A Simple Change And A Storm of Lobbying

A simple, seemingly technical, amendment to the Higher Education Act has set off a storm of lobbying from for-profit colleges. The lobbying push, which began earlier this year, is targeted toward an amendment that would change the way the Department of Education calculates student loan default rates. Currently, the federal student loan “cohort default rate” is the percentage of students who default on their student loans within two years of leaving school. The amendment would change this to the percentage of students defaulting within three years of leaving school. That one additional year has put many for-profit colleges and their collective representative, the Career College Association (CCA), on the offensive.

Why is the for-profit sector so concerned? Because changing the way the default rate is calculated puts them at risk of losing access to federal student loan money. Changing the calculation will cause the default rate for all colleges to go up, but it is especially bad news for for-profit colleges and could put hundreds of schools at risk of running afoul of the default rate cut-offs for participating in the federal student loan program. Currently, if an institution has a default rate above 25 percent for three years or a one-year default rate above 40 percent, the institution is no longer eligible to participate in the student loan program. And for-profit institutions are heavily reliant on federal loan funds.

The most recent National Post-Secondary Student Aid Survey report shows just how dependent for-profit colleges are on loan money. Seventy-two percent of students enrolled in for-profit institutions took out loans in 2003, compared with 53 percent at private, 4-year non-profit institutions and a mere 11 percent at public, 2-year institutions, the for-profit sector’s most direct competitors. And, students at for-profit colleges borrowed more money—an average annual loan amount of $5,800, slightly higher than the average annual amount for students enrolled in private, 4-year institutions ($5,100).

If for-profit colleges are going to continue to graduate students with heavy debt loads, they need to prove that the degrees are worth it—and default rates are one measure of the value of a degree. Sure, race, income, etc. are a big factor in a student’s likelihood to default, but institutional factors also play an important role. Of course, if you just listened to the CCA, you wouldn’t realize this—they argue that students’ failure to repay loans is not an indication of institutional quality. They even put out a research report to prove it.

In January, the CCA released a study, prepared by Indiana University, purporting to show that default rates “do not reflect on the quality or type of institution attended”. But this conclusion depends on what you characterize as a ‘student’ characteristic versus an ‘institution’ characteristic. If, as the report does, you characterize earning a degree as solely a ‘student’ characteristic, then the fact that this is a top predictor of loan default would simply reinforce the conclusion that default risk falls squarely on the shoulders of students.

But a student’s likelihood of graduating depends heavily on the academic support, financial aid package, and counseling the student receives from an institution. Given what we know about the ability of institutions to influence a student’s academic success and likelihood of graduating, the report actually supports the importance of institutions in lowering student loan default rates. The report concludes that, “…students’ academic trajectories throughout postsecondary education—credits attempted, credits completed, grades earned, transferring, enrolling continuously, time to degree/certificate, and failing credit hours—emerge as strong predictors of loan default. It is this constellation of student academic success variables that consistently represents the strongest set of predictors of loan default.”

But it is important to the for-profit sector that lawmakers don’t reach this conclusion. The amendment to change the default rate calculation has already been softened in response to lobbying efforts—the cut-off for participation in the student loan program will be raised to a 30 percent default rate over 3 years and schools will have until 2012 before the amendment takes effect. These changes will help for-profit institutions, which would see the greatest increase in default rates with the change. According to Department of Education calculations, for-profit colleges would, on average, see their default rates double with the addition of just one year, compared with a 50 to 75 percent increase in other sectors.

For-profit colleges often argue that their sector provides students that otherwise would not attend college—primarily minority, low-income students—with the opportunity to earn a degree. But this opportunity cannot end when a student enters the door and pays his bill, it must include the opportunity to receive needed academic supports and the opportunity to earn a degree. And it's not just for-profit colleges that need to pay attention to student academic success—many public institutions and private, non-profit colleges can do a lot more to support student learning and student success.

Student loan default rates are one measure of the extent to which institutions are providing a real opportunity—with high cut-offs for participating in the loan program, the default rate measure helps to protect students from colleges that simply provide them with the opportunity to pay a bill, rather than the opportunity to earn a valuable degree.

More Than Checking a Box

TEACH Grants, the new grant/loan program (some have called it a ‘groan’) created in the College Cost and Reduction Act is through the rule-making process and is now open for comment (hat tip to Sara Godrick-Rab at the University of Wisconsin who has been feeding us great tips on this issue). According to a January report in the Chronicle of Higher Education, the program is proving popular among students, with 30,000 checking a box on their financial aid forms indicating an interest in the program.

But it will take a lot more than checking a box, for both students and financial aid officers, to make sure that this program works as intended and doesn’t end up saddling students with thousands of dollars in unexpected debt.

