AP Audits

Two things I don't get about Sunday's front page WaPo story about the College Board's initiative to audit the syllabi of courses schools are calling AP, in order to weed out classes that are AP in name only. First, I don't really understand why this is front page news, particularly since its not actually, um, new: Schools were able to begin submitting syllabi in January of this year. Second, I don't understand why the College Board needs to audit the syllabi. I don't doubt that some schools slap an AP label on courses that aren't really that rigorous and don't prepare kids for AP tests. But AP is, you know, a test. The College Board already knows how many students from each school are taking the tests, and how they are doing on them. Shouldn't that information be enough for them to identify schools where very few of the kids taking AP classes take the tests or where those who do are bombing? Isn't the point of test-based accountability that you can use student performance information to make judgements about whether or not schools are doing what they should be doing without getting into labor intensive and potentially micromanaging things like evaluating everyone's curriculum?

Time Marches On

The NY Times reports on the growing movement to extend the school day. Mass Gov. Patrick has proposed doubling the funding for the state's existing "extended learning time" initiative. That means twice as many participating schools- up to twenty- next year in Massachusetts. And hopefully it also means doubling efforts to evaluate the program, which is high stakes at this point as attention to the issue grows at the local and federal levels. Not everyone agrees- some parents, mostly the more affluent ones, are concerned that it will cut into family time and stress out the kids. Others are more concerned about burn-out among teachers, a likely challenge even for the best planned initiatives. And everyone agrees it is expensive. But the movement is afoot. Spitzer's on board, now proposing an extended day as one of five options for NY's low-performing schools, and many other states and districts are not far behind.

Child Care Quality Counts

New analysis from NIH's longitudinal Study of Early Childhood and Youth Development finds that children who were in higher-quality early childcare had better vocabulary achievement at grade five, but children who had been in daycare had more negative behavior ratings in sixth grade. The differences are quite modest, but this finding is noteworthy because studies of the impact of early childhood experiences on children's achievement often see strong impacts in the early grades that fade out in later grades. NOTE: This post has been updated for clarity.

"Costs" versus True Costs

I've found Edspresso's recent series of posts by contributor Michael Strong on "How to Give Your Child An Expensive Private Education--for Less than $3,000 A Year" quite interesting. It's based on some pretty "progressive" ideas about education and wouldn't be my cup of tea, but I can see how a kid who went through the program would probably be both decently educated and a pretty neat kid. But Strong shouldn't claim it only costs $3,000 a year, because that ignores the major cost of the program: The significant opportunity costs for the labor of parents who must opt out of fulltime paid employment to deliver such a program for their child. An adult who has the verbal, literacy, writing, math skills and personal discipline to shepherd their child through such an educational experience would be a valuable employee for a variety of organizations and, barring significant health or emotional problems or living in an extraordinarily deprived area, it seems reasonable to assume such a person could earn, at minimum $25,000 a year in full-time employment. That opportunity cost brings the true cost of such a program to at least $28,000 a year, which is more expensive that many elite private schools. Now, obviously many parents choose to stay at home with their children for a variety of reasons and that's a perfectly valid decision that I in no way mean to imply anything negative towards. But opportunity costs should always be counted as part of the costs of any decision, whether it's about education policy or homeschooling one's child.

STRIVE Act Includes DREAM

Reps Gutierrez (D-IL) and Flake (R-AZ) introduced the first bipartisan comprehensive immigration reform bill of the 110th Congress. The Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy (STRIVE) Act is a huge deal and, if passed, will change our nation's approach to immigration. It's already controversial, as expected. Full text isn't yet posted but here's the synopsis. It includes the DREAM Act- see Title VI under "other"- for folks who got here at least 5 years ago at the age of 15 or younger and have graduated from high school.

For more on immigration policy, education-related and otherwise, check out the Migration Policy Institute, an independent think tank out of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Some great pubs, upcoming events, and other links.

Hearing on English Language Learners

There was a hearing on the hill this morning on English Language Learners and NCLB. Good for a basic review of key concerns- poor quality data and instruments for counting ELLs and measuring their language proficiency, and how to ensure effective teachers for this population- but not so illuminating if you're looking for new ideas on what to do about all of this. List of witnesses and the archived webcast posted here.

Foreign Policy and Five-Year-Olds

My friends in the pundit class tell me Bill Richardson is a super-accomplished guy with lots of foreign policy expertise. As AFTie Ed notes, he's also racked up some domestic policy accomplishments in New Mexico, including on education. Kindergarten-plus, which gives at-risk kids a jump start on kindergarten during the summer, is a great program, especially for places that lack resources for larger pre-K investments. The late Sandra Feldman was a champion of the idea, and AFT does good work promoting it.

Educational Markets Need Better Information

Rory Hester writes about the challenges of getting good information to pick a school for his children in the Anchorage area. Ryan Boots piggybacks on this with some more general comments about why educational markets need better, comparable sources of information to help parents seach for schools.

Going back to my vouchers posts earlier this week: Voucher proponents say markets and parent choice will improve educational accountability. But they never really engage with the informational obstacles parents--even really smart, committed, educated parents--face to making good choices here. For educational markets to work effectively, all schools receiving public funds must be required to take the same test so that parents at least have comparable information about student performance (preferrably in both absolute and growth or value-added terms) across all school options.

Public entities should also do more to provide relevant information to parents in accessible, easy-to-use formats. Sites like schoolmatters.com and greatschools.net provide some test score and school environment information, but it's not always easy to use and there are often gaps. The best charter school authorizers provide good information about the performance and characteristics of schools they charter, but there are no comparable sources for district schools or schools chartered by other authorizers. I think this idea from the British think tank ippr for locality-wide "admissions authorities" has interesting potential for U.S. cities with significant, multi-sector publicly-funded school choice, as a way to provide parents with better information and smooth the logistics of choice across multiple sectors.

Even Tai Shan's Off to China Soon...

It turns out we're not the only ones concerned about attracting top international college students. China has taken a major interest in this topic as well, and perhaps could give the U.S. some pointers. They've already reached a goal of attracting 120,000 foreign students by the 2008 Beijing Olympics and have set a new goal of 300,000 by 2020, more than double today's levels. They're serious too, and have started handing out more government scholarships and encouraging private colleges to recruit foreigners. Since most students who study in China come from the same countries that send large numbers of students to the United States, we could feel the impacts of their efforts. Also, like Korea, China is concerned about brain drain, and trying to convince its own students to stay put. Just more evidence that the market for international students is indeed hotter than ever. Find out more about how we're doing here.

Vouchers: Building New Opportunities or Just Shuffling Students?

Andrew Coulson responds to my post below about the limitations of the vouchers-based market approach for improving the education of disadvantaged students. Coulson asserts I'm overlooking important evidence that vouchers can substantially expand the supply of quality schools serving disadvantaged students. I'm not unaware of this research, but I do not think it shows what Coulson believes it does. He points primarily to the experience with vouchers in Chile and the Netherlands.

Chile's experience does seem to show that the creation of vouchers can, under certain conditions, lead to the creation of significant numbers of private schools. But it doesn't show that vouchers lead to the creation of a significant numbers of new, high-quality schools serving poor students. The use of vouchers and growth of private school enrollment in Chile is disproportionately concentrated among high- and mid-range SES children and does much less to help poorer children: A higher percentage of children from the top SES quintile use vouchers than from the bottom two quintiles. And, the implementation of these vouchers did not improve educational outcomes in Chile, while there is some evidence suggesting that achievement of low-income students in both public and private schools declined in the 1980s following implementation of vouchers.

The example of the Netherlands is even less relevant here. In the early 20th century, when a lot of Western nations were expanding their public education systems, the Netherlands decided to deal with religious differences by creating a system that included non-government run religious schools for children of different religions. These religions schools are run by independent non-profit boards and much comply with a variety of regulations. The fact that a significant number of Netherlands kids go to privately-run schools today says nothing about the probability that implementing a voucher-like system in the U.S. today will expand high-quality educational options for low-income kids.

I will admit that I'm less familiar with the more recent programs in Denmark and Sweden, although given their age there obviously is not "decades of research" on them. If Mr. Coulson sends me a copy of his book and any other relevant materials, I would be happy to learn more about this. As regular readers of this blog know, I'm far from opposing choice, but the existing evidence I'm aware of does not bear out assertions that an unrestricted market, alone, will create significant new high-quality options for poor kids.

