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.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
Friday, February 01, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, January 31, 2008
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 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.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
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.
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.
Tuesday, January 29, 2008
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.
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.)
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.)
Monday, January 28, 2008
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.,
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:
"Increasingly well-documented." Yeah, I wonder how that happened.
(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.
Sunday, January 27, 2008
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?!
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?!
Friday, January 25, 2008
This is Probably True
Per The Onion:
TV Critics Admit To Never Having Watched The Wire
NEW YORK—Despite heaping lavish praise on the HBO crime drama The Wire, television critics across the country admitted Monday that not one of them has ever sat down to watch an entire episode of the show. "The Wire has done what no other television program has come close to achieving—namely, presenting the life of a decaying American city and doing so with the scope and moral vision of great literature," said New York Times critic Virginia Heffernan, who was surprised to hear that the groundbreaking series had already started its fifth and final season in early January. "It sounds fantastic. I really wish I had HBO." Many reviewers from top media outlets assured reporters that they would start watching the Peabody Award–winning show just as soon as the first season reaches the top of their Netflix queues.
TV Critics Admit To Never Having Watched The Wire
NEW YORK—Despite heaping lavish praise on the HBO crime drama The Wire, television critics across the country admitted Monday that not one of them has ever sat down to watch an entire episode of the show. "The Wire has done what no other television program has come close to achieving—namely, presenting the life of a decaying American city and doing so with the scope and moral vision of great literature," said New York Times critic Virginia Heffernan, who was surprised to hear that the groundbreaking series had already started its fifth and final season in early January. "It sounds fantastic. I really wish I had HBO." Many reviewers from top media outlets assured reporters that they would start watching the Peabody Award–winning show just as soon as the first season reaches the top of their Netflix queues.
"Technical" Objections
Over at the UFT, Leo Casey accuses us of various rhetorical sins involves caricatures, straw men, etc, in recent comments about the NYC value-added project. Their grievances lie with the methodology, says Leo, and it's wrong to say otherwise. Okay, very well. Two questions:
1) What are the basic elements of a UFT-approved methodologically appropriate method for estimating individual teacher effectiveness using value-added measures based on standardized test scores? For example, if the school system were to find a way to fix every problem that Leo mentions--multiple teachers between tests, small numbers of students per teacher, etc.--would that be sufficient to assuage their concerns?
2) Given a UFT-approved value-added methodology, what uses of value-added data would the UFT endorse? Could the results be released to the public? Could they be used as one factor in making tenure decisions or providing performance bonuses? Anything else?
If Leo provides a straight answer to those questions, and if the answer to the second questions is something other than "None," I'll officially apologize for saying that the UFT's reaction to the value-added reflects a principled opposition to evaluating teachers using student test scores.
1) What are the basic elements of a UFT-approved methodologically appropriate method for estimating individual teacher effectiveness using value-added measures based on standardized test scores? For example, if the school system were to find a way to fix every problem that Leo mentions--multiple teachers between tests, small numbers of students per teacher, etc.--would that be sufficient to assuage their concerns?
2) Given a UFT-approved value-added methodology, what uses of value-added data would the UFT endorse? Could the results be released to the public? Could they be used as one factor in making tenure decisions or providing performance bonuses? Anything else?
If Leo provides a straight answer to those questions, and if the answer to the second questions is something other than "None," I'll officially apologize for saying that the UFT's reaction to the value-added reflects a principled opposition to evaluating teachers using student test scores.
Thursday, January 24, 2008
No Child Tickets
En route to a meeting here in D.C., I walked by the Woolly Mammoth theater this morning and saw this poster for the solo show by former NYC public school teacher, Nilaja Sun. Sounds good, and more fun than most No Child events these days. It opened on Jan 21 and will be around through February 17th.
Massive Endowments
The annual college endowment report from the National Association of College and University Business Officers (NACUBO) was released yesterday. Overall, it was a great year for higher education, with average earnings of 17.2 %. The richest institutions (over $1 billion in assets) did even better, earning 21.3%. One consequence of the growth is that institutions are having a hard time figuring out how to spend all the new money; endowment spending as a percent of assets dropped to 4.6%, the lowest rate since 1999. This will probably provide fresh ammunition to those in Congress and elsewhere who have proposed that institutions be required to spend a fixed percent of assets--usually 5%, the legal standard applied to many non-profits already. As Rich Kahlenberg said in the Wall Street Journal, "The price of college is rising and endowments are growing and people are frustrated by those two things going on at once."
