Dispatch From Barcelona

Last month I was sitting in a restaurant in the Eixample neighborhood of Barcelona, eating lunch, when a very old man began tapping me on the shoulder.

It was mid-afternoon, on a Saturday, and I was there on vacation with Maureen. The old man was at the table to our left, grinning and holding up an engraved pewter disk about three inches around. He was nattily dressed in suspenders, pressed slacks and a crisp white shirt. He said something that I didn't understand--in Catalan, I'm guessing--before the woman sitting across from him spoke. "It's his medal, from the government," she said. "He's 102 years old."

Travel is all about experiencing differences. But not all differences are the same.

The first are the most obvious kind: unique things that you can experience nowhere else. Like the Sagrada Familia, Gaudi's famed unfinished masterpiece. As much as travel books like to tout "hidden" aspects of cities and off-the-beaten-path attractions, sometimes you need to choke on a little tour bus exhaust and stand in line for an hour behind loud people wearing fanny packs because the path is beaten the way it's beaten for a reason. It's fascinating to walk through a grand cathedral mid-construction, particularly one as wildly artistic as this. We saw much of the Gaudi there is to see, all of it worthwhile (although the audio guide in Casa Battlo is absurdly enthusiastic, constantly referring to Gaudi as "history's greatest natural artist" or something along those lines). 

One thing puzzles me, though--Gaudi was of the Modernisme movement, a sort of Catalan Art Nouveau. People love it, just like everyone seems to like the wrought iron Metro signs in Paris and the Mucha posters that are all over Prague. Listening to a concert in Barcelona's jewel box of a music hall, the Palau de La Musica Catalana, is about as close as you can come to experiencing full synaesthetic overload without the help of highly illegal drugs. Why, then, don't people build Art Nouveau buildings now? It's not like the techniques are unknown. Yet the Gaudis are surrounded by blocks of nice but pedestrian buildings and nobody is making a new Casa Battlo. Are the forces of architectural fashion really so strong?

The second kind of differences are things that could be the same, but aren't. For example, at one point the little toes on Maureen's feet began to hurt--a new pair of sandals weren't entirely broken in. So we looked for a drug store. If we'd been here in DC, we'd have surely ended up in a CVS, i.e. the Worst Place In The Entire World. CVS is an affront to all that's good and decent, choked with sickening neon light, garish bags of poisonous food and a customer service experience that seems specifically designed to suck away your faith in humanity, bit by bit. But they've got a lock on the market and spread like fungus. (When the Dupont Circle art movie theater shut down last year--not the greatest place to see a movie, but still--it was replaced by a CVS even though there's another one, and I'm not exaggerating here, 100 yards away.) And the same is pretty much true everywhere, just substitute Duane Reade if you're in New York, etc.

Anyway, we walked around until we saw a green cross, the standard European sign for drug store. It was small, maybe one-fifth the size of a CVS. The decor was tasteful, the people behind the counter friendly and professional, and instead of Band-Aids we found a small tin of intricately wrought foam, fabric and adhesive bandages specifically designed for one and only one purpose: to alleviate sandal-induced pain on the outside of women's little toes. There's no good reason such a store couldn't exist in America. It just doesn't, because of various regulatory or business-related circumstances that could change. The world doesn't have to be the way it is, and sometimes it's the smallest things that make that most clear. 

The third kind of differences are those you don't see at all, because they don't exist. Barcelona is unique and interesting; that's why it's worth crossing an ocean to see. We spent two days driving through the Catalan hills, mostly looking at monasteries, some tucked away in high crags and others built in out-of-the-way valleys were monks still spend their hours in silent contemplation, pacing under curtains of stone. The city itself is, as Colm Toibin has written, "the only city in the world which was powerful during the fourteenth century and not afterwards." So the historic center is full of Gothic buildings and narrow passages that have been used for more or less the same purposes for the last six hundred years. There are beaches and stadia and museums and lots of restaurants that don't start filling up until near midnight. The wine is cheap and there's a certain appealing quality to everything that flows from an unusually rich culture that's maintained pride and identity despite centuries of waxing and waning subjugation. 

But no matter where you go people like to sit down with their families to relax and talk and eat on a mild weekend afternoon. 102 years old, and the man got up that morning, put on a good set of clothes, and headed out into the world for a walk and some wine and a good meal. The woman was his daughter and they were laughing and talking when we left. He was glad to be alive and wanted everyone, including the perfect stranger from another country sitting at the next table over, to know. 

Should New Era of Transparency Apply to Union Finances?

In theory, the new stimulus funding will have a new level of fiscal transparency that will tell us where and how the money was spent. Time will tell whether this actually happens and whether we will learn about how the funding was used. Given that we will not know a lot about how the base funding may have been reallocated, it will be difficult know how the stimulus funds were really used. But at least in theory, we will know more about how this funding is used than prior federal investments. Perhaps it is time to shed a little more light on how union funding is used. As union dues go up, what is the additional funding being spent on? Does the public have a right to know? Are union dues going up to compenate for all of the teachers that are being lost to job cuts, or are unions increasing salaries and expanding their influence. It would be interesting to know. (here)

My New Address

As some QuickandtheEd readers know, I started yesterday as executive director of the Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington, a consortium of 85 highly diverse independent schools educating 34,700 students in the Washington, D.C., region. I'll be leading a team that produces data and sponsors programs for AISGW schools on a wide range of topics, builds professional networks, and is a highly regarded voice for independent education and a source of expertise on independent school issues in the Washington region and beyond. Among other things, it's an opportunity to learn a lot about the day-to-day workings of schools.