It's telling that Mr. Coulson had to look so far and wide to find examples here. Sure, experiments with vouchers in the U.S. have been small and few, but the evidence that is available from existing programs--including privately-funded scholarship programs--is pretty unconvincing here. The existing programs, by and large, just change where pupils are allocated among existing schools, and create modest amounts of additional space in existing schools on the margins. In particular, existing evidence suggests that, even with a huge expansion in vouchers, the profit motive is just not going to drive a lot of high-quality new schools for poor kids, because there's just not a lot of profit to be made educating poor students in the U.S., particularly if you do it well. In contrast, the charter school movement has created 4,000 schools in the past 15 years that now serve more than 1 million kids, who are disproportionately low-income and children of color.

Boon for D.C. Scholarships

The Gates Foundation is commiting $122 million to college scholarships and mentorships for D.C. students, to give them an incentive to stay in school, help them afford college, and help combat the District's high dropout rate. Unlike some major universities located in the D.C. Metro area, the Gates Foundation clearly seems to understand that D.C.'s public charter schools are public schools, too: students from Anacostia, Ballou, H.D. Woodson, Friendship Collegiate, Maya Angelou-Evans and Thurgood Marshall Academy will be eligible for scholarships. All of these schools are located in Wards 7 and 8, and three of them are charter schools.

Fun with Hypotheticals

So, if you were a major urban school board, and were trying to fend of a mayoral takeover of the schools your currently control, do you think that failing to submit a budget proposal for the coming fiscal year in a timely fashion, and then insisting at the last minute that you need a much larger funding increase than the mayor's budget includes, despite enrollment declines, would really be the best course of action to win support for your case here?

The Case for the Starbucksification of Public Education

Traveling yesterday, so I'm late to comment on the page one Post piece about KIPP expansion. As KIPP continues to grow in size and prominence, some interesting things are becoming apparent. While KIPP is a reform model, it's also a brand, one that is being franchised around the country. Talking about brands and franchises in the context of public education tends to make people nervous, and often leads them to say things like "We don't want the equivalent of Starbucks for public education."

I, on the other hand, think it would be great if we Starbucksified the public schools.

I’ve said this around the Education Sector offices on more than one occasion, and the reaction has always been silence and arched eyebrows, the kind of look people use to signal that they are waiting for you to say you’re kidding.

Of course, most of the eyebrow-raisers drink coffee and thus go to Starbucks on a regular, sometimes daily basis. That’s because our offices are located on Connecticut Avenue in Northwest Washington, DC, where there is—literally—a Starbucks every block for as far as the eye can see. (When I was a kid I used to hike the Appalachian Trail with my father. The AT is marked with white blazes, and the idea is that when you stand next to a blaze, you can always look ahead to see the next one. I’m pretty sure DC Starbucks deployment works the same way.)

While I am also a Starbucks drinker, if I had my druthers I would buy my afternoon cappuccino from a quirky, independently owned coffee shop where they roast their ethically purchased beans themselves and the barista is always that cute girl with the short hair that you suspect / hope plays bass in a great indie rock band on weekends.

But I don’t have that choice, and never will. Only an organization with the money, discipline, and will-to-power of a giant corporation like Starbucks can manage to make high-quality coffee drinks unavoidable to a point that borders on the absurd. That inevitably involves certain compromises, both in terms of the quality of the coffee and the general sense of corporate sameness that degrades our quality of life in subtle and not-so-subtle ways.

That said, the ultimate effect of Starbucks' world domination has been a huge net increase in the quality of coffee, distributed broadly among the populace. This is true both because of the growth of Starbucks itself, and because of the competitive response: other franchises like Caribou Coffee (which I prefer, in only because they call their medium-sized coffee "medium," not "grande") have sprung into action, and everyone from McDonald's to Dunkin Donuts has upgraded coffee quality. While Starbucks might have run some locals out of business in a few coastal, blue-state enclaves, in most places it just means that you can buy good coffee that you could never buy before. The people who want Starbucks the most are often the farthest from centers of money and culture, and that distance is precisely the reason. Getting a Starbucks signifies that a place is Starbucks-worthy.

I'd like the same thing to happen to public education. A lot of local, independently-run schools aren't the equivalent of the cool coffee shop with the bass-playing barista. They're more like a mom & pop store with two pots of coffee on the back counter, decaf in the one with the orange rim. Starbucks—corporate sameness and all—could be a whole lot better.

Andy Rotherham correctly notes that KIPP isn't for everyone, and it might be reasonable to think that no organization, no matter how great, could successfully franchise more than, say, 2,000 schools. Maybe more, maybe less, nobody really knows at this very early point in the expansion of public school choice and non-governmental organizations running schools. But if one organization could run 2,000 really good schools, there's no reason that 10 or 15 couldn't do the same, each with a specific model tailored to a specific problem or population of students. That would be 30,000 schools, one-third of the 90,000 nationwide. Taking into account the additional benefits of competitive response, that would be a whole lot of progress.

In the end, much of the argument against Starbucks is aesthetic and—let's be honest—fairly elitist. The argument for Starbucks is utilitarian, and utilitarian values deserve a great deal of deference when it comes to matters of education policy. If every student deserves a high-quality education, then a policy or course of events that results in a large net increase in student learning sets a very high bar to dispute. Particularly if the people who would happily take a cup of high-quality soulless corporate coffee are drinking a much weaker brew today.

I Should Know Better than to Argue with Libertarians About Vouchers, But I Don't

I've resisted commenting on Megan McArdle's recent foray into pro-voucher blogging, because Matt Yglesias and Kevin Drum have been doing an admirable job making the basic relevant points, but I wanted to highlight a few points from a slightly different angle. Referring to poor performance of schools serving disadvantaged urban students, Megan writes:

I have a novel approach to solving this problem: I propose we . . . pay schools on the basis of their ability to educate these children. I plan to call this system something nifty and new-economy, like . . . a market. That has an edgy, new-millenial kind of feel, doesn't it? I think it's the juxtaposition of the hard-edged k and t sounds with the soft, sensuous labials of the first syllable.

The trouble is that the market alone isn't adequate to address the problems she sees in public education.

Kevin and Matt both raised this issue of accountability and quality. As anyone who loves the critically acclaimed but criminally underviewed Veronica Mars or Friday Night Lights knows, market success is not always synonymous with product quality. There are good reasons to believe that markets alone, in the absence of good information and public accountability, won't allocate children and resources to the schools that do the best job educating them. When public funds are used for public education, there is a public oversight responsibility to ensure that the schools receiving those funds—private, charter, public, what-have-you—meet basic standards of safety, quality, and student performance. That requires a public oversight role—some kind of quality-based entry barrier for participating schools, some kind of test-based accountability for student performance, the ability to prevent schools that consistently produce poor results from accepting voucher students—that most voucher proposals, in practice, lack. This kind of accountability isn't just about ensuring the public interest, though: It's also critical to provide parents with the kind of high-quality, comparable information they need to make good, informed choices among educational options. In the absence of such information the market won't be effective.

There's actually a basic contradiction in Megan's argument: Paying schools based on their ability to educate children is not the same as a market. There's no guarantee, for the reasons mentioned above, that a market would result in schools getting paid based on their ability to educate children. And it's certainly possible to imagine a financing scheme within the existing public school system that allocates resources to schools based on student performance. The latter would be an example of injecting market incentives into the educational system without actually creating a market. But there are obvious moral/practical complications to such a scheme because, in practice, it would exacerbate economic inequities and take resources away from schools that actually need additional support to help them improve. Performance incentives alone don't work when people in a school honestly don't know how to improve their student performance. When that's the case—as the experience of NCLB reauthorization suggests it is in many places—you need to either build the capacity of existing organizations or create new ones to replace them that do have capacity.

Which brings me to what I think is really the more significant limitation of voucher proposals: Vouchers are all about allocation of children amongst spaces in existing schools and do almost nothing to expand the supply of high-quality options. Spaces in existing schools are inequitable allocated, with poor kids having much less access to good schools. But more basically, the problem is that there's a severe shortage of high-performing schools in the geographic areas in which disadvantaged kids tend to be concentrated. Any serious approach to improving education for disadvantaged youngsters needs to create a lot more good schools in the places where these kids are. But vouchers just tinker in the margins of getting poor kids into the limited space available in decent (and sometimes not so decent) private schools that do already exist. Megan at one point paraphrases Matt's argument as "Therefore maybe we can muck around with charters, but don't go crazy!" But in terms of potential to radically change the educational system and options available to poor kids, charters are actually a much more radical approach than vouchers.

