Wednesday, July 15, 2009
Teachers First, Kids Second?
In a recent Education Sector online discussion, Laura Bornfreund states, “the challenge of teachers’ unions has little to do with the professional nature of the work and everything to do with the product they are producing: a public good.” I’d say the challenge has to do with both professionalism and the end product. But does this production of a public good mean that the union should be expected to lead or unreservedly support reform initiatives in the school system? Absolutely not. Let’s be real. That is not the union’s job, nor should it be.
Now I’ll be the first to admit that the union has its problems as the Citizens’ Commission on Civil Rights so accurately lay out. Unions (NEA in particular) are wrong to create a system that can encourage complacency and resistance to instructional improvement in schools.
So yes CCCR, it would be great if unions would support or help shape more effective reforms like these. And yes, they need to be more rational in their resistance to certain reforms. (This might happen if more teachers, who agree with these reforms, had more of a voice in their union…but that’s another discussion). However, we must not expect unions to accept every reform idea thrown at our school system and condemn them if they do not. Most (not all) teachers want what’s best for the students or we wouldn’t have entered this extremely challenging (and underpaid) profession. So the union’s perspective is one that definitely needs to be heard and respected in these reform debates, making sure that while we figure out what’s best for the students, the teachers who are the implementers of reforms do not get lost in the shuffle.
A Next Step for School Choice?
A fascinating proposal is being considered by the Los Angeles school board (here). Yesterday was the first meeting on it. The district has 50 schools that will come on line in the next couple of years. Instead of having the district run all of these new schools, Yolie Flores Aguilar, the vice president of the board, has proposed that there be a competitive process to determine who runs these new school sites. The school district itself could be one of the bidders, but would have to compete against others including charter school providers, union run schools, the mayor, and other non-profit/community groups. The thought of having the school district itself compete to run these schools would truly by a new evolution in thinking about the role of a school district. Finding adequate facilities is one of the biggest barriers to creating a new charter school. Some charter schools have been able to gain access to existing school facilities in LA, but generally these schools have been the bottom of the barrel facilities. Under this proposal brand new schools would be in play. As can be expected, this proposal will face much union opposition, and would likely create a lot of foundation support. As the LA Times editorial board concluded, this is a proposal worth consideration especially for the school sites that are located in parts of the districts where students do not currently have viable high quality school choice options. Setting up an effective set of criteria to determine who would operate the schools and expectation benchmarks that would need to be met to continue to operate the school would be a must. The specifics of the proposal start on page 7 (here). -- |
Calculating Costs
Last fall Congress passed the Higher Education Opportunity Act (HEOA) which included, among other things, a requirement that colleges and universities supply an online calculator of expected net costs. These calculators would enable prospective students and their parents to get a prediction of their actual costs, after subtracting a family's probable financial aid package from the institution's gross tuition and fees. The US Department of Education is developing a template, set to be released later this summer, that colleges could adopt with only minor adjustments. The HEOA requires the calculators to be live three year's after the law's passage (a little over two years from now). From this morning's Chronicle ($), we find that two colleges have already adopted their own versions and made them available to prospective students, and it wasn't all that hard to do:
Purdue built its calculator with the help of the university's IT office, and it took about two months, [the university's senior associate director of financial aid] said.A common complaint of university officials is that families will not understand that these calculators return only expected numbers and are not binding guarantees. Both Purdue and Smith College, the other early adopting institution, have found that not to be the case. Smith, for example, used to publish in its viewbook sample financial aid packages awarded to hypothetical families of different incomes. Real families often complained that their situation was similar to these hypothetical examples; the new calculator has reduced complaints and Smith now gets far fewer calls from families asking for explanations on how different assets are treated. At Purdue, more than 125,000 people used the calculater between September and March.
The true costs of higher education have been increasingly obscured by complex pricing models under which institutions list high tuition and fee costs but then distribute large financial aid packages. Other than national trends, families have been left in the dark about how much aid they should expect. The new calculators are one way of removing the guesswork.
Update: A commenter asked whether these calculators will be available to the public or only for applying students. The answer is they must be made available to the general public, but, in thinking about how to respond to the question, I thought it would be nice to be able to link to the fine work done by Purdue and Smith.