The intentions of the program are great: to provide an incentive in the form of financial aid to high-achieving students committed to teaching in a high-risk school and in a high-need subject area. And it wouldn’t work to simply give out grants and hope that students follow through—there needs to be some policy mechanism to encourage students to stick with the program. Under the TEACH Grants program students receive grants of up to $4,000 per year in exchange for promising to follow through on the required teaching commitment, but if they don’t follow through the grants are converted (permanently) to loans with interest accruing from the day the grants were provided.

With many requirements (students must teach four years out of eight after graduating, must teach in a high-need subject area and in a school serving low-income students, and students need to check-in to confirm their employment every year) to fulfill the commitment, it will take some excellent counseling from colleges to make sure that each student understands what is required of them, understands their odds of fulfilling the requirement (currently, the Department of Education expects only 20 percent of students to complete the program) and understands the consequences of failing to complete the program.

Counseling for students is required under the TEACH Grants program, but given that higher education administrators have expressed concerns about the added administrative burden of the program, there’s no guarantee students will receive the kind of comprehensive, continual counseling they will need. And without that counseling, we could see many students who thought they were receiving a grant, as the TEACH Grants name implies, but are suddenly getting a bill for additional student loan debt.

Measurement Man

Dan Koretz, a professor of education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and a member of Education Sector's Research Advisory Board, has a new book out from Harvard University Press called Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. It's a great primer, written in plain English, on the important but often opaque subject of standardized testing. Koretz illuminates the complexities of "sampling error," "statistical significance," "reliability," and a host of other tough terms. And he ends with a chapter on "the sensible uses of tests." At a time when standardized tests are the single more influential force in at every level of education, roadmaps like Measuring Up are a valuable comodity.

Law School Confidential

My wife is a lawyer, and so we get the ABA Journal in the mail every month. As a rule, I never read it, because I don't even have time to read all the magazines we get that cover issues I'm interested in knowing more about. But this month's issue features a big picture on the front cover of someone I happen to know: Bob Morse, czar of the U.S. News & World Report college rankings.

I've confined most of my rankings analyses to four-year and two-year colleges, but the law school story is similar: the rankings are very influential, which makes law school deans very anxious and upset. The piece kicks off with the story of the dean of the University of Houston law school, who managed the school through the aftermath of Tropical Storm Allison, only to resign six years later when Houston dropped five spots on the list.

There are many good reasons to criticize the U.S. News methodology for ranking four-year institutions. But it strikes me that if any segment of higher education has the least cause to complain here, it's law schools, which completely embrace the logic and justice of rankings in the way they evaluate their own students. The legal profession in general is one pecking order after another, ranking everything from schools and students to law firms and judicial clerkships in hierarchies of great consequence. The letter grades that law schools give out hardly matter; performance relative to--i.e. ranked against--other students is everything.

It was only a few years ago that my wife expended a great deal of effort on and experienced a considerable amount of anxiety about the issue of whether she would graduate in the top ten percent of her class at Georgetown Law. (She did.) She was right to worry; some judges explicitly say they won't consider clerkship applications from applicants without this credential. It's particularly important to distinguish yourself if you're coming from a school like Georgetown, which is in the lower half of what most people consider the best schools.

But while she was anxious, much like a law school dean waiting for the new rankings list, she never thought the student rankings process was unfair. Far from it--it's close to a pure meritocracy, giving every student something that at least resembles an equal shot at distinction and opportunity, regardless of where you come from or who you know. That's all she wanted, or expected, and it worked.

The point being, there's nothing wrong with rankings per se, only bad rankings. And the article actually doesn't provide a lot in the way of persuasive critiques of the U.S News law school method. Numerous law schools complain that other law schools lie and cheat on the data they submit, but that's not an argument against rankings, it's evidence that some law schools are apparently run by liars and cheats. While I'm sure the rankings aren't perfect, their focus on selectivity, employment, and reputation seems reasonably appropriate for status- and job-focused colleges of law.

The article comes back to the former Houston dean at the end, where she says their employment placement services (job placement is an element of the rankings) were disrupted after the storm, negatively affecting their score. But that's just telling the truth, isn't it? I imagine any fair ranking of America's most livable cities would have knocked New Orleans down a few spots from 2005 to 2006. You can't shoot the messenger -- or in the case of law school rankings, Bob Morse.

The Wisdom of Galactica

With the conclusion of The Wire, the mantle of "best show on television" falls on Battlestar: Galactica, which bows for its fourth and final season on the Sci-Fi channel tonight. Like The Wire, Galactica features exceptionally strong writing and acting, and has been freed by its relatively small cable audience to explore issues with a depth and sophistication that you never see on network television. Galactica is similarly sustained by focusing on a single, defining theme. On The Wire, it was the dehumanizing effect of modern institutions. On Galactica, it's the absolutely corrupting influence of war. 