Some voucher proponents claim that making vouchers available will create market incentives that expand the supply of high-quality schools in these communities, but there's not really evidence to bear that out. In some of the places where vouchers exist, new schools have sprung up, but many of them have been shady operations that did a poor job educating kids, had financial improprieties, and/or went out of business. There's a basic economic problem here: As the experience of EMOs that have struggled to make a profit operating charter and contract schools shows, it's just really hard to make any kind of profit educating disadvantaged kids; people whose primary interest is profit are much better advised to pursue other avenues.

When it comes to creating new high-quality options for disadvantaged kids, the charter school movement seems to hold much more promise than vouchers. Even there, though, there are significant obstacles to building quality new schools at a scale sufficient to impact outcomes for a significant number of disadvantaged children. Partly, this is because of artificial barriers created by state policy: State charter school caps, inequitable funding, zoning and other regulatory limits, etc. But it's also simply the case that building new schools is incredibly difficult, that making them good is even more so, and that ensuring quality at any kind of scale is even harder. Getting there is going to require identifying and developing new sources of high quality human capital, building new organizations that are able to support new high-quality schools in new ways, etc. The charter movement is doing some of this. Philanthropists have played a key role in starting to build this infrastructure, but government has been an important player, too: The federal charter schools program is a key source of start-up funding for charter schools. And getting to the point where all disadvantaged kids have access to a high-quality school is going to require a much more concerted government effort to support and incentivize individuals and organizations to create and run these schools.

Just cutting poor parents a check for a few thousand dollars and sending them on their way--as most voucher proponents recommend--isn't going to cut it, and proposals to do that, without ensuring public accountability for schools, and without accompanying efforts to dramatically expand the supply of good schools that are available to poor parents, would be every bit as much of an abdication of society's responsibility to these kids as what's happening now.

I've gone on long enough, but two more points:

Like many voucher proponents, Megan says many times that we should implement a voucher system because it couldn't possibly be any worse that what we have now. This strikes me as a wierd bit of reasoning. The fact that some existing schools are bad (and, in contrast to Megan, I do believe the situation many places could be made worse), doesn't mean some proposed reforms to improve them aren't better than others. The choice policymakers face on education is not between vouchers and the status quo, but among a wide array of education reforms, including charters, vouchers, small autonomous schools within districts, weighted-student funding, injecting market incentives into the existing system, top-down regulatory reform approaches, etc., some of which are better than others, and the best reform approach is probably not going to be the same everywhere.

More tangentially, this entire exchange started out with a discussion about similarities and differences between health care and education and why the left and center-left embrace seemingly different policy prescriptions in the two fields. I find comparisons of health and education policies fascinating and wish there was more cross-talk between the sectors. This interview I did with Sir Michael Barber, the architect of Tony Blair's education reforms who has also played a key role in driving reforms to the NHS there, gets into some of the similarities and differences in ways that are very relevant to this conversation, and I strongly encourage everyone to read it.

Why You--Yes, You, Suburban Business Person/Parent/Professional--Should Care About Lousy Urban Schools

Via DCedblog, WaPo business columnist Steven Pearlstein makes a very strong case for why affluent and middle-class Washington-area suburbanites should care about the dismal performance of the D.C. and PG County Public Schools. Money quote:

Put another way, if the Washington area economy is going to continue to grow, much of the growth will have to be in the District and Prince George's County, which won't happen as long as the schools are inadequate.

This isn't just true locally: You could make the same case for why affluent and middle class Americans and American business nationally must care more about the fate of kids in our troubled urban schools. Our depressed urban areas and inner cities are the frontier of development and economic growth in this country, and as the housing market slows down it's increasingly clear that gentrification and new condo developments aren't a long term strategy for lifting the fortunes of our cities. Doing a better job of educating the kids in disadvantaged communities is the best way we can build the supply of quality human capital needed to power our nation's economy into the next generation and through the massive economic challenges facing us in the next several decades as the baby boomers retire.

Pearlstein's also got some pretty sound commentary on Mayor Fenty's proposal to takeover the DC public schools.

Challenging the Challenge Index--With Data

Jay Mathews' online column today focuses on Andy's and my debate with him about whether his "Challenge Index" method is the best way to identify America's best high schools. Andy gets to the crux of the issues and notes that some of the schools Jay lauds are actually doing worse than the statewide averages for certain subgroups.

Take a look, for example, at Tampa's King High School, #73 on the list last year: Only 13% of the school's disadvantaged 10th graders scored proficient on the state reading test in 2006, and 40% scored proficient in math. Both rates are lower than the statewide pass rates for disadvantaged students, which were 17% and 49%, respectively. The school's economically-disadvantaged 9th graders also performed below statewide average for disadvantaged students. Jay also mentions Pensacola High School, also in Florida, #39 last year. Similar story: In 2006, 13% of its disadvantaged 10th graders scored proficient in reading and 30% did so in math. Its economically-disadvantaged 9th graders also passed at lower than statewide average rates for disadvantaged students. Its black 9th graders lag statewide pass rates for black students in reading and math, and its black 10th graders do so in reading. (In both schools, white and non-disadvantaged students passed state tests at higher than state average pass rates for their subgroups.)

Jay says these schools deserve credit for their high AP and IB participation rates--despite poor state assessment performance--because the population they educate includes a significant percentage of disadvantaged students who are more likely to do poorly on tests or drop out of school. But even if you buy that argument, shouldn't a school that we're saying is one of the very best less than one percent in the country be able to get its disadvantaged students to pass state assessments at at least the statewide average pass rate for disadvantaged students? It's not as if Florida as a whole is know for doing an awesome job educating disadvantaged students; we're talking about a fairly low bar here. And these are not the only schools on the "Top 100" list that are failing to get subgroups of disadvantaged and minority kids up even to state averages for their subgroups.

Davidson says goodbye to loans (well, mostly)

Davidson may have lost in the first round of the NCAA tournament, but it is winning headlines with today’s announcement that it will eliminate loans from its financial aid packages. Effective this fall, students will no longer need to borrow to afford a Davidson education (but "families may still choose to take out education loans"). As the first small, liberal arts college to propose this, Davidson is taking the lead--we’ll see who, if anyone, follows.

In fact, "we'll see" is probably the best approach to the announcement. Some have applauded this, while others remain skeptical, wondering if there is another angle from which this isn't as generous or straightforward as it seems. I'm not willing to join either camp yet. As they say, the proof is in the pudding, and if Harvard's experience is any indication, Davidson should see pretty quickly if its new policy actually increases the number of low and moderate income students who apply and attend.

Head Start Moves Ahead--Without National Testing

WaPo article over the weekend says Congress's Head Start reauthorization will likely discontinue the National Reporting System, a Bush administration-created test of all Head Start four- and five-year-olds that has been very controversial. Under the NHS, several small tests, measuring English language skills, vocabulary, letter recognition and early math skills, are administered to all four- and five-year-olds in Head Start every spring and fall, to assess how much Head Start programs are helping children learn. This is not a bad idea: Accountability has become a key education reform principle, policymakers are increasingly focused on early learning and therefore increasingly concerned about the educational aspect of Head Start, and there are concerns about the quality of some Head Start programs. All these factors support an increased effort to collect more systematic information about student learning in Head Start programs.

But the NRS has lots of problems. If you think educational accountability is complicated at the K-12 level, it's much more so with preschool-aged youngsters, whose development is more sporadic and whose skills are less stable. The NRS was implemented in a rush and there were a number of implementation problems. It's comprised of snippets from several other tests that are valid, but the NRS itself has never been validated. It's focused on a narrow range of early literacy and math skills and does not include important issues of social, emotional and motor development. Some questions have problems of class/cultural/racial bias, are developmentally inappropriate, or measure the wrong things. It doesn't include accommodations for students with disabilities, even though Head Start programs are mandated to serve 10% students with disabilities, and there are also problems with its treatment of non-English speaking children.

