Crackonomics

On the whole, I'm sympathetic to DC Schools Chancelor Rhee's intiative to shutter 23 DCPS schools. It doesn't make sense for a district that's experiencing long-term enrollment decline, including losing almost 30 percent of students to charter schools, to waste millions of dollars on maintaining a bigger physical infrastructure than it needs. The chancellor and Mayor Fenty had a series of neighborhood meeting yesterday to discuss the planned closings, with many of the attendees voicing their displeasure. And I have to say, while I don't actually agree, this is pretty funny and astute:

"It's like crackhead economics," Jarumi Moore, a Francis Middle School seventh-grader, said at the Wilson Building of the closings plan. "They're thinking short term. We're thinking long term."

Get that kid into an AP econ class! He can write a study calculating the marginal change in the implied discount rate people apply to the resale value of their personal possessions when selling them feed a crack habit at various stages of addiction, and compare that to long-term deadweight loss of public goods resulting from ill-advised education policies that pump up approval ratings at the expense of systemic reform. He'll be the next Roland Fryer. Seriously, I don't think I would have had anything nearly so clever or smart to say in the 7th grade about anything not involving comic books or Larry Bird; there are a lot of bright kids like this in DCPS and we need to get them a better education.

Harvard and the Myth of Tightening College Admissions

The New York Times reports today that applications to Harvard are up an amazing 19% over last year, with other elite schools like the University of Chicago, Amherst, and Northwestern seeing double-digit increases. This allows newspapers to get a jump on the annual circulation-goosing college admissions panic story, which usually doesn't run for another few months, when the same colleges will report record low percentages of student being admitted. So we don't have to wait until April to read some guidance counselor from a suburban high school breathlessly reporting that among his peers "There is a pure level of panic and frenzy like they've never seen before."

As I wrote here last year, and also at the American Prospect, there is less here than meets the eye. The Times reports, correctly, that the number of graduating high school seniors is now reaching a demographic crest, the largest in history. But the year-over-year percentage growth is quite small, nothing close to the double-digit rise in applications to Harvard et al. Similarly, there's no reason to the think that the percent of high school seniors applying to college has risen sharply; those numbers never change much on an annual basis.

What we have, then, is not a big increase in college applicants but a big increase in college applications. Which the Times acknowledges, quoting one consultant as saying, "There was a time when kids applied to three or four schools, then to seven schools, and now, 10 or more is not uncommon." This creates the impression that the odds of a qualified student getting into a good college are dropping faster than they really are.

For example: the article notes that Harvard (as well as Princeton and UVA) has ended its early admissions program. So let's say you're a super-qualified student. You want to go to Harvard, and Harvard wants you to attend. Previously, you would have submitted one application, via early admission, and received one acceptance. Now you've got to go into the general application pool along with everyone else.

Do you still submit just one application? Of course not. Applying comes at relatively little cost in terms of time and money--particularly to you, who are probably from an upper-income family. There's a common application, stuff can be submitted electronically--it's all easier than it once was. So you apply to Princeton, Yale, and most of the other Ivy League schools, along with a few other usual suspects like Chicago, Amherst and the rest. Why not? Harvard's not a lock, after all, you might get bumped for a senator's son, rich legacy, football player, or what have you. A few months pass, and the envelopes arrive. Some of the schools accept you, others don't, but you get into Harvard, and happily enroll.

Q: Under this scenario, what impact has Harvard's elimination of early admission had on the odds of a qualified student getting into an elite school? A: None whatsoever. The number of applicants didn't change, the number of slots didn't change, and the result for the hypothetical you was exactly the same: Harvard. But from the perspective of typical news coverage, it looks like admissions got tighter, because all of those new applications you sent to elite schools drove the total number of applications up, and thus admissions rates down.

It's true that by applying and being accepted to those other schools, hypothetical you gained acceptances that would otherwise have gone to someone else. But you didn't use them, so eventually it all comes out in the wash. Selective colleges set very specific goals for the size of their freshman class, which they meet by statistically estimating the percent of accepted applicants who are likely to enroll. If they miss their guess high, they squeeze a few more people into the dorms. If they miss their guess low, they take a few more people off the waiting list. Either way, the number of individual students who are ultimately admitted doesn't change.

Also: this discussion pertains to qualified students, those with the credentials to have a legit shot at getting in. Some significant percentage of applicants--and thus, some percentage of the 19% increase in applicants at Harvard--are unqualified, submitted by students who are treating the college admissions process like Powerball and have no chance of being admitted. An increase in the number of applicantions from unqualified applicants has no practical effect on the admissions process at all for the qualified student--but it seems to, by driving down the bottom-line admit rate number.

