Go Nats!

So, today's Post features an op-ed by former Ed. Secretaries Bill Bennett and Rod Paige arguing for--wait for it--voluntary national testing. Funny how I seem to have heard that idea somewhere before... Of course, there's no mention of Clinton or Dick Riley, who advocated voluntary national tests long before these two and when he actually was Education Secretary. Instead, Bennett and Paige reference the Fordhamites, who've been pushing the issue hard lately on on whose board Paige serves. They might also want to acknowledge AEI's Michael Greve. Here's Bennett and Paige's core policy recommendation:

Washington should set sound national academic standards and administer a high-quality national test. Publicize everybody's results, right down to the school level. Then Washington should butt out.

Greve said basically the exact same thing at Ed Sector's National Standards debate last spring, which also featured Fordham's Mike Petrilli along with Lauren Resnick, a very feisty Deb Meier, New America's Michael Dannenberg, and our own trendsetter Kevin Carey.

On the substance here: There are a lot of decent arguments for national testing. The huge variation in rigor of state standards (and often utter lack thereof) is the big attention-getter, but equally troublesome, IMHO, is that it's terribly inefficient to have 50 different state systems of standards and testing, and this inefficiency, combined with the high costs of remotely decent tests, leads to a lot of state using really crappy tests that don't actually assess their standards and contribute to the kind of "teaching to the test" accountability foes and parents complain about. It's also just dopey to think that how kids learn to read or calculate or do algebra and what they need to know when in these areas varies much from state to state--particularly in an increasingly global economy. Plus, having national tests would dramatically enhance our ability to do good research on all kinds of questions linked to student achievement, particularly if they were properly aligned grade-to-grade and accompanied by longitudinal student-linked data systems.

Regardless of increasingly rosy thinking about national standards from some small corners of both the left and the right (some of which, IMHO, is more PR than real), however, the politics of the issue are still nearly as killer as they were when Clinton came to grief over them in the 1990s, and the memory of that still makes a lot of folks incredibly wary. Even if National tests could be legislated politically, negotiating the content and standards for the tests would be a massive political nightmare people don't seem to be taking into account. Even such ostensibly straightforward things as reading and math are fraught with ideological baggage--remember the reading wars, or the controversy over the Clinton administration's proposed voluntary national math standards? And that's likely to come out in efforts to create such assessements. (And don't get me started on what happens when you try to do test-based accountability in history or science....)

Welcome Additions

With Craig and Zachary augmenting Kevin's Wire coverage, you may have noticed that we have more folks blogging lately. Further expanding our roster (and proving TAP isn't the only place in town to have a "super-intern") is Education Sector fall intern Alex Redfield, a student at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, Canada, whose previous experiences include working at Sacramento High School in California and on his dad's farm. And he may even be almost cooler than Kevin (if that's possible) leaving me still the least hip person on the ES blog team.

Rubbing Elbows with the Stars!

This morning I sat in on Business Roundtable's "Fourth Annual NCLB Forum: Assessing Progress, Addressing Problems, Advancing Performance." The panel discussion featured Acting Education Department Under Secretary and Chief of Staff David Dunn, House Education and the Workforce Committee Chair and Ranking member, respectively, Howard "Buck" McKeon and George Miller, and NEA President Reg Weaver, with USA Today's Richard Whitmire moderating.

Considering the venue and mix of speakers, it was probably too much to hope for significant revelations or in-depth discussion, and the panelists performed to expectations. Everyone was utterly predictable and on their best behavior. Rep. McKeon and Mr. Dunn suggested that NCLB is well on its way to solving all our educational woes. Rep. Miller talked seriously about implementation problems and drew a line in the sand regarding under-qualified teachers, saying that the "most important problem is hiring done on the cheap. No longer." But when it came to solutions, he seemed mostly to be saying that if we could just throw a little more money around, we'd be in much better shape. Mr. Weaver also focused on money. He argued that while NCLB's emphasis on outcomes is admirable, it is a distraction from the necessary improvements to incomes in the education system—and then called for the usual litany of smaller classes, multiple measures, growth models, and teacher incentives to move to difficult districts. The panelists seemed to be talking past each other, and no one mentioned the critical educational challenge NCLB aimed to address—racial inequities in education.

Overall, the event just didn't live up to its big-name panel. With actual movers and shakers on the schedule, I was hoping for some moving and shaking. I don't think political posturing and sidestepping count.

--Guestblogger Alex Redfield

You Spin Me Round (Like a Record)

While Kevin and Andy are merrily debating with Matthew Yglesias about the possibility and meaning of "closing achievement gaps," another post on young Mr. Yglesias' site today --about indie rock bands and record lables, of all things--put me in mind of an issue I've been thinking about a good bit recently--the role of Educational Management Organizations in the charter school movement. Bear with me here.

Educational Management Organizations, (mostly) for-profit (though often in name only) companies that contract with school districts and charter school boards to operate schools, run about 25% of charter schools nationwide. EMOs offer a lot of benefits but also drawbacks, and they are politically contentious, both within the charter community and without. A lot of tradeofs connected to EMOs--opportunity to reach an audience on a significant scale, access to capital, support services and expertise vs. reduced tolerance for innovation, surrendering some autonomy and a substantial chunk of one's revenues, and potential tradeofs between corporate bottom lines and other goals--sound parallel with the risks vs. rewards of record labels Ygelsias mentions, although obviously this comparison oughtn't be taken to far.

What interests me, though, is the area in the middle--ideas to help stand-alone charter schools tap some of the benefits EMOs can bring without sacrificing local leadership or room for innovation. Some good examples have already sprung up in the charter school community: "Back-office" service providers that offer services like payroll or purchasing but don't actually run schools, organizations that provide technical assistance and support to help stand-alone charter schools (DC's FOCUS, which helps prospective charter applicants put together a quality application, is one example), and networks that replicate high-performing schools that started as stand-alones (KIPP and Achievement First are classic models*) are some of the promising ideas here. Venture philanthropists like the New Schools Venture Fund have played a big role in both thinking about how to marry scale with diversity and innovation, and in funding promising initiatives in this area. Maybe the music world--at least the hip music world Kevin and Matthew Yglesias are all into (I only aspire to be even a fraction as cool)--could benefit from some Venture artists?

*btw, a look at the work these schools are doing is quite relevant to the Yglesias/Carey/Norris/Rotherham/AFT/Rothstein.....debate--a topic on which I have some additional thoughts that I still want to let ferment a while before sharing.

btw II: Being a bit of a masochist (I was on the Gadfly show twice), I took a quick glimpse at the comment thread of Yglesias' latest post, where his positive comments about NCLB appear to have provoked the predictable liberal blog commenter NCLB-bashing. Interesting to me that, while NCLB is in no way comparable to the Iraq debacle, criticism of the law from the left tends to break down similarly: Some folks think it was inherently a bad idea because it came from the Bush administration and/or testing is just plain bad. Others think the idea was good but results have not met expectations because of mistakes the administration made in implementation--such as allowing states to use crappy tests and not "fully-funding" the law. I tend to think the latter camp is onto something, but also that the inherent complexity in an endeavor like NCLB accountability guarantees that not everything will work perfectly from the get-go.

Also relating to young, bespectacled, male bloggers: EdWahoo appears to be, at least temporarily, and welcomely, back with a new post on his TFA experience (and more achievement gap insights), and has been restored to the blogroll. (Via Joanne Jacobs)

Yglesias on the Achievement Gap

Matt Yglesias responds to Zachary Norris' post about closing the achievement gap in Baltimore:

But what would it mean -- what could it mean -- to close the achievement gap between high- and low-SES students in American schools? For a whole variety of reasons, this just doesn't seem like it's going to be possible. At the outer limit, more prosperous parents are always going to be able to re-open the gap by investing even more resources in their kids' education. An education and child development arms race to the top might not be a bad thing, but it wouldn't close any socioeconomic gaps. To do that, you actually need to tackle inequality itself.

This is essentially the same question we recently discussed here and here with respect to the various arguments about school inequality promoted by Richard Rothstein, but it bears repeating: It's all a matter of how you define "close the achievement gap."

If you mean "erase all academic differences between students of different economic backgrounds," then it's indeed an impossible dream. Economic factors external to schools matter. As long as deep inequalities persist, educational outcomes will vary by class.