On top of these practical and technical concerns, which have been raised by such uninterested parties as the GAO, you have predictable political opposition to the NRS from people who oppose testing and academic instruction for young children on ideological grounds, from Head Start interests that do not want to be held accountable for their performance, and from those who fear, not without reason, that the NRS is part of a scheme to cut Head Start or to defund existing programs and give the money instead to states and/or faith-based groups.

The Bush administration didn't need to get Congressional approval to implement the NRS in 2003, but Congress can pass legislation blocking continuation of the NRS or forcing changes in it. Differences between the parties and houses about what to do about NRS were a major stumbling block to Head Start reauthorization in the previous two Congresses. With Democrats controlling both legislative houses now, it appears likely Head Start will be reauthorized this year. Last week the House Committee on Education and Labor passed legislation to reauthorize Head Start that included a provision suspending implementation of the NRS.

It's worth noting that just because the NRS is flawed, that doesn't mean all standardized testing of young children is bad, as some opponents contend. If assessment results are used carefully and the assessment tool used is appropriate to the assessment's purpose, standardized testing can play an important role in program self-assessment, research, and even accountability for early childhood programs. For example, the preschool on whose board I serve, Appletree Early Learning Public Charter School, regularly administers to its students certain standardized assessments that help us to track their progress and also provide valuable information we can use to improve our practices and curriculum, as well as to demonstrate our effectiveness to parents, our charter authorizer, and funders. These are not pen and paper tests, which, as Alice in Eduland points out, are often foolish as a way to measure what young children know. Instead, the child sits down with a friendly adult (often someone she knows) and participates in a variety of tasks, such as selecting the correct object or picture from an array in response to a question from the assessor. And there's nothing inherently cruel about this, either. Many people I've talked to who administer these tests to children say the children often find them fun, like a game. (To reiterate: How children respond to testing depends almost entirely on the attitude of the adults administering the test. There is no natural, in-born fear of tests.)

We're going to see a lot more talk about what accountability means in early childhood education in the very near future, as states continue to expand their investments in pre-k programs. The preschool movement has focused very heavily on inputs and a regulatory approach, such as requiring teachers to have bachelor's degrees, to ensure preschool quality. But the experience of K-12 education reformers over the past several decades has shown that regulation alone doesn't get you to good outcomes for kids. Incentives matter; accountability matters. And, as a practical matter, states that invest a lot in large-scale pre-k initiatives are going to want hard evidence they're getting something to show for it. That's going to mean more conversations about how do we assess learning with young kids. It will also mean developing new tools, similar to those described here, that look neither at inputs nor outcomes but at what actually goes on in classrooms. Hopefully, it will also mean states work to create integrated longitudinal data systems that allow them to track individual children from pre-k all the way through K-12; such systems would help with the growth or value-added analysis lots of people want to see integrated into accountability models ad the K-12 level, and would also allow states to track what we REALLY want to know when we talk about whether or not preschool works: Are the kids who participate in such programs doing better 5, 10, more years down the line?

College Rankings for Fun and Profit

InsideHigherEd reports that the President of Arizona State University will get a financial bonus if ASU climbs in the U.S. News & World Report rankings. If the rankings were based on measures that actually had anything to do with student learning, this might not be a bad idea. But as it stands, the most likely outcome will be to further drive up student costs. Why? Because of the way the U.S. News rankings are constructed.

95% of the rankings are based on measures that are, in whole or in part, a function of three things: wealth, prestige, and selectivity. Prestige is tough to change in higher education; institutional reputations are all but written in stone and difficult to move. Increasing selectivity can also be challenge, particularly for big state universities like ASU, because the pool of students to recruit is fixed, and because state legislatures don't like angry calls from taxpayers wanting to know why they're supporting public universities their kids can't get into.

Wealth, on the other hand, you can always get more of. So if the ASU President wants to earn his rankings bonus, the smartest course would be to spend every waking moment on the phone hitting up rich alumni for donations, and to figure out a way to raise tuition as much as possible. Then he should spend all that new money on...well, on anything really, it doesn't much matter what. If spending goes up, the U.S. News rankings will go up too, irrespective of whether the money is spent well.

Distorting RAND

About a month ago, I wrote a long post on the topic of "value-added" measures of teacher effectiveness. With such measures getting a high-profile endorsement from the Aspen Commission on NCLB, I wrote, it was a safe bet that opponents of tying teacher evaluation to student tests scores would be mischaracterizing the conclusions of a book published by the RAND Corporation on the topic. Sure enough, in the paid "What Matters Most" column published in yesterday's New York Times, UFT President Randi Weingarten wrote:

"..most experts, including the well regarded RAND Corporation, recommend against using "value-added" analysis for evaluating teachers."

This is just wrong, an example of simplifying conclusions and recommendations in a way that distorts their meaning to the point of inversion. Taken at face value, Weingarten's characterization suggests that RAND has rejected value-added methodologies as a whole. This is absolutely not true, as the previous post explains.

More on GWU's Anti-Charter Discrimination

Andy is righteously indignant that the George Washington University's Trachtenberg Scholarship, which provides four-year full scholarships to graduates of D.C. public high schools, excludes students who graduate from D.C.'s public charter schools. But it's even more ridiculous than that: The kids who got Trachtenberg scholarships this year hail from 4 D.C. schools: School Without Walls, Banneker, Duke Ellington, and Woodrow Wilson. Three of those schools--SWW, Banneker, and Ellington--are competitive admissions schools that accept students based on past academic performance, test scores, interviews, and, in the case of Ellington, performing arts auditions. They are NOT your typical D.C. Public School. In contrast, D.C.'s charter schools are required to take all comers, regardless of prior perfromance, and must select students with a lottery if they are oversubscribed.

Cuomo finds "uholy alliances"

Yesterday, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced that there might just be something to all those allegations of “kickbacks” and “unholy alliances” between lenders and financial aid offices—alliances that in the end benefit colleges and lenders more than students.

Check out the full story here, and New America Foundation’s (perhaps too gleeful) commentary here. Cuomo didn’t offer details on which colleges and lenders might be involved, but he did provide this list of “problematic practices” in the loan industry:

• Lenders pay financial kickbacks to schools based on a percentage of the loans that are directed to the lenders. The kickbacks are designed to be larger if a school directs more student loans to the lender. And the kickbacks are even greater if the schools make the lender their “exclusive” preferred lender.
• Lenders pay for all-expense-paid trips for financial aid officers (and their spouses) to high-end resorts like Pebble Beach, as well as other exotic locations in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Lenders also provide schools with other benefits like computer systems and put representatives from schools on their advisory boards in order to further curry favor with the schools.
• Lenders set up funds and credit lines for schools to use in exchange for schools putting the lenders on their preferred lender lists.
• Lenders offer large payments to schools to drop out of the direct federal loan program so that the lenders get more business.
• Lenders set up call centers for schools. When students call the schools’ financial aid centers, they actually get representatives of the lenders.
• Lenders on preferred lender lists agree to sell loans to a single lender so there is actually no real choice for the student.
• Lenders sell loans to other lenders, often wiping out the back-end benefits originally promised to the students without the students ever knowing.

While there will be some out there who charge that Cuomo is looking to pad his political resume (it can’t be easy following Spitzer) by taking down the student loan industry, the whisperings of these problems existed well before he took office. Cuomo’s investigation should provide answers to some important questions in a debate that has been dominated for too long by accusations and invective—questions like which practices are most common and which schools and lenders are involved. These answers will help to determine if this is a widespread problem requiring industry-wide regulation or a problem of isolated cases that calls for better enforcement of existing rules.

I’m holding out hope that Cuomo’s investigation will provide the evidence needed to make some good policy decisions—decisions that will help students find the best loans, and better define the ethical line for lenders and financial aid officers.

New Dream Act

New version of the DREAM- Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors- Act was introduced in the Senate last week by Sen Durbin (D-IL). Full text of the bill, S. 774 now up on Thomas site (similar to the House version, H.R. 1275, which was introduced on March 1). Why DREAM's worthwhile here. And Education Sector's related presidential proposal here. Hard to say if it will pass this time since it's fallen short several times before. But this year is probably it's best shot.

One More Thing...