This doesn't mean that the increasing-applications phenomenon has no impact on qualified students. If your competirors are submitting more applications, you need to as well, just like you need to keep up with taking AP classes and accumulating the other current markers of achievement. But in the end, you're still you, they're still them, Harvard is still Harvard, and things haven't gotten as bad as you think they have. When the media tells you to panic, don't.

Ask And You Shall Receive

Last week, I asked whether there were any colleges with unique strategies for controlling tuition and aiding students, but without the help of a gigantic endowment. Lo and behold, Inside HigherEd reports on Blackburn College, a small, private college in Illinois (chances are this school is off the NYT’s radar), that is trying to do something different with tuition and financial aid.

Blackburn College announced that it is both lowering tuition and getting out of the tuition haggling game. Basically, it’s lowering its sticker price by 15 percent but also going with a CarMax-type policy of not bargaining with parents over financial aid packages. A big plus to this new policy is that parents and students know the true cost of Blackburn, even before they apply. And this combination of lower tuition and lower spending on financial aid means that the school won’t be losing any tuition revenue, so the bottom line for the institution stays the same. But what about the bottom line for students?

Blackburn believes that the tuition--$15,000 with room and board—is affordable for low-income students, so long as the students get federal and state aid. If a student received a full Pell-grant and the full amount of Illinois’ need-based grant program the out-of-pocket cost for Blackburn would be approximately $6,000. Not bad, although that still means potentially graduating with over $20,000 in debt. And loans, while they are grouped with grants as part of an aid ‘package’, need to be paid back and aren’t nearly as good at facilitating access to college (CarMax doesn’t say it offers financial aid to buy a car). But loans are an excellent way to facilitate choice—students can opt for a private college instead of a public one, or a four-year instead of a two-year. But how can we know how much debt is too much debt?

The larger problem with financial aid policy is that there is no consensus over what the ‘right’ amount of debt for students is, or how much people should be expected to contribute to their own education. We need a goal—some strategic planning, if you will—for our financial aid system. Is the goal to help low-income students attend any college they like? To help them attend a public, four-year? A two-year? Or to facilitate choice in colleges among everyone, even those that are from upper-income families?

Until we answer these questions, our financial aid policies will always feel like a shot in the dark

Lede of the Day

"Free stuff makes people happy, but free stuff shot from cannons makes them jump and cheer like crazed monkeys."

From an Eric Hoover piece($) in The Chronicle of Higher Education, about a guy who owns a company that makes those portable CO2 cannons that launch rolled-up T-shirts in sports stadiums and arenas across the land.

Teaching Isn't Selling Sporting Goods...Or Anything Else

While we're on the subject of how teacher pay compares to other professions, another issue that often comes up in the debate is the fact that many teachers nominally work less than an eight-hour day, since the average school day is about 6.7 hours long. The usual rejoinder from the teacher perspective is that good teachers put a lot of time in before and after the school day, which is certainly true. The response to that is that lawyers and accountants and other professionals also do their share of work on nights and weekends. Then both sides start snarling at each other.

But what gets less talked about less is the way those hours are spent. I've worked in a variety of jobs since finishing grad school in the mid-90s, both in the public and non-profit sector, the basic components of which are pretty much the same: reading, writing, analyzing numbers, talking on the phone, sending email, going to meetings and events. Before that, stretching back to high school, I worked as a lifeguard, construction worker, department store cashier, waiter, sporting good salesman, camp counselor, etc. All different jobs.

But one thing they all have in common is that you're not actually working every minute of the day. For example, betwen the time I typed the words "the" and "words" in this sentence, I got up, poured a cup of coffee, chatted with a co-worker, and then spent another five minutes reading about how the Wizards somehow beat the Celtics again last night, in Boston no less. To the outside observer, I was working continuously, but actually it ebbs and flows, and this has been true on some level in every job I've ever had.

Spend some time in the classroom of a good teacher, by contrast, and you'll quickly notice that they're working the whole time. Not most of the time, but all of it. That's what it takes to succeed; you have to be constantly paying attention, planning, reacting, making decisions, keeping the whole intricate complex process on track. Somehow this needs to be taken into account in discussions of how much teachers work.

Pay for Performance: Chicken or Egg?