In September, I'll begin writing the “Washington View” column for Kappan magazine on a wide range of federal and national issues, focusing on school reform. I've signed up to write a couple of longer national policy pieces. And I hope to continue to contribute to the good work of Education Sector.

Launching and leading the organization has been a tremendous experience. I’ve learned an immense amount. I’m more than a little proud of what our team has accomplished. And I leave the organization knowing that it's in good hands. There is a tremendous need for the independent analysis that Education Sector has brought to the education debate.

Here's my new contact information, and I looking forward to staying in touch.

Thomas Toch
Executive Director
Association of Independent Schools of Greater Washington
P.O. Box 9956
Washington, DC 20016
ttoch@aisgw.org
o) 202-625-9223
c) 202-487-5941

California will issue IOUs starting tomorrow, but schools will get more of them

The California budget has been at impasse for the last month and the state is about to start issuing IOUs instead of paying its bills. The Democrat controlled legislature wanted to solve a $24 billion budget problem with roughly 2/3 cuts and 1/3 new revenues (tax increases and fees) and the governor and minority legislative Republicans want an all cuts solution including the elimination of the state’s welfare program. The two sides have been at impasse for weeks, but the clock keeps ticking. And, a failed effort yesterday was the last day to come up with a solution without having to start to issue IOUs. So the state will start issuing IOUs later this week.

While the state’s budget is a disaster, there is a ray of sunshine for schools in all of the bad news. Yesterday was the last day of the fiscal year, and the legislature and governor had planned to reduce funding for schools for the 2008-09 fiscal year by $3.3 billion. Because these reductions were not made in the 2008-09 fiscal year, schools get to keep the money. It gets better. The state’s constitution provides a minimum funding guarantee referred to as Proposition 98. The minimum guarantee for each year, takes the prior years funding level and adjusts it for growth in the economy and number of students. So, the fact that the state did not cut funding for 2008-09 means that the state’s funding obligations for future years will also be higher. Of course the cuts to school budgets will have to be paid with IOUs, but that is a technical detail. For once, it appears that Sacramento’s dysfunction has actually benefited schools. Of course, finding a budget solution was hard enough with education being cut. Now it will be almost impossible. Health, social services and prisons were big losers last night because they will likely need to be cut even further to make up failure of the education cuts. But expect fewer lay offs in the schools this next year because of last nights stalemate. I am sure that California educators will keep their head low on this one, but it seems that they will have something to quietly celebrate this 4th of July.

Update: The Governor has declared a state of emergency, called a special session and proposed to suspend the constitutional school funding guarantee for 2009-10. This guarantee has only been suspended one other time and it did not go well ending in a lawsuit that eventually settled between Schawarzenegger and the teacher union.

Teachers Unions Don't Matter

Some say. Others argue that unions matter more than ever, not just for job security but also to push necessary reforms. Our survey last year showed a mix of opinions on the role of unions in improving public schools. Now we're digging in deeper with a small group of public school teachers from around the country--Mass, Minnesota, NYC, California and Florida--to hear their thoughts on unions and reform.

Online discussion starts tomorrow morning and continues through Thursday.

Questions are already coming in! Post yours here.

Higher Education Accountability Systems

In 2008 and 2009, Education Sector conducted a comprehensive analysis of higher education accountability systems in all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. We analyzed thousands of documents, Web sites, policies, and laws attempting to answer two questions:
1. What information do states collect on their higher education institutions?
2. How does the state use that information to improve its colleges and universities?

Based on this research, we graded every state accountability system in 15 categories. Some categories, including student learning outcomes, productivity, faculty scholarship, student engagement, and affordability, focus on the information states gather about various means and ends of higher education. Other categories, including governance, funding, and public information, focus on the ways states use information to hold institutions accountable for quality and results. To be clear, we did not evaluate state results in various higher education outcomes, but rather the breadth, accuracy, and strength of their systems designed to hold institutions accountable for results.

In each category, states were graded on a three-level scale. States with particularly well-developed measurement and reporting instruments earned a "best practice" rating. Others, with less complete efforts, received a rating of "in progress." States where little is being done, or vital elements are missing, garnered a "needs improvement" rating. The interactive map below has grades for every state in selected categories. Mouse over the states to see how they stack up*.




Grades were based on a range of factors, including accuracy, timeliness, comparability, and breadth of information. States received more credit for information reported consistently by all institutions than for information reported idiosyncratically by only a few. Because accountability must be transparent to be meaningful, we considered only publicly available information. Each state was given the chance to comment on our reviews, and about half took the opportunity to point out things we had missed, comment on our findings, or ask questions about our analysis.

Every effort was made to grade states consistently and fairly. But on some level, however, the grades represent the subjective judgment of the authors. The grades should be seen as tools for improvement. Even states that receive "best practice" ratings have room to learn from the innovations and experiences of their peers.

