Massive Endowments

The annual college endowment report from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) was released yesterday. Overall, it was a great year for higher education, with average earnings of 17.2 %. The richest institutions (over $1 billion in assets) did even better, earning 21.3%. One consequence of the growth is that institutions are having a hard time figuring out how to spend all the new money; endowment spending as a percent of assets dropped to 4.6%, the lowest rate since 1999. This will probably provide fresh ammunition to those in Congress and elsewhere who have proposed that institutions be required to spend a fixed percent of assets--usually 5%, the legal standard applied to many non-profits already. As Rich Kahlenberg said in the Wall Street Journal, "The price of college is rising and endowments are growing and people are frustrated by those two things going on at once."

On some level, the top schools are victims of their own success. As has already been widely reported, Harvard earned $5.7 billion on its endowment last year, which is by itself larger than the total endowment of all but a handful of institutions. This is the principle of compound interest in action--when you meet with a retirement advisor, they always show you the parabolic curve of expected earnings and point out that you make most of your money in the last 10 years. Universities have a longer investment time horizon than any other institution that currently exists, governments included, so it's no suprise to see their longevity paying off.

But all that money raises some uncomfortable questions, about the price of college as Kahlenberg suggests (it's no coincidence that Harvard and Yale timed the announcement of their new endowment-funded financial aid programs to hit the news in the weeks before the NACUBO report), and--more importantly, in my opinion--why, exactly, all of this is being subsidized by the government in the form of tax preferences for everyone involved. As Richard Vedder pointed out in the Post over the weekend, Princeton recently built a new residence facility, Whitman College (above), named after major donor and alumna Meg Whitman, CEO of Ebay, which cost a staggering $388,571 per unit, roughly what Donald Trump spends building a luxury resort. Here we have a fabulously wealthy person donating money to a fabously wealthy university to built a fabulously expensive facility for the benefit of students who come from, in many cases, very wealthy families. I have no problem with that personally if that's how they want to spend their money, but why am I, as a taxpayer, footing part of the bill?

Value-Added Comes of Age

About four and a half years ago, I was working on a policy paper focused on a developing and controversial method of measuring teacher effectiveness called "value-added." Created by Dr. Bill Sanders in Tennessee in the mid-1990s, the essence of value-added is pretty simple: Using annual standardized test scores, look at the prior achievement history of a given teacher's students and, based on that, statistically predict how well they're likely to do in the current year. Then calculate the ratio of their actual performance to the predicted performance. Teachers with a ratio greater than 1.0 are more effective than average, those with a ratio of less than 1.0, less. This gives teachers credit for making a lot of progress with previously underperforming students, and doesn't give them progress for coasting with previously high-performing students. Whatever external factors impact performance--poverty, family life, etc.--are implicitly controlled for, because the prediction model is based on the prior performance of the students themselves.

Around the same time, I was reading Michael Lewis's new book, Moneyball, which I had bought the day it was published, being a big fan of both the author and the Bill Jamesian approach to thinking about baseball. And at some point I realized that the underlying premise of Moneyball and the promise of value-added were the same: using empirical data to fundamentally change and improve a labor market. Instead of relying on human observations of characteristics, with all the biases and errors that result, focus on outcomes instead. The paper was released the following year, my first and only real contribution to the teacher quality debate, and while in retrospect I'm kind of embarrassed by the length, I think the ideas hold up pretty well. (The original draft included a whole section explicitly drawing the Moneyball parallel, but it was excised in the editing process, and yes, I'm still bitter.)

So it's interesting to see (I take no credit for this) the New York City school system announcing a plan to start calculating value-added scores for some of its teachers. Just like in Tennessee, the idea is pretty straightforward:

The city’s pilot program uses a statistical analysis to measure students’ previous-year test scores, their numbers of absences and whether they receive special education services or free lunch, as well as class size, among other factors. Based on all those factors, that analysis then sets a “predicted gain” for a teacher’s class, which is measured against students’ actual gains to determine how much a teacher has contributed to students’ growth.

What they're going to do with the data, however, is unclear. One option is to use it for making tenure decisions, which, research has shown pretty conclusively, is a good idea--it seems clear that if your value-added scores put you among the very worst teachers in your first few years--like the bottom 3%, say--the odds of you ever becoming a good teacher are quite low. As Harvard's Tom Kane notes, "It seems hard to know who is going to be effective in the classroom until they are actually in the classroom.

Or you could simply put the data out there and let market forces work. Deputy School Chancellor Chris Cerf said:

“If the only thing we do is make this data available to every person in the city — every teacher, every parent, every principal, and say do with it what you will — that will have been a powerful step forward. If you know as a parent what’s the deal, I think that whole aspect will change behavior.”

Crucially, this would be good for the best teachers. One of the biggest problems with the teacher labor market is that the top teachers--the ones who are one or more standard deviations above the mean in terms of effectiveness--are criminally underpaid, and have no way of demonstrating their real value to the labor market. Their unions, however, are totally aghast at the prospect. Randi Weingarten, head of the United Federation of Teachers (and rumoured to be next head the national AFT) said:

“Any real educator can know within five minutes of walking into a classroom if a teacher is effective."

This is the equivalent of the scouts and general managers in Moneyball who were always on the lookout for the "good body," the "five-tool guy," the player who just looked like a major leaguer. As everyone now knows, they were profoundly mistaken, and people like the Oakland A's Billy Beane were able to exploit the market distortions that resulted.

What we're seeing in New York City today is all the major challenges of 21st century K-12 teacher policy being played out in real time. Value-added methods are still very much in development, subject to limitations of standardized tests, among many things. But in the long run, there will only be more, better information about student performance, along with newer, faster ways of analyzing that information and drawing increasingly accurate conclusions about how well teachers are doing their jobs. At some point the methodological debates will be resolved and the margins of error whittled down the satisfaction of reasonable people.

That will have profound implications for the way teachers are hired, paid, trained, assigned--perhaps for the nature of the profession itself. Much current teacher policy is logically derivative of extremely limited or absent information--if we can't accurately measure teacher effectiveness, then pay everyone the same. If we can't know how well teachers will perform when they arrive in the classroom, throw up a lot of regulatory and process barriers to entry in terms of training and certification. The shift from information scarcity to abundance will change that logic, and eventually the policies themselves. New York City is a sign of things to come.

Update: Eduwonkette compares this to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and then says she's not actually making the comparison she just made. The privileges of anonymity, I suppose. Sherman Dorn chooses a different horrible disease (botulism) to make his point--which is that the NYC value-added process may or may not have severe methodological flaws. It might, I don't know, I guess we'll find out. But, per above, methodological issues can be worked out, and anyone who thinks the hysterical reaction to the value-added initiative stems from a deep and abiding concern for statistical integrity is willfully not paying attention.

Update II: Dorn updates and points out that the "botulism" reference wasn't hysterical, fair enough, I was referring to the folks at UFT but that wasn't clear. He also says:

The claim that "methodological issues can be worked out" is evidence that Carey hasn't read the writings of professional researchers who point out that growth models are no holy grail.

I've read the research (which the UFT habitually misrepresents) pretty carefully. The people who've looked at the Sanders model have generally concluded that it does what it says it does: identify teacher effects, given appropriate caveats about statistical margins of error. It's true that they say it's no holy grail, which is unsurprising in that there's no such thing as a holy grail. There is not now nor will there ever be perfect information about teacher effectiveness; teaching is far too complicated for that. The only responsible approach to using value-added data--or any other data that purports to gauge teacher effectiveness--is to be cognizant of the amount of likely error and craft policies accordingly. And of course there should also be diligant work to improve the methods themselves, which nobody believes have reached an apex of refinement.

Given that, a fair response to the NYC announcement would be something like this: "We support efforts to fairly evaluate teacher effectiveness and recognize that objective evidence of student learning growth must play an important role in that process. We emphasize that the results of evaluation methods based on standardized test scores will be subject to significant degrees of statistical error, which much be appropriately taken into account, particularly when such information is used in the context of employment matters such as tenure and compensation. The best process will combine information from multiple methods, including peer and principal evaluation, and will preserve teachers' professional rights. We look forward to working in concert with management to develop such policies, which should include rewarding the most effective teachers for the vital work they do."

The actual response from the UFT was nothing like that. Rather, it reflects a principled opposition to the use of test scores of any kind in evaluating teachers. Again, this is not an argument about methodology; it goes much deeper than that. Talking about methods in a good faith attempt to reach the goal of better information is one thing, but the holy grail standard is all about making perfection the enemy of the good.