It turns out I can't. Purdue has a Web site up saying its calculator is not currently available, and I cannot find any evidence of Smith's site (it could exist, but I get paid to do things like this. If I can't find it, how likely are prospective students and parents to find it? I digress). There are, however, similar calculators available for Princeton, MIT, Yale, Williams, and Amherst. The College Board runs its own version to calculate Expected Family Contribution, but that is a far cry from a predicted cost at a specific institution. -- |
The Libertarian's Dilemma
A couple of weeks ago I was invited to attend a meeting at the Cato Institute to discuss a new paper that explores why higher education is perpetually becoming much more expensive and what do about it. I was happy to attend; while my politics are pretty far from Cato's and I often think they're wrong, they tend to be wrong in interesting ways. And in this case I thought the paper was quite good (more on why below). Its top-line recommendations track closely with something I write about a lot: the need for more transparency and public information about how well colleges and universities serve their students and help them learn.
The problem is that colleges aren't just going to unilaterally release lots of new information on their own. Nor would it help matters much if they did; for data to matter it has to be standardized in a way that allows for comparison. That's why companies report one set of quarterly financial results to the SEC, not 50 different sets to each state. Given that higher education is a national market this leads to a similar national solution: the federal government should compel colleges to release much more information about success as a condition of receiving direct or indirect federal aid.
This puts libertarians in somewhat of a box. On the one hand, they tend to be hostile toward the tens of billions of public dollars that flow into colleges every year. The more colleges cost, the greater the claim on the average citizen's hard-earned money and thus reduction in their precious liberty etc., etc.
But the best way to bend down the long-term higher education cost curve and thus reduce government spending is to increase government regulation in the form of mandatory reporting. So it's a pick your poison situation for the Cato folks--would you rather have Big Brother's hand in your wallet or his eye on your business? You really can't avoid both.
The paper itself, by Robert Martin, is admirably clear and concise, running through a lot of basic economic theory and how it applies to spiralling college costs. Some of it is familiar--the principal / agent problem, Bowen's revenue-to-cost hypothesis, etc.--but it's always nice to see these ideas restated in compelling ways. Good parts include:
Unlike for-profit firms, the nonprofit organization is accountable to a number of groups. It not only serves its “customers” (in the case of higher education, students) but also its third-party payers (taxpayers or private donors). The nonprofit’s customers know about the quality of the product or service, but third-party payers have very little firsthand knowledge about quality. For example, the taxpayers who support a state university are subsidizing the cost of students’ education. If the students minimize their efforts, spending more time at football games and parties than in learning, or if educators shirk their responsibilities, giving outdated lectures and not showing up for office hours, they may deliver results well below what taxpayers and donors expect. But taxpayers and donors probably do not know about it.
And:
In higher education, the principals are taxpayers, students, parents, alumni, and donors, while the agents are faculty, administrators, and board members. As is always the case, the interests of all of these parties are not perfectly aligned.
One rarely encounters a venal person in higher education. Theft is rare in the ivy halls. Most people working in higher education are dedicated, sincere, and conscientious. But they are also human beings subject to normal human failings.
The particular human failing that leads to the agency problem is the assumption that whatever is in our own interest is also in the institution’s interest. Often we are unaware that our interests do not coincide with those of the institution.
I’ve experienced this lack of awareness myself. As a faculty member at a private liberal arts college, I welcomed lower teaching loads and smaller classes, telling myself that these benefits gave me time and opportunity to improve my teaching and research. I also welcomed liberal sabbatical policies, more research funds, reduced contact hours, and liberal travel funds for much the same reasons.
Similarly, senior administrators can persuade themselves that lavish offices, extensive building projects, expensive public relations events, luxury travel, and high compensation are in the institution’s interest. Board members may consider expensive social events to be in the institution’s interest. The inability to recognize when our personal benefit deviates from the institution’s benefit leads
to excessive costs.
