Courting Unfulfilled Promises

I'm an editor, not a blogger. And I often cringe at the lengthy prose of many blog posts, saying to myself, "they sure could use a good editor." But the recent Supreme Court ruling on race and schools has brought out the blogger in me. First, I do respect our justice system, the Supreme Court, its justices, their decisions and all. But I can't help scoff at the futility of this decision in light of what many refer to as "the promise of Brown."

In 2004 there were celebrations all over to mark the 50th anniversary of Brown v. Board, the landmark 1954 desegregation case. Many books were published and conferences held. As associate editor of a higher education magazine at the time, I helped guide the publication down this road, interviewing the Brown plaintiffs, school officials in Topeka, Kan., scholars and activists that were involved then and now.

But what stood out among the commemorations and celebrations was the reality that after 50 years, the promise of Brown had not yet been realized. The court had ruled in 1954, but it took until the mid-1970s for the public to begin to act and then, only after court orders, much like the court-ordered desegregation ruling in Louisville, which along with Seattle's integration plan, prompted yesterday's High Court decision. And still, even after 30 years of court-mandated desegregation efforts, the consensus among educators was that there was still more to be done.

Thanks to yesterday's ruling, however, it will have to be done some other way. Even though the ruling allows for a limited use of race, which has sparked hope among some, to put that limitation into practice will take more resolve than many will demonstrate. If the Supreme Court's 2003 ruling on race and college admissions, Grutter v. Bollinger, is any indication-and it is-many of those who have started to act will now start to retreat. Soon after that ruling, race-conscious programs all over the country began folding, in fear of potential lawsuits.

Brown's reality of a quality education for all seems less likely in court rulings and more so in the voluntary actions of a public that is truly and deeply committed to this goal. I see more of Brown's reality in innovative school reform efforts, such as charter schools and public school choice, which have their drawbacks but are initiated in a spirit of free will and not obligation. And I see more of Brown's reality in the D.C. mayor's radical move to charge someone with nontraditional, but proven experience with the task of turning around a struggling public school system. I recognize that these efforts have to be proven, but after 50 plus years of waiting for the promise of Brown, I'm ready to put my hopes in something else.

- Posted by Robin V. Smiles, Editor, Education Sector

Segregation is unconstitutional, so desegregation must also be?

Cruel irony dripped from the Supreme Court’s decision today to declare unconstitutional the school assignment plans in Seattle and Louisville. In Brown v. Board the Court ruled that districts could not segregate schools based on race. Today’s ruling says, in effect, districts can not desegregate based on race either. I respectfully disagree with Liz in arguing that the ends in this instance do justify the means, and that the race-blind language in Brown should not be understood so literally as to ignore the larger social issues the case addressed.

From 1975 to 2000, under court order to desegregate, Louisville assigned students to schools based on a number of categories, including race. When let go from court supervision, the district voluntarily chose to keep the racial classification as one factor in its school assignments. Today’s decision essentially makes the same tools used to desegregate schools only seven years ago now unconstitutional, as if de facto segregation had been permanently overcome.

The Court erred tremendously in considering the school assignment plans from Louisville and Seattle together. True, both plans utilized a numeric race window as a consideration for assigning children to schools, but the similarities stop there. The majority, written by Chief Justice Roberts, repeatedly cited the fact that a Seattle school with 30% Asian-American, 25% African-American, 25% Latino, and 20% white students would not be allowed under their plan. In an effort to create diversity, Roberts is surely correct in asserting such a school should qualify.

The majority faulted both districts for assigning students based on either/ or racial classifications: white/ nonwhite in Seattle and black/ other in Louisville. But the demographics in the two districts are not comparable. In Louisville, the dichotomy was real; only a tiny percentage of students did not fall into one of these categories. Seattle, on the other hand, had significant percentages of students of Hispanic and Asian descent.

Roberts also repeatedly emphasized the infrequency of Louisville’s usage of race as a reason for it to be abolished. His logic was that, since it was a small factor (only about 3% of the school assignment decisions employed race at all), it was expendable. But small usage does not mean small importance. Today, over one third of black and Latino K-12 students still attend schools where at least 90% of the students are considered a minority. More than one in six African-American students attends a school with a minority population greater than 99%.

These concentrations manifest in poor schools. Blacks are considerably more likely to
attend schools with lower average academic skills than whites are. And they are more likely to be enrolled in schools with larger class sizes and with teachers who are less prepared than their counterparts in predominantly white schools. Compared with tenth grade whites, tenth grade black students are more likely to attend schools with security guards (71 vs. 47 percent), metal detectors (21 vs. 3 percent), and bars on the windows (9 vs. 2 percent).

