Budget: Deficit Thinking

After setting trade deficit records five years running, it was heralded as good news last week that our trade deficit may fall to only $705.9 billion and our budget deficit to only $150-200 billion this year.

Part of the joy of being an intern is the ability to attend events to put those monstrous numbers in context, like this panel discussion yesterday on balanced budgets, hosted by Democracy. The subtitle of the event, “Debating the Future of Progressive Fiscal Policy,” tells pretty much all the necessary details about the panelists’ political leanings. To varying degrees, all were bullish on the American economy, but they were also quick to point out that the type of deficits we’re currently running are not wholly advisable.

They all seemed to be in agreement that the type of spending mattered more than the actual amount of spending. That is, deficits can be used for positive purposes. This is where it relates to education. When mentioning good types of investments in the future, almost all of them referenced education, training, or some type of human capital investment.

Several of the panelists argued that progressives need to make the case for government in general. When conservatives attack the government and launch “starve the beast” type campaigns, the losers are inevitably the worst-off elements of society. Not coincidentally, they are also the least politically powerful. Investments in infrastructure like roads, water and air quality, transportation, energy, and yes, education, are things worthy of defending. They provide economic stimulus and keep the economy growing. There were a lot of investment metaphors thrown out, but my favorite is fairly simple. Think of an average American family. We’d say it would be a good thing for them to borrow to finance a mortgage or a child’s education. It probably would not be so prudent to purchase consumer goods like iPods, cell phones, or clothes. The same types of spending principles should be applied to the federal government.

For as much attention that is paid to balanced budgets, there is actually relatively little political will for it. Everyone thinks it’s a fine idea in principle, but no one’s for it when their pet program is on the chopping block. One of my college professors suggested this exercise: think of four priorities, like balancing the budget, cutting taxes, funding education, and keeping Social Security solvent. Which party is going to rank balancing the budget as their top priority in that list? The point is that balanced budgets and fiscal responsibility are principles for everyone, but priorities for no one.

The Absent Progressive Voice

Thanks to Sara for bringing a much-needed historical perspective to the question of the progressive role in education reform. Her post about Jonah Goldberg's blindered anti-public education rant, keyed to the Post series about DCPS incompetence, underscores my point--while conservatives like Goldberg may have foolish things to say about this problem, liberals too often have nothing to say, and that silence speaks volumes.

For some excellent thoughts on this topic, see this post from Georgetown Law professor James Forman, Jr. An exerpt:

In 2007, the civil rights community and, in particular, black folks, ultimately are going to have to make a decision: is the civil rights movement vindicated by having upper and middle-class black people (like me) run school systems that disserve poor black children? I believe the answer is no. My father gave most of his life to the movement, and I know that all the marching and the dying that people did was not so that some of us could have jobs. It was so that all of us could read, do math, develop a love for learning, feel the power that comes from knowing your brain can solve tough problems, and get a job you enjoy. Until we become clear on this question nothing else will get fixed.

That's the most progressive thing I've read in quite a while.

Let's Not Do Away with Public Education

It's hard to know where to start on conservative pundit Jonah Goldberg's recent column arguing that the U.S. ought to "do away with" public schools. Goldberg comes to this conclusion based on the Washington Post's recent series focusing on the horrible state of the District of Columbia Public Schools--which is sort of like concluding we should abolish the U.S. military because of the Abu Ghraib scandal.

There's no disputing that DCPS is a horrible mess, and that too many other school districts nationally are doing a grave injustice to the poor and minority kids they're failing serve. But it's hard to see where Goldberg's proposed solution would help.

Goldberg quotes Milton Friedman saying government is bad at providing services but good at cutting checks. But another thing government has been good at is ensuring that every child had a school to attend--an important achievement that could be lost in a purely market system. Obviously, that's not enough if the schools suck, but there's no reason to believe imploding the public schools would generate huge quality improvements.

The biggest problem in education today is an insufficient supply of good schools--public or private--particularly in high-minority, low-income communities. Simply cutting parents a check isn't going to fix that. We need a dramatic expansion of the supply of high-quality schools serving disadvantaged youngsters. Market mechanisms, combined with charity, can do (and are doing) some of that, but the woes of for-profit education management companies, combined with the inherent limits on the number of altruistic school founders, suggest there are serious limitations to what a purely market strategy can accomplish without a more aggressive public role.

In casting the debate as a choice between "greater funding" and "blow the whole thing up" Goldberg betrays a woeful ignorance about today's education policy landscape. What about the standards movement, which has for the first time given parents and the public meaningful information about student and school performance and focused educators on the goal of improving student performance? What about successful school turnaround efforts in San Diego, Sacramento, and elsewhere? What about Teach for America, the New Teacher Project, and other programs that aim to bring a much needed dose of new talent into the education system? What about performance pay, career ladders, and other efforts to make teachers truly accountable professionals and link teachers incentives more closely to actual public goals for schools? What about the charter school movement, which in barely 15 years has created nearly 4,000 new PUBLIC schools nationally, including, yes, too many bad ones, but also including some incredible successes--such as the KIPP and Achievement First networks--and expanded real choice for parents? Goldberg needs to take a look at Education Sector's website.

Yes, there are too many bad schools in the U.S. And, yes, too many reform efforts have failed. But imploding the current system, simply sending poor parents out to fend for themselves with a check and a wish good luck, would be just as great an abdication of public responsibility as anything in the current system.

Mapping D.C. Schools

Per Kevin's post below, if you're following the Washington Post's in-depth series on D.C. schools (or if you like cool interactive online tools), check out their online map tool here. A great way to see how school performance, teachers, and facilities problems are distributed throughout the district -- and you can layer all of that information with poverty data, street names, and wards. Good stuff.

More on the Progressive Solution

Kevin asks below what the progressive solution is the the entrenched, dysfunctional bureacracies that stifle progress and success in too many of our urban school systems. I don't presume to have the credentials to speak for progressives of liberals on this or any issue: I'm hoping Leo or Matt or Ed Muir and John See or Teacher Ken might be up for this.

It's important to realize, though, that historically progressives have been--far from defenders of dysfunctional, corrupt, and incompetent school bureacracies--some of the most radical advocates for dismantling schools systems when they disempower poor families and communities and perpetuate inequity for poor and minority children. James Forman, Jr. writes:

The late 1960s also saw the public school bureaucracy challenged by the community control movement, the topic of Part IV. Community control advocates included civil rights organizations, black nationalists, and some members of the liberal political establishment. They demanded that ghetto residents have more control over their neighborhood schools. While not itself a school choice initiative, the community control movement is an important part of the narrative. Like some choice proposals, it was premised on the notion that the public system was unwilling or unable to meet the needs of poor and working-class black children. Community control supporters also shared choice advocates’ belief that taking control from the bureaucracy and giving it to community members was an important part of the solution.

The Community Control movement faced some of the same challenges as other 1960s-era efforts to empower poor communities and foundered due to internal conflict as well as conflict between community activists, school boards, and unions--The latter of which, while often (and sometimes rightly) maligned as a source of urban bureacratic dysfunction, have also been advocates on behalf of teachers and communities against dysfunctional management. Between the high point of 1960s era activism and the 1980s, however, liberalism itself shifted to become much more defensive and invested in protecting the entrenched interests of its allies--including urban bureacrats--rather than expanding opportunity and social justice for the disadvantaged--a phenomenon that Charlie Peters, in his influential "A Neoliberal's Manifesto" cited as a core failing of late 20th century liberalism.

I would argue that a progressive vision of education reform needs to return to principles of parent and community empowerment. Ironically, the people who are doing the most to carry that banner these days are charter school operators and supporters who are often seen as centrists or even conservatives.