And:
To understand the incentives that operate in higher education, we need to recognize that the chief objective of the producers may not be education per se, but maximizing the school’s reputation...[This leads]to a bias against reform and a bias toward increasing revenues rather than cutting costs...Pointing out problems leads to controversies, and controversies damage reputations; hence, reform damages reputations. Even admitting that there are unresolved problems at the institution can damage its reputation...Suppose you are a faculty member, an administrator, or a
board member. Fixing a serious problem will take years, and it will involve considerable controversy. Alternatively, the problem and the controversy can often be temporized by applying more cash to the institution. With more money, for example, more appealing courses can be added without eliminating those with low registrations. Faculty members, administrators, and board members ask themselves: Do I want my tenure to be known for controversy or to be known for an increasing flow of new funds into the institution? The answer is obvious. More funds trump controversies. Thus, board members hire presidents for their fund-raising abilities and pay lip service to cost control.
And:
Bowen’s revenue-to-cost hypothesis is sometimes compared to another traditional explanation for rising higher education costs, “Baumol’s cost disease” (Baumol and Bowen 1967). The two explanations are not competing hypotheses, but Bowen’s appears to have more direct relevance to higher education...higher education finance is a black hole that cannot be filled. The relationship between revenues and subsequent costs has a dynamic feedback effect. Higher education responds to higher costs by raising tuition and fees or initiating fundraising campaigns. But because costs in higher education are capped only by total revenues, there is no incentive to minimize costs. The costs go up in tandem with revenues. The next year, the cycle begins again because the higher costs mean that the new programs must be financed by additional revenues. There is thus a never-ending spiral effect between revenues and cost.
Taking a Close Look at the Middleman
The New America Foundation released a report yesterday looking closely at the confusing and slightly mysterious role of guaranty agencies in the federal student loan program. These non-profit entities play several roles in administering federal loans - some are vestigial and no longer necessary for the federal loan program to function, while others are ill-defined and poorly monitored. And, as the report describes, the payment structure for the agencies' various functions can run counter to the interests of taxpayers and borrowers.
The report makes it clear that it is time to overhaul the role of guaranty agencies in the federal loan program in order to remove unnecessary activities (and federal payments for them) and focus guaranty agencies' energies and money on a truly important task - helping students repay their loans and preventing students from defaulting. -- |
TIME Act Reintroduced
Kennedy’s back with round two of the TIME---Time for Innovation Matters in Education---Act. The acronym could use some work but the proposed legislation looks pretty good and is well-timed following declarations by both Obama and Duncan about the need to expand school time.
The TIME Act expands school time in high-need schools so low-income students have more opportunities to learn. It’s based, and not loosely, on the model used by Mass2020 -- planning and evaluation are front and center, there is a lot of flexibility in how time is used, and schools must increase time for core academics, enrichment activities, and teacher planning and collaboration. In total, TIME authorizes $350 million in the first year and up to $500 million in 2014 for competitive grants to state education agencies, who will match a percentage of the grant (10% in first year and up from there) and then distribute at least 90% via subgrant process to locals—the rest is for state planning, evaluation and technical assistance (on tech assistance, look for a lot of groups stepping up to offer their services to states—besides the obvious National Center on Time & Learning which is intimately tied to the TIME Act.
Things you should know about the TIME Act:
• It targets high poverty schools (50% or more students FARM eligible) so it’s going to reach the kids who need it most. I’m very glad to hear less of the talk about how American kids can’t compete and the whole public school calendar is antiquated and therefore we should extend school from dawn to dusk and birth to death—and hear more about the fact that poor kids need shorter breaks and better opportunities to learn. This is what it’s always been about, this is what the research backs, and this is the only way to budge the big hand on the clock (there are still plenty of parents and teachers in happy middle class suburbs that have no intention of expanding the schedules or calendars in their schools—maybe in ten years, or twenty, but not yet). Risk of targeting high-poverty schools of course is that these schools are likely to be low-performing and may not have the capacity they need to pull it off. See further down…
• Grants are for 6 years. This type of initiative needs time, no pun, since it’s a major shift in custom and culture to see school as more than a 6-hour a day Labor to Memorial Day endeavor. And years are necessary to determine, at the district, state and national level, which time models are the most sustainable and effective as reforms—again, the idea of redesigning school schedules and calendars is no small thing so if we’re going to do this we should figure out what works and what doesn’t. On this note, TIME Act includes money for a national evaluation.