In Louisville, a district with an African-American concentration of 34%, the plan required blacks to make up between 20-50% of each school’s students. This is a fairly large window, and the fact that 70% of its schools fell more than five percentage points away from the average indicates flexibility in the plan’s implementation. Furthermore, some schools went over the 50% maximum, meaning it was not a strict “quota” by any definition.

Opponents of using racial guidelines suggest socioeconomic status (SES) as a proxy for race, but targeting by SES alone does not achieve the desired results. In 2004-2005, the US Department of Ed. highlighted five districts (Charlotte-Mecklenburg and Wake County, NC; San Francisco, CA; Brandywine, DE; and La Crosse, WI) that had implemented SES-based school assignment plans. None of the five eliminated racial segregation. Both North Carolina districts saw substantial hikes in their racial concentrations; Charlotte-Mecklenburg's percentage of students in racially segregated schools increased 25%. The other three districts achieved only modest gains. La Crosse's meager 3.25% reduction scored top marks, and had the advantage of nine extra years.

Near the end of the majority decision in the Michigan law school affirmative action case, the Court suggests that 25 years from now racial preferences will no longer be necessary. While this is an admirable goal, it should not be constrained by a given number of years. Instead, we must continue to utilize racial considerations until the statistics begin pointing to a world where race is neutral.

Desegregation: Does the end justify the means?

An article in the BBC reports that the Supreme Court has just narrowly decided that the race of a student cannot be a factor in determining where they are to attend school. Stemming from affirmative action plans in Louisville and Seattle, the case was brought by white parents whose children were denied entry to their public school of choice because of racial quotas.

Opposition to the desegregation programs was not one sided, either. Parents of black students also expressed frustration at seeing their kids shipped all over the city according to where quotas of black students needed to be filled, rather than to their local school. One mother is quoted saying: "I prefer to have my kid go to a school for poor black people across the street rather than spend hours on a bus to go to a school for poor white people on the other side of town."

So what does this ruling imply in the light of open interdistrict choice, a current hot topic in education reform? The choice to transfer out of district is generally seen to be a liberating and valuable option to poor, minority, inner city students whose dismal local schools are sabotaging their life chances. However, studies on open interdistrict choice policies in Massachusetts and Minnesota , among others, have shown that it actually increases social stratification, with white students significantly overrepresented in the percentage of students who utilize the option. Also, the already underperforming schools that lose students lose money as well. The results? Schools increasingly divided along the lines of race and quality.

Although the repercussions of this ruling combined with the growing popularity of interdistrict choice policies may exacerbate inequalities in education, I cannot bring myself to disagree with the ruling. You cannot fix inequality with inequality. We must not be telling children that they can't attend their school of choice because of their race, be they white or black, no matter how admirable our intentions are; in this case, the end doesn’t justify the means.

This case also brings to light an issue that needs to be addressed: Do choice and equality run counter to one another in education? And if so, how can policy address this under the shadow of the Constitution and this recent ruling?

The Debate over Student Loan Auctions

At the Higher Education Finance Working Group policy briefing yesterday, the discussion, in true financial aid style, was lively, a little snarky**, and, at times, thoroughly confusing. One area where it did shed some light was the debate over loan auctions in the federal loan program (Inside Higher Ed writes it up here).

In the current system, Congress decides how much of a subsidy (called “special allowance payments”) the federal government will pay to lenders in the federal loan program. Critics argue that letting Congress decide that number, which impacts lender profits, allows too much political influence in the system.

Auction proponents claim that loan auctions would allow the market, and not politicians, to determine bank profits. With loan auctions, each year loan companies would bid on the ability to make federal student loans. The ‘best’ bids would be those that offer to make loans for the lowest subsidy rates.

Lenders don’t like this idea, which they claim would create too much instability in the loan market—schools would not know which lenders they will be working with from year-to-year. Lenders also claim that it would drive out smaller lenders unable to match the bids of larger lenders, and it would hurt students, who would see fewer benefits and worse service from lenders that are working off of smaller profit margins.

These are all reasonable concerns, but I’m still skeptical. Lenders usually end this argument by saying that the current system is perfectly fine, works great for everyone and should be left alone. That makes me think that the party it really works best for is the lenders, since they are the ones interested in keeping the status quo.

I haven’t seen good evidence yet that we can’t devise a loan auction that allows the market to determine subsidy rates while also protecting smaller lenders (they could bid in groups) and ensuring that lenders maintain the service necessary to keep default rates low (we could start by cutting the amount the government pays lenders on defaulted loans). There must be good policy solutions out there that balance the interests of all three parties—taxpayers, students, and lenders—better than the system we have today.