The report's main page is available here. It has a larger version of the interactive map and links to a summary document of our grading system and the grades in each of our categories, individual summaries for every state, and separate reports for each of our 15 categories. We released a report in December highlighting best practices and explaining why state accountability systems matter.

*Many thanks to Abdul Kargbo for putting together this map. Thanks also to Renee Rybak, Robin Smiles, and the entire ES communications team who helped put this project together.

Advertising Reform

I finally opened my copy of Diplomas Count, an annual publication from Education Week devoted entirely to issues around high school graduation, and I didn't get far before something caught my eye. It wasn't the article on Florida's data system, the piece on ensuring graduation rates mean the same state-to-state, or the map of graduation rates by county. It was the ad on the left.

It's an ad for professional development courses in mathematics, literacy, and school design from an organization called America's Choice. At the bottom of the ad is the part that caught my eye: all these services are available for purchase with American Recovery Reinvestment Act (ARRA), Title I, and Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) funds. According to its Web site, it produces "remarkable results" "improving test scores" and "helping students build confidence." What's disturbing is the thought that a state or district out there would see this ad, read that "evidence," and then purchase America's Choice products with stimulus money intended for preserving teaching jobs and fomenting reform.

Update: A commenter suggested my "attack" on America's Choice was over the line. That was not my intent. My problems are with the ad itself and a system where states and districts spend public monies on products that are advertised but whose effectiveness has been shown only through less-than-rigorous research.

The Truth About New York City's High Schools

Dana Goldstein and Ezra Klein both linked last week to a graphic showing the school choice process in New York. The graphic is originally from an excellent report by Clara Hemphill and Kim Nauer on the impact small high schools are having in New York City, but, unfortunately, Goldstein and Klein continue the media's misinterpretation of the report.

Let's start with the most egregious misuse of the report, the top line finding that small schools have negatively impacted large ones. As Mayor Bloomberg and Chancellor Joel Klein have opened hundreds of new small high schools, schools with high attendance and gradution rates, the remaining large ones have seen their enrollments balloon and their rates drop. One goes up, one goes down, so it must be a wash, right?

Wrong. Citywide attendance and graduation rates are up.

But the media never digested this. They focused on the negative, that large high schools are slightly worse than they used to be, and made that the emphasis of their coverage. The report was great not for its startling new findings but for its balanced look at New York's schools. It found, among other things:

• Klein has closed 21 large high schools that had some of the city's worst performance records and the lowest levels of student and parent demand. At the same time he's opened 200 new small high schools that enroll about one-fifth of the city's high schoolers.
• Small schools are not creaming. Following up on a US Department of Education finding that small schools are not discriminating, Hemphill and Nauer found that small schools enroll roughly the same proportion of at-risk students (overage, ELL, special ed, low-income) as other city high schools.
• Small schools are better, on average, than medium and large high schools. Small schools have higher four- and six-year graduation rates, attendance, and percentage of students earning more than ten credits, even after controlling for poverty.
• A new system for placing students in schools has decreased the number of students rejected by all of their schools from 31,000 in 2002 to 7,445 in 2009.
  

The report also featured a graph of New York City's high school graduation rate increasing over time. Even Jennifer Jennings' (of Eduwonkette fame, and one of Joel Klein's most vocal, intelligent, and statistically able critics) investigative piece on "discharges," students who leave school (supposedly to transfer) who never graduate and are never counted as dropouts, acknowledged that graduation rates have risen in the Klein era. According to the state's data, New York City's high school graduation rates have risen from 41 percent in 2002 to 56 percent in 2008. Meanwhile, white-black and white-Hispanic gaps have shrunk and the percentage of students earning the state's Regents diplomas increased 11 perecent between 2005 and 2008.

Goldstein and Ezra Klein seized on a graphic from the Hemphill and Nauer report showing the steps New York City students and parents must take to learn about and apply to high schools. And while it's true that the city's high school admissions process is complex--all eighth graders must list their top 12 choices from a list of almost 700 unique programs--Goldstein's reminder that "school reform means reforming all schools for all kids" and Ezra Klein's statement that, "school choice isn't supposed to simply amplify the benefits that kids from good homes already have," miss the progress being made. In almost no other city does a kid have such options, options that allow all students to select from all city schools. Evidence from the Hemphill and Nauer report actually shows that students and parents have gotten better at navigating this process over time. And, even though the city still graduates just over half its students in four years, the reforms undertaken by Bloomberg and Joel Klein have had a positive net impact for all the city's children.

The Terrible Power of Dumb Ideas

In a canny act of preemptive self-parody, Tom Friedman begins today's column as follows:

I was at a conference in St. Petersburg, Russia, a few weeks ago and interviewed Craig Barrett, the former chairman of Intel, about how America should get out of its current economic crisis. His first proposal was this: Any American kid who wants to get a driver’s license has to finish high school. No diploma — no license. Hey, why would we want to put a kid who can barely add, read or write behind the wheel of a car?

One can imagine Friedman's thoughts as he filed this beauty: "Suck on that, Matt Taibbi!" Friedman may not have invented the place-drop / name-drop / facile idea three-step, but he's certainly perfected it. 