If, however, you mean "bring all students, including low-income students, up to defined minimum levels of proficiency," then we're talking about much different and more realistic challenges. I'm pretty sure Zachary didn't walk into the classroom with the goal of bringing all of his students up to the exact level achieved by the wealthiest, most priviliged private school students. I'm guessing he was simply working to make sure his students had sufficient knowledge and skill to eventually move ahead into college and/or the workforce, to be able to lead decent, fulfilling, productive lives.

That's all anyone is asking of these school systems, including those who drafted No Child Left Behind. Not erase class differences, just help all students learn at least what they need to know.

Nobody thinks this a remotely easy job. But there are many schools doing it successfully, right now. As New York City public schools chancellor Joel Klein said yesterday at the annual Broad Prize event, "If you want to know what's possible, look at what's actual."

Likes Lambs to the Slaughter...

Editor's Note: As part of The Quick and the Ed's ongoing discussion of "The Wire," we'll be featuring periodic posts from Zachary Norris, who recently spent 4 years as a biology teacher and basketball/debate coach at a public high school in Southeastern Baltimore. Zachary can attest to the program's accuracy first-hand, as the producers and writers visited his classroom frequently as part of their research. Here's his take on the first episode, with more to follow. - KC

So The Wire is taking on education in Baltimore City? I tried to do that once; I was bright-eyed and optimistic with visions of systemic reform dancing in my head. "Like lambs to the slaughter," I had no formal teaching experience and no real qualifications other than a college degree and a strong desire to “close the achievement gap.” I joined the Teach For America program and ended up teaching in Baltimore for three years. The experience was humbling.

Like the teacher on the show, I was greeted by a dysfunctional buzzer upon arrival at my school. A fitting symbol of the system's disarray, they were desperately in need of teachers and couldn't let me in once I got there. Many of my peers in the program were “surplussed,” bouncing around from school to school until the district administrators decided where our services could be put to best use. Upon arrival at my school, I was placed in a classroom that had not been cleaned by the previous year's teacher, who I later learned was a first-year teacher that had quit in February. It is common in Baltimore for rookie teachers to quit during the school year. In fact, in my first year in Baltimore, only two out of the six first-years who started the year at my school actually finished. The result of this trend was a staff crunch, and my classroom role swelled at times to above forty students (ranging in age form 3rd to 6th grade, with up to 16 IEP students). It is criminal.

Speaking of criminal, how much of the City’s budget is spent on pointless professional development programs like the one shown on The Wire’s season premiere? Educational consultants with six-figure salaries rattle off clever acronyms like IALAC (I Am Loved And Competent) in steamy August auditoriums and cafeterias. I mean really, how many teachers actually use that stuff? I know I never did. As the frustration of the teachers builds to a crescendo, the professional development meeting devolves into a gripe session about the student population and the hopelessness of their situation. This in itself is destructive, perpetuating negative stereotypes of students and lending to the apathy of teachers. So in the end, the good intentions of administrative policies turn into a completely destructive activity. Welcome to education in Baltimore.

So how did the writers of The Wire get it so right where so many others have gone wrong? They actually spent time in the schools. In my last year in Baltimore a few of the writers of The Wire asked if they could interview my students and me and sit in on my classes for a couple of weeks. Bill Zorzi, one of the writers, and I became quick friends. Bill is a genuine guy who really cares about the children of Baltimore. In fact, he came to be a regular face at my school, taking several students under his wing, teaching a journalism class and helping out with our school newspaper and yearbook.

Based on my conversations with Bill and the other staff at The Wire, I am confident that we are in for a deeper social commentary than your typical shoot-em-up drug dealer drama. The Wire is concerned with the social context of the drug scene: the economic injustice that created it, the political corruption that perpetuates it, and the criminal education system that gives the children of Baltimore, and so many other cities like it, no other option but to be a part of it.

-Posted by Zachary Norris

How to get to Sesame Street

This weekend I saw a noteworthy documentary – The World According to Sesame Street. For something I spent a lot of time watching when I was young (Bert and Ernie were my favorites), it’s not a show I’ve spent much time thinking about as an adult. This documentary gives a new perspective on what Sesame Street is - beyond being educational television for children; it can also be an ambassador of certain values – tolerance, equality, and general friendliness – to the rest of the world.

The documentary’s primary focus is the year-long effort to create Sesame Street in Bangladesh, or Sisimpur (QuickTime clip) as they call it. You watch as they create Sisimpur, from thinking about what their ‘street’ will look like, to creating puppets, and dealing with the politics necessary to get it on the air. This process of creating Sesame Street in other countries also serves as a lens for the challenges children face around the world – as they create Sesame Street in Kosovo, they struggle with how to build understanding between Serbians and Albanians, even as violence between the ethnic groups continues. In South Africa, they create Kami, a puppet with HIV, in order to educate children about AIDS.

This film raises, but doesn’t necessarily answer, some interesting questions – is faith in a television show misplaced? Is big bird a global archetype or a form of cultural imperialism? And what will be the ultimate impact of these international Sesame Streets? Throughout the film, you see plenty of earnest, and at times inspiring, people who truly believe in the ability of Sesame Street to provide quality education to children in a wide range of cultures and living conditions.

Tune in to PBS on October 24^th to catch this film, if for no other reason than to hear Ernie sing rubber ducky in multiple languages (who knew he was multilingual?!). Check out the other Sesame Streets in the world in here.

The Wire Week Two: Craig's Take

“You told me to watch this show, and so far in two episodes, nothing’s happened,” a friend complains. The most frequent objection to the THE WIRE, and one of the biggest ways it diverges from traditional television drama, is its pacing. By the end of each episode, nothing is neatly wrapped up, and, if you are not paying careful attention, you might think nothing much happened at all. (I nearly gave up on the first season more than a few times before I became hooked.)

But THE WIRE isn’t just trying to tell the stories of particular characters. It’s using those characters—what they do, what they experience, and what they learn over the course of a season—to tell the story of an entire city. From scene to scene, it might seem like nothing much is happening, but look closer, and you’ll see a larger, more complex tale unfolding.

Take last night’s episode and what it said about “urban education.” Yes, school hasn’t even started yet. But that doesn’t mean no one is teaching—or trying to teach—our young protagonists. Visiting his father in prison, Namon gets advice about surviving and advancing in his part-time job—dealing drugs. Bubbles the drug addict tries to teach his business—selling small items out of a cart—to an adolescent “intern” he has taken under his wing. Cutty, the ex-con who juggles landscaping with mentoring boys in a boxing program, sizes up Michael as a potential protégé. Assistant principal Marcia Donnelly sends Dukie, who has neglectful and/or impoverished parents, a box of clothes to encourage him to show up.

Meanwhile, a group of middle school teachers meet to plan a common classroom discipline strategy that, they hope, will capture their students’ attention when they arrive in a few days. Marlo, the brilliant and ruthless young drug kingpin, takes a more direct approach to getting their attention—having a minion hand each boy $200 to buy new clothes for school.

As producer Ed Burns says in an interview here, “the idea we're trying to bring across is that kids are going to get educated. […] They will learn. It's just a question of where.” And from whom.

p.s. I didn’t understand the reference to “soft eyes” either. If anyone does, e-mail me at cjerald@speakeasy.net. Thanks!

Redistricting--It's not just for Texas anymore

Don't freak out, I'm not talking about Congressional redistricting. But redrawing school attendance areas--as many rapidly growing (or shrinking) school districts need to do regularly--can be just as political and contentious, as an article in this week's Washington Post real estate section illustrates. Short version: A big new development in Urbana (a community in Frederick County, Maryland, a DC exurb) required construction of a new elementary school. But, contrary to homebuying parents' expectations, not all the kids in the development got assigned to the new school. Controversy ensured. But now some previously disappointed parents have decided the old school is ok after all.

Call me naive, or maybe one-note, but I have to wonder if these situations wouldn't be a bit easier if schools let parents choose their schools and differentiated the educational programs to balance demand. Of course, I realize this approach would have complications of its own.