Wisconsin, Cyberschools, and Virtual Schooling

The publicity following a recent ruling by the Wisconsin Court of Appeals ordering the state to end funding of the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, a full-time virtual charter school operated by the Northern Ozaukee School District (just north of Milwaukee), is helping to reinforce the public misconceptions around virtual schooling. Take, for example, this breathless lede in Friday's AP story:

School districts across the United States are watching a court ruling that challenges the existence of virtual schools and could determine the future of online education.

Don't believe the hype and don't think that all virtual schooling looks like Wisconsin Virtual Academy. Many people think that "cyber" charter schools, schools that are responsible for students' entire education experience and that students attend full-time, are the primary sponsors of online learning. But, the majority of students learning online participate in "supplemental" virtual schooling programs. These supplemental programs, many state-run, allow students to take online courses in addition to their regular school-based courses.

The AP story and much of the discourse surrounding the Wisconsin decision confound the ideological and political controversies that surround cyberschools with virtual schooling in general. Despite their growth and popularity, full-time cyberschools are highly controversial—a result of their non-traditional approach to learning, their status as charter schools, the transfer of student funding away from traditional schools, and their enrollment of former home-school students. Many unions, especially state and local- level affiliates, have vehemently opposed cyberschools.

Not only is the story above factually incorrect (the law in question is a very specific Wisconsin state law—Colorado, for example, just recently passed its own cyberschool legislation), but it narrows all of online learning to the cyberschool model. This is particularly dangerous because many of the practices found in supplemental virtual schooling programs are bringing about reforms that have long eluded traditional public schools and prompting educators and policymakers to question and change key components of our traditional, classroom-based public system. Limiting the discussion of virtual schooling solely to cyberschools equates virtual schooling with home schooling and bounds the possibilities of online education into the constraints of polarized, non-productive and ideological education battles.

That said, proactive state legislators across the country should take note of the Wisconsin case. Many states' laws, like those in Wisconsin, need to be modernized to reflect an education system that is no longer defined by bricks and mortar schools, seat time, and strict geographic lines. These legislators should heed the lessons of the charter school movement and craft strong laws that provide the regulatory and accountability framework needed for all forms of virtual schooling within the public system.

Specifically, cyberschool options should exist to help serve the vast variety of student and family needs. It's ok for different models to serve different students with differing needs to ensure each of them is successful—that's called personalization.

The key issue is really around public funding. Funding should follow student success and not penalize innovation or efficiency. But, let's also make sure to weight the public funding so that it is sensitive to what the state is actually buying. Many cyberschool models have very limited student/teacher interaction, rely heavily on parents as educators, and are less likely to serve special needs students or those without a stay-at-home parent. With weighted funding, some cyberschools would receive less money. But, more money could also follow to cyberschools that can demonstrate success serving students with higher needs. The more sophisticated conversation is not about whether cyberschools are good or bad, but what role they play in a state's various educational priorities and how the funding follows those priorities.

Funding Gaps

The Education Trust released its annual state report, The Funding Gap, which looks at funding trends from 1999 to 2005 and compares district funding for those serving the highest percentages of poor students and students of color and those serving the lowest percentage of these students. Winners include 10 states that narrowed the gap between funding for low and high-poverty districts: Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Minnesota, NJ, NY, New Mexico, Ohio, Wyoming and my own Maryland. Maryland, btw, along with Ohio and Wyoming, not only closed their gap but reversed it and now provides more funding to high-poverty districts. Losers? Illinois, Florida, Texas and more than a dozen more states where the funding gap actually increased from 1999 to 2005. That's right smack in the middle of our strong accountability era, where all school systems are pressed to meet standards for all students. How can we have school financing policies that are so in conflict with this accountability standard? It seems to me that aligning our accountability and finance systems should be a basic must-do.

Also good to note that EdTrust has added an important new piece of analysis to their annual report. Carmen Arroyo, the author of the report, crunched the numbers on percentages of English Language Learner students and found that in the eight states with the highest percentages of ELLs, districts with a lot of ELLs receive less funding than districts with few or no ELL students (I'll have to ask Carmen how many districts in the top ELL states really have no ELL students? Few, I'll bet). This type of ELL analysis is a key addition, as this population of students promises to grow not only in those high-ELL states but in most others too.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 3

Summary: McNulty successfully fakes evidence of a Baltimore serial killer, yet nobody cares. Lester explains that he's failed to include the kind of lurid psycho-sexual element that will bump the story onto the front page. Bunk is increasingly (and amusingly) aghast. Prop Joe gives Marlo money-laundering lessons. The Sun's parent company hands down a new round of budget cuts, forcing the closure of all foreign bureaus and firing / buyout of veteran reporters. The Fabulist makes up some more stuff while acting like even more of a snot. Burrell tries to feed Carcetti fake crime stats, not realizing that Valchek gave the mayor the real stats first, so Carcetti sets the wheels in motion to can Burrell and replace him with Daniels. Clay Davis continues to feel the heat. I think I could watch a whole hour of nothing but Clay Davis. Michael begins to conclude that certain aspects of working for the Marlo organization--such as working seven days a week on the corner and being asked to murder small children--aren't so great. Method Man gives up Butchie to Chris and Snoop, who promptly torture him (Butchie) to death in an effort to smoke out Omar. He was indeed a tough old man. Snoop continues to question the wisdom of the "provoke the baddest man in Baltimore into trying to kill us all" strategy. Omar, blissfully on vacation in the Carribean with his boyfriend, hears the news about Butchie. Duh-duh-DUH!!!!

This episode continues the proud Wire tradition of constructing scenes that assume you've studied every scene in every episode with Talmudic intensity, like when Daniels and his ex-wife fret about Burrell possibly revealing old allegations of Daniels doing something vaguely corrupt back when he was involved in drug investigations, before the show even began. I can't remember the last time this fact was even mentioned, and its never been clear to me whether the allegations are even true, but nothing is ever forgotten on The Wire, because it's all connected. Bonus: Pearlman grilling Clay Davis' driver about the $20,000 he got caught with all the way back in Season One.

Now that Omar has reappeared, the most signicant characters yet to show up are, in no particular order:

Cutty
Prez
Bunny
Namond
Randy
Poot
Royce
Brother Mouzone

Episode three seems like as good a time as any to put The Prop Joe Question on the table. To wit: the "prequel" webisode featuring Joe is dated 1962, where he looks to be about ten, give or take. That means Joe is now roughly 55 years old. Allowing for time to work up through the ranks, etc., he's been seriously in The Game for 30 years, minimum. Joe, more than anyone else on the show, has figure out the two essential truths of The Game, and their resulting corollary: 1) Making money is the easy part. 2) Staying alive and out of prison is the hard part. Ergo, the smart play is: Whenever possible, trade money for a reduced risk of being imprisoned or killed. But even given the resulting reduced income, Joe must be fabulously rich; heroin has been in Baltimore since the 70s and crack since the 80s. As we learned this week, to nobody's surprise, Joe knows how to launder money into offshore accounts. His position as the middleman betweent The Greek and the rest of the Co-op members must be extremely lucrative, I assume he's the equivalent of "The Bank," the position Stringer Bell was shooting for before he got shot. Yet Joe must also know that while he can reduce the odds against him, he can't ever eliminate them entirely. Eventually he'll roll snake eyes and get caught in the Marlo-Omar crossfire, or something along those lines. You can have a short run, or you can have a long run, but only The Game remains.

Given all that, what the heck is Proposition Joe doing in East Baltimore? Why does he spend all day in the back of a repair shop in his ratty hoody, dressed liked Kevin Smith, while bad men with guns come and go? He's a smart guy -- why not learn French and retire to Antigua? I don't get it. I suppose the only plausible explanation is that he just enjoys The Game for its own sake. Sam Zell is pushing 70 and has $6 billion, yet he's busy buying media companies, screwing around with Wrigley Field, and imposing real-life cost cuts on newspapers like the real-life Baltimore Sun. Same principle, I guess. The only other explanation is some kind of horrible last season retcon involving numerous heretofore unmentioned losing trips to Atlantic City and Vegas, a la The Sopranos, but I think David Simon is too smart for that.

A Faulty Argument

Back in December, I blogged about a proposed Higher Education Act provision that would change the way default rates are calculated by the Department of Education. I hypothesized that this change could increase default rates by about 60 percent, putting some schools at risk of losing their eligibility to participate in the federal loan program because of too-high default rates -- if a school has a default rate of 25 percent or higher over three years or a single-year default rate of 40 percent or higher, it loses eligibility to participate in the federal loan program.