• The 6 years includes a full year for planning with a subset of schools. This year of planning is essential—not every school is ready for this and the potential for wasted money and time is enormous. Planning year, plus competitive nature of grants should help avoid the “bad schools now open longer” problem. This is very real risk--increasing student learning is of course the goal here but there are incentives to keep kids in school, even if they’re not learning anything. Parents want to know their kids are safe, businesses don’t want to be responsible for policing kids in the afternoon, and police don’t really want this responsibility either. [As an aside, I once asked the principal of a high school where I worked why students were watching Jerry Springer from 4-5pm every afternoon—just watching, not discussing, not thinking. The principal said it was a reward for good behavior all day and helped keep them engaged in school. I'll stop there].
• Restrictions on how the time can be used are few and intentionally imprecise, although there is a hard fast number for the amount of time schools must extend time by--- at least 300 hours (an arbitrary number). Still, schools have a lot of leeway in choosing how they use those hours-- to enhance learning in core academic subjects, or for enrichment, or for teacher planning and collaboration. Schools can extend by hours in the day, days in the week, weeks in the year—or any combination. And there is additional flexibility built in for high schools---elementary and middles must extend for all kids, but high schools have to do so for only kids in at least one grade—likely this is aimed at younger students, so ninth-grade academies and small school initiatives will align nicely with this. This kind of flexibility is important not only in an operational sense—schools have different needs---but also in an experimental sense—again, to learn what works in what context. Risk here is that flexibility puts a lot of pressure on the leadership to build a schedule and organize staff with some serious strategy in mind.
• There are also few restrictions on who is doing what to extend time--so partnerships can be forged between LEAs and universities and community agencies. This will bridge the worlds of school-based and out-of-school learning, which is good. But it will be messy at first—who provides which services, who hires and oversees staff, who serves as the fiscal agent, and who's accountable for what outcomes? All questions that the extended time movement will stir up and hopefully help answer. -- |
Duncan needs to pressure Washington State
Sec. Duncan has put pressure on several states to either change their charter school cap policy or pass a charter school law. For example, Duncan has pushed Tennessee to increase the number of students that could attend a charter school. He discouraged Indiana from imposing a stricter cap on charter schools. There are still 10 states that do not allow charter schools. The Secretary called out one of these states a while ago as the state’s legislature was considering a charter school law – Maine.
Charter schools in Maine, really? This is a state where the largest city Portland, Maine has a total population of 63,000. Most communities in the state are too small to support a charter school even if they were allowed. Portland has a total of 14 regular schools including 8 elementary schools and these are all relatively small schools by national standards. So, maybe it could support one or two charter schools. In addition, the state’s population is decreasing. So, how many other communities in Maine would have a large enough student population to support multiple elementary schools? Is this one of the places to wage a war to expand charter schools?
I spent a chunk of last summer doing some work in Montana, another rural state without charter schools. I can’t imagine more than a few cities in that state even having enough students to support a new school let alone a new charter school. Perhaps Missoula Billing or Helena, but not likely anywhere else. To my knowledge there are only a couple private schools in the whole state. Perhaps there may be some reason to create distant learning charter schools to support home schoolers in these rural states, but site based programs would be limited in many of these states.
There are some states where the Secretary has not made enough noise about the lack of charter schools. At the top of my list is my home state of Washington. Washington has over 1 million students, the 15th largest student population in the country. The largest city has almost 600,000 people, and most of the state’s population is centralized along the west coast of the state within a couple of hours of Seattle. In the largest school district in Seattle – Seattle school district – almost a quarter of students attend private school. So this is not a state that is opposed to school choice. It is the home of Bill Gates, one of the most important charter school supporters. It is also home to the Center for Reinventing Public Education, one of the leading charter school research groups that could help design an effective charter approval and oversight process. So, here is a state where charter schools could really make an impact, but the state is not stepping up.
The state’s teacher union has been able to keep the charter school advocates at bay including a $3 million state initiative effort funded by Paul Allen around 2000. And in 2004, when the legislature finally acted to approve a charter school law, WEA and NEA will able to go to the voters and have it repealed.
