Enjoy It While It Lasts

The Post reports a huge influx of highly-qualified students from China applying as undergraduates to elite American universities. At the University of Virginia, the number grew from 60 in 2005 to 816 in 2009. At Brown University, 166 to 500, and so on. This shows, once again, the huge advantage we have in being home to lion's share of the world's top-notch colleges and universities in the era of globalization. Assuming U.S. / Chinese relations stay reasonably stable and anti-immigration crazy people don't get their way, increasing numbers of very smart, motivated students from the other side of the world will come to America to live, learn, start businesses, make important discoveries, and otherwise improve our way of life.

But it won't last forever. It's clear that, given the opportunity, elite American universities are prone to implement discriminatory admissions policies that artificially limit the number of American students of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese descent. So I'm pretty sure that the number of Chinese students of Chinese descent who are admitted will only grow so much. Hard quotas will be implemented, and most of the best and brightest Chinese undergrads will have to look elsewhere. There's just no way to get around the numbers:  China alone is nearly 4.5 times larger than the U.S. and the percent of Chinese students with access to an education pipeline that can bring them to college is growing. 

Eventually, other colleges and universities will find a place for them and their peers from India, Africa, South America, and elsewhere. Some of those institutions could be American, but many will be in Europe or elsewhere. Filled to the brim with the world's smartest students, their academic reputations will rise relative to elite American institutions that are hamstrung by narrow-minded admissions policies and an unwillingness to grow to meet surging demand. Eventually, someone's going to realize that it's perfectly feasible to build an institution of higher education that can, with a combination of physical infrastructure and technology, serve several hundred thousand undergraduates from around the world, all admitted purely on their merits, at once. Whatever nation gets there first will enjoy all the benefits that we do today. 

The Realities of Disruptive Innovation

Many thanks to Cathy Cavanaugh and Erik Black for their thoughtful guest post below reviewing Gene Glass's policy brief, "The Realities of K-12 Virtual Schooling." As virtual schooling becomes increasingly prominent, it will rightfully deserve increasing amounts of scrutiny and attention. This is all good if the focus is on ensuring good outcomes for the increasing numbers of students taking virtual courses, hybrid courses, and any of the thousands of variations to be developed.

But it's not at all good if researchers and advocates just use virtual schooling as a new venue to play out old ideological or political battles. My only addition to Cavanaugh and Black's review is my concern that the article tries to assess a new model with a very fixed notion of school. To be clear, I don't at all object to many of Glass's specific concerns -- I also share his concerns about financial incentives to lower quality, poor student outcomes, and abuses by fully-online cyber schools. But rather than see these as a part of a whole new, large, and varied mode of education, his conception that "traditional" norms and bureaucracies are the only "real" school limits his analysis.

My motivation for writing the cover feature on Florida Virtual School in the new edition of Education Next was to tell the story of a reform endeavor that has not fit neatly into these prevailing norms:

To accomplish this rare feat, the school has adroitly walked a fine line. It has built a distinct educational philosophy, approach, and culture. At the same time, it has maintained its identity as a public school and remains part of the system. This unique positioning, far enough outside to do business in a different way yet sufficiently inside the system to avoid political backlash, has been a key element in the school’s success. Mark Pudlow, spokesperson for the Florida Education Association, the teachers union that has fought pitched battles against many of Florida’s recent initiatives, acknowledges the result of Florida Virtual School’s approach: "[It] never developed the kind of mistrust that tends to be associated with other reform ideas." Savvy leadership, strong political support, and a series of well-timed decisions around growth have helped FLVS become the country’s most successful virtual school, and perhaps one of its most important reform stories as well.

My article ends before the current legislative battle in Florida over the state's virtual school, but I've learned quite a bit from the episode. One big take-away is that for all the interest in the book Disrupting Class and the theory of disruptive innovation, the reality is that it is, well, disruptive.

