PBS Merrow Report on NCLB

Last night, PBS aired the first of three special reports on NCLB. John Merrow interviewed Education Secretary Spellings, Chester Finn of Fordham and ES's own Kevin Carey on how some school districts are getting around NCLB requirements. Read the transcript or download audio file here. More from Kevin on this in his Hot Air report.

School Time Update

Massachusetts is still leading the way with extended school time plans. Governor Patrick recently doubled funding for Massachusetts' Expanded Learning Time (ELT) Initiative in the state budget. And Mass2020 and the Rennie Center for Education Research and Policy have created a joint national venture to support extending learning time in schools across the country. They're also looking for someone excellent to help lead this effort as their National Network Director- contact if you're interested.

Oklahoma State Superintendent Sandy Garrett just called for a longer Oklahoma school year in her State of Education speech. The Sooner state only has 175 days a year of public schooling,five days less than the 180 national average so they really are playing catch up in this case. Still, it's enough to spark debate. There are folks who can't stand the idea of school in the summertime (i'm guessing they either had really great times at Camp White Pine or really bad times in summer school). So despite moves to extend learning, there are still plenty of legislative moves to "save summer".

Dare To Compare

I was on the NCES website recently and found myself lured away from the "what's new" research links to the bright colorful bubbly font of the NCES Kids Zone. It's full of educational games and graph-making capabilities that I'm pretty sure no kids are actually using. Are they? Let me know if you know kids or classrooms that are using this site.

Anyway, there's a "dare to compare" tab that lets you try out questions from international tests to see if you really are smarter than 4th graders. You can try out NAEP questions, CivEd questions, or TIMSS- trends in math and science study- questions, the latter of which I find funny since getting kids to try out the TIMSS questions in the Kids Zone is the closest we'll get this time around to actually participating in the next TIMSS. Evidently, participation is expensive (and all the other cool countries aren't doing it either) so we dropped out this time. I find that amusing too- in a depressing sort of way- since we don't have a problem with testing and are otherwise so committed to Creating Opportunities to Meaningfully Promote Excellence in Technology, Education and Science.

Don't get me wrong- I really enjoyed "daring to compare" in the Kids Zone. But if competing is so important now, as it was then and then, we should spend more time collecting and analyzing comparative data.

Happy August!

I'm leaving for vacation on Sunday, so if you see a post from me here in the 10 days after that, it means that (A) Wi-fi access in the jungles of Costa Rica is suprisingly good, and (B) I need to get a life.

Not-So-Brainy Babies

A study out of the University of Washington indicates that Baby Einstein videos—despite Presidential accolades—might actually hurt children’s language development. Researchers found that the more videos infants watched, the fewer vocabulary words they knew.

Former Senior Policy Analyst Sara Mead was on this story back in April - check out her report on what the evidence does—and does not—say about brain development from ages zero to three.

That Can't Be a Good Thing

Washington insiders will doubtless be chatting for days about Matthew Scully's tell-all takedown($) of his former colleague, lionized Bush speechwriter Michael Gerson, in the new Atlantic Monthly. Seriously, you'd have to be saint or one of the 2.6% of Americans who still approve of the President to not a least kind of enjoy it. But I found this to be disquieting:

Even on the dreariest days—slogging through a tax, education, or Chamber of Commerce speech—Mike and John and I endlessly entertained one another, with all the running jokes and gags you’d expect three guys in a room to develop. Education speeches in particular—with their endlessly complicated programs and slightly puffed-up theories, none of which we could ever explain quite to the satisfaction of our policy people—were always good for a laugh. As John observed in late 2003, around draft 20 in the typically chaotic revising of an education speech, “We’ve taken the country to war with less hassle than this.”

Education is really so boring and complicated that it can't be made interesting by the spin-meisters and wordsmiths in the Bush Administration?!! I think that's really depressing.

Pre-K Notes

Wall Street Journal online covers pre-k, just as Harvard Press releases a new book on the same subject by Berkeley professor and Education Sector nonresident senior fellow David Kirp. Check out Sara Mead's review of The Sandbox Investment in last month's American Prospect. Sara, we miss you here in the policy pod.

But How Do You Really Feel About It? Poll Results from EdNext

Check out the 2007 Education Next survey on what American's think about public schools here. Press release from Harvard's Kennedy school here. In all, it includes another look at how the public feels about national standards, accountability, choice, teacher pay and the reauthorization of NCLB. Compare to ETS poll 2007 and Scripps Howard poll 2006.

Gadfly to the Disenfranchised: Drop Dead

Per Edwize, James Forman Jr. rightly takes the Gadfly to task for the "illogical, bizzare, and offensive" notion that District of Columbia residents don't deserve representation in Congress because our current elected non-voting representative, Eleanor Holmes Norton, opposes a Congressionally-mandated school voucher program opposed by most DC residents. Nothing to add, other than to note that the original legislation authorizing the DC voucher program passed Congress by one vote -- the one vote that we, the only capital city residents of any democracy in the world who are unrepresented in the national legislature, don't have.

Dispatch from Virgin Fest 2007

Education, as we all know, is about the young people. Accordingly, every summer we at The Quick and The ED leave the air-conditioned comforts of our DC offices and go forth into the sweltering heat to take the pulse of America's youth. Last year we went to Lollapalooza in Chicago. This year our destination was closer to home: Virgin Festival 2007, at Baltimore's Pimlico Race Track. Our motto: We sweat and pay $9.00 for beer so you don't have to.

Day One

A rocky start. We're late out of the house and traffic is snarled for miles on I-695. By the time we get onto the track, we've completely missed Fountains of Wayne. What genius put them in the noon slot? If someone's got to play at such an un-rock-and-roll hour, how about someone who sucks, like Incubus? But my spirits are lifted as we emerge from the tunnel onto the infield and "I Want You To Want Me" blasts from the nearby North Stage. Despite the fact that I own no Cheap Trick albums, I'm actually looking forward to the set quite a bit. It's funny--there were surely lots of other bands just as famous back in the day, but only the Trick are here now. Fashions come and go, but great pop hooks last forever.

We wander to the other end of the track, past the de riguer collection of booths manned by One Campaign-type advocacy groups and signs telling us not to feel guilty about the inevitable mountains of garbage the festival will produce, because all the plastic cups are made from corn (really). A Scottish band called--naturally--The Fratellis is up on the South Stage. They're pretty good; I buy the CD at the Virgin Megastore, which is in a mini-tent. When the band talks to the crown between songs, their accents border on Trainspotting-level incomprehensibility, but when they sing, you wouldn't know if they were from America, the U.K., or elsewhere. This is a common phenomenon--why? Does the act of singing naturally flatten out the accent, or does everyone unconsciously mimic the vocalizations of rock bands that came before?

We walk back to see Amy Winehouse, who, defying her media image, appears on-time and relatively sober. Although she seems distracted up close on the big TV screens, she sounds great; highlights include a cover of the Zutons' "Valerie" and the inevitable set-closing "Rehab." We skip Incubus (see above re: sucking) and grab lunch. There's a dance tent off to the side where the audience trends younger and more...frenzied. You can walk across to track and sit in the grandstand, which we do, because by mid-afternoon it is, according to Ad-Rock, "hot as a mofo in this mofo." Truer words, Ad! He and the other Beastie Boys turn in a strong set that more than lives up to expectations; "Sabotage" lets me check one off my mental list of 100 songs to see performed live before I die.

Evening falls and we get close to the stage for The Police. I am, as they used to say, stoked. Synchronicity was the first album I ever bought, during the summer between 7th and 8th grades, and I'd hole up in my room with the headphones on listening to Side 2 (albums had sides then) over and over again. Sadly, the band broke up soon after, so while I've been to several Sting concerts with the attendant lute solos and free-form jazz explorations, I've never seen the original lineup until now. They open strong with "Message in a Bottle," then wander a little, before snapping into a groove about halfway through "Every Little Thing She Does is Magic" and never looking back. "De Do Do Do De Da Da Da" turns out to be much better live than the studio version, and the rest is, well, pretty awesome. Seen through the soft light of nostalgia, sure, but so what? That's what youthful memories are for.

