From the New Republic. Seriously.

Here's the actual, honest-to-God headline:

Rick Perry Is a Higher-Education Visionary. Seriously.

I'm way too busy to give this the attention it doesn't deserve but I thought it was a data point worth noting.

Update: Dean Dad (who's generally much more impressed with Kevin Carey than I am) isn't very impressed by Carey's case.

The larger flaw in Carey’s analysis, though, is that it mistakes saying for doing. If Governor Perry really wanted to remake Texas’ higher education system into something more teaching-focused and less research-focused -- a debatable goal, but not an absurd one -- I’d expect to see him beef up the teaching-focusd institutions that already exist. If he shifted state funding from, say, Texas A&M to the state and community colleges, then yes, I could start to buy the argument that he actually means it. If he decided that other parts of the country have the whole “research” thing well in hand, and he wanted to focus Texas on teaching, I’d expect to see him divert money from UT-Austin and send it to the K-12 districts and the community colleges. One could argue the wisdom of that, but at least it would be a vision.

No. He’s endorsing an attack on universities for not being high schools, an attack on community colleges for being high schools, and an attack on K-12 for, well, being there. Yes, some isolated bits of rhetoric could make sense in another context, but that’s not what’s happening. I agree with Carey on the oft-noted paradox that academics who are otherwise liberal become dogmatically, idiotically conservative when discussing their own profession, but their skepticism about Perry is fairer than that. Some of Perry’s rhetoric may be interesting, but at the end of the day, his only vision for higher education is hostility.

Grade Inflation

An early stage professor posted this view on grade inflation:

I have to agree with the article that students do tend to expect A's. But mainly because they work hard, and the expectation is that if you work hard and learn the material, you should get an A. I don't really see this grade inflation as a problem. To me, an A grade means you learned the material and showed proficiency in it, not that you performed better than XX% of your classmates. Grades are not a ranking tool, but an indication of proficiency. I think that having a clear expectation of what you need to do to get an A makes it more likely that students will work harder to meet these requirements and learn the material better.

I think that this really is where the grade inflation is coming from. When I was a wee one, back in my home country, the decoding scheme for grades was:

A: Exceptional Work above and beyond expectations
B: Clear Mastery of material and met all expectations
C: Deficiency in one or more aspects of the course
D: Don't take any more courses in this area
F: Fail (with attendant consequences)

I think that the shift to A's being regarded as showing proficiency has been part of the general creep in academic culture. After all, an A average is starting to look like a requirement for entry to graduate school. I remember when a straight B average was solid evidence that a student was ready for graduate level work.

On the other hand, viewed in this light there isn't any real inflation. We have just changed the definitions of performance and introduced right truncation to make it impossible to pick out the really exceptional students by transcripts alone. I, of course, hate this approach but I can see why it might be popular if the focus is "did they get it or not" and reducing the arms race to demonstrate exceptional performance.

"This is an egregious example of a public university being willing to sell itself for next to nothing."

Yeah, 'egregious' is what I'd go for (from the St. Petersburg Times via Chait):

A foundation bankrolled by Libertarian businessman Charles G. Koch has pledged $1.5 million for positions in Florida State University's economics department. In return, his representatives get to screen and sign off on any hires for a new program promoting "political economy and free enterprise."

Traditionally, university donors have little official input into choosing the person who fills a chair they've funded. The power of university faculty and officials to choose professors without outside interference is considered a hallmark of academic freedom.

Under the agreement with the Charles G. Koch Charitable Foundation, however, faculty only retain the illusion of control. The contract specifies that an advisory committee appointed by Koch decides which candidates should be considered. The foundation can also withdraw its funding if it's not happy with the faculty's choice or if the hires don't meet "objectives" set by Koch during annual evaluations.

David W. Rasmussen, dean of the College of Social Sciences, defended the deal, initiated by an FSU graduate working for Koch. During the first round of hiring in 2009, Koch rejected nearly 60 percent of the faculty's suggestions but ultimately agreed on two candidates. Although the deal was signed in 2008 with little public controversy, the issue revived last week when two FSU professors — one retired, one active — criticized the contract in the Tallahassee Democrat as an affront to academic freedom.

Rasmussen said hiring the two new assistant professors allows him to offer eight additional courses a year. "I'm sure some faculty will say this is not exactly consistent with their view of academic freedom,'' he said. "But it seems to me it would have been irresponsible not to do it."

The Koch foundation, based in Arlington, Va., did not return a call seeking comment.

Most universities, including the University of Florida, have policies that strictly limit donors' influence over the use of their gifts. Yale University once returned $20 million when the donor demanded veto power over appointments, saying such control was "unheard of."

