Today's winner of the CNN.com award for egregious sensationalism in education journalism goes to ABC News, for this headline:
"Alabama Teacher Accused of Sex, Murder Plot"
The only possible silver lining that I can see here is that perhaps this marks some level of media fatique with the tried-and-true, grossly voyeuristic "Female high school teacher has sex with male student" story, the prominence of which is always in direct proportion to the teacher's physical resemblance to Nicole Kidman in "To Die For."
Good looking blonde teacher = front-page national news.
Older, not-so-attractive teacher = page 9 of the Metro section.
In other words, the same process the media use to decide whether or not they care about missing children.
Maybe now there at least needs to be an ancillary murder plot or something else to spice up the story before it runs large like this.
Story tip: Ethan Gray.
Friday, April 14, 2006
Stop. No, STOP. Read this Report.
This report should be ( and I promise this phrase will be used with extreme judiciousness here at the Quick and the Ed) required reading for anyone interested in improving the quality of teachers in American classrooms.
Written by Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger, the premise is straightforward: school districts should pay less attention to teachers' paper credentials and more attention to actual success in the classroom, reconfiguring their tenure and compensation policies to be more aggressive about not retaining the teachers who are least successful in helping students learn and giving salary bonuses to those who are most successful, particularly with low-income students.
There is powerful logic at work here. For decades researchers have been struggling to tease out bits of evidence pointing to the small impact of various traditional methods of categorizing teachers--certified, uncertified, alt-route, has a Master's degree, licensure exam scores, this disposition, that disposition, etc. etc. Some of these things matter a little, or somewhat, some (like having a Masters' degree) appear not to matter at all. The lack of definitive results has left plenty of room for people of different camps to comfortably keep various ideological arguments going ad infinitum, with little danger of actually resolving the issue and thus having to find something else to do.
But at the same time, research has also consistently found huge variations in teacher effectiveness within any category of teacher you care to name--old or young, certified or not, black or white, short or tall. Some teachers are just much, much better than others, regardless of external labels or credentials.
The Gordon paper simply takes these finding to their logical conclusion: instead of shaping teacher policy around things we know don't matter very much, let's shape teacher policy around things we know matter a lot. Instead of fighting a losing up-front battle to filter and sort prospective teachers based on qualities that may have a tenuous connection to success in the classroom, let's filter and sort them based on actual success in the classroom.
This would be a seismic change in the way teachers are prepared, hired, and treated as professionals. Really, an earth-spins-backward-on-its-axis, time-reverses-direction, Margot-Kidder-flies-up-out-of-a-ditch magnitude of change. It would mean taking seriously a fact that most educators know intuitively yet is largely absent from teacher policy: teaching is an extraordinarily complicated endeavor, and people find different ways to be good at it. You can train and test prospective teachers, give them knowledge and skill, and those things are important, but once they get into the classroom some teachers bring additional talents, work ethic, intelligence, drive, etc. to bear, and others don't. Those differences matter a lot to student learning.
This report has the courage to take seriously plain facts that many people know but are unwilling to act upon, because doing so would be a huge challenge to the status quo. Read it today.
Written by Robert Gordon, Thomas Kane, and Douglas Staiger, the premise is straightforward: school districts should pay less attention to teachers' paper credentials and more attention to actual success in the classroom, reconfiguring their tenure and compensation policies to be more aggressive about not retaining the teachers who are least successful in helping students learn and giving salary bonuses to those who are most successful, particularly with low-income students.
There is powerful logic at work here. For decades researchers have been struggling to tease out bits of evidence pointing to the small impact of various traditional methods of categorizing teachers--certified, uncertified, alt-route, has a Master's degree, licensure exam scores, this disposition, that disposition, etc. etc. Some of these things matter a little, or somewhat, some (like having a Masters' degree) appear not to matter at all. The lack of definitive results has left plenty of room for people of different camps to comfortably keep various ideological arguments going ad infinitum, with little danger of actually resolving the issue and thus having to find something else to do.
But at the same time, research has also consistently found huge variations in teacher effectiveness within any category of teacher you care to name--old or young, certified or not, black or white, short or tall. Some teachers are just much, much better than others, regardless of external labels or credentials.
The Gordon paper simply takes these finding to their logical conclusion: instead of shaping teacher policy around things we know don't matter very much, let's shape teacher policy around things we know matter a lot. Instead of fighting a losing up-front battle to filter and sort prospective teachers based on qualities that may have a tenuous connection to success in the classroom, let's filter and sort them based on actual success in the classroom.
This would be a seismic change in the way teachers are prepared, hired, and treated as professionals. Really, an earth-spins-backward-on-its-axis, time-reverses-direction, Margot-Kidder-flies-up-out-of-a-ditch magnitude of change. It would mean taking seriously a fact that most educators know intuitively yet is largely absent from teacher policy: teaching is an extraordinarily complicated endeavor, and people find different ways to be good at it. You can train and test prospective teachers, give them knowledge and skill, and those things are important, but once they get into the classroom some teachers bring additional talents, work ethic, intelligence, drive, etc. to bear, and others don't. Those differences matter a lot to student learning.
This report has the courage to take seriously plain facts that many people know but are unwilling to act upon, because doing so would be a huge challenge to the status quo. Read it today.
Not from the Onion
From the Sydney Morning Herald:
I know this is nothing to laugh about, but it seems like investigating the obvious to me.
Young people who adopt the "Goth" lifestyle of dark clothes and introspective music are more likely to commit self-harm or attempt suicide than other youngsters, a Scottish study has found.
I know this is nothing to laugh about, but it seems like investigating the obvious to me.
Thursday, April 13, 2006
Fugly
DC Education Blog's Nathan critiques the design of DCPS's new facilities master plan website. Since I have the aesthetic sensibilities of a small wombat, I'll defer to others on this matter. But I do hope this isn't a premonition of things to come when the new facilities plan is released on May 28th.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
What I Don't Get (one of many things)
Joe Williams has been blogging at the Chalkboard about this school space smackdown between a NYC school district school, the elite New Explorations in Science, Technology and Math, and the Ross Global Academy Charter School, which the NYC Department of Education wants to co-locate in NEST's building. That this debate is getting ugly is nothing surprising.
But here's what I don't get: NEST is subject to possible co-location because it is underenrolled and has extra space. Yet there are thousands of kids in New York City, in the grades NEST serves, who are entitled under NCLB to transfer out of their low-performing schools but can't because there aren't enough spaces available in higher-performing ones. NEST doesn't have an AYP rating under NCLB because it doesn't receive Title I funds, but it is rated "in good standing" under New York's state accountability system, and has higher-test scores than the average NYC public school. So, if NEST's principal is really that opposed to charter co-location, why doesn't she offer to solve the excess space problem by opening up all the excess space in the school to students who want to transfer out of low-performing schools under NCLB? If NEST's parents and educators don't want to do that, then it's pretty obvious that the excess space would be better allocated to people who ARE trying to expand the number of high-performing school spaces for underserved kids in NYC.
But here's what I don't get: NEST is subject to possible co-location because it is underenrolled and has extra space. Yet there are thousands of kids in New York City, in the grades NEST serves, who are entitled under NCLB to transfer out of their low-performing schools but can't because there aren't enough spaces available in higher-performing ones. NEST doesn't have an AYP rating under NCLB because it doesn't receive Title I funds, but it is rated "in good standing" under New York's state accountability system, and has higher-test scores than the average NYC public school. So, if NEST's principal is really that opposed to charter co-location, why doesn't she offer to solve the excess space problem by opening up all the excess space in the school to students who want to transfer out of low-performing schools under NCLB? If NEST's parents and educators don't want to do that, then it's pretty obvious that the excess space would be better allocated to people who ARE trying to expand the number of high-performing school spaces for underserved kids in NYC.
