More on Special Education and NCLB

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

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

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

Happens to the Best of Us

Per CNN:

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

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

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

Investing in Harvard Graduates (for real)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monopolizing the Mantle of Public Education

Via Joanne Jacobs:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Student) Slip 'n Slide®

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sundaes on Sunday

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

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

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

Sure...

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

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

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

More Financial Education

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

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

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

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

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

Financial Education Needed

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

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

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

Consultants Earning Their Keep

Alexandar Russo, June 25th:

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

The Washington Examiner, today:

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

Souljah-ing the Teachers Unions

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

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

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

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

School Names, Again

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

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

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

Slap Them In Irons

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

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

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

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

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

The Special Education Accountability Debate

Today’s Ed Week article on NCLB and special education accountability is a great discussion of the two sides of this debate: states want more flexibility under NCLB to establish different standards and assessments for special education students, and special education advocates want NCLB to stay where it is—holding states accountable for getting special education students, with a few exceptions, to the same grade-level standards as other students.

I’m siding with the special education advocates on this one.

This report from the National Center for Learning Disabilities outlines the big reason why—most special education students aren’t diagnosed with a disability that precludes them from reaching grade-level standards. Instead, the diagnosis is meant to ensure that students receive the supports they need to achieve at grade-level. In addition, the current flexibility under NCLB already excuses approximately 30 percent of special education students from regular state assessments and standards. That’s already a higher percentage than the Aspen Commission on NCLB found reasonable.

Making this debate stickier is the fact that minority and low-income students are overrepresented in most disability categories. Studies have shown that the process of diagnosing a disability isn’t color-blind, and minority student have a higher chance of being diagnosed with a disability. This makes reducing the accountability for educating special education students an even riskier proposition, because it will disproportionately reduce accountability for minority and low-income students.

More to come from ES on this topic, but this Ed Week article makes a great primer.

Another Student Loan Scandal? Or Not?

In a fresh blow to the beleaguered student loan industry, New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo has charged some companies in the fast-growing private student loan market of charging students higher interest rates because they attend colleges where students are more likely to default on their loans. In uncovering yet another scandalous lender practice, Cuomo...

Hey, wait a minute.

Isn't that what lenders are supposed to do, price their loans based on risk? InsiderHigherEd reports,

Taking a specific college, or type of college, into account as a factor in determining a credit score could theoretically mean that loans to students at, say, Harvard could be seen by lenders as less risky and therefore more desirable than those made to students at community colleges, for-profit institutions and historically black colleges.

It's not a matter of lenders "seeing" anything, Harvard students are less risky and more desirable than other students, obviously so. Yet Senator Dodd has responded by introducing legislation to "Prohibit lenders from using any data in their underwriting that may have disparate impact on the loan products, terms, or conditions available to student borrowers based on race, age, and other personal factors, or the institution they attend."

So if you're a poor student with an IQ of 180 who gets into Harvard and you need a private loan to make ends meet, you have to pay above-market interest rates in order to subsidize the rates other, riskier students? Is that fair? Are we going to make that student pay higher rates on her Visa bill too, to avoid "disparate impact" in that credit market?

Clearly, it's important to give people a way to borrow money for college without having to pay usurious interest rates that will limit their choices later in life. But that's why we already have a massive, federally subsidized student loan program, where everyone pays the same interest rate regardless of race, age, personal factors, or the institution they attend. Cuomo is going after the private loan market, the whole point of which is to offer credit as credit is due. As the article notes, tying loans to institutional default rates will disadvantage the credit-worthiest students at high-default institutions, but in the long run a private market should be expected to sort that out, because it's in the lender's financial interest to do so.

The student loan industry has been subject to plenty of harsh, deserved criticism of late. But this seems like crossing the line into political opportunism.

Moderate Democrats' Original Sin

In his Post column today, Richard Cohen commits the original sin of moderate Democrats writing about education.

Cohen slams the Democratic candidates in last week's DC-based presidential debate for calling for more school funding without acknowledging that the DC school system is reasonably well-funded and still does a terrible job. Fair enough. But then he continues:

The litany of more and more when it comes to money often has little to do with what, in the military, are called facts on the ground: kids and parents. It does have a lot to do with teachers unions, which are strong supporters of the Democratic Party. Not a single candidate offered anything close to a call for real reform.

The salient fact about DC is not that it has education problems. Every big city in America has those. The overriding issue is that our schools are worse than other big cities that also have kids, parents, and teachers unions. In fact, the Washington Teachers Union has kept a pretty low profile since being humbled by a massive corruption scandal a few years back. In DC at least, they're not the big issue.

But that kind of nuance is lost on Cohen. He's doing what far too many center-left types do when discussing education: playing off the conservative agenda, rather than taking time to come up with an agenda of his own.

The standard right-wing education agenda has three and only three principles, which have stood unchanged for decades:

1) More money won't fix education.
2) Teachers unions are the problem.
3) Vouchers are the solution.