On the topic of the anti-public education conspiracy. One could plausibly argue that the worse thing President Bush has done to public education is not embrace the education policies of the radical right. After all, the chief historical legacy of the Bush Administration will be exposing just how foolish the various policy fantasies of the extreme political right really are. By actually trying to privatize Social Security, raise revenue by cutting taxes, achieve peace through endless war, etc., President Bush has set back the cause of crackpot right-wing policy entrepreneurs by a generation or more. The anti-public education folks have managed to escape all of this, and are thus free to hold conferences, raise money, and peddle their fringe theories with impunity for the foreseeable future.

Fish, A Barrel, Etc.

Rick Hess writes about the Duke Lacrosse player contretemps at the National Review Online. He recounts how after the incident 88 faculty members quickly sponsored a full-page advertisement in the student newspaper, which declared: “These students are shouting and whispering about what happened to this young woman and themselves” and “the disaster didn’t begin on March 13th and won’t end with what the police say or the court decides." But as the facts of the case have come into question, the sponsors of the ad are backpedaling...sort of. Hess notes:

Karla F. C. Holloway, the English professor who dreamed up the ad, explains that professors should “give voice to student concerns.” Moreover, as Holloway recently told The Chronicle of Higher Education, no one should have imagined that the ad was accusing the young men of rape. For instance, she says, the phrase “what happened to this young woman” did not mean that the faculty presumed she had been raped. Holloway explains, “Something did happen [at the house]. A party happened. Drunkenness happened. If you want to read ‘happening’ in one particular way, that’s the bias you bring to your reading.”

On the one hand, there's a certain shooting-fish-in-a-barrel element to quoting college professors talking this way. It's a big country and there are a lot of professors, so one could argue that just as you can always find a blond middle school teacher somewhere who's been spending a little too much time after class with her pupils, so too can you always find an academic using academic jargon to make a fool of herself.

But the difference, I think, is that this kind of thinking and speaking is not only normal in higher education, it's encouraged. In fact, it's necessary to get ahead in some fields and land jobs at prestigous colleges like Duke. Most people, in the course of growing up, learn not to say things in public that are so risible that they defy parody. It takes a lot to break that instinct, but our colleges and universities have apparently figured out how to pull it off.

That Settles That

Yesterday we had a long, multi-blog debate about the idea, widespread among educators, that NCLB is part of a conservative conspiracy to destroy public education. Today, the Washington Post went above the fold with an article titled "Dozens in GOP Turn Against Bush's Prized 'No Child' Act," wherein conservative NCLB opponent Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich.) says "The President believes in empowering bureaucrats in Washington, and I believe in local and parental control," while the Fordham Foundations' Mike Petrilli notes that "with the president so politically weak, conservatives can vote their conscience."

Meanwhile, on the Op-Ed page, Robert Novak quotes Tom Delay about President Bush: "he has expanded government to suit his purpose, especially in the area of education. He may be compassionate, but he is certainly no conservative in the classic sense."

Hey, I wish it was always this easy. (Points to first Q&E reader who sends in an example of an NCLB opponent chalking this up to some sort of brilliant double-blind conservative deep game strategy: "You see, that's just what Karl Rove wants you to think....")

While it's nice to have the newspaper make your points for you, I question the article itself. First and foremost, what the heck is it doing on the front page? True, this legisation "could severely undercut President Bush's signature domestic achievement," if the Republicans controlled Congress. Which they don't. And if they did, they wouldn't have introduced the legislation in the first place. Isn't this just another piece of minority-party protest legislation, designed for purely political purposes?

The article notes that:

"Once-innovative public schools have increasingly become captive to federal testing mandates, jettisoning education programs not covered by those tests, siphoning funds from programs for the talented and gifted, and discouraging creativity, critics say."

Really? Which critics? Did they offer any, you know, examples or data to support those criticisms? If not--and I'm guessing not--doesn't that suggest that this is, again, a purely political exercise?

To his credit, Kevin Drum notes that the article undermines a lot of the argument he made yesterday. But I still think he's getting key parts of the law wrong. The testing requirements aren't reallly "outlandishly complex," indeed a lot of the most valid anti-NCLB criticism focuses on the tests and school performance indicators being too simple (not that some people won't happily make both arguments simultaneously). And, per Eduwonk yesterday (and again this morning), it's just not true that "80% of our schools systems are basically OK." Probably 80% think they're okay, but that doesn't mean they are. All those students not learning and dropping out go to school somewhere.

ES Interview: The "Godfather" of Head Start

Edward F. Zigler is one of the nation's leading experts on and advocates for young children. Trained as a researcher in the 1950s, a key member of the group that founded Head Start in the 1960s, Zigler remains, at 77, a prolific scholar and committed advocate for young children.

Hechinger Institute director and Education Sector Senior Fellow Richard Colvin (whose early childhood blog, Early Stories, you really should be reading, if you aren't already) recently interviewed Zigler and asked him about his experiences as a scholar and advocate, his views on universal prekindergarten, preschool quality, Head Start, and childcare. Never one to pull punches, Zigler has some provocative and interesting things to say on these topics. You can read all this and more in the Education Sector Interview.

The Myth of Conservative Love for NCLB

Kevin and Matt and Andy have done a good job explaining why claims that NCLB is a secret plot to privatize public educaiton reflect paranoia more than reality. I want to tackle one piece of the argument neither has adressed yet: The perception that hardcore conservatives and the religious right support NCLB. This is wrong. Hardcore conservatives and the religious right were not excited about NCLB; they held their nose and voted for, or did not oppose it, because they were told that it was part of the price for the 2000 electoral victory of a President who would do other things they supported.

Before the 2000 election, most of the major conservative groups had coalesced around an Elementary and Secondary Education Act reauthorization proposal--"Straight A's"--that was primarily focused around local "flexibility" and converting existing federal education funding streams to block grants. The NCLB proposals Bush put out during the campaign were a break with this. Conservatives accepted it though, because they were told that the "softer," more soccer-mom friendly line Bush played on education during the 2000 campaign was important to winning over centrist voters in a year when voters unprecedentedly claimed education was their top concern. Conservatives were also placated by voucher proposals that were included in Bush's campaign plan (as well as in the proposal he initially introduced to Congress, though vouchers were basically DOA there) and, to a lesser extent, Reading First's emphasis on phonics. But they were never crazy about NCLB, and it's certainly not the policy they would have written if they had been in charge.

Just look at the roll call votes on NCLB's passage in the House: Of those voting "nay" on the NCLB conference report, 33 were Republicans, 6 were Dems, and 2 were Independents. And those R names include ones like Delay, Hoekstra, Pitts--the House's most conservative.

Conservatives became increasingly unhappy with NCLB during the course to its passage and have become even more unhappy since then. They got very little that they initially wanted in the law: No vouchers, very little in the way of increased "flexibility" and consolidation of federal programs, and large increases in funding for NCLB programs over the past 5 years. Several of the prominent conservatives who stood behind the law in 2001 have turned their back on it, and conservative leaders are once again coalescing around an NCLB reauthorization proposal that looks shockingly like where they were in 1999--a reheated version of the Straight A's Act.

The Phantom Pro-NCLB Anti-Public Education Conspiracy

Following up on the post below about the notion that NCLB is just a stalking horse for a broader conspiracy against public education.

Over the last six years, the Bush administration has supported a whole range of radical and/or deeply conservative policies, and in many cases they've managed to spin these ideas as sensible and/or moderate. But it's never been hard to figure out their true intentions, because the originators and prime supporters of the ideas have always been right out in the open for everyone to see. The 2001 tax cuts were pushed by anti-tax zealots like Americans for Tax Reform; the Iraq war was supported by people with dreams of a 21st Century Pax Americana; the constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage was backed by religous fundamentalists with deep antipathy for gay people; etc., etc.

None of this was a secret. You could call Grover Norquist at any time, day or night, and he would happily explain the grand plan to cut taxes every year until government was small enough to strangle in a bathtub. The same was true for pepple with imperial ambitions, people who want to force gays and lesbians back in the closet, people who want to drill for oil in national parks, privatize Social Security, and so on and so forth.

Moreover, these weren't people who just happened to share a political ideology or party affiliation with the Bush administration. These were the actual people directing or implementing the policies, either through regular consultation with the White House, or by being hired into the appropriate positions within the government.

Where were the members of the vast anti-public education conspiracy hiding during all of this? The early years of the Bush administration were a heady time, a historical moment where conservatives could finally put their true intentions on the table for all to see, because they were finally in charge. You could say some crazy stuff back then--let's abolish Social Security! and rule the world!--and people would actually take you seriously.

