Again With the Not Understanding Baseball

Look: If people want to challenge the premise of comparing baseball to teachers in New York, fine. But if you're going to make the argument on baseball terms, then have your facts in order. First there was this, then Leo Casey says:

It now appears that “Billyball,” as its advocates called Beane’s statistical approach, doesn’t have quite the track record of success Carey reported. The most famous account of Beane’s method was Michael Lewis 2004 book Moneyball, which looked closely at Beane’s 2002 draft picks, since the Athletics had accumulated an unusually large number of such picks that season. As New York Times sports columnist Murray Chass recently recounted, the Beane’s 2002 choices chronicled in the Lewis book have proven less than felicitous. Statastically speaking, the other teams which picked based on scouting reports did better than the Athletics. You can count us among the skeptics that evaluating teachers is a process akin to judging baseball talent. But it is interesting to know that the baseball model being proffered as a basis for judging teaching performance was not even successful on its own terms.

As people who have actually read the book know, the premise of Moneyball was that Billy Beane was able to exploit inefficiencies in the baseball labor market created by the difference between what people believed was important in a baseball player and what, statistically speaking, was actually important. Some of those biases were between different kinds of statistics--people overvalued stolen bases and undervalued on-base percentage. Other biases were between human observations and statistics--people believed they could identify talent by looking at it, and were often wrong. People also tended to gamble high draft picks on high school pitchers, even though such choices rarely pan out. Beane's approach was particularly valuable to the A's because they were, and are, a small market team with relatively low revenues. Teams like the Yankees could overvalue players and still win a lot of baseball games because they had money to waste. The A's didn't, and so it was critically important to maximize the number of wins per dollar spent. Beane's success in this respect is completely irrefutable; under his management the A's have consistently won more games than most teams while spending less money.

The Murray Chass column Leo references is about one small slice of that overall strategy, the 2002 amateur draft, which forms a lot of the narrative of Lewis' book. Chass' suggestion that the long-term result of that draft doesn't support Beane's strategy is based primarily on the following:

Four of the seven players picked by Oakland (57 percent) among the first 39 picks in that draft have played in the majors, including [Jeremy] Brown. Of the other 32 picks, 20 have played in the majors (62.5 percent).

The A's first pick in that draft wasn't until 16th. So their average draft position among the first 39 picks was lower than the average position of the other teams teams. More importantly, that draft was a success. Three of the four players--Nick Swisher, Joe Blanton, and Mark Teahen--have become successful major leaguers, which is a fine rate given the small percentage of draftees who succeed. Chass notes that only one is still with the A's as if that's a negative, which is silly--I don't think any believes the Red Sox were wrong to sign Babe Ruth just because they eventually sold him to the Yankees.

Chass also notes that Prince Fielder, one of the players chosen before the A's first pick, turned out to be quite good. Sure--but most of the other players drafted before the A's first pick, Swisher, didn't do nearly as well. In fact, the first round of the 2002 draft is littered with high school pitchers who went bust because of injury problems--precisely the kind of player Beane rightfully avoided, one of the many reasons the strategy Leo derides has in fact worked so well.

Update: A reader points out that "Billyball" is the term for the way Billy Martin managed the Yankees, not the way Billy Beane runs the A's. Another strike against Leo.

Update 2: Matt Tabor has a good post in response to Leo here.

College Transfer Blues

Laura Dempsey, a civil rights lawyer and Army wife, writes in the Washington Post about the many reasons it's hard for her to maintain a career. Among them:

Wives attending college when their service members transfer must choose between paying exorbitant out-of-state tuition if they stay behind or losing a substantial number of credits if they move. Although many smaller and online universities admirably volunteer to accept transferred credits for military wives, most of the country's larger public universities and almost none of the top-tier private schools do.

This is a good opportunity to point out that the "system" of tranferring college credit in this country is a mess, much more so than most people realize. Colleges start with the baseline presumption that credits earned at other colleges are no good. Then they intermittently create "articulation" arrangements with other institutions, often on department-by-department ore even course-by-course basis, most commonly within state university systems or between systems within states. Absent those arrangements, they just decide which credits they'll accept however they like. It's a completely non-transparent and idiosyncratic process, and the worst thing about it is that students don't find out how many of their credits will be accepted by the college they're transferring to until after they apply and decide to go.

This is partly because we live in a big country with a lot of colleges that are governed in a very decentralized way, so there's no clean public policy solution from a national perspective. But there's also an element of institutional hubris -- departments tend to think that the standards for introductory Econ or what have you at that other institution just aren't up to snuff, when in fact most of the courses students take as undergraduates aren't all that different regardless of where they're taught.

There's also a financial element -- it's not in a college's best interests to make it really easy for students to transfer out, and when they accept students who transfer in, every credit they reject is a credit students will have to pay to re-take. Market pressures don't fix the problem because students don't usually transfer many times, so it's a case where they don't know they're going to get the shaft until they've gotten it, and once they've gotten it they're never in a position to avoid getting it again.

Only students in special circumstances that result in serial transfers--like Army wives--come to realize just how absurd and inefficient the system is, likely resulting in billions of dollars per year of wasted time and money that could be better spent elsewhere.

Other Than That, Spot-On

Mike Klonsky takes issue with my recent baseball / education comparison:

But Carey equates Bloomberg’s N.Y. testing mania with 1990’s Oakland A’s manager Billy Beane’s supposed reliance on statistics (“crunching numbers without prejudice”) to pilot his team to the World Series. What a stretch! No team has better individual player stats than the current Yankee team which can’t quite make it to the top. If statistics decided everything, there would be no need to play the game. Good managers crunch numbers, but often make their most important decisions based on intangibles, gut feelings, and connoisseurship. One more thing—A’s star power hitter Jose Conseco, the first major leaguer ever to hit at least 40 homers and steal at least 40 bases in a season-- was also one of the first admitted steroid users. Steroids may have ultimately done great damage to Conseco’s body as well as to the integrity of MLB. But it sure was good for his stats. Maybe Beane should have been looking past the numbers and Carey looking for a better metaphor.

A few observations:

1) The Oakland A's have not gone to the World Series under Billy Beane, which is the main reason I didn't say that they did.

2) Billy Beane is the general manager of the A's, not the manager, which is not at all the same thing.

3) Yankees players indeed have excellent statistics, which likely one of the reasons that the Yankees have, over the last 12 years, gone to the playoffs 12 times, won the American League East 10 times, won the American League pennant 6 times, and won the World Series 4 times. They haven't won the Series in the last few year because--unlike basketball and football--baseball is a sport where even the greatest teams only win 60-some percent of their games, so the odds of winning three consecutive short series against good opponents are always against you. The Yankees didn't need Moneyball techniques to win all those games, because they have more money than Brunei.

4) Nobody named Jose Conseco has every played major league baseball. Conseco is a large insurance company based in Indianapolis, where I used to live.

5) Jose Canseco did indeed go 40-40, in 1988, nine years before Billy Beane became the general manager of the A's. He left the A's in 1992, returned briefly in '97, and never played for them again, no doubt in part because his on-base percentage for the A's that year was .325, making him exactly the kind of player Billy Beane did not want to hire.

6) There are no equivalents of steroids in teaching--no dangerous illegal substances that boost your classroom performance at the expense of your fellow teachers. So I have no idea what the steroid scandal is supposed to demonstrate here, other than when you give people strong incentives to boost their performance, they try very hard to boost their performance, which is more or less my point.

8 1/2 Million Dollars an Hour

Philanthropist Donald Bren just gave $8.5 million to THINK Together, an L.A.-based nonprofit group that runs afterschool programs, to extend the school day by an hour in 30 or so Santa Ana and East LA schools. That is one huge private donation to expand THINK's afterschool programming, which stands to really help these kids--largely low-income and English-learning--gain the extra learning they probably need. Still that's one seriously expensive hour so I hope a chunk of that goes to evaluate the program's impact . Anecdotes and testimonials are nice but they won't be enough to sustain that kind of expansion beyond Bren.

Please Stop

Acknowledging that few observations are more banal than the soul-deadening nature of airline travel, for me the single worst thing is the televisions BLARING cable news around departure gates. Yesterday -- I'm not making this up -- I sat in the Detroit airport across from a nun while CNN ran an extensive piece investigating the critical issue of why celebrities cheat on their hot wives, complete with references to Divine Brown, Jude Law's nanny, and constant use of words like "hot," "erotic," etc.At the moment it's something about whether Britney Spears is somewhat as opposed to completely insane.

Back to education tomorrow, promise

The Ivy League Just Keeps Getting Greener

But not the trendy, Al Gore kind of green—the old-fashioned, John D. Rockefeller kind of green.