Understanding this--the need to empower poor families and communities and the potential of new, community-driven public schools of choice to do that--is why I became a charter school convert. Several years ago, the C.S. Mott Foundation arranged for a group of education policy analysts to visit a group of "small, autonomous schools," (not charters) created by the Oakland school district in response to the activisim and parent organizing efforts of a local community organization whose members were angry about the terrible conditions the Oakland schools had placed their children in. These working class and poor, largely black and Hispanic families were alienated from and disempowered by the local public schools, which had no meaningful connection to the community. Organizing, and persuading the district to create new schools the parents wanted, was the only way for these parents to get not only much better schools for their children, but also the type of ownership of public education that middle-class families take for granted. Those parents in turn became empowered to make other changes in their and their children's lives, and those schools became a cornerstone for building functioning communities in those neighborhoods.

It's important to understand that this is a different, and I believe richer, account of how choice empowers parents than standard market-based arguments, which ignore the importance of community and broader political forces, and tend to cast empowerment solely in terms of increasing poor parents' purchasing power and making them competent consumers, rather than helping them get real political power to influence institutions that affect their lives. Further, it's a view that's not in tension with the progressive belief that improving schools alone is insufficient without broader social and political changes to address the myriad other factors contributing to poor life outcomes for disadvantaged kids, since gaining power to influence public education instiutitons also puts parents in a position to influence other issues that impact their and their children's lives.

I'll admit this is a much messier strategy than the centrist and conservative approaches Kevin describes, and the potential it has to threaten certain established liberal consituencies may actually doom it as a progressive education agenda. But it's happening in places like Los Angeles, where Green Dot charter schools founder Steve Barr has organized thousands of parents to advocate for better schools for their kids, and I'd like to see what it could do, alongside more centrist and conservative reforms already underway, in a place like D.C., where God knows the parents and community need all the empowerment we can get.

Where's the Progressive Solution?

Day two of the Post's exhaustive series on the decades-long failure of DC Public Schools traces the history of constant leadership turnover and unfulfilled reform efforts. It also features more examples of corruption, recalcitrant bureaucracy and mind-boggingly inept management, such as this from former superintendant Arlene Ackerman:

Ackerman obtained extra federal money and pressed ahead with the summer school plan. But the school system's personnel office functioned too poorly to recruit additional teachers. Early in her tenure, for example, Ackerman came across a motorized filing system that had broken long ago, trapping hundreds of personnel records behind a wall.

"Somebody told me, 'Oh, this has been this way for years,' " Ackerman said. "Years! I'm thinking, no wonder people are telling me that they can't get data or records."

Ackerman and a few aides worked the phones to contact summer school teacher prospects. "One night, we were calling people until so late that I finally said, 'It's 11 o'clock. We can't call anybody else tonight and ask them if they want to work in D.C. They will know we're desperate,' " she recalled.

Ackerman puzzled over the central office culture. Late one night, after attending a meeting, she returned to headquarters to see a line of people in a hall waiting to see one of her subordinates. She said she eventually came to believe that the man, a longtime employee who no longer works in the system, had amassed great power through his ability to hand out jobs, award contracts and outlast superintendents. "He was like the godfather," Ackerman said.

So here's my question: what's the progressive / left-wing solution to the DCPS incompetence problem? I know what the libertarian / right-wing solution is: blow up the system and replace it with vouchers. I know what the centrist solution is: standards, accountability, and choice in a public context, i.e. charter schools. What's the liberal solution?

Unfortunately, I don't think there is one. That's not to say there's no progressive education agenda at all--left-wing folks reliably support things like funding equity and smaller class sizes, and there are places where those reforms are badly needed.

But those aren't solutions to the problem of an entrenched, dysfunctional educational bureaucracy. The biggest failure of the traditional liberal education agenda--and the main reason that vouchers and other dodgy ideas persist--is total silence in the face of educational problems like those in DCPS, failures that are literally ruining the lives of tens of thousands of low-income and minority students--the very students liberals are supposed to care about the most.

Understanding "Standards"

There has been much discussion of standards in the last week, fueled by the release of two major reports. The National Center for Education Statistics raised some interesting questions about the rigor of state standards and variation between the states. Their report compelled Secretary Spellings to argue against national standards on the editorial pages of the Washington Post.

There is some ambiguity in the use of the word "standards" in this debate. In terms of curriculum, standards are a specific description of what students should know and be able to do by the end of a course or grade level. This is what we mean by "national standards." In terms of assessment, standards are the level of performance to which students are held accountable -- the difficulty of the test. This is what we mean by "high standards" (which, incidentally, is also the reason women say they won’t go out with me). It's the difference between what a student should learn and how well they need to learn it to pass the test.

The distinction is subtle but important. As a high school math teacher, I immediately noticed a significant gap between my state’s curriculum standards and what was expected on the state test, and I often wished they were more aligned. There was more depth and more breadth in the curriculum standards. Of course, even these did not account for everything I wanted to teach my students, like mental toughness or the importance of going to college.

In policy discussions, we should be aware of the two types of standards and be clear about which we are referring to. It is crucial that all states have high assessment standards, which is why the NCES report is troubling (though in my view mitigated by flawed methodology). But this does not necessarily mean that all states must have equivalent curriculum standards. In theory, states can exercise discretion in what students learn and when they learn it while also ensuring that all students benefit from a rigorous and complete curriculum. The question is how to make sure it happens.

Nightmare on the Potomac

A few years ago, I took a tour of Archduke Franz Ferdinand's castle outside of Prague (if you've seen The Illusionist, a lot of the scenes were shot there). After a while, it became apparent that our tour guide, while friendly, polite, and knowledgeable, was also completely insane. Not "kind of eccentric" insane but "I am the Messiah" insane. Years of living under the utter absurdity of life in the former Eastern Bloc had driven him over the edge, never to return.

After reading today's Washington Post article about DC Public Schools, I wonder how many DCPS employees are at risk of a similar affliction. More than anything, it's a portrait of a school system where common sense goes to die.

The article, which is worth reading in full, is a litany of bureaucratic incompetence. It also highlights one of the real challenges of urban school reform. When new leaders are hired, they naturally focus on reforms tied directly to classroom learning. You'll never hear a new superintendant say something like this at his or her first press conference:

"We're not going to adopt any innovative or fashionable reforms. Nor are we going to implement wholesale changes to the curriculum or recruit new learning specialists and teachers. Instead, we're going to start by getting to a basic level of competence in running this place. There are no new ideas here, we're just going to work at not doing things that will make us subject to ridicule. Only after we've gotten there--and it's going to take some time--will we move ahead with the rest."

Yet that might be exactly the right thing to do. Most people are able to keep their sanity in the face of constant absurdity, but it tends to sap their motivation and will, breeding cynicism and hopelessness. It prevent legitimate reforms from taking root. And, as the Post shows in some great graphics, it leads to a school system--pay attention, those who think demography is destiny--where the average 8th grade math score for non-poor students is the same as the average score for poor students nationwide.

Or to look at it a slightly different way--there's a gap of 23 scale score points (225 to 248) between the scores of poor and non-poor students nationwide in 4th grade math. That gap is only marginally bigger than the 19 point gap between the national average score for poor students (225) and the DCPS score for poor students (206).

In other words, poverty is drag on educational attainment, but so is gross incompetence, and the effects of the two seem to be pretty comparable. And of course, most DCPS students have the soul-crushing misfortune of experiencing both at the same time.

It's enough to drive you crazy.

Will vs. Will

In a profile of Newark mayor Cory Booker, George Will says:

Fifty years ago Newark's population was 460,000. Now it is 284,000 -- up about 10,000 in five years -- of which 54 percent are black and 33 percent are Latino. In 1995 the state took over the school system, in which principalships were being sold and so much of schools' budgets went for the salaries of unionized teachers that some classrooms lacked even chalk.