We all talk about wanting to go to scale with innovation. Many people also want to promote competition in education. But very few are really prepared to deal -- particularly if a non-traditional, but still public, entity like Florida Virtual School competes and wins big -- when the results from competition at scale don't fit into the dominant narratives of public vs. private, reformer vs. status quo, what's good for teachers, etc. In this case, legislators are complaining because the school is too successful at attracting students that are engaged and want more than their prescribed allotment of education. The private sector lobbyists are complaining about too much competition and attempting to use the political process to carve out their protected niche. And it's a subset of public sector folks complaining that Florida Virtual is too successful because the school is winning enrollments from home and private school parents who are opting back into public education. Strange days indeed.

Truth Hurts

In a story about college admissions rejection letters and where they fall on the nice-to-mean continuum (really), the Wall Street Journal reports: 

Most Discouraging: Boston University. To students who have family ties to the university, its letter begins: "We give special attention to applicants whose families have a tradition of study at Boston University. We have extended this consideration in the evaluation of your application, but I regret to inform you that we are unable to offer you admission." Consideration of family legacies is common practice at many universities. But Rob Flaherty, 17, a North Reading, Mass., recipient, said he felt the wording in BU's letter translated to "we made it even easier for you and you STILL couldn't get in."

Well, yeah, that's exactly what it means. Legacy admissions policies are morally unjustifiable. They're basically a way for colleges and universities to cash in a portion of their academic integrity in exchange for the substantial financial benefits that come with telling alumni that if that if they play their cards right, they may be able to give their children a leg up come admissions time. And admissions preferences only matter at the margin. If you apply to a college as a legacy, then what you're doing is saying "If it comes down to a choice between me and a non-legacy candidate who's more qualified, please pick me." That's a lot to ask. Now colleges are supposed to lie about it too, so people don't feel bad? 

Colleges Continue to Raise Tuition, Squander the Money on Sports

We all know the drill by now: Faced with a major financial shortfall, the university announces that it has no choice but to sharply raise student tuition once again. "We remain committed to providing an affordable education for all," says the university president, in somber tones. "But we will not degrade the high academic standards that make this institution great. We continue to provide an excellent value to our students, and we call on all members of the university community to come together in this difficult time of shared sacrifice." Students complain, while some of the more outspoken members of the faculty wonder aloud why "high academic standards" never seem to involve "paying professors more money." They are ignored.

I think this standard line of rhetoric is growing less persuasive by the year. And it's really hard to pull off in light of the new NCAA report detailing the recent orgy of spending on college sports. A few years ago, the NCAA put some numbers on a fact that had long been suspected: the vast majority of big-time college sports programs lose large amounts of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. A handful turn a profit, but most run big deficits that have to be made up with funds from student tuition, state appropriations, layoffs, salary freezes and elsewhere. 

Faced with this harsh reality and an uncertain economic future, the nation's most prominent Division I institutions naturally decided to further ratchet up sports spending by nearly 11 percent per year, from an average of $31 million in 2004 to over $42 million in 2007. 

Of course these types of studies are always shrouded in anonymity, so there's no way to pick them up and compare your university's annual sports deficit / major spending increase and compare it to new student charges and departmental budget cuts elsewhere. But given the scarce number of universities that turn a profit, the odds are high that if your institution has aspirations of playing football in January, it's somewhere on the list. 

Guest Blog: The Realities of K-12 Virtual Education

"The Realities of K-12 Virtual Education" is a policy brief released this month (April 2009) by the Great Lakes Center for Education Research and Practice. Written by education policy expert Gene Glass, the brief summarizes the growth in virtual schools over the past decade and discusses questions of costs, funding, and quality before recommending regulation, audits, accrediting and assessment in virtual schooling.

While we agree with the four policy recommendations offered in the brief and we share the author’s concern about the preponderance of private commercial involvement in virtual schooling, we call for a more thorough examination of the complexities in virtual schooling and a recognition of the great many high quality virtual school programs serving students. The brief paints virtual schools with a broad brush on the basis of a small number of studies and reports, many of which are outdated.