Happy Birthday, Beverly Cleary!
Acclaimed children's book author Beverly Cleary is 90 today. The author of nearly 40 children's books spanning five decades--including Henry Huggins, The Mouse and the Motorcycle, and her best-known book, Ramona the Pest--Clearly has helped countless children--including me--learn to enjoy reading through her work, which is amusing, relatable, and fundamentally respectful of children. Happy Birthday, Mrs. Cleary.
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
What Success in Higher Education Really Means
I spent last Thursday and Friday in my former home town of Indianapolis testifying at the Secretary of Education's Commission on the Future of Higher Education. Some very interesting discussions focused on what higher education quality really means. Which made me look back to the article the Washington Post ran last week reporting that that Stephen Joel Trachtenberg, the President of George Washington University, will be stepping down after nearly 20 years on the job. It's worth giving their top-line summary of his accomplishments a careful read:
But it's telling to observe the terms under which the success for institutional leaders in higher education is defined. To summarize, Trachtenberg did a great job of increasing the institution's wealth, exclusivity, and reputation (as gauged by the academic credentials of its faculty), as well as expanding the physical plant.
Nowhere is there a mention of how much better a job GW did in educating its students under Trachtenberg or helping them earn degrees, how much more they learned or how increasingly successful they were as they moved on into further education, the workforce, and their lives.
I'm not saying none of those things happened. But they aren't mentioned, for the simple reason that nobody really knows if they happened or not. Colleges and universities gather and make available virtually no information about the learning outcomes of their students.
Thus, institutions aren't judged on student outcomes. They're judged on the aforementioned measures of wealth, exclusivity, and reputation, which (not coincidentally) are the primary drivers of the rankings published by the likes of U.S. News and World Report. The most succesful higher education leaders--and Trachtenberg seems to have been quite successful--understand these rules of the game and play them well.
Inevitably, this has the effect of marginalizing student success when it comes to institutional priorities and resources. Successful university presidents must raise a lot money, increase the applicant pool, and attract star faculty. They can take steps to improve the quality of teaching and learning. This distinction between mandatory and optional priorities makes a huge difference, generally not to the benefit of undergraduates.
First, I want to be clear that I have no reason to think that Stephen Trachtenberg is anything other than a very good president, nor that GW is anything other than a very good school."During his time as the 15th president of GWU, the school grew physically, financially and in academic reputation. The endowment is nearly $1 billion, almost $800 million more than when Trachtenberg arrived in 1988; undergraduate applications have jumped from 6,000 to more than 20,000 annually (moving it from the ranks of a "safe" school to one that many students now worry about gaining admission to); and a number of the school's programs have climbed in national rankings. In 2004, there were 10,556 undergraduates.
The city's largest private employer, GWU under Trachtenberg also opened the first new hospital in the District in 25 years, created five new schools and elevated athletics.
"He made the school much more national in scope and impression, upgraded the faculty and bettered the tone of the school for everyone," said Charles Manatt, a lawyer and board of trustees chairman."
But it's telling to observe the terms under which the success for institutional leaders in higher education is defined. To summarize, Trachtenberg did a great job of increasing the institution's wealth, exclusivity, and reputation (as gauged by the academic credentials of its faculty), as well as expanding the physical plant.
Nowhere is there a mention of how much better a job GW did in educating its students under Trachtenberg or helping them earn degrees, how much more they learned or how increasingly successful they were as they moved on into further education, the workforce, and their lives.
I'm not saying none of those things happened. But they aren't mentioned, for the simple reason that nobody really knows if they happened or not. Colleges and universities gather and make available virtually no information about the learning outcomes of their students.
Thus, institutions aren't judged on student outcomes. They're judged on the aforementioned measures of wealth, exclusivity, and reputation, which (not coincidentally) are the primary drivers of the rankings published by the likes of U.S. News and World Report. The most succesful higher education leaders--and Trachtenberg seems to have been quite successful--understand these rules of the game and play them well.
Inevitably, this has the effect of marginalizing student success when it comes to institutional priorities and resources. Successful university presidents must raise a lot money, increase the applicant pool, and attract star faculty. They can take steps to improve the quality of teaching and learning. This distinction between mandatory and optional priorities makes a huge difference, generally not to the benefit of undergraduates.
Anecdotes, Suspicion, Discrimination, and How Gender Sterotypes Hurt Early Learning
I think this Tampa Tribune article (hat tip to the EdWonks) about the suspicions unfairly cast on male kindergarten teachers is pretty silly. For starters, it's a prime example of the non-education education story, to steal a phrase coined by Kevin. In March, a local male kindergarten teacher was arrested on charges of "sexual performance with a child," and someone at the Tampa Trib apparently thought that might cause parents and the public to fear all male early childhood teachers--a tiny fraction of kindergarten teachers in the area--are pedophiles. The article offers no evidence that parents are worried about this possibility--even the anecdotes the reporter gathers sorta run against the theme.
But there's also a serious issue here, in the underlying assumption that seems to run through the piece that no normal, healthy young man would choose to work with small children unless he had an ulterior motive. Teacher quality is a huge challenge in early childhood education, particularly for preschool teachers, who are oftern very low-paid, than for kindergarten teachers, who are typically paid on part with other elementary school teachers.
I think a major reason that early childhood workers are so poorly paid is that working with young children has traditionally been seen as a woman's job, and therefore not something that's really worthwhile or should be well paid. (The insistence of some early childhood advocates on conflating educationally-focused and purely custodial care is also part of the problem here, IMHO). I don't think improving the quality of preschool and early childhood education requires having more male teachers, but I also don't think wages for preschool teachers--and therefore quality--are going to raise near as much as they need to until we stop viewing it solely as a "women's job."
But there's also a serious issue here, in the underlying assumption that seems to run through the piece that no normal, healthy young man would choose to work with small children unless he had an ulterior motive. Teacher quality is a huge challenge in early childhood education, particularly for preschool teachers, who are oftern very low-paid, than for kindergarten teachers, who are typically paid on part with other elementary school teachers.
I think a major reason that early childhood workers are so poorly paid is that working with young children has traditionally been seen as a woman's job, and therefore not something that's really worthwhile or should be well paid. (The insistence of some early childhood advocates on conflating educationally-focused and purely custodial care is also part of the problem here, IMHO). I don't think improving the quality of preschool and early childhood education requires having more male teachers, but I also don't think wages for preschool teachers--and therefore quality--are going to raise near as much as they need to until we stop viewing it solely as a "women's job."
Monday, April 10, 2006
What Education Policy Positions Say About Politicians
I'm stepping a bit on Andy's turf with this, but Matthew Yglesias has a great post at TPMcafe about how the issues a candidate for elected office chooses to talk about and how he or she talks about them define who the candidate is for the public.
This is particularly relevant to education. Most voters don't choose a candidate solely based on his or her positions on education topics, but how a candidate chooses to talk about education and the degree to which he or she chooses to emphasize it to send an important message to voters about the candidate's character and values: is he pro-reform?, will she stand up to special interests?, does he care about social justice, opportunity, and helping the weakest in society? etc.
Interestingly, the two examples Yglesias highlights of politicians using an issue to define themselves--John Edwards talking about child poverty in 2004, and George W. Bush's outreach to African Americans (including the emphasis on NCLB and the "soft bigotry of low expectations) in 2000--both focused heavily on children, including education.