I received an email this morning from Stanford University announcing that it (like Harvard, Princeton, etc.) will be expanding its financial aid program. Now a family with an income of less than $100,000 will not need to pay tuition, and a family with less than $60,000 will not pay tuition or room and board fees. It’s great that wealthy institutions like Stanford are starting to one-up each other on generous financial aid packages, but it also points to some troubling issues.

Stanford’s aid will provide free tuition to households with incomes in the top 20 percent of incomes in the United States, and the offer of free tuition and free room and board will go to households with incomes in the top 40 percent. Something seems wrong when a college’s tuition—even an elite private school—is beyond the financial capacity of those defined by the New York Times to be “upper class” and “upper middle class”. Suddenly, there is a lot of aid money going to students who, when looking at the income distribution in the United States, shouldn’t need it.

And this aid money is not distributed evenly across colleges—most institutions don’t have the financial resources to offer these generous aid packages. The Council for Aid to Education released today its “Voluntary Support of Education” report, which tracks private donations to colleges. These donations have increased for the 4^th year in a row, totaling $29.8 billion in 2007. But even more interesting is that the top 20 institutions, representing 2 percent of responding institutions, raised over a quarter of all the money going to higher education. Topping this list? Stanford University with $832 million last year.

The Brookings Institution, meanwhile, released a report today indicating that—while a college degree is still a powerful ticket to upward economic mobility—the growing gap in college attainment between the rich and poor in the United States threatens the ability of those from low-income families to climb the income ladder. And our most recent Chart You Can Trust shows that if you’re from a low-income family, it’s still much harder to get into the most elite institutions, even if you have high test scores, than someone from the “upper middle class”.

So while students that attend an elite institution can increasingly be assured that college will be affordable, this assurance does not extend to the vast majority of students who attend less wealthy or open-access institutions. And since low-income students are much less likely to attend an elite institution like Stanford, they might end up paying a higher tuition bill than someone who can attend--even if that person is from the top quintile of household incomes.

Brrrrrr......

I'm in Grinnell, Iowa, at the moment, visiting Grinnell College, giving a presentation / speech about NCLB. There's a lot I could discuss -- the friendly people, pleasant accomodations, lively dialogue before and after the speech, the fact that Grinnell has the 6th largest endowment per-student of any college or university in the nation, larger than Stanford, Amherst, or M.I.T., but all I can really concentrate on at the moment is the fact that it's very, very cold. I mean, REALLY COLD. When I accepted the invite to come here last Fall, I knew it was cold in theory in Iowa in February, but to actually step into this upper midwestern maelstrom of coldness is to be reminded that it's never, ever, actually cold in Washington, DC. Chilly perhaps, nippy from time to time, occcasionally on the cool side, but never cold like it is here, now. The drive from Des Moines takes a little over an hour and on the way I must have seen 100 cars buried in the median or on the side of the road in the ice and snow. It's cold, I say!

Update: Temperature when I walked out the door at 8AM this morning: Minus 12 degrees. Just to put that in perspective, I'd say the typical resident of DC would regard 30 degrees as cold. The difference between here and that is the same as the difference between 30 and warm spring day of 72.

How We Deal

Eduwonkette’s recent post on linkages between leading education think tanks poses a couple of important questions: Do the leading education policy shops amount to “multiple organizational outposts” for a small and insular group of thought leaders? And can think tanks claim to be independent evaluators when they share board members and funders?

Since Eduwonkette included Education Sector in her post and accompanying chart, it’s worth discussing how we deal with the issues that she raises.

To start with, we eschew government money and we don't do fee-for-service work. We are funded not by one or two foundations but by many different ones. We list them on our web site and we name them in individual reports if they fund that work specifically, though a substantial percentage of our funding is general-operating support rather than project-specific grants. Our contractual agreements with foundations give us editorial control over the work we produce. We’ve found that what our funders value most is good work—thoughtful analysis, clear writing, and an ability to advance our ideas effectively.

To further promote transparency, our web site includes biographies of all of our team members, directors, research advisory board members and non-resident senior fellows. In each instance, our goal is to draw on the expertise of smart people with differing backgrounds and perspectives. The fact that some of these people are also affiliated with other organizations means only that others recognize their talents as well.

What drives our work at Education Sector is a set of core principles about the purposes of education and the nature of educational reform. We posted them on our web site early in our history under the heading What We Believe. These principles undergird all of our research, analysis and commentary and they make it easy to tell where we’re coming from on policy questions. Agree with them or not, you know what they are.

We also have a Transparency Policy that governs potential conflicts of interest. Every Education Sector employee has sign the document anew every year. And we are developing for our web site documents that describe our “theory of action”—our sense of how to improve American education and how we as an organization propose to promote those improvements happen—in the policy areas where Education Sector does the bulk of its work.

In often makes sense in the course of doing our work to collaborate with other organizations. Such networking sharpens our thinking and helps us have impact. It’s what every good think tank and policy organization does in every field. Conversely, Education Sector does not as an institution sign policy manifestos or other multi-organization documents. Nor do we take institutional positions in policy debates, in contrast to membership and advocacy organizations, which frequently do. Each of us shares Education Sector’s organizing principles, but we often have very different takes on issues. It keeps us sharp.

Ooh, Good News

It seems that a new Neal Stephenson book will be published in September. Apparently, "It's set on another planet and has aliens and so on. It's really about Platonic mathematics, but he needed the aliens and space opera-ish elements to spice it up a little bit." Exciting! I've read objectively better books over the last five years, but I probably haven't enjoyed any books as much as Cryptonomicon and the time it took to plow through the entire 2,500 page Baroque cycle was well spent. I believe this may put me in common company with Instapundit, which is kind of disturbing, but what can I do. Stephenson's Snow Crash remains one of the more prescienct novels in recent memory, he basically described Second Life in 1991.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 7

In which Clay Davis plays every card in the race deck, except, presumably, the King of Diamonds, because that's McNulty.

Summary: Davis beats the rap with the help of real-life Baltimore criminal defense attorney Billy Murphy, who once got Don King acquitted, so I'm guessing this wasn't much of a stretch. McNulty gets everything he ever asked for, with predictable results. Steintorf tells Carcetti he has no choice but to continue the homeless initiative, recalling the immortal words of Slim Charles at the end of Season Three.

Omar continues killing his way through the Stanfield organization, but is looking less invincible by the hour, with Kenard, as usual, calling out the truth. Saint Gus says to hell with the nut graf, go talk to the people! Kima sings the traditional Baltimore classic "Goodnight Fiends, Goodnight Hoppers" lullabye to Elijah, which the writer of this episode, Richard Price, borrowed from his book Clockers. I'm loading that into the MP3-enabled crib I buy for my kids, if and when I have some. I wonder if they'll sell it at IKEA?

Gratuitous, slightly jarring cameo of the week: Munch from Homicide. Poot, meanwhile, is clearly finalizing plans for his Michael Corleone-style simultaneous assassination of the entire board of the former New Day Co-Op.

Earlier in the season, State's Attorney OBonda turned down the opportunity to take the Clay Davis case federal with the "head shot" real estate charge. Oops! Lest anyone think the acquittal is implausible, I know several people who have worked in the Baltimore federal court system, and they all say this is the main reason cases up there go federal--avoiding jury nullification. While the state jury pool is local, federal cases draw juries from the whole northern half of the state, which means a black man from West Baltimore like Clay Davis who avails himself of his Constitutional right to a jury of his peers ends up being tried by an all-white jury comprised of people from the Eastern Shore and the westernmost rural counties of the state.

Also, there's a been a fair amount of bloggy discussion about whether Prop Joe really would have let himself get played like that. I think the answer is: sure. He wasn't ominiscient, he was thinking two steps ahead and Marlo was thinking three. Every day you play the Game, you put yourself in harm's way; Joe was lucky he lasted that long. Plus, much as I enjoyed Joe as a character, let's not forget that he was just as much of a dirtbag drug-dealing murderer as all the rest. He was smart, his families had roots in the community, he could have done a lot of things with his life and he decided to spend it spreading violence and poison throughout East Baltimore. Think about it: what was the practical result of Joe and Stringer's Co-op innovation? A smoother running heroin and crack distribution network, resulting in a more consistent supply of product, higher profits for the dealers, and lower prices and greater availability for the consumers. In other words, the worst possible thing for the community. Think of people like Bubbles, or Jonny (RIP), or the drug prostitute who kicked off an earlier episode this season. The Co-op meant more addiction, more death, more people becoming those people, and Joe was responsible. He got what he deserved.