This is a state where an Obama support for charter schools would likely make a difference. This state loves Obama. In the fall election he received 58 percent of the vote. But, perhaps more important in this Democrat controlled state, 68 percent supported Obama against Clinton in the primary. So encouragement to Sec. Duncan, put Washington state on the top of your list of states that need a charter school scolding. Based on a quick look at demographics add Kentucky, Alabama, and Nebraska to the states that need a little harassing on charter school law. You can likely leave the rest of the non-charter school states alone including Maine.
Basic Demographics of Non-Charter school states.
Washington
1,033,000 students, 97.2 people per sq mile, largest city Seattle (593,000),
Cities with greater than 100,000 people – 6 cities
Alabama
749,000 students, 91.3 people per sq mile, largest city Birmingham/Hoover (229,000),
Cities with greater than 100,000 people – 4 cities
Kentucky
683,000 students, 106.8 people per sq mile, largest city Louisville (558,000),
Cities with greater than 100,000 people – 2 cities
Nebraska
288,000 students, 23.1 people per sq mile, largest city Omaha (433,000),
Cities with greater than 100,000 people – 2 cities
West Virginia
279,000 students, 75.3 people per sq mile, largest city Charleston (53,000),
Cities with greater than 100,000 people – 0 cities
Maine 189,000 students, 42.7 people per sq mile, largest city Portland (63,000),
Cities with greater than 100,000 people – 0 cities
Montana – 143,000 students, 6.5 people per sq mile, largest city Billings (102,000),
Cities with greater than 100,000 people – 1 city
South Dakota – 121,000 students, 10.5 people per sq mile, largest city Sioux Falls (152,000), Cities with greater than 100,000 people – 1 cities
North Dakota – 95,000 students, 9.3 people per sq mile, largest city Fargo (93,000),
Cities with greater than 100,000 people – 0 cities
Vermont – 92,000 students, 67.2 people per sq mile, largest city Burlington (38,000),
Cities with greater than 100,000 people – 0 cities -- |
The State of Our Nation's Children
The Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics released its annual report on the well-being of America's children today. It tracks measures in eight key areas ranging from demographics and family background to health care, behavior, and education. The report is worth checking out in full, but I've chosen to highlight some selected findings below.
The chart below shows child poverty rates over time. As the middle line indicates, the percentage of children in poverty has hovered near 20 percent since 1980 and is notable for its lack of variation. The most notable positive finding is that the percentage of children living in poverty has declined for families with females as heads-of-households.
This next chart shows the percentage of youth living in various household structures, by whether or not the adult(s) were employed. All of the categories have risen over time, suggesting that more adults have more secure employment than they did in 1980 (this is of course a general trend upward and current unemployment numbers suggest at least a temporary downturn on this measure). Household with two married parents have consistently been more economically stable than other family structures.
Part of the reason children are increasingly living with working adults is the next graph, which shows the percentage of children born to unmarried mothers by age group. Children born out of wedlock has risen for every age group except 15-17 year-olds. Births from eighteen and nineteen year-olds has risen slightly in the last few years, but remain well off the modern high in the early 1990s.
The next graph shows the percentage of children aged 6-17 who qualify as overweight according to body mass index calculations from the Center for Disease Control. It shows a steady increase in overweight children, male and female, between 1976-80 and 1999-00. The percentage of overweight adolescents has increased from six percent to 17 over the graph's time frame, numbers which seemed low to me. 
If anyone needs further evidence of how a housing bubble developed, look no further. The chart below shows the percentage of children living in households where the cost of housing was greater than 30 percent of the family's income. It rose from 15 to 37 percent, suggesting that more families are spending more money on housing. The percentage of children living in households spending more than 50 percent of their monthly income on housing costs alone has gone from six to 16. These numbers include both renters and owners.
Find all the indicators here.
-- |
School Districts Without Schools
This is a pretty incredible story. Among the 285 school districts in this country that don't actually operate a single school is this one:
Tavistock, for example, is a golf course with some big homes on it - and a total of 20 residents. But it has its own local government and school board. In the coming year, the little town with seven homes will send one student to school in neighboring Haddonfield, paying a total tuition of $14,805.