The great advantage of these principles--in addition to being easy to remember--is that they fit like a glove with, respectively, conservative anti-tax, anti-labor, and anti-government principles. And since this country is never going to actually de-fund and privatize public education while breaking the teachers unions, you never have to come up with something new to say. George Will, for example, clearly has a column on each of these topics on file, which he republishes once a year after a few minutes of updating names and dates with, one assumes, the "find and replace" function in Microsoft Word.

That said, there are elements of truth in each case. Money obviously matters in education, but many public school systems, like the DC schools, are terribly inefficient. Teachers unions are strong advocates of public education and protect rights that teachers deserve, but they also stand in the way of sensible ideas like tying teacher pay to performance. And issues of constitutionality and larger public policy concerns aside, there are plenty of disadvantaged students in bad public schools who would, in the short term, be much better off in a private school.

This, in turn, creates space for people with an independent image to maintain--your Cohens and Mickey Kauses--to burnish their street cred by selectively adopting one or more of the conservative education principles. So Cohen denounces calls for school funding, Kaus is always looking for a chance to take shots at teachers unions, contrarian-by-design publications like The New Republic trumpet their support for vouchers, etc. As with the three principles themselves, little of this is about education policy per se. Rather, it's about using education policies as a proxy for other things. Maybe there was a time when this came across as gutsy truth-telling, but at this point it all feels like pro forma gesturing and nothing more.

The sad thing is that there are plenty of ways to apply the center-left mindset to education without simply adopting simplistic right-wing bromides. Instead of simply supporting or denouncing more school funding, reform the way funding is distributed within school districts, or adopt a "weighted funding" approach where money follows the student. Instead of being for or against vouchers, support expanded choice in the context of public education, with charter schools. Instead of being reflexively pro- or anti-union, work with unions to reform things like teacher pay and help create a labor-management relationship for 21st century schools.

There are ways to do all of these things, and to talk about them sensibly. But that would mean paying attention to education for its own sake, something too few pundits and politicians seem willing to do.

CNN, So-Called Legitimate News Organization

Cnn.com has revamped its site, including a shakeup of its front-page news categories. "Education" has traditionally had its own spot, usually--this being America--near the bottom under Celebrity News, but still on par with Science, Health, etc.

Well, no more. Education has been nixed as stand-alone category and has been replaced by "Funny News." As of this writing, 2:20 PM EDT, the two stories in this new category are:

"Stealing Another Man's Wife Costs $4,802"

and

"Larry the Cable Guy Gets Own Beer"

As a wise man once said, it's not that you can't make this stuff up, it's that you wish you had to.

A School By Any Other Name...

Researchers have discovered a new culprit for low academic achievement: school names. The Salt Lake Tribune reports, “in Florida, five schools are named after George Washington although 11 honor manatees, also known as sea cows.”

God forbid that schools be named after animals known as sea cows. Let’s hope that no manatees read the Salt Lake Tribune this morning – probably a safe bet, but who knows what will happen if the story gets picked up on the Atlantic coast.

The article describes a study that found that schools are less likely than ever to be named after civic heroes and more likely to be named after natural features. The authors think this trend may be linked to poor civic education.

Does the name of a school really affect the education of its students? I don’t know, and I don’t think there is any research on the question. But if the connection does exist, wouldn’t Manatee Elementary do a better job educating its students about biology and sea life than Jefferson Elementary?

I guess the real way to fix American education is to name schools like this: “Roosevelt Amino Acids a² + b² i-before-e Hyperbole High School”

NCLB (R)Evolution?

The SCOTUS desegregation decision sucked up all the ed policy air last week, but other issues still moved ahead, e.g. NCLB reauthorization (subject of today's lead WaPost editorial), to which Sec. Spellings added some new ideas as reported by USA Today's Greg Toppo:

U.S. Education Secretary Margaret Spellings on Wednesday proposed "a more nuanced" way of evaluating schools under President Bush's No Child Left Behind school reform law — one that would differentiate between schools that are close to meeting state math, reading and science standards and those that are "chronic, chronic underperformers."

Under the proposed change, public schools with just a few struggling students could help students without being labeled underperforming. In the bargain, they'd avoid sanctions that can include firing staff, privatizing or even closing their doors.

A lot of the discussions around changes to the core AYP formula have focused on the "growth model" concept currently being piloted in some states, whereby schools are rated not by the percent of students meeting an absolute standard but by the percent of students on a growth trajectory to meet the absolute standard at some point in the future. The idea is to give schools credit for making a lot progress, even if the end result is still below par.

Spellings is talking about a different idea: creating nuance around the degree and scope of underperformance. A common--and essentially correct--criticism of NCLB is that it treats schools that miss the bar by a little with a few students in the same way as schools that miss the bar by a lot with a whole bunch of students. This proposal would make life easier for schools in the former category.

Probably a good idea, as approving quotes in the article from various NCLB proponents suggest. However -- We need to make sure that achievement gaps for vulnerable student subgroups -- low-income, minority, special ed, and LEP -- can't be tolerated indefinitely. Moreover, if we're going to go down this road, there should be a corollary: if we're going to go easier on the schools that miss by an inch, we need to do more, sooner, for students in schools that miss by a mile. If a school is far below the proficiency line with little growth for nearly all of its students, then there's no point in waiting six years to take action. Those kids need something different and better today.

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