AFTie Ed responds to this post below on teacher pay:

My baseline position wasn’t “we’re not in this for the money, give us more money.” Instead it’s “we don’t have the option of being in it for the money, and trying to introduce that option without making the pie bigger isn’t a smart idea.” What I was trying to argue is that we don’t have in place one of the essential preconditions to having an effective variable pay structure: adequate base compensation...As a result, you get a system where people are being driven to a large extent by the intrinsic rewards of the work, and by the external rewards that come from a kind of cult of teacherdom. I don’t know if it’s chicken or egg, but uncompetitive pay is a factor keeping this dynamic in place.

There's an active argument going on about whether teachers are or aren't underpaid, involving lots of dueling statistics about benefit levels as a percent of salary, the number of hours worked in and out of school, which professions are fairly comparable to teaching, and whether or not a 9-month job with no vacation is really just 3/4ths of a 12-month job with vacation. But I don't think it's actually all that relevant to this discussion. I'm perfectly willing to concede that given stakes involved, and the amount of training, experience, and hard work required to do a good job teaching, public school teachers aren't paid enough, by a significant margin. And it's abundantly clear that individual teachers haven't proportionately shared in the overall growth of the economy over the last 30-plus years, in terms of salary.

That said, insisting that "adequate base compensation" be a prerequisite for pay for performance is, functionally, the equivalent of being against pay for peformance. Raising the total amount of money going to teachers salaries without changing the way teachers are paid would seem like--and to a large extent, would be--investing tens of billions of dollars in the same illogical system with nothing concrete in return. That's why NEA's call for a $40,000 base salary for all teachers, to take one example, is utter fantasy. You can say this is unjust, and you can be right, but that's the way it is. Policymakers have been blithely ignoring calls to substantially raise base tacher pay for decades now and will do it for decades more if nothing changes.

The best and most plausible strategy to increase total teacher pay, therefore, is not to raise the floor, but the ceiling--create a methodologically sound system for evaluating teacher effectiveness, in conjunction with labor, and then send the new money to the most effective teachers. Policymakers would go for that, really they would--instead of more $40,000 teachers, more $140,000 teachers. I know the "methodologically sound" part is tricky and subject to debate, but this is not an unsolveable problem. (Look for more from ES co-director Tom Toch on the subject of teacher evaluation soon).

I also note that class size reduction, heavily favored and promoted by teachers unions, is on some unavoidable level at odds with the adequate base compensation agenda. There's only so much money; every dollar spent on hiring more teachers is a dollar not spent on paying indiviudal teachers more.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode Two

I watched this episode On Demand in the middle of last week, and I have to say it was unsettling to listen to Saint Gus of the Newsroom talk about how life is always tough for Mother of Four, and then listen to characters lament that the only time Baltimore makes national news is when multiple bodies are discovered rotting in a rowhouse in the poor section of town, and then pick up the newspaper the next day and read about how, allegedly, a deranged, down-on-her-luck mother of four killed her daughters and left them to rot in a rowhouse in the poor section of town, which was soon covered on national news. DC the nation's capital is in the news every day, but DC the troubled, mid-sized mid-Atlantic city? Pretty much only with stuff like this.

Episode Summary: Bubbles is troubled. McNulty staggers up to the edge of the deep end, peers over, takes a swig of Jameson, and jumps off. With the investigation down, Marlo quickly resumes having everyone and their mother killed, up to and including that guy who the other guy said looked at him funny back in '93. He's also trying to cut out the middleman on the package and go straight to the Greek, which leads him to...Avon! Hey, Avon. He looks just like he should, the same but more weary, fronting as best he can. It's funny how the universe of Baltimore murderer / drug dealers sort of arranges itself on a purely relative scale--Marlo is such a dead-eyed sociopath that by comparison Avon seems somewhat reasonable, Prop Joe is Santa Claus, and Omar is an avenging angel. Or he would be, if he actually made his way on screen.

Saint Gus, meanwhile, has to deal with his very own Jayson Blair, who can't even squeeze a decent human-interest story out of opening day at Camden Yards. (Aside: It always seemed strange to me that the Jack Kelly fabrication scandal at USA Today received far less attention than the Blair affair, even though Kelly's fabrications were arguably much worse. Relative standing of the papers, I suppose.) Gus' boss, meanwhile, wants to run a prize-bait expose of the school system, one of those series that kicks off Sunday morning with a little box showing the chapters to come (Monday: "Everything is Bad." Tuesday: "Then it Gets Worse"), with each story jumping from page one to a full two-page spread that you feel vaguely guilty for not reading. Gus argues that, sure, the school system is terrible, but so are lots of other things, and shouldn't we tell the real story, the whole story? Or something like that. The Bad Editor says no, we need to dumb it down so people can understand.