According to Wikipedia, the town of Tavistock was formed to allow the members of the Tavistock Country Club the ability to play golf on Sundays.
Hat tip Gadfly. -- |
Free
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired magazine and author of The Long Tail, has a new book out called Free: The Future of a Radical Price. His basic hypothesis is that businesses need to adapt to a new world where the price of Free (Anderson always gives it the capital "F") is the Future. Anderson, while providing some really interesting and compelling examples, overstates the case for Free. Malcolm Gladwell's review reads as if it was written by a person who gets paid to write for a living. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but both views are slightly off.
First, it's admirable that Anderson is taking Free seriously. Not only does he write a book explaining how others need to adapt to Free, he has made his entire book available on Google for Free for the next month. It's an engaging read, and I strongly encourage it if for no other reason than to learn about lots of interesting businesses. But, while Anderson's examples of Free are interesting, note that none of them are actually Free in every sense of the word:
- Gillette gives away razors Free but charges for the blades.
- Google gives away searches, a blogging service, a news feed, email, chat, and other products Free. But it collects your information and targets you for ads.
- Zecco gives away 10 Free stock trades a month if you have at least $25,000 in your account. It charges if you have less money than that or if you make more trades. It also makes interest when you leave money sitting in cash.
- Craigslist charges for job listings in seven cities only and for apartment listings in only one city (New York). Everything else is Free.
- SecondLife lets everyone have an avatar and explore the game for Free. It charges half a million paid users between $5 and $195 a month to rent virtual real estate.
- Webkinz has been the number one toy in America for two years. You have to buy a real stuffed animal, but then you have access to a Free web site, where you can also upgrade by paying more money.
- Runescape lets 5 million users play on its site for Free, but these are subsidized by the one million paid subscribers that generate $60 million in revenue a year (more than the most profitable online news content site, The Wall Street Journal, which is partially Free and partially not).
- Disney's Club Penguin is a Free website where users can have their own penguin and igloo. Users can upgrade their igloo or buy a virtual pet for their virtual penguin for $6 a month. It generates $40 million in revenue annually, and Disney paid $700 million to acquire it in 2007.
The list goes on: strip clubs let you see the show for Free but charge you for drinks. Casinos charge you for the shows but let you drink for Free. Etcetera, etcetera.
These are all interesting examples, but they're not all Free in the sense that they cost $0.00. They're free in that users can sample a version, but to get the full experience (or repeat it) they must pay, somehow or other. This is different than free.
Gladwell, while opposing Free intellectually, actually embodies it in his work. He works for a magazine with paid subcribers, but he makes a lot of those available on his Web site, and he makes his real money on his books and speaking engagements. Even his employer, The New Yorker, embodies some Free principles. It makes a significant portion of its magazine freely available online, including Gladwell's semi-regular columns (and book reviews!).
What's most interesting about Free is that it's not new at all. Information has always been passed by word of mouth. Businesses have always promoted themselves with sample products and free give-aways. Technology has sped all this up, but it's not new.
Some industries have adapted better than others. Newspapers, by and large, have not done it smoothly. Free shares the story of a Portuguese newspaper that used Free to boost its sales 36 percent over three months when it began offering Free silverware with every newspaper purchase. If you bought Monday's paper you'd get a free spoon, Tuesday a fork, and so on. Weekend edititons, the best selling and highest priced days, earned readers serving utensils. If you bought the paper every day for three months, you'd accumulate a full set.
Music, comparatively, has adapted much better than newspapers. It had to figure out how to survive on the radio, then on television, and now on the Internet. Record companies have struggled to block the spread of music file sharing, and their bottom line has suffered. But musicians themselves are doing quite well. Easier access spreads their music to more audiences, building larger fan bases for concerts, licensed music in movies and advertisements, and merchandise in general.