In any case, if you're interested in the politics of education, particularly the Democratic side, read the post.
This is particularly relevant to education. Most voters don't choose a candidate solely based on his or her positions on education topics, but how a candidate chooses to talk about education and the degree to which he or she chooses to emphasize it to send an important message to voters about the candidate's character and values: is he pro-reform?, will she stand up to special interests?, does he care about social justice, opportunity, and helping the weakest in society? etc.
Interestingly, the two examples Yglesias highlights of politicians using an issue to define themselves--John Edwards talking about child poverty in 2004, and George W. Bush's outreach to African Americans (including the emphasis on NCLB and the "soft bigotry of low expectations) in 2000--both focused heavily on children, including education.
In any case, if you're interested in the politics of education, particularly the Democratic side, read the post.
What Does Immigration Mean for Public Education?
Unless you've been living under a rock the last few weeks, it's been pretty obvious that immigration remains a highly contentious issue in the United States. Today, up to 180,000 people are expected to participate in a pro-immigrant demonstration on the National Mall, just a few blocks from my office.
Regardless of what your stance is on the political questions about immigration now before Congress, it's clear that immigrants and children of immigrants have become a significant part of the U.S. population, and that, for both demographic and economic reasons, they're going to continue to be one.
In fact, according to a recent report from the Urban Institute (which I highly recommend reading), nearly one in five school-aged children in the U.S. is either an immigrant or the child of immigrants. The majority of these children were born in the United States, and are proficient English speakers, but such changing demographics do raise new questions for public schools. In particular, many schools lack the resources or expertise to effectively educate the 6 million children who do not now speak English proficiently, and the increasing geographic dispersion of immigrants--who are now settling in non-border states and places not traditionally seen as destinations for immigration--means more schools that lack experience teaching children of immigrants or English language learners must now face these challenges. There's also the question of what role public schools play in equipping immigrants, children of immigrants, and, indeed, all the children they serve, to be good citizens.
Unfortunately, because the conversation about immigration is so polarized (as are questions about public education), there's not a lot of honest public conversation about these issues that isn't laden with political baggage.
Regardless of what your stance is on the political questions about immigration now before Congress, it's clear that immigrants and children of immigrants have become a significant part of the U.S. population, and that, for both demographic and economic reasons, they're going to continue to be one.
In fact, according to a recent report from the Urban Institute (which I highly recommend reading), nearly one in five school-aged children in the U.S. is either an immigrant or the child of immigrants. The majority of these children were born in the United States, and are proficient English speakers, but such changing demographics do raise new questions for public schools. In particular, many schools lack the resources or expertise to effectively educate the 6 million children who do not now speak English proficiently, and the increasing geographic dispersion of immigrants--who are now settling in non-border states and places not traditionally seen as destinations for immigration--means more schools that lack experience teaching children of immigrants or English language learners must now face these challenges. There's also the question of what role public schools play in equipping immigrants, children of immigrants, and, indeed, all the children they serve, to be good citizens.
Unfortunately, because the conversation about immigration is so polarized (as are questions about public education), there's not a lot of honest public conversation about these issues that isn't laden with political baggage.
Saturday, April 08, 2006
The Allegedly Ever-Crazier College Admissions Rat Race, Continued Ad Infinitum
The Wall Street Journal and Washington Post ran near-identical articles last week focusing on the declining percentage of applicants being accepted by elite colleges and universities. Both focused on single-digit acceptance rates at Ivy League institutions, along with various quotes from admissions officers and anxious parents emphasizing that getting into the Ivies these days is tougher than getting a straight answer from the Bush White House about the war in Iraq. The Post summarized the phenomenon as follows:
This quote--and the article generally--seems to miss the distinction between perception and reality. The declining admit rate at elite schools is, as the article notes, being driven entirely by the denominator in the equation. It's not that the elite schools are admitting fewer students--in fact, they're admitting more. It's that the number of applications is rising even faster, driving the percentage down.
If the increasing number of applications reflected a corresponding increase in the number of qualified applicants, then it would be fair to say that it's harder to get into an elite college. But this article, and others like it, says that a big factor here is the same pool of applicants simply submitting more applications.
That would make it seem harder to get in, because students would be rejected more often. But the net result, in terms of the total number of qualified students getting spots, wouldn't change. From 2004 to 2005, the Top 50 four-year institutions in terms of SAT scores saw a 6.5% incease in applications, and accepted 2.2% more students, driving their aggregate admit rate down by one percentage point. So unless the number of qualified applicants increased by more than 2.2%, this whole "it's harder to get into college" phenomenon is mostly a mirage.
About 3 million students are expected to graduate from high school this year, and about two-thirds of them are looking for college spaces. The number of rejections is further inflated by the increased number of applications sent out by each student, reacting to the uncertainty of admission and the ease of online and common applications. This produces a self-perpetuating cycle: It is harder to get in, so seniors apply to more schools, which makes it even harder to get in, at least for the most sought-after schools."
This quote--and the article generally--seems to miss the distinction between perception and reality. The declining admit rate at elite schools is, as the article notes, being driven entirely by the denominator in the equation. It's not that the elite schools are admitting fewer students--in fact, they're admitting more. It's that the number of applications is rising even faster, driving the percentage down.
If the increasing number of applications reflected a corresponding increase in the number of qualified applicants, then it would be fair to say that it's harder to get into an elite college. But this article, and others like it, says that a big factor here is the same pool of applicants simply submitting more applications.
That would make it seem harder to get in, because students would be rejected more often. But the net result, in terms of the total number of qualified students getting spots, wouldn't change. From 2004 to 2005, the Top 50 four-year institutions in terms of SAT scores saw a 6.5% incease in applications, and accepted 2.2% more students, driving their aggregate admit rate down by one percentage point. So unless the number of qualified applicants increased by more than 2.2%, this whole "it's harder to get into college" phenomenon is mostly a mirage.
Friday, April 07, 2006
History is not Math
Not to "rehash" Andy's already extensive coverage of the "narrowing the curriculum" hysteria, but Mike Petrilli's bite at the apple in the latest Education Gadfly recommended a predictable--but I think dead wrong--response to the issue that I need to rant a bit about.
Petrilli--like a lot of folks in the edworld--argues that history, science, and other subjects are getting pushed out of the curriculum because NCLB holds school accountable for math and reading only, and not for other subjects (although the law doesn't preclude states from including other subjects in AYP). Petrilli's response, then, is to say the feds should require states to test students in science (which they're already must do in three grade levels come 2007, as Petrilli notes) and history, AND incorporate the results of those tests in determining whether or not schools are making adequate yearly progress under the law.
I think this is a terrible idea, for three reasons.
The first is a technical issue: There's a trade-off, in designing accountability systems, between complexity and transparency--the more stuff (different subjects, different grades, disaggregated subgroups, etc.) you try to incorporate into coercive accountability system, the more unwieldy they become, and the harder for folks who don't crunch policy for a living to understand. (Jay Mathews, for example, already claims that AYP is too confusing--I don't agree with him, but I do think adding many more variables would make the system too confusing). Adding two additional subjects to the AYP determination would make the system much more complex, and harder to explain or defend to parents and the public. I don't think that's a good idea. (Apologies to Kevin, from whom I'm cribbing a bit here, although less eloquently than him.)
Second, while I generally hate this type of argument, I AM concerned about a slippery slope here. I think that art and music are just as important for children to be well-educated as science or history--should we add standards and testing and make those subjects part of AYP, too?