Caught in the Tangled Web

I've been doing some background reading for a policy paper about minority college graduation rates this morning, and I ran across a interesting paper written by George Kuh and his colleagues at the National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE) at Indiana University about the effect of student engagement on students' grades and likelihood of staying in school. I notice that it references a paper I wrote on the subject four years ago. I, in turn, am planning on referencing Kuh's paper in my new report. George and I have had drinks together on several occasions, and were both members of a panel that testified to the Commission on the Future of Higher Education last year. The new director of NSSE recently asked me to participate in a panel discussion on college rankings. In 1998 and 1999, I worked for the state senator from Bloomington, Indiana, where Indiana University is located.

Clearly, I am inextricably caught up in a web of undisclosed relationships and inherent conflicts of interest that must be fully disclosed in exhaustive, graphically-aided detail in my upcoming report. Either that or Education Sector will be morally obligated to change its logo and destroy any stationary containing the word "independent." Alas, if only someone had made me aware of this before.

Hearts and Unicorns

January’s Phi Delta Kappan featured three different authors commenting on the state of democracy in public education today. The last article entitled, “Democracy and Education: Empowering Students to Make Sense of Their World” linked education and democracy with a cogent premise—learning theory. William Garrison views instructional practice or the way students are taught to learn, as the conduit to prepare young people for democratic citizenship. Garrison asserts that the core connection between democracy and education is formulated by testing understanding through experience.

“Learning is the process of constructing meaning or structuring reality…Formal education, as a system by which society transfers its knowledge and customs from generation to generation, generally does a poor job of teaching students how to learn, specifically a poor job of helping students to develop as self-directed learners, which is so critical in a rapidly changing world.”

So, where is this “self-directed” learning taking place in today’s public school system? I would point to Napa Valley’s New Technology High School as one such place. NTHS genesis began in Napa but has now spread across nine different states and has a total of 35 schools. NTHS uses “project-based learning” as their model. Students present tech-based projects, work in teams, and create products on the subject at hand. Students are encouraged to take responsibility for their own learning. I’ll concede “project-based” learning can at times become synonymous with new-age educational centers that award hearts instead of A's and Unicorns in place of an F. But, I would also argue that NTHS is imparting advanced levels of learning and communication skills that need to be applied to real-world problems. The learning environment at New Tech stimulates a workplace environment, helping students achieve greater analytical skills through autonomy and experience. Find more on NTHS here.
Posted by: Claire Williams

The Wages of Wynn

In a race that received a significant amount of national attention and an influx of outside money, Donna Edwards defeated eight-term incumbent Albert Wynn for the Democractic nomination to represent Maryland's overwhelmingly big-D Democratic 4th Congressional district. Edwards was heavily backed by progressive labor interests, including the SEIU, who saw Wynn as too pro-business. Not all labor groups took the same tack, however. A month ago, Wynn was endorsed by the Maryland teachers unions:

Congressman Wynn has shown political courage in raising major concerns about the reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Law," Clara Floyd, president of the Maryland State Teachers Association, said in a statement. "If we want to make sure that every child has access to great public schools, then Congress must provide the flexibility and resources needed to make that happen."

Which just goes to show that there's no so such thing as a free lunch in politics. If you're going to throw your weight around Congress pursuing this or that legislative agenda--in this case, opposing parts of the proposed NCLB reauthorization legislation that was considered late last year--then you have no choice but to step up and support the candidates you're leaning on when they're politically vulnerable; if you don't, the premises of your pressure tactics fall apart. This wasn't just an education phenonomena, some other AFL / CIO affiliated unions endorsed Wynn as well. The problem with taking the short-term benefit of influencing someone to your cause is that in the long term the quo always comes back to the quid and you end up crosswise with people who should be your allies while alienating the new person who kicks your guy out of office.

The Suspense is Killing Me

I'm going to be at Grinnell College in Iowa next week speaking at an event focused on accountability, NCLB, etc. The commissioner of the Nebraska Department of Education will also be there, giving a presentation titled No Child Left Behind: A Vision for the Future...A Roadmap to Disaster? Hmmm, I wonder what the opening betting line would be on his answer to that question?

That Seems Like a Good Idea

I went to the Phillips Collection over the weekend to see their new exhibit of acquisitions from the last ten years. I didn't quite realize the extent to which "acquired" is museum-ese for "convinced a rich art collector to donate this in theoretical increments over a multi-year period so as to maximize their tax deductions," as opposed to "bought." I imagine running a successful museum must involve spending an awful lot of time drinking weak coffee in senior citizens' living rooms while pretending to like their small yappy dogs.

More to the point, instead of handing out audioguides to walk around with or hang on a lanyard around your neck, the exhibit just had a cell phone number where you would call and then hit a certain number plus # to hear the recording corresponding to a given painting. This seems like a remarkably obvious and good idea in the age of ubiquitous cell phone ownership. There must be some kind of edu-application, albeit one that will be subsumed by ubiquitious broadband-connected miniature computer ownership in a few years.

More Time Movement

The After-School Corporation (TASC) is partnering with the NYC Department of Education and the NYC Department of Youth and Community Development on a 3-year demonstration program for Expanded Learning Time. They, like the Massachusetts model, want to increase student learning time by at least 30%. And like Mass2020, TASC is going to serve as the intermediary for the 10-15 pilot programs.

An RFP with details here.

Meanwhile, on the national front, we're still kicking around the Expanded Learning Time Demonstration Act (H.R. 3642) that was introduced by Representative Payne (D-NJ) last year and showed up in the Miller/McKeon draft NCLB legislation. The grants would provide funds for expanded learning time through longer school days, additional school days, or a combination of longer school days and additional school days.

Population Projections Per Pew's Passel (& Cohn)

The Pew Hispanic Center has a new report by Jeffrey Passel and D’Vera Cohn projecting national immigration trends to 2050. Since most know that immigrants make up an increasingly big slice of the American pie, it may not be surprising to learn that nearly one in five Americans will be an immigrant in 2050 (vs. one in eight in 2005). But here are a few other things you should know:

First, if you thought the last major immigration wave was big, get ready for bigger. This 21st century wave of foreign born will hit 18% of the population by 2050 (compared to 14% at the turn of the 20th century).

Second, the Latino share of the population will rise to 29% (from 14% in 2005). The Asian population will nearly double from 5% to 9%*, the Black population will grow slightly and the white population will decline from 67 to 47%.

But, it’s not the kids that will make up most of that growth. The child population will grow slowly compared to the elderly one. Check out Fig. 22 (couldn't upload it, sorry) where you'll see a fast-growing elderly population compared to a slow-growing child population. Still more working-age adults projected, but the dependency ratio that Passel and Cohn lay out will get worse over time (59 dependents for every 100 workers in '05 versus 72/100 in 2050).

Overall, for schools, this means we need to be prepared to serve not only a more ethnically and linguistically diverse population of kids—many of whom will be English-language learners and many more of whom will be 3rd and upward generations--but we also need to be prepared to do a better job communicating with their parents and grandparents. We’re getting away with not paying attention to this right now but, as this report reminds us, need to get better quicker.

*correction: apologies for earlier error on asian pop growth- the asian pop will triple in number, double in % of total U.S. population.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 6

Last week, we noted that Omar is apparently Superman. This week, Marlo clarifies: Omar is Spider-Man, albeit more of the rage-filled alien black suit variety.

Summary: The New Day is done, as Marlo takes control of the B'more drug trade with Omar hobbled but bent on revenge. Nancy Grace does a hilarious cameo suggesting she has either less self-awareness or more of a sense of humour than I'd have thought. Scottie, who for the first few episodes was shaping up to be the biggest tool since Black and Decker, manages to get some real reporting done before reverting back to his lying ways. Executive editor Whiting III bust out his all-that's-wrong-with-newspapers-today Dickensian thing again. Nick heckles the groundbreaking of the yuppy development at the freight elevator (or something) that was supposed to save the union. Carcetti reminds us--and perhaps himself--how he got elected in the first place. Daniels shows his chops in front of the press, while Prop Joe's mole in the D.A.'s office comes to light. There are like 600 characters on this show but I actually have no idea who it could be. Bunk comes this close to getting Chris for the murder of Michael's stepfather, but is stymied by McNulty's fake serial killer investigation, which becomes a victim of its own success, depriving McNulty of dead homeless guys and thus leading him to--naturally--steal a live one instead. Randy appears and has about three lines, each of which is enough to break your heart.

Three more past-season alums come off the no-show list:

Randy
Nick
Judge Phelan

This lends further credence to my Poot-as-Keyser-Soze theory. Simple process of elimination, really.

After spending the first half of the season establishing characters, themes and plot lines, Episode Six gave the season some much-needed momentum. And hey, what do you know, maybe it's not going to be quite as simple-minded as the critics fear. What if there's truth waiting underneath all the lies and cynicism? What does it mean when politicians do the right thing for the wrong reason, and when police do the wrong thing for the right reason? Hopefully, we'll find out.