I assume this means that Will has renounced his previous support for the "65 Cent Solution," a half-baked education policy "reform" proposal that would require local school districts to spend a minimum of money on instruction--that is, "salaries of unionized teachers"--and thus reduce spending on things like chalk.

Must have missed that column when it ran.

Sample problems

Gannett has an in-depth piece today comparing each state’s scores on NAEP versus their own tests. They also let you try to solve some sample NAEP fourth and eighth grade math problems, separated by level. Problem is, they got one wrong. Go to the “proficient” question on 8^th grade math. Gannett says the correct answer is D, but the actual answer is (-3, -2). Even ignoring the negative sign, the correct answer isn’t even offered. You’d think a story highlighting how horrible the nation’s students are performing on standardized tests would get their own sample right.

UPDATE, 6:30 PM: Gannett has fixed the error, the correct answer is now displayed.

Bee Finished

Andrew Coulson has some more details about Scripps Spelling Bee winner Evan O'Dorney and the public school-connected program through which he receives home-based instruction. I think the whole thing is pretty interesting, as is the growth of home-based charter and, in this case, public schools that appeal to parents who want to educate their children themselves but need or simply appreciate the additional (publicly-funded) support and resources these programs offer them. It just goes to show that the lines between different types of education are blurring, and, to the extent that means more choices for parents and kids, greater equity for parents who want non-traditional options, greater accountability to both parents and the public, and good outcomes for kids, I think it's terrific.

But one thing Coulson says really bothers me:

Though Evan O’Dorney is registered through a public school, a great many homeschoolers are not. And yet, somehow, they manage to get by pretty well. Why, it’s almost as if this “public accountability” thing isn’t all it’s cracked up to be!

That's pure speculation on his part. Neither he nor anyone else knows anything about how these kids, on the whole, are doing, because there's no uniform information available on them, no data on their performance, and in some places no one even knows who these kids are. Many homeschooling parents are doing laudable work in an incredibly difficult job. I've known several of them. But, in rare cases, homeschooling can also provide a hiding place for abusive and neglectful parents, with tragic results. That doesn't mean anyone can or should take away parents' right to homeschool, but it does mean we all have an interest in minimal oversight and basic, transparent information about how these kids are doing--and it's not just because of the public interest, but also for good homeschool parents themselves, who deserve not to be tarred by bad people who pretend to be homeschoolers, and who could use the results of transparent public information to make the case for what they're doing. That's what public accountability means: Knowing how kids are doing. And knowing is a good thing.

Oh, and one more thing: Since the Cato folks and I go back and forth a lot, and since they asked nicely, I've added them to our blog roll. And as an added bonus, the link will take you to a blog of only their education and child-related posts, so you won't have to wade through 9 bazillion Daniel J. Mitchell posts on how the flat tax--and not the fact that they're recovering from Communism--is responsible for the rapid growth of Eastern European economies. Groovy!

Is this news?

I’m a little frightened that it is considered newsworthy when a student gets into college without the help of SAT coaches, essay-writing experts, and hyper-vigilant parents. Isn’t that how most students get into college?

The really interesting story (hinted at in a couple of paragraphs toward the end) is whether the money spent on college coaching among upper-income families puts lower-income students at a significant disadvantage when it comes to getting into selective colleges. Basically, does all that high-priced college coaching really help students get into the top schools?

Daley wants more time

Chicago mayor Richard Daley argued again Tuesday for a longer school day as the city prepares to renegotiate its contract with teachers. He packed all the red-meat essentials into the appeal: he plead international competitiveness with kids in India and China, poked fun at the antiquated school calendar dictated by farming seasons, used city pride and compared Chicago to New York, and played emotional with an appeal for children’s safety.

What he didn’t do was talk directly about what the additional time means in schools. The research is actually quite mixed on the subject, mainly because adding more time often doesn’t address issues of quality. A 1998 study by the Consortium of Chicago School Research found that planned events like Halloween parades; standardized testing; assemblies; and dental, vision, and hearing screening cut a significant portion of time available for actual instruction. When added to teacher inefficiencies, almost half of a child’s time in school is wasted by poor time management. Daley’s plan of adding more quantity of time does nothing to alleviate issues of quality. And his efforts at year-round scheduling for urban schools make sense policy-wise, but it appears he’s pursuing those changes for financial reasons (and to great parental furor).

It should be interesting to watch the mayor’s pursuit of extended school days as he negotiates a new union contract for the city’s teachers. The current contract, signed in 2003 and set to expire at the end of the month, gave teachers four percent annual raises in exchange for 15 minutes more per school day. Daley seems to be pushing for something similar this time around. Next time he shoots from the hip, it’d be nice to see him aim at a pay scale rewarding teachers for boosting student achievement, serving as mentors, or volunteering to work at struggling schools, as they’re already implementing on a small scale.

Dispelling the Myth

Most of the conversation about findings from the new report from the Center on Education Policy--state test scores are up--will focus on the implications for No Child Left Behind. But the best way to interpret the findings, particularly as they relate to elementary math scores, is to see them as adding to the growing body of evidence refuting the unreformability myth that plagues public education.

Many people think the public schools can't be fixed. This widespread notion legitimizes agendas across the ideological spectrum. Anti-government conservatives use the idea to argue against spending more money on schools, or fixing funding disparities--sure, many poor kids go to schools that get less money than the suburbs, but no amount of money can help them, so what's the difference? Free market advocates use the allegedly unfixable nature of the current system to argue for vouchers, while human services-oriented people on the left will tell you that we've got address problems of income inequality, nutrition, and housing before we expect any more from the education system. The result is a strong--if inadvertant--left/right coalition that sucks a lot of the energy out of efforts to make schools better.

But trends in elementary math scores show that the unreformability idea simply isn't true.

The CEP report found the strongest gains on state test scores in this area, with improvement in 37 out 41 states studied. No one should be surprised--this is perfectly consistent with trends on the National Assessment of Education Progress. Most long-term educational achievement trends are depressingly slight, lending credence to the idea of an unreformable system. Not so with elementary math. The percent of 4th graders scoring as "Proficient" on NAEP almost tripled from 1990 to 2005, from 13% to 36%. The percent at or above the lower "Basic" level went from 50% to 80%.

The numbers for minority students, while lower overall, improved at an even faster rate. In 1990, 1% of black 4th graders were Proficient in math, and 18% were at Basic or above. By 2005, those percentages had jumped to 18% and 60%, respectively.

Why did improvement happen in this area? Because that's the area the schools were trying to improve. If you're going to boost achievement, it makes sense to start with the basic skills in the early grades, and build from there. That's what the first state accountability systems--and later, NCLB--tried to do, and lo and behold it appears to be working. Trends for reading aren't as good, but I think the reasons for that are also pretty clear: teaching and learning reading is in many ways more difficult and complicated for students and teachers alike, plus reading instruction remains hamstrung by bitter ideological divisions that are getting in the way of best practices being implemented in the classroom.

So we've still got work to do in math, and then we've got to turn to the other subjects, and then then middle school, high school, and beyond. Nobody said it would be easy. But nobody should be saying it can't be done.

A TFA for College Counseling?

I spent a few hours today at the Advisory Committee on Student Financial Assistance hearings, and overall was encouraged by some of the ideas, and the bipartisan support for simplifying the financial aid process. But, the second session I sat in on, which focused on the University of Virginia College Guide program, was especially interesting.

UVA’s College Guide program places recent UVA graduates in low-income Virginia communities, where they act as college counselors at a local high school. Prior to their placement, the ‘guides’ receive intense training in financial aid, and visit colleges across the state. The program, which is showing signs of success, is in its second year and is now expanding to ten other college sites.

