicago, the Electronic Learning Record project (a.k.a. Bettr@) aims to facilitate the formation of “interest nets” that will share content and help learners set goals and assess their progress.

Both groups are finding traction outside of traditional public schools. TeamPlay works with a variety of after-school and youth development programs, with plans to expand. Bettr@ director Patrick Whitney envisions working with home school-ers and potentially some charter schools, but not traditional schools. “Innovations come from the edge,” he says.

Neither group plans to focus on traditional public schools. Is it because schools are intractable by nature? Could schools and teachers be wary of the legal landscape of sharing student information? Or is something else going on?

Four-Day Weeks

Budgets are tight and schooling is expensive. So it’s not surprising to see state officials proposing new ways to cut costs in education. But this idea to eliminate the required 180-day schedule—something South Carolina state superintendent Jim Rex is proposing—is surprising. This will give districts more options for how they set up their school schedules. More options sounds good. But the most likely result here is that cash-strapped districts will cut the school week to 4-days a week. What’s wrong with this? Pretty much everything related to student learning. Rex estimates that it will cut nearly 20% of costs for maintenance, facilities, and bus driver salaries. But this is the wrong way to cut costs. Aside from the inevitable complications for working parents-- what will kids do on that extra week day?--there is absolutely no reason to think that fewer longer days will help students learn. Research on time and learning suggests just the opposite— kids need quality instruction and learning opportunities on a regular and consistent basis. Knowing this, many other states and districts are actually proposing to extend school time. And while I’ve served as the skeptic on some extended school time proposals, the fact that kids need more, not fewer, opportunities to learn is incontrovertible. So unless South Carolina--and any other state or district thinking about this-- has a solid plan for more quality out-of-school learning opportunities, this is going to mean less learning for students.

So what’s a state to do? Marc Porter McGee of ConnCan has some interesting ideas here, including cutting overhead and shedding unnecessary contracts. States and districts are going to have to be careful, though, with these decisions about what's necessary— bus driver salaries and facility costs may not seem directly connected to student instruction but if cutting these means cutting school time, less cost means less learning.

Losing Ground?

As I wrote a couple of days ago, there's a lot to recommend in the new report about high school graduation rates from the Education Trust (where I used to work). But the media seems a little fixated on the first sentence: "The United States is the only industrialized country in the world in which today’s young people are less likely than their parents to have completed high school."

It's a big dramatic statement, and the New York Times jumped on it in an editorial that ran yesterday, saying:

Americans should be deeply alarmed by new data showing that the country is continuing to lose ground educationally to its competitors abroad. The United States once had the world’s top high-school graduation rate. It has now fallen to 13th place behind countries like South Korea, the Czech Republic and Slovenia. Worse still, a new study from the Education Trust, a nonpartisan foundation, finds that this is the only country in the industrial world where young people are less likely than their parents to graduate high school.

Time magazine picked it up in a story that ran today, saying:

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation in the world where children are now less likely to receive a high school diploma than their parents were, according to an Oct. 23 report by the Education Trust, a children's advocacy group based in Washington.

Two things to keep in mind. First, the statistic comes from the latest batch of education numbers released by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). The OECD is indeed a collection of industrialized countries. But it's not an organization of all industrialized countries. The table from which this number was pulled includes 29 OECD member countries and six additional "partner economies." It's true that, by one measure, the U.S. is the only member country with a generational decline in high school degree attainment (more on this below). But the comparison list doesn't include Japan, China, India, Taiwan, Iran, South Africa, Argentina and Venezuela, among others. There may be differences of opinion about the meaning of "industrialized," but I'm pretty sure Japan qualifies. Whether high school attainment is stable or rising in every other industrialized country, I don't know. In any case, the phrase "only industrialized country in the world" is over-broad. 

Second, the decline is very small and depends on how you look at it. According to the table, here's the percent of American students graduating from high school by age cohort:

25-34: 87%

35-44: 88%

45-54: 89%

55-64: 86%

While the average age of first-time parents is in the mid-20s, that number has been creeping up over the years.  But (obviously) many people aren't first children, so the average age of anyone's parent at the time of their birth is probably around 30. That means that a person in the 25-34 cohort is likely to have parents in the 55-64 cohort, whose high school attainment percentage is one point lower. I assume the Trust is using the 45-54 cohort, which is two points higher, but that's too young to be parents of most of the 25-34 year olds. Either way, there's not much difference. 

Also, the fact that the numbers are all near 90 percent means that OECD must be counting GEDs, since commonly used measures of on-time high school graduation (like the numbers cited elsewhere in the Ed Trust report) are generally much lower, in the mid-70s. And because people sometimes pick up GEDs later in life, there's some chance that the number for the 25-34 cohort will tick up a percentage point or two as time goes by. 

The chart also shows a drop in high school attainment from the 35-44 cohort in the Russian Federation (which is certainly industrialized)--not at all surprising given the many other measures (e.g. life expectancy) on which Russia is in decline. Say what you want about the Soviet Union, but it was good at getting students through school. 