Now, I have no doubt that conversations like this happen all the time, complete with facile use of the word "dickensian" and all the rest. But what David Simon Saint Gus seems to be arguing is that anything other than digging deep and exposing the entire underlying system, complete with all the connections and moving parts, is a moral failure and a lie. In other words, the only truly responsible journalistic treatment of Baltimore is...The Wire. Really? I think I disagree. The best treatment, maybe, but that's a helluva high bar. It takes, what, seven years and tens of millions of dollars? What happens in the meantime? If you can pick off a piece of the problem, expose it, and do something about it, what's the argument against that? Or are the children of Baltimore doomed until the revolution comes?

Breaking the Greed / Virtue Dichotomy in Teacher Pay

Commenting on the new issue of Quality Counts, which compares states on teacher pay measures and suggests that teachers make less than comparable professions, AFTie Ed says:

It leaves open the question of why people go into teaching. As the song says "it's not about a salary, it's all about reality, teachers teach and do the world good..." I think the results here should concern people whose main focus is on incentivizing the current pay structure. If fiscal incentives matter, the first decision for a lot of people is going to be to go into a different field. People motivated by salaries will, rather than wanting to climb to the top of 88 cents on the dollar, go get the dollar itself.

This is a variant on the baseline teachers union position on money, which is, "We're not in this for the money; give us more money."

Let me be first to say that this isn't actually an absurd concept on its face. There's no good reason that people should be forced into penury just because they're doing socially valuable work in the public sector. Quite the opposite, in fact.

But it's not the strongest rhetorical case, and more to the point, it's not necessary. Look at the two doctors on the front page of the Post this morning, identical African-American twins from PG County named Vince and Vance who look just exactly like you'd think a Vince and Vance would look, and also happen to be Army reservists who volunteer in Afghanistan. They're clearly not doing that for the money (although I'm guessing the elapsed time between the story hitting the newstands and getting optioned for TV/movies could be measured in fractions of a second), but as a cardiologist and urologist, I'm guessing they have plenty of money. In medicine, you can do good and well at the same time.

But you've also got to go to medical school, which as we discussed here a few days ago, was thoroughly Flexnerized almost a century ago. Much higher, more uniform standards, longer, more difficult to get into, extended clinical induction model, etc. etc. Also, fewer practitioners and less organized labor. I don't know if all those factors necessarily have to go together, but the fact that they do in medicine has to be meaningful on some level.

The problem with the "we do this for the children not the money" line is that it paints teachers as the kind of professionals that provoke admiration but not aspiration -- people appreciate them but are glad someone else is doing the work. Ed himself goes on to say that "I'm of the belief that we're going to have to make changes to how teachers are paid in order to raise compensation broadly. And that this could be a really good thing for education overall." I wonder he's thought through just how much things would have to change for that to become true.

Disconnected Youth

Disconnected, disengaged, at-risk. All terms to describe the kids who aren't in school, don't have jobs, can't find purpose. Plenty of work out there that argues that we need to reconnect these young people to school, work and civic life. The Campaign for Youth (CFY) is an alliance of about a dozen youth-focused organizations (including the National Youth Employment Commission, American Youth Policy Forum, Forum for Youth Investment) that's recently developed A National Investment Strategy for Reconnecting America's Youth. Check out the summary of their recommendations (pdf).

Spellings Stands Firm

I went to the National Press Club today to listen to a speech from the Secretary of Education. I was at a similar event a while back--has to have been more than a year ago--and she seemed more confident this time around. Given enough questions and enough time, you can tell if someone's just a top-line manager/figurehead type or if they actually pay attention and know what they're talking about, and she's the latter. Her friendly, folksy demeanor is a real asset in environments like that; it puts people at ease while also making them less likely to ask really sharp questions.

Her basic message on NCLB was that the President would veto any reauthorization that waters down accountability, and that if Congress won't move she's going to go ahead and implement stuff on her own during the 11 months she has left. It's never been entirely clear to me why the U.S. Department of Education is legally allowed to let some states and not others (or, for that matter, any states at all) implement accountability systems that clearly diverge from NCLB requirements, as it has with the state "growth model" pilots. I suspect the answer is that it's not legal, but since nobody's ox was gored, they just did it anyway. Back in my first job in state government, I remember asking our staff attorney"Are we allowed to do that?" and she said, "We do what we want, and if people don't like it they can sue us. Which is unlikely, because they probably won't know we did it, and even if they find out, suing a government agency is harder than you think. You need standing, you need money to pay for a lawer, and it takes forever. Our lawyers are free and we're not going anywhere."