There are few more dangerous illusions than the notion that people can survive war unscathed as long as the cause is just. The humans on Galactica are fighting the most just war imaginable: a race of evil cyborgs ambushes a relatively peaceful human society living on a group of planets in the distant future, annihilating billions of people with nuclear weapons and chasing a small band of survivors through space toward the only refuge left to them: the long-lost homeland of Earth. 

Yet instead of making the show about the triumph of the human spirit, Galactica's creators show how that spirit is crushed, sometimes slowly, sometimes not, under the weight of the impossible moral decisions war inevitably brings. That was the essence of Lee Adama's defense of Baltar's collaboration in the final episode of last season. "It was an impossible situation," he says. "When the Cylons arrived, what could he possibly do? What could anyone have done?" You see it in Sol Tigh, who rejected collaboration and ended up promoting suicide bombing, executing his own wife, and was left ruined as a result.  You see it in the pointed contrast between Adama's pilot-episode speech to the troops and Admiral Cain's parallel speech from the between-season movie, Razor, where she gave into the need for revenge and was ultimately undone by it. 

Like any show, the beats and themes on Galactica have started to become more obvious as time goes on; it wasn't hard to guess where Kendra Shaw came from on Razor and where she would go in the end. So while I'll miss the show, I'm glad they're wrapping it up this year. As the creators have made clear, even the best of women and men can only survive war's inhumanity for so long. In this day and age, that can't be said enough. 

Notes on SES

Newly released interim report (pdf) from the Department of Education shows that the number of kids in chronically low-performing schools who are getting free tutoring through NCLB’s Supplemental Educational Services (SES) is rising but still only reaches 17 percent of all those eligible. Same kids also have the option to switch from their school to a better performing school but only a paltry one percent of eligible students are taking advantage of this. Why such low participation rates for SES and public school choice? Mostly because parents don’t seem to know or understand that they have these options (only half of those surveyed said they had been notified about the SES option, and less than a 1/3 said they’d heard about the public school choice option). [By the way, it's increasingly unlikely that SES will survive NCLB reauthorization, at least not without big changes. It's ironic, really, that as an NCLB provision (albeit now the ugly stepsister) SES is not really held accountable in any meaningful way for student outcomes. So changes should ensure that we can at least tell whether or not SES or SES providers (which have tripled in number in the past 3 years) actually improve learning opportunities for kids. Proposals to get rid of SES or lump it together into another pot don't address the participation/access issue or the questionable quality issue.]

The A.J. Soprano Factor

This discussion over at the The Atlantic and at G-Spot about merit and college admissions seems as good a reason as any to reprint, in its (relatively short) entirety, a policy brief co-blogger Erin Dillon and I wrote a few months ago:

Tony Soprano, patriarch of the eponymous crime family on the HBO drama "The Sopranos," had a son named Anthony Jr.—A.J. for short. A.J. was a terrible high school student. None too bright to begin with, he skipped class, experimented with drugs and alcohol, vandalized school property, and eventually got expelled. Nonetheless, A.J. went to college. His mother, Carmela, devoted countless hours to monitoring his grades, scouting for colleges that might accept him, buttonholing guidance counselors, managing the application process, and constantly reminding him of the importance of higher education. For Carmela, the question was not if her son would go to college, but where. In the end, she got her wish, practically dragging A.J. to school.

A.J. Soprano is a fictional character, but the intersection of social class and college access that he illustrates is all too real. Despite a wide range of programs dedicated to increasing access to higher education for all students, college is far more accessible for upper-income students like A.J. than for students of modest means. Chart 1, which is based on newly available data from the U.S. Department of Education's ongoing Education Longitudinal Survey, illustrates this fact.


All of the students in the survey were high school sophomores in 2002 and were given standardized tests in reading and math at that time. Each bar on Chart 1 shows the percent of students with different test scores and levels of family income who had enrolled in college by 2006, two years after their expected high school graduation.

The fourth bar on the graph represents the A.J. Sopranos of the world, those who scored in the bottom 25 percent (the first achievement quartile) on standardized tests as high school sophomores and came from families earning more than $100,000 per year. Despite their academic shortcomings, 58.4 percent of these students went on to college. For high-income students in the second achievement quartile—still below the median—the college-going rate was significantly higher, 85.3 percent.

This is a higher rate than that for those directly opposite A.J.—students from the highest achievement quartile and the lowest income level, less than $20,000 per year. 80.3 percent of these meritorious poor students went to college, which means that nearly 20 percent did not. High-achieving wealthy students, in contrast, went to college at a 96.2 percent clip. In other words, high-achieving poor students are five times more likely than high-achieving rich students to skip college in the first two years after high school.

Some observers have argued that there is no real college-access problem for the brightest students. Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute recently wrote in The Wall Street Journal that "No evidence indicates that the nation has many children with IQs above 120 [the top 10 percent] who are not given an opportunity for higher education. The university system has also become efficient in shipping large numbers of the most talented high school graduates to the most prestigious schools."