On some level, the top schools are victims of their own success. As has already been widely reported, Harvard earned $5.7 billion on its endowment last year, which is by itself larger than the total endowment of all but a handful of institutions. This is the principle of compound interest in action--when you meet with a retirement advisor, they always show you the parabolic curve of expected earnings and point out that you make most of your money in the last 10 years. Universities have a longer investment time horizon than any other institution that currently exists, governments included, so it's no suprise to see their longevity paying off.
But all that money raises some uncomfortable questions, about the price of college as Kahlenberg suggests (it's no coincidence that Harvard and Yale timed the announcement of their new endowment-funded financial aid programs to hit the news in the weeks before the NACUBO report), and--more importantly, in my opinion--why, exactly, all of this is being subsidized by the government in the form of tax preferences for everyone involved. As Richard Vedder pointed out in the Post over the weekend, Princeton recently built a new residence facility, Whitman College (above), named after major donor and alumna Meg Whitman, CEO of Ebay, which cost a staggering $388,571 per unit, roughly what Donald Trump spends building a luxury resort. Here we have a fabulously wealthy person donating money to a fabously wealthy university to built a fabulously expensive facility for the benefit of students who come from, in many cases, very wealthy families. I have no problem with that personally if that's how they want to spend their money, but why am I, as a taxpayer, footing part of the bill?
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
Value-Added Comes of Age
About four and a half years ago, I was working on a policy paper focused on a developing and controversial method of measuring teacher effectiveness called "value-added." Created by Dr. Bill Sanders in Tennessee in the mid-1990s, the essence of value-added is pretty simple: Using annual standardized test scores, look at the prior achievement history of a given teacher's students and, based on that, statistically predict how well they're likely to do in the current year. Then calculate the ratio of their actual performance to the predicted performance. Teachers with a ratio greater than 1.0 are more effective than average, those with a ratio of less than 1.0, less. This gives teachers credit for making a lot of progress with previously underperforming students, and doesn't give them progress for coasting with previously high-performing students. Whatever external factors impact performance--poverty, family life, etc.--are implicitly controlled for, because the prediction model is based on the prior performance of the students themselves.
Around the same time, I was reading Michael Lewis's new book, Moneyball, which I had bought the day it was published, being a big fan of both the author and the Bill Jamesian approach to thinking about baseball. And at some point I realized that the underlying premise of Moneyball and the promise of value-added were the same: using empirical data to fundamentally change and improve a labor market. Instead of relying on human observations of characteristics, with all the biases and errors that result, focus on outcomes instead. The paper was released the following year, my first and only real contribution to the teacher quality debate, and while in retrospect I'm kind of embarrassed by the length, I think the ideas hold up pretty well. (The original draft included a whole section explicitly drawing the Moneyball parallel, but it was excised in the editing process, and yes, I'm still bitter.)
So it's interesting to see (I take no credit for this) the New York City school system announcing a plan to start calculating value-added scores for some of its teachers. Just like in Tennessee, the idea is pretty straightforward:
What they're going to do with the data, however, is unclear. One option is to use it for making tenure decisions, which, research has shown pretty conclusively, is a good idea--it seems clear that if your value-added scores put you among the very worst teachers in your first few years--like the bottom 3%, say--the odds of you ever becoming a good teacher are quite low. As Harvard's Tom Kane notes, "It seems hard to know who is going to be effective in the classroom until they are actually in the classroom.
Or you could simply put the data out there and let market forces work. Deputy School Chancellor Chris Cerf said:
Crucially, this would be good for the best teachers. One of the biggest problems with the teacher labor market is that the top teachers--the ones who are one or more standard deviations above the mean in terms of effectiveness--are criminally underpaid, and have no way of demonstrating their real value to the labor market. Their unions, however, are totally aghast at the prospect. Randi Weingarten, head of the United Federation of Teachers (and rumoured to be next head the national AFT) said:
This is the equivalent of the scouts and general managers in Moneyball who were always on the lookout for the "good body," the "five-tool guy," the player who just looked like a major leaguer. As everyone now knows, they were profoundly mistaken, and people like the Oakland A's Billy Beane were able to exploit the market distortions that resulted.