None of which means that the Education Trust is wrong to say that far too many students are dropping out of high school (particularly low-income and minority students) and that states need to do much more to hold schools accountable for high school graduation rates and support them in efforts to improve. But these kind of alarming statistics tend to take on a life of their own once they're repeated in major media outlets, so it's important to get them exactly right. 

College Gets More Expensive, Part MCMXVII

The College Board released it's annual Trends in Student Aid and Trends in College Pricing reports today. These are generally considered to be the definitive sources of new information on the respective topics and are chock-full of informative historical tables if you're interested in that kind of thing. While the data itself is reliable, the College Board tends to spin the annual results in ways that reflect well on its customer base: the higher education industry. So the press release was titled "College Prices Increase in Step with Inflation." The New York Times bought into this hook line and sinker and then did it one better, titling its article about the reports "College Costs Up Slightly, Report Says." Given that tuition has been routinely doubling the inflation rate for the past 20 years, this is good news, right?

Well, no. Average college tuition at public universities was up a healthy 6.4 percent this year, well in line with historical trends. Inflation-adjusted tuition was lower because inflation was higher, due to the run-up in energy prices among other factors. Now, it's true that on a long-term basis, on average, wages and income rise along with inflation. But at the moment we're still teetering on the brink of economic calamity (or we fell off a couple of weeks ago and just haven't gotten around to admitting it yet.) Unemployment is up, people are losing their shirts in the stock market, and the domestic automotive industry is about to collapse. The bottom 50% of households--i.e. the households that are most vulnerable to changes in college costs--are no better off today than they were eight years ago in terms of income, even as the price of college has risen dramatically. Suggesting that everything is copacetic because a worldwide spike in oil prices combined with a global food crisis and other terrible problems had the effect of deflating real tuition calculations is absurd.

Update: I note that the Times has now changed the headline to "Downturn Expected to Drive Tuition Up." Better!

Sweating the Big Stuff

The Washington-based National Alliance for Public Charter Schools reports that about 400 new charters have opened this fall, bringing the total number of charter schools to 4,600, with a national enrollment of 1.4 million. But charters rely heavily on the credit and bond markets to finance buildings, start-up, and cash-flow. And such funding is becoming much more expensive, or drying up altogether, in the wake of the global financial implosion, experts on charter finance and banking industry sources say. At the same time, a number of charter school authorizers meeting in Indianapolis this week reported they aren't seeing a lot of strong applications for new charters. Conclusion: a tough job--building good schools for disadvantaged kids from scratch--is about to get tougher.

100% or...What?

The 2014 target for 100% proficiency is one of the most vexing parts of the No Child Left Behind Act. On one hand, it seems absurd to suggest that every single student in America, all 49 million of of them, could pass a legitimate proficiency standard in both reading and math less than six years from now, and that every school where that standard isn't met is, by definition, deficient. Even taking into account "safe harbor" provisions that drop the actual number a few points below 100%, it's still a huge challenge, one the nation's schools are not currently on track to meet. The 100% goal is one of the principle reasons that a lot of people think NCLB is a rigged game and thus a conspiracy to destroy public education so as to pave the way for takeover by profit-hungry corporations, etc., etc. 

At the same time, I understand the logic behind it. The law was enacted in 2002. The proficient targets haven't been set particularly high. Any goal less than 100% would have been tantamount to giving up on some percentage of that year's kindergarten class, to looking the parent of a five year-old in the eye and saying "Twelve years just isn't enough time to teach your child to read and do math at a relatively low level." Settling on a goal lower than 100% also raises the question of how much lower and which children, exactly, would be written off from the get-go. Given the historical relationship between race, class, and educational opportunity in America, it's not hard to guess whose children those would have been. 

This raises the question of what would happen if the federal government didn't mandate a uniform timeline for all states. "Why not let the laboratories of democracy take a shot at it?" one might ask. "They're good people; even if they made different decisions, surely they wouldn't game the system in an utterly fraudulent, cynical way...."

Except we know they would. We know this because, as Anna Habash explains in a new report from the Education Trust, that's exactly what many of them have already done when given flexibility to decide how to hold high schools accountable for graduation rates under NCLB. 

Here's how it works: States are required to hold high schools accountable for graduation. But unlike with achievement scores, where every school has to meet a proficiency target that starts with where the 20th percentile school was in 2002 and ends with 100% in 2014, states can pick whatever end-goal graduation rate target they like and use whatever improvement trajectory they choose. 

That provides two different, exciting ways to render the provision completely meaningless. One is to pick an absurdly low goal. Welcome to the state of Nevada, where all manner of sins are legal and the statewide high school graduation rate goal is 50 percent. In other words, as long as your odds of graduating are better than what you get when you slap down $20 on red at the roulette wheel, you're doing fine. Alaska chose 55.58%, because apparently 56% even was just too heavy a cross to bear. And so on. 

Other states have been a little more clever. Instead of setting the bar at knee height, they adopt a putatively high bar but give schools centuries to get there. Maryland, for example, theoretically has a 90% graduation rate goal. But it will accept any improvement as sufficient progress, even 0.01%. At that rate, the state's African-American students will all be graduating by the year 3117, by which time we'll all be cursing in Mandarin Serenity-style and learning will take place via coaxial cables jammed into the back of your head. 