My third concern is more fundamental. I think subjects like history and science are fundamentally different from reading and math. Although there are still some folks--primarily in ed schools--who haven't bought into it yet, there's actually a pretty clear, well-defined research consensus about how children learn to read, and what educators need to do when for kids to become proficient readers. There's not the same level of research and consensus in math as in reading, but there is a body of research here, and math, like reading, is an area in which kids need to learn specific skills in a particular sequence in order to become proficient and move to the next level. In both reading and math, we can study what and how kids need to learn in order to become proficient because--calculator debates aside--there's some general agreement about what, ultimately, kids need to know. Everyone agrees that kids need to learn how to read, and there's not a lot of debate about what that means. And, while we might disagree about how far kids need to develop their mathematical knowledge and skills, we can generally agree on what algebra is and what computation is.
That's not true in history or science. What children need to learn in these fields is fundamentally a values issue. Should kids study the history of the state in which they live, or the history and cultures of Africa? Even if we can all agree that kids need to know something about U.S. history, what should the focus be, and whose history should they learn? Why the heck do kids have to learn what a stamen and pistil are (does anyone reading even remember learning this in middle school)? Is there really any reason they need to know the names of the planets in the solar system? These aren't questions that research can answer. And, even if we could all agree on what kids should know in history or science* how would anyone justify one sequence for when kids need to know which ideas over a different order?
Because these questions are values issues, without a clear cut "right" answer, the process of standards-setting in these fields has been incredibly politically charged, culture-war issues, in the states that have undertaken it. (See, for instance, Kansas and evolution, or the debate over Virginia's history SOLs when they were initiated.) I think such debates are really a distraction from real educational questions. Since these questions are less clear cut, I think the standards for them are best set by local communities (loosely defined), combined with parental choice.
This doesn't mean that I don't think history and science are important--I do. But I don't think the nature of these subjects is well-suited to state standards accountability systems. And I think that's ok. There's this tremendous temptation to hang everything on the single accountability system, to act as if that's the only way of indicating to schools what's important or getting them to do it.
I think shows a tremendous lack of imagination. Schools and people who work in them are driven by tons of different competing incentives, not just the state accountability system, and there are lots of ways to get them to do things that we want them to do without tying it to the accountabilty system. There is, of course, the time-tested federal approach--that dominated federal policy before NCLB--of giving schools money, in the form of federal grants, for doing something we want them to do. Programs like the Teaching American History grant program, which was part of Petrilli's portfolio at the Department of Ed, take that approach. (In general, I'm not a fan of these types of small programs, a topic for another day, but this is one alternative.) One could also use an accreditation model: For example, a variety of scientific organizations (NSF, AAAS, professional associations in the various fields, etc.) could establish criteria for identifying schools that are doing a good job teaching science, and schools could seek these accreditations. States could even require that schools receive one of a variety of possible accreditations. These are just a few ideas.
*I think we might ultimately be able to reach some minimal consensus on scientific concepts--such as the scientific method, human biology, and some basic principles of physics--that kids need to know to function in an increasingly science-driven culture.
Petrilli--like a lot of folks in the edworld--argues that history, science, and other subjects are getting pushed out of the curriculum because NCLB holds school accountable for math and reading only, and not for other subjects (although the law doesn't preclude states from including other subjects in AYP). Petrilli's response, then, is to say the feds should require states to test students in science (which they're already must do in three grade levels come 2007, as Petrilli notes) and history, AND incorporate the results of those tests in determining whether or not schools are making adequate yearly progress under the law.
I think this is a terrible idea, for three reasons.
The first is a technical issue: There's a trade-off, in designing accountability systems, between complexity and transparency--the more stuff (different subjects, different grades, disaggregated subgroups, etc.) you try to incorporate into coercive accountability system, the more unwieldy they become, and the harder for folks who don't crunch policy for a living to understand. (Jay Mathews, for example, already claims that AYP is too confusing--I don't agree with him, but I do think adding many more variables would make the system too confusing). Adding two additional subjects to the AYP determination would make the system much more complex, and harder to explain or defend to parents and the public. I don't think that's a good idea. (Apologies to Kevin, from whom I'm cribbing a bit here, although less eloquently than him.)
Second, while I generally hate this type of argument, I AM concerned about a slippery slope here. I think that art and music are just as important for children to be well-educated as science or history--should we add standards and testing and make those subjects part of AYP, too?
My third concern is more fundamental. I think subjects like history and science are fundamentally different from reading and math. Although there are still some folks--primarily in ed schools--who haven't bought into it yet, there's actually a pretty clear, well-defined research consensus about how children learn to read, and what educators need to do when for kids to become proficient readers. There's not the same level of research and consensus in math as in reading, but there is a body of research here, and math, like reading, is an area in which kids need to learn specific skills in a particular sequence in order to become proficient and move to the next level. In both reading and math, we can study what and how kids need to learn in order to become proficient because--calculator debates aside--there's some general agreement about what, ultimately, kids need to know. Everyone agrees that kids need to learn how to read, and there's not a lot of debate about what that means. And, while we might disagree about how far kids need to develop their mathematical knowledge and skills, we can generally agree on what algebra is and what computation is.
That's not true in history or science. What children need to learn in these fields is fundamentally a values issue. Should kids study the history of the state in which they live, or the history and cultures of Africa? Even if we can all agree that kids need to know something about U.S. history, what should the focus be, and whose history should they learn? Why the heck do kids have to learn what a stamen and pistil are (does anyone reading even remember learning this in middle school)? Is there really any reason they need to know the names of the planets in the solar system? These aren't questions that research can answer. And, even if we could all agree on what kids should know in history or science* how would anyone justify one sequence for when kids need to know which ideas over a different order?
Because these questions are values issues, without a clear cut "right" answer, the process of standards-setting in these fields has been incredibly politically charged, culture-war issues, in the states that have undertaken it. (See, for instance, Kansas and evolution, or the debate over Virginia's history SOLs when they were initiated.) I think such debates are really a distraction from real educational questions. Since these questions are less clear cut, I think the standards for them are best set by local communities (loosely defined), combined with parental choice.
This doesn't mean that I don't think history and science are important--I do. But I don't think the nature of these subjects is well-suited to state standards accountability systems. And I think that's ok. There's this tremendous temptation to hang everything on the single accountability system, to act as if that's the only way of indicating to schools what's important or getting them to do it.
I think shows a tremendous lack of imagination. Schools and people who work in them are driven by tons of different competing incentives, not just the state accountability system, and there are lots of ways to get them to do things that we want them to do without tying it to the accountabilty system. There is, of course, the time-tested federal approach--that dominated federal policy before NCLB--of giving schools money, in the form of federal grants, for doing something we want them to do. Programs like the Teaching American History grant program, which was part of Petrilli's portfolio at the Department of Ed, take that approach. (In general, I'm not a fan of these types of small programs, a topic for another day, but this is one alternative.) One could also use an accreditation model: For example, a variety of scientific organizations (NSF, AAAS, professional associations in the various fields, etc.) could establish criteria for identifying schools that are doing a good job teaching science, and schools could seek these accreditations. States could even require that schools receive one of a variety of possible accreditations. These are just a few ideas.
*I think we might ultimately be able to reach some minimal consensus on scientific concepts--such as the scientific method, human biology, and some basic principles of physics--that kids need to know to function in an increasingly science-driven culture.
Wednesday, April 05, 2006
Politics-free Accountability is like Calorie-free Chocolate
Thanks to the good leaders of Maryland and Baltimore for providing a case study in how messy the interaction of politics with public school accountability can be.