What we're seeing in New York City today is all the major challenges of 21st century K-12 teacher policy being played out in real time. Value-added methods are still very much in development, subject to limitations of standardized tests, among many things. But in the long run, there will only be more, better information about student performance, along with newer, faster ways of analyzing that information and drawing increasingly accurate conclusions about how well teachers are doing their jobs. At some point the methodological debates will be resolved and the margins of error whittled down the satisfaction of reasonable people.
That will have profound implications for the way teachers are hired, paid, trained, assigned--perhaps for the nature of the profession itself. Much current teacher policy is logically derivative of extremely limited or absent information--if we can't accurately measure teacher effectiveness, then pay everyone the same. If we can't know how well teachers will perform when they arrive in the classroom, throw up a lot of regulatory and process barriers to entry in terms of training and certification. The shift from information scarcity to abundance will change that logic, and eventually the policies themselves. New York City is a sign of things to come.
Update: Eduwonkette compares this to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and then says she's not actually making the comparison she just made. The privileges of anonymity, I suppose. Sherman Dorn chooses a different horrible disease (botulism) to make his point--which is that the NYC value-added process may or may not have severe methodological flaws. It might, I don't know, I guess we'll find out. But, per above, methodological issues can be worked out, and anyone who thinks the hysterical reaction to the value-added initiative stems from a deep and abiding concern for statistical integrity is willfully not paying attention.
Update II: Dorn updates and points out that the "botulism" reference wasn't hysterical, fair enough, I was referring to the folks at UFT but that wasn't clear. He also says:
I've read the research (which the UFT habitually misrepresents) pretty carefully. The people who've looked at the Sanders model have generally concluded that it does what it says it does: identify teacher effects, given appropriate caveats about statistical margins of error. It's true that they say it's no holy grail, which is unsurprising in that there's no such thing as a holy grail. There is not now nor will there ever be perfect information about teacher effectiveness; teaching is far too complicated for that. The only responsible approach to using value-added data--or any other data that purports to gauge teacher effectiveness--is to be cognizant of the amount of likely error and craft policies accordingly. And of course there should also be diligant work to improve the methods themselves, which nobody believes have reached an apex of refinement.
Given that, a fair response to the NYC announcement would be something like this: "We support efforts to fairly evaluate teacher effectiveness and recognize that objective evidence of student learning growth must play an important role in that process. We emphasize that the results of evaluation methods based on standardized test scores will be subject to significant degrees of statistical error, which much be appropriately taken into account, particularly when such information is used in the context of employment matters such as tenure and compensation. The best process will combine information from multiple methods, including peer and principal evaluation, and will preserve teachers' professional rights. We look forward to working in concert with management to develop such policies, which should include rewarding the most effective teachers for the vital work they do."
The actual response from the UFT was nothing like that. Rather, it reflects a principled opposition to the use of test scores of any kind in evaluating teachers. Again, this is not an argument about methodology; it goes much deeper than that. Talking about methods in a good faith attempt to reach the goal of better information is one thing, but the holy grail standard is all about making perfection the enemy of the good.
Around the same time, I was reading Michael Lewis's new book, Moneyball, which I had bought the day it was published, being a big fan of both the author and the Bill Jamesian approach to thinking about baseball. And at some point I realized that the underlying premise of Moneyball and the promise of value-added were the same: using empirical data to fundamentally change and improve a labor market. Instead of relying on human observations of characteristics, with all the biases and errors that result, focus on outcomes instead. The paper was released the following year, my first and only real contribution to the teacher quality debate, and while in retrospect I'm kind of embarrassed by the length, I think the ideas hold up pretty well. (The original draft included a whole section explicitly drawing the Moneyball parallel, but it was excised in the editing process, and yes, I'm still bitter.)
So it's interesting to see (I take no credit for this) the New York City school system announcing a plan to start calculating value-added scores for some of its teachers. Just like in Tennessee, the idea is pretty straightforward:
The city’s pilot program uses a statistical analysis to measure students’ previous-year test scores, their numbers of absences and whether they receive special education services or free lunch, as well as class size, among other factors. Based on all those factors, that analysis then sets a “predicted gain” for a teacher’s class, which is measured against students’ actual gains to determine how much a teacher has contributed to students’ growth.