Of course, the big question—which was asked by one of the advisory committee members—is whether the program can be scaled up. Sure, this program can help students in the handful of high schools it reaches, but what about the hundreds of high schools that remain in need of good, intense college counseling?

UVA’s program does a lot to address the quality side of the problem. Much like Teach for America, it relies on getting smart, motivated young people into these schools, where they can make an immediate impact on students. In fact, there was talk of ramping up the UVA program under a TFA-like model. But, even if it reached the scale of TFA, it still wouldn’t be able to address the quantity side of the problem, and reach all of the students who need it.

Instead, more fundamental problems of training and on-the-job expectations need to be addressed. A successful program like UVA’s will probably see the largest, national-level impacts by showing what can happen when students receive individual, high-quality counseling, and by focusing national attention on the need to improve the training of guidance counselors. The college counselor can be an important link in the high school-to-college pipeline, and hopefully the success of UVA’s program will shine the light on the need for both more quantity and more quality in college counseling.

Praxis II growth

Lost amid the news recently that Iowa’s growth model had been accepted by the Department of Education was the apparent mandate that all new teachers pass the Praxis II test in order to meet “highly qualified” status under No Child Left Behind.

I find it ironic that Iowa’s application for implementing a growth model was initially denied for two reasons: that the state did not have two years worth of data for analysis, and that it did not mandate a test for teachers. The news of the testing requirement came out last summer, but the application makes it clear the Department of Education used the chance at a growth model as leverage. It was right in front of everyone, in the second paragraph of the application (download it here).

Now Iowa will be one of 45 states using the Praxis II as a measure for teacher preparedness. Yet, I’m not convinced the evidence fully supports it as an adequate proxy for teacher quality. Dan Goldhaber, a University of Washington and Urban Institute researcher, recently published a report analyzing what exactly teacher testing tells us about teacher effectiveness. He finds some positive associations, but the policy implications are mild or mixed.

Read the article for his regression results, or click on his chart, at left, comparing Praxis II curriculum tests and teacher effectiveness in math. Goldhaber defines a minimum level of teacher quality as two standard deviations below the mean for teacher effectiveness. First, notice how much of the sample is centered pretty tightly around the mean. Next, look at area IX. These are the false positives: teachers who pass the Praxis II but who perform relatively poorly in the classroom. Compare that to areas I and IV. Those are false negatives: teachers who scored too low to qualify under today’s cut-off scores but are actually fairly effective teachers.

Last, look at the vertical lines. The left line represents North Carolina’s cut-off score from 1997-2000. The right line is Connecticut’s current one. Think of a state trying to determine an appropriate cut-off point deciding between these two lines. The teachers scoring in sections II, V, and VIII would no longer be eligible for certification with the higher level. Of this 7.4% reduction in teacher workforce, 7.2% were effective teachers under Goldhaber’s minimum standard. Neither of the cut scores is screening out large numbers of applications--even the higher Connecticut standard still passes almost 90% of test-takers

The point is that there are there are serious trade-offs for implementing teacher testing. The false positives and false negatives are troubling, as is the seeming arbitrariness of determining a cut score. I wish the Department of Education didn’t strong-arm states into implementing a policy with such questions.

Bee Careful...

Cato's Andrew Coulson says that the success of homeschooled students in the Scripps Howard National Spelling Bee shows market-based education is superior to public schooling. There are several obvious problems with this conclusion. Most obviously, making systemic arguments based on the examples of a few outliers is a fool's game. Spelling bee success, while laudable, tells us little about how children are faring on other indicators relevant to future life outcomes. Coulson also oversells the extent to which even a completely free market can customize learning to students' individual interests, competitive drives, and abilities. One of the reasons I support greater educational choice is the potential for greater diversity and customization, but market pressures will still exert some of the same homogenizing force on schools that school boards and regulation currently do. Obviously, homeschooling allows even greater customization, but homeschool families, when we account for the opportunity costs of parent time and other hidden costs, often invest much more in their children's education than even high-cost public and private schools.

But here's an interesting thing: Evan O'Dorney, the Bee's top finisher, who Coulson refers to as a "home schooler," is actually a student of Venture School, a public alternative school run by the San Ramon Valley Unified School District. While most of students' learning is independent and/or home-based, they attend the school in person and meet with the public school's teachers weekly, and also take state accountability assessments like other California public school students.

The point here isn't to play gotcha with Coulson: It's that innovative public schools, including both district-run and charter schools, can and are expanding choice and diversity within public education, and they're doing it with transparency and public accountability for their performance (something that remains shockingly lacking in both private education and too many public school systems). It's not enough, because of state policies that continue to restrict the supply of charter schools; a culture in too many school district and state education bureaucracies that's averse to choice; and the sheer fact that creating new, high-quality schools of choice, particularly for disadvantaged youngsters, is back-breaking work (and it's also something that has to happen to make meaningful, high-quality choice a reality for most students regardless of whether it's offered by public/charter or private schools). But there's tremendous untapped potential for increasing choice and diversity within public education, a strategy that I believe ultimately has far more promise than tax credits or vouchers.

Choice for the Chosen Ones

Matt Yglesias responds to the post below, saying:

There probably isn't a unique best way to handle this. Which is why it's fortunate that even if you restrict your attention to the relatively small set of elite colleges and universities there are still a whole bunch of 'em. It seems to me that there's a set of defensible approaches to the issue (including no requirements whatsoever) and it's good for some colleges to adopt each of them. I worry that pressure on each individual school to strike the "correct" balance leads ultimately to a kind of bland uniform compromise that serves no good purpose.

If you don't restrict your attention to a small set of elite colleges, this argument breaks down. The vast majority of college students don't have the opportunity to choose from among many or even some elite schools. They attend a local public university or community college. So the choices universities make matter--most undergrads don't have the luxury of voting with their feet, or wallets.

Moreover, there really isn't a lot of diversity out there on this issue, a point made by a commenter on Matt's blog. Even among private colleges and selective universities, there's not a normal distribution of decision-making ranging from laissez faire to tightly prescriptive. The elective system as it stands has been unchanged and widely adopted for at least a half-century now.

Moreover, the need for colleges to make some choices here doesn't mean they should all make the same choices, or even the same choices for all their students. Far from it. It would be great if their were some real intellectual diversity and competition around questions of the undergraduate core curriculum, among and within universities. What we have now is sameness via near-universal lack of any meaningful decisions. There's a huge, reasonable middle ground here between flexibility and guidance. Universities just aren't interested in going there, because it would mean contentious fights with the faculty, and who needs that kind of grief?

Blessed are the Tastemakers

I went shopping for indie rock CDs in Canada, and figured out what's wrong with higher education in America.

Specifically, I was in a CD store on Rue St. Denis in Montreal, where my lovely wife and I were on vacation over the holiday weekend. Since the Canadian good bands per capita ratio is, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, at least 50 times greater than the American ratio, I had high hopes upon entry. But it soon became clear that I was out of my league. I'm one of those people who's heard of all the good Canadian bands that everyone's heard of (the New Pornographers alone have made three of my 25 favorite albums of the decade) but none of the bands that nobody's heard of. This store seemed exclusively dedicated to the latter. There was an obligatory copy of Neon Bible for sale, but that was hardly the point.

After getting over being confronted with the limits of my coolness, I noticed some interesting things about the store itself. Even though it wasn't very big, they were only using about 20% of the available floorspace. Most of the CDs were on single row of tables in the middle. They could have easily fit 10 times as many CDs into the store if they had wanted to, but they obviously didn't, because this store wasn't selling access to music. They were selling taste.