Chart 2 suggests otherwise. Aptitude and achievement play a significant role in college-going, but class matters too. Chart 2 is based on the same group of students as Chart 1, but shows only the percent of students whose first college was a highly selective four-year institution.

The odds of a poor, low-achieving student going to a highly selective institution are 0.2 percent, practically non-existent. Among the A.J. Sopranos, however, 3.5 percent managed to sneak into an elite school, suggesting that admissions preferences for athletes, legacies, and the children of the rich are alive and well.

This contrast between students with similar test scores and different incomes persists across Chart 2. In each achievement quartile, students from the wealthiest families are far more likely than their similar-scoring peers to attend the kind of high-status college or university that often serves as a gateway to personal and professional success.

There are a host of factors contributing to this phenomenon, not all of them involving anxious mothers or college admissions committees giving a leg up to the scions of wealthy alumni. Low-income students frequently attend under-resourced high schools that don't provide good guidance counseling or college preparatory curricula. College tuition is rising much faster than available need-based financial aid, which may lead some college-ready poor students to believe that higher education is beyond their financial reach. But whatever the reasons, it's clear that equal access to college remains an unmet promise in America. When it comes to higher education, it's an advantage to be rich like A.J.

If you want to see the footnotes and standard errors, the original brief is here.

Supply-Side Education Policy, Continued

Expanding on yesterday's post: Tests can be thought of as a kind of tax on the public education system. They consume scarce resources that could be used for teaching purposes. The tens of millions of dollars a year states spend on standardized tests represent funds that could have been used to reduce class size or increase teacher pay. The same is true for the money needed to create data systems that track students who move between school districts, an essential component of calculating accurate high school graduation rates. More importantly, tests consume time, both in the actual taking and in pre-test preparation, reducing the hours available for instruction and thus, presumably, the amount that students learn.

But, as with taxes, tests are necessary because they create a resource--detailed, comparable information about school success--that serves the broad public interest. Tests are compulsory, not voluntary, because otherwise people would have an incentive to free-ride and enjoy the benefit without the tax. The trick is to strike the right balance of taxation, so the short-term negative consquences are minimized (they can't be eliminated) while the public benefit is maximized. If the public resources are used wisely, they support the overall quality of the system and thus the quality of education provided. Individually, the dry cleaner across the street from my house would benefit if he didn't have to pay taxes. But he's better off operating under a system of taxation, because it pays for the sidewalks and roads that bring customers to his door.

People don't like taxes. As a result, they're susceptible to arguments that taxes can be lowered without consequences. Yet many of loudest critiques of NCLB imply the need for more information resources, not less. Fair accountability systems, we are told, will measure value-added growth. They will take into account social studies, art, music, foreign language, critical thinking, creativity, parental satisfaction, etc., etc. It's true, accountability systems would be better if they measured these things. But they can't be measured for free. And they certainly can't be measured using fewer resources than we use today.

Arguments that we could fix this whole mess simply by having less of what people don't like (taxes) and more of what people do like (public resources) are dishonest. In the long run, they breed cynicism and distrust, because they teach people to expect a combination of taxes and services that's impossible to achieve.

Supply-Side Education Policy

As part of a Slate series of policy briefs for the next president, UVA law professor Jim Ryan offers a fix-NCLB agenda. But he fails to notice that his proposed solutions completely contradict one another.

We are told, for example, that because NCLB "requires schools to test the bejeezus out of elementary- and middle-school students in reading and math," we should "Administer fewer tests. National tests should be given less often, perhaps in only fourth, eighth, and 11th grades."

We are also told that "Current test results don't tell us all we need to know about schools" because they ignore subject like "social studies, history, literature, geography, art, and music," and that "What we can't tell from scores alone, because they don't tell us where students started or how much they progressed over the year, is the value that a particular teacher or school has added to a student's education." Therefore, "School quality should also be measured using value-added assessments, crediting schools that make exceptional progress with their students, regardless of where those students started."

Which is it? If the NCLB is to be faulted because it causes schools to "downplay if not ignore subjects not tested," how does fewer tests in the same subjects fix that problem? And you can't have value-added measures without annual testing, which Ryan wants to eliminate.

This is, to use a bloggy cliche, a classic "and a pony" policy agenda. NCLB can be improved, no doubt, but the people who wrote it weren't morons; there are some very real and difficult tradeoffs to contend with in formulating accountability policy, and one of them is the tension between the costs and burdens of assessment and the need for comprehensive information. This is the equivalent of promises to cut taxes and increase services. Call it supply-side education policy: the less we test, the more we'll know.

Madlibs!

You know you want them.

Graduation Day

As the Times reported this morning, Secretary Spellings announced a new policy today that all states must calculate high school graduation rates in the same way under NCLB. It's a good idea, and illustrates several important things about national standards and state / federal relations.