On Kozol

A few years ago, Jonathan Kozol and I were among a group of people giving presentations at an event in Chicago tied to the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board. He spoke first and gave the kind of eloquent, morally severe speech one would expect, asserting that the nation's increasingly segregated schools were an insult to the memory of Brown. He also had unkind words for the contemporary school reform movement, citing in particular those who would point to "miracle schools," as he called schools with high poverty and high achievement, as evidence that education could serve as a counter-weight to larger problems of race and class. "We can't depend on miracles," he concluded. There was much applause.

I was working at the the Education Trust at the time, which specializes in identifying high-poverty, high-performing schools. So at the end of my presentation, which was about school funding disparities between rich and poor (they're particularly large in Illinois), I said, "Like most of the people in the audience, I've read and greatly benefitted from Jonathan Kozol's books. But I think he's wrong about the promise of high-performing schools. They're not miracle workers, they just do their jobs uncommonly well. Saying that their success is somehow supernatural denigrates their real accomplishments."

After the final speaker, an unreconstructed Marxist professor from DePaul who explained (really) that there could be no school reform until the revolution comes, we broke for lunch. I was making small talk with someone from the Chicago school district, when Kozol walked up and asked, without preamble, "Do you really think there all these schools out there that can overcome poverty?" Thus began a fascinating, hour-long conversation that continued as the room emptied out and the waiters cleared the dishes around us, before going outside where he could smoke. He was smart, wry, and more willing than he is in public to concede that some of public education's failures originate from sources other than societal racism, corporate-controlled goverment, and economic inequality. He was particularly interested in the school finance stuff, and we exchanged FAXs (he didn't do email) for a few months thereafter.

Kozol has been in the news a lot lately, first with his much-discussed diet to protest NCLB, and now with the publication of a new book, "Letters to a Young Teacher." The Weekly Standard has a review here, which contains most of the elements of the standard conservative anti-Kozol piece, which has become a genre unto itself: a lengthy section focusing on Kozol's admiration for Castro, standard pro-voucher and anti-school spending arguments, etc. There are also more than a few exaggerations and factual errors, which is problematic given that the author, Jonathan Leaf, accuses Kozol of the same sloppiness, as well as (citing no evidence) outright fabrication. Leaf says:

Kozol's impact has been enormous. The national phenomenon of judges' compelling states to change their tax codes to increase funding for schools in poor districts was driven by the widespread credence given to his 1991 book Savage Inequalities, which sold over 250,000 copies in hardcover alone.

That's nonsense. School funding lawsuits have been going on without interruption since the early 1970s, and the seminal Kentucky case that kicked off the "adequacy" movement in school finance, Rose v. Council for Better Education, was decided in 1989. Leaf also says:

As academics have known for many years, states that spend more on their schools often have the worst educational performance and some of the states that spend the least per pupil--like North Dakota and Utah--have among the best.

While North Dakota does pretty well, Utah ranks in the bottom half of states on the latest NAEP reading test. Hardly "some of the best."

Leaf does, however, hone in on what I think is the essential criticism of Kozol, which is that in his righteous anger and dark pessimism, he's become blind to all evidence of progress and possibility with our public schools. This point is made in Sandra Tsing Loh's much more worthwhile review in latest issue of The Atlantic, which isn't online yet, where she confesses to being:

"a longtime, rabid fan of Jonathan Kozol. Yea, I could show you my tower of dog-eared Kozolalia...I am the sort of impressionable woman whose eyes seep tears while reading his heartrending descriptions of racial inequality in public education...Pfizer should develop a special anti-depressant--"Zokol: for when you've read too much Kozol."

But she's also the mother of a white child who attends the predominantly minority, often low-income Los Angeles Unified Public Schools. She says:

I was pleasantly surprised (steeped in Kozolalia as I was) to discover that it was not a blasted wasteland...While aesthetically uninspiring on the outside, inside it was a plethora of books, computers, LeapFrog pads, and the like...I have yet, for instance, to trip over a crack-addicted parent in the parking lot...

Tsing Loh relates how she had her own Jonathan Kozol moment recently, and tried to talk to him about what these things might mean:

But he wasn't interested. What we need are moral leaders! he roared mightily. This is a civil rights issue! We need a religous leader, a prophet...thundering from the pulpit!

Kozol's critics often complain that he's been writing the same book, over and over, for forty years. I've never understood this--if the book needs to be written, if the message needs to be heard, then what else should he do? People need reminding of what's important--that's why church is every Sunday--and there's no surplus of well-known authors who can focus attention on the deep structural and social inequities that plague the education of the most vulnerable children.

But somewhere along the way, the burden and exhilaration of all those decades of righteousness seem to have narrowed Kozol's vision to point that he can longer see reasons to hope. True prophets provide more than just portents of doom; they stand up and show the faithful a path to a better place.

Don't Be Questioning My Bill James-itude

Calling my Daily News editorial on the NYC value-added controversy "outlandish and mathematically inept," Steve Koss says:

True baseball aficionados -- those familiar with the work of Bill James, for example -- also understand that these now-famous analytical models are almost exclusively multivariate regression models. In other words, baseball general managers like Billy Beane use mathematical models that predict a player’s value or performance from many different variables simultaneously, each variable clearly measurable and each contributing a portion of the total “value added.” These models are mathematically complex, fraught with issues of relevance, cross-interference among variables, and time series interdependencies (respectively called statistical significance, multicollinearity, and autoregressive conditional heteroskedasticity) that must be carefully considered in their formation and use.

Contrast this approach with the DOE’s under Chancellor Klein, where a teacher’s ostensible “value added” is derived entirely from a single variable, standardized test scores, that is itself an arguably spurious measure. Imagine baseball owners paying their players on the basis of just one variable, such as number of home runs. Within a few years, it would hard to tell the New York Yankees from the New York Giants – every Yankee would be 6’6”, weigh 275 pounds, bench press 500 pounds, and hit 40+ home runs per year. With players judged and rewarded on any single variable, the game of baseball would be rendered unrecognizable, grossly perverted from the multiple-skill game it is today.

Okay, people can say what they like about my credentials, education policy papers, or what have you, but I started buying the Bill James Baseball Abstract in the mid-1980s. These accusations will not stand.

Moreover, Koss doesn't know what he's talking about. The NYC value-added measures are not "derived from a single variable," they're exactly the kind of complicated multi-variate measure he describes. As the NY Times reported.

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.

The NYC model uses something like 12 discrete variables, and the HLM version of value-added pioneered by Bill Sanders is so complicated that you need a PhD in statistics and a special computer at SAS headquarters to run it. It's more complicated that anything Bill James does, as it should be.

As for baseball, yeah, imagine if the Yankees started throwing untold million of dollars at players based primarily on their home run totals, leading to players shooting themselves full of steroids and turning into musclebound, home run producing freaks. It's a good thing that never happened! Instead, the Yankees continue to dominate the American League East and add to their historic World Series victory total by sticking to the tried-and-true Yankee tradition of paying players strictly on the basis of the number of years since they left the minor leagues, regardless of what position they play, how well they hit, or the number of games they win.

Enlightened Leadership

We released a report recently on the troubled state of teacher evaluation in public education, in which we suggested that a few local teacher unions are supporting comprehensive evalution systems with teeth, but that most aren't. So it has been encouraging that a number of union leaders have written to compliment the report. One union-created organization, the new Tom Mooney Institute for Teacher and Union Leadership in Washington, DC, has linked to the report on its website.

But perhaps that's not so surprising, since the institute, named after the former president of the Cincinnate Federation of Teachers and funded by several foundations that also support Education Sector, is working to groom a new generation of progressive, reform-minded teacher unionists. "Our goal," the organization writes, "is to help local union leaders to be bold, collaborative and creative advocates for the improvement of public education."

No one can object to that mission.

education, baseball, tomato, tomahto

Those who couldn't get enough of my extended baseball metaphor vis a vis the recent NYC teacher evaluation contretemps can read a new version in the New York Daily News here.

Hoosier Taxation

Michele McNeil reports in Education Week:

Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels, a Republican, who is facing re-election this year along with the entire House and some of the Senate in that state, has made property-tax relief his top priority this legislative year and wants to remove funding for schools’ general operating budgets from the property-tax rolls. That plan, coupled with a legislative proposal to fund the costs of student transportation—except the purchase of school buses—with state dollars and not property taxes, would mean a $1.3 billion annual shift of school costs to the state. The state, in turn, would raise the 6 percent sales tax by a percentage point, and use other money set aside for property-tax relief to make up the lost funding to schools.