The brief’s statement that virtual schools require special attention because they are new implies that more traditional practices can expect protection from examination, without regard to quality and relevance. We welcome discussions of quality in virtual schools. We see a baby/bathwater problem in Glass’s discussions of quality, beginning with the definition of virtual schools as simulations of "real schooling." This definition of virtual school ignores both the labels developed by the virtual schools community and the millions of students and teachers who do very "real" teaching and learning without being in the same time and the same place, especially students who succeed in virtual schools after failing in "real" schools.

Glass makes the accurate assertion that virtual schools take a variety of forms and types. Unfortunately, the paper responds to that complexity by oversimplifying many key issues based on either outdated or incomplete sources. After a thorough description of the growth trends over the past decade using recent and credible sources, and a fair summary of the early effectiveness studies, the brief deviates into opinion studies involving surveys of populations who may or may not have first hand experience with quality virtual schools. We disagree that public acceptance of virtual schools can be used as a measure of their effectiveness. A great many data-driven measures of effectiveness are available. Such measures are included in studies of successful humanities courses in virtual schools, which refute the brief’s claim that "more complex areas of the curriculum (e.g., the arts) are beyond the reach of" virtual schools. For instance, the Florida Virtual School teaches several courses in the arts, including 2D Art for Middle School Students, Art Appreciation and AP Art History, some of which have been studied closely by researchers and were found to demonstrate high quality according to the standards of the art education community. It may be that Dr. Glass’s perspective of art education is limited to traditional media rather than the rich digital media now used in arts curricula. Seeing artists working with sophisticated computer-based tools to generate a wide range of digital media in most any graphic arts studio or modern art classroom would broaden this perspective. Given the trend of school boards and state boards of education to make budgetary cuts to the arts, online art programs provide a sanctuary for students who might not have the ability to develop their expressive talents in their local classrooms.

The policy brief accurately assesses the importance of online credit recovery courses for students who have not found success in their classroom courses. Indeed, credit recovery plays a very important role in K-12 virtual schooling, though it should be noted that there has been no national assessment conducted of student motivations for participating in online learning. State level data gathered in two states in the Southeastern United States through the UF Virtual School Clearinghouse program indicate that an overwhelming percentage of students utilize virtual schools to enable flexibility in their daily schedules or to accelerate their academic progress. In the states surveyed, student course retention and recovery was the 3rd most often cited reason for participation in a virtual school course.

It is unfortunate that Glass seems to assert online learning for credit recovery purposes may constitute a misallocation of resources. This couldn’t be further from the truth; several education programs in the United States utilize online courses to meet the needs of individuals who dropped out of high school. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, in California alone, each year 120,000 individuals fail to earn a high school diploma by age 20. Those without high school diplomas are more likely to be unemployed, engaged in the criminal justice system and in receipt of state medical benefits. By providing flexible, differentiated online learning, it may be possible to reach individuals who have not been successful in traditional face-to-face classroom environments. The U.S. could learn a lesson from Mexico in this regard: a network of Mexican universities has launched a nation-wide system of virtual schooling specifically to increase the level of workforce productivity by making high school completion available to all adults, thus increasing the college-ready population.

According to Glass, "Whenever teacher and learner are not in a face-to-face relationship, suspicions run high that all or much of the work being assessed may not be that of the learners themselves." But research by University of Florida researchers in 2008 indicated that students do not perceive a greater level of academic dishonesty in online classes as compared to face-to-face. As any experienced online teacher knows, content and curriculum must be adapted for use online. In highly moderated online courses, teachers have far more personal interaction with students and their parents than they do during the traditional classroom course, and many effective virtual schools depend on partnerships with site-based guidance counselors and tutors for added assurance that students do their own work. Many virtual courses are project-based, relying on open-ended qualitative assessments of learning rather than tested skills. A formative evaluation provides a much richer and more personal opportunity for the student to convey understanding of a topic or concept. Given a rich dialog between learner and instructor, it becomes quite evident when a student receives external aid on a formative assignment.