First, if you give states broad discretion to define how their educational success is measured, it's a sure bet that at least a few of them will, with a straight face, put forth definitions and standards that are so lax and self-serving that they'd be funny if they weren't so sad. For example, when you read the words "on-time high school graduation rate" you probably think it means "percent of students who start high school who graduate on time." You'd think this because you're not insane, or running a state Department of Education. But for years North Carolina has interpreted this phrase to mean "percent of students who graduate from high school who graduate on time."

To repeat: Instead of calculating graduation rates as (on-time graduates / entering freshmen), North Carolina has, until this year, calculated graduation rates as (on-time graduates / all graduates). So a high school could see two-thirds of its students drop out in the 10th grade to go work at Chick-Fil-A, but still post a 100% graduation rate as long as the remaining third graduated on time. Other states have adopted fun policies like reporting the percentage of 12th graders who graduate, etc., etc.

The second thing to consider is that this new policy is a kind of national standard. There are lots of people around town who will tell you that national educational standards are a total non-starter politically and will never happen. But that's not really true; the palatability of national standards depends, as it ought to, on what is being standardized. There's no logical reason for different states or localities to adopt different defintions of "high school graduation rate," a term that has only one logical meaning. That's why today's announcement probably won't create a massive hue and cry about federal power grabs and the homogenization of the public schools. Graduation rate means what it means.

The same logic can, and should, be applied to academic subjects. Should middle schools in Richmond, VA be teaching American history from 1860 to 1870 in the same way as their counterparts in Juneau, Alaska? Probably not. But for other subjects, particularly basic computational and language skills in the early grades, there's no earthly reason for 50 different sets of standards and assessments. I can't imagine there's ever been a parent who, upon discovering that their 2nd grader couldn''t add 2 and 3, said "no problem--we'll just move somewhere with different standards."

Empty Threats

I was having lunch with a friend last week, super-smart guy but not an education person, when he mentioned that Arizona was about to opt out of the No Child Left Behind Act. He was surprised when I said it was the first I'd heard of it, because here I'm supposed to be the person who gets paid to keep track of this stuff. So I went ahead and looked for it and sure enough: "The Arizona House of Representatives is on the verge of opting out of the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, President Bush's premier educational accomplishment."

Huh! Of course they'll have to get it passed the State Senate and the governor, but still...whoops, wait a minute...few grafs later..."Some of the support stems from a change [the author] added to the bill Wednesday. If the state would not reimburse local school districts for the amount of lost federal dollars, Arizona would stick with No Child Left Behind." Ah.

That amount being $600 million per year. In the state with the worst budget deficit in the nation.

So my policy of ignoring all state threats to boycott NCLB on the grounds that they never come to anything turned out to be solid after all; this is no different than the Arizona House passing a resolution expressing the sense of the membership that the Cardinals should stop losing so many football games.

It seems fair to say that over the past five years, the leaders of the 50 states have collectively weighed the consequences of (A) cutting school spending by 5% to 10%, (B) raising taxes or cutting spending on other things in order to raise an amount equal to 5% to 10% of school spending, or (C) implementing NCLB, and they've all decided that (C) is the best option. You may disagree, but that's what they believe.

Paying for Public School

It may seem strange to pay to attend a public school, but this article in Sunday's Washington Post reports on parents who do just that. In most public school choice arrangements additional costs are absorbed by the school district or state, but in some cases parents are willing to pay 'tuition' for their child to attend the public school of their choice. And apparently D.C. parents, who only have one, urban district to choose from, can opt to cross state borders to send their child to school in Maryland or Virginia. This option isn't cheap, though--Maryland's Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School costs $13,627 a year, a price most D.C. parents can't afford.

Exchange Rates and Amsterdam Falafel

I was sitting my hotel room in Berlin last week, watching BBC World, when the news turned to the American economy. The gist of it was: because the dollar's so weak, we're screwed. I'm not an economist, but I've never quite understood why I'm supposed to be so upset about this. As a tourist I'm screwed, certainly--I was Rome about five years ago, back when you could by a Euro for 85 cents, and it was pretty great. Now they cost $1.55, which means I paid more for my sweet new pair of blue sueded Adidas Spezials than I 'd like to admit. But it's not like the weak dollar has had the same effect on prices here, where I live and spend most of my money. There are ways of measuring such things, after all. 

But no, the BBC announcer assured me that things were going to hell in handbasket in America even as I sat there. As evidence of this, they cut to a reporter standing outside an American store. Things have gotten so bad, he intoned, that some U.S. stores, like this one, are now accepting Euros as payment! Cue ominous music! He walked inside, camera tight on his shoulder, and went up to the counter with his twenty-Euro note to buy...falafel. At Amsterdam Falafel, in Adam's Morgan, here in DC, where I've eaten probably 15 or 20 times. Small world. 