Unrelated note: In addition to a new elementary school Urbana also got a brand new middle school opened this year, and my brother-in-law teaches there. So, Urbana parents, regardless of what elementary school you were assigned, your kids can look forward to a stellar drama and band teacher in a few years:)

College Graduation Rate Catastrophe

The NYTimes goes above the fold this morning with an article about catastrophically low graduation rates at urban universities in Chicago. At Northeastern Illinois, 16 percent of students who start as first-time, full-time, degree-seeking freshmen earn a bachelor's degree within six years. At Chicago State, it's 17 percent. For certain student groups, it's even lower. The 2004 graduation for black men at Northeastern Illinois was 3.5 percent.

In other words, for some students, the odds of success are within the margin of error of absolute zero. This is an education system that is statistically indistinguishable from a system designed to prevent students from graduating from college.

The article does an excellent job of systematically working through the two major excuses about why we can't do better.

Excuse #1: We're an open-access urban campus serving a lot of under-prepared, non-traditional students. We're giving them a chance, but of course not all are going to make it.

True enough. Nobody expects Chicago State to have the same graduation rate as the University of Chicago. But there's a difference between many students not graduating and hardly any students graduating. And the article shows that most other urban campuses that have similar students and similar admissions policies do a signficantly better job, graduating up to 50 percent of their students.

Excuse #2: Our students do graduate, but it takes them longer than six years.

This is a common refrain, the idea that the six-year timeframe (for getting a four-year degree) has become archaic, and if only it were extended the numbers would look much more rosy. But here's what the two univerisities have to say on that subject:

The graduation rate at Chicago State after seven years is nearly 35 percent, compared with the six-year rate of 16 percent, Dr. Daniel said. At Northeastern Illinois, where the six-year rate is 17 percent, the 10-year rate is 23 percent, university officials said.

I'm skeptical about that first number. I've never seen a research study about college graduations suggesting anything like a doubling of graduation rates between years six and seven. It's much more likely to see numbers like those at Northeastern Illinois, which basically say that if you extend the timeframe all the way out to a full decade, the numbers go from terrible to...slightly less terrible.

Helping students graduate who arrive on campus with many risk factors, who don't have strong momentum toward completion, is a very difficult job. But that can't be a reason to accept success rates that are almsot as low as they could be--particularly when other institutions with the same challenges do much better.

Fenty-astic?

I feel like I should have something smart to say about Tuesday's election and Adrian Fenty as the next Mayor of D.C., but I don't. (Nathan at DCedublog, where are you when I need you?) People in D.C.'s charter movement who know more than I do about this and whose opinions I respect seem to think Fenty will be more supportive of charter schools than the other major candidates would have been, but there's still a lot of uncertainty about what a Fenty administration will mean for both DCPS and the city's charter schools.

Education was a big issue in the election. (Both Cropp and Fenty seemed to spend a lot of money sending me glossy folders proclaiming how much they cared about the schools.) But it's an open question whether that attention will translate into real school improvements. (I'm not holding my breath.) In November, D.C. voters will elect a new school board president, and voters in Wards 5, 6, 7 & 8 also choose school board district reps, so stay tuned.

Andy has related non-D.C. election news, too.

A World of Worries

In return for getting to the Capitol Hill Club by 9am on Tuesday, I got an excellent breakfast (there was salmon) and a snappy mini-disk that held OECD’s 421-page 2006 Education at “Glance”. While this tome of international education information might not have gotten a ton of press in the United States, (perhaps because there’s not much new in it – we’re still treading water while other countries move up in the charts), it has gotten some interesting international coverage, showing that we’re not the only country with worries.

Britain and Canada’s concerns sounds familiar, while the talk in Ireland is about class size. The Czech Republic is concerned about low college spending, and, on the other hemisphere, Australia and Korea are talking about their high college fees (though they are still lower than the U.S.). Finally, Germany and Israel are looking for all-around change.

Evidence that around the world, the OECD data will be used (wisely, and probably also unwisely) to pursue a variety of education reform agendas.

The Wire Week One: "The Boys of Summer"

The fourth season of The Wire kicked off last night, and I'm happy to report that the show hasn't lost a step, despite the third season's conclusion of host of major dramatic arcs. It begins with the funniest Home Depot scene ever, and concludes with the realization that the rowhouses that have seen the steady death of the city's families, aspirations, and future have literally been turned into a graveyard. In between, it follows the huge cast of police, drug dealers, addicts, politicians, and teachers, all with unsparing honesty. Depending on the person, it's no more or less than they deserve.

The Wire also follows four new characters, all black middle-school boys from the west side of Baltimore. The central question is whether a school system where, to quote one character, "not a goddamn thing works like it should" can overcome the inescapable influence of the economically depressed, drug-ravaged world around the boys. As other scenes make clear, the time and distance between their lives and total ruin is surpassingly small.

Another major plotline involves the ongoing mayoral election and the candicacy of a white councilman looking to upset a black incumbent mayor. More than any show or movie I've seen, this episode really got across what a hugely difficult, exhausting, unpleasant process running for office can be. The depiction of life in the classroom struck me as similarly realistic, although having never taught I'll take Craig Jerald's word for it (see his post below). Craig, I think you forgot to mention the recent Antonio Banderas vehicle "Take the Lead" in your inventory of terrible, terrible teacher-based movies.

I always come to the end of an episode of "The Wire" wondering how they manage to fit so much into an hour. Partly it's because almost all of the words and scenes have larger or multiple meanings, which lets the writers say a huge amount in relatively little time. It's also because most television shows spend a phenomenal amount of energy assuming that the viewers are stupid and/or not paying attention. Characters in "The Wire" don't waste time explaining to one another what you, the viewer just heard or saw. They don't refer back to previous plot developments, or translate urban slang in plain English. They act like people, not characters, because the writers trust that honest stories about actual people are all you need.

Update: Matt Yglesias draws a parallel between The Wire and Watchmen. Kinda wish I'd thought of that (although I can't imagine anyone seriously criticizing the inclusion of Dr. Manhattan, he's the mainspring of the entire story....).

Sara Mead Hates Boys!*

Tomorrow afternoon Richard Whitmire, Harry Holzer and I will be discussing boys' and girls' academic achievement and whether or not Americans need to be concerned about boys falling behind academically. Richard's currently writing a book about why he's worried about boys (and thinks you should be to), I wrote a paper that looked at trends in male and female achievement and came to (mostly) more sanguine conclusions, and Dr. Holzer does research on the situation of African-American men and boys. AFT's Ruth Wattenberg will moderate. Conversation commences at the National Press Club at 1:00 PM. For more info or to register, click here. And don't be afraid: Both Richard and I have promised not to throw any food.

*No, I don't, silly! In fact, I like them quite a bit.

College Admissions for Sale

Anyone with even a passing interest in the undergraduate admissions process should track down this new article$ by Daniel Golden in the Wall Street Journal. Based on his new book, The Price of Admission, the article details how elite colleges like Duke and Brown systematically lowered and subverted their admission standards to recruit the students of parents who were either rich, famous, or both. Here's how things worked at Duke:

Texas entrepreneur Milledge "Mitch" Hart III, co-founder of Electronic Data Systems Corp., didn't know anyone at Duke in 1981. But after his daughter told him it was one of her top two choices, Mr. Hart called a former Duke dean he knew who promised to introduce him to the right person: Joel Fleishman.

Mr. Fleishman wrote a wine column for eight years for Vanity Fair magazine and cultivated Duke donors with vintage selections. "Joel used to give very expensive bottles of wine and put them on his university expense account," recalls former president Keith Brodie, who succeeded Mr. Sanford in 1986 and sought to restrict the practice of development admits. "Because they were millionaires, you had to buy an expensive bottle." Mr. Fleishman, now a professor of law and public policy at Duke, declines to comment.

Mr. Fleishman met the Hart family at the airport and escorted them to the house of the Duke president, where the family stayed for three nights, Mr. Hart recalls. His daughter enrolled at Duke -- followed by three more of his children. In 1986, after Mr. Hart pledged $1 million to a fund-raising campaign led by Mr. Fleishman, Duke established the Hart Leadership Program, which teaches students leadership skills.

I don't know about you, but my recollection of the college admissions process is a little different than that.

Now, one could say that this kind of thing has been going on forever, and one would be correct. The difference is that in the past universities felt no need to apologize for it, because they were perfectly comfortable serving promoting and sustained the privileges of class. Todays' world is very different, and higher education institutions--particularly elite institutions--like to think of themselves as the virtuous apex of the American meritocracy.