What they're going to do with the data, however, is unclear. One option is to use it for making tenure decisions, which, research has shown pretty conclusively, is a good idea--it seems clear that if your value-added scores put you among the very worst teachers in your first few years--like the bottom 3%, say--the odds of you ever becoming a good teacher are quite low. As Harvard's Tom Kane notes, "It seems hard to know who is going to be effective in the classroom until they are actually in the classroom.
Or you could simply put the data out there and let market forces work. Deputy School Chancellor Chris Cerf said:
“If the only thing we do is make this data available to every person in the city — every teacher, every parent, every principal, and say do with it what you will — that will have been a powerful step forward. If you know as a parent what’s the deal, I think that whole aspect will change behavior.”
Crucially, this would be good for the best teachers. One of the biggest problems with the teacher labor market is that the top teachers--the ones who are one or more standard deviations above the mean in terms of effectiveness--are criminally underpaid, and have no way of demonstrating their real value to the labor market. Their unions, however, are totally aghast at the prospect. Randi Weingarten, head of the United Federation of Teachers (and rumoured to be next head the national AFT) said:
“Any real educator can know within five minutes of walking into a classroom if a teacher is effective."
This is the equivalent of the scouts and general managers in Moneyball who were always on the lookout for the "good body," the "five-tool guy," the player who just looked like a major leaguer. As everyone now knows, they were profoundly mistaken, and people like the Oakland A's Billy Beane were able to exploit the market distortions that resulted.
What we're seeing in New York City today is all the major challenges of 21st century K-12 teacher policy being played out in real time. Value-added methods are still very much in development, subject to limitations of standardized tests, among many things. But in the long run, there will only be more, better information about student performance, along with newer, faster ways of analyzing that information and drawing increasingly accurate conclusions about how well teachers are doing their jobs. At some point the methodological debates will be resolved and the margins of error whittled down the satisfaction of reasonable people.
That will have profound implications for the way teachers are hired, paid, trained, assigned--perhaps for the nature of the profession itself. Much current teacher policy is logically derivative of extremely limited or absent information--if we can't accurately measure teacher effectiveness, then pay everyone the same. If we can't know how well teachers will perform when they arrive in the classroom, throw up a lot of regulatory and process barriers to entry in terms of training and certification. The shift from information scarcity to abundance will change that logic, and eventually the policies themselves. New York City is a sign of things to come.
Update: Eduwonkette compares this to the infamous Tuskegee syphilis experiment, and then says she's not actually making the comparison she just made. The privileges of anonymity, I suppose. Sherman Dorn chooses a different horrible disease (botulism) to make his point--which is that the NYC value-added process may or may not have severe methodological flaws. It might, I don't know, I guess we'll find out. But, per above, methodological issues can be worked out, and anyone who thinks the hysterical reaction to the value-added initiative stems from a deep and abiding concern for statistical integrity is willfully not paying attention.
Update II: Dorn updates and points out that the "botulism" reference wasn't hysterical, fair enough, I was referring to the folks at UFT but that wasn't clear. He also says:
The claim that "methodological issues can be worked out" is evidence that Carey hasn't read the writings of professional researchers who point out that growth models are no holy grail.
I've read the research (which the UFT habitually misrepresents) pretty carefully. The people who've looked at the Sanders model have generally concluded that it does what it says it does: identify teacher effects, given appropriate caveats about statistical margins of error. It's true that they say it's no holy grail, which is unsurprising in that there's no such thing as a holy grail. There is not now nor will there ever be perfect information about teacher effectiveness; teaching is far too complicated for that. The only responsible approach to using value-added data--or any other data that purports to gauge teacher effectiveness--is to be cognizant of the amount of likely error and craft policies accordingly. And of course there should also be diligant work to improve the methods themselves, which nobody believes have reached an apex of refinement.