On March 29, the Maryland state board of education voted to transfer management of 11 chronically low-performing Baltimore middle and high schools away from the Baltimore City School Board to third-party groups. State-imposed management takeovers and private management of public schools are always contentious, but Baltimore is particularly contentious because Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley is running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and the current governor, Bob Ehrlich, is a Republican.
O'Malley accused Ehrlich, State Superintendent Nancy Grasmick, and the Maryland state board of education of playing election year politics with the school takeovers; O'Malley's opponent for the Democratic nomination, Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan, seized on the issue as evidence that he is better on education than O'Malley; Democrats in the state legislature passed a last-minute bill to block the takeover (Ehrlich says he will veto the bill; it's not clear whether Democrats have the votes to override him.); and Ehrlich fired back at the Democrats opposing the takeover. Expect more fireworks around this issue ahead.
Messes like these drive education policywonks and more pragmatic reformers to curse politics and wish it out of education altogether...
Some policy wonks seem to devote a lot of energy to trying to protect public education accountability systems from politics. In some ways, that was a major force driving the authors of No Child Left Behind, who had seen the way states flouted or deliberately watered down accountability requirements in the 1994 Improving America's Schools Act and were determined to write the law so as to narrow states' leeway and force them to do the right thing. As we lurch towards the coming debate on NCLB reauthorization, I sense a similar yearning in some conversations about what NCLB 2.0 should look like--this sense that, if we just get the policy details, if we just get the legislative language right, if we can just come up with the ideal way to identify schools, we can create an accountability system that works on its own, unsullied by and without dependence upon politics.
But trying to make accountability work without politics is like trying to make calorie-free chocolate. Accountability--real accountability--is inherently political. For accountability systems to have substance, there have to be consequences. Having consequences requires some person or entity to make a decision, to flip the switch that sets those consequences into action. We can't create an automated accountability machine that swings into action without a second thought whenever a school crosses x-defined accountability threshold--these decisions are important enough that they require human judgement.
For this decision-maker to have legitimate authority, there must be evidence that the public has placed its trust in this entity, either through election or because the entity is accountable to an elected official. Even when elected leaders choose to vest authority for school accountability in an ostensibly independent entity, that entity still operates in a politicized climate, subject to the will of the elected officials who created it and the public. But this means that accountability decision-makers are also subject to political pressure from organized interests that stand to benefit or lose from the consequences they have the power to impose, and this makes accountability decisions highly politicized.
The only way I know of to really isolate accountability from politics is by abdicating public responsibility for public education altogether--devolving all educational decision-making, through vouchers, to parents, with no public oversight of the schools to which they choose to send their children. Some voucher supporters think the evils of politics in education are sufficient to justify this trade-off, but it's one that I, ultimately, cannot accept. To paraphrase Churchill, educational accountability is the worst option, except for all the others we've tried.
Rather than railing about the influences of politics on education policy and accountability, the only real solution is to change the politics itself, to create a new politics that gives policymakers the right incentives to hold schools accountable in ways that are good for children. The most obvious way I see to do this is by organizing and empowering parents and children whose voices often go unheard in political power struggles over education. Steve Barr is doing this with the Jefferson High School movement in Los Angeles. At a more macro, much less grass-roots level, I think Education Sector's goal of "making the debate about public education public" is a part of this, too. But there are a lot of other ways to change the politics here, too, and I'd welcome any suggestions or comments for ones I'm not thinking of now.
On March 29, the Maryland state board of education voted to transfer management of 11 chronically low-performing Baltimore middle and high schools away from the Baltimore City School Board to third-party groups. State-imposed management takeovers and private management of public schools are always contentious, but Baltimore is particularly contentious because Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley is running for the Democratic gubernatorial nomination, and the current governor, Bob Ehrlich, is a Republican.
O'Malley accused Ehrlich, State Superintendent Nancy Grasmick, and the Maryland state board of education of playing election year politics with the school takeovers; O'Malley's opponent for the Democratic nomination, Montgomery County Executive Doug Duncan, seized on the issue as evidence that he is better on education than O'Malley; Democrats in the state legislature passed a last-minute bill to block the takeover (Ehrlich says he will veto the bill; it's not clear whether Democrats have the votes to override him.); and Ehrlich fired back at the Democrats opposing the takeover. Expect more fireworks around this issue ahead.
Messes like these drive education policywonks and more pragmatic reformers to curse politics and wish it out of education altogether...
Some policy wonks seem to devote a lot of energy to trying to protect public education accountability systems from politics. In some ways, that was a major force driving the authors of No Child Left Behind, who had seen the way states flouted or deliberately watered down accountability requirements in the 1994 Improving America's Schools Act and were determined to write the law so as to narrow states' leeway and force them to do the right thing. As we lurch towards the coming debate on NCLB reauthorization, I sense a similar yearning in some conversations about what NCLB 2.0 should look like--this sense that, if we just get the policy details, if we just get the legislative language right, if we can just come up with the ideal way to identify schools, we can create an accountability system that works on its own, unsullied by and without dependence upon politics.
But trying to make accountability work without politics is like trying to make calorie-free chocolate. Accountability--real accountability--is inherently political. For accountability systems to have substance, there have to be consequences. Having consequences requires some person or entity to make a decision, to flip the switch that sets those consequences into action. We can't create an automated accountability machine that swings into action without a second thought whenever a school crosses x-defined accountability threshold--these decisions are important enough that they require human judgement.
For this decision-maker to have legitimate authority, there must be evidence that the public has placed its trust in this entity, either through election or because the entity is accountable to an elected official. Even when elected leaders choose to vest authority for school accountability in an ostensibly independent entity, that entity still operates in a politicized climate, subject to the will of the elected officials who created it and the public. But this means that accountability decision-makers are also subject to political pressure from organized interests that stand to benefit or lose from the consequences they have the power to impose, and this makes accountability decisions highly politicized.
The only way I know of to really isolate accountability from politics is by abdicating public responsibility for public education altogether--devolving all educational decision-making, through vouchers, to parents, with no public oversight of the schools to which they choose to send their children. Some voucher supporters think the evils of politics in education are sufficient to justify this trade-off, but it's one that I, ultimately, cannot accept. To paraphrase Churchill, educational accountability is the worst option, except for all the others we've tried.
Rather than railing about the influences of politics on education policy and accountability, the only real solution is to change the politics itself, to create a new politics that gives policymakers the right incentives to hold schools accountable in ways that are good for children. The most obvious way I see to do this is by organizing and empowering parents and children whose voices often go unheard in political power struggles over education. Steve Barr is doing this with the Jefferson High School movement in Los Angeles. At a more macro, much less grass-roots level, I think Education Sector's goal of "making the debate about public education public" is a part of this, too. But there are a lot of other ways to change the politics here, too, and I'd welcome any suggestions or comments for ones I'm not thinking of now.
Sensationalism 101
Cnn.com, one of the most widely-read news sites in the world, features at the top of its home page a list of "Top Stories." There are usually about 13 stories there. As of 11:47 AM EDT this morning, there are two education-related stories among the top 13. They are:
"Teacher charged with raping student 28 times"
and
"Teacher, crushing bug with gun shell, blows up hand"
There are millions of teachers in the United States. People being people, on any given Wednesday a few of them are going to do something illegal or monumentally stupid. The same is undoubtedly true for lawyers, truck drivers, certified public accountants, and every other profession of considerable size. But their foibles and sins don't generate coverage like this, because those stories don't play into the simplistic "even in our public schools!!!" narrative at work here. Instead of substantive education journalism, we get stories making it seem like the nation's classrooms are chock-full of morons and sexual predators.