Our younger readers may not believe this, but there was a time not so long ago when you could know that a CD (or LP) existed, want to buy it, have the money to buy, but be unable to buy it, simply because you couldn't find anyone to sell it to you. There was no Amazon or eBay or iTunes; if they didn't have it at the local Strawberrys or Tape World, you were out of luck. That's why a visit to someplace like Tower Records in New York City was always so great--it was a whole building full of music, where you'd spend hours flipping through the racks looking for the early Smiths album you were missing or--even better--the fabled "European import" of some Neil Young concert from the early 70s.

The point being, Tower records was selling access to stored information, in this case sonic information. Then the Internet came along and opened up that access to everyone, everywhere. Not surprisingly, Tower went bankrupt. But the store on Rue St. Denis is still open, because the challenge of the information age isn't in gaining access to information, it's making sense of it. It's not figuring out how to buy CDs, it's figuring out which CDs to buy--and which not to. Those are issue of judgement and taste, which only people can provide. The value of the Montreal CD store was as much in the albums that weren't on sale as in those that were. In that context, only using 20% of your floor space makes a lot of sense.

The store also had a single wall rack that took this principle to even further extremes. While the rack was built to hold CDs about 10 deep, only the first three rows were in use. They were devoted exclusively to the gods and giants--Hendrix, Bowie, Neil Young, the Stones, Iggy Pop, Johnny Cash, Leonard Cohen (this being Canada), the New York Dolls, etc. (Although this last selection strikes me as somewhat false; I think it was Chuck Klosterman who noted that while everyone can recite the one-paragraph version of the Dolls' seminal place in the late '70s NYC punk scene and thus life as we know it, no one other than self-serious rock critics ever listens to their music, owns their albums, or even knows what they sound like. The image and idea of the Dolls were infinitely more important than any music they actually made).

Moreover, the CD store wasn't just selling the standard "essentials" catalogue for each artist. Instead, there was a carefully selected combination of iconic works, under-appreciated studio albums (i.e. Axis: Bold as Love), obscure concerts, BBC session outtakes, etc. It was pretty cool.

What, you may ask, does this have to do with higher education?

Beyond the obvious point that Hendrix appreciation is a higher education in and of itself, this CD store embodied the promise--and in many cases, the failure--of the undergraduate curriculum at the contemporary American university.

In some ways, universities went through all this a long time ago. While recorded music wasn't widely available until the mid-20th century, recorded words have been in circulation since Guttenberg. But even until recently, universities were judged by their prowess in storing and providing access to information, embodied in statistics like the number of books and journal subscriptions held by the library. They're still judged by the percentage of professors with PhDs--information stored in human form.

But these assets are--and really, always were--essentially irrelevant to the needs of your average undergraduate. Those students don't need access--they need taste. In other words, they need the university to apprehend the vast array of human knowledge and make some very smart, considered judgments about where to start and where to focus in building an education. They need the equivalent of the CD rack of gods and giants for the realm of ideas instead of music.

Unfortunately, most big universities moved away from this kind of core curriculum a long time ago. Instead they set students loose in the equivalent of Tower Records, with instructions that amount to "Buy at least one CD from Rock/Pop, Jazz, Classical, Soul / R&B, Folk, and Country. Then pick one of those categories and buy 10 more CDs from that section, plus another 10 from that section or any others."

In fact, it's worse than that, because universities are more limited than Tower in terms of what they can offer, and their offerings tend to skew toward what the faculty want to teach, not what students need to learn. It's like the above scenario, except there are only 50 CDs in each section, selected by a socially maladjusted record store clerk who looks down on the clerks in charge of the other sections (who feel the same way about him) and who has decided that the 50 albums in Rock/Pop will include the complete Yngvie Malmsteen catalogue, but not Exile on Main Street.

This doesn't mean every student needs exactly the same core curriculum, like some kind of rote march from Revolver to Never Mind the Bollocks to Nevermind. But it does mean that universities need to do a better job of applying some degree of judgment in working with their students to decide what they need to learn. Otherwise, they may end up like Tower Records, while the little CD store up the street thrives in selling the intellectual taste that, more than anything, students really need.

Statistics with Meaning

NCES released their annual report this morning on the condition of education in the U.S. They took the opportunity to highlight high school coursetaking trends. More states are requiring more coursework for graduation, and overall, the average number of course credits completed by graduates increased from 21.7 in 1982 to 25.8 in 2004. More students are taking more math, science, and English courses with no declines in art or social studies, but to the detriment of study halls, vocational education, and career training. They’re taking more advanced courses as well. The number of students taking at least one AP exam doubled between 1997 and 2005.

Great news. Bust open the bubbly. Surely additional credit hours in the basics translates to higher test scores, right? That is the assumption behind the drive for the basics, no? Actually, the data suggests there was minor, incremental, or even no change. On NAEP in 1971 in reading, 17 year olds averaged a scale score of 285. On NAEP in 2004 in reading, 17 year olds averaged a scale score of 285. That’s not a typo. During the same time frame, math scores increased from 300 to 307, a 2.3% increase over 33 years. For some comparability, the coursetaking trend discussed above is a 19% increase since 1982. The numbers don’t quite compute.

When asked about this conundrum, Grover J. (Russ) Whitehurst, Director of the Institute of Education Sciences, admitted there was a “legitimate concern” that courses had been watered down. He labeled it a top priority to analyze what exactly these courses are teaching, and said data including course syllabi and the textbooks used in the classes exists, but has yet to be fully analyzed. That’s why I left “the condition of education 2007” feeling like I had been bombarded with statistics without much context.

Special Treatment for Private Loans, No Way Out for Students

Robert Shireman, President of The Institute for College Access and Success, is guest blogging over at New America Foundation—check out his post today on how private student loans (not the government-backed loans) can’t be eliminated in bankruptcy.

Bankruptcy allows people who have serious financial problems a chance to start over by relieving them of most of their debt and preventing creditors from pursuing lawsuits and garnishing wages. But these protections do not extend to private student loan debt. Private student loan debt is in a special category of debt, along with child support, taxes, criminal fines, and government-backed student loans, that can't be eliminated with bankruptcy.

How did private student loans end up in that category? Well, apparently no one is quite sure. But one thing is sure -- preventing students from discharging private student loans eliminates a valuable safety valve for students with the most serious financial problems.

New Quick-and-Edster

The post below comes from Chad Aldeman, who's spending the summer at Education Sector in our higher ed department. Chad is a University of Iowa alum, currently working on a graduate degree in public policy at William and Mary. Welcome!

Valuing Education

My colleague Abdul Kargbo just published a terrific article comparing his educational experiences as a child in Sierra Leone to his later high school and college experiences in the U.S. His analysis makes some provocative points for both educators and the broader community of folks interested in using education, social and economic reforms to enhance equity and social justice.

Taxing Priorities

An event Wednesday at the joint Urban- Brookings Tax Policy Center highlighted how unnecessarily complex and ineffective the federal student aid programs are, and offered simple solutions for progress.

It has been well-documented that the U.S. is beginning to fall behind in accessibility of college and completion of degrees. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development reports that we have been overtaken in the percentage of young people pursuing post-secondary degrees. By failing to target financial aid dollars to the students who need it most, our tax policy has been enabling this decline.

To fully understand how our system of tax credits and educational grants functions (or doesn’t, depending on your view), see Wednesday’s report. The duplicity, mutual exclusivity, and poor targeting of the Hope credit, the Lifetime Learning Credit, and the tuition and fees deduction leave families confused. Never mind the current scandals in the student loan industry. A 2005 GAO report found “suboptimal use of the postsecondary tax preferences” by students and families arose, at least in part, from their complexity.