The proposed change is pretty simple. Currently, the Department of Education calculates the student loan default rate as the percent of students defaulting on their student loans in the first two years after entering repayment. The proposed change would extend that window to the first three years after entering repayment. But, as we showed in an October Charts You Can Trust, the percentage of students defaulting on their loans grows considerably with each added year, particularly among students with high amounts of debt.

And now, as Inside Higher Ed reports, the Department of Education released numbers showing that for-profit colleges would see their default rate double on average, and other institutions could see their rates increase by between 50 and 75 percent (check out the article for numbers broken down by institution type). Not surprisingly, for-profit colleges are not happy about this change and are trying their best to resist it.

The Career College Association is quoted as saying, “This is a questionable policy metric because community colleges, proprietary schools and minority serving institutions all accept a much higher percentage of lower income students than do traditional schools, and many have a higher [Cohort Default Rate] as a result. The single best predictor of a student’s likelihood of default is the student’s own socioeconomic status.”

Sure, socioeconomic status impacts a student’s risk of defaulting on loans and students should definitely be held responsible for responsibly managing their debt. But colleges have a responsibility to equip students with the skills and knowledge needed to get the jobs that allow them to repay their debt, and for ensuring students graduate on time -- or at all. And schools are also responsible for ethically counseling students on the amount of debt they can realistically undertake for their education and for providing adequate financial aid so that students are not graduating with overly burdensome debt loads. All of these actions are entirely within a college’s purview and would have a large impact on the percent of students defaulting on their loans.

Also, take a look at the Department of Education cut-off default rate numbers: 25 percent default rate over three years or a 40 percent default rate over one year. Is a college that consistently allows one in four of its students default on their loans in the first three years (in reality, two years*) after leaving college really providing a valuable service that the student and taxpayers should be paying for?

* Because it takes nearly a year after a student stops paying on his or her loan for the loan to technically be considered in default, a three-year window is really a two-year window, and a two-year window is really a one-year window. In addition, students with loans in deferment or forbearance are counted as being in repayment.

Crackonomics

On the whole, I'm sympathetic to DC Schools Chancelor Rhee's intiative to shutter 23 DCPS schools. It doesn't make sense for a district that's experiencing long-term enrollment decline, including losing almost 30 percent of students to charter schools, to waste millions of dollars on maintaining a bigger physical infrastructure than it needs. The chancellor and Mayor Fenty had a series of neighborhood meeting yesterday to discuss the planned closings, with many of the attendees voicing their displeasure. And I have to say, while I don't actually agree, this is pretty funny and astute:

"It's like crackhead economics," Jarumi Moore, a Francis Middle School seventh-grader, said at the Wilson Building of the closings plan. "They're thinking short term. We're thinking long term."

Get that kid into an AP econ class! He can write a study calculating the marginal change in the implied discount rate people apply to the resale value of their personal possessions when selling them feed a crack habit at various stages of addiction, and compare that to long-term deadweight loss of public goods resulting from ill-advised education policies that pump up approval ratings at the expense of systemic reform. He'll be the next Roland Fryer. Seriously, I don't think I would have had anything nearly so clever or smart to say in the 7th grade about anything not involving comic books or Larry Bird; there are a lot of bright kids like this in DCPS and we need to get them a better education.

Harvard and the Myth of Tightening College Admissions

The New York Times reports today that applications to Harvard are up an amazing 19% over last year, with other elite schools like the University of Chicago, Amherst, and Northwestern seeing double-digit increases. This allows newspapers to get a jump on the annual circulation-goosing college admissions panic story, which usually doesn't run for another few months, when the same colleges will report record low percentages of student being admitted. So we don't have to wait until April to read some guidance counselor from a suburban high school breathlessly reporting that among his peers "There is a pure level of panic and frenzy like they've never seen before."

As I wrote here last year, and also at the American Prospect, there is less here than meets the eye. The Times reports, correctly, that the number of graduating high school seniors is now reaching a demographic crest, the largest in history. But the year-over-year percentage growth is quite small, nothing close to the double-digit rise in applications to Harvard et al. Similarly, there's no reason to the think that the percent of high school seniors applying to college has risen sharply; those numbers never change much on an annual basis.

What we have, then, is not a big increase in college applicants but a big increase in college applications. Which the Times acknowledges, quoting one consultant as saying, "There was a time when kids applied to three or four schools, then to seven schools, and now, 10 or more is not uncommon." This creates the impression that the odds of a qualified student getting into a good college are dropping faster than they really are.

For example: the article notes that Harvard (as well as Princeton and UVA) has ended its early admissions program. So let's say you're a super-qualified student. You want to go to Harvard, and Harvard wants you to attend. Previously, you would have submitted one application, via early admission, and received one acceptance. Now you've got to go into the general application pool along with everyone else.

Do you still submit just one application? Of course not. Applying comes at relatively little cost in terms of time and money--particularly to you, who are probably from an upper-income family. There's a common application, stuff can be submitted electronically--it's all easier than it once was. So you apply to Princeton, Yale, and most of the other Ivy League schools, along with a few other usual suspects like Chicago, Amherst and the rest. Why not? Harvard's not a lock, after all, you might get bumped for a senator's son, rich legacy, football player, or what have you. A few months pass, and the envelopes arrive. Some of the schools accept you, others don't, but you get into Harvard, and happily enroll.

Q: Under this scenario, what impact has Harvard's elimination of early admission had on the odds of a qualified student getting into an elite school? A: None whatsoever. The number of applicants didn't change, the number of slots didn't change, and the result for the hypothetical you was exactly the same: Harvard. But from the perspective of typical news coverage, it looks like admissions got tighter, because all of those new applications you sent to elite schools drove the total number of applications up, and thus admissions rates down.

It's true that by applying and being accepted to those other schools, hypothetical you gained acceptances that would otherwise have gone to someone else. But you didn't use them, so eventually it all comes out in the wash. Selective colleges set very specific goals for the size of their freshman class, which they meet by statistically estimating the percent of accepted applicants who are likely to enroll. If they miss their guess high, they squeeze a few more people into the dorms. If they miss their guess low, they take a few more people off the waiting list. Either way, the number of individual students who are ultimately admitted doesn't change.

Also: this discussion pertains to qualified students, those with the credentials to have a legit shot at getting in. Some significant percentage of applicants--and thus, some percentage of the 19% increase in applicants at Harvard--are unqualified, submitted by students who are treating the college admissions process like Powerball and have no chance of being admitted. An increase in the number of applicantions from unqualified applicants has no practical effect on the admissions process at all for the qualified student--but it seems to, by driving down the bottom-line admit rate number.

This doesn't mean that the increasing-applications phenomenon has no impact on qualified students. If your competirors are submitting more applications, you need to as well, just like you need to keep up with taking AP classes and accumulating the other current markers of achievement. But in the end, you're still you, they're still them, Harvard is still Harvard, and things haven't gotten as bad as you think they have. When the media tells you to panic, don't.

Ask And You Shall Receive

Last week, I asked whether there were any colleges with unique strategies for controlling tuition and aiding students, but without the help of a gigantic endowment. Lo and behold, Inside HigherEd reports on Blackburn College, a small, private college in Illinois (chances are this school is off the NYT’s radar), that is trying to do something different with tuition and financial aid.

Blackburn College announced that it is both lowering tuition and getting out of the tuition haggling game. Basically, it’s lowering its sticker price by 15 percent but also going with a CarMax-type policy of not bargaining with parents over financial aid packages. A big plus to this new policy is that parents and students know the true cost of Blackburn, even before they apply. And this combination of lower tuition and lower spending on financial aid means that the school won’t be losing any tuition revenue, so the bottom line for the institution stays the same. But what about the bottom line for students?

Blackburn believes that the tuition--$15,000 with room and board—is affordable for low-income students, so long as the students get federal and state aid. If a student received a full Pell-grant and the full amount of Illinois’ need-based grant program the out-of-pocket cost for Blackburn would be approximately $6,000. Not bad, although that still means potentially graduating with over $20,000 in debt. And loans, while they are grouped with grants as part of an aid ‘package’, need to be paid back and aren’t nearly as good at facilitating access to college (CarMax doesn’t say it offers financial aid to buy a car). But loans are an excellent way to facilitate choice—students can opt for a private college instead of a public one, or a four-year instead of a two-year. But how can we know how much debt is too much debt?

The larger problem with financial aid policy is that there is no consensus over what the ‘right’ amount of debt for students is, or how much people should be expected to contribute to their own education. We need a goal—some strategic planning, if you will—for our financial aid system. Is the goal to help low-income students attend any college they like? To help them attend a public, four-year? A two-year? Or to facilitate choice in colleges among everyone, even those that are from upper-income families?