What about the little guys?

Top colleges—Harvard, Yale, Davidson, University of Virginia—have all made great headlines in the past year by dramatically expanding the financial aid they offer to students and eliminating or significantly shrinking the debt students will graduate with. Yale announced Monday that it will be spending another $307 million from its endowment for increased financial aid and research. This is great, but what about all those colleges, especially the small, private ones, that don’t have the endowment money to keep up with Harvard and Yale?

InsideHigherEd reported this week (The Harvard Trickle-Down Effect) on a session at the Council of Independent Colleges’ Presidents Institute which focused on exactly this question. Despite the fact that most of these schools—small, liberal arts colleges—don’t compete directly for students with Harvard-type schools, they are still worried about the ripple effect from Harvard’s aid announcement, primarily the pressure from students and parents to provide similarly generous aid packages.

While Harvard’s aid plan is great for Harvard students, it’s just not a realistic way to address the problems of rising tuitions and rising student debt at most institutions. And, as we’ve shown here and here, generous aid policies at the most elite institutions can have a negative impact on need-based aid because lower-tier institutions respond by offering tuition discounts to recruit high-performing students. Or, as InsideHigherEd summarizes:

C. Brent DeVore, president of Otterbein College and the session’s moderator, briefly and cogently laid out the financial aid picture leading up to and including Harvard’s announcement. He described how many small private colleges turned to financial aid based on students’ academic or other merit (as opposed to purely financial need) to compete for students’ attention, both against the prestige advantage of the elite colleges and the price advantage of most public colleges. That trend was exacerbated as states, particularly in the South, embraced lottery-driven scholarships that in some places have made an education at a public university virtually free.

As parents’ have become increasingly accustomed to such tuition breaks, merit-based aid has often been replaced by “want-based” aid, “demand-based” aid, and “match the scholarship down the street” based aid, DeVore said, to knowing nods from the presidents in the room.

The presidents’ concerns about the new trend in super-aid policies from elite institutions ranged from lowered expectations about how much financial responsibility a family should bear for a college education to even higher tuition increases and more competition for faculty. Presidents’ ideas for countering this competition ranged from broadening the recruitment pool of students to doing a better job of promoting the academic advantages of a small institution.

But there was no mention of what kinds of budgeting changes schools could make to keep their tuition increases down and make them more price competitive. It seems like a budgeting response may be just as important as a PR response. What I'd like to know is whether there are any small, independent colleges without gigantic endowments that are doing innovative and smart things to keep tuition increases and debt-levels reasonable and maintain need-based aid, but without hurting the institution's bottom line.

New Leader at Carnegie

Stanford's Tony Bryk, a member of Education Sector's research advisory committee, was recently appointed the new President of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. Many people don't realize just how influential Carnegie has been since it was chartered by an Act of Congress in 1906. It developed the Teachers Annuity and Insurance Association, which become the TIAA in TIAA-CREF, the giant educator's retirement and insurance company. It founded the Educational Testing Service, ETS, which publishes the SAT, GRE, and AP tests. It sponsored the Flexner Report, which completely revolutionized medical education in America, moving medical schools from a group of semi-professional, unregulated institutions with dodgy, inconsistent standards and questionable quality to the much more uniformly high-quality, well-regulated institutions we have today.

The Carnegie classifications, which put higher educaiton institutions into categories like "Research I," "Research II," "Comprehensive / Master's"," etc.(they've since altered the names) remain the dominant way of categorizing colleges and universities, and define the research status hierarcy that institutions try to climb. It played a signficant role in the discussion that led to the creation of Pell grants in the early 1970s. Former Carnegie president Ernest Boyer's books High School and College, published in the 1980s, were very influential and remain (somewhat depressingly) accurately description of the challenges those institutions face.

Indeed, the Carnegie Foundation's history suggests that higher education is arguably more subject to positive influence via philanthropic/foundation initiative than K-12. This is partly a matter of scale and governance. The vast majority of college students attend one of about 3,500 two- and four-year colleges--compared to 90,000 schools--with more concentrated governance and control. But I also think higher education is inherently more sensitive to the things that philanthropies are in a position to change: public perception, the consensus of research--information, in other words. Colleges are also intensely status- and peer-conscious, so if you can leverage a few key actors, the rest will follow of their own accord.