The brief’s sections on cost, accreditation, and teacher certification are useful overviews of these critical issues, bringing to light important cautionary cases. Cost in virtual schools is a complex issue that has been reduced in the brief to three factors, masking important forces that vary by state and LEA. A more comprehensive analysis is needed.

We urge readers of "The Realities of K-12 Virtual Education" to take its policy recommendations seriously, become informed about issues of virtual school quality, and to learn from the cases of abuse of power. But these issues, like most of the issues addressed in the brief, apply to all forms of schooling. When assessing the effectiveness of any school or model, we should not assume that all schools in a category as broad as virtual schools resemble each other. Understanding of schooling models must be based on an understanding of the variety of forms and a recognition that schools, in particular online schools, undergo rapid evolution so that even the same school may not resemble itself after just a few years.

--Dr. Cathy Cavanaugh, Associate Professor of educational technology in the School of Teaching and Learning at the University of Florida and Erik W. Black, doctoral fellow at the University of Florida in the educational technology program. Both are affiliated with the University of Florida's Virtual School Clearinghouse research project.

Dear Rejected Student,

It is with deep regret that I write to inform you we are unable to offer you a spot in the class of 2013 at Desired University. You may be asking what was lacking in your application; for most of our applicants the honest answer is nothing. We received thousands of applications from incredibly talented individuals, and unfortunately space restrictions dictate that we are able to admit only a tiny percentage of applicants. In part this is because so many of your peers now elect to apply to so many more colleges. But, in the end, our decisions came down to chance, because the deans were obliged to select from among candidates who clearly could do sound work here. We regret to inform you that you have lost this lottery.

If you are receiving this letter, please take heart that our past experience suggests that a particular college a student attends is far less important than what the student does to develop his or her strengths and talents over the next four years. Chances are you got in to another school that is equally or almost as good, and you control your own destiny once there. We appreciate your interest in our school, and we wish you all the best in your future endeavors (hint: we have great law/business/medicine post-graduate programs).

Sincerely,
Overworked Admissions Office

(Above portions in bold are excerpts from real rejection letters sent to the class of 2013.)

Real Conversations

Higher Ed Watch writes today about one of the arguments private lenders are using in support of the FFEL program, and against Obama's proposal to provide all loans through the federal government's Direct Loan program: that the profits the government will make on loans to primarily middle class students will be used to subsidize increased Pell Grants to lower-income students. This is, they argue, a tax on the middle class to help poor students attend college. As Higher Ed Watch explains, that argument twists the truth about where the money for increases in Pell Grants is coming from.

But, what is even more disturbing, is that lenders are using that argument in the first place, rather than having a real discussion about how students might benefit from keeping private providers in the federal loan system. It's a sign of how far this conversation has gotten from students' experiences and what policies are most likely to benefit them, as borrowers.

I just returned from a conference held for financial aid officers by Texas Guaranteed, one of the 35 guarantee agencies in the country. The conversation at the conference was not generally about FFEL vs. Direct Lending (although there was certainly some of that). Among the financial aid officers it was, refreshingly, about what makes it easier for students to both get and repay student loans, and also what makes it easier for schools to do their job in getting financial aid to students.

From those conversations, a few key qualities emerged which any new loan program, whether it is FFEL, Direct Lending or some 'third way ' approach should have, including clarity on where students can get loans and who they need to repay, good communication between lenders and schools and lenders and students, and strong default prevention activities, which includes letting schools know when their students are behind on loan payments and supporting schools in providing good loan counseling and financial literacy instruction during school.

These are all areas where lenders and guarantee agencies can contribute to conversations about their role in a new loan system and how that system can best support students. Texas Guaranteed, for example, provides some great (free) resources to schools, including technology that allows them to track loan repayment, financial literacy presentations and course materials, and default prevention consultants that can work individually with schools to improve their default rates. But I haven't heard about how those resources will be kept, replicated, or improved under a new system. Instead, we get to hear the usual rhetoric pitting one group of students against another group of students in a debate that should be leading to a better financial aid system for all groups of students.

Charter Schools Feel the Squeeze As Belts Tighten In D.C.