So last night my wife and I are deciding where to have dinner before going to a play (Stunning, at the Woolly Mammoth Theater, it derails a little in the last act but is otherwise quite good), and I've got a ten-Euro note left over in my wallet, so we decide to give this whole mixed currency thing a try. And sure enough, they guy behind the counter happily accepted it and gave me the going exchange rate, which ended paying for almost the whole meal. 

But I still don't understand what this is supposed to mean or why it's a signal or function of the weak dollar. At any given moment, the exchange rate is what it is. From my perspective, the only advantage of buying falafel with Euros is that I got a better deal, in terms of the exchange rate and lack of commission, than if I'd taken my Euros to the Travelex on K Street. But that doesn't have anything to do with the value of the dollar relative to the Euro, it would have been just as true back when the dollar was strong. If the owners of Amsterdam Falafel want to accumulate Euros as a means of betting that the dollar will become even weaker, there are surely easier ways to do it. There can't be that many people walking around DC with Euros in their pocket making spending decisions based on who'll take their foreign currency. It was obviously a fantastic publicity coup, but other than that, I'm puzzled. 

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Remind Me Not To Raise My Kids in Tampa Bay

Via Sherman Dorn, a Florida state senate committee has approved a bill that would give high school biology teachers the "academic freedom" to teach whatever non-scientific theories they please--Zoroastrian creation myths, anything--adding to existing Florida statute instructing history teachers that "American history shall be viewed as factual, not as constructed, shall be viewed as knowable, teachable, and testable, and shall be defined as the creation of a new nation based largely on the universal principles stated in the Declaration of Independence." In other words, in Florida, science is whatever people believe it is (or isn't), while history is beyond interpretation and debate.

Berlin Diary, March 2008

There's a quote from the artist Anselm Kiefer on a gallery wall inside the Hamburger Banhoff Museum in Berlin, where I vacationed last week. It begins, "The future is rubble." Kiefer goes on to quote verse from Isaiah about grass growing on housetops while pondering the inevitability of destruction and possibility of renewal. That a German painter and sculptor born in early 1945 should think way, and create darkly moving art to match, is unsurprising, given that the history of nearly every museum, cathedral, and building to speak of in Germany's capital city contains some variation on the phrase, "Until it was bombed into rubble during World War II."

All places have their scars--the operative phrase in Ireland is "until it was razed by Oliver Cromwell in 1649"--but Berlin's are fresher and deeper than most, a consequence of destruction followed by partition. I'd seen pictures of the Wall, of course, heard Kennedy and Reagan's famous speeches and watched the '89 celebration. But I never really understood how wrong it was until I stood where it used to be. Great cities have structures, centers, axes, spines. A prime meridian in Berlin runs north on the Ebertstrasse from the renewed Potsdamer Platz, past the site of the new Holocaust Memorial on the right and the vast greenery of the Tiergarten on the left, between the east-facing Brandenburg Gate opening up to the wide Under Den Linden boulevard lined with hotels, universities, and museums, then a few steps farther to the historic, west-facing Reichstag.

The idea that less than 20 years ago this same path was a 100-yard wide no-man's land of machine guns, barbed wire, and block towers staffed by soldiers ordered to shoot on sight is hard to fathom. Imagine the same thing running through the middle of Times Square, jogging north to Columbus Circle and then east along 59th street to the river, and you'll get a sense of what I mean.

This still-ongoing return to normalcy makes Berlin a really interesting place to visit. There are lots of other reasons too: the museum systesm is terrific, probably the best and most extensive I've seen outside of Paris. The former eastern section has the restaurants, shops, streetlife, and energy you get when money and people start flowing back into an urban space they once left. Street vendors sell postcards of complete with (alleged) chunks of the Wall, which is apparently becoming a kind of Cold War True Cross. And it's always interesting to notice examples of Things That Are Better in Europe:

- You can bring your dog on the extensive, efficient metro system, where trains arrive every few minutes. You can also eat and drink beer, which is sold in kiosks located right on the platforms. This seems to work perfectly well, with no mess or bad behavior, even when the cars fill up with inebriated, singing football fans heading to a weekend afternoon match at Olympic Stadium.

- The coinage.

- The erudition of museum audioguides.

- The big department stores (KaDeWe, located in the downtown of former West Berlin, out-Harrods' Harrods).

Things That Are Better in America: Not having to root around in your pocket for 30 cents to give to a dour, unhelpful middle-aged lady every time you want to use a public restroom. Also, people smoke everywhere in Berlin--the Marlboro Man, banished from his home country, is alive and well on billboards. There's also a surprising amount of graffiti, not the fun kind, even in the nice places.

It was interesting to learn about Germanic history, of which I confess I knew little pre-World War I. All the Fredericks and electors and coalitions of kingdoms and states are confusing. Did you know there was a failed revolution in Berlin in 1848? I didn't, or I had forgotten. Another effect of the 20th century's monumental destruction, I suppose--it's hard to see past it to what came before.


