2010 Budget

The Department of Education today released its 2010 budget. You can read the full thing or check out Alyson Klein's first look. Things that I noticed:

• the budget shifts money around reading and early childhood. It would cut Reading First state grants and Even Start while creating two new programs called "Title I early childhood grants" and "Early learning challenge fund."
• $50 million for a high school graduation initiative is a nice thought but not likely to make a major impact.
• Weak language around $500 million annual "College access and completion fund." It says money should be used to "improve degree attainment rates in higher education and identify and promote what works in helping needy students get a degree," but gives states "considerable flexibility" and allows this money to replace spending on functions currently undertaken by guaranty agencies (that will be cut elsewhere). This program had promise, but it needs strong language in order to address persistent achievement gaps in higher education.
• On Tuesday the New America foundation called it an uncertain future for two grant programs that began in 2006. The future is clearer today, and it's a short one. They're axed after 2010-11.
• Harlem Children's Zone-like efforts can expand. The budget includes $10 million in competitive grants for nonprofits to plan "promise neighborhoods."
• Teach for America gets $15 million, notable because little of their government funding has come through the Department of Education.
• The "What Works and Innovation Fund" grows $100 million, from $650 to $750.
• Arguments about making the Pell Grant an entitlement program have been heated, but did you know that it is already, in part? In 2009, "7 million undergraduates will receive up to $4,860 from discretionary funding and an additional $490 from mandatory funds to help pay for postsecondary education."
• Obama has called for an end to Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program, citing cost savings. Some have criticized the plan by suggesting the federal Direct Loan program couldn't handle the volume. The answer to that can be found in the 2010 budget. Counting a program where the feds stepped in to ensure the availability of the student loan market during the credit crunch, "over 75 percent of Federal student loan volume in the 2008-2009 academic year will be financed through capital provided by the Department of Education."
• DC voucher program's funding decreases, but is not cut entirely. It would go from $15 million in 2008 to $12 million in 2010, presumably to pay for Obama's position that kids currently receiving scholarships could continue, but the program will not expand.

Comparing Effectiveness

The NY Times magazine last weekend ran a lengthy interview with President Obama. Part of it deals with education and his opinions on education, but the most interesting passage was when the president is talking about health care. In it, he describes how, while a patient's involvement in their own care is a good thing, there are a lot of decisions that are best left to more knowledgable experts:

I have always said, though, that we should not overstate the degree to which consumers rather than doctors are going to be driving treatment, because, I just speak from my own experience, I’m a pretty-well-educated layperson when it comes to medical care; I know how to ask good questions of my doctor. But ultimately, he’s the guy with the medical degree. So, if he tells me, You know what, you’ve got such-and-such and you need to take such-and-such, I don’t go around arguing with himor go online to see if I can find a better opinion than his.

And so, in that sense, there’s always going to be an asymmetry of information between patient and provider. And part of what I think government can do effectively is to be an honest broker in assessing and evaluating treatment options. And certainly that’s true when it comes to Medicare and Medicaid, where the taxpayers are footing the bill and we have an obligation to get those costs under control.

This seems to me like exactly the role the federal government should play. It should not dictate the actual decisions on the ground, but it should be able to provide information that leads to better decisions, especially in areas where it provides direct funding.

One of those areas is education. All districts must have math and reading curricula and a system for developing their teachers, but they lack good information on the effectiveness of their choices. They must base their decisions on company-produced studies, academic research, or, worst of all, local political calculations. Besides dangers of bias, research conducted by companies selling something often compare the effects of the treatment to the effects of doing nothing. Not surprisingly, something is usually more effective than nothing. Academic research tends to focus only on the general value of interventions, so it has something to say about phonics versus whole word reading instruction, new math versus old, or the general value of professional development. But it tends not to evaluate specific programs or interventions, or, if it does, the programs are boutique and unscalable. Not to mention the fact that academic research is buried in inaccessible journals and jargon.

Local decisions become a political parlor game. The math curriculum adopted is the one favored by a few teachers on some committee because they've found it useful in their classrooms, a sample size of one. The professional development plan shoved onto teachers is the one who had the best salesman to woo district officials. And so on.

The Institute for Education Sciences has begun edging towards comparative effectiveness research, releasing an evaluation of math textbooks and reading intervention programs in the last couple months, but we need much more. The US Department of Education spends a smaller percentage of its budget on research and development than any other federal agency, and it could do a lot more. It could be an influential voice to say, "you can pick whichever program you want, but here's some good information to inform your decision about which ones work and whether they merit their cost. And, oh by the way, we'll give you more money if you choose the ones that work best at the lowest price." Following the information will be left to local policymakers, but the federal government has a role in providing good information and nudging those decisionmakers into choosing wisely.