Day Two

Parking is easier today, and we arrive in plenty of time for Regina Spektor. She's one of those artists whose music is very tied up with her persona--in this case, the smart, casually hip girl from the city who'd probably be in med school at Columbia right now if she hadn't taken to her piano lessons instead. I don't know if that's actually who she is or not, but the image worked for me and the other few thousand people who gather by the stage in the early afternoon sun. She walks out smiling, demure and unaccompanied, and sings a capella before moving to the piano for an hour of soulful, intricate numbers including the deceptively catchy "Fidelity." It's a great way to start the day.

Spoon have no persona at all, but make up for it with good set heavy with songs from Gimme Fiction and their excellent new album Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. Highlights: "Don't Make Me a Target," plus "Small Stakes" from Kill the Moonlight. We skip Panic! At the Disco and take a nap by the South Stage as Bad Brains plays with the kind of serenity that only decades as a legend of hardcore punk / reggae fusion can give you. Then we walk back past some kind of professional wrestling exhibition that is either hysterical or disturbing, depending on whether it is or is not performance art.

Next up, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs. Two takeaways here. First, there aren't very many real rock stars in the world, but Karen O is one of them. She comes onstage looking like a cross between Chrissie Hynde and Cher circa the 1986 Oscars, prowling, prancing, grinning and growling in a way that absolutely bleeds charisma. Second, there are two kinds of live acts. Most--Spoon is a good example--sound more or less like they do recorded, just marginally looser, longer, and louder. A few, however, are transformed in concert to the point that they sound like an entirely different--and much better--band. The Yeah Yeahs Yeahs are the second kind.

Interpol has neither a persona nor a rock star, but they do have an image--stylish, modern, unemotional--that matches their music to an obviously calculated but nonetheless effective degree. That said, it's been a long weekend and their songs start to sound the same. We're on the right side of the stage in front of this ridiculously huge fenced-in "VIP area" that is never more than 10 percent full, since most people are apparently smart enough not to pay extra for the privilege of looking like a zoo animal with more money than sense. It starts to rain, just enough to tamp down the heat, and soon The Smashing Pumpkins hit the stage for the festival's final show.

Billy Corgan has apparently purchased a Stepford bass player to replace D'arcy, but the Pumpkins still rock out to large degree. In the long run, every band, regardless of greatness, reaches a point where it has made all the music it will make that really matters. Corgan knows this, and he's clearly unwilling to go gently into the rock and roll good night of reunion tours and greatest hits sets. So for every stellar version of an older song like "Zero" there was a rushed-through "Bullet With Butterfly Wings" or "the next single" from the new album, Zeitgest. It made for an uneven finish to long, fun weekend--but good for him anyway. Better to fight obsolescence and lose than never fight at all.

All in all, another good research trip -- I'm thinking Austin City Limits next year.

The UnTruth Comes Out

The NEA would like to be seen as an intellectually serious contributor to the discussion about No Child Left Behind, and at the level of individual members and state and local affiliates, this is often quite true. But then you see this (via Matt Yglesias), which looks like something a glassy-eyed Lyndon LaRouche supporter would try to shove in your hands as you're coming up off the Metro, and you wonder why anyone should bother listening to a word the national NEA has to say. The "Halliburton-ization" of the public schools? Neil Bush? Shouldn't the grassy knoll be on there somewhere?

However, reading this wasn't a total loss. I looked at the fine print at the bottom and saw --the NEA has an NCLB blog! Who knew? It's called NCLB - It's Time for a Change!, and features the following hilarious /sad disclaimer:

NCLB - It’s Time for a Change! is a blog written and maintained by a group of writers employed by the National Education Association. They are responsible for the content — what you read on this blog does not necessarily reflect the position or policy of the National Education Association or its affiliates.

In other words, "We've bought and paid for this blog, but won't take responsibility for anything the anonymous writers have to say." Not that I entirely blame them, when the posts tend to begin along these lines:

Joel Packer, NEA Education Policy and Practice director, represented NEA and showed off his legendary encyclopedia knowledge of the law. Packer expertly fielded questions on a host of topics...

So as near as I can tell, there are only three differences between this and the AFT's NCLB Blog:

1) The AFT stands behind what it writes.
2) The people from the AFT who write the posts actually sign their names.
3) Posts at the AFT blog often have something worthwhile to say.

Other than that, pretty similar.

Professor, Teach Thyself

There's an excellent article$ by Jeffrey Brainard in the Chronicle of Higher Education this week about the way science is taught in most research universities. Basically, people have known for a long time--decades or more--that some ways of teaching science are better than others. When classes are designed in way that requires a lot of inter-student collaboration, hands-on learning, and regular feedback from the faculty, students learn more. When students are stuck in the back of a lecture hall passively listening someone drone through notes they've used for years, they learn less.

But many research universities have been slow to adopt best practices in teaching, if they adopt them at all? Why? Because research universities aren't designed to care about teaching. All the incentives--financial, professional, and institutional--are for (surprise) research. So even as Congress is pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into financial aid programs designed to induce students to major in science, universities refuse to give those students the kind of education that the universities themselves have determined students need. For example:

Innovators...are limited in what they can achieve, says Susan B. Millar, a senior scientist in the School of Education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who studies teaching in science and engineering. "I don't know that you can take these kinds of programs to scale when the unit of change is the individual," she says. "You can only do that for so long, until you get tired or retire. And then it doesn't spread."

Top administrators are loath to force change on departments. "I'm very reluctant to define successful and unsuccessful ways in which this can be done," says Patrick V. Farrell, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at Madison, where some of the new teaching methods were developed. "I don't want to say, 'Lectures don't work, but group learning does.' In some contexts that's true; in other contexts, it's not. I'm looking for effectiveness in helping students learn."

I'm not sure which is worse: the anti-empiricism, or the total disregard for students? The only reason the University of Wisconsin provost "doesn't want to say" what the education researchers at the University of Wisconsin know to be true is that would mean having an argument with the faculty that he'd rather not have. One of the unfortunate side effects of giving college professors academic freedom when it comes to their speech and scholarship--and those are undeniably good things--is that the concept has been extended to their teaching to a degree that produces absurd reasoning like this. Obviously, college professors should be given a lot of lattitude to innovate and teach, but to say that the subject essentially can't even be discussed is nuts, and bad for students.

But hey, I could be wrong. If someone sends evidence that UW-Madison is actually evaluating its faculty for their "effectiveness in helping students learn" in any kind of reliable, empirical, public way--not just student evaluations, but something tied to real evidence of learning--I'd be more than happy to retract everything above.

To Teach or Not to Teach

New report (pdf) released by NCES that describes which college grads decide to teach, which don't, and why. It's a statistical report, using data from the 1993-2003 Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study, "B&B 93/03", so it can be long and boring unless you like that kind of thing. Here's the quick and easy if you don't:

1. Teachers stay put more than we think. Teachers have relatively low attrition rates and are actually leaving the profession at lower rates than their peers in other professions. So caution the characterization of teachers as a bunch of fickle ship-jumpers. Or at least no more so than the rest of us.

2. When they leave, it's mostly for family reasons or to go into an entirely different field. Not surprisingly, it's the ladies who leave for family and the men who leave for business and engineering, often for pay reasons. See #s 4 & 5.

3. Teachers don't test well (but probably raise their hands a lot in class). College entrance exam scores are lower for those who go into teaching. Sadly, there's actually an inverse relationship between these exam scores and the likelihood for teaching (16 percent of grads with the lowest scores went on to teach vs. 6 percent of those with the highest scores). That said, the same pattern is not true for grades. As college grade point average increases, grads are more likely to go on to become teachers. So, are they smarter or not? Depends on how you use testing and GPA to measure smarts.