Until we answer these questions, our financial aid policies will always feel like a shot in the dark

Lede of the Day

"Free stuff makes people happy, but free stuff shot from cannons makes them jump and cheer like crazed monkeys."

From an Eric Hoover piece($) in The Chronicle of Higher Education, about a guy who owns a company that makes those portable CO2 cannons that launch rolled-up T-shirts in sports stadiums and arenas across the land.

Teaching Isn't Selling Sporting Goods...Or Anything Else

While we're on the subject of how teacher pay compares to other professions, another issue that often comes up in the debate is the fact that many teachers nominally work less than an eight-hour day, since the average school day is about 6.7 hours long. The usual rejoinder from the teacher perspective is that good teachers put a lot of time in before and after the school day, which is certainly true. The response to that is that lawyers and accountants and other professionals also do their share of work on nights and weekends. Then both sides start snarling at each other.

But what gets less talked about less is the way those hours are spent. I've worked in a variety of jobs since finishing grad school in the mid-90s, both in the public and non-profit sector, the basic components of which are pretty much the same: reading, writing, analyzing numbers, talking on the phone, sending email, going to meetings and events. Before that, stretching back to high school, I worked as a lifeguard, construction worker, department store cashier, waiter, sporting good salesman, camp counselor, etc. All different jobs.

But one thing they all have in common is that you're not actually working every minute of the day. For example, betwen the time I typed the words "the" and "words" in this sentence, I got up, poured a cup of coffee, chatted with a co-worker, and then spent another five minutes reading about how the Wizards somehow beat the Celtics again last night, in Boston no less. To the outside observer, I was working continuously, but actually it ebbs and flows, and this has been true on some level in every job I've ever had.

Spend some time in the classroom of a good teacher, by contrast, and you'll quickly notice that they're working the whole time. Not most of the time, but all of it. That's what it takes to succeed; you have to be constantly paying attention, planning, reacting, making decisions, keeping the whole intricate complex process on track. Somehow this needs to be taken into account in discussions of how much teachers work.

Pay for Performance: Chicken or Egg?

AFTie Ed responds to this post below on teacher pay:

My baseline position wasn’t “we’re not in this for the money, give us more money.” Instead it’s “we don’t have the option of being in it for the money, and trying to introduce that option without making the pie bigger isn’t a smart idea.” What I was trying to argue is that we don’t have in place one of the essential preconditions to having an effective variable pay structure: adequate base compensation...As a result, you get a system where people are being driven to a large extent by the intrinsic rewards of the work, and by the external rewards that come from a kind of cult of teacherdom. I don’t know if it’s chicken or egg, but uncompetitive pay is a factor keeping this dynamic in place.

There's an active argument going on about whether teachers are or aren't underpaid, involving lots of dueling statistics about benefit levels as a percent of salary, the number of hours worked in and out of school, which professions are fairly comparable to teaching, and whether or not a 9-month job with no vacation is really just 3/4ths of a 12-month job with vacation. But I don't think it's actually all that relevant to this discussion. I'm perfectly willing to concede that given stakes involved, and the amount of training, experience, and hard work required to do a good job teaching, public school teachers aren't paid enough, by a significant margin. And it's abundantly clear that individual teachers haven't proportionately shared in the overall growth of the economy over the last 30-plus years, in terms of salary.

That said, insisting that "adequate base compensation" be a prerequisite for pay for performance is, functionally, the equivalent of being against pay for peformance. Raising the total amount of money going to teachers salaries without changing the way teachers are paid would seem like--and to a large extent, would be--investing tens of billions of dollars in the same illogical system with nothing concrete in return. That's why NEA's call for a $40,000 base salary for all teachers, to take one example, is utter fantasy. You can say this is unjust, and you can be right, but that's the way it is. Policymakers have been blithely ignoring calls to substantially raise base tacher pay for decades now and will do it for decades more if nothing changes.

The best and most plausible strategy to increase total teacher pay, therefore, is not to raise the floor, but the ceiling--create a methodologically sound system for evaluating teacher effectiveness, in conjunction with labor, and then send the new money to the most effective teachers. Policymakers would go for that, really they would--instead of more $40,000 teachers, more $140,000 teachers. I know the "methodologically sound" part is tricky and subject to debate, but this is not an unsolveable problem. (Look for more from ES co-director Tom Toch on the subject of teacher evaluation soon).

I also note that class size reduction, heavily favored and promoted by teachers unions, is on some unavoidable level at odds with the adequate base compensation agenda. There's only so much money; every dollar spent on hiring more teachers is a dollar not spent on paying indiviudal teachers more.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode Two

I watched this episode On Demand in the middle of last week, and I have to say it was unsettling to listen to Saint Gus of the Newsroom talk about how life is always tough for Mother of Four, and then listen to characters lament that the only time Baltimore makes national news is when multiple bodies are discovered rotting in a rowhouse in the poor section of town, and then pick up the newspaper the next day and read about how, allegedly, a deranged, down-on-her-luck mother of four killed her daughters and left them to rot in a rowhouse in the poor section of town, which was soon covered on national news. DC the nation's capital is in the news every day, but DC the troubled, mid-sized mid-Atlantic city? Pretty much only with stuff like this.

Episode Summary: Bubbles is troubled. McNulty staggers up to the edge of the deep end, peers over, takes a swig of Jameson, and jumps off. With the investigation down, Marlo quickly resumes having everyone and their mother killed, up to and including that guy who the other guy said looked at him funny back in '93. He's also trying to cut out the middleman on the package and go straight to the Greek, which leads him to...Avon! Hey, Avon. He looks just like he should, the same but more weary, fronting as best he can. It's funny how the universe of Baltimore murderer / drug dealers sort of arranges itself on a purely relative scale--Marlo is such a dead-eyed sociopath that by comparison Avon seems somewhat reasonable, Prop Joe is Santa Claus, and Omar is an avenging angel. Or he would be, if he actually made his way on screen.

Saint Gus, meanwhile, has to deal with his very own Jayson Blair, who can't even squeeze a decent human-interest story out of opening day at Camden Yards. (Aside: It always seemed strange to me that the Jack Kelly fabrication scandal at USA Today received far less attention than the Blair affair, even though Kelly's fabrications were arguably much worse. Relative standing of the papers, I suppose.) Gus' boss, meanwhile, wants to run a prize-bait expose of the school system, one of those series that kicks off Sunday morning with a little box showing the chapters to come (Monday: "Everything is Bad." Tuesday: "Then it Gets Worse"), with each story jumping from page one to a full two-page spread that you feel vaguely guilty for not reading. Gus argues that, sure, the school system is terrible, but so are lots of other things, and shouldn't we tell the real story, the whole story? Or something like that. The Bad Editor says no, we need to dumb it down so people can understand.

Now, I have no doubt that conversations like this happen all the time, complete with facile use of the word "dickensian" and all the rest. But what David Simon Saint Gus seems to be arguing is that anything other than digging deep and exposing the entire underlying system, complete with all the connections and moving parts, is a moral failure and a lie. In other words, the only truly responsible journalistic treatment of Baltimore is...The Wire. Really? I think I disagree. The best treatment, maybe, but that's a helluva high bar. It takes, what, seven years and tens of millions of dollars? What happens in the meantime? If you can pick off a piece of the problem, expose it, and do something about it, what's the argument against that? Or are the children of Baltimore doomed until the revolution comes?

Breaking the Greed / Virtue Dichotomy in Teacher Pay

Commenting on the new issue of Quality Counts, which compares states on teacher pay measures and suggests that teachers make less than comparable professions, AFTie Ed says:

It leaves open the question of why people go into teaching. As the song says "it's not about a salary, it's all about reality, teachers teach and do the world good..." I think the results here should concern people whose main focus is on incentivizing the current pay structure. If fiscal incentives matter, the first decision for a lot of people is going to be to go into a different field. People motivated by salaries will, rather than wanting to climb to the top of 88 cents on the dollar, go get the dollar itself.

This is a variant on the baseline teachers union position on money, which is, "We're not in this for the money; give us more money."

Let me be first to say that this isn't actually an absurd concept on its face. There's no good reason that people should be forced into penury just because they're doing socially valuable work in the public sector. Quite the opposite, in fact.

But it's not the strongest rhetorical case, and more to the point, it's not necessary. Look at the two doctors on the front page of the Post this morning, identical African-American twins from PG County named Vince and Vance who look just exactly like you'd think a Vince and Vance would look, and also happen to be Army reservists who volunteer in Afghanistan. They're clearly not doing that for the money (although I'm guessing the elapsed time between the story hitting the newstands and getting optioned for TV/movies could be measured in fractions of a second), but as a cardiologist and urologist, I'm guessing they have plenty of money. In medicine, you can do good and well at the same time.