But like most truly worthwhile things, that status comes at price--in this case, not selling yourself to the highest bidder. Colleges have been deft at having it both ways for some time now. One wonders how long it can last.

Motown Madness

So, Detroit teachers are still striking, despite a judge's order to return to class. This means the start of a second week Detroit youngsters won't be in school. Detroit's teachers are striking because Detroit Public Schools, which has lost a ton of money in recent years and faces an $100+ million budget shortfall, wants to cut teacher salaries and require them to pay an increased share of their health insurance premiums. The Detroit Federation of Teachers is, instead, asking for a 5% pay increase.

I have to wonder if they're cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Part of Detroit's financial problem is that, like all school districts in the state, it's suffering from state budget cuts due to the state's weak economy. But Detroit's problem is much worse because it's losing a lot of students who choose to enroll in charter schools or suburban districts (Michigan has an interdistrict school choice program), taking their state per pupil funds with them. Last year the district lost 11,000 students! The strike-induced delay in the start of the school year is only accelerating this student loss, as parents--who have no idea when the schools will reopen--scramble for alternative educational options for their children. And the strikers are hardly bolstering public support for or confidence in Detroit public schools. Looking at the press coverage of some of the strikings teachers' behavior and some of the quotes from them, I can't blame parents for deciding they don't want to entrust their kids to these people. I still have acquaintences who live in Michigan (where I grew up), who marvel that, "these people just come across as fools."

I also find it hard to believe the Detroit teachers are gonna get that much sympathy from their local labor bretheren in the UAW, who've been forced to make significant concessions in recent years as Detroit's automakers struggle with global competition, high gas prices and ballooning retirement and health costs. But confronted with similar competition and health pressures, DFT somehow thinks it can strike its way out of facing fiscal realities. In doing so, they cast a negative reflection on the labor movement more generally at a time when the nation needs it more than ever.

I'm not blaming Detroit's teachers for all the problems there. Working conditions and school facilities there are abysmal, kids come into the schools there with all sorts of challenges, communities in which they are located are broken, central DPS and political leadership have failed kids and teachers in many ways, and the state's fiscal situation certainly doesn't help. But DFT's current choices aren't helping and may make the situation worse.

Update: DFT response on the AFT blog. Ms. Price makes a good point about the culpability of Detroit Public Schools' management and leadership. I have friends who taught in Detroit, and some of the things I heard from them would curl your hair. That said, I'm not sure she actually corrects my facts. Public opinion data on these issues is notoriously tricky--people tell pollsters they like teachers like most Americans say they like their Congressman. What matters is that Detroit parents are voting with their feet: 11,500 left DPS last year, and that ain't all people moving away. I'm surprised to hear Ms. Price dismissing the loss of students to charters, considerng how DFT argues that raising Michigan's cap on university-authorized charters would hurt Detroit public schools because more students would be lost to charters. I'm also surprised to hear her arguing that "[The funding Detroit Public Schools] receives now is enough to do a good job of educating our students and getting the classrooms right." I wouldn't want to see that statement trotted out during the next state appropriations debate.

This Week on the Wire: Craig's Take

An assistant principal walks a new teacher down an empty hallway and into a tired looking classroom. The new guy surveys the clutter of desks and debris. “So this is me?” The administrator eyes the former cop turned rookie educator. “This is you.” And I’m one happy viewer. As the second biggest WIRE fan around (no one tops Kevin), I’m pretty euphoric that the best television series in history is spending a full year taking a close look at urban education.

Let’s face it, Hollywood sucks at school. Remember the sappy Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle DANGEROUS MINDS? How about the sudsy BOSTON PUBLIC? No wonder my friends groan whenever I try to get them to watch a classroom-themed drama. But as a former Teach for America recruit (one of the earliest--I’m an old guy), I can’t seem to resist. Like Charlie Brown with that darn football (now I’ve really dated myself), I’m a glutton for punishment.

But after watching the first episode with Kevin last Thursday (pssst, HBO On Demand!), I can report that so far THE WIRE has it right. Of course, with its depiction of a condescending and completely irrelevant “pre-season” professional development session, viewers who haven’t worked in an urban school district might think the show’s writers have finally flubbed up and gone the way of hyperbole. But I recall having to sit through far, far worse. (At least the lady telling these teachers the pencil sharpener is a “hot spot” has a decent delivery.)

Let's be honest. As bad as the school system looks in the first few glimpses we got in the season opener, the show’s depiction isn’t nearly as grim as it could have been. Consider that Pryzbylewski (the cop-turned-teacher) gets hired before the kids have shown up. One out of every four high-poverty, urban school districts reports waiting until the beginning of the school year before making most job offers to teachers. (Factoid from here and great analysis of this truly awful practice here. Oh, only seven percent of better-off suburban districts wait that long.) Unlike many of his new professional peers, Prez gets to set up his classroom before it’s full of twelve-year-olds!

Thanks to Kevin for inviting me to guest blog about this season of THE WIRE. I'm looking forward to seeing how Prez handles his new job when the kids do finally fill up that classroom next week. Once the show's "school year" kicks into gear, it should provide an interesting opportunity for thinking hard about how policy affects real teachers and kids ... or, perhaps, how it doesn't. Stay tuned.

AFTie Confusion

In critiquing my post on Richard Rothstein, AFTie John can't figure out the difference between the title of a law and what the law actually says.

Or he thinks Rothstein can't tell the difference, or Congress can't. I'm not exactly sure.

The larger point being, the phrase "close the achievement gap" can mean equally legitimate but very different things. It can mean "erase all academic performance differences between poor and non-poor students," or it can mean "make sure that both poor and non-poor students reach a defined (and in most states, not particularly high) level of achievement."

Since Congress chose the latter definition when the wrote the actual provisions of NCLB, it seems safe to assume that they also had that definition in mind when they referred to closing the achievement gap in the title.

It's also safe to assume that Rothstein, who is obviously a pretty smart guy, understands the distinction. That's why his tendency to switch back and forth between the two in rhetorically slippery ways is so maddening.

20 More Days (of the same?)

D.C. Superintendent Clifford Janey is proposing to extend the school year for a group of low-performing schools, as reported by the Post. This would mean a 200-day school year, reducing summer break by nearly 20 days and giving these students more time to learn. This isn't a bad idea, given research that shows low-income kids fall behind their more affluent peers during the long summer break. "Summer learning loss", as it's called, and the achievement gaps it helps to create, are worth tackling with more time. But I'm not convinced that more time in D.C.'s lowest performing schools is going to do the trick. I worry that this is a policy of last resort, a concern that is only heightened by the Post's reporting that Janey is adding the time because he says he's "running out of options to help students in low-performing schools."

I also wonder how D.C. plans to assess this program, and to sustain it if it proves effective. It is possible, I guess, that Janey has been contemplating and studying this idea for some time, and that D.C. has a strong plan to implement and evaluate the effects of a longer DCPS school year. But in case not, he might want to check out Massachusetts, where ten public schools in five districts were competitively chosen to try out longer days and longer years beginning this school year. Massachusetts 2020, which has been leading this charge, knows how difficult this can be- financially, politically and logistically- and will gladly share lessons learned. Good reading before we finalize plans for what board of education VP Carolyn Graham calls "a radical" and "aggressive" approach to boosting student achievement in D.C.

By the way, Education Sector will be talking about extending school time on October 11th. Join us if you can.

School Reform by Referendum?

An interesting court case is happening in New York City - a coalition of parents and teachers, including representatives from Class Size Matters and the American Federation of Teachers, filed a lawsuit in order to place a class size referendum on the November ballot. The city blocked the referendum, which would set aside 25 percent of the money received through the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case in order to lower class sizes. Legalities aside, the essential question is whether a referendum is the best way to determine how this money should be spent.

In the Campaign for Fiscal Equity case, the state's highest court ordered the state to pay city schools $4.7 billion to $5.63 billion in additional operating funds over four years. That is a lot of money and (assuming this money comes through) it is an incredible, and rare, opportunity for New York City.