Beyond complexity, there are serious fundamental problems with the system we have in place. Most glaringly, there is no linkage between tax credits and grants administered by the Department of Education. The tax credits are administered by the IRS; a student must fill out the laborious Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) to be eligible for Pell grants. Additionally, the tax credits are non-refundable, meaning those families with income below the threshold for paying net federal income taxes receive nothing, and the tax structure penalizes students who must work to pay for school.

These issues need to be ameliorated to regain our status as an international leader in higher education. We must target our financial aid programs better to the students who need them most. We need to stop penalizing working students. The students who must work their way through college are the same ones who we need to graduate. We should fix the issue of refundability. Tax credits with this restriction end up going to middle- and upper-class families, which is fine, but it doesn’t address the issue of affordability.

We should also make the FAFSA simpler. Susan Dynarski, a professor at Harvard University, showed an enlightening chart at the event comparing the FAFSA with the 1040, the 1040A, and the 1040EZ. The FAFSA had more questions and more pages and asked for more financial information than all of them (see a full explanation here). Legally, students cannot fill out the FAFSA until after January 1 of their senior year in high school, and they likely will not know their aid package until March or April. Imagine a situation where the aid was predictable based on income. Students and families could have a reasonable estimate of their financial aid before looking at colleges or applying. Better yet, imagine a system like that of the Social Security Administration, where the family of every child would receive a letter in the mail every year after birth letting them know how much financial aid they could expect. These steps would allow for greater transparency in the financial aid system, and target more directly the portion of the population least likely to attend college.

You're Fired (Not!)

This post by AFTie Ed last week was laugh-out-loud funny but also made a point well worth remembering:

Wait, you mean you can’t just snap your hand and get rid of non union employees you don’t like? Wow!

There are lots of reasons lousy and downright horrid people often don't get fired, and most of those reasons would remain even if there were no tenure or unions in public education.

Preschool in the Primaries: Score one for Senator Clinton

Campaigning in Florida today, Senator/Presidential Candidate Hillary Clinton put forward an ambitious policy proposal to move the U.S. towards universal preschool education. This is the first major education proposal rolled out by the Clinton campaign, and it's a good one. The plan would provide states with matching grants (starting at $5 billion federal investment and scaling up to $10 billion) to expand publicly-funded preschool programs, with a priority on low-income and English language learners, and requires state preschool programs to meet high quality standards as a condition of funding.

This strategy (which might look familiar) capitalizes on the incredible state-level momentum around preschool and early childhood education, while also creating a much needed incentive for laggard states to get in gear and addressing the two major shortcomings of state preschool programs right now: they serve too few children and are often too low in quality to have significant impacts on those they do serve.

So far, we haven't seen a lot on education from the candidates, in part because it's less a key priority for voters this year than Iraq, national security, or the economy, but also because it's pretty early and candidates are just beginning to put meat on formal policy proposals. I hope other campaigns will follow Clinton's lead in proposing bold action on early childhood: It's right on the merits and also plays well politically. And even though significant preschool programs are expensive, they're a steal next to some of the health and security expenditures on the table.
For example, New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, who officially joined the race today, has a strong record of leadership on early childhood in New Mexico, where he created the state's first statewide preschool program, and should translate that same advocacy for early learning into his presidential campaign.

Stay tuned her for more coverage and comment as the campaigns start putting more ink on the page on their education platforms.

Selling EdFund

Via New America Foundation, Schwarzenegger is considering selling California’s state guarantee agency, EdFund, to a private, potentially for-profit, loan company. In the federal loan program, guarantee agencies not only insure student loans, they also provide oversight by ensuring that lenders perform the required due diligence to collect loans and prevent defaults.

The Institute for College Access and Success put out a brief on the potential sale of EdFund back in 2005—a must read if you’re interested in this issue. In it, they describe why EdFund’s sale could be detrimental to California’s taxpayers.

I describe (shameless plug) in my recent report on the student loan industry how close ties between private, for-profit loan companies and guarantee agencies create a serious conflict of interest in the oversight of the federal loan program. With recent headlines on abuses within the industry, the Department of Education needs to keep a close eye on this exact kind of transaction.

Blame Foucault

Almost a month ago, I noted a bizzare post at the National Review Online's higher education blog laying blame for the Virginia Tech killings at the feet of the postmodern English department. Apparently, Foucault made him do it, because if you question conventional ways of thinking about truth and morality, people will naturally be driven to murderous rampages, which, as we all know, is why the Modern Language Association shut its doors 30 years ago. It simply couldn't manage the attrition.

My only mistake was in assuming this was just an example of ill-conceived, one-time riffing off the top of the new cycle. Apparently not. The discussion is still going strong over there, with this post approvingly quoting a recent column from--seriously, you can't make this up--Phyllis Schlafly, where she notes that while she has no idea what Cho actually studied, he "could have" read selections from various--horrors!--feminist courses.

Or, notes Schlafly, he could have taken a senior seminar titled "The Self-Justifying Criminal in Literature." Right! By all means, let's purge Macbeth from our institutions of higher learning, because if we keep teaching Shakespeare to these kids...oh, wait a minute....(John Miller gets this right).

Historic(al) NAEP Results

New NAEP history & civics results were released yesterday. To the seeming surprise of many, history scores were up across the board, while civics scores are up in grade 4 and flat elsewhere.

I'm guessing a lot of pre-written newspaper articles and blog posts beginning with some basic historical fact that most students don't know, followed by a general bemoaning of our collective ignorance of our shared past, heritage, etc., etc., are sitting in various electronic and physical dustbins this morning.

The New York Times still went with the overly-pessimistic "Students Gain Only Marginally on Test of U.S. History." That's real glass-is-half-emptyism, no?

The top-line policy context is, as always, NCLB. Along with the recent upswing in 4th grade NAEP science scores, these results seem to, if not puncture, at least fail to support the widely held notion that NCLB's focus on reading and math is creating collateral damage in other subjects, as teachers make time for the basics by cannibalizing subjects like history and science.

The consensus unverified speculative opinion is that because NCLB is helping more students with reading, they're learning more in other subjects, because it's awfully hard to learn if you can't read. Which makes perfect sense, that's why NCLB was designed to focus on core subjects in the first place. What's interesting is the begrudging, backhanded way this gets discussed. For example:

Peggy Altoff, president of the National Council for the Social Studies, suggested that the intensified reading instruction in primary grades might disguise a failure to teach much history and civics in fourth grade. Social studies test scores might be climbing, she said, because fourth-graders are more likely to understand simple questions that do not require much knowledge of history, such as interpreting pictures.

Or:

“It’s heartwarming that the test organizers have found positive things to say, but this report is not anything to break out the Champagne over,” said Theodore K. Rabb, a professor of history at Princeton who advocates devoting more classroom time to the subject.

Look, if it turns out that history and science instruction in this country have been fatally hamstrung by a more generalized lack of reading skills, then shouldn't advocates for those fields be first the barricades to support NCLB-like reforms, given the initially paradoxical yet increasingly plausible idea that increasing basic skill instruction at the expense of history and science may actually lead to more learning in those subjects? Or is this just all about using the public policy arena to jockey with the other disciplines for status?

Spring Awakening...

...a Broadway musical based on a 19th century German morality play set to rock music by Duncan Shiek, received 11 nominations for the 2007 Tony awards. Admittedly tenuous edu-connection: the main characters are high schools students and some of the scenes take place in school. I saw it last month and liked it a lot, although its R-Ratedness came as kind of a shock. Also, I almost bumped into Mandy Moore walking out of the show; she's taller than you'd think given that most Hollywood actresses / singers are practically munchkin-sized.

Back to education policy now.