Most education philanthropy focuses on K-12, because those challenges seems more urgent, but I think that many organizations--particularly the big new foundations getting into the game--are missing a chance to make a lasting difference in the higher ed arena. If they achieve only a fraction of what the Carnegie Foundation has over the last century, it will be time and money well spent.

Update: A reader points out that refering to the Carnegie Foundation as a "philanthropy" is confusing, since it doesn't give out money like, for example, the Carnegie Corporation of New York (an ES funder), but rather does most of its work in-house. Good point, I was thinking about non-profit policy-focused organizations generally, many of which operate with some mix of in-house and sponsored work, but that wasn't clear.

The reader also notes that the Carnegie Foundation developed the "Carnegie Unit," which is still the standard way that high school courses are categorized and measured. When someone says that high school students who want to go to college should take at at least three "units" of math, four English, etc., etc., they're talking about Carnegie units. Apparently this was an outgrowth of the development of TIAA -- they needed a standard way of measuring how many courses teachers taught. This illustrates a larger point--also inherent in the story of the Carnegie classification of colleges and universities--which is that defining the way things are measured often has more lasting influence than the measurement itself.

Democracts and NCLB

Sam Dillon's Times front-pager on NCLB-bashing among Democratic presidential candidates came out a few days before I hit the road to spend Christmas with the fam, but apparently I'm not the only one who didn't get to it until after the New Year. As Eduwonk notes, the buried lede in that piece was the major thought division between the candidates and House Education and Labor Committee chairman George Miller. Now Miller's counterpart in the Senate, Ted Kennedy, comes with a Post op-ed saying the same thing, in stronger words:

The administration continues to speak glowingly of the law while Democratic candidates blast it. But simplistic campaign rhetoric hardly reflects what's actually happening on school reform.

So what gives? I actually think there's no mystery here. The politics of NCLB suck for Obama, Clinton, et al because a certain number of people really hate the law and those people disproportionately vote in the primary, while there's no comparable counter-contingent with strong feelings running the other way. But the candidates don't actually want to engage in "all-out opposition not just to specific details but to the entire thrust and ideology of NCLB," to quote Jonathan Kozol quoting NEA President Reg Weaver on the union's position, because they don't actually think that way. That's why the end of Dillon's article is a litany of "buts"

Mr. Obama, for instance, in a speech last month in New Hampshire denounced the law as “demoralizing our teachers.” But he also said it was right to hold all children to high standards. “The goals of this law were the right ones,” he said. When Mr. Edwards released an education plan earlier this year, he said the No Child law needed a “total overhaul.” But he said he would continue the law’s emphasis on accountability. And at the elementary school in Waterloo, Mrs. Clinton said she would “do everything I can as senator, but if we don’t get it done, then as president, to end the unfunded mandate known as No Child Left Behind.” But she, too, added: “We do need accountability.”

That's classic pre-general campaign hedging. To say that we need to radically overhaul or jettison the law while maintaining accountability makes no sense; accountability is where the core meaning of the law begins and ends. The candidates are just pandering as much as they think they can get away with, and Kennedy and Miller are sending public signals about where those limits lie. Given the way things are going for Senator Clinton, winner of the New Hampshire NEA's endorsement and strongest NCLB basher among the major candidates, my guess is that the high water mark of anti-NCLB rhetoric from the D side has passed, with relatively little effect on the public discourse in the long run.

Some things are just what they seem.

Blogging and So Much More

Education Sector has a new position open for a policy associate. It's a great opportunity to join ES and work on a range of ed policy projects. Q&Ed blogging rights included. More details here.

The Wire, Season Five, Episode 1

After more than a year's hiatus, the final season of The Wire debuted tonight. By popular demand, we're back with the weekly blogging. If you've been catching up on the DVDs recently--and if you haven't been, you should start--see here for the final post from last season (or just search for "wire" in the search box at right for the whole list), and here at the Guardian Unlimited for my take on why it's the greatest American television program (sorry, "programme") ever made. Matt Yglesias also wrote a good post last week arguing that while series creator David Simon's pessimistic worldview may be objectively overstated, it's essential for the series' artistic success. Bonus: a response from Simon himself in the comments thread.