**I get a little cranky on the opinion page of yesterday’s USA Today about a mailing I got from Sallie Mae—it is misleading and points to the need for more oversight and regulation in the student loan industry.

Local Teachers Union Leaders Speak

Teachers unions are at the center of many raging education policy debates, and opinions about them are as strident and varied as they could be. But while representatives of the national unions, along with unions in big city schools districts, get most of the press covereage, the experiences and ideas of the leaders of the nation's thousands of smaller local unions are often left out. Which is a shame, because the local collective bargaining table is where many of the most important education decisions are actually made.

In a new Education Sector report, "Leading the Local," Susan Moore Johnson and her colleagues at the Harvard Graduate School of Education have conducted a series of in-depth interviews with 30 recently-elected local union leaders from a diverse group of districts across the country. Their thoughts, on a range of topics from teacher pay to union-management relations to leading multiple generations of teachers in an era of increasing competition and accountability, show that local union leader positions on these issues are much more complex and varied than people commonly understand. Regardless of where you stand on the issues, if you care about teacher policy, you should read this report.

Intersecting Interests in College Rankings

Ever since a number of small liberal arts colleges announced their intention to abstain from this year’s rankings by U.S. News & World Report, the debate about the ranking’s merits has been reinvigorated. Commenting today on the university presidents’ decision, Robert Samuelson contends:

“What their students will learn, if they're paying attention, is a life lesson in cynicism: how eminent authorities cloak their self-interest in high-sounding, deceptive rhetoric.”

It is highly likely that there are self-interested motivations behind this decision. The presence of ulterior motives, however, does not change the fact that the rhetoric may, to a certain extent, be true. In the case of the U.S. News rankings, a little information could be a dangerous thing.

I decided where to go to college two years ago based upon many of the U.S. News criteria: percentage of small classes, acceptance rate, and retention rate. I got lucky. None of these factors quantify why Brown University has actually been a good fit for me. The majority of the reasons that I love Brown are things I knew nothing about before I arrived; the potential for a large 10am lecture to be dynamic, or the impact of a school’s grading system on its overall academic culture.

The statistics are not going away. They will live on in books, college brochures and college counseling offices, and they do have their place in the application process. But the U.S. News suggestion that colleges can be summarized and ranked by these characteristics alone does more to add to the clutter of the admissions process than to sort through it. Placing colleges and universities on such an absolute scale perpetuates the misconception that there is a universal set of wealth and prestige based qualities that make a school better or worse for every student.

Let students pick a school that is number one on something that will actually matter to them once they get there - whether that is one of the U.S. News variables or the number of on campus coffee shops. They really are up to the challenge.

(For more on potential alternatives to the U.S. News paradigm, see Kevin Carey’s article, “College Rankings Reformed: The Case for a New Order in Higher Education”)

Best. Job. Ever.

Sara Mead, gender warrior, scourge of the infant education industry, frequent commentator on the DC schools scene, expert on all things regarding small children, founding Quick & ED contributor, genuinely nice person, and policy analyst par excellence, is leaving us to begin an inevitably successful stint at the New America Foundation. It's a sad moment for everyone at Education Sector; Sara wrote many of the organization's first and best reports, and she leaves behind an example that will be hard to follow.

But follow it someone shall. We're now hiring for a new senior policy analyst to fill Sara's (metaphorically) large shoes. All the requisite qualifications apply--we're looking for a smart, innovative thinker who's great at research and analysis and even better at writing, someone with significant experience and expertise in a range of policy areas and environments.

More broadly, we're looking for someone who wants to tackle one or more of the big-picture education policy challenges of the day--making the K-12 accountability systems of today work better for all students while inventing the accountability systems of tomorrow; giving all students and parents more choices of high-quality public schools; increasing the supply of top-notch teachers, particularly for the students who need them the most. We need an analyst who not only has great ideas in these areas but also has the will and strategic vision to translate them into real-world improvement on behalf of student and society at large.

If you're that person, let us know. And don't forget the job comes with the keys to this blog, along with a full tank of gas, unlimited mileage, and no-fault insurance. We're looking forward to hearing from you.

School Time

I've been on leave but not so far gone that I haven't managed to talk to reporters about lengthening the school day, an issue that is proving to have legs. Bolstered by the Gates/Broad "Ed in '08" effort, more school time is hotter than it has been in decades. Reporters have consistently asked "what's the biggest obstacle to extending school time?" The short answer is money, although of course it's more complicated, as I explain here. Folks balk at the cost of adding hours or days, which is fair considering a single extra day of public school would cost a state millions of dollars. If it is a worthwhile expense (yes, it's got promise but no, it's certainly not a wholesale national solution to poor quality schools and low student performance), the money has to flow in and out of somewhere, so who gets it and where it comes from are the toughest questions. School districts, for example, are eyeing 21st Century Community Center funds as an innovative way to fund more school hours just as many existing afterschool programs are becoming wary of losing this funding. Here's hoping this doesn't devolve into a school versus afterschool battle since, in the end, it's going to take a well-coordinated effort by both for kids to get the learning opportunities they need to make it in and out of school. More from me (including some baby bragging) when i return later in July.