Internet space is free yet I'm still resentful of the resources about to be wasted pointing out how ridiculous this is. But okay: Many high school drop-outs live in cities where you don't need a car to get around. As for those who don't--let's say you drop out of high school because your high school is terrible or you get pregnant or there's a family emergency or you're 16 and prone to foolish choices. A couple of years go by and you realize you need that diploma. How do you go back to school if you can't drive a car to get there? Or get to your job and feed your family in the meantime? Friedman and Venter seem not to realize that a sizeable majority of American teens don't attend Rydell High School. "Don't drop out, Kenickie--you won't be able to take your hot rod to the drive-in!" Plus, you don't actually need a high school education to be a good driver--for pity's sake, Dale Earnhardt was a drop-out. 

All of this would be merely aggravating if this kind of sad excuse for policy debate didn't have a real, detrimental impact on the lives of students. When you tell people that large problems can be solved with simplistic, nominally clever policy solutions, you're implicitly raising a question: "If it's so easy, why haven't we done it already?" That in turns breeds cynicism and mistrust, a jaded worldview in which large social problems are either fundamentally unsolvable or hostage to venal politicians who won't do the right thing even though the answer is so obvious that anyone with a lick of common sense can see it. And once you get there, the temptation is strong to throw up your hands and worry about something else. 

The high school dropout problem is serious business. We can do better, if we focus on improved funding, leadership, better teachers, curriculum and assessments tied to high standards, alignment with higher education, integration of social services, virtual high schools, and many other things. Meanwhile, Friedman continues to crank out endless slightly altered copies of columns that weren't very good to begin with, getting rich and making the world a dumber place along the way. 

Changing the Game

Typically video games are associated with violence and turning kids into couch potatoes. But a report released by the Sesame Workshop this week challenges this stereotype. The report, titled "Game Changer," discusses the potential benefits digital learning has on educating children and motivating them to make healthier choices.

Panelists commenting on the report at The Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars believe video games can serve an integral role for changing how students are evaluated on what they can do. David Rejeski who directs the Serious Games Initiative at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, said that games in classrooms today are limited to drilling students on facts. Rejeski heralded "serious games" as a way to cause students to become problem solvers.

Take for example the game Budget Hero. Players are placed in the shoes of Barack Obama and are presented with 160 real policy options of how to balance the nation’s budget. The applet does an effective job of taking a generally boring topic and turning it into an interactive learning experience. In fact, one teacher has written a two-day lesson plan around the game.

Budget Hero may be fun to play, but it is unknown how well the game can assess student learning across different student populations. Education and technology experts at the Woodrow Wilson event agreed that many small applets should be introduced to determine what works best as opposed to developing a few large-scale assessments that are more likely to fail. One benefit to testing digital assessments in classrooms is that video game developers can receive valuable feedback from teachers. Also, introducing teachers to interactive games will help them to become comfortable with using technology and the possibility of using high-stakes digital assessments in the future. A lot of work needs to be done to improve assessments, but it is refreshing to see that experts in the technology and education sectors are beginning to agree on the starting point: developing lots of applets for classroom evaluation.

-- Tim Harwood

Beyond Gender Equity in Education

Earlier this week, a panel at the Academy for Educational Development’s Center for Gender Equity on “Adolescent Girls and the Workforce” offered strong arguments for working towards gender equity jointly in education and the labor force worldwide. May Rihani, Director of AED’s Global Learning Group, opened the discussion by calling for secondary education to step up and become more relevant for all youth to pursue a diversity of fields in the workforce.

The UN defines gender parity as a combination of equitable ratios of girls to boys in primary, secondary, and tertiary education levels of education, average shares of women in wage employment, and proportions of national government seats held by women. While two thirds of all countries theoretically achieved gender equity by 2005 (according to the UN Millennium Development Goals), girls still do not have equal access to primary and secondary education in some regions of the world.

Sub-Saharan Africa, Oceania and Western Asia have the largest gender disparities in school enrollment. Furthermore, the disparity between educational equity and workforce equity remains vast. In South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa, 40 to 80 percent of young women are neither in schooling nor in the workforce. Of those that are in the workforce, two thirds work in vulnerable jobs including unpaid family employment or self-employment. These statistics are even more troubling given the current global economic crisis since hard-pressed households often cut costs by taking adolescents out of school and avoiding health check-ups.

Dr. Andrew Morrison of the World Bank recommended expansions of conditional cash transfer programs as one key to alleviating education and workforce inequities. Mexico’s Oportunidades conditional cash transfer (CCT) program, for example, pays poor mothers to send their children to school and get regular health check-ups. CCTs are spreading rapidly across the developing world, now existing in almost every South American country: Brazil (Bolsa Familia), Chile (Chile Solidario), and Panama (Red de Oportunidades) are just a few examples.

In regions where creating such large social safety nets are difficult to develop (or difficult to hold accountable given corrupt government systems), smaller initiatives like school feeding programs or in-school health clinics may suffice to dramatically improve children’s health and keep more kids in school as well as increase opportunities to reduce intergenerational replication of poverty.