Is class size reduction a good use of these funds? Maybe, but it is an expensive reform and can result in unintended consequences if enacted poorly. It does, though, have a nice ring to it and is easy to understand, making it popular among parents and voters. Voters, though, don'’t typically have all of the information needed to make an informed decision -– take California, for example.

California'’s class size reduction effort was implemented quickly and across all schools, resulting in greater inequalities in teacher quality distribution - schools suddenly had to find credentialed teachers to fill the open positions, resulting in an increase in the number of un-credentialed teachers, especially among schools serving the most disadvantaged students.

Research has shown that class size reduction can be effective in raising student achievement, especially among minority students, if it is done well. Given that the Campaign for Fiscal Equity money is a once in a lifetime opportunity for New York City, how it is spent needs to be a carefully considered process involving multiple options. I doubt that referendums are the best way to achieve this.

Rothstein, Concluded

Richard Rothstein recently posted a lengthy essay at the Economic Policy Institute Web site responding to various critics--most prominantly Checker Finn--who've been writing in recent weeks about his views on race, class, and educational achievement. I've blogged overmuch on this topic, but I'm going to go back to the well one more time, because the first page of the essay actually tells you everything you need to know about the basic fault line in this ongoing debate. Rothstein says:

Mr. Finn asserts that good schools are "powerful enough instruments to boost poor kids' achievement to an appreciably higher academic plane." Nobody - not I, nor anyone with whom I am familiar - disagrees with this assertion. But what is commonly argued (and the notion that I dispute) is not that good schools can boost the achievement of disadvantaged children to "an appreciably higher plane" but rather that such schools can "close the achievement gap;" i.e., produce achievement from lower class children that is approximately equal to the achievement of middle class children.

Or, to rephrase:

Checker Finn believes that good schools can appreciably increase poor student learning. I, along with all reasonable people, believe that too. Therefore, for the remainder of this essay, I'm going to argue against a different assertion--one that Checker Finn did not make, and which most reasonable people do not believe--which is that good schools can completely erase the achievement gap.

This is classic, straw-man-driven rhetorical misdirection. Moreover, it's a hugely important distinction from a policy perspective, because--Rothstein's frequent assertions to the contrary--NCLB is not based on the premise that good schools can erase the achievement gap. It's based on the premise that good schools can raise disadvantaged student performance to a defined level, proficiency. A school can make AYP under NCLB and still have huge achievement gaps, as long it gets all students over that minimum standard.

On a number of levels, the entire ongoing public debate about the NCLB and the achievement gap is driven and sustained by an inability--or unwillingness--to recognize this distinction.

High School Students Not Stressed Out Enough -- Seriously

Diana Jean Schemo's great article about high remediation rates in community colleges was, unfortunately, kind of buried in the Labor Day weekend slot a few days ago. If you missed it while barbecuing and closing up your pool, take a look. In a nutshell:

As the new school year begins, the nation’s 1,200 community colleges are being deluged with hundreds of thousands of students unprepared for college-level work.

and:

The unyielding statistics showcase a deep disconnection between what high school teachers think that their students need to know and what professors, even at two-year colleges, expect them to know.

This quote in particular stands out:

As the debate rages, nearly half of all students seeking degrees begin their journeys at community colleges much like the Dundalk campus of the Community College of Baltimore County, two-story no-frills buildings named by letters, not benefactors or grateful alumni. The college’s interim vice chancellor for learning and developmental education, Alvin Starr, said he saw students who passed through high school never having read a book cover to cover.

“They’ve listened in class, taken notes and taken the test off of that,’’ Dr. Starr said.

People living and working in the upper-middle professional classes are deluged with anecdotes, books, and news stories bemoaning the ever-more-crushing workload being imposed on high schoolers. Along with Jay Mathews' excellent Washington Post Op-ed from a few weeks ago, this article is another reminder that most American high school students simply do not live their lives that way. Their biggest problem isn't schools that ask too much, it's schools that ask too little.

Unfortunately, the consequences of too-low expectations don't come back to the high schools that create them. They fall upon the students themselves, often just a few months after graduation, when they enroll in college and suddenly find out how little their diploma is actually worth.

Next Week on "The Wire"

Next Monday, the Quick and Ed will be launching a new feature, a weekly analysis and discussion of the HBO television show "The Wire." For those of you have never watched it, it's time to start. "The Wire" is, by a wide margin, the best show currently on television and part of any serious discussion of the greatest television shows ever made.

Created by former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon and former Baltimore homicide detective Ed Burns, "The Wire" follows the lives of a group of police and drug dealers on the West side of present-day Baltimore. That makes it sound like a typical cop-and-robbers show. It isn't. In fact, "The Wire" is unlike anything else on television. Using dozens of characters and multiple, interlocking storylines, "The Wire" is nothing less than the story of the life of an entire city, in all its messy, fascinating complexity.

More than any show now running, "The Wire" treats its viewers like adults. The characters don't stop for unnatural conversations designed to tell you what you just saw or what happened last week. The vernacular of criminals and police isn't watered down. Each episode isn't shoehorned into a neat three-act structure with a tidy emotional and dramatic conclusion, because life doesn't work that way.

Each character in the sprawling cast is complex and multidimensional–"The Wire" doesn’t' glorify its heroes or demonize its villains, although it has plenty of both. In addition to a top-notch cast of actors, "The Wire" also benefits from a writing staff that includes experienced Baltimore journalists, as well as novelists like George Pellecanos and Dennis Lehane.

Every season, "The Wire" uses its huge canvass to explore a specific theme related to life in urban America. The first season looked at the struggle of individuals in modern organizations, the second season examined labor and the deindustrialization of cities, and the third season focused on the challenges of political and social reform.

Season Four will focus on education. In addition to ongoing storylines involving police, criminals, and politicians, the show will follow four middle-school boys and a frequently dysfunctional school system struggling to deal with the consequences of drugs, poverty, and our society's crushingly ineffective efforts to fix those social ills.

This all might sound horribly, take-your-medicine-bleak and boring. Trust me, it's not. "The Wire" is also tremendously entertaining. The only danger is that once you rent the DVDs you won't get any work done that week because you'll be up all night until you've seen every episode, possibly more than once.

Joining me each week will be Craig Jerald, a D.C.-based education analyst and writer who wrote a great paper on high school reform earlier this year. A former Teacher For America corps member, much of Craig's work has focused on closing the achievement gap for low-income and minority students. Like me, he'll be breaking down each episode and what it means for contemporary education policy, asking whether policymakers at all levels are working hard enough and smart enough on behalf of students like those in Baltimore.

Stay tuned.

Orwellian? Not Really

My take on higher education data systems, student privacy, and yesterday's article in the NYTimes about the F.B.I. accessing federal student loan records, over at Washington Monthly.

Colleges Giving Even More Financial Aid to Wealthy Students

Way back in the earliest history of Education Sector--I believe it was January 2006--we published our first "Chart You Can Trust." It described how colleges are increasingly funneling scholarship money away from lower-income students and instead giving it to wealthy applicants who are more useful for boosting both colleges' standing in the U.S. News college rankings and their financial bottom line.

That chart used data from the federal National Postsecondary Student Aid Survey, gathered in 1992, 1995, and 1999. Yesterday, the Education Trust (my former employer) released an excellent new report titled "Promise Abandoned: How Policy Choices and Practices Restrict College Opportunities." It contains a similar analysis, but uses newer data from the 2003 NPSAS survey.

Their conclusion: things have gotten even worse.

From 1999 to 2003, private colleges increased the average aid to students from families making less than $20,000 per year from $4,027 to $5,240, an increase of $1,213, or 30%.

During the same time period, private colleges increased the average aid to students from families making more than $100,000 per year from $3,321 to $4,806, an increase of $1,485, or 45%.

This is on top of even larger disparities in earlier years. Over the last decade, both public and private institutions have devoted a hugely disproportionate share of new scholarships to the most privileged students. The whole principle of awarding financial aid according to financial need appears to be rapidly disappearing from our colleges and universities.

Higher education institutions enjoy a wealth of benefits in our society, ranging from social standing to direct and indirect financial support from the government. Those benefits are based on the notion that these institutions serve a higher social purpose than a typical private enterprise. Colleges are supposed to be more than businesses, they're supposed to represent the best of what our society is, and aspires to be.