The D.C. City Council held a press conference today announcing that the council would support a $309 cut to the per-pupil facilities funds provided to charter schools - for charter schools, that's an improvement from potentially bigger cuts in Mayor Fenty's budget. This cut in facilities funding clearly poses some large problems for charter schools in DC, but it could also be a warning sign for charter schools in other districts around the country.

For DC charter schools, the cut in facilities funding means needing to reevaluate lease terms on facilities to ensure they can afford the rent, or, if the school owes money on a facility loan, it might mean reallocating budget dollars to ensure they don't default on that debt. More broadly, it introduces political risk to facilities funding - what bank will lend to a school if their facilities allotment might be cut in half next year? See this article in the Washington Times for more on how this impacts DC charter schools.

In the bigger picture, states and districts everywhere are trying to find ways to cut budgets, and charter schools present a potentially easy target. They're not seen as part of the public school system in many areas, allowing political leaders to make cuts without seemingly cutting public school funding. And, they're not always very popular. Particularly in states like Ohio, where charter schools have been facing increasing resistance and efforts to restrict growth, the tightening fiscal situation only adds fuel to arguments that charter schools siphon money away from public education and are an unnecessary extravagance in a time of limited resources.

It's possible that President Obama's support for charter schools and the 'race to the top' funding may stem some cuts to charter schools. But as school district leaders look at their budgets, charter school advocates will need to lobby hard and may need to make some deals to maintain their funding levels.

No Frills (Including Fact Checkers)

Newspapers are hard hit during these financial times. They're simultaneously cutting staff and raising workloads, so I can understand if a few stories go uncovered. But apparently they're cutting back on fact checkers, too, at least at the Christian Science Monitor. Here's a quote from an article yesterday on no-frills higher education:

A main factor driving up tuition at public universities is the reduction in state funding. In the Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education, for instance, appropriations per student slid 20 percent in the past decade, says chancellor John Cavanaugh. During the same period, however, the system found ways to save, so tuition went up just 16 percent.

This is an oft-repeated line, but it's not really true nationally or in this case. The Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education's 2007-8 Fact Book shows why. Some quick math from Table C.2 finds that in-state undergraduate tuition, fees, room and board increased from $8,089 to $13,184 between 1997-8 and 2007-8, a 63 percent rise (if you focus on tuition only, as Cavanaugh did, it would lower the percent to 49.3, still far higher than the 20 percent quoted by the chancellor). Compare that to Table G.1, which shows that system appropriations per student actually increased by two percent over the same ten-year period. The state was not overly generous, sure, but for every additional student that enrolled, it provided additional funds to compensate. The national trend tells a similar story: in constant dollars per student, at public four-year institutions between 1983 and 2008, tuition more than doubled while state appropriations were up about nine percent.

A Quick History Lesson

In an interview with the Wall Street Journal's editorial board, would-be commerce secretary Senator Judd Gregg evokes a revisionist history of the FFEL (private lenders) vs Direct Loans (government as lender) debate as evidence of Democrats' intentions to move to a single-payer, government-based health care system. I can't comment on Democrats' future plans for health care, but his comments on the history of student loans require some correcting.

From the article:

...Mr. Gregg argues that he has history on his side. The Democrats, he says, pulled the same public-private switcheroo before with student loans for college. Back in the late 1990s, "there was a huge debate in the committee . . . between myself and [Senator Ted] Kennedy over a private plan versus a public plan." In the end, they compromised -- the government would offer loans directly to students, but that program would have to compete with private-sector lenders. "And the agreement was very formal, and the record shows this very clearly. We agreed to level the playing field, put both plans on the playing field at an equal status and see who won. Well, private plans won. Big time."

Given the choice, most borrowers went to the private sector for their loans. But the Democrats who wanted to nationalize the student-loan market did not take defeat in the marketplace gracefully. "They didn't like that," Mr. Gregg says. "So ever since then they've tilted the playing field back and now they're going to wipe out the private plans in their budget."