4. Teachers like teaching. Ninety-three percent said they were satisfied overall with their profession and 90 percent said they'd choose it all over again. But they do have complaints- the richest ones are heard in the teacher's lounge but the report summarizes more politely: Nearly half (48 percent for each) said they're dissatisfied w/pay, parent support, and student motivation.

5. Still more women in teaching- and don't expect this to change. Women earned most of the bachelor degrees in education (79 percent vs. 21 percent for men) so of course more female grads ended up as teachers. Women may have more options now in the workforce than ever before, but the work-life balance issue is going to ensure that we keep coming in droves to teaching. More on the gender differences in the NCES report but also in this AAUW report on the pay gap for college grads from a few months ago *.

Education Week's got more easy to read info about the NCES report here.

* Disc: I was the dir of research at aauw when we designed the study. It can't escape its advocacy but it's good research, conducted by some of the same folks who did the NCES report.

Grad Rate Follies

A new report from Daria Hall at the Education Trust, my former employer (BTW, what's the statute of limitations on that in the blogosophere, vis a vis disclosure? It'll be two years in September, I'm thinking that's the limit. If you agree / disagree, email)--covered here in the NYTimes--makes a point that's not made often enough, namely that the No Child Left Behind Act's provisions related to high school graduation rates are more or less a complete joke. In nearby Virginia, for example, the goal is 57 percent. What? How does a number like that even get chosen? Was there a conversation when some state education official said, "Hey, how about fifty-eight percent?" and somone else said, "C'mon now, these people aren't miracle workers!"

Update: Turns out Virginia upped its target to 61 percent earlier this year, which I think moves the state from an F to a D-minus. Also, more disclosure: Education Sector co-director Andy Rotherham is a member of the Virginia Board of Education. He voted against this target, saying it was too low.

Cracks in the NCLB Foundation

In a speech earlier this week, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), Chairman of the House Education and Labor Committee, staked out his vision for the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act. Much of the subsequent discussion focused on the Miller's proposal for what are commonly called "multiple measures." He said:

Our legislation will continue to place strong emphasis on reading and math skills. But it will allow states to use more than their reading and math test results to determine how well schools and students are doing.

This is one of those issues where a few words here or there can outweigh the hundreds of pages that comprise the rest of the law. It's so important that a group of NCLB supporters sent Miller a letter a few weeks ago (link via This Week in Education) saying, essentially, "Please, please don't screw this up."

As this gets discussed in the coming weeks, months, and possibly years, it's important to understand what's at stake. Nearly all the back-and-forth will be about what gets measured. But equally important--perhaps more important--is who does the measuring.

The multiple measures idea stems from one the most common--and correct--criticisms of NCLB: schools are rated almost exclusively based on state assessments in reading and math. This system can be inaccurate and reductive--not only are we limited to one way of measurement, via standardized tests, but we're also limited in what's measured. Subjects like art, music, social studies, etc. are left out, along with the non-academic skills and character traits that schools are charged with teaching students. By expanding school measures beyond once-a-year tests, the thinking goes, we can get a broader, more nuanced, more accurate sense of what schools are really doing for their students.

A worthy goal, to be sure. But here's the problem: in many multiple measure scenarios, it's the schools themselves that will be doing the measuring. And that undermines one of the great virtues of NCLB: the separation of those being held accountable from the process by which they're judged. That independence is based on a rock-solid understanding of human nature: people can't be wholly accountable to themselves.

The people here at Education Sector who handle accounting, for example, are scrupulously honest. Nonetheless, we're required to have our books audited by an outside accounting firm every year. Nobody disputes the necessity of this, just like nobody disagrees with having line judges call serves in and out at Wimbledon. When the stakes are high--as with money, championship tennis, and the educational lives of the nation's schoolchildren--measurement must be independent.

Local measurement will also inevitably create huge inconsistency and variance among schools and districts. People are already confounded by the fact that there are essentially 50 versions of NCLB, one for each state. What's the law going to look like if there's one version for each of the nation's 14,000 school districts, or 90,000 schools? A lot like having no accountability at all.

These are the reasons that we're stuck, for the moment, with standardized tests, their many flaws and limitations notwithstanding. And it's why this single issue has the potential to make various cliched dam-related metaphors come to life. Crack open NCLB with misguided multiple measures, and the entire vast enterprise will collapse.

Fish-y Logic on Higher Ed

In his Times column($) today, Stanley Fish begins by making a perfectly reasonable observation:

Whenever I’m asked, and sometimes even before I’m asked, I advise parents of college-age children to not send their sons and daughters to private schools, but to send them to public institutions, at least if there are any good ones in their state. I say this for the obvious reason. The tuition/fee difference between a good private school and a good state school can be as much as $40,000, and, aside from the dubious coin of prestige, it’s hard to see what you would be buying.

before going on to discuss the state of higher education in Florida, saying some things that aren't true, and then contradicting himself:

Florida is not even in the second tier of university systems in this country. Florida does not have a single campus that measures up to the best schools in the systems of Virginia, Wisconsin and Georgia, nevermind first-tier states like California, Michigan and North Carolina...Five straight years of steadily increased funding, tuition raises and high-profile faculty hires would send a message that something really serious is happening. Ten more years of the same, and it might actually happen.

Virginia doesn't really have a university "system" per se; it has the University of Virginia and Virginia Tech and a bunch of other loosely governed individual campuses. The University of Florida is in the bottom half of the "First Tier" of national university according to U.S. News, just like the University of Wisconsin-Madison, UNC-Chapel Hill, and Georgia Tech (UVA just makes the top half with a tie for #24).

And if public universities really do offer a similar quality of education at a fraction of the cost of privates, why does Fish want them to become...more like privates? Hike tuition, raise more money, and then spend it on a bunch of faculty who made their reputations as scholars and researchers, not teachers? That's exactly the kind of status-obsessed, students-be-damned behavior that public universities should be avoiding.

Update: Sherman Dorn, who works at a public university in Florida, comments here.

Clintonian Education Policy

In Nashville yesterday and today for the annual DLC National Conversation. Interesting fact: like most conferences, you get a canvas tote bag full of stuff when you register. Unlike most conferences, the bag includes a 100 ml. bottle of Jack Daniels. Which is kind of a good one in principle, except 100 ml. is too big to bring back through airport security, which means you either have to drink it alone in your hotel room a la David Hasselhoff or during the conference itself, which, even in a meeting of elected officials, might be kind of rude.

President Clinton gave a great speech at lunch, offering a full-throated defense of his legacy and of the continued relevance of the DLC. That said, his education comments were short and disappointing--his only recommendation for NCLB is essentially, "fewer tests, but based on national standards," which would make it impossible to implement the growth model reforms that seemingly everyone supports these days.

Paying More for More Valuable Degrees

The NYTimes has an article on an interesting higher ed policy issue: whether colleges should charge more for some degrees than others. Most don't, but there's any argument to be made that this is unfair: some degrees--like engineering--are both more valuable in the job market and more expensive to provide in terms of equipment and labor. By contrast, an education degree is both less lucrative and less costly. Why should teachers implicitly subsidize the education of engineers who suck up more college resources and then turn around and make twice as much money out of school? The flip side argument is that we don't want short-term costs to influence long-term life decisions (particularly since people tend to be quite econonmically irrational about such things), or to warp college curricula around limited considerations of economic value.

A key question to answer, then, is the extent to which student choices of major are influenced by variations in price. If demand for given majors is relatively inelastic, then colleges could probably differentiate up to a point without significant negative side effects and thus make pricing more efficient and fair. On this point, the Times reports:

At the University of Kansas, which started charging different prices in the early 1990s, there are signs that the higher cost of majoring in certain subjects is affecting the choices of poorer students.

“We are seeing at this point purely anecdotal evidence,” said Richard W. Lariviere, provost and executive vice chancellor at the university. “The price sensitivity of poor students is causing them to forgo majoring, for example, in business or engineering, and rather sticking with something like history.”