So, we at the Quick and the Ed are hereby establishing the "Cnn.com award for egregious sensationalism in education journalism." Readers who email examples will win lasting fame.
"Teacher charged with raping student 28 times"
and
"Teacher, crushing bug with gun shell, blows up hand"
There are millions of teachers in the United States. People being people, on any given Wednesday a few of them are going to do something illegal or monumentally stupid. The same is undoubtedly true for lawyers, truck drivers, certified public accountants, and every other profession of considerable size. But their foibles and sins don't generate coverage like this, because those stories don't play into the simplistic "even in our public schools!!!" narrative at work here. Instead of substantive education journalism, we get stories making it seem like the nation's classrooms are chock-full of morons and sexual predators.
So, we at the Quick and the Ed are hereby establishing the "Cnn.com award for egregious sensationalism in education journalism." Readers who email examples will win lasting fame.
Tuesday, April 04, 2006
Education Majors Less Literate
AIR released an important new study in January detailing the literacy levels of students about to graduate from college. While most of the press coverage focused on the headache-inducing, depressingly-low overall scores (e.g. only 4 in 10 students finishing 4-year degrees scored as "proficient" in prose and document literacy; quantitative scores were even worse), there's a lot of additional good information to be found deeper in the report, particularly in the tables that break down the numbers by various student characteristics.
Some of the most telling data relate to the gaps between white and black students; there's a new Chart You Can Trust detailing those numbers on the main Web site today, along with the transcript of our recent national standards debate, new ideas on preschool implementation, and an interesting story from a community college professor in New York.
The college student literacy report also calculated average literacy scores by students' college major. The results:
*Significantly different from students majoring in math, science, or engineering
This is an unfortunately familiar taxonomy of which majors attract and graduate the highest-caliber students, and which don't. For all the recent focus on attracting more talent into science and mathematics, it's arguably the future teachers of America who need the most attention. As the chart shows, education majors have significantly lower levels of document and quantitative literacy than students who major in math, science, and engineering (prose literacy scores were also lower, but not at a statistically significant level).
While future science and math types beat out all other majors at various levels of significance in all three categories (not only, it should be noted, in quantitative skills but also in the ability to comprehend and use information from texts and documents), education and health majors appear to have the overall lowest levels of literacy. There's a deeply-rooted dynamic at work here in terms of who is drawn into the profession. Changing that is a major challenge for everyone working to boost talent in the classroom.
Some of the most telling data relate to the gaps between white and black students; there's a new Chart You Can Trust detailing those numbers on the main Web site today, along with the transcript of our recent national standards debate, new ideas on preschool implementation, and an interesting story from a community college professor in New York.
The college student literacy report also calculated average literacy scores by students' college major. The results:
*Significantly different from students majoring in math, science, or engineering
This is an unfortunately familiar taxonomy of which majors attract and graduate the highest-caliber students, and which don't. For all the recent focus on attracting more talent into science and mathematics, it's arguably the future teachers of America who need the most attention. As the chart shows, education majors have significantly lower levels of document and quantitative literacy than students who major in math, science, and engineering (prose literacy scores were also lower, but not at a statistically significant level).
While future science and math types beat out all other majors at various levels of significance in all three categories (not only, it should be noted, in quantitative skills but also in the ability to comprehend and use information from texts and documents), education and health majors appear to have the overall lowest levels of literacy. There's a deeply-rooted dynamic at work here in terms of who is drawn into the profession. Changing that is a major challenge for everyone working to boost talent in the classroom.
Monday, April 03, 2006
Schools, relative poverty, and social mobility
Interesting New Yorker article by John Cassidy looks at where the method by which the poverty rate is measured comes from (if you haven't heard this before, it's rather interesting), some concerns folks on both left and right have with the way we currently calculate poverty, and whether other measures--including measures of relative poverty--might be better. All relevant to education, particularly since poverty plays a role in some funding formulas.
But this is what got me:
But this is what got me:
Research by Tom Hertz, an economist at American University, shows that a child whose parents are in the bottom fifth of the income distribution has only a six-per-cent chance of attaining an average yearly income in the top fifth. Most people who start out relatively poor stay relatively poor.Now, there are a lot of factors that contribute to this--health care, housing policy, differences in parental support, lack of access to social networks, just to name a few--but the fact remains that the quality of education our public school systems provide to low-income students is often dramatically lower than that provided to more affluent students, and these disparities in educational opportunity seriously undermine social mobility.
Saturday, April 01, 2006
Crimson Financial Tide Lifts More Boats
This story, detailing Harvard's announcement of increased financial aid for low- and middle-income families, is nothing but good news. As the NYTimes' Karen Arenson correctly notes, "The quest by prestigious colleges to attract more low- and middle-income students is turning into a financial aid arms race." Two important takeaways:
1) Other elite colleges and universities can do more to promote access for students who aren't rich enough to afford a $30,000 tuition bill. Administrators should be prepared to answer the question: Harvard, Stanford, and other institutions are doing this--why aren't you?
2) While the nation's higher education institutions are fiercely independent, often to the point of obstinancy, they're also very sensitive to public perception. That's the dynamic here, as institutions realize that doing well and doing good go hand and hand. The challenge for reformers is to redefine the terms of that perception, shifting the values that inform institutional reputations away from the measures of fame, wealth, and exclusivity that dominate the U.S. News rankings and moving them toward more important things, like institutional success in serving economically disadvantaged students.
1) Other elite colleges and universities can do more to promote access for students who aren't rich enough to afford a $30,000 tuition bill. Administrators should be prepared to answer the question: Harvard, Stanford, and other institutions are doing this--why aren't you?
2) While the nation's higher education institutions are fiercely independent, often to the point of obstinancy, they're also very sensitive to public perception. That's the dynamic here, as institutions realize that doing well and doing good go hand and hand. The challenge for reformers is to redefine the terms of that perception, shifting the values that inform institutional reputations away from the measures of fame, wealth, and exclusivity that dominate the U.S. News rankings and moving them toward more important things, like institutional success in serving economically disadvantaged students.
Friday, March 31, 2006
Welcome to the Dark Age
The U.S. House of Representatives passed a new version of the federal Higher Education Act yesterday. The floor debate included a lot of back-and-forth about student loans, spiraling tuition costs, affirmative action, and other hot-button issues. Little attention was given to the following provision, which was added last year by the House Committee on Education and the Workforce:
SEC. 132. DATABASES OF STUDENT INFORMATION PROHIBITED.
(a) PROHIBITION. Except as described in (b), nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the design, development, creation, implementation, or maintenance of a nationwide database of personally identifiable information on individuals receiving assistance, attending institutions receiving assistance, or otherwise involved in any studies or other collections of data under this Act, including a student unit record system, an education bar code system, or any other system that tracks individual students over time. (b) EXCEPTION. The provisions of subsection (a) shall not affect the loan obligation enforcement activities described in section 485B of this Act.
But of all the provisions in the law, this is possibly the most shortsighted, damaging, and indicative of the relentless efforts of the private higher education establishment to shield itself from any kind of scrutiny from the outside world.
This is the back-story: The National Center for Education Statistics, an independent arm of the U.S. Department of Education, gathers information about the nation's colleges and universities through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Every year, each institution is required to fill out and submit a series of surveys about themselves and their students, focused on topics such as enrollment, funding, staffing, degrees awarded, financial aid, and graduation rates. This process is the backbone of higher-education data-gathering; it's the only way to consistently know anything about the institutions that compromise a vital segment of the economy.