But when those institutions start to put their own interests of status and money ahead of the pressing need to help lower-income students earn a college degree, it calls those basic assumptions into question.

Addendum #1: Welcome, Talking Points Memo readers. For those of you reading the Quick and the Ed for the first time--and I'm guessing that's more or less all of you--this blog is published by Education Sector, an independent, nonpartisan education policy think tank located in Washington, DC. If you're looking for a smart, fresh perspective on education that's not tied down by predictable orthodoxies, give us a try.

Addendum #2: A few readers have emailed to point out that institutions like Harvard and Yale have taken steps in recent years to cut tuition for low- and middle-income students. True enough. But that's just another example of how the national sense of what's going on higher education is warped by the actions of a few elite, high-profile institutions that educate only a tiny percentage of all students.

It's great if universities with multi-billion dollar endowments finally do the right thing and stop charging the families of the few low-income students they enroll (75% of all students at elite colleges and universities come from the top income quartile, only 3% from the bottom quartile) tens of thousands of dollars of tuition. But if those actions don't alter the overall averages -- and the new data clearly indicate that they don't -- then the basic problem is unchanged.

Wah, Wah, Good One

Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in today's Washington Post:

for people who say, 'Wah, wah, we can't have spelling bees because we have to focus on math and reading' -- let's measure the spelling"

It's an arguable position on an issue of central importance to the coming reauthorization of NCLB. A lot of NCLB criticisms boil down to the same basic complaint: because the law is designed to increase focus on the things that federal policymakers believe are most important--reading and math, defined proficiency levels, the performance of traditionally disadvantaged students--it inevitably decreases the focus on every other thing, like other academic subjects, performance levels, and student groups.

While this is a real concern, most critics don't like to grapple with one obvious response--let's test those things too--since they tend to also be unhappy about the current amount of testing, or testing generally. Too much testing is obviously problematic, but you also can't hold schools accountable for things without objective information about them. It's a tremendously tricky problem.

That said, it's hard not to like a member of the Cabinet--particularly in this administration--who's willing to go on the record and talk like a real person.

Gender, Race and the SAT

The College Board just released its report on national and state average results from the first-ever cohort of college students (the high-school class of 2006) to take the new SAT, first offered in March 2005, which ditched the old "verbal" section for "critical reading," added more advanced math content, and added an essay-based writing section.

Most media reports seem to be focusing on the state horserace or the fact that this year's critical reading subtest averages are somewhat lower than last year's verbal score averages. I'm not sure either of these is very informative, since the population of kids taking the SAT differs from state to state, and the new SAT the college board started administering in March 2005 is a different test from that administered in previous years.

Also gaining attention is the impact of the new writing section on average male-female SAT score differences. Historically, men have had higher average scores than women, not just on the SAT overall but also on both its verbal and math subsections--a departure from other assessments where men tend to do better than women on math (with a few caveats), but women tend to do better on verbal skills. But women did do better than men, on average, on the new writing section, lowering the the male-female score gap from 42 points in 2005 to 26 points this year. In addition to the writing section, the new critical reading section, which eliminated the infamous verbal analogies, probably also made the test more female-friendly, since verbal analogies are one of the few areas of verbal skills in which men typically outperform women, and the difference between men's critical reading scores this year and their verbal skills last year is larger than that for women.

Because women's improved SAT performance relative to men reflects changes in the assessment and not simply changes in students' skills, it shouldn't be taken as evidence of a boy crisis. But is men's continued higher average SAT performance--in both reading and math--evidence against a boy crisis? The answer is no. First, the difference between male and female reading scores on the SAT is tiny. More significant, the populations of men and women taking the test are different. More females than males take the SAT--54% of SAT-takers in the 2006 college-bound cohort were girls--and, because students in the highest segments of the achievement distribution for each gender are already pretty likely to take the SAT, the larger pool of women taking it probably means more women from lower on the achievement are taking the test--and a look at the gender breakdowns of students by score distribution backs this up.

Finally, it's worth pointing out that, once again, gender gaps are much smaller on the SAT than are racial and ethnic gaps. And the SAT results seem to buttress the notion that we should be particularly concerned about African-American males, who are the lowest-performing racial/gender subgroup, trailing their sisters in math and, unlike males from other racial/ethnic groups, reading, even as males make up a smaller percentage of African-American SAT-takers than they do any other racial/ethnic group.

By the Way...If you want to hear and talk more about gender gaps in education from K-12 through higher ed, please join Education Sector on Tuesday, September 12 at the National Press Club in Washington, DC, for a discussion with USA Today's Richard Whitmire, Georgetown and the Urban Institute's Harry Holzer, and yours truly. It's free, but space is limited, so RSVP quickly!

College Presidents for Transparency and Accountability

Regular readers of this blog may have noticed that one of my somewhat obsessive hobbyhorse issues areas of signficant interest is the ongoing debate about establishing a national "unit record" higher education data system.

Put simply, the federal government wants to improve the ways it collects information about college performance, using privacy protected data about individual students. The associations of private colleges have fought a scorched-earth P.R. campaign against the system, basically calling it the precursor to an Orwellian police state.

That tactic has been pretty successful--the House of Representatives passes legislation banning the system earlier this year--partly because supporters of the system from within higher education, of which there are many, haven't been as focal in presenting the opposing view.

That's why its was great to open up the Washington Post this morning and read an excellent, well-reasoned Op-ed supporting the system written by Thomas Hochstettler, President of Lewis and Clark College in Portland, Oregon. It's definitely worth reading in its entirety, but here's his case in a nutshell:

Where some see the specter of Big Brother looking over colleges' and students' shoulders, I see a potential for a robust (and privacy-protected) set of metrics that would yield essential data with tremendous potential for advancing our individual institutions and for identifying with greater precision those areas where our national education policy needs to be strengthened. Where some see the specter of government intrusion, I see the possibility of transforming our current separate data-reporting schemes into a streamlined system that is beneficial to students and useful to faculty and administrators.

Contrary to what critics of the database plan might have the public believe, we in academia know remarkably little about what emerges from the vast and diverse system of higher education. Why do students drop out? Where do they go when they do? What factors in primary and secondary school, beyond grade-point averages, class rankings and standardized test scores, best predict their success or failure in college? What impact does their educational experience have on our students' success or failure after graduation?

We are ill-equipped to answer these questions. Without comprehensive information, both individual institutions and society lack the tools to assess how the system is working, how it is failing and how it might be improved.

Why would the president of a private college like Lewis and Clark--along with most of the major associations of public institutions--support the new data system? I'm guessing because they know that they're ill-served by the current higher education market, which is starved for real information about quality. When the public has no good data about which institutions are actually serving students best, it naturally falls back on the long-established, written-in-stone higher education pecking order, which favors elite private institutions. Getting more good information into the hands of the public--precisely the goal of the data system in question--would allow all the other institutions to be judged more fairly on their merits.

$200,000 bonuses, it's a start

Martin O’Malley has a new plan for improving Maryland’s low performing schools - $200,000 principal bonuses, paid out over four years. That’s an impressive sum, and refreshing to see someone putting real money on the table - as the plan states, “Half-hearted measures will not work.” However, it is only a start. There are two key elements missing from this plan:

First, a strategy for identifying and recruiting exceptional principals from school districts within Maryland and across the country. Relying solely on money as a carrot to recruit high performing principals is insufficient; the state needs to actively recruit principals that will do the best job.

Second, there is no accountability. Base annual bonuses on principals’ gains, not only in test scores, but also in recruiting high quality teachers, improving the curriculum, ensuring students receive additional supports, and involving parents. The plan uses the analogy of a CEO hiring an exceptional manager to turn around a store. However, that CEO would do more than hire the manager for the store, he would carefully watch sales data to ensure improvements were happening. Certainly, he would do that before paying out a large bonus.

O’Malley should be focusing not simply on luring principals into schools with financial incentives, but actively recruiting principals who think they are up to the challenge of earning those bonuses with large gains in student achievement.

Of course, holding principals accountable also requires giving them the freedom to make the necessary hiring, curricular, and scheduling changes to build the school they envision. If Maryland will be recruiting principals worth $200,000 bonuses, then they should entrust those principals to make the school level decisions necessary to earn that money.