This is maddening. The program has been in place for 15 years and all they have is "purely anecdotal" evidence? How about some actual evidence? Universities know precisely what decisions their students make in terms of selecting courses and majors. For most of them, they have detailed financial records. At an institution the size of the University of Kansas, they have tens of thousands of cases to study. Isn't there an economist or PhD candidate on staff who could answer this question? One of the remarkable--and disquieting--things about universities is how they so infrequently apply their tremendous capacities of analysis and inquiry to themselves.

Miserly Colleges

Lynne Munson of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity turns in a thought-provoking op-ed at Inside Higher Ed today. She takes colleges to task for hoarding vast sums of money in endowments while still charging students high tuition rates:

Stanford University spends $76 million on undergraduate financial aid, a sum that sounds generous but amounts to a mere 0.5 percent of the value of its endowment. The university spends just 4 percent of its $14 billion endowment toward operating expenses. If the 5 percent payout rule required Stanford to spend another 1 percent of its endowment, and that money was directed toward financial aid, students would enjoy $211 million in additional support. That is precisely the cost of letting all 6,600 Stanford undergraduates attend tuition-free.

With all the talk in Congress about how much money loan companies (including “non-profit” loan companies) are making off of student loans, it might be worth also taking a look at how colleges spend their endowments. As Munson points out, taxpayers are helping to fund the federal grants and subsidized loans that allow many students to afford the high tuitions at these institutions (and allow these institutions to charge such high tuitions). Meanwhile, donors receive tax breaks for adding to these large endowments. It’s worth asking what the public is really getting out of this deal.

The Onion, Predictably, Sees the Truth

From a story in this week's Onion (Interestingly, not on-line yet, another reason to be psyched they're publishing the print edition in DC now):

New Theories Suggest Kennedy Wasn't Shot - A controversial new book about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has raised questions not about the role of a lone gunman or a conspiracy of shooters, but about whether the late president was even shot at all.
While the book, Outside the Crosshair, does not dispute the fact that a massive portion of Kennedy's skull was separated from his head during the 1963 Dallas visit, it maintains that the president suffered fatal explosive-cranial trauma through means completely unrelated to gunshots.
"Certain extreme force was involved in this tragic death," said Dr. Horace Musashi, the book's author and professor of computer science at Mount Union College in Alliance, OH. However...Musashi favors an explanation known as the single-massive-spike-in-blood pressure-theory. After 11 years of painstaking research, Musashi uncovered testimony from anonymous eyewitnesses who claimed that unopened packets of duck sauce and soy sauce were hastily removed from Air Force One..."

The crucial detail is that Musashi is a college professor. Despite the democratization of access to information and expertise, it's still the case that society bestows considerable--albeit undifferentiated--intellectual status on university faculty. As long you have a PhD in something and faculty appointment somewhere, you get a significant added presumption of knowing what the heck you're talking about--if even if what you're talking about has nothing whatsoever to do with your training and field of study.

Not that this is altogether a bad thing, it's good to maintain academic standards and credentials in era where simple assertion of expertise is easier than ever before.

But it has the negative byproduct of lending undue credence to Harvard psychologists who believe in alien abduction, BYU physics professors promoting wacky 9/11 conspiracy theories , University of Minnesota philosophers who see sinister government plots behind the Kennedy assassination and 9/11 and the death of Paul Wellstone, etc. etc.

Churchillian Speech

Ward Churchill was fired by the University of Colorado yesterday because he said that the maintenance workers and secretaries who were burned and buried alive in the World Trade Center on 9/11 were a bunch of Nazis who had it coming. The official reason for the firing was academic misconduct, which has the ACLU in a snit. Churchill's speech, they said was "protected by the First Amendment and cannot serve as a legal basis for any adverse employment action."

I'm a card-carrying member of the ACLU and close to a free speech absolutist, but in this case I don't buy it.

For various reasons including limited resources and the need to maintain an atmosphere of collegiality and trust, universities can't go around conducting in-depth investigations into the scholarly conduct of every professor on campus. But they certainly have the right to do so on a case-by-base basis, and it seems more than fair to assume that a person so deranged that he can't see the distinction between the perpetrators and victims of monstrous crimes against humanity might also be a less-than-scrupulous scholar. Sure enough, that's what they found.

The ACLU seems to be saying that liars and plagiarists can innoculate themselves against the consequences of their actions if they can manage to offend enough people to bring scorn and infamy upon themselves and the university that employs them. Plus, who thinks that if Churchill had, for example, been publicly espousing the principles of Nazism--rather than simply ascribing them to innocent victims of terrorism--he'd still have a job? Of course not, because he never would have gotten his job in the first place. Nobody is saying Ward Churchill should be arrested for saying what he said, just that no decent institution of higher education should pay him to do so.

All Competition is Not the Same

Ezra Klein critiques a recent WSJ op-ed$ about income inequality and the return on human capital from Cato's Brink Lindsey, which concludes:

Those interested in reducing meaningful economic inequality would thus be well advised to focus on education reform. And forget about adding new layers of bureaucracy and top-down controls. Real improvements will come from challenging the moribund state-school monopoly with greater competition.

Ezra says:

Responding to that sort of despair by trying to break the teacher's unions is truly an astonishingly narrow and inadequate solution

I don't put any stock in Cato's voucher-mania, but it's a mistake to assume that every call for more competition in education, challenging the monopoly, etc., is necessarily about breaking teachers unions. For an example, look no further than today's front-page New York Times story about former Democratic fundraiser and Rock the Vote founder Steve Barr, who's challenging urban school districts by opening new charter schools with unionized teachers. Barr says, "If the district doesn’t work with me, I’ll compete with them and take their kids."

The point being, while one could probably accurately surmise that Lindsey wouldn't mind breaking teachers unions, its perfectly possible to accomplish what he advocated for in a pro-union context. Not all attempts to introduce competition into the education system mask a dastardly anti-labor agenda. Plus, given that most serious education observers--left and right--agree that many school systems suffer from moribund bureaucracies in need of reform, implicitly putting unions on the wrong side of that argument isn't doing them any favors.

Doing the Math on Borrower Benefits

As the financial aid legislation in both the House and Senate have moved forward over the past couple of weeks, lobbyists for loan companies have been going full throttle trying to derail efforts to cut subsidies to lenders. They are even using the new legislation to intimidate borrowers into consolidating their loans—my mailbox has been inundated with letters from loan companies threatening rising student loan costs because of the proposed legislation (there have been plenty more since this).*

A recent advertisement in The Politico by the “Campaign to Reform Student Loans” highlights one of their most popular arguments, that the proposed subsidy cuts will “wipe out the interest rate discounts currently available to borrowers.” And then they give some scary calculations: a student with a $20,000 loan will pay an additional $5,000 over 20 years as a result of this legislation, and a student with a $60,000 loan will pay an additional $38,000 over 30 years.

And this is true. A very, very small percent of students would end up paying more on their loan over the course of repayment without these borrower benefits. But, according to FinAid.org—a great source of independent information on financial aid—less than 1 in 29 borrowers will see the full discount from these borrower benefits.

The most common benefits are a .25 percent discount on the interest rate for automatic debit payments and a 2 percent interest rate discount for 48 on-time payments. But less than 15 percent of students sign up for the direct debit, and less than 10 percent qualify for the on-time payment discount for the entirety of their loan. It is not easy to make 48 consecutive on-time payments, and if a borrower misses just one, he or she loses the benefit for the life of the loan.

FinAid writes:

A review of lender SEC filings reveals that the combined cost of all the discounts, including the direct debit and prompt payment discounts, averaged less than 10 basis points (0.10%) over the past decade. That's less than 5% of the nominal "full" 2.25% discount and less than $50 per borrower on average.

Using FinAid’s handy loan discount analyzer, a student with a $20,000 loan that gets the direct debit discount and has a 1 in 36 chance of being late with a payment (a much more realistic expectation) could expect to save $592. For the student with $60,000 in loans, it would be around $1,700. A much lower benefit than loan company lobbyists advertise.