It's also a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and somewhat antiquated process, with institutions filling in thousands of data points across the various surveys. Each survey is separate, greatly reducing the ability to cross-reference information in a useful way. For example, because the graduation rate and financial aid surveys are separate, we know the percent of students at a given institution who graduate within six years, and the percent who receive financial aid, but not the percent of financial aid recipients who graduate within six years.
To modernize this system, IPEDS proposed a new way of submitting information: instead of each institution aggregating it's internal student-level data into a bunch of separate, disconnected surveys, they would instead simply submit that student-level, or "unit record," information to IPEDS directly. In addition to being more efficient from the institutional perspective (after investing in some new data infrastructure), it would also allow for much more accurate calculation of key institutional measures like graduation rates and net student prices.
Institutions have long complained that current federal graduation rate measures are inaccurate because they don't give institutions credit for students who transfer to another institution and graduate there. The unit-record system would fix that problem, because IPEDS would be able to connect enrollment information from one institution to graduation information from another. Institutions have also complained that current measures of the cost of going to college are overstated because they don't show the average "net price" to students after subtracting out financial aid, tuition discounts, etc. The unit record system would have fixed that problem too.
Faced with a system that would have made their graduation rates look higher and prices look lower, what did the private higher education establishment do? It crushed the unit record system like a bug.
While associations of public universities such as the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) were supportive of the unit record system, the private colleges, represented most prominently by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) attacked the idea from the very beginning. Aligning themselves with far-right privacy nuts like the Eagle Forum, they characterized the idea as the first step toward an Orwellian nightmare dystopia where every student is monitored from cradle to grave by the faceless bureaucrats of some presumably totalitarian regime. The president of Gettysburg College wrote breathlessly in the Washington Post that:
What accounts for this over-the-top reaction? Simple: colleges and universities--particularly private colleges and univerisites--are resolutely opposed to any form of increased public scrutiny. As far as they're concerned, the quality of education they provide to their students and the benefits they give to society in exchange for the substantial public financial support they receive through student financial aid and their tax-exempt status is nobody's business but their own.
They know that any attempt to increase the amount or quality of information about them could be used as a means to form judgments about how well they're doing their job. That could lead to increased competitive pressures, uncomfortable questions, and other various forms of that dreaded word accountability.
And so they embarked on a disingenuous campaign to conflate institutional privacy with student privacy. By pretending to stand up for the latter, they very effectively preserved the former.
This is not to say that privacy is not a real and abiding concern in the modern age of information. It seems like not a week goes by that you don't read some new and horrifying account of security breaches at private database companies, resulting in the release of your social security number, mother's maiden name, cholesterol level, and AMEX card to gangsters located in one or more former Soviet republics.
But the unit record proposal contained every security protocol imaginable, including strict limits on the use and release of the data and harsh legal penalties for any privacy violation. It would be a federal felony punishable by prison time to release the information, at a level actually stricter than releasing data from the IRS. Which, as it happens, is a good example of a government agency that's been gathering "unit record" data far more sensitive than someone's college major for a long time while by and large successfully balancing citizen privacy rights and the government's interest in information. The government is actually quite good at keeping information secret; in fact that's usually the problem.
We live in an era where all large organizations strategically gather data about themselves to understand how they work and improve the services they provide to consumers. Any private company will tell you that such analysis is an essential component of continued improvement and long-term viability. We also live in a country where many colleges and universities routinely fail to graduate 50 percent of their students, where less than half of all college graduates are proficient in tests of literacy, where students and parents are forced to choose colleges with virtually no solid information about which institutions will actually give them a high-quality education, where globalization competition for knowlege-based jobs is growing by the day.
In other words, we live in a world with a crying need for more information about our higher education system. And yet Congress appears poised to, with little discussion or fanfare, usher in a higher education information dark age by prohibiting the creation of a system that would gather that information. Such an action would be a victory for the narrow self-interest of private institutions, and a sound defeat for students, parents, and everyone else.
SEC. 132. DATABASES OF STUDENT INFORMATION PROHIBITED.
(a) PROHIBITION. Except as described in (b), nothing in this Act shall be construed to authorize the design, development, creation, implementation, or maintenance of a nationwide database of personally identifiable information on individuals receiving assistance, attending institutions receiving assistance, or otherwise involved in any studies or other collections of data under this Act, including a student unit record system, an education bar code system, or any other system that tracks individual students over time. (b) EXCEPTION. The provisions of subsection (a) shall not affect the loan obligation enforcement activities described in section 485B of this Act.
But of all the provisions in the law, this is possibly the most shortsighted, damaging, and indicative of the relentless efforts of the private higher education establishment to shield itself from any kind of scrutiny from the outside world.
This is the back-story: The National Center for Education Statistics, an independent arm of the U.S. Department of Education, gathers information about the nation's colleges and universities through the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Every year, each institution is required to fill out and submit a series of surveys about themselves and their students, focused on topics such as enrollment, funding, staffing, degrees awarded, financial aid, and graduation rates. This process is the backbone of higher-education data-gathering; it's the only way to consistently know anything about the institutions that compromise a vital segment of the economy.
It's also a time-consuming, labor-intensive, and somewhat antiquated process, with institutions filling in thousands of data points across the various surveys. Each survey is separate, greatly reducing the ability to cross-reference information in a useful way. For example, because the graduation rate and financial aid surveys are separate, we know the percent of students at a given institution who graduate within six years, and the percent who receive financial aid, but not the percent of financial aid recipients who graduate within six years.
To modernize this system, IPEDS proposed a new way of submitting information: instead of each institution aggregating it's internal student-level data into a bunch of separate, disconnected surveys, they would instead simply submit that student-level, or "unit record," information to IPEDS directly. In addition to being more efficient from the institutional perspective (after investing in some new data infrastructure), it would also allow for much more accurate calculation of key institutional measures like graduation rates and net student prices.
Institutions have long complained that current federal graduation rate measures are inaccurate because they don't give institutions credit for students who transfer to another institution and graduate there. The unit-record system would fix that problem, because IPEDS would be able to connect enrollment information from one institution to graduation information from another. Institutions have also complained that current measures of the cost of going to college are overstated because they don't show the average "net price" to students after subtracting out financial aid, tuition discounts, etc. The unit record system would have fixed that problem too.
Faced with a system that would have made their graduation rates look higher and prices look lower, what did the private higher education establishment do? It crushed the unit record system like a bug.
While associations of public universities such as the American Association of State Colleges and Universities (AASCU) were supportive of the unit record system, the private colleges, represented most prominently by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) attacked the idea from the very beginning. Aligning themselves with far-right privacy nuts like the Eagle Forum, they characterized the idea as the first step toward an Orwellian nightmare dystopia where every student is monitored from cradle to grave by the faceless bureaucrats of some presumably totalitarian regime. The president of Gettysburg College wrote breathlessly in the Washington Post that:
"The threat to our students' privacy is of grave concern," wondering "at what cost to individual privacy," asserting that such a "mammoth" and "gigantic" project would be a "costly and troubling assault on privacy," and so on. Because "the potential for abuse of power and violation of civil liberties is immense," she said, Congress "must reject this measure."And so Congress did exactly that, inserting the HEA language seen above.
What accounts for this over-the-top reaction? Simple: colleges and universities--particularly private colleges and univerisites--are resolutely opposed to any form of increased public scrutiny. As far as they're concerned, the quality of education they provide to their students and the benefits they give to society in exchange for the substantial public financial support they receive through student financial aid and their tax-exempt status is nobody's business but their own.