Free gives two good examples to support this. The band Radiohead opted to release their most recent album, In Rainbows, online in digital format and let anyone download the tracks for whatever they chose to pay. The band made more money on this digital release, before the album actually hit stores, than they made on their entire previous album. This could be an anamoly because of Radiohead's already-large fan base, but Free also gives an example of a musician named Derek Webb. He had a new record out called Mockingbird, but his label was financially unable to promote it. Webb decided to give it away free, so long as people provided him with their name, email address, and zip code. 80,000 people downloaded it in three months, and Webb is now able to use the information he collected to build a fan base. When he tours, he sells out his shows. Free made it possible.
But, you might argue, giving out personal information carries some cost, so it can't be Free. That's entirely true, and it's what makes Free little more than a marketing gimmick. This is what both Anderson misses and Gladwell scorns. Free is powerful and lucrative, but it's pretty much a sales gimmick nonetheless. -- |
Death! Destruction! Student Loans!
Education Sector released a super-sized Charts You Can Trust today looking at the past 15 years of financial aid, and the constant growth in student borrowing. Below is Chart 1 from the report, and the trend line is pretty clear. From 1992-93 through the latest NPSAS in 2007-08, the percent of students borrowing has increased nearly every year for every type of institution. In 2007-08, 53 percent--more than half--of full-time students borrowed for their education.
Today's Inside Higher Ed covers the report - and provides some push back to our assertion that this rising tide of debt is a BIG problem. Are we just joining the bandwagon of hype around the issue of student debt?If we are on that bandwagon (we, after all, did use the word catastrophic...), I think the wagon is headed in the right direction. Let's just say that the fact that more than half of full-time students borrow for college actually isn't such a big problem and that it focuses on the wrong end--nearly half of students, after all, don't borrow. So great, we're just fine today.
But that doesn't address the very clear trend line - which continually ticks upward and, given growing tuition and the current economic situation, isn't likely to stop anytime soon. So at what point is there too much borrowing? And isn't it good to sound the alarm before we get to that point, rather than wait until we have a generation of college graduates so far in debt that they can't contribute to the economy through spending, buying houses, and starting families?
Borrowing is also higher among the most vulnerable students - the ones that are supposed to be helped the most by financial aid. We didn't include this in the report, but low-income students borrow at slightly higher than average rates - 56 percent, compared with 42 percent for higher income students. So, is 56 percent of low-income students borrowing too high?
These are, after all, the students who can least afford to take on substantial debt to finance college. And that means that 56 percent of those students will pay more for college in the end. Just like that pair of shoes costs more when you add in interest from your credit card, college costs more when you include interest payments over 10 years--even subsidized interest.
Borrowing is really just one symptom of the larger problem - that higher education is becoming increasingly unaffordable. The 44 percent of low-income students who are not borrowing may be using other methods of paying for college that have their own costs, like holding a full-time job, which reduces a student's chance of graduating.
So maybe it's not death and destruction, but growing student debt and the underlying problem of college affordability could actually be catastrophic - and not just for student borrowers, but for the health of our entire economy. -- |
Duncan Data
There's renewed scrutiny around what Secretary of Education Arne Duncan accomplished in his previous position as head of the Chicago Public Schools. Andrew Coulson writes over at Cato about what his sleuthing has uncovered:
So to get a reliable measure of Duncan’s impact, I pulled up the 4th and 8th grade math and reading scores for Chicago on the National Assessment of Educational Progress — a test that is much less susceptible to massaging by states and districts. I then compared the score changes in Chicago to those for all students in Large Central Cities around the nation, and tested if the small differences between them were statistically significant. Not one of them is even remotely significant at even the loosest accepted measure of significance (the p <>Chicago students did no better than those in similar districts around the nation between 2002/2003 and 2007, a period covering virtually all of Duncan’s tenure in Chicago.
This would be all well and good, and we could trust Coulson's excellent analytical skills. Or we could trust the analysis that the National Center for Education Statistics has already done on the same data. Back in December, when Duncan was only a candidate for his new job, I wrote about what they found:
Since Duncan took over in 2001, Chicago has made statistically significant progress in fourth and eighth grade math and fourth grade reading scores. They're up across all subjects and grades for low-income students, students with disabilities, and English Language Learners (ELL). Low-income students narrowed achievement gaps in all but fourth grade math, while students enrolled in special education and ELL students closed gaps in both eighth grade subjects....The racial achievement gaps have not narrowed as much as we'd like, but blacks are scoring higher in 3/4 categories and Hispanics on all four.