--Parvathi "Parv" Santhosh-Kumar, Education Sector Intern

Tale of Three Turnarounds

Turning around a low performing high school may be the most difficult task in K-12 education. This week Sec. Duncan has suggested that charter schools should play a critical role in the effort to turn around low performing schools. Perhaps this comparison will start to suggest why. There is a lot to learn about two attempts started this year in Los Angeles Unified both of which have been backed with a lot of foundation funding. The first, Mayor Villaraigosa took control of Roosevelt High school and all of its feeder elementary and middle schools as part of compromise to the mayor failed attempt to take control of the entire district. It seems that the school take over business has not turned out to be a feather in his cap to help him in a run for the governor’s office that many speculated when he first proposed mayoral control. Villaraigosa gave up aspirations of the Governor’s office earlier this week, and we can only hope that this will give him more time to address the problems facing LA and investing energy in really turn around these schools. The first year of the mayors reform appears to be a disaster although the test results to confirm this will not be available for several month (here). Teachers have given the mayor a sound vote of no confidence the worst of which was a vote of 184 (no confidence) to 15 at Roosevelt. Much of the complaints seems to result from the ambiguity of the governance of the schools being both LAUSD schools and mayor schools with a lot of finger pointing between the two.

And the future for the mayor’s schools does not look very bright either. The mayor’s take over is not really much of a takeover because all of the teachers at his school are still a part of the school district staff and the teachers union and are part of the districts budget. I can only imagine how the fiscal relationship is going. The mayor’s staff did have some authority in choosing staff for the schools from the district’s existing staff. And, generally the schools have staff that are much younger than the district average. From a budget perspective this can be a good thing because the schools in theory should be able to provide more services for the same funding level. But, as LASUD implements budget cuts this year cutting thousands of employees based solely on seniority, a disproportionate number of those staff cuts will come from the mayor’s schools including many of his principals and an estimated 20 percent of the schools staff. This is not likely to add to the morale. The budget just adopted in LA appears to be a patch job that will set up the need for a whole round of additional cuts next year and the year after that. Details on budget just adopted. And if you look at the districts $10 billion in unfunded retiree health benefit obligations their budget pains may be longer than two or three years especially as broke as the state is.

Combine the general confusion of governance between the mayor’s office and the district with the lack of teacher support and a bleak budget future, and the path to success for Roosevelt seems unlikely.

In contrast, Locke High school, another of LA high schools that were among the lowest performing in the state, has been part of a hostile take over by Green Dot charter schools. There has been a lot of press about Steve Barr and Green Dot the last month including an entertaining article in the New Yorker. While there is a lot of work to do to turn this school around, it sounds like the process is on track as summarized in a LA Times article a couple days ago (here). It is clear that the campus is safer and less chaotic which is a first step for education happening. The governance of the school is clear, and it seems like systems to run the school with the effective Green Dot model are being put in place. Traditionally these type of charter schools start with a ninth grade cohort and then grow as that cohort moves through the system. Thus it may take 4 years to find out if this experiment is really working. But still I will be looking to see how Locke and Roosevelt do later this summer when the state test results are released.

For comparison purposes these two schools need to also be compared to a low performing high school run by the school district. Such comparison high schools are not hard to find in LA because there are so many of them. I chose Fremont Senior High. This school has been in school improvement under NCLB since 1997-98. In theory, the district has been required to implement reforms in this school for the last 11 years, and it has been in major governance restructuring under NCLB for the last 5 years. In addition, the school participates in a state turnaround program called the High Priority schools program.


Here are the test scores for 2007-08 for 10th graders for these three schools.
Percent of 10th graders proficient on state test in 2007-08
Roosevelt High (Mayoral takeover)
English 21% Algebra 3%

Locke High (Green Dot)
English 13% Algebra 5%

Fremont High (LAUSD - control)
English 12% Algebra 2%

Will update in August when the new test results are public. My money is on Steve Barr and Green Dot, how about you?

Dirty Laundry

The New York Times recently published a full-length article chronicling all the ways colleges and universities are cutting back in these recessionary times. The piece's intent was surely to show how bad things are, but these are the examples it gave:

• The University of Washington communications department is saving $1,000 a month by cutting land lines from its offices.
• Dickinson College saved $900 by making a swim meet with Bryn Mawr College "virtual." Each team swam in their own pools and then they compared the times. The college saved $150,000 by cutting free laundry service for students and $75,000 by eliminating ESPN and HBO in the dorms.
• UNC-Chapel Hill cut a bus tour that introduces new faculty members around the state.
• Oberlin saved $22,300 by reducing window washing. It's also reducing the hours at its cafe.
• Pitzer College is power washing its sidewalks only once this year instead of twice.
• Carleton College is reducing trash pickup from daily to weekly.
• Whitman College imposed limits on free printing in computer labs. It's $60 per semester this year and will be lowered to $50 next year.
• Whittier College will save $30,000 this year by eliminating cafeteria trays.
• Washington and Jefferson will no longer serve breakfast at Trustee's meetings; they'll have free passes to the cafeteria instead.
• Davidson College will save $10,000 by switching from bottled water to tap.
• Cornell College will not replace old voicemail equipment in order to save $40,000.