Given that, a fair response to the NYC announcement would be something like this: "We support efforts to fairly evaluate teacher effectiveness and recognize that objective evidence of student learning growth must play an important role in that process. We emphasize that the results of evaluation methods based on standardized test scores will be subject to significant degrees of statistical error, which much be appropriately taken into account, particularly when such information is used in the context of employment matters such as tenure and compensation. The best process will combine information from multiple methods, including peer and principal evaluation, and will preserve teachers' professional rights. We look forward to working in concert with management to develop such policies, which should include rewarding the most effective teachers for the vital work they do."
The actual response from the UFT was nothing like that. Rather, it reflects a principled opposition to the use of test scores of any kind in evaluating teachers. Again, this is not an argument about methodology; it goes much deeper than that. Talking about methods in a good faith attempt to reach the goal of better information is one thing, but the holy grail standard is all about making perfection the enemy of the good.
Tuesday, January 22, 2008
Wisconsin, Cyberschools, and Virtual Schooling
The publicity following a recent ruling by the Wisconsin Court of Appeals ordering the state to end funding of the Wisconsin Virtual Academy, a full-time virtual charter school operated by the Northern Ozaukee School District (just north of Milwaukee), is helping to reinforce the public misconceptions around virtual schooling. Take, for example, this breathless lede in Friday's AP story:
The AP story and much of the discourse surrounding the Wisconsin decision confound the ideological and political controversies that surround cyberschools with virtual schooling in general. Despite their growth and popularity, full-time cyberschools are highly controversial—a result of their non-traditional approach to learning, their status as charter schools, the transfer of student funding away from traditional schools, and their enrollment of former home-school students. Many unions, especially state and local- level affiliates, have vehemently opposed cyberschools.
Not only is the story above factually incorrect (the law in question is a very specific Wisconsin state law—Colorado, for example, just recently passed its own cyberschool legislation), but it narrows all of online learning to the cyberschool model. This is particularly dangerous because many of the practices found in supplemental virtual schooling programs are bringing about reforms that have long eluded traditional public schools and prompting educators and policymakers to question and change key components of our traditional, classroom-based public system. Limiting the discussion of virtual schooling solely to cyberschools equates virtual schooling with home schooling and bounds the possibilities of online education into the constraints of polarized, non-productive and ideological education battles.
That said, proactive state legislators across the country should take note of the Wisconsin case. Many states' laws, like those in Wisconsin, need to be modernized to reflect an education system that is no longer defined by bricks and mortar schools, seat time, and strict geographic lines. These legislators should heed the lessons of the charter school movement and craft strong laws that provide the regulatory and accountability framework needed for all forms of virtual schooling within the public system.
Specifically, cyberschool options should exist to help serve the vast variety of student and family needs. It's ok for different models to serve different students with differing needs to ensure each of them is successful—that's called personalization.
The key issue is really around public funding. Funding should follow student success and not penalize innovation or efficiency. But, let's also make sure to weight the public funding so that it is sensitive to what the state is actually buying. Many cyberschool models have very limited student/teacher interaction, rely heavily on parents as educators, and are less likely to serve special needs students or those without a stay-at-home parent. With weighted funding, some cyberschools would receive less money. But, more money could also follow to cyberschools that can demonstrate success serving students with higher needs. The more sophisticated conversation is not about whether cyberschools are good or bad, but what role they play in a state's various educational priorities and how the funding follows those priorities.
School districts across the United States are watching a court ruling that challenges the existence of virtual schools and could determine the future of online education.Don't believe the hype and don't think that all virtual schooling looks like Wisconsin Virtual Academy. Many people think that "cyber" charter schools, schools that are responsible for students' entire education experience and that students attend full-time, are the primary sponsors of online learning. But, the majority of students learning online participate in "supplemental" virtual schooling programs. These supplemental programs, many state-run, allow students to take online courses in addition to their regular school-based courses.
The AP story and much of the discourse surrounding the Wisconsin decision confound the ideological and political controversies that surround cyberschools with virtual schooling in general. Despite their growth and popularity, full-time cyberschools are highly controversial—a result of their non-traditional approach to learning, their status as charter schools, the transfer of student funding away from traditional schools, and their enrollment of former home-school students. Many unions, especially state and local- level affiliates, have vehemently opposed cyberschools.