Admissions Impossible Continued

From the New York Times, in an article titled "Ivy League Crunch Brings New Cachet to Next Tier," about the idea that ever-more-selective elite universities are driving students to apply to less-elite universities, which are as a result becoming more elite:

The logjam is the result of supply and demand. The number of students graduating from high school has been increasing, and the preoccupation with the top universities, once primarily a Northeastern phenomenon, has become a more national obsession. High-achieving students are also applying to more colleges than they used to, primarily because of uncertainty over where they will be admitted. Supply, however, has remained constant. Most of the sought-after universities have not expanded their freshman classes.

While the spread of the "Northeastern obsession" is probably an accurate characterization of the last 20 or 30 years of college admissions, I don't think things have changed much in recent years. Moreover, the idea that supply is constant simply isn't true. Per the U.S. Department of Education, here's the percent change in enrollments at Ivy League campuses (in descending order of U.S. News ranking) from 2003 to 2006:

Princeton: +6.1%
Harvard: + 3.0%
Yale: +1.6%
Penn: -1.6%
Columbia: +1.0%
Dartmouth: +0.4%
Cornell: +1.7%
Brown: +5.4%

Seven out eight have increased the number of enrollments, at rates comparable to the overall national increase in the number of high school graduates. As the Times itself reported($) just a couple of weeks ago, Yale is considering a signficant expansion.

The Education Tax Credit Endgame

Andrew Coulson tries again to convince us that education tax credit's aren't the same thing as public funding, and fails because he ignores my key points: Education Tax Credits have the same impact on individual and government budgets as would government expenditures for the same purpose, and unlike broad tax cuts, the linkage of tax credits to specific behaviors has a distorting impact on individual incentives. But at this point I'd imagine we're talking past each other, because we have fundamentally different perspectives on taxation.

There's a broader point worth making here, and it involves the seeming contradiction between Cato-types' recent preference for education tax credits and their more general stance on tax issues. Libertarians have traditionally argued that tax systems should be both simple (count the number of posts on their blog extolling the flat tax) and behavior-neutral, to avoid ingintroducing incentives that distort behavior and markets. Education Tax Credits violate both of those principles.

But what's particularly interesting is how education tax credits interact with the much more important libertarian contention that tax rates and tax revenues should be low. As tax rates are lowered, the value of non-refundable tax credits (and thus the amount of support education tax credits would generate for scholarships, or the amount of tuition they offset for parents) declines. Were both Coulson and his colleagues in Cato's tax policy shop to succeed, the ultimate result would be to virtually eliminate any public role in encouraging support for education. This is an important point: The ultimate aim of Coulson's views is not simply to destroy "public education" but to eliminate any social commitment to supporting children's education, leaving responsibility to fund children's schooling entirely in the hands of their parents and, for children with the bad judgement to be born to poor parents, the vagaries of individual charity.

Obviously, this is a view that is very far out of the mainstream not just of American culture but also of the school choice movement (of which I consider myself a part). So it's no wonder Cato's education policy team would prefer to talk about the benefits of choice for poor parents and for reducing social conflict. (To his credit, Coulson has written that he believes parent responsibility to pay for education is a core principle of his ideal education system.) But it's entirely disingenuous of them to present tax credits as a "third way" on school choice--they're actually a much more radical alternative, leading ultimately to an utter abdication of any social or communal responsibility or committment to children.

"and they look at us like we are demented..."

So says my former employer Kati Haycock in today's NYTimes article about a recent study from ACT documenting the lack of rigor in high school curricula. Kati's talking about her suggestion that some analysis might be in order. I've got nothing to add, other than to say that (A) there's every reason to believe things are as bad as the report says they are (look at remediation rates and learning outcomes in college), and (B) "and they look at us like we are demented" cries out to be the name of an emo band of some kind.

Aim First, Then Fire

John Edwards’ recently announced college plan gets it right on one of the big college affordability issues: the need for a simpler, straightforward financial aid application, and more support to students and their families when they are applying to college and figuring out how to afford it. Unfortunately, his tuition plan—which promises to pay the first year of college for 2 million students—doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Yes, a more generous and simplified grant program targeted to low-income students is needed in our federal financial aid system (although it isn’t clear if Edwards’ plan is targeted to low-income students). Experience shows that when students know that they can afford college, they are more likely to see college as an attainable goal, and therefore more likely to apply and enroll. Edwards’ plan, while it gives students that assurance their first year, does not give them any help in the years after that. Rather than offer this grant program for only one year to “any student who is willing to work hard and stay out of trouble,” I’d like to see the program targeted to students who need it most and offer them grant aid for their entire undergraduate careers.

It also contains vague, merit-based language – they have to take a ‘college prep’ curriculum and ‘stay out of trouble’. Experience with other grant programs with a merit component, like Georgia’s HOPE scholarship program, shows that the students who end up losing the money because of these criteria are generally the neediest students. They don’t always have the strong support systems needed to make sure they take all the required college prep classes and, be honest, would you have wanted your college financial aid dependent on ‘staying out of trouble’?

I worry that this program would end up leaving out the students who need the most help, and inadvertently shift grant aid to students who tend to receive more in other forms of financial aid, like tax credits, loans, and merit-based institutional aid.

Incomparable

Since there's obviously not much else going on in the world, the Post published its third front-page story today on the DC school reform plan plagiariasm "scandal," wherein Mayor Fenty produced a school reform plan partially copied from the school district in Charlotte, NC. Read about days one and two here and here. After the obligatory intro, the article begins--and for all intents and purposes, ends--here:

Although there is plenty to admire about Charlotte's schools, there is also a growing chorus of critics who question whether Charlotte's successes reach beyond an academic elite.

Charlotte's students overall perform well in elementary school, for instance, but those gains largely disappear by high school, where many arrive needing remedial work. In the latest round of statewide tests, the yawning achievement gap between black and white students widened.

It is also unclear how much Charlotte's experience applies to the District. Charlotte's sprawling system of 129,000 students has more than twice as many pupils as the District and includes suburban and rural schools. The District's enrollment has declined for more than a decade; Charlotte is growing by 5,000 students a year. In national tests, Charlotte's fourth- and eighth-graders topped the list for urban schools in reading and math, while the District brought up the rear.

These differences raise questions in Washington about whether Charlotte's performance is broad enough or relevant enough for the Fenty administration to follow.

Let me get this straight.

An alleged "growing chorus of critics," who are named nowhere in this article, are concerned that the Fenty administration, in trying to reform a school district that is bleeding enrollment and has rock-bottom test scores, has erred in copying parts of the school reform plan of another district with growing enrollment and much higher test scores. Their concerns are based on the fact that the two districts are in some ways dissimilar. How are they dissimilar? The other district has growing enrollment and much higher test scores!

Alternatively, copying is a bad idea because Charlotte, like DC, hasn't solved some of public education's most vexing problems, like reforming high schools and closing the achievement gap.

In other words, to the extent that Charlotte is like the District, copying was wrong. To the extent that Charlotte is different from the District, copying was wrong. This is what happens when you start with a "scandal" and then fill in the blanks afterwards.

Meanwhile, the Post still hasn't asked or answered the only questions that matter: Are the reforms copied from Charlotte any good? Are they likely to help District students learn?

Coming soon to the front page, no doubt.

New Voices for the Summer

Please welcome Michael Dobson, whose first Quick and Ed post appears below. Dobson, who just completed his first year of law school at George Washington University, will be interning with Education Sector this summer, researching legal issues around public school choice. As the D.C. weather continues to get hotter and muggier, look out for most posts from him and other summer ES interns.