Comparative effectiveness research is not cheap. The stimulus bill provided the first-ever invesment in such research, and even its $1.1 billion appropriation will be only a beginning. Yet, it has potential to save much more down the road as our health care system erradicates inefficiencies. Such research is also not apolitical either, but neither are the decisions at the local level. Better to have a respected federal body to hear all the voices and make non-binding recommendations than have less knowledgable local actors making the same, under-informed decisions in 15,000 different districts.

Green Dot Rising

Doug McGray has written a terrific piece in this weeks' New Yorker about Steve Barr and Green Dot Public Schools' insurgent campaign to reform public education in Los Angeles--and now beyond. As with most good narrative articles, it's not readily summarizable (and the endlessly quotable Barr makes it a lively read in any case, e.g. "I don't want to blow up L.A.U.S.D.'s ass, but what will it take...." 

Urban education reform fights are often explicitly cast in labor vs. anti-labor terms. And there's often truth in that. But Barr complicates this way of thinking. He's a Democrat and an organizer. His schools are unionized. When he needed the signature of unionized teachers to take over Locke High School, he went and got them. He's sincerely trying to partner with national unions like the AFT to expand his movement beyond L.A. There are bona fide anti-labor types within the public school choice movement, but Steve Barr isn't one of them.

Instead, what McGray very clearly describes is a fight against a school district that was willing to let a massively dysfunctional high school sit and fester for years on end. A district that stood side-by-side with the city teachers union in fighting to retain the right to continue that neglect. The article doesn't paint Barr as a miracle worker, or Green Dot as a source of fantastic new pedagogy and world-beating teaching. Rather, they've taken a building that wasn't actually functioning as a school in any true meaning of the word, and installed what all schools need: discipline, expectations that students will work, teachers who believe they can succeed. Charter schools were originally sold as a source of innovation. But as it turns out, many of the most successful charters have been a source of something even more important: competence. 

Now U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is talking to Barr about expanding the Green Dot approach nationally, to target the bottom one percent of schools, the Locke's of America, schools where failure is least ambiguous and ongoing neglect hardest to justify. Barr wants to work with AFT President Randi Weingarten to get this done. It'll be fascinating to see if Barr's initial skirmishes in L.A. grow into something more. 

Massive Disinvestment?

Andrew Delbanco has written a thorough and fair-minded article in the New York Review of Books about how the current economic crisis is exposing the way our higher education system is one "in which 'merit' is the ubiquitous slogan but disparity of opportunity is often the reality." He makes one point, however, that deserves some scrutiny:

These institutions—long before the current crisis—were seeing what Peter Sacks, in an indignant and informative book, Tearing Down the Gates: Confronting the Class Divide in American Education, calls "massive disinvestment" by the states. The University of Virginia now receives a mere 8 percent of its funding from the state of Virginia, down from nearly 30 percent a quarter-century ago. At the University of Wisconsin, in a state with a long progressive tradition, only about 19 percent comes from public funds—also down from around 30 percent just a decade ago. To make up for the decline in public money, tuition rates at public universities have been climbing even faster than at private institutions—a trend likely to accelerate, at least in the short run.

It's not that simple. The chart below, from David Longanecker, President of the Western Interstate Commission on Higher Education, shows public appropriations and net tuition revenue per FTE student, adjusted for inflation, from 1984 to 2008. This clearly illustrates the well-known role of higher education as the budgetary balance wheel in state appropriations. When fiscal times are bad, you can't just close down the prisons and let murderers run free, while you can cut funding for the universities and expect that tuition will make up the difference. When times are good, by contrast, state policymakers would rather spend the extra money on things that everyone feels good about, like universities, instead of more problematic services like welfare, incarceration, etc.

Thus, you see public money (the blue bars) flowing into higher education during the economic good times and out during the bad. The net result has been mostly a wash--real appropriations per FTE are higher than they were in 1983, albeit lower than the peak in the go-go years of the late 1990s, when states were swimming in unexpected revenue. One could reasonably argue that this is still a cut because higher education shrunk as a percent of all government spending, which tends pick up a portion of productivity gains and thus rise faster than inflation. True. But a lot of that was a function of other trends, most notably skyrocketing health care costs and an aging population, both of which put huge pressure on state Medicaid budgets. The other important factor is college enrollment, the red line on the chart. From 2001 to 2005, public institutions were hit with the unfortunate two-fer of a recession-induced funding pullback just as the baby boom echo was cresting. Thus, the sharp decline in revenues per student. But they made a lot of that back in the later years of the expansion as enrollment levelled off and revenues increased, the normal historical pattern.