Cutting free laundry service, HBO, unlimited printing, and bottled water, these are the best the Times could come up with? See anything in the list about revamping the curriculum, developing online content, re-thinking the deployment of professors, re-establishing teaching as dominant over research, or anything more substantive than cafeteria trays?

It could just be sloppy journalism. The Chronicle of Higher Education has two slightly more meaty pieces in its latest issue. One chronicles the mismanagement of Greensboro College ($) that's leading to a 20 percent reduction for salaried employees. The other ($) found departmental cuts at Washington State University (theater, dance, German, and community and rural sociology), Florida Atlantic (Master's program in women's studies), Wisconsin Lutheran (political science), and Louisiana State (philosophy). These are important developments to the students and faculty studying or working in these particular departments, but as the articles describe, many were selected for the ax precisely because of faculty and student disinterest.

It could be there's just not that much to report. Like a lot of other industries, the higher education job market is dry and many current employees have taken pay cuts. But so far journalists covering these issues have yet to write about any sweeping, dynamic change that a higher education institution has pursued to cut costs or dramatically change the way they do business as a result of budget constraints.

Colleges Are Responsible for Everything, or Nothing, Depending

George Leef, vice president for research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, takes issue with a recent report I co-authored about college graduation rates. We criticized colleges with unusually low graduation rates compared to peer institutions with similar admissions selectivity. Leef is having none of it:

Even at schools with very low graduation rates, some students do graduate. They discipline themselves and work hard enough to earn the credits they need to graduate. It’s not that those who graduate were the “lucky” ones. Each student is in control of his destiny; either he does what is required, or he doesn’t. We’re not talking about dice here. We’re talking about human beings with free will.

That’s why I find it troubling that the authors repeatedly talk about schools “failing to graduate their students.” Colorado Christian College doesn’t “fail to graduate” 92 percent of the students who enroll there. Rather, only 8 percent do what is required of them to graduate.

Let’s place responsibility where it belongs.

(Note: Colorado Christian College contacted us after the report was published to say that they mis-entered their graduation rate data into the IPEDS system and that it's actually 39 percent.)

So Leef thinks what happens to students in college is solely dependant on what students put into the experience. Unless, of course, when he doesn't think that at all. Here's Leef writing last year at the National Review:

Here is an important article that explains how far France and Germany have gone in proselytizing against capitalism in their schools. They seem to be succeeding where the Soviet Union failed — in creating "the new soviet man." Young Frenchmen and Germans are taught about economics in a way that would make Karl Marx smile.

The indoctrination is worse there than here, but many American students also get a misleading, socialistic version of capitalism and business in their classes. Young Americans would subscribe to most of the ideas popular among the French and Germans — such as that welfare and government employment are rights.

The left has always understood that the way to wreck a society based on individualism and liberty is by reshaping the thinking of the young people. France and Germany are destined to become poorer, more regimented countries. There are lots of professors here who would say, "Right on!"

In other words, colleges have so little influence over the academic lives of their students that a 92 percent drop out rate is perfectly acceptable because degree completion is totally a function of whether students have the gumption and will to succeed. Yet colleges have so much influence over the academic lives of their students that the Marxist professoriate may very well "wreck" our entire society by indoctrinating students who are powerless to resist their professors' devious collectivist spell.

As I've said before, people have a remarkably fluid view of the efficacy of higher education. Leef subscribes to the Charles Murray IQ-determinist view of education and thinks we need to reduce access to college. So it's convenient to argue that colleges with low graduation rates are doing nothing wrong. But he also believes that leftist professors are conspiring to convert our youth to socialism, so it's convenient to blame colleges for the fact that young people tend to support an active role for the government in various aspects of the economy.

Assessing the Common Core

I'm at the Council of Chief State School Officers' (CCSSO) assessment conference, so naturally there was a big plenary session focused on the common core standards work (led in part by CCSSO). But, even though the session was held before hundreds of assessment experts -- and despite Secretary of Education Duncan's commitment of $350 million in stimulus funding to support assessment work based on the common core -- the panel delved only lightly into how the assessment part will come together.

The quota for standards movement skeptics is way oversubscribed and developing core standards for K-12 by the end of the year is already quite an endeavor. But, at the same time, it won't work if we're hoping that the thinking behind the assessment piece will just kind of come together at the end. If there's one thing that my assessment friends have taught me, it's about the co-dependencies and linkages between the two.

Here are a few initial thoughts on how to think about the assessment side of the equation and spend the Secretary's money wisely:

1. Use Assessment to Drive Support for "Fewer, Clearer, and Higher" Standards: Integrating the assessment conversation can strengthen both educator and political support for the common core. There is widespread agreement on the need to improve assessment, so the connection between improving assessment and "fewer, clearer, higher" should be explicit. If you want to assess more deeply and at a higher level of cognitive challenge, you'll likely need more extended performance-like tasks (like NAEP Science 2009 or PISA). These take more time to assess and can be expensive -- in other words, you need fewer. Clearer is also critical -- if the standards cannot be clearly defined within the curriculum, then we end up with generic tests and weaker instruments.


2. Don't Lock in Current Practice: My greatest fear is that we'll get these shiny new standards and then race to develop RFPs for a national common assessment. Any plan that invests heavily based on the current deeply embedded assessment tools and practices will show no more than very modest improvements.