The whole city evokes a sense of trying to come to grips with history while also transcending it. Kiefer says he was told virtually nothing of the crimes of Nazism while growing up after the war, and his art is an obvious repudiation of that kind of willful amnesia. The conspicuous new memorials and planned museums of Nazi and Cold War atrocities reflect a similar mindset.

And the simple fact that Berlin has reverted back to a peaceful, open society is having a powerful effect. Our hotel was located about a half-mile from Potsdamer Platz, an intersection of boulevards that was, at the beginning of the 20th century, one of Europe's busiest centers of transit, society, culture, and commerce. Then came the two world wars, and the fires and bombs that tore the graceful hotels, clubs, and buildings to the ground. Then the Wall cut it in two, and the space lay empty and fallow.

Now it's coming back to what it was. Something like $25 billion has been invested in Potzdamer Platz over the past two decades, resulting in huge glass-roofed courtyards, shopping malls, a new train station, offices, film festivals and theaters. When wars and ideologies don't get in the way, people do what people do -- walk, shop, eat, drink, talk and converse, come together in a common space. To a Berliner trasported forward from a hundred years ago, Potsdamer Platz would probably seem, in many ways, familiar. But he would probably wonder what on earth could have happened to wipe away the old structures so thoroughly, and why people kept stopping to look at that small, ugly piece of concrete wall.

Lawless Policymaking

So I went on vacation for a week and missed the whole differentiated consequences pilot project thing. Alas. But it's interesting to see it from a little distance. A few thoughts:

For readers not steeped in NCLB arcana--and really, what's the matter with you--Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings announced that she would allow 10 states to change what they do with schools that fail to make "adequately yearly progress" under NCLB. As written in the law, AYP is binary standard--you make it or you don't, and the law doesn't distinguish between schools that miss the cut with one group of students by an inch and those that miss with all their students by a mile. NCLB critics say this is simplistic and unfair, and they have a point. A somewhat overblown point, since states have adopted a range of statistical gimmicks to prevent schools from missing AYP by any amount, and because you have to miss AYP for multiple consecutive years for consequences to really kick in. But a point nonetheless.

The pilot project will allows states to react with (presumably) more resources, support, and pressure in the really bad schools than in those on the margins. It will only be open to states that have done a reasonably good job of implementing the law--e.g. no track record of making AYP determinations six months after the school year begins--and that have identified a substantial percentage of schools as needing improvement. These are all good ideas--there's no reason to have differentiated consequences in a state like, say, Wisconsin, where only 4 percent of schools miss AYP. There's nothing to differentiate when all your schools are above average.

This is not, in the strictest sense of the word, legal. The black-letter law is pretty clear: If you want federal money, you have to implement an accountability system that works as follows. There are no sections or subparagraphs that say The Secretary of Education may at her discretion alter or ignore the previous subparagraphs if people seem to agree they're not written well and Congress doesn't get around to reauthorizing the law on schedule. But this is nothing new; Sec. Spelling did the same thing with a "growth model" pilot project a few years ago, which allowed states to rate schools based on year-to-year improvement, rather than absolute levels of performance.

Sec. Spellings can do this for a simple reason: nobody objects. She's using what amounts to an extra-legal, consensus-driven process of amending the law without going through the whole hassle of introducing bills, havings votes, getting lobbied, etc. etc. The check on this method is that anyone with standing can derail it simply by saying so: If Senator Kennedy, Representative Miller, Representative Boehner, or any of the major interest groups hated the idea, it wouldn't be happening. But since the only real objections have been "it doesn't go far enough," the process goes ahead. It's actually a pretty efficient when you think about it.

It's also interesting to think about the long-term implications for NCLB reauthorization. My best guess is that nothing moves until 2010 at the earliest. That would still be a faster turaround than the Higher Education Act, which nearing the 10th anniversary of its last incarnation. What happens if, in the meantime, this Secretary of Education or the next one continues to pick off the law's major flaws, one by one? A couple of predictions:

First, it will be become increasingly clear that NCLB is not identifying schools as low-performing because it's horrendously inaccurate and arbitrary but because those schools are, in fact, low-performing. This is what happened with the growth model pilot project, where it turned out that most of the schools that look bad when judged by an absolute standard also look bad by a growth standard. Students just aren't learning there. Similarly, despite what you may have read in the newspaper, NCLB has not resulted in states coming down on large numbers of schools like a ton of bricks. It is simply not happening. In fact, if states takes the terms of the pilot project seriously, a reasonably likely outcome is that more schools will be subject to legitimately serious consequences, not less.