Jennifer Washburn, who has reviewed dozens of contracts between universities and donors, called the Koch agreement with FSU "truly shocking."

Said Washburn, author of University Inc., a book on industry's ties to academia: "This is an egregious example of a public university being willing to sell itself for next to nothing."

Over the past few years we have seen the undermining (often deliberate) of the independence and credibility of a number of important institutions -- universities, research labs, government agencies, think tanks. It has been done through funding with increasingly less subtle strings attached, through attacks on academic freedom and independence (anyone for tenure reform?), and through a full court press on a media that has been all too willing to play the toady and the fool.

It's easy to see the short-term benefits of this erosion for people who, say, are trying to ignore evidence of climate change or the relationship between tax rates and budgets over the past twenty years, but in the long-term, when we lose our sources for reliable information and analysis, there are no winners.

p.s. I'm opening the floor for nominations. Can anyone suggest a more weaselly phrase than "I'm sure some faculty will say this is not exactly consistent with their view of academic freedom''?

California's Choice

Steve Lopez writing for the LA Times:

In 1990, Linscheid said, the Cal State budget and the state prison budget were roughly the same. Today, the state prison budget is only about 10% less than the Cal State, UC and community college budgets combined. Meanwhile, the number of inmates has shot up from 25,000 to 175,000 over the last 20 years, thanks largely to law-and-order initiatives backed by the prison guards union. The union bankrolls politicians like Gov. Jerry Brown, too, and reaps huge benefits, but they come at the expense of school funding.

UCLA Chancellor Gene Block recently wrote in The Times that of the 42 Republicans in our state Legislature, 29 are products of California's public system of higher education. They got a great bargain, but not a single one of them has supported a Brown proposal — balance the budget half with cuts and half with a temporary extension of existing tax increases — that would maintain a barely acceptable level of quality in the Cal State system and help students avoid crippling tuition hikes.

I can vouch for the bargain part. A couple of years ago I took a grad course at a UC school to get caught up on the latest developments in Bayesian networks. The course was excellent, the paperwork was reasonable, the cost was still remarkably cheap for what you got.

Of course, my isolated experience doesn't mean much but it is consistent with pretty much any system of college rankings you can find. By almost any measure, California has arguably the world's best university system (according to the ARWU rankings, four of the world's top twenty universities are in the UC system).

But California also has a sentencing system that can give you 25 to life for cheating on a driving test and a legislative system that makes it easier to amend the constitution than to pass a budget. We can certainly keep one of these three systems, we might even manage two but at least one will have to go.

If you made this an explicit choice, few Californians would choose to sacrifice our universities, but in the implicit choice we've been given, that's exactly what we've decided to do.

p.s. If you're not depressed enough, check this story from NPR.

Around a quarter of a million reasons to want to keep your job

I started my teaching career in Arkansas, a state known at the time for many ludicrously small school districts. This caused an exceptionally high administrator to teacher ratio. Supporting all these administrators consequently put an additional strain on an already underfunded system.

I had always thought of this as a Southern problem, but this excellent piece by Dana Goldstein has me questioning that assumption:

One of Governor Andrew Cuomo's contentious budget cutting ideas is to consolidate very small school districts. I'm generally a tax-and-spend liberal, but this is a good idea, especially in relatively densely-populated parts of the state. I was reminded why today by the New York Times, which reported on a controversy engulfing the tiny Westchester village of Katonah, NY, not far from where I grew up. Katonah's school board would like to hire a superintendent named Paul Kreutzer, who happens to be the only superintendent in Wisconsin to have publicly supported Gov. Scott Walker's attempt to ban teacher collective bargaining.

Unsurprisingly, hundreds of Katonah teachers, parents, and students are loudly protesting Kreutzer's appointment.

But what really caught my eye was that if he does get the job, the 39-year old Kreutzer is set to earn $245,000 annually to oversee a district of just six schools and 3,800 students. Ninety-three percent of these kids are white, and just 1 percent are non-native English speakers. Approximately 0 percent of Katonah public school children participate in the federal free-and-reduced-price lunch program.

This reminds me of an anecdote I've mentioned here before.

When I first decided to go into teaching I asked a retired superintendent I knew for advice. The first thing he told me was, "Never trust a superintendent; they'll lie to your face." I think he was being just a bit harsh but I understand his position. Administrators live in an intensely political world where the right move can double their incomes and the wrong one can get them demoted or fired. It tends to test character.

Just to be clear, like teachers, most administrators (particularly most principals) are dedicated educators who genuinely care about their students, but they are also, by necessity, expert game-players who know how to work a system. This is simply part of the skill set. An administrator who's bad at politics will probably be a bad administrator.