Beyond the mathematics of loan discounts, it’s worthwhile to think about the lenders’ argument: that they should receive more in subsidies so that they can then pass some of the money along to some students as discounts. In essence, lenders are asking for a smaller cut to their subsidies because they want to act as middlemen for this money.

But wouldn’t it make more sense for Congress to just give this money directly to students, either in the form of interest rate cuts or increased grant aid?

* Lenders are interested in getting students to consolidate before the legislation takes effect because, if this legislation works like past changes to subsidy rates, lenders will be able to collect the old, higher subsidy rate for the life of the loan on any loans consolidated before the new subsidy rate takes effect.

Maverick Leads Charge

For those of you intrigued by today's front-page NYTimes story on Steve Barr, the guys who's shaking things up out in L.A., Education Sector was on the story a year ago with this report.

Compacts & Contracts: A Colorado Case

The National Governor’s Association released a report over the weekend calling on states to implement compacts with colleges and universities. It’s a growing trend in higher education, and it deserves a closer look.

The most innovative higher education funding scheme comes from Colorado. In 2005, the state began allocating higher education money based on a student-stipend program called the College Opportunity Fund. Money follows in-state undergraduates to their chosen institution. Students complete a short application in order to be eligible, and the stipend is good for only 145 credits. All stipends to public institutions are equal, and privates get about half that amount. Every institution that opts to participate must agree to a performance contract with the state. The state may purchase fee-for-service contracts for graduate schools, rural education, economic development services, and dual enrollment programs.

Advocates argued the stipend program would increase college attendance for traditionally underserved populations. They argued these students and families suffered more from lack of information about the affordability of higher education than from actual financial limitations. Publicizing the stipend as a use-or-lose system would theoretically address this problem. Accountability schemes in higher education struggle with the principal-agent problem--who exactly is the “client,” students or the state? By setting all stipends equal and allocating funding entirely based on student enrollment, the state has effectively said students are.

National CrossTalk published an in-depth look on Colorado’s stipend program last winter, and they found some things working and some not: the 145 credit limit appeared to be pressuring students to complete college quicker, colleges had almost immediately raised tuition levels to compensate for years of inadequate funding, and the fee-for-service measure had been implemented in such a way that state funding levels remained almost exactly constant. Most important to the program’s success, although current students failed to comprehend the reason for the change, students as young as eighth grade are already registering for the stipends.

Choice requires information, and there will not be symmetry in who has it. Part of the state’s role, then, should be to inform the consumers of their options, or mandate the producers (universities) provide enough data for real choices. That doesn’t appear to be happening. Another gaping hole in this design is that it is entirely state-based. Institutions have no incentive to attract international scholars or high-caliber students from other states, because they’ll receive $0 for enrolling these “clients.”

Before switching to performance contracts with individual institutions, Colorado had a performance-based funding mechanism in place. About 2% of the total general funds in FY2001 were allocated to the governing boards based on performance results. Moving away from this funding scheme to a contractual system means the accountability mechanism has shifted from (admittedly limited) financial consequences to legal ones. The devil is in the details, and we’ll have to wait and see how enforceable the four-year contracts turn out to be.

Contracts are not a panacea. More states should experiment with various accountability tools to better manage this country’s higher education institutions. Kudos to the NGA for featuring various state attempts to do so.

The Box Theory

I am a product of the blue box theory of American History. Flipping through my 10th grade U.S. history text book, it is impossible to ignore the takeover of the special interest box: little blue boxes, outlined and shaded, each one condensing minority perspectives and contributions into half a page or less: Women in the civil war, Immigrants and the railroad.

This weekend, the blue box theory struck again.

The Israeli Education ministry announced Sunday that Israel’s war of independence will now be referred to as a “catastrophe” for the state’s Arab population. A New York Times article notes:

Ms. Fenig, who is the national supervisor of homeland, society and citizenship studies, said, “Pedagogically, it is not right to hide facts and ignore Arab sensitivities if we want to live together and build something in common.”

Though applaud Ms. Fenig’s commitment to marginalized views, I cannot help but wonder if this is an impossible task. Can history text books ever succeeded in incorporating all sides into a coherent narrative, or will minority history never encroach further than boxes?

Flexing Our Way Towards Reform?

Just like during NCLB’s creation, the issue of local control over federal dollars is brimming to the surface again. While far less sexy than highly effective teachers or growth models, flexibility may be another looming battle in the fight over if/when/how to reauthorize NCLB. Recently, Representative Howard “Buck” McKeon introduced the State and Local Flexibility Improvement Act, designed to give state and local officials more authority over federal dollars. In describing the legislation, McKeon used the ever-popular federal-government-ruins-everything refrain in advocating “removing Washington constraints on federal dollars.” The bill proposes expanding flexibility authority for states and local school districts to use federal funding in ways that better match their needs.

Sound familiar? NCLB had four new provisions that provide for this exact type of flexibility. What’s happened since? A new series of reports from the U.S. Department of Education looks at participation rates in each program and how and why districts use (and don’t use) the various provisions.* The newest Education Sector Chart You Can Trust analyzes how these provisions have been used and why participation has been lower than expected.

Interestingly, rural districts have the highest participation rates. These small districts get very small allocations under some Title programs and pooling those funds for other purposes makes a lot of sense for them. Other districts are not quite as enthused with flexibility. Only 16% of districts report using Transferability, a flexibility provision available to all districts. And even fewer districts—one to be exact—used the new Local-Flex program, which was intended to provide even more flexibility to districts.

The reasons that participation isn’t higher vary-and some have to do with uneven implementation and a lack of information. Some districts also reported being frustrated with the small amount of money eligible to transfer—a problem that McKeon’s proposal aims to address. However, a sizeable percent of districts (44%) that didn’t use the program reported choosing not to participate because they already had sufficient existing flexibility in how to use funds.

None of this is to suggest that flexibility isn’t a good idea that could use some tweaking, or that local control isn’t important. It does provide a caution however, that like many education catch-phrases, just “removing Washington,” doesn’t necessarily lead to the kind of dramatic change we all want.

*Full disclosure: I recently left the Department of Education, where I served as the contracting officer’s representative on the contract that produced this evaluation, but an independent contractor conducted all analyses and wrote these reports.

How Colleges Short-Change Women

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, USA Today editorial writer Richard Whitmire, author of a forthcoming book about how K-12 schools supposedly short-change boys, looks at the issue of gender discrimination in college admissions. Says($) Whitmire:

In desperate attempts to keep their campuses from swinging hugely female, as far more women than men apply to college these days, straight-A girls are told to look elsewhere, while B-average boys get the fat envelope.

As a typical example, Whitmire notes that "the admittance rate for men at the College of William and Mary was an average of 12 percentage points higher than the rate for women from 1997 to 2006." To which the dean of admissions there responds, "Even women who enroll ... expect to see men on campus. It's not the College of Mary and Mary."

Whitmire wants to know why nobody is filing a big splashy lawsuit about this. The main reason seems to be the phenomenon that the William and Mary guy alludes to--compared to other admissions preferences, the student/group interests here are conflicted.

A given minority student applying to college presumably has two congruent interests: (1) to increase their chances of admission, and (2) to increase the chances that other minorities will be admitted. Both interests lead to the same policy: affirmative action.

Men and women, by contrast, have two opposing interests: (1) to increase their chances of admission, and (2) to decrease the chances that other members of their gender will be admitted. In other words, give admissions preference to me (or in the case of women, don't discriminate against me), but once you've done that, don't apply the same policy to anyone else, because I'd rather have more of the other gender and not too many of my own.

That said, admissions preferences for men are clearly a terrible, selfish policy. The original (and still best) justification for affirmative action was to help students who, because of their race, had fewer opportunities to attend a good K-12 school and had historically suffered discrimination in society at large. For boys, the former is highly debatable--there are good reasons to think the so-called "boys crisis" in K-12 education is overblown--and the latter could obviously not be less true.