But instead of leading the charge for a national voucher system, the President passed a bipartisan education bill with the cooperation and support of leading Democrats. Instead of putting someone who wants to destroy public education in charge of public education--which would have been a pretty typical maneuver for this administration--he appointed an urban school superintendant to be Secretary of Education. Then he replaced him with the former chief lobbyist for a state school boards assocation.

There are anti-NCLB / anti-public schools folks like Cato, and pro-NCLB / pro-public schools groups, like the Education Trust. There is also a large group of people who are anti-NCLB and pro-public education, like the NEA. But that doesn't mean that the opposite must therefore be true. The coalition of conservatives who are both pro-NCLB and anti-public education doesn't exist, at least not in any meaningful sense.

Basketball, Girls and Tech

If you're interested in science, tech, engineering and math (STEM) issues, a good resource to know about is the National Girls Collaborative Project*, a relatively new initiative that's serving as a national clearinghouse of public and private resources to advance the participation of girls in STEM. We need this so we don't waste resources developing the same projects all over the country (some good wheels having been invented and all that). Also, check out the WomenTech Portal, which is a new resource from the IWITTS (Inst for women in trades, tech and science) site where educators can find research-based articles and some programmatic resources on recruiting and retaining women in tech.

No, there's no real connection between basketball, girls and tech but since there's madness for the former it seemed like a more appealing title for the post. And on that note, here's the women's bracket and a chance to help girls in sports even if you don't care about the tournaments.

Disclosure: I sat on the NGCP Board while at AAUW

NCLB Paranoia

Matt Yglesias has a smart post about how some people are too quick to succumb to paranoid interpretation of NCLB--that the 100 percent proficient target is a conspiracy to destroy public education. As he rightly points out, it's a strange anti-public education conspiracy that counts Ted Kennedy and George Miller as enthusiastic members, but excludes organizations like the Cato Institute that actually do want to destroy public education, yet hate NCLB.

It's worth noting for the record that "100 percent proficient" doesn't mean that every student has to score 100 percent on the state test. It means that every student needs to pass the state test, which in some cases can mean only getting 60 percent of the questions right, or fewer.

Some of Matt's commenters draw the Iraq resolution analogy--Democrats got snookered by the Bush Administration then, this is no different. But this ignores the fact that (A) Kennedy and Miller didn't just vote for NCLB, they wrote many parts of the law, and (B) Unlike the Iraq resolution, Kennedy and Miller are still steadfast NCLB supporters today.

At The Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum, in the post to which Matt was responding, says:

the 100% goal isn't just rhetorical. It comes with penalties. If you don't meet the standard, you lose money, you're officially deemed a "failing school," and your students are eligible to transfer to other schools. And needless to say, by 2014 there won't be any satisfactory public schools to send them to because 99% of them won't have met the standard.

NCLB doesn't identify schools as "failing." It identifies them as "in need of improvement." Those words don't mean the same thing, and they're not meant to mean the same thing. And while it's true that the in need of improvemet schools can lose money, the children in the schools never lose money, because all the money in question is used to (A) provide them with free after-school tutoring, or (B) let them transfer to another, better school. So let's be clear about who, exactly, is being penalized here.

Moreover, the whole idea that every school in America will soon be identified as "failing" is simply contradicted by the facts. Check out, for example, this article in yesterday's Chicago Tribune about how the percent of Illinois schools making adequate progress under NCLB last year went up, from 74 to 82 percent. One can argue, as I do in the article, that these numbers are in significant part a result of states using their discretion under NCLB to monkey around with the law's school identification mechanisms. But that's the way things are playing out.

The point being, if the people who wrote NCLB were really trying to identify every school in America as failing, they did a pretty bad job of it. Which makes you think that maybe--just maybe--that wasn't their intent at all.

March Graduation Rate Madness

The 2007 NCAA Men's basketball tournament bracket has been announced. While nobody knows for sure who's going to win, a few things are certain. There will be thrilling upsets, bitter defeats, and Cinderella stories. Jim Valvano's mantra, "survive and advance," will be invoked roughly once every 47 seconds over the three-week period. Seth Davis will preen, Dick Vitale will annoy, and a lot of these basketball players will never graduate from college.

Because of college basketball, the federal government has been collecting graduation rate data from every four-year college in the country since the early 1990s. Bill Bradley sponsored the Student Right-to-Know Act in large part because he was concerned about colleges that recruited athletes but rarely helped them earn degrees. Grad rate data for individual sports programs is hard to come by, because the NCAA has since invented a more generous, alternative grad rate methodology. Also, federal privacy laws prohibit schools from publishing grad rates for very small groups of students--like, for example, a basketball team.

But we do have graduation rate data for schools as whole, broken down by students' race and gender. A few facts:

• The median six-year graduation rate for black men (not just basketball players, but the entire student population) at school that made the 2007 NCAA men's basketball tournament is 50.6%. The highest is Vanderbilt (92.6%), while the lowest is Memphis (18.9%). Seventeen schools graduate one-third or fewer black men within six years.
  
• The median grad rate for white men is 67.8%. Of the 48 schools that reported grad rates for both white men and black men, 43 have higher grad rates for white men than black men. The median graduation rate gap between black men and white men is 17.5 percentage points. The largest gap, 36.6 percentage points, is at Marquette.

Now, I know that a few people will leave school without a degree for good reasons--somehow I don't think Greg Oden will be getting his B.A. from Ohio State (go Buckeyes) in May 2010. But that's a rare exception. While it's true that some people will transfer to another school, giving the average college credit for students who transfer elsewhere and graduate on time only increases their graduation rate by about eight percentage points. And while some people will take longer than six years to finish, their numbers are also relatively small.

The bottom line is that many of these students arent's getting a degree from anywhere, ever. Graduation rates, particularly for minority students, are very low at many colleges and universities. Really, scandalously low. Here's the 2007 NCAA bracket, with grad rates for black men and white men in parantheses, in that order:

SOUTH
1. Ohio State (48.1 / 65.9)
16. Central Connecticut State (22.0 / 35.0)

8. B.Y.U. (NA / 57.4)
9. Xavier (69.2 / 80.5)

5. Tennessee (38.3 / 53.8)
12.Long Beach State (22.7 / 45.3)

4. Virginia (75.0 / 92.3)
13. Albany (50.6 / 59.6)

2. Memphis (18.9 / 30.2)
15. North Texas (35.3 / 35.0)

7. Nevada (19.2 / 46.6)
10. Creighton (NA / 75.9)

3. Texas A&M (51.4 / 74.2)
14. Penn (76.7 / 93.4)

6. Louisville (27.4 / 34.6)
11. Stanford (88.7 / 95.3)

EAST
1. North Carolina (61.8 / 82.8)
16. Eastern Kentucky (20.6 / 32.3)

8. Marquette (42.3 / 78.9)
9. Michigan State (51.9 / 75.6)

5. USC (61.2 / 81.5)
12. Arkansas (34.9 / 54.0)

4. Texas ( 57.5 / 72.2)
13. New Mexico State (31.8 / 39.5)

2. Georgetown (74.5 / 94.9)
15. Belmont (NA / 58.0)

7. Boston College (74.0 / 91.8)
10. Texas Tech (45.0 / 52.9)

3. Washington State (42.9 / 60.6)
14. Oral Roberts (33.3 / 56.0)

6. Vanderbilt (92.6 / 88.6)
11. George Washington (60.0 / 77.9)

WEST
1. Kansas (31.1 / 57.0)
16. Florida A&M (33.7 / 36.4) or Niagara (54.5 / 68.5)

8. Kentucky (31.9 / 57.2)
9. Villanova (69.2 / 83.4)

5. Virginia Tech (57.3 / 74.4)
12. Illinois (57.2 / 84)

4. Southern Illinois (24.3 / 41.2)
13. Holy Cross (72.7 / 92.8)

2. UCLA (60.0 / 86.0)
15. Weber State (NA / 41)

7. Indiana (40.3 / 71.9)
10. Gonzaga (NA / 74.5)

3. Pittsburgh (54.3 / 67.6)
14. Wright State (33.3 / 36.6)

6. Duke (81.4 / 94.4)
11. Virginia Commonwealth (31.9 / 35.9)

MIDWEST
1. Florida (60.0 / 77.8)
16. Jackson State (31.6 / NA)

8. Arizona (32.9 / 58.0)
9. Purdue (43.5 / 66.8)

5. Butler (69.2 / 68.0)
12. Old Dominion (42.2 / 39.5)

4. Maryland (59.8 / 77.8)
13. Davidson (54.5 / 88.0)

2. Wisconsin (52.2 / 77.4)
15. Texas A&M Corpus Christi (NA / 30.4)

7. UNLV (23.4 / 37)
10. Georgia Tech (56.8 / 72.5)

3. Oregon (28.6 / 62.4)
14. Miami (Ohio) (46.4 / 80.8)

6. Notre Dame (62.5 / 96.2)
11. Winthrop (53.4 / 46.7)

Don't Go There

I haven't read Rod Paige's new book on teachers unions, but I assume that Andy Rotherham's negative review is on the mark. The bottom line is that once you slander an entire group of educators by calling them a "terrorist organization," you really can't go on and write a book subtitled "How Teacher Unions Hurt Children, Hinder Teachers, and Endanger Public Education." It's like Mel Gibson writing a book about Israeli foreign policy--you just can't go there.