So, overall, "massive disinvestment" is inaccurate. The government is hanging in there. (This varies a lot by state, of course, some are much worse, others better.) Not what many (myself included) would wish in an era that values information and learning more than ever, but not a total walkback by any means.

A related but distinct phenomenon is the issue of (as Delbanco frames it) public investment as a percentage of higher education revenues. Even as public revenues have been flat in absolute terms over the long haul, they've declined significantly relative to all higher education revenues. Why? Because colleges and universities have boosted spending much faster than inflation, and they're making up the difference by hiking tuition. Thus, you see the yellow bars (real per FTE net tuition revenue) doubling in absolute terms while also comprising a larger percentage of the whole, and as such making public revenues (the blue bars) a smaller percentage of the whole.

Of course, all of this could look much worse in a few years, depending on how things go with the economy. The decision to funnel a big chunk of federal and state stimulus funding into K-12 and higher education will help.

The question Delbanco doesn't address is whether the long-term trend of higher education spending running far ahead of inflation, economic growth, family income, public appropriations, and everything else is an unavoidable fact of life that needs to be accommodated or a public policy problem that can be substantially addressed. I think it's the latter, and as public coffers and family pocketbooks are increasingly barren, I think others will too.

The Problem With Saving For College

A few weeks ago the New York Times "Education Life" section published a long piece about saving for college. The premise is that, if current trends continue, college will eventually become so expensive that parents need to to start socking money away from pretty much the moment their eyes first lock across a crowded restaurant. Seriously, don't even wait to pick up the check--tuition is going up by the minute! Therefore, responsible parents should follow a program that is carefully delineated with subheads like (I am not making this up) "Newborns and toddlers," "The Preschool Years," etc. 

I know the whole frog-in-a-boiling-pot-of-water thing is a myth, but how did we get so comfortable with this? I'm not saying people shouldn't pay part of the cost of higher education, particularly at private institutions, or that saving is a bad strategy per se. But somewhere along the line things got out of hand. And much of the blame lies with our public policymakers, who love to peddle college savings ideas, all manner of tax breaks , subsidies and incentive programs. Since pretty much everyone likes college, and savings, and thinks that society could use more of both, putting the two together is irresistible. 

But the more I think about this, the more I believe it's a dodge. In this day and age, higher education (not just university education, but post-secondary education broadly defined) should be considered a basic public service, supported by public revenues, combined with effective oversight to restrain college costs. I think college savings plans are increasingly just a way for politicians to escape those obligations. And now we're seeing the consequences, in the wreckage of tens of thousands of 529 colleges savings plans. This is the subject of my new column at the Chronicle of Higher Education. 

The Myth of Too Many Great Students

In the course of a witty and poignant reflection on his daughter's college search, Joel Achenbach of the Washington Post writes:

The dirty secret of the American educational system is that there's a glut of good kids -- excellent grades, first-rate test scores, a blizzard of extracurriculars. We've all read the stories of the despairing admissions officers wading through applications from one overachiever after another, cursing the gods -- "No, not another valedictorian!"

It's true, we've all read those stories, because newspapers like the Post love to publish them. But the idea there's this new or problematic oversupply of super-qualified high school students--it's nonsense, really. The dirty not-so-secret of the American educational system is that a quarter of the kids don't graduate from high school on time, and for black and Latino students it's closer to half. Of those who do finish, many aren't even minimally prepared for college-level work--national remediation rates for college freshmen are, depending on the estimate, 25 to to 40 percent. In 1978, seven percent of all 17-year olds scored over 350 on the NAEP long-term trends math exam. Last year, it was six percent. Achenbach says that kids these days "routinely" apply to "12 or 15" colleges. Last I checked with the folks at the UCLA Higher Education Research Institute who study these things, about two percent of students apply to 12 colleges or more. 

In truth, the frenzied college admissions rate race is a niche phenomenon concentrated in the wealthy sections of a relatively small number of metropolitan areas located disproportionately on the coasts. Of course, those are also the places where agenda-setting national newspapers are published, and where the people who write for them live. But let's not pretend that their lives are in any way representative of most American college students, people who tend to be focused on more mundane problems like getting a decent high school education, finding enough money to get through the local public two- or four-year college, and earning a degree.