Episode 1 summary: Carcetti shuts down the Major Crimes Unit investigation of the Marlo / Chris / Snoop organization and rowhouse mass murders because he's sucking money of out the police budget to cover the school fiscal crisis (and because he won't take school money from the governor he plans to unseat). McNulty is drunk and angry again, which is bad for his relationship with Beadie but good for the viewership generally. Bubbles is clean, and if there's an ounce of sympathy in David Simon's soul, which there may not be, which may be a good thing, he'll end up okay.

Herc is gone from the force and working for Levy, which means he's working for the criminals he used to incompetently try to put in jail. Whether this is a net plus for the murderers and drug dealers of Baltimore remains to be seen. Herc is so dumb that he can't even figure out how to abuse his expense account. (A lobbyist friend of mine taught me this a long time ago, when I tried to beg off his paying for lunch on the grounds that we had discussed nothing business-related. "I don't care if my clients pay for your lunch" he said. "But if they don't pay for yours, they don't pay for mine.") Marlo is scheming against Prop Joe and Method Man.

The Baltimore Sun, meanwhile, is apparently much like all the other important instutitions in the city: declining, absurd, and led by incompetents, but populated by a few smart, flawed-but-noble individuals who haven't stopped fighting for the greater ideals the institution represents. In this case, that would be Meldrick Lewis from Homicide:Life on the Streets, who's now ten years older and more of a stickler for usage.

In many ways, however, there's not a lot to say about Episode 1, because not a lot happens, which is the way every season of The Wire begins, which is one of the many reasons it's so great. The Wire is only the only show I've ever seen that fully takes advantage of long-form television's greatest asset: time. The typical movie runs 120 minutes, 200 at most. That's more time than a 44-minute TV episode, but you've still got to accomplish a great deal of character and narrative development in a small space. A series has more potential in theory, but for a long time every TV episode was structured like a 44-minute movie, with the additional burden of having to structure the plot around commercial breaks. The 1980s saw the introduction of season-long story arcs in the better dramas, but even those only went halfway, interspersing stand-alone episodes and continuing to give every episode some kind of beginning, middle, and end. Even critically-hailed series like The Sopranos still work this way.

The Wire, by contrast, is essentially one story in five chapters, a season per. The first few episodes are all about establishing characters, settings, and themes, and only as the story progresses do you start to see how it's all connected. The Wire also packs much more into each minute, simply by not wasting time explaining things to the viewer. Most TV shows are absolutely clogged with clunky expository dialogue (Typical C.S.I. scene: Grissom: "The body is completely exsanguinated." Coroner: "You're right, Grissom, all the blood has been drained from the body.") The Wire does you the favor of assuming you're not stupid. Like all art worth experiencing, it asks you to pay attention. The result is a cumulative dramatic force that's unmatched. It also leaves room for lots of small, understated moments pregnant with meaning, like when Beadie decides she's left the light on for McNulty long enough...and then changes her mind, for at least a little while longer.

Next week: The Sun's dubious editor decides to gin up an expose of the school systemm. which mean's we'll get to go all meta on TQATE by discussing fictional critiques of shaky education news coverage right along side the real thing.

Bogus Trends, Lawyer-Style

The Sunday Styles section in the Times today fronts a story about how law and medecine are allegedly becoming less desirable professions. Apparently, people are more and more attracted to creative professions and are thus less willing to enter into, or stick with, the medical and legal grinds.

In the grand tradition of bogus trend stories, it begins with an anecdote, follows with confirming quotations, and only then gets around to providing any actual data:

Indeed, applications to law schools and medical schools have declined from recent highs. Nationally, the number of law school applicants dropped to 83,500 in 2006 from 98,700 in 2004—representing a 6.7 percent drop between 2006 and 2005, on top of the 5.2 percent slip the previous year, according to the Law School Admission Council...The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to 42,000 from 46,000 in 1997, although it has recovered from a low of 33,000 in 2003

First of all, if you reduce 98,700 by 5.2%, you get 93,568. Reduce that by 6.7% and you get 87,299. Even accounting for rounding errors, that's not 83,500. Copy editors are supposedly maniacal about English usage, which is fine, but what about arithmetic?

More to the point, the "evidence" that both law and medicine are simultaneously becoming less attractive is that law school applications dropped by 15.4% from 2004 to 2006, while medical school applications increased by 27.3% from 2003 to 2006.

If newspapers insist on squeezing copy into the standard trend-story mold, then I guess there's little one can do to stop them. But if the numbers don't back the alleged trend up, then just leave the numbers out. It makes this stuff (a little) less aggravating.

Comic Book Guy Can Read

Back from a two-week hiatus, will be catching up on various edu-related stories that occured in my absence.