Not only is the story above factually incorrect (the law in question is a very specific Wisconsin state law—Colorado, for example, just recently passed its own cyberschool legislation), but it narrows all of online learning to the cyberschool model. This is particularly dangerous because many of the practices found in supplemental virtual schooling programs are bringing about reforms that have long eluded traditional public schools and prompting educators and policymakers to question and change key components of our traditional, classroom-based public system. Limiting the discussion of virtual schooling solely to cyberschools equates virtual schooling with home schooling and bounds the possibilities of online education into the constraints of polarized, non-productive and ideological education battles.
That said, proactive state legislators across the country should take note of the Wisconsin case. Many states' laws, like those in Wisconsin, need to be modernized to reflect an education system that is no longer defined by bricks and mortar schools, seat time, and strict geographic lines. These legislators should heed the lessons of the charter school movement and craft strong laws that provide the regulatory and accountability framework needed for all forms of virtual schooling within the public system.
Specifically, cyberschool options should exist to help serve the vast variety of student and family needs. It's ok for different models to serve different students with differing needs to ensure each of them is successful—that's called personalization.
The key issue is really around public funding. Funding should follow student success and not penalize innovation or efficiency. But, let's also make sure to weight the public funding so that it is sensitive to what the state is actually buying. Many cyberschool models have very limited student/teacher interaction, rely heavily on parents as educators, and are less likely to serve special needs students or those without a stay-at-home parent. With weighted funding, some cyberschools would receive less money. But, more money could also follow to cyberschools that can demonstrate success serving students with higher needs. The more sophisticated conversation is not about whether cyberschools are good or bad, but what role they play in a state's various educational priorities and how the funding follows those priorities.
Funding Gaps
The Education Trust released its annual state report, The Funding Gap, which looks at funding trends from 1999 to 2005 and compares district funding for those serving the highest percentages of poor students and students of color and those serving the lowest percentage of these students. Winners include 10 states that narrowed the gap between funding for low and high-poverty districts: Alaska, Arkansas, Connecticut, Minnesota, NJ, NY, New Mexico, Ohio, Wyoming and my own Maryland. Maryland, btw, along with Ohio and Wyoming, not only closed their gap but reversed it and now provides more funding to high-poverty districts. Losers? Illinois, Florida, Texas and more than a dozen more states where the funding gap actually increased from 1999 to 2005. That's right smack in the middle of our strong accountability era, where all school systems are pressed to meet standards for all students. How can we have school financing policies that are so in conflict with this accountability standard? It seems to me that aligning our accountability and finance systems should be a basic must-do.
Also good to note that EdTrust has added an important new piece of analysis to their annual report. Carmen Arroyo, the author of the report, crunched the numbers on percentages of English Language Learner students and found that in the eight states with the highest percentages of ELLs, districts with a lot of ELLs receive less funding than districts with few or no ELL students (I'll have to ask Carmen how many districts in the top ELL states really have no ELL students? Few, I'll bet). This type of ELL analysis is a key addition, as this population of students promises to grow not only in those high-ELL states but in most others too.
Also good to note that EdTrust has added an important new piece of analysis to their annual report. Carmen Arroyo, the author of the report, crunched the numbers on percentages of English Language Learner students and found that in the eight states with the highest percentages of ELLs, districts with a lot of ELLs receive less funding than districts with few or no ELL students (I'll have to ask Carmen how many districts in the top ELL states really have no ELL students? Few, I'll bet). This type of ELL analysis is a key addition, as this population of students promises to grow not only in those high-ELL states but in most others too.
Monday, January 21, 2008
The Wire, Season Five, Episode 3
Summary: McNulty successfully fakes evidence of a Baltimore serial killer, yet nobody cares. Lester explains that he's failed to include the kind of lurid psycho-sexual element that will bump the story onto the front page. Bunk is increasingly (and amusingly) aghast. Prop Joe gives Marlo money-laundering lessons. The Sun's parent company hands down a new round of budget cuts, forcing the closure of all foreign bureaus and firing / buyout of veteran reporters. The Fabulist makes up some more stuff while acting like even more of a snot. Burrell tries to feed Carcetti fake crime stats, not realizing that Valchek gave the mayor the real stats first, so Carcetti sets the wheels in motion to can Burrell and replace him with Daniels. Clay Davis continues to feel the heat. I think I could watch a whole hour of nothing but Clay Davis. Michael begins to conclude that certain aspects of working for the Marlo organization--such as working seven days a week on the corner and being asked to murder small children--aren't so great. Method Man gives up Butchie to Chris and Snoop, who promptly torture him (Butchie) to death in an effort to smoke out Omar. He was indeed a tough old man. Snoop continues to question the wisdom of the "provoke the baddest man in Baltimore into trying to kill us all" strategy. Omar, blissfully on vacation in the Carribean with his boyfriend, hears the news about Butchie. Duh-duh-DUH!!!!