But you've also got to go to medical school, which as we discussed here a few days ago, was thoroughly Flexnerized almost a century ago. Much higher, more uniform standards, longer, more difficult to get into, extended clinical induction model, etc. etc. Also, fewer practitioners and less organized labor. I don't know if all those factors necessarily have to go together, but the fact that they do in medicine has to be meaningful on some level.

The problem with the "we do this for the children not the money" line is that it paints teachers as the kind of professionals that provoke admiration but not aspiration -- people appreciate them but are glad someone else is doing the work. Ed himself goes on to say that "I'm of the belief that we're going to have to make changes to how teachers are paid in order to raise compensation broadly. And that this could be a really good thing for education overall." I wonder he's thought through just how much things would have to change for that to become true.

Disconnected Youth

Disconnected, disengaged, at-risk. All terms to describe the kids who aren't in school, don't have jobs, can't find purpose. Plenty of work out there that argues that we need to reconnect these young people to school, work and civic life. The Campaign for Youth (CFY) is an alliance of about a dozen youth-focused organizations (including the National Youth Employment Commission, American Youth Policy Forum, Forum for Youth Investment) that's recently developed A National Investment Strategy for Reconnecting America's Youth. Check out the summary of their recommendations (pdf).

Spellings Stands Firm

I went to the National Press Club today to listen to a speech from the Secretary of Education. I was at a similar event a while back--has to have been more than a year ago--and she seemed more confident this time around. Given enough questions and enough time, you can tell if someone's just a top-line manager/figurehead type or if they actually pay attention and know what they're talking about, and she's the latter. Her friendly, folksy demeanor is a real asset in environments like that; it puts people at ease while also making them less likely to ask really sharp questions.

Her basic message on NCLB was that the President would veto any reauthorization that waters down accountability, and that if Congress won't move she's going to go ahead and implement stuff on her own during the 11 months she has left. It's never been entirely clear to me why the U.S. Department of Education is legally allowed to let some states and not others (or, for that matter, any states at all) implement accountability systems that clearly diverge from NCLB requirements, as it has with the state "growth model" pilots. I suspect the answer is that it's not legal, but since nobody's ox was gored, they just did it anyway. Back in my first job in state government, I remember asking our staff attorney"Are we allowed to do that?" and she said, "We do what we want, and if people don't like it they can sue us. Which is unlikely, because they probably won't know we did it, and even if they find out, suing a government agency is harder than you think. You need standing, you need money to pay for a lawer, and it takes forever. Our lawyers are free and we're not going anywhere."

What about the little guys?

Top colleges—Harvard, Yale, Davidson, University of Virginia—have all made great headlines in the past year by dramatically expanding the financial aid they offer to students and eliminating or significantly shrinking the debt students will graduate with. Yale announced Monday that it will be spending another $307 million from its endowment for increased financial aid and research. This is great, but what about all those colleges, especially the small, private ones, that don’t have the endowment money to keep up with Harvard and Yale?

InsideHigherEd reported this week (The Harvard Trickle-Down Effect) on a session at the Council of Independent Colleges’ Presidents Institute which focused on exactly this question. Despite the fact that most of these schools—small, liberal arts colleges—don’t compete directly for students with Harvard-type schools, they are still worried about the ripple effect from Harvard’s aid announcement, primarily the pressure from students and parents to provide similarly generous aid packages.

While Harvard’s aid plan is great for Harvard students, it’s just not a realistic way to address the problems of rising tuitions and rising student debt at most institutions. And, as we’ve shown here and here, generous aid policies at the most elite institutions can have a negative impact on need-based aid because lower-tier institutions respond by offering tuition discounts to recruit high-performing students. Or, as InsideHigherEd summarizes:

C. Brent DeVore, president of Otterbein College and the session’s moderator, briefly and cogently laid out the financial aid picture leading up to and including Harvard’s announcement. He described how many small private colleges turned to financial aid based on students’ academic or other merit (as opposed to purely financial need) to compete for students’ attention, both against the prestige advantage of the elite colleges and the price advantage of most public colleges. That trend was exacerbated as states, particularly in the South, embraced lottery-driven scholarships that in some places have made an education at a public university virtually free.

As parents’ have become increasingly accustomed to such tuition breaks, merit-based aid has often been replaced by “want-based” aid, “demand-based” aid, and “match the scholarship down the street” based aid, DeVore said, to knowing nods from the presidents in the room.

The presidents’ concerns about the new trend in super-aid policies from elite institutions ranged from lowered expectations about how much financial responsibility a family should bear for a college education to even higher tuition increases and more competition for faculty. Presidents’ ideas for countering this competition ranged from broadening the recruitment pool of students to doing a better job of promoting the academic advantages of a small institution.

But there was no mention of what kinds of budgeting changes schools could make to keep their tuition increases down and make them more price competitive. It seems like a budgeting response may be just as important as a PR response. What I'd like to know is whether there are any small, independent colleges without gigantic endowments that are doing innovative and smart things to keep tuition increases and debt-levels reasonable and maintain need-based aid, but without hurting the institution's bottom line.

New Leader at Carnegie

Stanford's Tony Bryk, a member of Education Sector's research advisory committee, was recently appointed the new President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Many people don't realize just how influential Carnegie has been since it was chartered by an Act of Congress in 1906. It developed the Teachers Annuity and Insurance Association, which become the TIAA in TIAA-CREF, the giant educator's retirement and insurance company. It founded the Educational Testing Service, ETS, which publishes the SAT, GRE, and AP tests. It sponsored the Flexner Report, which completely revolutionized medical education in America, moving medical schools from a group of semi-professional, unregulated institutions with dodgy, inconsistent standards and questionable quality to the much more uniformly high-quality, well-regulated institutions we have today.

The Carnegie classifications, which put higher educaiton institutions into categories like "Research I," "Research II," "Comprehensive / Master's"," etc.(they've since altered the names) remain the dominant way of categorizing colleges and universities, and define the research status hierarcy that institutions try to climb. It played a signficant role in the discussion that led to the creation of Pell grants in the early 1970s. Former Carnegie president Ernest Boyer's books High School and College, published in the 1980s, were very influential and remain (somewhat depressingly) accurately description of the challenges those institutions face.

Indeed, the Carnegie Foundation's history suggests that higher education is arguably more subject to positive influence via philanthropic/foundation initiative than K-12. This is partly a matter of scale and governance. The vast majority of college students attend one of about 3,500 two- and four-year colleges--compared to 90,000 schools--with more concentrated governance and control. But I also think higher education is inherently more sensitive to the things that philanthropies are in a position to change: public perception, the consensus of research--information, in other words. Colleges are also intensely status- and peer-conscious, so if you can leverage a few key actors, the rest will follow of their own accord.

Most education philanthropy focuses on K-12, because those challenges seems more urgent, but I think that many organizations--particularly the big new foundations getting into the game--are missing a chance to make a lasting difference in the higher ed arena. If they achieve only a fraction of what the Carnegie Foundation has over the last century, it will be time and money well spent.

Update: A reader points out that refering to the Carnegie Foundation as a "philanthropy" is confusing, since it doesn't give out money like, for example, the Carnegie Corporation of New York (an ES funder), but rather does most of its work in-house. Good point, I was thinking about non-profit policy-focused organizations generally, many of which operate with some mix of in-house and sponsored work, but that wasn't clear.

The reader also notes that the Carnegie Foundation developed the "Carnegie Unit," which is still the standard way that high school courses are categorized and measured. When someone says that high school students who want to go to college should take at at least three "units" of math, four English, etc., etc., they're talking about Carnegie units. Apparently this was an outgrowth of the development of TIAA -- they needed a standard way of measuring how many courses teachers taught. This illustrates a larger point--also inherent in the story of the Carnegie classification of colleges and universities--which is that defining the way things are measured often has more lasting influence than the measurement itself.

Democracts and NCLB

Sam Dillon's Times front-pager on NCLB-bashing among Democratic presidential candidates came out a few days before I hit the road to spend Christmas with the fam, but apparently I'm not the only one who didn't get to it until after the New Year. As Eduwonk notes, the buried lede in that piece was the major thought division between the candidates and House Education and Labor Committee chairman George Miller. Now Miller's counterpart in the Senate, Ted Kennedy, comes with a Post op-ed saying the same thing, in stronger words:

The administration continues to speak glowingly of the law while Democratic candidates blast it. But simplistic campaign rhetoric hardly reflects what's actually happening on school reform.