Too Few Teachers, Too Many Consultants?

The Post ran two education stories yesterday, both unsatisfying, albeit in different ways. (Although it's possible that my mood was altered after reading that great/scary profile of the Vice President...)

The front-page piece, about teacher shortages, reads like the prologue to a good article about big-picture teacher policy issues. I just wish they had written the actual article. In summary: the current generation of retiring teachers entered the profession in a time when women had few career options other education. Thus, schools got a disproportionate share of really smart women, who stayed in the classroom for their entire career. Once the economy opened up, the best and brightest women started going into law, medicine, business, etc., and the teacher talent pool declined in quality. At the same time, NCLB has raised the bar for entering the profession, and new teachers are less likely to see teaching as a 30-year career, leading to frequent turnover and exacerbating the challenge of replacing the older smarter generation.

In broad strokes, all true, although the article should have pointed out that teachers shortages vary widely by region and subject. Some states still produce more new teachers than they need, and schools of education continue to graduate a surplus of elementary education majors even though the shortages are concentrated in secondary education, special education, and science and math.

But the more interesting question is where you go from here, and the article misses most opportunities to explore those issues. Some people, for example, see the shortage and the move to raise the bar for entering the profession as in opposition. Others think that the only way to attract all those women back out of law school is to provide an even higher bar, on the ground that ambitious people want to see themselves as part of a profession that implicitly denotes high standards for entry. Unions point out, correctly, that teachers get paid less than the professions to which smart women now flock. Others see this as a reason to support Teach for America-like alternate routes into the classroom. The article could have put some or all these issues on the table and helped readers sort through them, but for the most part they were nowhere to be found.

The other article, about management consultants hired by DC Public Schools, begins as follows:

Two dozen high-priced consultants have set up shop on three floors of the D.C. public schools' headquarters, wearing pinstripe suits, toting binders and BlackBerrys and using such corporate jargon as "resource mapping" and "identifying metrics."

That lede pretty much gives the game away, doesn't it? "High-priced suits," "pinstripe suits," and "jargon" -- oh my! And even Blackberrys, which would have been a meaningful signifier if this was 2001, not 2007. Newsflash: everyone and their Mom sends wireless email these days.

A couple of weeks ago, the Post ran a great, important series of articles making the case, in excruciating detail, that many of the woes of DCPS lie with comically incompetent bureaucracy that will never, ever, be able to reform itself. A problem of management, in other words. Now the same paper write a cynical article criticizing DCPS for hiring management consultants who, according to the article, have already saved the district $7 million to $9 million. What, exactly, is the problem? The article notes that DCPS has previously hired consultants at great cost, and then ignored their advice. Does that mean that if your doctor puts you on an exercise program to lose weight, and you ignore it, it was stupid to go to her in the first place and you never should again?

Goodbye, for now

This is a sad post for me to write, since it's probably going to be my last here for a while.

As Andy mentioned in an incredibly kind post over at Eduwonk, today is my last day at Education Sector. In a few weeks I'll be starting a new job at the New America Foundation, where I'll be leading their Early Education Initiative and also contributing to their work on federal education policy. This is an exciting opportunity for me to work with some great people on an issue I care a lot about.

At the same time, I'm sad to be leaving Education Sector: It's not often you get an opportunity to be a part of creating an incredibly successful and dynamic organization from the time it's just a spark in someone's eye, and I've really enjoyed and grown incredibly during the last two years I've been here. I'll particularly miss the incredible staff I've had the opportunity to learn from and work with here--especially Andy Rotherham. As Andy mentioned, he and I have worked together for almost seven years. I'm very grateful that he saw potential in me back then and for the incredible professional opportunities he's given me since then. He's a great policy thinker and entreprenuer, but he's also a great boss, mentor and friend.

I've also really enjoyed blogging here at the Quick and the Ed. I've enjoyed the back and forth with various folks, and I know I'm a better writer and thinker for it. While I won't be blogging here any more, I'm not entirely going to be gone from the blogosphere. You'll find me posting from time to time at the New America Foundation's Higher Ed Watch blog, and as Andy mentioned, I'll be guest-blogging for him at Eduwonk later this summer. And you may occassionally find updates on my doings at my boyfriend's blog, which, if you're not already reading, you should be.