This isn't a very good idea. The Indiana general fund property tax functions essentially like a state--not local--property tax, in that the state sets local property tax rates, then determines the total amount of general fund revenue school districts get, and then fills in the difference between that amount and what the local property tax raises with state money, which comes from combination of sales and income taxes. When property values rise, the state benefits in the form of reduced obligations to school general funds; when property values fall the state is on the hook for the lost revenue. School budgets aren't affected either way. That creates a fairly stable three-legged property/sales/income revenue stool for local schools, with the volatility of one source being offset by the others. If the Daniels proposal is enacted, they'll be down to two legs and subject to increased risk of sales tax volatility tied to the business cycle, which is precisely what the Ed Week article describes happening in Florida.

In other words, this isn't really an education issue at all, it's just a question of whether the state of Indiana wants to change its revenue mix in a way that relies more on sales taxes and less on property taxes. Another consequence woudl be redistributing some of the tax burden down the income ladder, since poor people consume their entire income, more or less by definition, and thus pay sales taxes on it, while wealthier people invest part of their income in stuff like property, which would be taxed at a lower rate.

The "Trans-Classroom" Teacher

The new issue of Innovate: The Journal of Online Education features a thoughtful article by Teachers College's Susan Lowes about the possibilities arising from an emerging cohort of "trans-classroom" teachers:

...Although face-to-face and online courses do indeed take place in separate environments, the social field of the teacher who teaches them increasingly includes both. And as a teacher moves, either simultaneously or serially, from one environment to the other, the course being taught will also be transformed as it is shaped and reshaped to fit first one context and then the other....This research, exploratory though it is, suggests that giving more teachers the opportunity to teach online, as well as deliberately encouraging those who do teach online to share what they have learned with their fellow classroom teachers, provides an opportunity to strengthen teaching in both environments.

As I wrote last week, the future for education is neither a fully virtual nor a parallel system, but an integrated one. Dr. Lowes' research focuses us in the right direction: Away from the false online vs. classroom dichotomy and towards an understanding of how to improve teaching practice across a multiplicity of learning environments.

TEACH Grants: A Misnomer

President Bush’s 2009 budget includes $14 million for a new program established by Congress (introduced by Kennedy and Miller) last year—the TEACH Grants program. The program calls for grants of up to $4,000 to be awarded to approximately 41,000 students each year starting in the 2008-09 school year, and is intended to encourage students to pursue teaching in high-need schools and subjects. According to the budget, the TEACH Grant program,

...awards annual grants of up to $4,000 to eligible undergraduate and graduate students who agree to serve as a full-time mathematics, science, foreign language, bilingual education or other English language program, special education, or reading teacher at a high-need school for not less than 4 years within 8 years of graduation.

Sounds good, right? But these ‘grants’ are mislabeled—if you keep reading the budget description, it becomes clear that these aren’t grants at all. And calling them grants could lead some students into much more debt than they expected:

For students who fail to fulfill this service requirement, grants are converted to Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loans, with interest accrued from the date the grants were awarded. (Italics are mine)

This means that students who don’t meet any one of the requirements—teaching within 8 years of graduation, teaching in a high-need school for at least 4 years, or teaching in one of the subjects listed—will suddenly have as much as $16,000 in loans, and that’s not including the accrued interest. That would certainly be a rude awakening to a student who thought they were receiving a grant. In fact, these aren’t even considered grants in the budget; they’re just, for some reason, called grants:

For budget and financial management purposes, this program will be operated as a loan program with 100 percent forgiveness of outstanding principal and interest upon completion of a student’s service requirement. The Administration currently estimates approximately 80 percent of participating students will not complete the required service and thus will have their grants converted to Direct Unsubsidized Stafford Loans. (Italics, again, are mine)

According to the government’s own calculations, only 20 percent of students who sign-up for this program will actually receive the promised benefit. The rest will end up with much higher debt loads than originally expected.

If the government is considering this as a loan program for budget purposes, it should label it as a loan program for clarity and for students’ own budgeting purposes. While 'TEACH Loans' might not sound as generous, the proper labeling will save many students a lot of confusion and also save some students from a potentially distressful financial situation when an unexpected bill comes due at graduation.

Note: Thanks to Sara Goldrick-Rab at the University of Wisconsin - Madison for the tip. And as she points out, "It's not a loan forgiveness program though-- it's a loan, not a grant-- and there's no forgiveness if it turns into a loan."

Knightfall

Legendary basketball coach Bob Knight is retiring from Texas Tech. I met him, briefly, years ago when I worked from the state senator from Bloomington, IN. He's an imposing guy, more so than you realize watching him on TV because there he's surrounded by even bigger players. Even beyond that, he has this palpable physcial presence that's unusual and more than a little intimidating. It's easy to see how that, combined with a brilliant basketball mind, molded three national championship teams and the most wins in history, just as it led to his justified dismissal from IU when his temper got the better of him one too many times. Some suggest that Knight will be remembered as much for his failings as his success, but I don't think that's true; he may have embarrassed himself but he never dishonored the game through the kind of cheating that ran rampant in other programs that couldn't match the talent and execution at IU.

Helicopter Parents and Other Exaggerations

In a refreshing anti-bogus trend story, Eric Hoover reports the following($) in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the alleged growth of "helicopter parents" who supposedly can't let go of their darling children and hover over them in college, thus spoiling them into adulthood and beyond. This meme has grown so prevalent that it was the topic of a week-long series of Tank McNamara, and there is of course no more reliable filter and promoter of bland conventional wisdom than the daily comics.

Surveys of Students Challenge 'Helicopter Parent' Stereotypes

Tales of meddlesome moms and dads are irresistible. Take the one about the mother who asked the dean to make sure her son was wearing his sweater. Don't forget the parent who told the professor his tests were too hard.Then there's the one about the administrator who received a telephone call when someone's kid needed a light bulb replaced.

These and many other true stories have shaped the popular image of modern parents as high-strung nuisances who torment college administrators day and night. Only that description doesn't match reality, according to Marjorie Savage, director of the parent-liaison program at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. "Helicopter parents?" Ms. Savage says. "Truly, there aren't that many of them." Several longtime student-affairs officials agree that while helicopter parents are real, their numbers — and behaviors — have been exaggerated.

In admirable anti-bogus trend fashion, Hoover continues by citing actual, solid, verifiable data, namely newly-released results from UCLA's extensive, long-established Survey of the American Freshman, based on responses from over 272,000 students at 356 colleges and universities nationwide. The survey found that a significant number of freshmen--particularly, and not suprisingly, first-generation students, who are disproportionately from low-income and minority backgrounds--complained of not having enough parental involvement, which is consistent with the recent finding from the respected National Survey of Student Engagment that helicopter parenting, to the extent it actually exists at all, is a good thing.

This illustrates two of the more important things to understand about the way higher education is perceived in this country:

1) Everything is filtered through the sensibility of the top 10 percent of college students and institutions, clustered on the coasts and big cities, people who make up a disproporionate share of the consumers of elite media and an overwhelming percentage of the producers of elite media.

2) This filter produces common perceptions of students and colleges that are often 180 degrees from the general truth.

Helicopter parents aren't prevalent and problematic, they're rare and beneficial. The biggest problem facing typical college-bound high school students isn't too much pressure to cram lots of activities and college prep classes into their schedule, it's not enough preparation for the academic rigors higher education. Similarly, college isn't actually a break and a let-down after the hard work of running the admisssions gantlet; for much students it's a lot more work than they experienced in high school, which often leads to academic struggles and dropping out. The biggest problem facing most college bound students isn't getting into college, since anyone can get into college, it's paying for it once they get there. While growth in private school endowments get a lot of attention, many public universities are gearing up for another set of state budget cutbacks. And so on.

This is particularly problematic from a public policy standpoint, because nearly all worthy higher education policy issues concern the bottom 90 percent, particularly the bottom 50 percent. Elite institutions and the people who attend them are fine--more than fine--and don't need any help. It's the students attending community college and relatively open access four-year instiutions--i.e., most students--who deserve resources and attention, but they don't get it because everyone's worried about whether Little Jenny will get into Dartmouth or Smith.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode Five

I which Marlo reminds us that the future ain't promised to no one, as he seizes the crown. When it became clear that Marlo was going to become the new force on the West Side at the end of Season 3, I was relatively non-plussed; I wasn't sure what more could be said after the epic Stringer / Avon story came to conclusion. But I think the steady onset of Marlo's dead-eyed will to power has been one of the strongest elements of Season 5. You can barely understand what he's saying half the time (thank God for Tivo), but it's nearly always meaningful and compelling. Marlo, Chris, and Snoop clearly represent the culmination of the capitalist impulse that David Simon is critiquing, what he chooses to do with Marlo thematically and plot-wise will play a big role in the ultimate success of the final season.