So what gives? I actually think there's no mystery here. The politics of NCLB suck for Obama, Clinton, et al because a certain number of people really hate the law and those people disproportionately vote in the primary, while there's no comparable counter-contingent with strong feelings running the other way. But the candidates don't actually want to engage in "all-out opposition not just to specific details but to the entire thrust and ideology of NCLB," to quote Jonathan Kozol quoting NEA President Reg Weaver on the union's position, because they don't actually think that way. That's why the end of Dillon's article is a litany of "buts"

Mr. Obama, for instance, in a speech last month in New Hampshire denounced the law as “demoralizing our teachers.” But he also said it was right to hold all children to high standards. “The goals of this law were the right ones,” he said. When Mr. Edwards released an education plan earlier this year, he said the No Child law needed a “total overhaul.” But he said he would continue the law’s emphasis on accountability. And at the elementary school in Waterloo, Mrs. Clinton said she would “do everything I can as senator, but if we don’t get it done, then as president, to end the unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind.” But she, too, added: “We do need accountability.”

That's classic pre-general campaign hedging. To say that we need to radically overhaul or jettison the law while maintaining accountability makes no sense; accountability is where the core meaning of the law begins and ends. The candidates are just pandering as much as they think they can get away with, and Kennedy and Miller are sending public signals about where those limits lie. Given the way things are going for Senator Clinton, winner of the New Hampshire NEA's endorsement and strongest NCLB basher among the major candidates, my guess is that the high water mark of anti-NCLB rhetoric from the D side has passed, with relatively little effect on the public discourse in the long run.

Some things are just what they seem.

Blogging and So Much More

Education Sector has a new position open for a policy associate. It's a great opportunity to join ES and work on a range of ed policy projects. Q&Ed blogging rights included. More details here.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 1

After more than a year's hiatus, the final season of The Wire debuted tonight. By popular demand, we're back with the weekly blogging. If you've been catching up on the DVDs recently--and if you haven't been, you should start--see here for the final post from last season (or just search for "wire" in the search box at right for the whole list), and here at the Guardian Unlimited for my take on why it's the greatest American television program (sorry, "programme") ever made. Matt Yglesias also wrote a good post last week arguing that while series creator David Simon's pessimistic worldview may be objectively overstated, it's essential for the series' artistic success. Bonus: a response from Simon himself in the comments thread.

Episode 1 summary: Carcetti shuts down the Major Crimes Unit investigation of the Marlo / Chris / Snoop organization and rowhouse mass murders because he's sucking money of out the police budget to cover the school fiscal crisis (and because he won't take school money from the governor he plans to unseat). McNulty is drunk and angry again, which is bad for his relationship with Beadie but good for the viewership generally. Bubbles is clean, and if there's an ounce of sympathy in David Simon's soul, which there may not be, which may be a good thing, he'll end up okay.

Herc is gone from the force and working for Levy, which means he's working for the criminals he used to incompetently try to put in jail. Whether this is a net plus for the murderers and drug dealers of Baltimore remains to be seen. Herc is so dumb that he can't even figure out how to abuse his expense account. (A lobbyist friend of mine taught me this a long time ago, when I tried to beg off his paying for lunch on the grounds that we had discussed nothing business-related. "I don't care if my clients pay for your lunch" he said. "But if they don't pay for yours, they don't pay for mine.") Marlo is scheming against Prop Joe and Method Man.

The Baltimore Sun, meanwhile, is apparently much like all the other important instutitions in the city: declining, absurd, and led by incompetents, but populated by a few smart, flawed-but-noble individuals who haven't stopped fighting for the greater ideals the institution represents. In this case, that would be Meldrick Lewis from Homicide:Life on the Streets, who's now ten years older and more of a stickler for usage.

In many ways, however, there's not a lot to say about Episode 1, because not a lot happens, which is the way every season of The Wire begins, which is one of the many reasons it's so great. The Wire is only the only show I've ever seen that fully takes advantage of long-form television's greatest asset: time. The typical movie runs 120 minutes, 200 at most. That's more time than a 44-minute TV episode, but you've still got to accomplish a great deal of character and narrative development in a small space. A series has more potential in theory, but for a long time every TV episode was structured like a 44-minute movie, with the additional burden of having to structure the plot around commercial breaks. The 1980s saw the introduction of season-long story arcs in the better dramas, but even those only went halfway, interspersing stand-alone episodes and continuing to give every episode some kind of beginning, middle, and end. Even critically-hailed series like The Sopranos still work this way.

The Wire, by contrast, is essentially one story in five chapters, a season per. The first few episodes are all about establishing characters, settings, and themes, and only as the story progresses do you start to see how it's all connected. The Wire also packs much more into each minute, simply by not wasting time explaining things to the viewer. Most TV shows are absolutely clogged with clunky expository dialogue (Typical C.S.I. scene: Grissom: "The body is completely exsanguinated." Coroner: "You're right, Grissom, all the blood has been drained from the body.") The Wire does you the favor of assuming you're not stupid. Like all art worth experiencing, it asks you to pay attention. The result is a cumulative dramatic force that's unmatched. It also leaves room for lots of small, understated moments pregnant with meaning, like when Beadie decides she's left the light on for McNulty long enough...and then changes her mind, for at least a little while longer.

Next week: The Sun's dubious editor decides to gin up an expose of the school systemm. which mean's we'll get to go all meta on TQATE by discussing fictional critiques of shaky education news coverage right along side the real thing.

Bogus Trends, Lawyer-Style

The Sunday Styles section in the Times today fronts a story about how law and medecine are allegedly becoming less desirable professions. Apparently, people are more and more attracted to creative professions and are thus less willing to enter into, or stick with, the medical and legal grinds.

In the grand tradition of bogus trend stories, it begins with an anecdote, follows with confirming quotations, and only then gets around to providing any actual data:

Indeed, applications to law schools and medical schools have declined from recent highs. Nationally, the number of law school applicants dropped to 83,500 in 2006 from 98,700 in 2004—representing a 6.7 percent drop between 2006 and 2005, on top of the 5.2 percent slip the previous year, according to the Law School Admission Council...The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to 42,000 from 46,000 in 1997, although it has recovered from a low of 33,000 in 2003

First of all, if you reduce 98,700 by 5.2%, you get 93,568. Reduce that by 6.7% and you get 87,299. Even accounting for rounding errors, that's not 83,500. Copy editors are supposedly maniacal about English usage, which is fine, but what about arithmetic?

More to the point, the "evidence" that both law and medicine are simultaneously becoming less attractive is that law school applications dropped by 15.4% from 2004 to 2006, while medical school applications increased by 27.3% from 2003 to 2006.

If newspapers insist on squeezing copy into the standard trend-story mold, then I guess there's little one can do to stop them. But if the numbers don't back the alleged trend up, then just leave the numbers out. It makes this stuff (a little) less aggravating.

Comic Book Guy Can Read

Back from a two-week hiatus, will be catching up on various edu-related stories that occured in my absence.

Starting with the most significant, that of course being this NYTimes piece about schools using comic books as an instructional tool:

In Maryland, the State Education Department is expanding a new comics-based literacy curriculum, after a small pilot program yielded promising results. In New York City, a group of educators applied to open a new small high school that would be based around a comics theme and named after the creators of Superman; their application was rejected but they plan to try again next year. And the Comic Book Project, a program run out of Teachers College at Columbia University that has children create their own comic strips as an “alternative pathway to literacy,” is catching on. Six years after it started in one Queens elementary school, it has expanded to 860 schools across the country.

It all sounds good, but edu-eminence Diane Ravitch throws cold water on the idea, saying "If you’re going to use comics in the classroom at all, which I have serious doubts about, it should be only as a motivational tool. What teachers have to recognize is that this is only a first step."

This reflects two common assumptions about comic books, both which are wrong. First, that comic books are fundamentally unsophisticated as a medium. Second, that supporting a youthful enthusiasm for comic books reduces the likelihood of students moving to more serious, legitimate literary forms.

Comic books seem simple, but they're not. This mistake stems from confusing the form with the genre. The most popular American comic books have long been superhero stories, featuring lots of explosions, skin-tight costumes, and tales of good vs. evil. But the most popular forms of all media tend toward pop-culture, lowest-common demoninator fare; whether it's Transformers at the box office, American Idol on television, Chris Daughtry in music, or Harry Potter in the book store. Don't get me wrong, I like Harry Potter, but J.K. Rowling ain't Henry James. The fact that the number one movie of 2007 was Spider-Man 3 doesn't lead anyone to conclude that film as a medium is always and irredeemably low culture.