In the end, the biggest losers here are women from the middle and lower parts of the socioeconomic spectrum. This is why:

The overall pool of college students is, for the purposes of this discussion, fixed at 57 percent women, 43 percent men. Individual college policies don't change that in the aggregate, because everyone can go to college somewhere. So gender-based admissions policies don't solve the gender imbalance, they just redistribute it downward to colleges that don't have selective admissions, and thus aren't in a position to manipulate their gender mix.

As a result, women who attend selective colleges suffer a reduced chance of getting into the college of their choice, but enjoy a more balanced gender distribution. Men who attend selective colleges get a leg up on admissions, and get to hang out with smarter women who are more fun to talk to and will earn more if they marry them someday. For men, it's win-win; for women, it's win-lose.

The lose-losers are women who attend non-selective colleges and universities, women who are more likely to be first-generation, mid-to-low income students. They have to put up with an even more maldistributed gender mix than they would otherwise experience, plus the men they go to school with are less smart than they would otherwise be.

So if you're a women attending Regional State University and you're wondering why there aren't very many guys around, and the ones who are around are a bunch of drooling idiots, blame the admissions director at William and Mary.

Attention Researchers

At Teacher Magazine, Jessica Shyu ask her readers to weigh in on what makes teachers stay. Good question. After that, we should figure out what makes them leave. Then we need to know what makes people join or not join the profession in the first place.

Of course, we already have plenty of theories, conjectures, and conventional wisdom about these questions. We do not have nearly enough useful research. It's time to stop asking for anecdotes and start asking for data.

For example, which of the following would be more attractive to chemistry majors with at least a 3.2 GPA: A $3000 raise for teachers or a career ladder program that uses the same money to provide opportunities for advancement and promotion. I don't know the answer, but a simple study could tell us. A more clever study could tell us the approximate dollar value of a career ladder program to any subset of the student population we're interested in. And it could do the same for other policies that affect whether or not people want to teach.

Researchers have already done surveys and analyzed the labor market, but these inquiries have been limited, and many are now outdated. With a current and comprehensive study, we could reshape recruitment and retention to improve teacher quality. JPMorgan and McKinsey have the data. It’s time for schools to have it too.

Q&A on Special Education and NCLB

Sherman Dorn raises some great questions about special education and NCLB in response to my CYCT on the topic.* While Dorn thinks that my answers to his questions are all an unqualified ‘yes’, I’d say they’re more of a ‘yes, but…’:

• Do schools use special education as an excuse not to educate students identified as having disabilities?

Here we agree that the answer is yes. And I think we’d also agree that it is important to qualify this answer. Often, teachers and principals don’t have the tools to adequately address learning problems or disabilities. While I think holding schools accountable for teaching students with disabilities to grade-level standards is one part of the equation for improving the success of special education students, another, very important part, is ensuring that teachers and principals are well-trained and have the resources they need to carry out this responsibility.

• Should schools be pushed to educate students with disabilities better?

We also agree on the answer to this question: yes. And—as I said above—accountability is an important part of this push. But another part will be equipping teachers and schools to meet the challenge, or else we can push all we want, but won’t get very far.

• Can students with disabilities reach the proficiency standard identified by states?

As I say in the report, for the majority of students enrolled in special education—around 80 percent—the answer is yes. These students are identified with disabilities that do not preclude them from reaching grade-level standards. In these cases, I do think that the ultimate goal should be grade level achievement. For the minority of special education students for whom grade-level achievement may not be possible—the ones with the most severe disabilities—alternate methods are needed to hold schools accountable for their achievement.

Under NCLB, we already allow states to use alternate methods for approximately 30 percent of special education students. Ten percent are assessed with alternate assessments, these are intended for students with severe cognitive disabilities. Twenty percent are assessed under ‘modified standards’, these are intended for students who are not able to achieve grade-level standard within the typical timeframe, but do not have severe cognitive disabilities.

As Dorn notes at the end of his post, the limits on the number of students who can be assessed with alternate methods needs to be based on research on the proportion of students for whom this is appropriate. The Commission on No Child Left Behind did some research on this and found that the current limit for testing students with ‘modified standards’ is too high. And so, while we may need to improve the methods we use to assess this group of students, I’m not convinced that the overall percent of students that are assessed with alternate methods needs to be increased.

Dorn offers an idea for an alternate method of testing special education students—students can take a lower grade-level assessment so long as they increase a grade-level each year. This will still hold schools accountable for increasing student achievement from one year to the next, but also recognizes that some students are not yet at grade level. This could work for the students currently covered under ‘alternate assessments’ and ‘modified standards’, but for the majority of special education students, I still think that the ultimate goal needs to be grade-level achievement. Growth models hold some potential for addressing this—they can be used to hold schools accountable for improving student achievement while also recognizing the huge differences in where students start.

• Is NCLB the best current tool to prod states and schools to educate students with disabilities better?

My answer to this is a yes, with a big BUT. The key word is current. Right now, NCLB is the best accountability measure students with disabilities have had since IDEA. BUT, it is certainly not the best measure they will ever have, at least I hope not. While I applaud NCLB’s focus on achievement gaps and disaggregating data, I also think there’s a lot to do to improve the quality of assessments, add more nuance and accuracy to identifying the ‘in need of improvement’ schools, and improve the consistency and accuracy of state standards. This is hard work that will require resources, good policymaking, and solid research, but I don’t think that rolling back accountability is the way to get to an improved NCLB.

*Sherman, thanks for the name correction!

Lonestar Leadership: New Education Chair in Texas

Texas Governor Rick Perry named a new chairman to the State Board of Education yesterday. Perry chose Don McLeroy, a staunch conservative dentist known for his strong views on curriculum: yes to abstinence, no to evolution.

I could tell you more about McLeroy, but you should take a look at his surprisingly candid website. In case you’re short on time, or in case a wise bureaucrat gently suggests that McLeroy take down the site, I’ll describe some highlights.

In an essay on standards and state tests, McLeroy dismisses state authority in education, the same authority he will now oversee. “Not only has the rise of the State led to mediocrity in our schools, it has provided a base for monopolistic educational ideas, views and fads to gain a dogmatic hold over our entire State. It has stifled diversity, a trait that is so necessary in all fields of endeavor.”

In a barely-coherent polemic on evolution, McLeroy lists 117 arguments against Darwin’s theory. Don’t ask me what he means by #115, “[Evolution] moves to fast to see; moves to slow to see.”

In “The Gift of Medievil Christendom to the World,” McLeroy argues that “Freedom… is never found in the ancient world... It is never found in the rest of the modern world. Freedom is unique to the areas of the world that have been touched by Christianity.”

As Chairman, McLeroy will have several important duties. In coming years, the nation’s second most populous state will create new curriculum standards in English, reading, writing, and science. McLeroy will appoint committes and chairs while setting the agenda for each board meeting. His role may be especially important due to the split composition of the board: seven firm social conservatives and eight moderate republicans and democrats.

Update: The Dallas Morning News editorial staff gives its take on the appointment.

Terrible PhD Completion Rates

Richard Vedder is at least two standard deviations more conservative than I am on most issues, but his higher education blog is a consistent source of sharp commentary and outside-the-box thinking. Yesterday he discussed abolishing tuition at Harvard; today's topic is the shocking state of PhD completion:

A half century ago, it was common for persons to get their Ph.D. in four or five years and some, including myself, did it in under three years (at age 24 yet). Today, a majority of those entering graduate programs do not have their degrees in six years, and in the humanities, a majority of Ph.D. candidates have not completed their degree in TEN years!!! Of those who DO get their humanities Ph.D. within 10 years, a majority have not received the degree after six years. The dropout rates are about as high as for undergraduate education.

Dropout rates in undergraduate education are pretty bad, especially at non-elite public universities, where dropout rates of 60 percent or more are not uncommon, particularly for low-income and minority students. That large numbers of people who have already proven to be college material, by virtue of completing a bachelor's degree, are spending years of their lives in the futile pursuit of doctorate strikes me as a massive waste of resources all around.