So: Good-bye for now, but just for now, and don't be a stranger.

Are Men More Cleverer Than Women?

A new study just released in the UK claims that intelligence gaps do innately exist between the sexes, with men scoring an average of 5 points higher on IQ tests than women, and outnumbering women more than 5 to 1 in the “genius” category. The researchers found this interesting, given that "this is against a background of women dramatically overtaking men in educational attainment and making very rapid advances in terms of occupational achievement."

How revolutionary: scientists once again amazing themselves, Arthur Jensen style, by proving that white, upper class males perform best on a test designed by white, upper class males. Who defines intelligence? How exactly are we measuring it? The issue of intelligence test-bias has been debated for decades, with no agreed upon resolution. Although tests today are surely a great deal less biased then those of say, 1984, I dare say that what an IQ test is best at is measuring how well a person performs on IQ tests, and we should be weary in generalizing the results to represent the mental capacity of an entire race or gender.

Voucher Use in Washington Wins No Praise from Students

The title of this entry is a wordplay off Cato’s Adam Schaeffer's latest post, where he criticizes the NY Times and Washington Post coverage of the recent DC voucher program study, arguing the media outlets made too much of the report’s conclusion that voucher students fared no better than public school counterparts in the first year of the DC program, while downplaying the news that parents of voucher recipients were happier with schools than a control group. In calling the parental support a “wild success,” Schaeffer misses a key aspect of the analysis.

Compared to a control group, parents of students enrolled in the voucher program gave higher grades to their child’s school and believed the school had less violence. James Forman Jr. argues that parental satisfaction, if it matters in voucher program success, should be factored in public school accountability. Still, to hold up parental support as evidence of success here is pretty superficial, especially when we consider who made up the control group in the study. The authorizing legislation mandated the “strongest possible research design for determining the effectiveness of the program,” so the Institute of Education Sciences adopted a lottery system for the program, so that the results of the voucher recipients could be compared to the results of non-recipients, while controlling for motivation and other factors. The control group consisted of students who applied but were rejected for the vouchers. This makes for a valid comparison for student achievement, but not necessarily for parental happiness. All of the parents wanted their child educated outside of the DC public schools; it only makes sense that the ones who achieved this goal were happier than the ones who didn’t, especially after only one year.

Moreover, who is the best judge of violence and overall school quality—parents, or the students themselves? On violence, students reported no statistically significant difference between public and private schools. In other words, the people who actually witness and experience violence, the students themselves, reported no increases in seeing weapons; being offered drugs; or being victims of theft, physical assault, or bullying. On school quality, the only sub-group who noticed a difference was the lowest performing students. They rated private schools worse, not better, than traditional public schools.

Honestly, there’s not really that much to be excited about here one way or the other. The voucher law passed, it’s being implemented and studied, and one year’s worth of data probably isn’t enough time delay to evaluate its effectiveness. While I’m a little less optimistic about the program than Schaeffer (who makes the mighty claim that, “all scientific assessments of choice programs show positive gains, and nearly all of those studies show statistically significant gains”), I’ll wait for more evidence before jumping ship or onto the bandwagon.

What can TPS reports teach us about education?

At a Business Roundtable event today featuring rockstars Wendy Kopp, Mike Feinberg, Chris Barbic, Jon Schnur, and Tim Daly, I was most struck by a small caveat that Feinberg made when comparing his KIPP teachers’ schedules to those of average business workers. They both work 7:30-5:00 days, but the teachers are working with kids. There’s no slacking off. They can’t exactly pull a Peter Gibbons of Office Space fame. When asked by the consultants, the infamous Bobs, to describe his daily schedule, he responds:

Peter Gibbons: Well, I generally come in at least fifteen minutes late, ah, I use the side door - that way Lumbergh can't see me, heh heh - and, uh, after that I just sorta space out for about an hour.
Bob Porter: Da-uh? Space out?
Peter Gibbons: Yeah, I just stare at my desk; but it looks like I'm working. I do that for probably another hour after lunch, too. I'd say in a given week I probably only do about fifteen minutes of real, actual, work.

Anyone who’s worked in an office knows what Peter is talking about here. And anyone who’s worked with kids knows that teachers can’t “just sorta space out” for a while.

The event today focused on taking the still relatively small reforms that TFA, TNTP, YES, KIPP, and New Leaders have implemented and taking them to scale. For example, how do we attract and retain enough teachers and principals willing to give up the Peter Gibbons moments for a career raising student achievement levels?