The comic book form is actually very complex. First you have all the challenges of story, pace, characterization, narration, and dialogue that are inherent to writing. Then you have a whole separate set of challenges related to creating visual art -- tone, perspective, color, mood, composition, etc. Then you have to figure out how to present a host of images in sequence, understanding the way readers will mentally fill in the transitions from one perspective, scene, and point of view to another. Finally (and most importantly) you have to understand how the words and pictures fit together, the manner and impact of readers rapidly switching back and forth between reading words and seeing pictures, two very different cognitive experiences. Comic books incorporate elements of writing, painting, illustration and film, but it's really the combination of forms that make them unique and complex. As Umberto Eco once said, "Comic books have a language of their own."

The mistaken idea that comic books are simple leads to the second, Ravitchian idea that introducing students to comic books is educationally dangerous. This is wrong. Reading comic books is reading, first of all, not watching TV or playing Halo 3 or listening to Chris Daughtry. I don't think there's some kind of substitution effect at work where students who read comic books will read fewer books; rather they'll read more of everything and not read less of everything else.

Case in point: I've been reading comic books regularly since I was nine years old and now I essentially read and write for a living. More broadly, when I think of the typical comic book reader, "illiterate" isn't the word that comes to mind. Sartorially and socially challenged, maybe, but as a rule comic readers tend to be much more intellectual and word-focused that the average Jane or Joe. Rather than continuing the ignoble tradition of Fredric Wertham, education scholars faced with the massive problem of illiteracy should support every promising avenue they can find.

Update: Sherman Dorn makes many good points about the generally shoddy, ahistorical nature of the education reporting in this piece here.

Paying and Evaluating Teachers

The Denver Post reports on Obama as the next great supporter of ProComp, Denver's highly praised pay-for-performance, or merit pay, program. This issue of teacher pay has become one of the big education debates among Democrats in the 2008 presidential campaign (both Clinton and Edwards are against merit pay but support differential pay–extra for teachers in high-need schools and teaching shortage subjects).

Merit pay is usually couched as a recruitment and retention issue–let's attract and keep good teachers by giving bonuses for performance– but the real question on merit pay is about teacher evaluation–if we're going to pay extra for the best performance, how do we fairly and accurately assess performance? Education Sector is hosting an event on this very question next Tuesday. Details here.

Ringing in the New Year

The student loan industry is likely hoping for a better start to 2008 than they experienced in 2007, when New York Attorney General Cuomo started off the year with an investigation into improper relationships between financial aid offices and loan companies.

Jonathan Vogel speculates over at Inside Higher Ed on what colleges and lenders can expect in 2008, as the fallout continues from Cuomo’s investigations.

New Year's Update

On vacation until Friday, thus the light, blackberry-based posting. Stay tuned for exciting features such as gratuitous Ohio State boosterism and why Diane Ravitch is wrong about comic books.

Best of 2007 (Colleague Edition)

Continuing in the "Best of" spirit of the times, here's the list of 2007's best songs from Daria Hall, Assistant Director for K-12 Policy at the Education Trust. Daria knows substantially more about NCLB implementation than I do, a fact I note in sympathy as much as in admiration. Daria is also trusted source of new music recommendations, so--as with NCLB policy--similarity between this and previous posts is generally a function of my availing myself of her expertise and not the other way around.

Keep the Car Running- Arcade Fire
Fans- Kings of Leon
Imitosis- Andrew Bird
Impossible Germany- Wilco
Paper Planes- M.I.A.
All the Old Showstoppers- New Pornographers
Breakin’ Up- Rilo Kiley
Gone, Gone, Gone (Done Moved On)- Robert Plant and Allison Krauss
Nude- Radiohead
I Feel It All- Feist
Can You Please Crawl Out Your Window- The Hold Steady (I’m Not There Soundtrack)
Stronger- Kanye West
Pagan Angel and a Borrowed Car- Iron & Wine
You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb- Spoon
Rehab- Amy Winehouse

The Testing Quandary

ES Co-Director Tom Toch answers a tough test question posed by the NYT's Freakonomics blog:

Should there be less standardized testing in the current school system, or more? Should all schools, including colleges, institute exit exams?

Other respondents include Fair Test's Monty Neill and Gaston Caperton, the President of the College Board (for some reason, he really likes the SAT...). Read all of the responses here.

It's (Not) So Easy

The Post ran a useful article a few days ago ("Calls Grow for a Broader Yardstick For Schools") about one of the more interesting challenges of NCLB reauthorization and education policy generally: expanding the scope of educational accountability beyond standardized test scores in reading and math to include many other important things--mastery of other subjects, more generalized abilities like critical thinking and analytic reasoning, "soft" skills like leadership and teamwork, graduation and success in college and the workforce, etc. etc. But it leaves the central question answered: if nearly everyone thinks this is a good idea, why aren't we doing it already ?

Mostly, I think, because this imperative bumps up against other imperatives, and nobody has figured how to adequately reconcile their inherent conflicts.

NCLB was designd to make the assessment of schools objective, universal, and unavoidable. In other words, all schools within a state are assessed according to the same standards and in the same way. There are very good reasons to put a premium on this. Without objectivity and universality, it's a short road back to the default judgment that most schools render upon themselves: "We're doing the best we can, given the students we have." Given how badly some schools and students are failing, that's just not good enough.

The way that NCLB achieves objectivity and universality, however, has significant shortcomings. It's a mechanistic process, based on rules intead of human judgment. The problem is that it's really hard to developing rules that (A) accurately assess something as complicated as a school and (B) people can understand.

For example, here's a by-no-means-exhaustive list of some of the important categories of information we might want to gather about a school and its students, along with the number of possible values for each:

Student Race/Ethnicity: 5 (White, Blank, Hispanic, Asian, Indian)
Student Gender: 2 (Male, Female)
Student LEP status: 2 (Yes, No)
Student Disability status: 2 (Yes, No)
Student Economic status: 2 (Low-income, Not Low-Income)
Student Gifted status: 2 (Yes, No)
Subjects: 5 (Math, Reading/LA, Social Studies, Science, Art/Music)
Proficiency Status: 4 (Below Basic, Basic, Proficient, Advanced)
Value-Added Growth: 3 (Below Expected, Expected, Above Expected)
Attainment (i.e. graduation, progression to next year in school): 2 (Yes, No)
Grades: 4 (Typical grade configuration)
Timeframe: 4 (Now, Short-Term, Medium-Term, Long-Term)

Keep in mind that this is, in many ways, a very conservative estimate of the number of possible variables. There are more than five significant racial/ethnic groups, more than five important academic subjects, more than four potential levels of academic proficiency or value-added growth to consider, far more than one category of disability, gifted status, etc. Heck, you could even argue about gender.

But even this highly simplified model produces 307,200 possible outcomes. Each of them tells us something different, and as such could theoretically merit a different response. This throws the decisions of NCLB's authors into a fairly sympathetic light. They knew that a 307,200-element accountability system wouldn’t fly, so they started narrowing things down.: Two subjects and five racial/ethnic categories. One category each for LEP, special ed, and economic status, but no combinations—in other words, we measure the performance of white children and low-income children, but not white low-income children. Gender and gifted status are out. One proficiency level, no value-added. Only seven of 12 grades, and multiple grades can be combined. Include one growth measure (safe harbor), but make it either/or so you don’t create extra variables. Each of the 16 distinct outcomes (two subjects X eight student categories, although very few schools will have all eight) has equal and overriding status as an indicator of school success. Miss one, miss all, it doesn’t matter—your identification as not making AYP is the same. Then, having rolled the entirety of a school’s success into the single binary AYP variable, put it on a four-level time scale: 0-1 years in a row, 2-3, 4-5, 6 or more. Each level corresponds to a collection of mandated and optional responses—None, In Need of Improvement, Corrective Action, Alternative Governance.

Even this relatively small level of complexity seems barely manageable. The testing industry is popping rivets trying to handle two academic subjects in seven grades. State Department of Educations struggle, some mightily, to gather all the required data and turn school ratings around on time. There are constant complaints about the expense and bureaucracy of compliance and time lost to preparing for and taking one test in two subjects per year.

And even with all the compromises and simplifications, most people still don't know how the NCLB system actually works. That diminishes the capacity of the law to act as a catalyst for change, since educators and policymakers can't constructively respond to signals they don't understand.

The article quotes Ed Trust's Amy Wilkins saying maybe this is okay: "Proponents of multiple measures say it will give a richer, fuller view of a school, but this isn't about a rich view of a school. It's about failures in fundamental gate-keeping subject areas." That view reflects Title I's origins in and continued focus on compensatory education for low-income children, and I agree this needs to remain the first priority. But like it or not, NCLB has come to be about all students and all schools, and that demands a richer view on some inescapable level.