3. Enable Both Sustaining and Disruptive Improvements: We need a 5-7 year plan to significantly improve student assessment, with investments all along the pipeline from crazy new idea to modest, low risk improvements. And, we need an intentional plan to evaluate and scale these up along the way. This implies a series of pilots at various scales, along with incentives to build demand so that successful ideas progress along the pipeline. (Read more about potential new ideas in Beyond the Bubble.)


4. Open Platforms and Shared Infrastructure: These are essential to drive down costs, enable scaling, and allow new ideas to penetrate from the edges. (See more in my previous post about standards.)


5. Be Smart About Where You Start: The earlier stage the idea, the more it needs to be tried in a low-risk, but still consequential, environment. If we hold every new idea to the current lowest common technology denominator or strictest technical and process constraints -- especially high-stakes testing constraints -- the ideas will not be very innovative. That said, every pilot needs to take a universal design approach and contemplate how it could work for all students (the open platforms will help here).

College Consumerism Run Amok?

The two dirtiest words in higher education these days are "climbing" and "wall."

Seriously, if you spend enough time attending conferences, reading op-eds, etc., you come to realize that that climbing walls have somehow come to symbolize all that ails post-secondary education in America today. People are constantly denouncing their proliferation, or loudly noting that their institution refuses to install one, or otherwise employing them as a symbol of consumerism run amok. Students today demand all manner of creature comforts, the thinking goes, forcing colleges to kow-tow to their every whim, which is why college is so expensive and academic standards are in decline and the academy in general is a pale shadow of its former, greater self, back when students were students and professors were professors and higher learning happened how and where it was meant to happen, that is, in unheated, dimly-lit buildings constructed entirely of large granite blocks quarried no later than the 16th century.

This puzzles me.

First, because of all the things to be upset about, climbing walls don't seem that bad. Are they really that expensive? At least students are getting some exercise. How about dorms that cost nearly $400,000 per unit? That's extravagance.

Second, because colleges act as if they have no influence over the consumer preferences of students. Which is ridiculous. For example, some time in the near future I'm going to drive to the Best Buy on Route 1 in Alexandria, Virginia, and buy a flat-screen television, The store offers something like a hundred different models to choose from. In making my selection, I'll be asking a number of questions. How big is it, measured diagonally, in inches? How many HDMI inputs? Ethernet connection? Plasma, LCD, or LED? Are there 1080 lines of resolution? 120 Hz or the more powerful 240hz? And so on.

How do I know to ask these questions? And why is every similar customer, regardless of where they live and where they're shopping, asking the same questions? Because that's how flat-screen televisions are advertised. I also consulted independent reports like this article in the New York Times, which advises that LEDs are really just backlit LCDs and I only need 240hz if I'm going to spend a lot time watching fast-motion programming like pro football. (I won't be; I'm more of an HBO and Showtime guy.) So there's some marketing b.s. to wade through. But it's safe to say that there are no crucial elements of flat-screen televisions that aren't readily available for me to understand.

By contrast, let's say I was trying to choose the right college for my (non-existent) 17-year old daughter. And let's say I'm the perfect higher education consumer from the academy's perspective--I don't care at all about climbing walls or fitness centers or luxury dorms or any of that stuff. I care about all the truly important things I'm supposed to care about: the quality of the teaching, scholarship, and academic environment, how the school will help my daughter become an enlightened, ethical, fair-minded public citizen.

How would I choose? Where would I get that information, in a way that would allow me to decide among hundreds of alternatives? Answer: nowhere, because it doesn't exist. Colleges may complain about having to market themselves based on dorm-based pilates studios and whatnot, but it's not like they have some other secret brochure in a filing cabinet somewhere, filled with all the real information about the true meaning of higher education, materials that they would gladly distribute far and wide if only students weren't so coddled by their helicopter parents and addled by the rap music and the video games.

In fact most colleges don't systematically gather this kind of information, or if they do--via the National Survey of Student Engagement or something similar--they don't release it to the public. Yes, yes, colleges are lot more complicated than televisions. But nobody can say with a straight face that colleges are doing nearly as much as they could to provide consumers with information about teaching and learning that's useful for making consumer choices--that is, presented in a way that allows for institutional comparisons.

Even the data that colleges do gather, like graduation rates, are usually buried on the IR department Web page somewhere. Why? Because graduation rate are frequently terrible. And that's the real climbing wall scandal: they're cheap, compared to the cost of improving the quality of instruction that many undergraduates receive. If colleges want consumers to make choices differently, then colleges have take the lead in creating, promoting and standing behind different terms of consumer choice.

More Standards, Please

Why is a highly promising, successfully piloted technology that can help resolve a number of important issues around testing students with special needs -- and save money -- still sitting on the shelf?

In this case, the barrier is getting the tools to integrate into current testing processes and software platforms. Sounds complex and geeky, but here's a helpful analogy: One of the powerful aspects of the Internet is that standards enable Web site creators' work to be accessible to anybody with a browser. And, the browsers are built to accommodate a variety of add-ins or helper applications to build new functionality and tools into the standard browser. But, imagine if each state had a different browser. And, for states to choose your new tool, they had to abandon their current browser (and all of the Web sites built to work with that browser).