The Greatest Good

As a first-day intern at Education Sector with minimal background experience in the field of education policy, yesterday’s Center for American Progress/Century Foundation forum on “The Future of School Integration” offered me an interesting glimpse into the current state of debate about school integration. Most of the panelists, including John Brittain (a veteran civil rights attorney), Susan Eaton (research director at the Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race and Justice at Harvard Law School whose recently published book served as the fulcrum for the panel discussion), Richard Kahlenberg (author and Senior Fellow at the Century Foundation), and Cynthia Brown (Director of Education Policy at the Center for American Progress), agreed that, while racial integration remains a important goal, the current legal climate requires a shift of focus and tactics away from race to emphasize the need for socioeconomic integration.

The dissenter from this consensus was Rick Hess, a resident scholar and director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, who, in his accustomed role as devil’s advocate, argued that parents in middle-class schools will resist socio-economic integration efforts—not because they’re heartless racists or elitists, but simply because efforts to bring more low-income children into their schools conflict with what middle-class parents view as their interests in a zero-sum game.

The concerns Hess suggested these parents might have—that problems typically associated with majority low-income schools (disruptive behavior in the classroom, violence, negative peer influence, etc.) will simply travel with the kids, or that the presence of children whose previous, underperforming schools have not prepared them to perform at grade level will damage instruction for other children—are valid. And, for the most part, the other panelists failed to address what I conider the strongest argument against the concerns voiced by Mr. Hess: the utilitarian benefit of socioeconomic integration.

Studies suggest that children from low-income families perform better in majority middle-class schools than their counterparts in majority low-income schools, with no noticeable detriment to the middle-class students they are placed among. If socioeconomic integration produces the same results at scale, then the ultimate result of more socioeconomic integration programs would be a better educated workforce, a more robust economy, less intergenerational poverty, and an overall stronger America. Obviously, there’s no guarantee of such results, but the potential returns for the nation as a whole seem to outweigh the narrow concerns of self-interested parents— particularly since studies also suggest little negative impact to middle-class children from socioeconomic integration.

Regardless of appeals to utilitarian principles, however, many middle-class parents will still mount political opposition to socioeconomic integration plans for the reasons Hess mentioned. So what’s the solution? Well, as Mr. Hess himself pointed out, the first step is to not demonize those parents for feeling the way they do. Their concerns, from their perspective, are valid, and an approach dismissive of those concerns will only lead to acrimony. Their fears must be allayed, and as another panelist, Mr. Khalenberg, pointed out, the only way to do that is with assurances that a strict disciplinary scheme will be sewn into any integration strategy. Parents being asked to accept a socioeconomic integration plan have to know that their children’s education will not be undermined by repeat student offenders gifted with an unlimited number of chances.

Those parents also have to know that children coming from underperforming schools and dysfunctional homes will not simply be dropped into middle-class schools and left to their own devices. A support structure of counselors and engaged teachers and administrators should also be in place within schools to lend guidance and encouragement, which would not only benefit the children coming from low-income schools, but their middle-income classmates as well. Children from middle-income families would also reap the benefits of the greater influx of tax dollars coming into their schools behind their new classmates, money that could be used to refurbish facilities like gyms and libraries.

All of this takes a certain degree of political will to invest the necessary resources and engage in the oversight needed to make sure the job is done right. Undoubtedly many parents would still have doubts, and some might even still oppose the plans, but many would probably see the effort being expended and appreciate it enough to at least give it a chance.

Flying Blind

Richard Vedder makes a good point about the information deficit in higher education. He thinks the president of Ohio University--where he teaches--should be fired. But in making his case, he's got a problem:

Yet the President has his supporters. And, frankly, some of the critical information that would be useful in evaluating the state of the university under his leadership is simply unavailable. Do students graduate knowing more than when they entered? Are graduates of the university leading fulfilling lives five years after attending the school? Do new graduates feel their education was a good investment? And has the answers regarding any of these questions changed materially over the years the current president has run the institution? Honestly, I don't know the answers to these questions. Nor do the Trustees who hire the leaders of our institutions --they operate with far less information than is desirable. That is another reason why the Spellings Commission calls for more assessment and transparency in university operations is important.

Most people in higher education seem to have deep misgivings about the Spellings Commission and its call for more assessment, transparency, and accountability for the nation's colleges and universities. These are not illegitimate concerns; accountability done badly is worse than none at all.

But these conversations hardly ever fully account for the true costs of the information deficit Vedder describes. Without solid information, we're left with opinions, personal relationships, institutional power, and ideology. This is true not just of evaluating presidents but a whole host of other decisions in higher education, everything from where students choose to enroll to how professors are hired and trained to how universities are organized and funded. Each of these processes would benefit from more information about institutional quality, but none of them have it, and they're worse as a result.

DC Plagiarism "Scandal" Part III : The Conclusion (I Hope)

On the third day, the Post proved that the editorial / news firewall is alive and well, running a lead editorial condemning recently-elected Maryland Senator Ben Cardin for putting a "hold" on the "all-important restructuring of the District's public schools" because of an unrelated dispute with the District. They concluded:

The House, recognizing the true state of emergency at the District's schools, quickly approved the bill transferring authority to the mayor. But until the law is enacted, the schools are in a kind of limbo. Mr. Fenty is constrained in what he can do. Each day of delay forestalls the start of any improvement. Mr. Cardin says he doesn't intend to imperil congressional approval of the schools takeover. Actions, though, speak louder than words.

So true! The only way Senator Cardin could have done more damage to the school takeover plan yesterday is if he'd run a headline in a major American newspaper criticizing the mayor and the plan for an essentially bogus reason, something like, let's see, "Fenty Regrets Copied Proposal: School Takeover May Be In Doubt."

Unfortunately, this will all fit neatly into the pre-written Fenty meta-narrative. Plagiarism is generally a youthful offense, after all, the refuge of striving students in over their heads. I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that in another month or so, as the "first six months of the Fenty administration" retrospectives start to roll in, you'll read something like this:

"After a landslide victory where he won every precinct in the city, Mayor Fenty remains popular with District residents, who praise his energy and can-do spirit. But observers are increasingly questioning whether the youthful mayor, in his rush to implement a broad-reaching agenda, has overextended himself. In May, the mayor was embarrassed by revelations that many parts of his much-touted school reform plan were copied wholesale from a similar plan in Charlotte, North Carolina. Said one long-time District activist, who asked to remain anonymous, 'This scandal is a sign of things to come.'"

This is complete nonsense, but that won't stop it from becoming conventional wisdom. That's why politicians pay consultants huge amounts of money to build the frame of reference through which they're seen--one it's established, there's not a lot you can do to change it, and it affects the way people see not just the politicians themselves, but everything around them.

Excellent Questions About Preschool

Richard Colvin asks some good questions in response to recent reports about poor quality in Boston's preschool program.

The first is about bachelor's degree requirements and the relative value of bachelor's degrees compared to specific training and experience in early education. It's really tempting to think that if we just required all preschool teachers to have bachelor's degrees (or bachelor's degrees with early childhood certification), we could ensure high quality. But two of the biggest and best studies of state preschool implementation, the SWEEP and Multi-state studies, didn't find bachelor's degrees were a reliable predictor of, teacher behaviors known to support students' early learning, and children's outcomes. This shouldn't be shocking when we consider that virtually all K-12 teachers have a bachelor's degree and no one believes that this makes all K-12 teachers highly-effective. As in K-12, teacher quality is probably the most important program factor for determining preschool quality and impacts, and it's clear that many public and private preschool programs do not have sufficiently high-quality teachers right now. But the bachelor's degree, and even certification, is just too blunt an instrument.

Second, Richard asks if states are jeopardizing quality by expanding their preschool programs too fast. This is a reasonable concern, and I think it's worth a broader discussion. Some of the problems with Head Start quality have their roots in the effort to expand the program very rapidly in its early years to build political support (which the program was successful in gaining). It would be a shame for states to replicate that error in their preschool programs.