Adding more information to the existing rules-based system will consume even more scarce resources and create even more hard-to-manage complexity. Not adding more information will leave us with an accountability system that reflects only a fraction of what we want for schools. That argues for a non-rules-based approach, one that relies more heavily on human judgment, since people are much better at making sense of vast amounts of information from disparate sources than rules. But that, in turn, threatens universality and objectivity. Perhaps one could mitigate this problem by aggregating many judgments through more robust market-focused systems, but then we're opening up a whole new can of worms...

Anyway, it's tricky. Anyone who thinks the shortcomings of the existing system are a result of obvious choices not made should think again.

Best of 2007 (Wife Edition)

In addition to being smart, beautiful, and possessing the most spouse-friendly hobby imaginable (cooking), my wife Maureen also has fine taste in music. She looks at blogging with suspicion, particularly having read this and last year's special music festival posts and noting that at least of half of the insightful critical opinions and observations, such as they are, were hers, not mine. I tried citing the timed-honored principle of spousal communal ownership of intellectual property, but she didn't buy it. So, here's Maureen's iPod "Best of 2007" playlist:

Arcade Fire, "(Antichrist Television Blues)"
The National, "Apartment Story"
Radiohead, "Bodysnatchers"
LCD Soundsystem, "North American Scum"
Band of Horses, "Is There A Ghost"
Wilco, "Impossible Germany"
Bloc Party, "Hunting for Witches"
Spoon, "You Got Yr. Cherry Bomb"
The White Stripes, "Icky Thump"
Ted Leo & the Pharmacists, "The Sons of Cain"
Rilo Kiley, "Silver Lining"
Iron & Wine, "Boy With a Coin"
The New Pornographers, "Myriad Harbour"
Stars, "Take Me to the Riot"
The Apples in Stereo, "Can You Feel It?"
White Rabbits, "While We Go Dancing"
Andrew Bird, "Fiery Crash"
Buffalo Tom, "You'll Never Catch Him"

I might have gone with different selections in some cases-- "Woman King " or "Jezebel" for the Iron & Wine song, for example -- but overall this is a fine way to spend 90 minutes driving to your parent's house for the holidays.

"Best of" lists are often a good way to identify your critical / genre weak spots; I bought The Hold Steady's "Boys and Girls in America" a year ago solely because it was on top of a lot of Ten Best lists from respectable sources. On first listen I was like "Not bad," on second, "Pretty good," on fifth, "Kind of great!" and so on and so forth. By the time I saw them at the 9:30 club last month I was three/fourths convinced they're authentic American geniuses; it was certainly one of the ten best concerts I've ever seen.

Fire This Time

Last week the Post reported the following:

A technology manager for District schools who stuck schoolchildren with his tabs for thousands of dollars worth of lavish restaurant meals, nightclub jaunts and a visit to a strip club was charged yesterday with filing fraudulent expense reimbursement requests.

The story ran in the Metro section, below the fold. That's because municipal corruption in DC is like lake effect snow in Cleveland--the fact of it isn't news, only the magnitude. Compared to the property tax office, teachers union, and charter school board officials who stole hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars, this guy is the equivalent of a small flurry.

I note this in light of the ongoing efforts of DC mayor Adrien Fenty and schools chancellor Michelle Rhee to get legislation through the City Council that would allow Rhee to fire central office employees "without cause," which in gov-speak means "if she thinks they're doing a bad job." Fenty and Rhee are getting a fair amount of pushback from the council and the civil service and teachers unions, but it looks like the plan will go through.

To be clear, even the current sclerotic civil service system can manage to fire convicted felons. Similarly, "Work hard or I'm going to fire your a--" is not, in and of itself, a comprehensive management strategy. It's equally important to identify and support high-performing--or even normal-performing--employees, to create a constructive, collaborative work environment that attracts talent.

That said, incompetence and corruption are two sides of the same coin, flowing from a generalized organizational culture of indifference--or even opposition--to things like excellence, accountability, and service to the public. That's what Fenty and Rhee are after, I think, and given the catastrophic failure of the system they're trying to change, they deserve a great deal of latitude in how they try to get there.

"School Choice on Steroids"

NPR’s Larry Abramson takes a trip to Mapleton school district outside of Denver, Colorado, where they are “trying to offer school choice on steroids.” But (unlike in baseball) this isn’t magic. Test scores are still low, and the idea of school choice hasn’t fully permeated the mindset of students and parents in Mapleton.

Despite offering everything from a hands-on, project-based school modeled after New Tech High in Napa, California to an International Baccalaureate school complete with uniforms, many parents still base their choice decisions on convenience. Many of the school improvements promised by choice theorists depend on parents choosing schools with the best academics. But reality shows that parents and students make decisions based on a host of other factors—where their friends go, how close the school is to home or work, and some very important, if not academic, criteria, like school safety.

The research and advocacy around school choice often focuses on building the supply of schools and reducing barriers to choice for parents and students, but not much has focused on what is needed to build a knowledgeable consumer base. There is a bit of a “build it and they will come” attitude about school choice reform. But without a culture of informed choice, school choice reforms might either see little to no impact, or might see choice (somewhat like the higher education market) shifting priorities to things like sports or fancy facilities and away from the quality of teaching and learning in schools.

Listen to the segment here. And if you want more NPR segments on school choice, check out these two pieces—one on Green Dot Public Schools’ takeover of Locke High School in Los Angeles, and the other profiling Green Dot’s founder, Steve Barr.

The Post Fails Math

One of the ways you know a particular story has really embedded itself in the public consciousness is when it becomes a genre. As in the "People who think public education should teach X blame NCLB for reduced attention, resources, etc. for X" story, of which roughly 632,000 have been published in major media outlets in the last five years. Today's version in the Post focuses on music education, and contains a significant error. It says:

Despite research showing that students who study music have better attendance, achievement and lifetime earnings, music classes are struggling to survive. Supporters of such classes place some of the blame on the federal No Child Left Behind law....As instructional time in math, language arts and other subjects students must achieve proficiency in has risen, time devoted to other subjects has declined. Time spent on arts and music in 2007 is about half what it was before No Child Left Behind became law in 2002, according to a report recently released by the nonprofit Center on Education Policy.

The sentence I've italicized above is not even close to being right.

You can read the Center on Education Policy report referred to in the article here. It only shows detailed data for changes in instructional time for elementary schools. According to the report, the districts surveyed devoted 110 minutes per week to art and music in 2007. Districts that reduced time for art music reported an average reduction of 57 minutes. 110 minutes is not "about half" of 167 minutes, it's 65.8%, a hair below two-thirds.

Much more importantly, only 16 percent of districts reported reducing time for art and music at all.

Needless to say, this is a hugely important distinction. The plain meaning of the sentence printed in the Post is that NCLB has caused a 50% reduction in the total time spent teaching art and music. The report suggests that the actual number is closer to five percent (.34 X .16). In other words, the story is wrong by as much as an order of magnitude.

This seems like a classic symptom of the objectivity / accuracy value imbalance in the media -- newspapers will go to great lengths to make sure that a political reporter's spouse's friend's cousin's college roomate didn't buy lemonade from a stand in front of the candidate's neighbor's house, yet they make math mistakes like this all the time.

A More Selective Pool of Teachers

ETS released a new research report on teacher quality last week showing that the teacher pool seems to be improving, at least on academic measures. The researchers compared the 1994-1997 and 2002-2005 Praxis test takers and found that the SAT scores and GPAs of teacher candidates have increased from one cohort to the next. Why? They credit a combination of policies, both federal and state, including alternative pathways to teaching, higher standards (and standards in general) for academic qualifications, and tougher admissions and licensing requirements. The research suggests that it's a more selective process now–minimum passing scores have been raised and, as a result, Praxis passing rates are down. And the proportion of test takers with prior teaching experience has risen, suggesting a change in the traditional undergraduate education degree route to teaching.

Less rosy are the results for elementary, special education and physical education candidates. Except for special education, where there appears to be some decline, these teacher candidates have better grades and scores too. But they still lag far behind their subject-matter-certified peers for secondary education. And the typical teacher, demographically, isn't much different than a decade ago. There are still disproportionately low numbers of African American and Latino teacher candidates (with the K-12 school population now less than 60 percent white, it's a little startling to still see the teacher pool hovering near 90 percent white). And the male-female ratio hasn't budged at all- still holding at only a quarter male).

The research can't say anything about the classroom effectiveness of these teachers. That's a whole other can of worms. But the direction overall- toward a more selective and perhaps respected pool of teachers- seems positive. The next question for researchers, then, is whether there is some state or federal policy that matters most for this change, or if it is some strange combination of policies that make the difference for teacher quality.