They know that any attempt to increase the amount or quality of information about them could be used as a means to form judgments about how well they're doing their job. That could lead to increased competitive pressures, uncomfortable questions, and other various forms of that dreaded word accountability.
And so they embarked on a disingenuous campaign to conflate institutional privacy with student privacy. By pretending to stand up for the latter, they very effectively preserved the former.
This is not to say that privacy is not a real and abiding concern in the modern age of information. It seems like not a week goes by that you don't read some new and horrifying account of security breaches at private database companies, resulting in the release of your social security number, mother's maiden name, cholesterol level, and AMEX card to gangsters located in one or more former Soviet republics.
But the unit record proposal contained every security protocol imaginable, including strict limits on the use and release of the data and harsh legal penalties for any privacy violation. It would be a federal felony punishable by prison time to release the information, at a level actually stricter than releasing data from the IRS. Which, as it happens, is a good example of a government agency that's been gathering "unit record" data far more sensitive than someone's college major for a long time while by and large successfully balancing citizen privacy rights and the government's interest in information. The government is actually quite good at keeping information secret; in fact that's usually the problem.
We live in an era where all large organizations strategically gather data about themselves to understand how they work and improve the services they provide to consumers. Any private company will tell you that such analysis is an essential component of continued improvement and long-term viability. We also live in a country where many colleges and universities routinely fail to graduate 50 percent of their students, where less than half of all college graduates are proficient in tests of literacy, where students and parents are forced to choose colleges with virtually no solid information about which institutions will actually give them a high-quality education, where globalization competition for knowlege-based jobs is growing by the day.
In other words, we live in a world with a crying need for more information about our higher education system. And yet Congress appears poised to, with little discussion or fanfare, usher in a higher education information dark age by prohibiting the creation of a system that would gather that information. Such an action would be a victory for the narrow self-interest of private institutions, and a sound defeat for students, parents, and everyone else.
Thursday, March 30, 2006
Fat, Drunk, and Stupid is No Way to Go Through Life
On March 28th, the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution released the newest version of its Child Well-Being Index (CWI), "an evidence based measure of trends in the social conditions encountered by American children and youth since 1975." Written by Duke Prof. Kenneth Land, the report shows evidence that youth smoking, drinking, drug use, crime, suicide, and pregnancy rates are all down. Unfortunately, though, children's health is getting worse, and their educational performance as measured by the national NAEP—which was the predetermined focus of the panel discussion Brookings held to announce the CWI this year—is frustratingly flat considering the number of reform efforts enacted over the past thirty years.
Coinciding with the CWI event was the release of a publication called "The Education Flatline: Causes and Solutions," which offers perspectives from Diane Ravitch, Kate Walsh, Ron Haskins, Isabel Sawhill, David Gordon, Gene Maeroff, and Education Sector board member Bruno Manno. This diverse group of thinkers put forward a number of suggestions for how to raise student achievement, including national standards, an increase in the number of charter schools, improving teacher quality, and reforming Pre-K-3 policies and practices.
Land used the CWI to make a noteworthy connection between the rise in Pre-K enrollment in the 1990's and the rise in NAEP scores for nine-year-olds in the early 2000's. While Land argues that Pre-K enrollment "may be a leading indicator" of later NAEP score improvements, to draw such a correlation requires a methodological evaluation of state—not national—NAEP reports, so that one can take stock of the widely differing state Pre-K programs. The CWI uses the national NAEP.
On a broad scale though, it seems that everyone loves Pre-K these days. It's gotten a lot of buzz, including support from our nation's governors. But any large scale reform effort should be spurred by empirical evidence and will have to make sense of the immensity of the implementation challenges. Watch for
PS – Ironic reaction to the CWI report from U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings: "This year's Child Well-Being Index highlights the tremendous gains our students are making, thanks in large part to the landmark No Child Left Behind Act." Really? Thanks "in large part" to NCLB? Minority students have made tremendous gains if you look back as far as fifteen years ago. But they only made marginal gains from 2003 to 2005, which is the time in which NCLB would have had an impact. Given that the CWI event was organized for the express purpose of drawing attention to 30 years of mostly flat NAEP scores, Spellings big ol' NCLB slap on the back seems a bit out of place. It may make for a good quote but it's rooted in a flawed analysis of how the CWI relates to federal policy successes or failures.
- Posted by Ethan Gray
Wednesday, March 29, 2006
Push Me, Pull Me
In reporting on new data about the number of schools identified by NCLB as not making adequate yearly progress, Bloomberg News writes:
NCLB was enacted more than four years ago. How long must we wait for the press to report its provisions accurately? First, NCLB does not label schools as "failing." They're labeled as "not making adequate progress" or "in need of improvement." These are not semantic distinctions; the words actually mean what they mean. Second, while the "penalties" can include replacing administrators and teachers, they certainly don't have to. These might seem like fine points, but they actually go right to the heart of what the law does and doesn't do.
The story also goes on to say the following:
Nobody from the National Education Association is quoted here, but one assumes that their take on these numbers hasn't changed since January, when head NEA honcho Reg Weaver said:
To summarize: The Fordham Foundation thinks that a small increase in the number of schools not making AYP shows that NCLB isn't working, because if it were working the actual number would be a lot higher. The NEA thinks that a small increase in the number of schools not making AYP shows that NCLB isn't working, because if it were working the actual number would be a lot lower.
If you ever wondered why the various warring factions in the NCLB debate seem to be talking past, over, through, and behind one another, this is a good place to start.
"The percentage of failing schools rose by one point from the previous school year. Under the 2002 law, schools that do not make sufficient academic progress face penalties including the eventual replacement of their administrators and teachers."
NCLB was enacted more than four years ago. How long must we wait for the press to report its provisions accurately? First, NCLB does not label schools as "failing." They're labeled as "not making adequate progress" or "in need of improvement." These are not semantic distinctions; the words actually mean what they mean. Second, while the "penalties" can include replacing administrators and teachers, they certainly don't have to. These might seem like fine points, but they actually go right to the heart of what the law does and doesn't do.
The story also goes on to say the following:
"The results raise doubts about whether the law is working and its results are fairly calculated, said Michael Petrilli, vice president for policy at the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, a Washington-based research group. 'Most people thought that at this point in the law, we'd be seeing these numbers go way, way up' as standards toughen, said Petrilli."
Nobody from the National Education Association is quoted here, but one assumes that their take on these numbers hasn't changed since January, when head NEA honcho Reg Weaver said:
"Four years of President Bush's signature education policy is sufficient to weigh facts, examine data and understand this so-called 'No Child Left Behind' (NCLB) Act through the experiences of millions of education professionals across America. If we distill these into one observation, it is that the anniversary marks four years of winning rhetoric and failing substance. From its inception, NCLB has been overemphasized, under funded and sugarcoated at the expense of public school children. New data illustrates our conclusion. It shows that more schools failed to achieve 'adequate yearly progress' (AYP) under NCLB in 2005-06 than ever before."
To summarize: The Fordham Foundation thinks that a small increase in the number of schools not making AYP shows that NCLB isn't working, because if it were working the actual number would be a lot higher. The NEA thinks that a small increase in the number of schools not making AYP shows that NCLB isn't working, because if it were working the actual number would be a lot lower.
If you ever wondered why the various warring factions in the NCLB debate seem to be talking past, over, through, and behind one another, this is a good place to start.
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