Elsewhere, the Baltimore powers-that-be remind Clay Davis to stop snitching. Come on Clay, didn't you see the Carmelo Anthony video? Train Wreck McNulty and the fabulist meet their destinies in one another--maybe. I'm inclined to give Simon the benefit of the doubt that this plotline may not be as crashingly obvious as it seems. Strangely, nobody in the Sun management says or does anything to invoke the righteous anger of Saint Gus. Managing editor Klabenow in particular seems quite reasonable in his handling of the serial killer case, first in declining to put it on A1 without more reporting and then refusing to let McNulty tap their phones. Maybe not such a one-dimensional bad guy after all? Levy, Lester, Omar, and everyone else continue to underestimate Marlo. Cutty and Dukie have a conversaton that's a bit too didactic for my taste, while Lester and McNulty explain their wire tap plan to the viewer each other. Come on! No exposition allowed. Bubbles wrestles with survivor's guilt. Omar goes in with guns blazing only to be outfought by Chris, Snoop, and Michael. The only thing that saves him is an apparently bullet-proof couch and the fact that he's Superman. But we knew that already.

Based on next week's coming attractions, the yet-to-appear list now looks like this:

Cutty
Prez
Bunny
Namond
Randy
Poot
Royce
Elena
Brother Mouzone

I'm assuming that Prez, Bunny, and Namond will show up eventually, and Brother Mouzone will probably stay in NYC. Therefore, I can only conclude that <The Wire will wrap up with the stunning revelation that it was Poot all along, pulling the strings Keyser Soze style to become the unchallenged king of Baltimore.

Let's also return for a moment to the scene between Carver and Herc in last week's Episode Four. To recap: It's nightime, in the back parking lot of the Western District headquarters, and they're having a beer. The two came up in the ranks together, but while Carver has been promoted, Herc was recently kicked out for general incompetence. Carver has decided to bust Colicchio for beating up an innocent schoolteacher. Herc advises Carver that this is going to cause him a lot of problems, people will say he's a snitch. Carver says he's going to do it anyway, because:

Carver: Remember when I gave you that kid to deliver last year, whats-his-name, you were supposed to get him to Bunk Moreland? You remember that?

Herc: Yeah. I f---ed up. So what?

Carver: So, it mattered.

Herc: So what the f--- does this have to do with Colicchio?

Carver: So it all matters. I know we thought it didn't, but...it does.

Herc: So you gotta do Colicchio, huh? Guess you think they had to do me?

Carver: [silent]

Herc: Yeah, probably. [pause] The guys are going to talk s--- about you for a while. But f--- it, Carver. You do what needs done.

This exchange pretty much sums up everything David Simon has been trying to say on The Wire and how it plays out for the characters and story. When asked by Slate to summarize what the show is about, he said:

Thematically, it's about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings—all of us—are worth less. We're worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It's the triumph of capitalism.

In other words, Simon believes that while the only decent, moral view of the world holds that all people have value--that everything and everyone matters--the systems that govern the world, particularly Baltimore, are disconnected from this idea. Often, they oppose it. Accordingly, pretty much every character on The Wire is defined along three dimensions:

1) Where this state of affairs has left them.

2) How well they understand it.

3) How they've chosen to respond.

Simon's crucial observation--what elevates The Wire above standard drama--is that understanding the nature of things and choosing to fight back--to do what needs done--is by no means a sure path to happiness of any kind. McNulty, for example, is painfully aware of how the system works, but trying to do something about it destroys him. He can't deal with the absurdity and injustice, it drives him to drink and dissolution. Jay Landsman, by contrast, understands the system just as well as McNulty, but he's long since given over to cynicsim and self-interest. Not in a totally evil kind of way--remember his mercy toward Bubbles last season--but he's completely unwilling to sacrifice any of himself to change a system he didn't make. Other characters, like Bunk, try to split the difference, trying to matter and stay sane at the same time.

Many of the most potent dramatic moments on The Wire revolve around the characters coming to understand Simon's view of reality, the way it changes them, and the choices they make. Bunny Colvin, Carver's mentor, chose to push back, kept his dignity, but lost his pension and job. Bodie was hollowed out by the knowledge that "the game is rigged," but still decided to die on his feet rather than live on his knees. I suspect that in their last moments, both Prop Joe and Stringer Bell understood that their hubris in thinking that The Game--and thus, those playing it--could be anything other than a remorseless death machine was what brought them down.

Simon's underlying pessimisim is reflected in the fact that the farther up the food chain we go, the less likely to find anyone pushing back against the system, because, of course, the game is rigged in their favor. At the same time, he allows most of the characters who fight honorably to live with some integrity and peace of mind. Lacking that would be the one tragedy that even David Simon couldn't bear to show.

More Massive Endowments

I went to an event at AEI on Friday morning, focused on the question of whether Congress should obligate non-profit universities to spend a minimum percentage of their endowments every year, a requirement currently applied to non-profit charities. Parenthetically, it's worth noting that AEI puts on some of the best education-related events in town. The issues are timely, they get the right people in the room, and the discussions are pretty balanced, ideologically. The one downside is that the conference center is on the 12th (top) floor of the AEI building, which houses publications like The Weekly Standard along with organizations like the Project for the New American Century and, well, AEI. That means that if you go to enough of their education events, you inevitably have the experience of glancing at the person standing next to you in the elevator and thinking "Hey, I saw you on TV, you're that guy who seems to be hell-bent on destroying civilization as we know it." Is there an ethical obligation to say something in this situation? This troubles me.

Anyway, while I walked into the event glad that the endowment issue is causing people to scrutinize the much-understudied issue of how colleges spend their money, on balance I was against a minimum payout. Charles Miller, chairman of the recent Commission on the Future of Higher Education, made a principled argument against the feds interfering with institutional spending decisions while also pointing out that university endowments are encumbered by a lot of donor-directed legal restrictions on spending. Plus, he noted, any university financial official with half a brain could shuffle funds around in a way that would meet the letter of the law while leaving actual spending unchanged.

Other panelists, however, made some good counterpoints. For example, did you know that when it's reported that universities spend, on average, 4.6% of their endowments, that number includes the cost of managing the endowments themselves? Or that the single biggest category of donor-restricted spending is financial aid for low-income students? So when politicians suggest that institutions could do more to restrain prices for needy undergraduates if they bumped the payout up to 5%, that's not a crazy idea.

Richard Vedder also raised a larger issue: the generally unquestioned idea that colleges and universities deserve non-profit status because of the positive benefits they provide to society at large. Vedder argues that the empirical case for this, framed in terms of benefits vs. the cost in lost tax revenues, isn't as obvious as one might think. Of course, of course, much of what makes higher education valuable can't be measured in terms of dollars and cents. That said, I think the non-profit sector that most resembles higher education in longevity, attitude, and weakness for monumental architecture is organized religion, in particular the Catholic Church, and while the church spends money running charities and parochial schools for low-income urban students, colleges blow vast amounts of tax-subsidized funding operating professional sports entertainment franchises for the amusement of their students and alumni. There are few, if any, major non-profit sectors that are as fundamentally self-interested as higher education, where we're obligated to assume social benefits on faith in such a diffuse, attentuated way.

To be clear, I'm not advocating for revoking the tax status of your local university. Higher education does a great many things for a great many people, and in countles ways large and small enriches the world around us. But the time when policymakers and the general public simply take higher education's word for it--on spending, learning, and many other things--is, thankfully, coming to end.

NY Times Delivers the Standard Virtual School Story

Today’s New York Times features the standard story on K-12 virtual schooling. The Times deserves kudos for covering this increasingly important topic and for accurately pointing out that there are different types of virtual schools. But, after noting that the vast majority of students participate in supplemental, mostly state-run virtual schools, the article focuses 90% of its copy on the controversies surrounding full-time, cyber schools.

True, cyber school issues are in play in many state courts and legislatures. More importantly, they are full of controversies around unions, home schooling, and privatization—the red meat issues that make for good copy and get the usual suspects going on either extreme of conventional education debates. It all makes for a good story that can be easily covered in the usual way that education is covered. But, there’s a much bigger story still untold.

Just as modern workplaces bridge multiple online and offline communications modes, the future for education is neither a fully virtual nor a parallel system, but an integrated one. The overwhelming majority of students will continue to attend physical schools. However, increasing numbers of students will also take courses or parts of courses online, moving back and forth seamlessly between the traditional and virtual—just as they do in every other aspect of their lives.

Right now, there is an opportunity for the deep structural changes that we’ve seen the Internet spark in almost every other field. In each case, new organizations developed alternative management structures, distribution methods, and work models.