The Higher Education Lobby 1, Students 0

When special interests subvert good public policy, they usually try to cover their tracks. While people in the know can guess what really happened, both the influencers and the influencees usually create enough plausible deniability to escape blame.

But sometimes it all happens right out in the open, and that in itself tells you a lot about the lobby and the issue at hand. So it was yesterday with the announcement--first reported yesterday in the Chronicle of Higher Education and also this morning in Inside Higher Education-- that the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) will be pulling back on an initiative to gather better education statistics about higher education.

Here's what happened: Over the last five years or so, many colleges have begun to collect information about how well they teach their students and how much their students learn, through survey instruments like the National Survey of Student Engagment (NSSE) and tests like the Collegiate Learning Assessment (CLA). While most institutions keep the results confidential, some make them publicly available. NCES proposed that those institutions submit the link to the Web page containing the results. That way NCES could include that link on it's free College Opportunities On-Line Web page, so that high school students choosing colleges could see the information.

In a response, the higher education lobby had a cow.

And so it was depressing but unsurprising to hear Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, director of the Institute for Education Sciences, say, in so many words, "The people who made this decision were just trying to do the right thing and fulfill the NCES mission of gathering education information in the best interests of the public. They didn't realize that sometimes people in positions of greater authority within the government have to compromise the public interest in order to placate special interests." Thus, the requirement to submit links to the already-public teaching and learning data will be removed.

Just to be clear: The Department of Education wasn't requiring any institution to participate in NSSE, the CLA, or any other survey or assessment process. Nor was it requiring institutions that participate but choose to keep the results confidential to disclose their results. All it said was that if you do disclose them, let us know where, so students choosing colleges can see them.

Why is higher education acting like it has something to hide? Because it does. The plain truth is that a great many institutions are doing a mediocre or worse job of educating undergraduate students. Everyone knows this, but nobody wants to say so, because fixing that problem would require a lot of hard choices. Thus, any attempt to raise the issue--or to disclose data about the issue--is quickly squashed. Or, as Whitehurst said (this is an actual quote):

“We understand in the current environment that people see this as a foot in the door for a potential move some time in the future to require some kind of student learning outcome, by providing strong incentives to collect that. We think that’s a state or association role to move in that direction. It exceeds the response of a federal authority or control to be incentivizing that kind of collection.”

The federal government provides higher education with tens of billions of dollars in the form of tax preferences, research grants, and student aid, but it "exceeds the response of a federal authority" to even create incentives for institutions to possibly disclose information that would indicate whether or not they're using all of that money to help the students and families who are paying those taxes.

That says it all.

NCLB Higher Ed? No, Not Really

Alex Kingsbury has an informative state-of-play piece in U.S. News & World Report about measuring student learning in higher education, and how that information might be used to hold colleges and universities accountable for doing a good job teaching their students.

There's an extremely reductive way of talking about these issues, which goes something like this:

"The Bush Administration, which ruined K-12 education by imposing an insulting, simplistic, wrong-headed NCLB accountability system based on low-level standardized tests, is now trying to screw up higher education in the same way. This is wrong."

That's really not what's going on. There will be no NCLB-HE. But there are things the federal government can and should do to start getting more information about higher education quality out into the hands of the public, and to create incentives for universities to do a better job of teaching undergraduates. The difference between this and the accountability nightmare described above is mostly a matter of being smart, judicious, and reasonable--qualities that are admittedly not exactly in surplus within the Bush administration on the whole. But overall I think the Secretary Spellings is doing the right thing here. There was no great political outcry for her to take on the difficult issue of higher education reform, that she did so anyway is to her credit, and her efforts so far have been worthwhile.

Teaching Religion

Boston University Professor Stephen Prothero's new book, Religious Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know--And Doesn't, argues that, despite high levels of religiousity, Americans on average are shockingly ignorant about both the religions they profess to believe and world religions. Prothero further argues that this ignorance is dangerous at a time when religion is playing an increasing role in both domestic politics and in conflicts around the world, and recommends that schools begin teaching religion as history and culture to counteract this ignorance. (Sound familiar, eduwonk readers?)

Prothero has a good point: you only have to look at the debate among political pundits over whether or not Mitt Romney is a Christian, or the inability of many of our nation's political and foreign policy leaders to differentiate Shiite from Sunni Muslims to understand the seriousness of this ignorance. Prothero explains American's lack of religious literacy largely in terms of American protestant revivalism's historical emphasis on a personal relationship with God over theology. Susan Jacoby, writing in The Washington Post, suggests it's actually a reflection of a broader deficit in Americans' civic and cultural knowledge. I'll take a step further and suggest its part of a general lack of knowledge, period, among even many educated Americans, because, as E.D. Hirsch has written, our schools do not focus on inculcating cultural knowledge in students and often even disdain teaching of a defined body of core knowledge in literature, history, and, yes, religion. It's worth noting that Hirsch's Dictionary of Cultural Literacy includes a lot of religious literacy, too.

One could draw an interesting parallel between, on the one hand, progressivist education's emphasis on process, thinking skills, and shaping children's self-esteem and values, over inculcating knowledge, and, on the other hand, American religion's emphasis on personal emotional experience, personal moral behavior, and a relationship with Christ over theology.

I actually think both sides of the equation are important, in both education and religion.

A false choice is often posed in education between Hirsch-style content knowledge and progressivist-style higher-order thinking skills. A Newsweek article about Prothero actually makes an important point about this debate, as well as accountability:

When he began teaching college 17 years ago, Prothero writes, he discovered that few of his students could name the authors of the Christian Gospels. Fewer could name a single Hindu Scripture. Almost no one could name the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Prothero, who went to Yale in the early 1980s and speaks of his all-night bull sessions on politics and religion with reverence, realized that to re-create that climate in his classroom, his students first had to know something. And so he made it his job to (1) figure out what they didn't know and (2) teach it to them. He began giving religious literacy quizzes to his students, and, subsequently, to everyone he knew. Almost everybody failed.

Note that in this story, content knowledge didn't compete with higher-order thinking, but was a prerequisite to it. Note also Prothero's straightforward approach to making sure his students got that content knowledge: first find out what they don't know, then teach it to 'em. Seems straightforward enough, but it's all too often not what happens for kids. Accountability also plays a key role in this formula: testing (quizzes) is critical to find out what the kids don't know and, presumably, to determine whether or not they've learned it after it's taught. Note nobody's whining about how devastating it was for Prothero's students to take these quizzes they couldn't pass.

All that said, I share Jacoby's skepticism about Prothero's proposal to require high school students to take courses in religious history. She writes "given the failure of so many schools to inculcate the most elementary facts about American history, it is hard to imagine that most teachers would be up to the task of explaining, say, the subtleties of biblical arguments for and against slavery." I have similar concerns, although the obvious answer--in this or any area where schools aren't getting kids content knowledge they need--is not to give up, but to figure out how policies can give schools the resources and support they need to teach kids this knowledge. More important to me, there are limited hours of the day and there are trade-offs in the things we decide to emphasize in our curricular requirements: How should we weigh learning about religious history against American history, against other literature, against math and science? I don't know, but I do agree that we need to do a better job in passing on to our students their cultural patrimony, in history, literature and, yes, religion.