This episode continues the proud Wire tradition of constructing scenes that assume you've studied every scene in every episode with Talmudic intensity, like when Daniels and his ex-wife fret about Burrell possibly revealing old allegations of Daniels doing something vaguely corrupt back when he was involved in drug investigations, before the show even began. I can't remember the last time this fact was even mentioned, and its never been clear to me whether the allegations are even true, but nothing is ever forgotten on The Wire, because it's all connected. Bonus: Pearlman grilling Clay Davis' driver about the $20,000 he got caught with all the way back in Season One.
Now that Omar has reappeared, the most signicant characters yet to show up are, in no particular order:
Cutty
Prez
Bunny
Namond
Randy
Poot
Royce
Brother Mouzone
Episode three seems like as good a time as any to put The Prop Joe Question on the table. To wit: the "prequel" webisode featuring Joe is dated 1962, where he looks to be about ten, give or take. That means Joe is now roughly 55 years old. Allowing for time to work up through the ranks, etc., he's been seriously in The Game for 30 years, minimum. Joe, more than anyone else on the show, has figure out the two essential truths of The Game, and their resulting corollary: 1) Making money is the easy part. 2) Staying alive and out of prison is the hard part. Ergo, the smart play is: Whenever possible, trade money for a reduced risk of being imprisoned or killed. But even given the resulting reduced income, Joe must be fabulously rich; heroin has been in Baltimore since the 70s and crack since the 80s. As we learned this week, to nobody's surprise, Joe knows how to launder money into offshore accounts. His position as the middleman betweent The Greek and the rest of the Co-op members must be extremely lucrative, I assume he's the equivalent of "The Bank," the position Stringer Bell was shooting for before he got shot. Yet Joe must also know that while he can reduce the odds against him, he can't ever eliminate them entirely. Eventually he'll roll snake eyes and get caught in the Marlo-Omar crossfire, or something along those lines. You can have a short run, or you can have a long run, but only The Game remains.
Given all that, what the heck is Proposition Joe doing in East Baltimore? Why does he spend all day in the back of a repair shop in his ratty hoody, dressed liked Kevin Smith, while bad men with guns come and go? He's a smart guy -- why not learn French and retire to Antigua? I don't get it. I suppose the only plausible explanation is that he just enjoys The Game for its own sake. Sam Zell is pushing 70 and has $6 billion, yet he's busy buying media companies, screwing around with Wrigley Field, and imposing real-life cost cuts on newspapers like the real-life Baltimore Sun. Same principle, I guess. The only other explanation is some kind of horrible last season retcon involving numerous heretofore unmentioned losing trips to Atlantic City and Vegas, a la The Sopranos, but I think David Simon is too smart for that.
This episode continues the proud Wire tradition of constructing scenes that assume you've studied every scene in every episode with Talmudic intensity, like when Daniels and his ex-wife fret about Burrell possibly revealing old allegations of Daniels doing something vaguely corrupt back when he was involved in drug investigations, before the show even began. I can't remember the last time this fact was even mentioned, and its never been clear to me whether the allegations are even true, but nothing is ever forgotten on The Wire, because it's all connected. Bonus: Pearlman grilling Clay Davis' driver about the $20,000 he got caught with all the way back in Season One.