Virtual schooling can drive the same sorts of transforming changes in public education. While the importance of effective teaching and learning has not changed, the Internet has enabled educators to significantly alter the experience of schooling. Virtual schools are personalizing student learning and extending it beyond the traditional school day. They’ve created new models for the practice of teaching—with opportunities to easily observe, evaluate, and assist instructors. And they are pioneering performance-based education funding models.

That is why it is increasingly important to understand the broader innovations that are emerging from online schooling and their potential to leverage reform on a far larger scale in public education.

Cutting it at the Front of the Classroom

The American Federation of Teachers has released a statement on a report we published yesterday. The report's called “Rush to Judgment: Teacher Evaluation in Public Education.” As the title suggests, it looks at the ways school systems figure out who’s cutting it at the front of the classroom and who isn’t. It’s a pretty important issue, given that the nation spends $400 billion a year on public school salaries and benefits.

The AFT’s statement declares that the report “acknowledges” what the union has “long known,” that “current testing systems are not accurate or strong enough to become the basis of a good teacher evaluation program.” The union went on to say that the report is “thoughtful and balanced.”

I appreciate people saying nice things about my work. I deserve far more compliments than I get. But I suspect that the kind words from my friends at the AFT might have something to do with the fact the union’s largest local, the United Federation of Teachers in New York City, is waging war against a recent proposal by New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein to rate teachers in the nation’s largest school system on the basis of their students’ test scores.

It’s a radical idea in public education, where teachers’ credentials have always mattered more than their performance. For the record, it’s an idea that I support. Teaching is, after all, primarily about student achievement.

But I argue in “Rush to Judgment,” which I wrote with Bob Rothman of the Annenberg Institute for School Reform, that test scores should play a supporting rather than a leading role in teacher evaluations.

That’s because only about half of public school teachers teach subjects or at grade levels where students are tested, eliminating the prospect of a system that’s applied fairly to all teachers. A second problem is that most standardized tests in use today measure a narrow band of mostly low-level skills and thus disadvantage excellent teachers able to move their students beyond the basics.

Kevin Carey, Education Sector’s policy manager, noted in a post here several days ago the progress that has been made in figuring out how to distinguish individual teachers’ impact on their students’ reading and math scores from the myriad of other influences on student achievement. It’s not defensible to use test scores in teacher evaluations without separating signal from noise in this way. And to their credit, Joel Klein and his deputy, Chris Cerf, the architect of the New York testing plan, are taking steps to do the right thing on this point. But there aren’t a lot of school systems in the country with the technical know-how to do what New York is doing.

As a result, test scores are best suited to play a secondary role in teacher evaluations and school systems should use schoolwide scores in their evaluation calculations, rather than individual teachers’ scores.

A key to stronger teacher evaluations, in both New York and nationwide, is taking a lot more seriously the scrutiny of teachers’ work in their classrooms. The typical teacher evaluation in public education today consists of a quick classroom visit by an untrained principal wielding a checklist that often doesn’t even focus directly on the quality of a teacher’s instruction.

As we argue in our report, evaluations should be based on clear, comprehensive standards of strong teaching practice that have emerged in recent years. And they should be based on multiple observations by multiple evaluators, with a substantial role going to teams of trained school system evaluators free of the inclinations to favoritism and conflicts of interest that plague principal-led evaluations—and that led to the rise of credential- and seniority-based pay scales in public education 80 years ago.

Credible, comprehensive classrooms evaluations supplemented with student test scores used responsibly is a strategy that the AFT should be able to buy into, at least if it likes our report.

The School Budget Crisis That Wasn't

There's something strange about the front-page school budget crisis story in the Washington Post this morning, titled "Housing Downturn Squeezes Schools."

All the major elements are there. "The rapid cooling of the Washington area's real estate market has hit school systems with force," we are told. There are "financial hard times." "As can be seen with jittery stock markets across the world, it is unclear whether the storm is over." "The economic instability could not have happened at a worse time" because NCLB mandates "threaten schools that fail to comply with restructuring and state takeover."

The only thing that's missing is...the budget crisis.

Seriously, I've read the article through twice, and other than a salary freeze in PG County, there's hardly anything there. The article notes that "In the District, next year's budget will probably drop from $796.2 million to $794.6 million because of declining enrollment." In other words, a 0.2% drop for reasons that have nothing to do with the housing downturn. In Fairfax County, the budget is increasing by 3.3 percent, but they may only cover the cost of AP and IB tests for low-income students, instead of everyone--which is likely to result in a 0% change in AP test-taking. Average class size may rise by 0.5 students. The Montgomery County budget is going up $110 million, but "proposals to save $546,060 by asking some teachers in the five secondary magnet programs to teach one more daily class have raised alarm." The Loudon County school budget is increasing by 14%.

It's almost like they decided to write the story first and then sent some staff writers out to do the reporting, and when the facts didn't match the framing, they just went ahead and published it anyway....

The problem here is that the Post doesn't seem to understand how school funding actually works. The article says that "school systems rely mainly on state and county government funding, and those governments draw most of their revenue from property taxes." That's only half true--county governments get their revenue from property taxes, but state governments get their revenue from income and sales taxes. And the dynamics of property vs. income and sales taxation are very different.

The basic formula for state budgeting is this: (Tax Base X Tax Rate) = Revenue = Budget. State income and sales tax rates are fixed and don't change very often. They produce a certain amount of revenue in a year, which the state legislature spends.

The basic formula for local budgeting, by contrast, works like this: Tax Rate = (Budget / Tax Base). In other words, elected officials start by deciding how much money they want to spend, and then set whatever property rate is needed to raise that much money based on the total value of taxable property.

When times are good and property values are rising rapidly--as they did in the DC area before the real estate bubble began to burst--county officials tend to enact generous budgets that increase in the range of 5% - 10% per year. Because property values increase much faster, the actual property tax rate goes down. But homeowners don't care about the rate, they care about the bill, and while they grumble about increased taxes, they also understand that--unlike with state taxes--local property values and school budgets are intimately related. Just as increased property values are good for the Fairfax school budget, a healthy Fairfax school budget is good for property values.

When property values crater, school officials ease up an the annual increases while increasing the property tax rate dramatically, because the tax base is shrinking while the budget is still growing--but again, nobody cares about the rate, only the bill. And people will still pay the increased bill, for the reasons above, and because while property taxes are based on property, they're not payed from property--they're paid from income, and local incomes are not crashing in DC in the same way that housing values are crashing. There's no "income bubble," people still have jobs--particularly when a lot of the economy is government-related--and so for the most part they can still pay their property taxes.

In other words, the Post wrote the story thinking that local budgeting works just like state budgeting--that a decline in the tax base leads to a commensurate decline in tax revenues, and thus spending. As the facts of the story itself show, this just isn't true.

The Higher Ed Lobby Strikes Again

Most of the Presidential candidates, particularly the Democrats, have pledged to do something about the high price of higher education. But while they're busy campaigning, the DC higher education lobby is working behind the scenes on Capitol Hill to sabotage efforts to make higher education more transparent, accountable, and ultimately affordable.

This begins with the recent initiative by Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings to provide parents and students with more information about how well individual colleges and universities educate their students. Part of this push has focused on accreditation, a voluntary, non-governmental process by which higher education essentially polices itself through periodic inspection and peer review by non-profit accrediting organizations. Accreditation is intricately tied to federal policy, because the feds only allow students to use Pell grants and federal student loans at accredited colleges. In order to ensure that the process has integrity (stay with me here) the U.S. Department of Education periodically reviews and re-certifies the accrediting organizations themselves. In other words, it accredits the accreditors.

Accreditation can have a lot of value in providing colleges with candid feedback, and it's done a good job of building a floor in terms of quality and financial integrity. If you pay your tuition to an accredited college, it's very unlikely they'll steal your money or hand you a worthless diploma. But accreditation does a terrible job of creating or providing any kind of public, comparable information about institution-level academic quality. The process simply isn't designed for this, which is why colleges never lose accreditation because they don't do a good enough job teaching their students. In the end, the academic quality component of accreditation often amounts to this:

Accreditor: Given your academic mission and student population, are you doing a good job educating your students?
College: Yes.
Accreditor: Are you sure?
College: Yes.
Accreditor: Okay then!

This is one reason that less than half of all recent colleges graduates scored as "proficient" on a test of literacy.

Since accreditation is one of the few federal leverage points on issues of learning (as opposed to research or financial aid) in higher education, Sec. Spellings has used it to push for more public information about academic quality. The institutions and accreditors have pushed back--hard. This all came to a head last month, when the federal panel that accredits the accreditors met to review the New England Association of Schools and Colleges (NEASC), which has been around since 1885 and accredits most of the Ivy League.