One of the panelists mentioned something about how quality teachers and principals are like all good leaders in that they set high goals and constantly assess their progress, and then they quickly said “like generals.” The conversation moved on, but I got stuck on that. What if we were to recruit and train teachers like the Army does for soldiers? Of course, teaching does not equal war, but there are lessons in recruitment and training. The Army gives large signing bonuses, especially for educational attainment and specific organizational needs. They train members in a relatively short period of time by building teamwork and getting recruits to buy into the mission and accept a common purpose. Members must demonstrate mastery before advancing in pay or rank, and when they finish their commitment, they are either given more bonuses to stay on, or take their occupational prestige with them to the private sector.

Granted, this is essentially the TFA/ TNTP model, but the key difference is the relative lack of integration within organizations. The military is absolutely seamless in comparison, while local, state, and federal governments, in addition to teacher colleges, non-profits, national councils, and unions all meddle in teacher issues. Maybe there’s something there. Maybe we need some sort of national teaching cadre a la the Peace Corps or the Army. Heck, maybe we should make service in one of the agencies required, like Israel, Denmark, and Germany. The Peter Gibbons lifestyle is just too tempting.

Preschool and School Choice Movement Leaders Combine Forces to Form New Pornographers-style Education Advocacy Supergroup

(No, not really, but keep reading)

Cato's Adam Schaeffer highlights a debate within the school choice community: On one side are activists pushing targeted voucher programs to help kids with specific needs--kids with disabilities (as in Florida), foster kids (Arizona), and poor kids in urban districts with crappy schools (in Wisconsin, Ohio, D.C.). On the other are those, like Schaeffer and Howard Rich (to whose WSJ column Schaeffer's piece is pegged), who actually think the whole public education system is the problem and want to replace it with a tax credit and/or voucher regime for all families. Curiously, this debate actually has a lot of similarities the debate among early childhood advocates on the merits of targeted versus universal preschool programs. And it's not the only thing these two issues have in common.

I believe that the school choice movement (in which I include the charter school movement) and the preschool movement are the two most vital movements in education today. For starters, they're both actual movements, with grassroots advocacy bases committed to moving the ball on the issues. While federal policymakers are hemmed in by the policy cage of NCLB and difficulties of its implementation, these state and local level advocates are driving real, on-the-ground change on choice and early learning.

Both are also terribly ambitious. They're questioning long-accepted relationships, roles, and responsibilities--In the case of school choice, breaking district educational monopolies and giving parents more control over their children's education; in the case of preschool broadening the understanding of public and communal responsibility to small children and their families. They're redefining the boundaries of publicly-supported education--In preschool, to include younger children; in school choice to include private, charter, and other non-traditional schools. And they're both building new institutions and infrastructure to deliver new types of education in new ways.

Both movements also rely on similar authority to make the case for their preferred reforms: A combination of arguments based on economic theory (each even has its own Nobel Prize winning economist in Milton Friedman and James Heckman!), program evaluation and effectiveness research aimed at showing their programs deliver positive results for kids and the public, and social justice arguments focused on the needs of historically underserved children. Both augment these arguments and research with savvy PR campaigns and grassroots advocacy to move the ball on their goals. And both movements have been driven by the strategic investments of committed patrons in the philanthropic world (both individuals and foundations).
And both, as their agendas advance and states start implementing their policy prescriptions, are having to deal with quality problems in the preschool programs and schools of choice that emerge.

In my experience, there's not a lot of love lost or perceived shared ground between the leading lights of the preschool and school choice movements. Conservative and libertarian choice advocates tend to hate the idea of public preschool funding, and preschool supporters have good reason to be wary of the market based on their experience with poor quality in unregulated private preschool and daycare programs. That's unfortunate, because they could learn a lot from one another and there are some natural synergies between their goals.

So, how do we get the preschool and choice movements talking? I don't think there's really much chance that they'll combine forces and form a New Pornographers-style education advocacy supergroup, but if folks were willing to lay down their biases, I think we might see some interesting conversations and collaborations emerge.

The Community College Transfer Problem

Give the New York Times' Sam Freedman credit for a good choice of topic today -- a program that helps community college students transfer to four-year universities. The story of Viviana Alcazar's journey from a local two-year school to a degree from Stanford also underscores the particular importance of community colleges to the nation's rapidly-growing population of Hispanic colleges students, who are more likely than both white and other minority students to attend a two-year school. That's because the states with large Hispanic populations, like California and Florida, also tend to be the states that chose to accomodate the mid-20th century surge in college enrollment by building highly-stratified higher education systems (in part because they didn't have an existing infrastructure of private schools) whereby only a small proportion of students go to presitigious four-year research universities while most go to local two-year schools. California alone has something like 1.4 million community college students, two-thirds of all the undergrads in state, public or private.