Now that Omar has reappeared, the most signicant characters yet to show up are, in no particular order:
Cutty
Prez
Bunny
Namond
Randy
Poot
Royce
Brother Mouzone
Episode three seems like as good a time as any to put The Prop Joe Question on the table. To wit: the "prequel" webisode featuring Joe is dated 1962, where he looks to be about ten, give or take. That means Joe is now roughly 55 years old. Allowing for time to work up through the ranks, etc., he's been seriously in The Game for 30 years, minimum. Joe, more than anyone else on the show, has figure out the two essential truths of The Game, and their resulting corollary: 1) Making money is the easy part. 2) Staying alive and out of prison is the hard part. Ergo, the smart play is: Whenever possible, trade money for a reduced risk of being imprisoned or killed. But even given the resulting reduced income, Joe must be fabulously rich; heroin has been in Baltimore since the 70s and crack since the 80s. As we learned this week, to nobody's surprise, Joe knows how to launder money into offshore accounts. His position as the middleman betweent The Greek and the rest of the Co-op members must be extremely lucrative, I assume he's the equivalent of "The Bank," the position Stringer Bell was shooting for before he got shot. Yet Joe must also know that while he can reduce the odds against him, he can't ever eliminate them entirely. Eventually he'll roll snake eyes and get caught in the Marlo-Omar crossfire, or something along those lines. You can have a short run, or you can have a long run, but only The Game remains.
Given all that, what the heck is Proposition Joe doing in East Baltimore? Why does he spend all day in the back of a repair shop in his ratty hoody, dressed liked Kevin Smith, while bad men with guns come and go? He's a smart guy -- why not learn French and retire to Antigua? I don't get it. I suppose the only plausible explanation is that he just enjoys The Game for its own sake. Sam Zell is pushing 70 and has $6 billion, yet he's busy buying media companies, screwing around with Wrigley Field, and imposing real-life cost cuts on newspapers like the real-life Baltimore Sun. Same principle, I guess. The only other explanation is some kind of horrible last season retcon involving numerous heretofore unmentioned losing trips to Atlantic City and Vegas, a la The Sopranos, but I think David Simon is too smart for that.
A Faulty Argument
Back in December, I blogged about a proposed Higher Education Act provision that would change the way default rates are calculated by the Department of Education. I hypothesized that this change could increase default rates by about 60 percent, putting some schools at risk of losing their eligibility to participate in the federal loan program because of too-high default rates -- if a school has a default rate of 25 percent or higher over three years or a single-year default rate of 40 percent or higher, it loses eligibility to participate in the federal loan program.
The proposed change is pretty simple. Currently, the Department of Education calculates the student loan default rate as the percent of students defaulting on their student loans in the first two years after entering repayment. The proposed change would extend that window to the first three years after entering repayment. But, as we showed in an October Charts You Can Trust, the percentage of students defaulting on their loans grows considerably with each added year, particularly among students with high amounts of debt.
And now, as Inside Higher Ed reports, the Department of Education released numbers showing that for-profit colleges would see their default rate double on average, and other institutions could see their rates increase by between 50 and 75 percent (check out the article for numbers broken down by institution type). Not surprisingly, for-profit colleges are not happy about this change and are trying their best to resist it.
The Career College Association is quoted as saying, “This is a questionable policy metric because community colleges, proprietary schools and minority serving institutions all accept a much higher percentage of lower income students than do traditional schools, and many have a higher [Cohort Default Rate] as a result. The single best predictor of a student’s likelihood of default is the student’s own socioeconomic status.”
Sure, socioeconomic status impacts a student’s risk of defaulting on loans and students should definitely be held responsible for responsibly managing their debt. But colleges have a responsibility to equip students with the skills and knowledge needed to get the jobs that allow them to repay their debt, and for ensuring students graduate on time -- or at all. And schools are also responsible for ethically counseling students on the amount of debt they can realistically undertake for their education and for providing adequate financial aid so that students are not graduating with overly burdensome debt loads. All of these actions are entirely within a college’s purview and would have a large impact on the percent of students defaulting on their loans.
Also, take a look at the Department of Education cut-off default rate numbers: 25 percent default rate over three years or a 40 percent default rate over one year. Is a college that consistently allows one in four of its students default on their loans in the first three years (in reality, two years*) after leaving college really providing a valuable service that the student and taxpayers should be paying for?
* Because it takes nearly a year after a student stops paying on his or her loan for the loan to technically be considered in default, a three-year window is really a two-year window, and a two-year window is really a one-year window. In addition, students with loans in deferment or forbearance are counted as being in repayment.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)