A Bit Too Much Editorial Freedom

I couldn't help read the The New York Times and Wall Street Journal editorials on charter schools over the last couple of days without injecting into the conversation a publication on the status of big-city charters issued recently by the Seattle-based Center on Reinventing Public Education (CRPE).

The two newspaper editorial pages squared off over a new study of charter school performance conducted for the U.S. Department of Education by researchers at the Educational Testing Service in Princeton. The study found that students in traditional public schools outperformed their counterparts in charter schools in reading and math. The Times declared the study to be evidence that charter schools are not a "cure-all" for what ails American public education. The Journal cried foul, declared the study unreliabled, and insisted that other studies "have repeatedly shown charter school students outperforming their counterparts in traditional public schools."

Both papers "marshalled" evidence on charters aggressively. But there's another assessment of charter schools out from a far more credible source, CRPE, a University of Washington think tank headed by the respected researcher Paul Hill. Hill and his colleagues recently published a summary of a symposium on the state of the charter school movement involving 22 charter advocates and researchers.

The gathering, organized by CRPE, was a who's who of the national charter school movement. And their take on the charter movement was sobering. "I think the issue of attaining academic quality was highly underestimated by all of us," said Ted Mitchell, head of the NewSchools Venture fund, a non-profit organization that invests in charter school management organizations. "We can only grow as fast as we can find good people, and we are not able to find all the people we need," said Mike Feinberg, co-founder of KIPP Academies, which has opened over 50 charter schools nationwide. "This isn't McDonalds," added Nelson Smith, the head of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, an advocacy organization. "The process of replicating a good school isn't easy or predictable." The report on the symposium concluded that "all agreed that the road to scale is much rockier than anyone imagined."

There are some truly inspiring charter schools run by smart, committed people who would probably shun education rather than put up with the stifling bureaucracy of many traditional public schools. But creating good schools of any sort is hard work, these earnest educational entrepreneurs have discovered. Admitting that reality, and that many charters have not emerged as high-quality alternatives to traditional public schools, as Paul Hill's conferees have done in a public report, is a gutsy step for charter leaders to take, and a step towards increasing the supply of stronger charters. Someone call the polemicists that the Journal and the Times and tell them to take the rest of the day off.

See This Movie

Saw a very, very good movie over the weekend--Half Nelson, about an 8th grade history teacher with a drug problem and his friendship with one of his students. No real policy takeaways, just an unusually smart, honest, and well-acted film about real people struggling to make sense of a world damaged by the illegal drug trade in countless ways.

Teacher Certification Slug-Fest, Final Rounds

Days 4&5 of my back-and-forth on the merits of teacher certification are now posted at Edspresso. In all seriousness, less of a fight than an interesting conversation, for which my fellow debater deserves much credit. There are also some worthwhile extra perspectives in the comments section.

SMART Snags

There have been a lot of stories this week about the no-so-smart federal SMART grants. The National Science and Mathematics Access to Retaining Talent (SMART) grant program offers $4,000 to eligible students who are majoring in an eligible field of study. It's these devilish "eligibility" details that have caused the recent problems.

First, as detailed by InsideHigherEd.com, more than a hundred students at Utah State University were told they were eligible for the $4,000 grants only to hear a week later that they were not. Apparently they are ineligible because they had taken too many credit hours to qualify (seniors are eligible only if they've taken between 90-120 credits). So it seems seniors are only seniors if they've taken just the required number of credits. The Utah State U website now clarifies this for prospective SMART grantees.

And in other SMART grant mishaps, you'll be happy to know that evolutionary biology is back! The Chronicle's articles on Tuesday and then today provide the full story, which is basically that the list of eligible majors for the SMART grant managed somehow to leave out evolutionary biology. Tough one to miss considering how hot the topic of evolution has been lately. But all's well that end's well. The Dept of Ed has released a statement explaining the oversight and evo-bio is now happily sandwiched between marine biology and environmental biology on the revised list.

New Quick-and-Edster

Note: the post below is the first on the Quick and the Ed from Erin Dillon, a newly-arrived policy analyst at Education Sector. Erin comes to the organization from New York, NY, where she worked as a research associate at the Beginning with Children Foundation, helping with a college preparatory program for high school students and managing a research project examining charter school students' academic achievement. Prior to that, she received her master's in Social Sciences in Education at Stanford University. Look for more posts from Erin in the future.

Help for High Performing Schools

The Washington Post ran an article today on how students in Montgomery County, Maryland did on the state's High School Assessment (HSA), which for the first time is being used as a high-stakes exit exam for this year's sophomore class. The good news is that the school system plans to implement special programs at low-performing schools, and that the evidence suggests that such programs can be greatly beneficial. But those plans also raise the question of whether some students will be short-changed because, paradoxically, they have what every parent wants for their child: a place in a high-performing school.

In 2005, only 26.5% of students at Kennedy High School passed algebra. After a year of interventions, including extra instructional time before and after school and at lunch, and a $150,000 program designed specifically to target algebra, that rate jumped dramatically, to 67.6%, the schools’ highest scores since 2002. The moral being that there is hope in intensive interventions and additional resources for students who need them. High school exit exams don’t necessarily have to result in low-income and minority students missing out on a high school diploma.

At Walt Whitman high school, by contrast, the 2006 passing rate in Algebra was much higher, 80.7%. Scores for most specific groups of students were strong: 70% of Hispanic females passed, as did 100% of Asian females. But the African American passing rate at Whitman was 33.3%, a decrease from 2004 and 2005.

A spokesman for the school system said that "special programs will be put in place at schools where significant numbers of students failed to pass the exams." Let's hope those programs are also extended to students at schools like Whitman where high averages mask huge achievement gaps. The numbers at Kennedy High School suggest that interventions work. Students shouldn't miss them simply because they're lucky enough to be in a "high performing" school.

College Is Not a Dating Service

Andy tries to lure me into commenting on this U.S. News story (in the much-critiqued "America's Best Colleges") about the increasing female dominance on college campuses. Ok, I'll take the bait. Here's how the story kicks off:

The University of La Verne sits on 26 acres of suburbia between the city of Los Angeles and the mountains. It's a small place, with just over 1,600 students, most of whom live in three drab and boxy-looking dormitories. A decade ago, one was exclusively male, one was female, and one was coed. But faced with a surge in women students (who made up 65 percent of the student body last year, up from 58 percent a decade ago), the school had to convert two thirds of the male facility for women's use. "Everyone knows guys are scarce on this campus," says Nick Solis, a sophomore, who adds that the women in his coed dorm have taken to using the men's room out of convenience.

For starters, let's just point out that this school is an anomaly. Across all colleges and universities in the U.S., the average male-female breakdown for traditional-age undergraduates is about 55% female to 45% male. (Women strongly outnumber men among older, non-traditional students, which is part of why the CUNY system, to which the author refers in the piece and which has 35% of students over 25, is about 2/3 female.) That's still not parity, and the 60/40 female/male ratio among black students is concerning to many people. Butthis school is clearly an extreme.

The article trots through all the typical statistics and explanations about why women outnumber men in college, but it's main focus is on how (and why) some colleges are now going out of their way to recruit more men, and, in some instances, appear to be using pro-male affirmative action to do so.

Why are colleges trying to recruit more men?

The university experience, after all, is only partially about academics, and students strongly consider campus climate when choosing where to apply. Anecdotal evidence suggests that once a campus reaches a certain ratio, say 60-40 women to men, both females and males are less likely to apply. "Frankly, students care about the dating scene on campus and no one wants to be outnumbered," says Bari Norman, a former admissions counselor at Barnard College who now runs mycollegecounselor.com.

You see, college isn't really about getting an education. It's about the social life. And that means dating. And, potentially, finding a future mate. (As U.S. News so helpfully points out, "already researchers are thinking ahead to the long-term implications of a shortage of suitably educated peers for women to marry.") Leave aside that most college students today don't actually "date." They hook up. And, while I certainly knew girls in college who were really there to get the MRS. degree (I went to Vanderbilt), that's not why most people go to college (after all, no one ever argued that the Citadell or VMI should go co-ed because the crappy dating scene and lousy chances of finding a wife there were hurting male recruitment). People do still talk about college as if it's a place to find a future mate, but that's not the reality for most people: The median age at first marriage in the U.S. is 25 for women and 27 for men, and it's older than that for those who completed college.