In past years, reapproval of NEASC has been basically a formality. But this year, the panel had a new member, Anne Neal, president of the conservative American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA). As reported in InsideHigherEd, Neal proceeded to ask NEASC a series of discomforting questions that boiled down to "Do you have any standards or objective criteria for deciding if the institutions you accredit are actually teaching well? Do they? If you don't and they don't, how do you actually know?"

To which NEASC replied, in so many words: "No; no; we know it when we see it." And of course, they always see it.

At this point various parties involved started to challenge the entire premise of Neal's line of questioning, saying that it was beyond the purview of the panel to even ask whether accreditors have any kind of transparent process for assessing academic quality that could conceivably produce an answer other than "good enough." Behind the scenes, people started to say that if this kind of talk kept up, they would take the matter directly to Congress, which was (and is) in the middle of reauthorizing the massive federal Higher Education Act (HEA).

Now it appears that's exactly what happened. The talk around town is that the influential higher education lobby (described in this essential Washington Monthly piece from Politico's Ben Adler) has lined up substantial support behind an HEA provision that would short-circuit the Department of Education's entire effort, preventing it from requiring accreditors to require colleges to provide information about whether they're actually teaching their students well. The bill currently in the House says, in section 496:

"Nothing in this section shall be construed to permit the Secretary to establish any criteria that specifies, defines, or prescribes the standards that accrediting agencies or associations shall use to assess any institution's success with respect to student achievement."

In other words: While the federal government spends tens of billions of dollars a year supporting higher education, directly and indirectly through grants, loans, tax preferences, etc., it shall be legally required to take higher education's word for it that all that money is being spent well on behalf of students, regardless of any evidence to the contrary.

Keep in mind, this is not No Child Left Behind for higher education. Nobody is proposing that anyone other than the accreditors or the institutions themselves set standards for academic quality. They're just proposing that there ought to be standards or information of some kind that regular people and prospective students can actually understand, and that colleges should explain why they have or haven't met them.

What does this have to do with affordability? Simple: America's intractable college cost problem is actually in large part an information deficit problem. Because there's no real, comparable information about how well different colleges teach or how much their students learn, price and quality have become synonymous in the higher education market. Institutions accumulate prestige by spending their way up the rankings ladder, raising tuition and exclusivity along the way. The lack of data about quality (along with high barriers to entry) keeps competitors at bay. As long as this remains the case, no amount of additional Pell grants or reduced interest rates will be able to keep up with spiraling costs.

The Democratic nominee for president will either be Senator Clinton or Senator Obama, both of whom sit on the Senate HELP committee. That means that in the not-so-distant future, a Senator who may very well be the next President of the United States could be faced with having to vote up or down on a bill that will hamstring the ability of their administration to seriously tackle both the problem of inconsistent academic quality in higher education and out-of-control increases in cost.

Hopefully, someone will step in on behalf of students, taxpayers, and the public interest. But if the higher education lobby's history of short-circuiting needed reforms is any indication, the narrow self-interest of entrenched institutions may prevail once again.

What about the ladies room?

Forget about fancy, high-priced dorms--the University of Colorado at Boulder just sold the naming rights to a men's bathroom, complete with an inspiring quote: The best ideas often come at inconvenient times. Don't ever close your mind to them.

But what about the ladies? Certainly there's a successful businesswoman out there who would contribute her name for the sake of some potty parity. (Via Inside Higher Ed's reliably good quick takes.)

Charts You Can't Trust

Education Sector has a monthly feature called Charts You Can Trust, short policy briefs built around a couple of pieces of interesting data. You can read them all here. They're fun. We've always wanted to run a chart you can't trust, but never got around to it -- and now Sherman Dorn has beat us to the punch, with this piece on dubious graphics from the Friedman Foundation.

Subprime Student Loans?

Last Thursday, Sallie Mae announced a $1.6 billion loss—a bad day capping the end of a bad year for the company. Sallie Mae also announced that it would be cutting back on loans to nontraditional schools, especially schools with low graduation rates. Echoing the sentiments of banks who bet too much money on bad real estate loans, Al Lord, Sallie Mae’s chief executive, said "Sallie Mae has lent too much money to students who have gone to schools without very good graduation records." And now the company is looking to make some changes.

The first schools to feel the hit were for-profit career colleges—Career Education Corp., Corinthian Colleges, and ITT have all announced that Sallie Mae is cutting back on loans for their students. For-profit colleges are understandably nervous about this, and if these cuts start to limit students’ access to federal loans, it could be cause for concern. But right now, it looks like the cuts are mostly focused on the previously fast-growing private loan sector of Sallie Mae’s business—loans that don’t include the protections or guarantees of federal loans. And this may just be a good thing.

It’s not hard to see parallels between subprime mortgages and programs like Sallie Mae’s “opportunity loans” in which private loans were provided to students with poor credit ratings. While these loans might provide students with the money they need to attend college in the short-term, it’s hardly an opportunity if the students don’t have the financial resources to repay the loans. And hopefully it will encourage some of these colleges to shift their focus from simply getting students in the door, to also graduating them and helping them to get a job.

If You Pay Them They Will Pass

Seriously? Baltimore is putting aside nearly a $million to pay students to pass the Maryland state high school exit exams. This has got to be the worst example of how to engage students in their education, if that's in fact the point, although it was easy enough to find students who support this idea. Of course they do- it's $110 in their pocket if they pass- but I'll bet if you probed further you'd get a good number who'd tell you that it's not actually a smart use of funds. Better ways to engage students: make instruction more interesting and challenging, link the materials to their lives and experiences, help them understand why it matters. Not for $100 to pass a test, but the nearly 100 percent increase in earnings that college degrees will get them. Harder to do, yes, but that's what it takes if you want kids to care about school. As for the exit exams? They're gaining momentum in the states (about 1/2 have them now, or will by 2009) but it's not funding gimmicks that will make them work for students.

Frightening Bad Media Trend Convergence

Long-time Q&E readers know that we're particularly aggravated by two types of bad news stories with weed-like properties of propagation and ineradicability: the bogus trend story, and the voyeuristic female teacher / male student sex scandal. Inevitably, the two have now converged:

(AP) -- Heeding a steady drumbeat of sexual misconduct cases involving teachers, at least 15 states are now considering stronger oversight and tougher punishment for educators who take advantage of their students. Lawmakers say they are concerned about an increasingly well-documented phenomenon: While the vast majority of America's teachers are committed professionals, there also is a persistent problem with sexual misconduct in U.S. schools.

"Increasingly well-documented." Yeah, I wonder how that happened.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 4

This week, we learn that Baltimore is no city for old men.

First, Clay Davis continues hurtling toward an indictment, and gets the perp walk treatment from the DA to boot. I almost feel sorry for him, except not really. Then Commissioner Burrell gets the final word on his ouster. He tries to play the Daniels corruption card, but to no avail, because the truth hardly matters when it comes to politics, which he should have learned by now. Finally, Prop Joe's long, long run comes to an end. The Post's Tom Shales draws the parallel to Abe Vigoda's demise in The Godfather, which is a reasonable observation except he made it behind the thinnest of veils nearly a month ago, before the first episode had run. Maybe one reason newspapers are losing revenue and readers to the Internet is that their TV columnists don't know the meaning of "spoiler alert."

Ultimately all three got what was coming to them, and none were truly surprised. Joe's mistake was seeing himself as civilized, with his lawyers, bank accounts, and business-like reasonableness. But he was only a murderer and a drug dealer in the end, just like Marlo, and of the two of them, Marlo was the one smart enough to understand what that meant. Leroy Burrell may be "stone stupid," but he's headed to a full pension and sinecure in DC while Joe rots in a vacant with all the rest.

The rest of the episode was a little slow, I think. It was good to see Kima again, albeit to no real purpose. Beadie confronts McNulty, whose fake serial killer investigation continues like a slow-motion car crash. Lester enlists the help of old partner who got busted out of homicide because of some righteous confrontation with The Man. Hey, isn't that exactly what happened to Lester, almost to the letter? Saint Gus of the Newsroom takes a few more arrows on behalf of American Journalism. Carver decides he has no choice but to bust Colicchio for being a violent SOB, leading to a conversation with Herc that was one of the best moments of the season so far. Daniels barely settles into his new desk as Deputy-Ops before getting a call for Rawls. Maybe someone from the gay bar? Odds on that ever coming up again? Omar confronts Slim Charles but doesn't kill him, because a man's got to have a code.

Years-gone-by reference of the week: Prop Joes buy flowers for Butchie's funeral, telling the florist that he doesn't want one of those gangster arrangements, like the one Bodie (R.I.P.) bought for D'Angelo's funeral back in Season Two, Episode 7.

Next week: Looks like Cutty finally reappears. Dammit, where's Poot?!