These achievements, while not dramatically amazing, are pretty solid, and Duncan deserves credit for more than adequately steering the nation's third largest school district. -- |
Dear Bill Gates...
Hi! You don't know me, but I have an idea about how you should spend your hard-earned money. I'll bet you get a lot of that these days.
It's an old idea, a 19th-century idea. But I think its time has come again. Two words: Gates University.
What does that mean? Just what it sounds like! You should build a brand-new university, a great 21st-century institution of higher learning. A university unlike anything the world has ever seen.
Read the rest in my new column in the Chronicle of Higher Education. -- |
The 2 + 2 Myth
The Northern Virginia Community College (NOVA) has recently been airing radio ads touting their guaranteed admissions program, whereby students who complete an associate's degree at NOVA are guaranteed admission to 39 institutions, public and private, ranging from the University of Virginia to the University of Phoenix.
This type of program is called 2 + 2, because students can, theoretically at least, complete their associate's degree in two years, transfer their credits to a four-year school and enter as a junior, and then complete the final two years at the baccalaureate institution. NOVA's ads ask, "Seeking a bachelor's degree? Start with NOVA...finish at a university of your choice - GUARANTEED!" Those are powerful and misleading ellipses, because 2 + 2 programs are little more than tantalizing mirages.
It's a shame that 2 + 2 programs don't work better, because they offer a lot of promise both for individuals and state policymakers. An individual who successfully completes the program has gained a lot. They've saved money for their first two years, because community colleges cost less than four-year ones. And, since community colleges are often more convenient to beginning students, it might mean the student can live at home or continue at the same job for their first two years of school. They actually earn two credentials along the way, an associate's degree and a bachelor's degree, with all the attendant extra earnings potential that implies. The state benefits because it's cheaper for them to pay for an additional student at a community college than for an additional one at a four-year school. They maximize their resources.
The reality is it takes an incredibly special student to navigate this process as intended. They take the wrong classes or not enough. They must take remedial courses before being eligible for college-level coursework. Their original hopes of an associate degree fizzle and they drop out, or they finish the associate's and decide that's enough. They earn low grades. They don't realize they're eligible for financial aid, or, because financial aid covers only tuition and not fees, textbooks, or living expenses, they find the financial burden unmanageable. If and when they transfer, the four-year institutions don't accept all their credits. Or they do, but only as generic credit, not for grade, and not to be applied to any major or minor. The four-years also impose arbitrary rules on the number of credits transferred, saying that the student must complete the last x credits at their school.
While we know the obstacles are substantial, in general, there are just enough snippets of information out there to show us the chances of success at NOVA:
- NOVA's graduation rates are very low, at 10 percent for men and 16 percent for women. These are for first-time, full-time students only, and we know that graduation rates for part-time students tend to be even lower.
- Of the students who do finish, it takes them much longer than two years. Statewide, of the small fraction of students who are able to complete an associate's degree at all, it takes them an average of 3.9 years. They accumulate far more credits than the minimum.
- NOVA reports that only 14 percent of students transfer to another institution.
Researchers have found sizable "penalties" for students who try the 2 + 2 route to a bachelor's degree compared to those who entered a four-year institution from the outset. That doesn't mean we should push all students into four-year institutions, but it does mean we need to work at making the promise of 2 + 2 into a reality. Students need better information on their chances of success, but we also need more responsible and honest advertisements. -- |
Charter Schools in the Old Dominion State
The Washington Post editorial board wonders what the next governor of Virginia will do to help grow the number of charter schools operating in the state, and which of the gubernatorial candidates is most likely to support charter schools.
The Virginian-Pilot reports on the graduating class of one of only four charter schools currently operating in the state, and summarizes the current state of charter schools in Virginia.
As someone who grew up attending Richmond Public Schools and who benefited from having public school choice, I write about my own perspective on charter schools in Virginia in Sunday's Richmond Times-Dispatch. -- |
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
-- | 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
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.
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? -- |