Starting with the most significant, that of course being this NYTimes piece about schools using comic books as an instructional tool:

In Maryland, the State Education Department is expanding a new comics-based literacy curriculum, after a small pilot program yielded promising results. In New York City, a group of educators applied to open a new small high school that would be based around a comics theme and named after the creators of Superman; their application was rejected but they plan to try again next year. And the Comic Book Project, a program run out of Teachers College at Columbia University that has children create their own comic strips as an “alternative pathway to literacy,” is catching on. Six years after it started in one Queens elementary school, it has expanded to 860 schools across the country.

It all sounds good, but edu-eminence Diane Ravitch throws cold water on the idea, saying "If you’re going to use comics in the classroom at all, which I have serious doubts about, it should be only as a motivational tool. What teachers have to recognize is that this is only a first step."

This reflects two common assumptions about comic books, both which are wrong. First, that comic books are fundamentally unsophisticated as a medium. Second, that supporting a youthful enthusiasm for comic books reduces the likelihood of students moving to more serious, legitimate literary forms.

Comic books seem simple, but they're not. This mistake stems from confusing the form with the genre. The most popular American comic books have long been superhero stories, featuring lots of explosions, skin-tight costumes, and tales of good vs. evil. But the most popular forms of all media tend toward pop-culture, lowest-common demoninator fare; whether it's Transformers at the box office, American Idol on television, Chris Daughtry in music, or Harry Potter in the book store. Don't get me wrong, I like Harry Potter, but J.K. Rowling ain't Henry James. The fact that the number one movie of 2007 was Spider-Man 3 doesn't lead anyone to conclude that film as a medium is always and irredeemably low culture.

The comic book form is actually very complex. First you have all the challenges of story, pace, characterization, narration, and dialogue that are inherent to writing. Then you have a whole separate set of challenges related to creating visual art -- tone, perspective, color, mood, composition, etc. Then you have to figure out how to present a host of images in sequence, understanding the way readers will mentally fill in the transitions from one perspective, scene, and point of view to another. Finally (and most importantly) you have to understand how the words and pictures fit together, the manner and impact of readers rapidly switching back and forth between reading words and seeing pictures, two very different cognitive experiences. Comic books incorporate elements of writing, painting, illustration and film, but it's really the combination of forms that make them unique and complex. As Umberto Eco once said, "Comic books have a language of their own."

The mistaken idea that comic books are simple leads to the second, Ravitchian idea that introducing students to comic books is educationally dangerous. This is wrong. Reading comic books is reading, first of all, not watching TV or playing Halo 3 or listening to Chris Daughtry. I don't think there's some kind of substitution effect at work where students who read comic books will read fewer books; rather they'll read more of everything and not read less of everything else.

Case in point: I've been reading comic books regularly since I was nine years old and now I essentially read and write for a living. More broadly, when I think of the typical comic book reader, "illiterate" isn't the word that comes to mind. Sartorially and socially challenged, maybe, but as a rule comic readers tend to be much more intellectual and word-focused that the average Jane or Joe. Rather than continuing the ignoble tradition of Fredric Wertham, education scholars faced with the massive problem of illiteracy should support every promising avenue they can find.

Update: Sherman Dorn makes many good points about the generally shoddy, ahistorical nature of the education reporting in this piece here.

Paying and Evaluating Teachers

The Denver Post reports on Obama as the next great supporter of ProComp, Denver's highly praised pay-for-performance, or merit pay, program. This issue of teacher pay has become one of the big education debates among Democrats in the 2008 presidential campaign (both Clinton and Edwards are against merit pay but support differential pay–extra for teachers in high-need schools and teaching shortage subjects).

Merit pay is usually couched as a recruitment and retention issue–let's attract and keep good teachers by giving bonuses for performance– but the real question on merit pay is about teacher evaluation–if we're going to pay extra for the best performance, how do we fairly and accurately assess performance? Education Sector is hosting an event on this very question next Tuesday. Details here.

Ringing in the New Year

The student loan industry is likely hoping for a better start to 2008 than they experienced in 2007, when New York Attorney General Cuomo started off the year with an investigation into improper relationships between financial aid offices and loan companies.

Jonathan Vogel speculates over at Inside Higher Ed on what colleges and lenders can expect in 2008, as the fallout continues from Cuomo’s investigations.

New Year's Update

On vacation until Friday, thus the light, blackberry-based posting. Stay tuned for exciting features such as gratuitous Ohio State boosterism and why Diane Ravitch is wrong about comic books.