Plus, 10 years? That's insane. Part of me would love to figure out a way to get an advanced degree in a really interesting, complicated area. Then Vedder says:

Part of the problem is that dissertation preparation has gotten out of hand. I have sat on Ph.D. committees where professors force students to do months of additional work of trivial worth in order to fine tune and extend some esoteric thought that the professor fancies.

and I think: Nope, there's no way I could deal with that. Life is short, and there's work to do.

More on Special Education and NCLB

As promised, ES has a new Chart You Can Trust on NCLB accountability and special education students.

As this great article in EdWeek discusses, some lawmakers and education groups (such as the National Education Association and National School Boards Association) are calling for more flexibility when assessing special education students. Specifically, they’d like to give students assessments deemed appropriate by the students’ Individual Education Plan team (the group responsible for deciding on a special education student's education plan). But advocates for special education students argue that allowing this kind of flexibility will lower achievement standards and turn back the clock on accountability for these students.

I argue that the majority of special education students can meet the same, grade-level standards as regular education students, and holding them to different standards could be detrimental. Click here for more on this issue.

Happens to the Best of Us

Per CNN:

The longtime chairman of the Roger Williams University board admitted Monday to using the N-word during a board meeting, saying it "kind of slipped out."...Papitto, who has given the school at least $7 million and whose name is on the only law school in Rhode Island, said he had never used the term before.

"The first time I heard it was on television or rap music or something," he told WPRO.

That's understandable. As we all know, the N-word is bandied about like nobody's business on network television these days. And since Papitto, like most 80-year old white men, probably listens to rap music two or three hours per day, one can understand how it could slip out in a casual conversation about the difficulty of finding minorities to sit on the university board. It must be tough, having grown up in '30 and '40s--when, of course, racial slurs were unknown--only to endure a coarsened 21st century culture to which he inevitably, and forgiveably, succumbed.

Investing in Harvard Graduates (for real)

Richard Vedder offers some fairly radical ideas about how higher education financial aid could be different, particularly at elite schools:

Rich schools like Harvard, Yale and Princeton should let students in for free in exchange for a share of student earnings beyond subsistence for X number of years after graduation. In other words, Harvard should buy equity in the "human capital" that it allegedly creates, include it as an asset in its endowment, and there should be no student loans. Alternatively, students should be given the option of paying tuition now with no future obligation. However, I see no reason why Harvard, Yale and Princeton charge any tuition at all given that they earn at the minimum $75,000 per student in sustainable endowment income annually. There is a fairly decent case that can be made that, given the huge value of tax exempt status to them, these should not be allowed to charge tuition, although I would not go that far.

I probably would go that far. Barring some kind of catastrophic collapse of the nation's financial markets, it seems likely that at some point in the next 10 - 20 years, at least one university--probably Harvard--will reach the theoretical limit of the size of a non-profit university's endowment beyond which some combination of internal and external pressure makes charging tuition untenable.

On the other point, I wonder how much a sufficiently-sized group of Ivy League freshmen could raise per person on the open market if they securitized a portion of their future collective income over a given time period -- a percentage big enough to be worth buying but small enough to avoid massive disincentives to earn? Is that even possible, legally?

EduCap: A For-Profit Company in Non-Profit Clothing

The next time someone says you can't get rich working in non-profits, just show them the story on EduCap in today’s Washington Post. EduCap is a “non-profit” private student loan company, whose CEO receives $1 million in annual compensation. This story makes you rethink what it means to be a non-profit, and it also underlines how much money—and how little oversight—is in the whole student financial aid game.

The article details (although it still left me a little confused…) the corporate structure of EduCap—a nonprofit lending company that owns both the Catherine B. Reynolds Foundation and Loan to Learn, it’s lending brand.

Despite it’s non-profit status, which exempts it from paying federal income taxes, EduCap reaps enough profits to buy a Gulfstream IV Jet, to take its board on retreats to the Bahamas , and to offer to fly financial aid officers and their spouses to a Carribean island for an all-expense paid conference (which did not happen after intense media scrutiny).

The CEO claims that EduCap helps students by offering private loans to bridge the gap between federal loans and the cost of college. But I have to wonder how offering a high-risk student (probably low-income, and with little or poor credit history) a large amount of loan money at a high interest rate (18 percent in some cases) is helpful. It’s more likely to put these students at risk of bankruptcy or a lifetime of student loan debt.

If EduCap really wanted to help these students, it would, like a true non-profit, cut down on the perks and the million-dollar CEO salary and use its profits to offer at-risk students grants and/or loans at very low interest rates. If it doesn’t want to do this, then it should call itself what it is—a for-profit private loan company.

*An illustrated example of how non-profits in the student loan industry get rich: StudentLoanFollies.pdf

Monopolizing the Mantle of Public Education

Via Joanne Jacobs:

New Detroit Public Schools superintendent Connie Calloway said Thursday that she does not support charter schools, and she intends to present ideas that will help draw students back to the struggling school system.

"Charter schools mean suicide for public schools," said Calloway during her first board meeting, causing the crowd at Kettering High School to erupt in applause.

Calloway said Detroit Public Schools must get to the root of the persistent enrollment loss plaguing the 116,000-student district.

She identified two immediate reasons: ongoing disputes the district faces and the desire of parents to have safe, clean and orderly schools.

There are legitimate arguments to be had about charter schools--how they should be expanded, funded, governed, and held accountable. Some charter schools are great, others aren't, and no one should think they're an educational cure-all. But surely the most dishonest trope among charter opponents is the deliberate attempt to put charter schools outside the boundaries of "public" education.

Charter schools are public schools. They're governed and funded by the public and they enroll public students, free of charge. I've been in a bunch of charter schools here in DC--again, some great, some not--and I would defy anyone to walk in the front door and explain what makes them less than fully public.

Perhaps new superintendant Calloway understands this better than she lets on, with her odd "suicide" construction. Suicide comes from within, after all, so the question is what essentially public element of schooling is at risk here--something other than an inability to provide "safe, clean, and orderly" schools, I assume? If so, what is it? If not, what are we losing that's worth mourning for?

(Student) Slip 'n Slide®

I’ve been around long enough to understand that one new study shouldn’t be cause for celebration. But yesterday when EdWeek wrote up a study on summer learning deficits [subscription required for the full article] that carried tremendous policy implications, I was a little taken aback when I got to this section:

Daria L. Hall, the assistant director for K-12 policy development for the Washington-based Education Trust, a nonprofit group that promotes high academic standards for disadvantaged children, worries that the findings will take policymakers’ focus off the need to close a different kind of gap.

“We can’t allow the problems of the out-of school inequities to overshadow the problems of the in-school inequities,” she said. “However way you look at it, low-income kids and kids of color get less than their fair share of quality teaching, curriculum, and resources.”

The study traced about two-thirds of the gap in achievement between high SES and low SES students in 9th grade to elementary school summer deficits. The remaining third was traceable to differences already evident before the students began 1st grade. The study, conducted by Karl Alexander and colleagues at Johns Hopkins, found no statistically significant differences between the gains of high and low SES kids during the school year.

Presumably, Hall is taking issue with the conclusion that SES, accumulated, made all the difference. We know poor kids get fewer advantages in education (as evidentiary support see here or here), but this study says that, at least in urban districts with high concentrations of poverty, there isn’t a large difference between one bad school and another. Further, since Baltimore’s population mirrors many cities across the country, urban districts could implement new school calendars to ameliorate within-district achievement gaps. Hall’s point is well-taken that this step wouldn’t fix all achievement disparities, but it too casually dismisses what a district can do.

While it isn’t a new concept for researchers to argue for restructuring school calendars, this study utilized the best dataset available. Past investigations analyzed summer learning loss between kindergarten and first grade; Alexander included fall and spring tests (to measure summer and school-year learning) from 1st-5th grades, and continued to follow the students until they were 22. This allowed him to track whether students completed high-level coursework in high school or went on to college. Previous studies haven’t gone this far; past analyses found that summer learning differences matter, but they hadn’t yet systematically traced those effects over time. Alexander shows empirically what we’ve all assumed: home life matters in educational attainment, and, if the numbers are generalizable, it matters more. I’m not ready to lump this study in as just one more for the pile.