This, in turn, should provide some clarity to the accountability debate. In the end, the NEA didn't decide to wage war against NCLB because the law is underfunded, or lacks a growth model, or lacks differentiated consequences, or relies on standardized tests of inadequate quality, even though all those things are true. The NEA rejects the idea of assessment-driven governmental accountability for public education at its core. As long as this remains the case, no fixes--regardless of how sensible they may be--will change its mind.

Update: Marc Dean Millot points out that the Secretary could cite certain waiver provisions in NCLB to justify the legality of the pilot project. Fair enough, but it's a pretty broad interpretation; waivers typically involve states coming to ED with ideas, notices in the Federal Register, etc. That's not what's going on here. The larger point still stands, which is that this is essentially a de facto NCLB reauthorization happening in increments via consensus-backed adminstrative fiat. Which is why Millot's assertion that the waiver provisions "could just as easily be used by a future (Democratic) Secretary to kill [Supplemental Educational Services] outright," is silly, there is by no means a consensus that SES needs to be killed, far from it.

Everyone Wants Choice

School choice proponents usually focus on the potential for school choice to provide more, and better, options to low-income students--those students for whom school choice is generally not an option. But when choice policies are put in play, whether its virtual schools, charters, or inter-district choice, middle-income parents are often also interested in the newly available options. And the reasons vary--convenience, finding the right fit, and simple school quality all play a role in who uses choice and how they choose. A few stories this week illustrate how suburban parents are using school choice:

Today's Las Vegas Sun reports on the first graduate of the county's virtual high school. Matt Sosa started off attending the virtual high school for medical reasons, but finished there because he felt it was the best fit for his learning needs--and he received his high school diploma without spending a single day in the classroom.

The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday on a rift in Palos Verdes school district--a high-scoring, well-off district in which some parents are pushing to start a charter school to get away from what they see as a school system that is overly focused on test scores. But the parents that would be left, like many who criticize school choice, argue that the financial drain from the charter school will only hurt the remaining students.

And finally out of Rhode Island, an editorial in the Providence Journal arguing that parents should be able to send their children to school across district boundaries, both to allow parents to find the best school without having to buy a house in the right zip code and also to provide a way for parents to express their dissatisfaction with schools--by leaving.

There's nothing wrong with offering additional choice to middle- or high-income families, but policy needs to be designed, using transportation, targeted lottery systems, and equitable funding, to ensure that low-income students are the primary beneficiaries of school choice policies. And if policy is not sufficiently targeted, middle-class parents, as the above stories illustrate, will take advantage of the new options, potentially squeezing out the students who need those options the most.

The Tangled Web of Financial Aid Policy

Inside Higher Ed has a great piece today on the trade-offs inherent in institutional financial aid, focusing on the impact of institutions that move to a 'no loans' policy without also having a 'need blind' admissions policy. Doing both requires a hefty endowment and for those colleges that jump on the no-loans bandwagon without going 'need blind' there could be some unintended consequences that hurt the ability of low-income students to get into and pay for selective, private colleges. From the article:

The danger of going no-loans without being need-blind, Hill [President of Vassar College] said, is that it could result in some students receiving less aid and some low-income students not being admitted — at least once you leave the relatively small group of colleges and universities with stratospheric endowments. “If you are a school that is not need blind, and you go to a no-loan policy, you are going to make the financial aid for each of those you accept more generous, but it’s not saying what your overall commitment is,” she said. “If your aid budget is unchanged, or doesn’t increase in the future, you will be giving more financial aid to fewer students, and I’m not sure I would consider that a welfare-improving situation.”

Institutional financial aid doesn't always help those that need it most. Our first-ever Charts You Can Trust showed institutional aid increasing fastest for students in the highest income group. And we've followed up with charts looking at the impact of merit-based aid, or 'tuition discounts', that often go to the highest income students with the best test scores, and most recently at the continued income gap in college access to the most selective institutions--even among top students.

This article also raises an excellent question--one that's too often looked over in the debate about student debt--what is an appropriate amount of debt for college? Considering that a substantial amount of the financial benefits of a college degree accrue to the individual student, it is reasonable to expect students to invest in their own education. But that investment needs to be balanced against career expectations and the actual value of the degree. Another great quote from the article:

For example, Lindeman [financial aid director at Macalester College] noted that many colleges going no-loans say that they are thinking about the undergraduate who wants to be a teacher or join the Peace Corps, but who is worried about loan repayment. If that’s the problem, he said, colleges should be creating funds that repay the loans of new alumni who enter those or similar service-oriented (and low-income) fields. But he noted that the elite colleges that are boasting of going no-loans turn out plenty of lawyers and technology entrepreneurs and investment bankers — arguably far more than inner-city school teachers. Does everyone deserve a loan-free education, he asked?

Some great, if thorny, issues to think about in this piece, underlining that financial aid policy is far from being a clear-cut issue. Even so, if the discussion continues at this high of a level, then we're likely to see some good progress on the issue.