Of course, as Kevin and others have pointed out, since prospective college students don't currently have access to information to tell them which college they might learn the most at, or which has the best record placing people in good jobs in their desired field, they've got to rely on other information, such as reputation, wealth and selectivity (what U.S. News measures), how nice the dorms or rec center are; and, yeah, the potential dating scene.

But the real meat of the story (to the extent there is any) is in the discussion of whether colleges are accepting less-impressive male applicants over more qualified women in an effort to maintain gender parity. For obvious reasons, no college wants to admit that they're doing this, but the differential acceptance rates for males and females that the author trots out from several schools are quite striking. There are reasons, though, to proceed with some caution here. For starters, the competitive colleges the article cites represent only a tiny share of the college market. Top-ranked schools like the Ivies have near-parity in applicants and admissions rates for the genders. And the vast majority of college students in the U.S. go to noncompetitive schools that accept pretty much everyone who applies. Its also possible that some of these colleges are rejecting more women because more women from lower on the academic achievement distribution are applying to them.

But I wonder if articles like this contribute to something of a vicious cycle. Although there's no evidence, a persistent theme--on both sides--in debates about why women are outstripping men on some academic indicators seems to be that at least some groups of women are more determined and are working harder because they've gotten a message that they need to do so in order to compete economically, provide for their future families, etc. It would be ironic if, as a result, prestige colleges really did start requiring women to be much better than men to be admitted.

Teacher Certification Brouhaha

Day 3, at Edspresso. Ritchey and Carey duel over Teach For America, whether or not teacher certification has entered the 21st--or even 20th--Century. Carey lays down an evidentiary challenge.

Teacher Certification Ultimate Fighting Championship

Round 2 between me and David Ritchey, in the eight-sided ring.

NCLB Makes Children Fat

Or so says Cnn.com, which as of 3:00PM EST today is leading with a story titled "P.E. shrinks, waistlines bulge," complete with this picture of President Bush:

Just to make sure the point is clear, the teaser paragraph is as follows:

School-age children are growing fatter, but most states are failing to provide them with enough physical education, according to a report by the American Heart Association and the National Association for Sport and Physical Education. Critics contend the legislation meant to bolster academic standards -- President Bush's No Child Left Behind program -- may be a culprit.

The article recites the standard-issue "narrowing" critique of NCLB: because it focuses more attention on the core skills of math and reading, it focuses less attention on everything else, like, for example, phys-ed. It's a reasonable problem to worry about, and on some level probably an unavoidable consequence of working harder on basic skills. But as is often the case, there's less here than meets the eye.

The article quotes the report's citation of this statistic: "The percentage of students who attend a daily physical education class has dropped from 42 percent in 1991 to 28 percent in 2003." But this isn't an original finding, the report cites a previous study published by the Centers for Disease Control in 2004. You can see that study here. It found the following:

1) the proportion of students attending PE class daily declined significantly during 1991--1995 and did not change during 1995--2003 and 2) the proportion of students exercising or playing sports for >20 minutes during PE class 3--5 days per week did not change significantly during 1991--2003.

In other words, the decline in daily PE class attendance that Cnn.com is prominently hanging on NCLB concluded seven years before NCLB was enacted. And by another measure PE hasn't declined at all.

Charter Schools Rising

Big front-page WaPo story today about charter schools in the District of Columbia--which enrolled about 25 percent of the District's public school students in 2005-06 and will likely increase their share with the opening of 6 new schools this fall. For the most part, this was a pretty good article about the growth of charter schools in the past decade (D.C.'s charter movement turns 10 this year) and the impacts, positive, negative and minimal on DCPS.

I was a bit annoyed, though, by the amount of traction the Post gave Save our Schools, a DC-area anti-charter group. The article presented three of SOS's major arguments: First, that charter schools are hurting public schools by taking away funds; second, that charters are resegregating DC schools; and finally, as SOS leader Gina Arlotto so eloquently expressed it in the Post, "the charters stink, too."

Let's look at these arguments one by one. D.C.'s per-pupil weighted funding formula means that, yes, when a child switches from a DCPS school to a charter, the funding follows. But, DCPS also no longer has to bear the costs of educating that child. Certainly from the perspective of an invididual school, which may lose only a few students and has fixed costs, this is cold comfort. But it's important not to forget that spending on DCPS has also increased substantially since the charter law was passed, meaning that most DCPS schools are getting more per pupil now even though they serve fewer pupils. Not to mention analysis showing that, SOS rhetoric about pro-charter favoritism aside, charters actually receive less public funds per pupil than DCPS. (For various reasons, it may not seem like that at the individual school level within DCPS, but that's a DCPS system problem, not a charter school problem).

Then there's the resegregation issue. I find the claim inherently bizarre, since it would be pretty darn hard for DCPS to get more segregated than it already is. The real criticism isn't that charter schools are resegregating DCPS so much as that a few charter schools are attracting some white students. Both charter critics and the Post article ignored the vast majority of DC charters that serve a higher percentage of minority kids than the District at large to focus on two--Two Rivers and Capital City--that, at least in part because of where they are located, serve a much higher percentage of white students than the District's schools overall. But it's not like either of these schools is a lily-white enclave: Two Rivers, on Capitol Hill, is more than half black and 7 percent Hispanic, and Capital City, which is located in Columbia Heights, is about one-third each white, black, and Hispanic. And given that DCPS's nearly 85 percent African American enrollment and housing patterns mean most black kids in DCPS will be attending nearly all-black schools, attracting more white kids into the system seems like a way to reduce segregation for at least some DCPS students, not increase it.

Not to mention that for a lot of more affluent families choosing charter schools, the alternative wouldn't be to attend a DCPS school, unless they're among the fortunate few that can get into highly-regarded programs like the Capitol Hill Cluster School (where, by the way, Arlotto and other SOS activists send their kids--they wouldn't send them to a run of the mill D.C. school either, for all they want to deny parents who can't afford to live in their school boundaries better options) or the schools west of Rock Creek Park--instead it's sending their kids to an expensive private school or moving to Virginia or Maryland.

It's worth noting a major point the Post's analysis of declining DCPS enrollments overlooked: DCPS enrollment was falling long before charters came on the scene, and when you combine charter and DCPS enrollment, the decline in D.C.'s public school enrollment has actually slowed since charters came on the scene, suggesting that charters are helping D.C. keep more of the young families it needs to grow and thrive. This is why, as long as there's no definitive evidence that charters are discriminating in admissions or counseling out some kids, I don't have a problem with charter schools seeking to attract middle-class families of any race back into the city's public schools. Building more of the kind of public schools those families want to send their kids to also expands opportunities for less advantaged kids in D.C., and keeping those families in the District is important for long-term economic development, civic life, and stability. And, I have to admit, I have a bit of a personal interest here: I love this city, I love living here, and, if I'm ever so fortunate as to have children of my own, I'd really like to be able to send them to a public school in D.C.--and NOT one that's west of Rock Creek Park.

The strongest criticism folks can level against charter schools in D.C. right now is on quality--like DCPS the District's charter schools, on average, are performing far less well than they need to be. But the most recent data shows that charters are outperforming DCPS across the board; the District's authorizers are making progress closing down the lowest-performing schools, which should also improve quality; and some of D.C.'s charter schools are very good schools. But it's still not good enough, and everyone involved in the District's charter school community needs to keep working to improve quality and performance, because our kids and our city depend on it.

Teacher Certification Smack-Down

I'm debating David Ritchie, Executive Director of the Association of Teacher Educators, over at Edspresso this week. The topic is teacher certification--he's for, I'm against, although I think the debate will end up being a little more nuanced than that. Come have a look.

Mathews Gets It Right

Don't miss Jay Mathews' terrific op-ed in the Post this morning, which comprehensively debunks the "academically over-stressed teenager" meme as expressed in Alexandra Robbins' new book, "The Overachievers." Mathews notes that the allegedly typical high schooler consumed by homework, academics, and other activities focused on admission to an Ivy League school is largely a mirage, confined to the small fraction of the overall population, and that many of the statistics used to support that idea are mistaken or overblown. "The real national problem," Mathews says, "is not that we ask most teens to do too much, but too little."