Sundaes on Sunday

President Ronald Reagan might have given the cold shoulder to the Department of Education, but he was sweet on ice cream.

“Ice cream is a nutritious and wholesome food, enjoyed by over ninety percent of the people in the United States. It enjoys a reputation as the perfect dessert and snack food…Now, Therefore, I, Ronald Reagan, President of the United States of America, do hereby proclaim July 1984 as National Ice Cream Month and July 15, 1984, as National Ice Cream Day, and I call upon the people of the United States to observe these events with appropriate ceremonies and activities.”

That makes July National Ice Cream Month, and the third Sunday (that's this weekend) official National Ice Cream Day. Celebrate appropriately.

Sure...

At NROnline, Bill McMorris writes about legislation recently passed by the House of Representatives to cut student loan interest rates:

This bill also fails to deliver on the Democratic promise to make college more accessible to lower-income students. Cutting interest rates and forgiving debt serve to benefit college graduates, not perspective students. The Republican proposal, which would aid lower-income families by increasing Pell Grants without relieving individuals of their responsibility to repay their loans, was rejected along partisan lines.

Assuming for the sake of argument that he means prospective students, I still don't know what this means. If a low-income student goes to college, graduates, and gets a break on their loan repayment, that's not helping low-income students because they're technically not students anymore? And while using the money to fund Pell grants instead of cut interest rates is actually a pretty good idea, I can't help but note that the House Republicans had markedly less enthusiasm for taking money from the student loan companies who contribute generously to their campaigns and giving it to the poor college students who don't vote for them back when they controlled Congress and were in a position to actually do it.

More Financial Education

Along the lines of Kevin’s post below about financial literacy, NPR’s Morning Edition aired a story yesterday about a pastor who’s stuck in the never-ending cycle of default and repayment on his student loans. The pastor took out $15,000 in loans in 1984, owes nearly twice that amount now, and will still be repaying them in 2029. Since I’ve started doing work on student loans, I’ve heard many stories like this.

When most students are taking out loans, no one is there to counsel them on the salary they will need to make the minimum payments, or even to warn them of the serious financial consequences of defaulting on the loan. In my experience, getting over $30,000 in loans is as easy as signing a few pieces of paper, with absolutely no discussion of your plans for future income and only minimal loan counseling (an online ‘class’ that you can complete without even reading the information).

A student who defaults on their loan can see the amount they owe grow exponentially. Each time the borrower defaults, an 18.5% collection fee is added to their loan balance plus any accrued interest. If a borrower defaults multiple times, the loan balance can easily double. This increase is enough to ensure that many of these borrowers will never be able to repay their loans.

Current legislation includes both income-based repayment, which helps borrowers to stay out of default by pegging payments to their income, and loan forgiveness for borrowers working in public service fields. Both of these will likely help students in the future avoid the financial devastation of defaulting on their loans. But for the borrowers who do default, we need to address the punitive nature of how student loan defaults are handled, and find a better way to both encourage personal responsibility and also provide a means for these borrowers to repay their debt and recover financially.

(This comic is all too appropriate, but the reality is that it is not a joke for a lot of people.)

Financial Education Needed

There's an ad for LowerMyBills.com ("As Featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show") running along the side of the article I'm reading on the New York Times Web site right now which says, and I quote, "Mortgage Rates Fall Again In Washington DC! $510,000 mortgage for under $1,498/Month!"

If you were to buy a house today for $510,000 and put five percent down on a 30-year fixed mortgage at the going rate (6.33%), the monthly payment would be $3,008 per month.

This is one of the reasons people are losing their homes right now. I'm not saying there aren't others, or that consumers bear no responsibility for knowing what they're getting into when they borrow. But come on.

Consultants Earning Their Keep

Alexandar Russo, June 25th:

Kevin Carey mystifyingly defends the management consultant crowd by blaming incompetent management for DC schools' problems.

The Washington Examiner, today:

Communications breakdown caused boxes of sporting goods, computers and other essential equipment to be left padlocked in a shuttered District of Columbia junior high school for almost an entire year while a neighboring school was starved for supplies, a city consultant told The Examiner.

Souljah-ing the Teachers Unions

Ezra Klein follows up on last week's discussion of the lamentable tendency of left-leaning pundits to burnish their independent credentials by mindlessly bashing teachers unions and/or adopting other conservative eduction tropes.

As regular Quick & ED readers know, that doesn't mean teachers unions should be immune from criticism--far from it. I myself have engaged in a fair amount of what I'd like to think was mindful bashing of objectionable union policies (this post about teacher pay is an example, with the union response here and my counter here). The difference being that the debate was about an actual issue, involving research findings, real-world contract issues, etc.

By contrast, the generalized teachers union bashing from the left is, as Ezra notes, much more in the vein of then-candidate Bill Clinton's famous Sister Souljah denunciation. That's remembered as a canny political move that signaled Clinton's independence from traditional Democratic interest groups to moderate voters, so at first the parallel to pundits who aren't running for office might seem inexact. But of course they are running for an office of a kind--Grand Champion of Brave Intellectual Integrity.

The thing to remember is that it wasn't entirely obvious at the time that Clinton could get away with saying what he said in a speech to the Rainbow Coalition. The risk is what made it effective. Being the 735th person to point out that teachers unions are sometimes an obstacle to sensible school reform, by contrast, isn't going to get anyone into the Liberal Apostasy Hall of Fame. If you're going to criticize teachers unions, get your facts straight and have something meaningful to say. Otherwise, you're not impressing anyone but yourself.

School Names, Again

More on school names from Jay Mathews at the Washington Post, this time focusing on North Virginia. Evidently, presidents and well-known people “tend to be controversial, whereas few Americans have bad things to say about rivers, lakes, forests or freedom.” And don’t forget sea creatures!

Mathews thinks it would be better to name schools after people. He quotes the Manhattan Institute: “Teachers at Lincoln Elementary, for example, can reference the school name to spark discussions of the evils of slavery and the benefits of preserving our union.”

Teachers could spark the same discussion by displaying a five dollar bill or a penny, not to mention dozens of other great ways to excite students about a lesson on the civil war. In other words: Anything a name can do, we can do better.

Slap Them In Irons

There are times when I think that the the universe of generally-recognized post-secondary credentials is far too time-bound and monopolized by traditional education organizations. The fact that degrees are so standardized and derivative of time spent learning--two years for an associate's degree, four years for a bachelor's degree, too many years and the flower of your youth for a doctorate, etc.--instead of being based on actual objective evidence of learning strikes me as terribly limiting. It stays that way in large part because the current system is in the best interests of traditional colleges and universities, which dominate both the teaching and credentialing functions of higher education--and thus have a financial interest in basing the credential on how long (and thus, how much money) you've spent being taught by them.

Then I read articles like yesterday's Times expose of so-called financial advisors who steal from old people under the guise of paper-thin credentials:

[Scammer guy] is one of tens of thousands of financial advisers working hand-in-hand with insurance companies to market themselves to older Americans using impressive-sounding credentials like “certified elder planning specialist,” “registered financial gerontologist,” “certified retirement financial adviser” and “certified senior adviser.”

Many of these titles can be earned in just a few days from for-profit businesses, and sound similar to established credentials, like certified financial planner, that require years of study, difficult tests and extensive background checks.

The clear lesson here--beyond the obvious fact that people who effectively rob senior citizens of their life savings by tricking them into investing in ridiculously inappropriate investment vehicles are nothing more than common thieves who should be slapped in leg irons and send away to lengthy prison sentences--is that a wholly unregulated market for educational credentials would surely produce more abuses along these lines. That doesn't mean we should be stuck with the standard year-based degree system forever, but it does mean that loosening up the market should be accompanied by a commensurate increase in oversight.