Bubble sheets, scanners, and a variety of psychometric principles are part of a deep set of standard, shared tools that enable the current methods of assessment. If we want a much better system of assessment, it's not just content standards that policymakers need to think about. A variety of open standards and infrastructure for student data, growth modeling, and assessment software platforms also need to be implemented. Just as in content, a lack of open standards and shared infrastructure in these areas is a critical barrier to comparability. Perhaps more importantly, it's a costly, tangible barrier to the incorporation of new ideas and technologies.

Take read-aloud and other accommodations on a math test, for instance. (In order to ensure that the test assesses math and not reading, instructors read the questions and other information aloud.) While some states may have scripts to follow, it's almost impossible to ensure any type of consistency across thousands of readers providing accommodations in thousands of schools. Simple differences in the way a reader chooses to describe (or not describe) charts, graphs, and other information can skew the results. In this case, some common protocols across states would greatly enhance current practice.

Moreover, these common protocols would also enable us to develop a next generation of solutions to the problem of accommodations. States are already successfully piloting software tools, based on universal design principles, that can automate read-aloud and a wide variety of other accommodations. Not only do these tools ensure consistency, but they also eliminate the real costs to local schools of providing accommodations. Perhaps most importantly, the accommodations paradigm changes, providing students an element of control over pace and a variety of factors that can optimize the test-taking environment.

Investments in shared infrastructure to set the stage for long term growth and development -- can we get this shovel ready?

Scaling Innovation in Assessment (in China)

While the rest of the policy world is at the national charter school love fest conference, I'm in Los Angeles at the national student assessment conference.

I had one of my more disturbing, but unfortunately, not surprising, conversations yesterday after a session where I learned more about an innovative, NSF-funded science assessment project. "What's next?" I asked the presenter. "How are you going to scale this up into more classrooms across the country?"

"I don't know," he replied. He told me that the commercial publishers weren't really interested. And, despite the relevance of the project, which uses advanced simulations and has shown promising results in improving students’ understanding of both science content and the process of scientific investigation, neither were districts and states.

He did not know how to bring this innovation to scale -- at least in the United States. "But they are really interested in China," he told me, and went on to explain Chinese educators' plans to implement the NSF funded initiative (which is probably funded under the guise of helping America's students to compete).

IDEA Stimulus Money...Gone?

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (commonly known as the stimulus bill) provided $12.2 billion in new funding for the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA). Could one Supreme Court decision eat it all up?

Turnaround Jumper

Michael Jordan was a great, great basketball player, both for his God-given abilities and his drive to succeed. He could float above the rim in awe-inspiring ways, and it was his determination that led him from being cut as a high schooler to the world's best all-time player. These things are well known. What's less appreciated about Jordan is his development from a physical player reliant on slam dunks, quickness, and leaping ability to a wily veteran who perfected a difficult move later in his career.

That shot, the fade away turnaround jumper, is known as one of the more difficult in basketball. The offensive player stands with his back to the hoop, pivots quickly to face the basket, and jumps backwards and away from the defender. It is difficult to contest, because the defender must jump across the offensive player's body, time the jump perfectly, and get to the ball all without touching the shooter's body. But, because the shooter is falling away from the basket, he must shoot against his momentum, which requires strength and grace uncommon in an ordinary player. In other words, a player like Jordan, a guy who wants to prolong his career by mastering a high-risk, high-reward shot.

School turnarounds are equally difficult and important, because they seek to halt the inertia of our country's worst schools and push them towards a high goal. Our basketball-playing Secretary of Education gave an excellent speech on the topic today at the National Charter Schools Conference. It was a symbolic venue for a speech in which Secretary Duncan called for an expanded role for charters in school turnarounds. While acknowledging the need to maintain tight quality controls, Duncan made clear his intention to focus on turning around the fortunes of the bottom five percent of schools.

It's a smart move to call on charters for this work. Charters have the capacity to innovate in ways that traditional public schools do not--by expanding the school day or year, modifying the curriculum, and giving flexibility to school leadership in budgetary, personnel, and other decisions. With this flexibility must come high accountability demands from charter authorizers. And, because unsuccessful charters are more easily shuttered than traditional public schools, charters make sense as instruments of change. If they are not successful, they can be closed and something new can be tried.

If this sounds like a losing proposition for the charter school movement (they get the toughest assignments and might get blamed for failure), it could also be seen as opportunity. Charter schools continue to have an identification problem. The general public doesn't always understand what they are, and they are occasionally misrepresented as a stalking horse for the privatization of education. Taking on an expanded role in turning around the worst schools in the country could give charters the opportunity to show their value. Improving the educational attainment of the kids attending perennially dismal schools would be hard to dismiss or ignore.

One could argue charters are doing this already. Many are explicitly designed for low-income and minority students trapped in failing traditional public schools. But they continue to be seen, fairly or not, as skimming the students who have a desire for improvement. That image would fade if the charter sector answers Duncan's call.

This process will not be clean, and Duncan may have overreached with the five percent figure (why not start with the five worst schools in each state, or some other definable, achievable number?), but he's set the right goals. His speech today was a very good start; now it's time for the nation to work on their turnarounds.