Given the current situation of private lenders, it's hard to say that they won "big time"in the competition with the Direct Loan program. But, even more important to correct, is the allusion that all private lenders wanted to do was compete in a true marketplace until the Democrats came along and tilted the playing field. From the beginning, private lenders sought to limit the impact of Direct Lending through legislation. Private lenders got a legislated cap on the market share of the direct loan program for its first five years, ensuring that they wouldn't be out-competed entirely. And lenders sued when the federal government tried to lower fees in the Direct Loan program to compete with private lenders, saying that the Department of Education did not have the authority to make those changes.

And early evidence indicated that private lenders were not competing successfully with the Direct Loan program - in its first years, Direct Loans grew to a third of the student loan market. But that market share dropped as lenders competed aggressively (sometimes too aggressively) for schools' student loan business. Contrary to Senator Gregg's comment that borrowers went to the private sector, students rarely get to choose between the Direct Loan program and private lenders - schools make that decision and offer students one or the other. Lenders know this, and targeted heavy marketing to financial aid offices. This New York Times article from 2007 sums up the history of competition between private lenders and the federal government pretty well.

Mayoral Control is, in Fact, about Style

Secretary Duncan’s public endorsement of mayoral control in New York City this month comes on the heels of months of controversy for the city’s chancellor Joel Klein, whose tenure seems to be endangering not only NYC’s mayoral control but the viability of Mayor Bloomberg’s entire reform agenda. The allegations driving the calls for Klein to quit have little to do with whether Klein is right, and everything to do with who he is. “He’s a great litigator, he’s probably the smartest person I’ve met,” Randi Weingarten says, “But his view is it’s my way or the highway.” In systems with mayoral control in particular, conventional wisdom and leadership style matter as much, if not more, than winning policy arguments.

School systems are essentially “people [administrators] working with and through people [teachers] to influence people [students].”* For better or worse, politics are inherent in any school system, especially one which gives so much power to one directly-elected mayor and his hand-picked chancellor. These kinds of problems led authors William Sharp and James Walter to advocate participatory decision-making for urban superintendents in their 2004 book The School Superintendent: The Profession and the Person. Neither individual nor group decision making will advance the best reforms: while individuals are subject to bias and overconfidence, groups are impossibly slow at deciding. Perhaps most importantly, participatory decision-making can allow Bloomberg and Klein to preserve the executive power they need to effect real change while cultivating the social capital with teachers, parents and students to keep their political agenda from falling apart in the mean time.

One person in the position to learn a lot from Klein’s troubles is DC Chancellor Michelle Rhee. Kevin Carey is right to reject Nick Kristof’s questions about Rhee’s bedside manner: union leaders are hard-headed, and Rhee’s staffing policies should be judged by public debate, not by backroom placation. Still, Rhee’s challenges on discipline, attendance and standards will still be there even after the immediate fight over firing is fought and won. Whether legitimate or not, decisions to withhold information about the budget or firing her own children’s principal run the danger of appearing arbitrary and capricious. By letting teachers set some (but not all) of the agenda and making obvious that she values their input, Rhee can make the person-to-person connections she needs to overcome her image and preserve the political prerogatives of her office. In particular, Rhee will have to build systems to protect against truly arbitrary firing and create a rigorous system of professional development (the first signs of which are here) in the District before she pushes for greater firing rights. Fear, in this case, will not motivate teachers to get better but only motivate them to dig deeper into cynicism and complacency.

Rhee knows she can’t fix DC alone: she frequently makes statements like “teachers are the solution” to urban education woes or teachers are “the agents of social justice” in the District. By forming personal relationships open to mutual criticism with as many teachers as she can, Rhee can avoid the breakdown in trust, confidence and collaboration which have derailed Klein’s agenda.

By Chase Nordengren.

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* Ellen Goldring and William Greenfield, “Understanding the Evolving Concept of Leadership in Education: Roles, Expectations, and Dilemmas,” in The Educational Leadership Challenge: Redefining Leadership for the 21^st Century, ed. Joseph Murphy, Vol 101, no 1, Yearbook of the National Society of Education. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 3.