But I wish the column wasn't--like so much higher education media coverage--shot through the lens of super-elite institutions like Stanford. Two-year to four-year transfer is a huge problem in this country; while two-year transfer students tend to perform just as well in four-year colleges as students who start in four-year colleges, less than 40 percent ever transfer in the first place. In other words, the important goal isn't so much to get two-year students to transfer to Stanford as it is to get them to transfer somewhere in the four-year system, so they have a decent shot a bachelor's degree, increasing the dividing line of economic attainment in this country.

Private Colleges

Members of the Annapolis Group, comprised of about 80 liberal arts colleges including Sarah Lawrence, Oberlin, and Reed, announced yesterday they will opt out of the US News college rankings. It is the latest example of a failure to understand what the college accountability movement is all about.

While the US News ranking system is by no means perfect, there isn’t a lot of useful information on colleges and universities accessible for students and parents. It’s a pretty simplistic argument, but doesn’t the success and ubiquity of the magazine rankings indicate the huge demand out there?

The worst argument against accountability put forth by leaders of the Annapolis Group is that this is about privacy. As Thomas J. Hochstettler, President of Lewis and Clark College, argued last summer in an op-ed against the Spellings Commission:

Much of my colleagues' criticism centers on the perception that we can't trust the federal government with such sensitive data. Do we want Uncle Sam knowing every class our students are taking, every grade they earn, every course they drop? Critics have also noted the apparent ease with which the federal government could link data to students' Social Security numbers and, presumably, to their complete life stories.

Maybe Hochstettler forgot that the federal government has successfully conducted income tax, Social Security, and gun background check systems without breaches of privacy for years. For an even more apt comparison, consider that state education departments can now track individual K-12 student achievement year-to-year through student identification numbers.

No, this is a power grab. Some colleges in the Annapolis Group, like Amherst and Pomona Colleges, are able to graduate students in six years (the new four) around 95% of the time, but peer institutions are often well below this figure. The aforementioned Reed College (one of the leaders in the anti-rankings movement) succeeds at a 20% lower clip. Other members of the Annapolis Group, like Transylvania University and Hampden-Sydney College, graduate less than two-thirds of their entering students.

Graduation rates are crude measures of student success, but colleges provide us with little else. Imagine if a prospective student could know how hard they would be expected to work, or how successful the school is in placing graduates into jobs. Some of this data exists already, but it’s kept under wraps. Two of the seven colleges mentioned above (not the ones you’ve heard of) participated in the 2007 National Survey of Student Engagement, a survey that measures things like how much time a student spends studying, how many papers they write of what length, and how approachable faculty are. It costs institutions of this size only $3,375 to conduct the survey, but still not all of them do it, and they are not required to release any of the data.

There has to be some sort of side-by-side comparisons for students to make educated decisions on where to go to college. US News may honestly be the best we’ve got right now. With tuition skyrocketing and loan scandals rocking the industry, the least policymakers can do is help students make a good choice.

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Do you have any burning but unanswered questions about virtual schools? Have you always wanted to attend one of Education Sector's awesome events but happen to live way outside the D.C. metro region? Are you going to be stuck on a really boring conference call around 3:00 P.M. this afternoon and need something to keep you amused?

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All About the Benjamins

I was at first appalled when I heard about Harvard economist Roland G. Fryer’s proposal to provide a cash reward for students who perform well on tests.

The plan seems a brutal affirmation of the financial incentives that seem to control this country. Is the only way to succeed in motivating our children by hanging dollar bills in front of their face? What kind of values would that teach? Like Danny said, shouldn’t we be able to instill in children the desire to learn, rather than initiating some mad goose chase for a wad of cash?

But let’s be honest with ourselves: What do we want for our economically disadvantaged students? Why do we push them to succeed? What images do we use to motivate them? The answer is, more often than not, we hope that their performance in school will allow them to obtain a scholarship to college, to continue their education, allowing them choice in the job market and in their future, choice that is provided by, you got it, money. Many adolescents (and more in poor areas where there isn’t much exposure to college, different career paths, or success in an academic sense) have a hard time visualizing abstract concepts such as their life ten years down the road, and molding their actions in the present accordingly. They do, however, have a compelling desire for the twenty dollar bill sitting on the table. Is there really a fundamental difference between pushing our students to succeed financially in the future and rewarding them with cash right now?

And it seems to work. A similar cash incentive program for teachers whose classrooms perform well on tests in Tennessee has proven a success and experiments done in the United Kingdom and Kenya have shown that cash incentive raises student achievement across the board, not just in students in the top percentile.