The point being, this isn't as simple as it seems. To be effective, accountability policies need to challenge schools to achieve more than they may believe they can achieve, but not challenge them so much that the entire process loses legitimacy. The policies also need to balance realism about the potential to improve the system as it stands with the moral urgency of helping students who are enrolled right now and can't wait to grow up while we fiddle with the only schools they have. 

One way way get around the seemingly insoluble 100% problem is to change the back-end responses and incentives as schools approach the final steep climb to the top and pass various points of diminishing returns: the closer you get to 100, the more the consequences of failure become a matter of foregone positive incentives rather than mandatory negative ones. In any case, it's a tricky set of issues for the next Congress and President to address. 

Weighted Student Funding

Over on Flypaper, Stafford is blogging about today’s School Finance Redesign Project panel (the report should be here, I gather, but it looks like the site is down). She laments what she sees as inevitable union resistance to the good idea of weighted student funding, which Fordham touts as a panacea for public schools.

I don’t think weighted student funding is a bad idea, necessarily. But it’s worth noting that we’re sitting in a cautionary tale. The District of Columbia Public Schools used a weighted student formula for several of its most dysfunctional years before it was abandoned by Fordham favorite Michelle Rhee. There’s a good summary of the system from 2006 here. Among the pitfalls:

An unintended consequence of the WSF implementation is that certain key staffing decisions have become uneven and inconsistent across schools, such that DCPS cannot tell parents with absolute certainty what each school is providing for their students. Full autonomy regarding how dollars are spent has led to 150 different decisions to determine an adequate ratio for counselors, appropriate levels of support in literacy and numeracy, and how (or even if) content areas such as art, music, and PE are delivered to students.

The report concludes that the weighted student formula did not to do enough to “ensure that critical educational resources — not simply dollars — are distributed consistently and equitably.”

Seven Percent

When the media report the number of schools failing to make Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP), they generally report things like, "xxx number of schools failed this year under the federal No Child Left Behind (NCLB) law." This does a real disservice on lots of fronts. One, it belies the fact that states set their own standards. Two, it scares people, because the numbers are often in the hundreds. What they don't report is the actual percent of schools facing consequences, and, perhaps more importantly, what those consequences are.

A new Center on Education Policy report found that seven percent of all Title I schools in the country are now in "restructuring," meaning they were unable to make AYP for five consecutive years. Think about that number for a moment. Seven percent. We hear all the time how awful NCLB is and how it identifies too many schools as failing, but seven percent of persistent underperformers really isn't very high at all.

The same report recorded two other important findings. First, about twenty percent of schools going through restructuring are able to make AYP the following year. This is a good sign of progress. Second, nine in ten schools in restructuring choose options like extra professional development focused on school improvement, on-site technical assistance with more intense support and monitoring, and on-site leadership coaches or facilitators. These aren't exactly the drastic measures we hear about from the media.

Special Ed Vouchers

Governor Palin's speech on special education last here has drawn a fair amount of commentary; Sara Mead provides a comprehensive analysis here. As Mead notes, one of the main proposals was to create a voucher program for students with disabilities modeled on the McKay Scholarship program in Florida. Sara wrote a comprehensive analysis of that program while she was here at Education Sector, you can read the report here. 

Iowa Student Loans

Last week the Project on Student Debt released "Student Debt and the Class of 2007." My home state, Iowa, moved up one to claim the top spot. It was no small coincidence that over the weekend Iowa's Attorney General released his own report documenting the Iowa Student Loan Corporation's misleading advertising and improper practices.

This weekend's report outlined the dubious practices of Iowa Student Loan, including that it:

• paid employees bonuses based on loan volume
• paid colleges based on the number of borrowers
• falsely marketed private loans as the lowest-cost options
• steered students into private loans at the expense of cheaper federal loans with better repayment terms
• compared itself in market share and price offerings to for-profit lenders

Iowa Student Loan published numerous misleading advertisements aimed at increasing loan consolidation. For example, they published a table showing a hypothetical student with $60,000 in loans could cut their monthly payment in half, from $700 to $337. They did not mention the term of the loan would extend to 30 years and increase the student's total interest payments from $24,188 to $74,752.

This is a real problem in a state where students at each of the state's three public four-year postsecondary institutions all face debt loads above the national average. At the University of Iowa (my alma mater), 61% of students graduate with an average debt load of $22,181. The University of Northern Iowa averages about the same debt load but has a higher percentage of students borrowing. At Iowa State University, the state's land-grant college, graduates average $31,501 in debt. Both Iowa and Iowa State have higher graduate debt burdens that any of their peers.

There's no particular reason why Iowa should have this problem. Its economy has not been hit particularly hard. Its universities are not particularly expensive (the sticker price, that is). And its taxpayers are not particularly frugal. Instead, middling government support for higher education and a student loan corporation more worried about its loan volume and competing with the for-profit sector have slowly made Iowa what it is today: the least affordable higher education state in the country.