CER-fing Web 2.0

Sometime when I wasn't looking, the Center for Education Reform decided to try to get all Web 2.0 and such.

Winning the Lottery

Via Crooked Timber, controvery in England over student assignment to schools (which they refer to as admissions). The Department for Eduction and Skills, equivalent of the U.S. Department of Education, has established new regulations that try to make student assignment to schools fairer through a variety of measures. Admissions criteria, such as interviews and requested donations, that were disproportionately a barrier to less advantaged students have been banned. Most radical, families can no longer guarantee their child a slot in a school by purchasing a home nearby.

These changes are understandably controversial, and the controversy has focused on the city of Brighton and Hove. In response to the new regulations, the local school authority there instituted a system that divides the city into six catchment areas and uses a lottery to assign children to a school within their cathment area. Previously, preference for slots in a particular school went to children living closest to it, prompting more affluent families to purchase homes as close as possible to popular schools, and raising the prices of homes in those neighborhoods. The goal of both the national policy changes and the specific lottery policy in Brighton is to increase equity and transparency in school admissions, but whether the policy will actually do this is subject to debate.

In many ways, England is farther down the choice road in public education than the United States, having instituted a national "open enrollment" policy under the Tory government in 1988. English schools have also typically had more freedom to choose students than most American schools. Strikingly, given the many differences between our two countries and education systems, many of the fears about increased choice are the same on both sides of the Atlantic--potential increases in social stratification, inequity for disadvantaged students, concerns about the impact on communities, etc.--as is the hope by choice proponents that it will increase educational customization and equity for disadvantaged children who are ill-served by residentially-based assignments. Americans who are interested in the interplay between choice and equity should keep an eye out to the debate there. This forthcoming paper on the subject from the Institute for Public Policy Research, an English think tank that falls somewhere between the Brookings Institution and my previous employer, also looks well worth checking out. Although most American schools and districts don't have "admissions" in the same way that English schools do, their idea of a local-area-wide "admissions authority" to handle the school assignment process for all students and schools would make a lot of sense in the growing number of American cities, like D.C. and New York, that have a growing array of public (and, in the case of D.C., private) school choice options.

Shameless Plug: If you want to know more about England's experience with education reform and what the U.S. can learn from it, check out this interview I did with Blair education reform architect Sir Michael Barber last winter.

Accountability, Responsibility, and Enron

Sherman Dorn notes the upcoming release of Collataral Damage: How High-Stakes Testing Corrupts America's Schools, a collection of anecdotes about educators making morally dubious choices when faced with the pressures of test-based educational accountability. Dorn says:

The plural of anecdotes is not representative data, but there are enough concerns over the past 5 years that we can say those who ignore test preparation and other side-effects of high-stakes testing are ignoring reality

... unless any of those happened to say that the fraud at WorldCom and Enron wasn't a reason to be concerned about corporate misdeeds. Then at least they can say they were consistent.

The Enron analogy comes up a lot in these conversations. It's worth examining, because it says a lot about the way people think about educators and public schools.

The people who ran Enron worked in an environment of high-stakes accountability. In their case, accountability was based on their financial performance, as reported in mandatory filings to a federal government agency, the Securities and Exchange Commission. If the numbers were good, their stock price went up, the company grew, and they all got rich. If the numbers were bad, the stock price went down, the company was damaged, and they could lose their jobs.

Unfortunately for the employees and shareholders of Enron, the people running the place made a series of spectacularly bad business decisions (Kurt Eichenwald's book, Conspiracy of Fools, has all the sordid details and is well worth reading). Even more unfortunately, they chose not to own up their incompetence. Instead, they tried to cover up their misdeeds with accounting shenanigans. They got caught, the company was destroyed, and a bunch of them went to jail.

In response, numerous pundits blamed the federal government for creating the financial accountability system, arguing that the otherwise-honest businessmen at Enron had been corrupted by the high-stakes pressure of filing quarterly SEC reports about their performance....

Oops, forgot we weren't talking about education.

Of course, nothing of the kind happened. People called for more accountabilty, not less. Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley Act over the objections of big business. And even as Ken Lay, Jeff Skilling, et. al., were excoriated far and wide as liars and thieves, they were at least given the respect implict in being held responsible their moral choices.

College Rankings Dirty Tricks

Richard Vedder of Ohio University, an outspoken member of the recent Spellings Commission on the Future of Higher Education, has a higher education blog called "Center for College Affordability and Productivity." It's smart, provocative and well worth reading. If there's ever an award for "Least Bland Blog With the Most Bland Name," it would definitely be a contender.

In this post, Vedder comments on a recent Wall Street Journal article$ from the invaluable Dan Golden about the way some colleges are manipulating the U.S. News & World Report college rankings. This says it all:

ALBION, Mich. -- Adrian Jean Kammerer hasn't given Albion College a dime since she graduated in 2004. "I don't have money to be giving to Albion," says the law-school student. "I'm living off student loans."

Yet Albion counted Ms. Kammerer as an alumni donor to the school in 2004, 2005, and 2006. School officials keep her on the donor roll by treating the $30 she gave as a college senior as a $6 annual gift for five years. Ms. Kammerer isn't scheduled to drop off Albion's donor list until 2009.

Such fiddling -- which helped boost the percentage of donating Albion alums to 47% in 2006 from 36% in 1998 -- paid off handsomely. U.S. News & World Report's annual higher-education survey puts Albion's alumni-giving rate at 14th among liberal-arts colleges, contributing to an overall ranking of 91st among 215 such schools. In 2003, Albion boasted of its alumni-giving rate, among other credentials, in a cover letter for a grant application to the Kresge Foundation, which ultimately awarded the school $4.7 million.

This kind of shameful book-cooking is nothing new; a few years ago it was all about dropping low-scoring students out of the average SAT numbers (the WSJ busted colleges on that one too). Implicit in all of this is a certain "it's all just a game" ethic--most colleges think the U.S. News rankings are illegitimate to begin with, so by that logic there's no harm in looking for an edge. Sort of like Gaylord Perry throwing spitballs or Michael Waltrip cheating in NASCAR.

Which is exactly why the college rankings need to be more aligned with what actually matters in higher education -- teaching, learning, things like that.

R-E-S-P-E-C-T

This past Saturday, the Washington Post ran a pointed op-ed by Colbert King describing the dismal state of disrepair in one of the district’s elementary schools. With a proper amount of outrage and incredulity, King correctly asks, who is responsible for this and how do we hold them accountable?

Good questions that need to be answered immediately. Part of the trouble with facilities maintenance is that it gets little political play (compared to, say, a jump in test scores), meaning that few politicians give facilities upkeep the attention it deserves. Schools aren’t the only places this happens—the Post’s recent series of articles about Walter Reed show that our veterans also suffer from a lack of political attention to facilities maintenance.

The facilities we ask our students to learn in (and our teachers to work in)—like the facilities we ask our veterans to recover in—are a sign of respect. If we ask children to attend schools with broken tiles, unusable bathrooms, and peeling paint, what are we telling them about how much we value their education? Can we honestly expect them to respect the education system when we provide them with buildings that we, ourselves, wouldn’t work in?

Tenure Wars

Steven Levitt of Freakonomics fame has some sensible ideas about tenure for college professors ("Let's Just Get Rid of Tenure (including mine)"). He notes that instances where professors might be unjustly fired for politically unpopular views--one of the main justifications for tenure--"rarely" occur. My father--formerly the chairman of the computer science department at a mid-sized public university and therefore somone who had to deal with the hassles of unfireable bad professors on a day-to-day basis--made the same point to me a few years ago. "What could be politically controversial," he asked, "about designing integrated circuits?"

Sherman Dorn responds to Levitt's post by citing a case where people really did try to sack an economics professor for standing up to business interests--in the 1940s. I'm sure he's right, but doesn't that still qualify as "rare"?

Levitt is too dismissive in saying that someone who gets unfairly fired can just go back into the job market and find another job elsewhere. Most professors don't have the juice that comes with being a best-selling author and frequent contributor to the New York Times Magazine, etc. But as with any policy, there's a basic utilitarian standard that has to be addressed here. Tenure has benefits and costs. Levitt is saying the former outweight the latter. I don't think Dorn's reply really refutes that.