Of course, I am not arguing that cash incentives are a panacea by any stretch of the imagination, and if anything would act as a band-aid while larger problems with the education system are addressed. I will argue, however, that in a system where money and success are (albeit unfortunately) so synonymous, the proposal is more appropriate than it may appear at first glance.

NCLB, Version 2.0

What’s better than the original No Child Left Behind act? No Child Left Behind, version 2.0!

Yes, ladies and gentleman, it has almost come that time to reauthorize the 21^st century’s most controversial educational reform act. In anticipation for the looming congressional debate ahead, ETS presented its poll results at the seventh annual “Americans Speak” forum entitled, “Standards, Accountability and Flexibility: Americans Speak on NCLB Reauthorization”.

Despite the negative media attention NCLB has received in recent times, the poll showed that the public supports its reauthorization, with favorable attitudes strong among K-12 parents (48% in favor vs. 40% opposed).

But perhaps the most surprising finding of the ETS poll was the public knowledge of NCLB itself: only 32% of adults correctly identified NCLB as an education reform bill that has been signed into law.

Much of America remains in the dark about NCLB:

• 28% of the American public thinks that NCLB is simply “talk”, but so far has been no action.
• 13% of the American public thinks that the President/Congress has put together NCLB proposals, but that no deal has been reached.

And for further confusion; only 47% of Americans correctly identified the NCLB plan out of a 4 answer multiple choice question.

• 26% of the American public thought that NCLB meant “making sure that students keep progressing onto the next grade level until they reach graduation.”
• 12% of the American public thought that NCLB meant “requiring all students to pass a national test in twelfth grade in order to graduate from high school and go on to college.”
• 8% of the American public thought that NCLB meant “giving parents vouchers so that their child can attend the school of their choice.”

Whether it’s misinformation of lack of information, this data demonstrates a critical need for sound, balanced, and coherent information regarding NCLB. Why?

The ETS poll showed that while only 41% of the uninformed general public looked favorably upon NCLB, 56% of the general public approved of NCLB when presented with a clear definition of the law. Understanding NCLB is half the challenge.

Despite these complications, the other results presented by ETS make it clear that Americans believe that NCLB Version 1.0 (and soon to be NCLB Version 2.0) can be utilized as an effective means to achieve a greater end goal of improving the state of American education. Perhaps the anonymously-quoted policymaker said it best:

“Version 3.0, which is down the road, will be where you start to see the big shift, whether it’s things like national standards or really new forward-looking ways to doing accountability . . . we may be in a position to really go in a new direction.”

ETS’s poll results serve as a fresh reminder that greater transparency and access to education policy information is crucial in the NCLB debate. However, I don’t think it’s unreasonable to remain a bit cautious about ETS’s own motivations within the high-stakes testing industry during a time of increasing emphasis on accountability. ETS at its core is a business, and the company retains a clear interest in promoting measures like NCLB when they can benefit from a substantial increase in the demand for state testing.

$600

Last February, I told my geometry class about their upcoming state test. I said it was a chance to show what they had learned. I explained my new Saturday tutorial program and daily review problems. Luisa interrupted me.

"Mr. Rosenthal, the TAKS test doesn't even matter this year."

We were at a large urban high school in Houston and Luisa was in tenth grade. The TAKS test would matter next year, in eleventh grade. It would determine if she graduated. But the tenth grade test wouldn’t even determine if she passed geometry.

After the test, Luisa told me she had hadn't really tried. Other students said they started guessing half way through. They were tired. The test didn't matter, not to them. But it mattered a great deal to their school and their teacher. We would be judged on their scores.

I thought of Luisa when I heard about New York's pilot program to pay students for achievement. Among other incentives, the program would pay high school students $600 for passing standardized tests. The idea is to align their short term interests with their long term interests, while alleviating poverty and making test data more meaningful. I’m not convinced.

Maybe $600 could make Luisa care, but I think she wanted to pass all along. Like all of my students, she had a natural desire for knowledge and an affinity for success. I saw it in her eyes when she learned how to find the volume of a cylinder. But she had failed TAKS four years in a row and expected to fail again. She didn’t see the point of trying, and money couldn't address the root of her indifference. I have great financial incentive to play in the NFL, but I'm not practicing my spiral.

Maybe $600 could make Luisa care, but I could have made her care too. I could have convinced her that success was possible, inspired her to work harder. I could have shown her the value of striving for excellence, even against long odds. I think the fact that we're offering $600 means we didn’t do our jobs.

Maybe $600 could make Luisa care, but at what cost? (Besides $600, of course.) What would we teach her about the purpose of education? How would we change the way she sees school?

As Edwize (somewhat sarcastically) says, it's a very cool experiment. I'm really curious, but I'm even more wary.