But if we can't blame administrators for being good at politics, we can certainly blame many education reporters for being bad at journalism. To the extent that this is a story of labor and management, most journalists have unquestioningly swallowed the line of certain managers* that the blame for any problems in the system rested entirely with labor. Every standard of good journalism should have told them to look at both sides of the issue. Every reporter's instinct should have told them to take with a block of salt potentially self-serving claims of a group of media savvy, politically adept people who are trying to protect high but vulnerable salaries and, in some cases, impressive potential careers in politics and the private sector.

* And to be ABSOLUTELY clear, let me make this point explicitly: I am not talking about most administrators. The majority of superintendents and the vast majority of principals are hard-working and intensely focused professionals whose first priority is the interests of their kids. Just like the vast majority of teachers.

Removing Uncertainty

One of the arguments that has been made a lot is that it is important to remove sources of uncertainty to make business investments less susceptible to political changes. However, this need to make things less uncertain doesn't appear to apply in the public sector:

Every one of Detroit's public school teachers is receiving a layoff notice -- but that doesn't mean they will all be fired.

The layoff notices were sent to the 5,466 unionized teachers "in anticipation of a workforce reduction to match the district's declining student enrollment," according to a Detroit Public Schools statement. The layoff notices are required as part of the Detroit Teachers Federation collective-bargaining agreement. Non-Renewal notices have also been sent to 248 administrators, and the layoffs would go into effect by July 29.

Even though the risk of an actually losing a job might be low, imagine having to plan around how to pay for a mortgage or a lease if one's job might not be there? How can this possibly be a good way to organize an economy?

A big recommendation and a small caveat for "The Test Generation"

Dana Goldstein has a great piece of education reporting over at the American Prospect. It's balanced and well-informed, though one section did make me a bit nervous:

Colorado politicians don't need to travel as far as Seoul, however, to get a look at education reform that prioritizes good teaching without over-relying on standardized testing or punitive performance-pay schemes. In 2009, in the southwest Denver neighborhood of Athmar Park -- a Latino area studded with auto-body repair shops, tattoo parlors, and check-cashing joints -- a group of union teachers opened the Math and Sciences Leadership Academy (MSLA), the only public school in Colorado built around peer evaluation. The elementary school borrows some of the cooperative professional development tools used in other countries: Every teacher is on a three-person "peer-review team" that spends an entire year observing one another's classrooms and providing feedback. The teachers are grouped to maximize the sharing of best practices; one team includes a second-year teacher struggling with classroom management, a veteran teacher who is excellent at discipline but behind the curve on technology, and a third teacher who is an innovator on using technology in the classroom.

Each teacher in the group will spend about five hours per semester observing her peer's teaching and helping him differentiate his instruction to reach each student. (MSLA is 92 percent Latino, and more than 97 percent of its students receive free or reduced-price lunch. Sixty percent of the student population is still learning basic English.) "It's kind of like medical rounds," explains Kim Ursetta, a kindergarten and first-grade English and Spanish literacy instructor who, as former president of the Denver Classroom Teachers Association, founded MSLA. "What's the best treatment for this patient?"

Peer review accounts for a significant portion of each MSLA teacher's evaluation score; the remainder is drawn from student-achievement data, including standardized test scores, portfolios of student work, and district and classroom-level benchmark assessments. MSLA is a new school, so the state has not yet released its test-score data, but it is widely considered one of the most exciting reform initiatives in Denver, a city that has seen wave after wave of education upheaval, mostly driven by philanthropists and politicians, not teachers. Alexander Ooms, an education philanthropist and blogger at the website Education News Colorado has written that MSLA "has more potential to change urban education in Denver than any other single effort."

When I visited MSLA in November, the halls were bright and orderly, the students warm and polite, and the teachers enthusiastic -- in other words, MSLA has many of the characteristics of high-performing schools around the world. What sets MSLA apart is its commitment to teaching as a shared endeavor to raise student achievement -- not a competition. During the 2009-2010 school year, all of the school's teachers together pursued the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards' Take One! program, which focuses on using curriculum standards to improve teaching and evaluate student outcomes. This year, the staff-wide initiative is to include literacy skills-building in each and every lesson, whether the subject area is science, art, or social studies.

Don't get me wrong. I think that MSLA is a great model for education reform but it's only one school (so the successes might due to an exceptional leaders like founder Ursetta or principal Nazareno) and it's new (so you have to figure in things like the Hawthorne effect and unsustainable practices).

Unlike many of its competitors, MSLA is based on sound ideas and I'd like to see more schools give these methods a try, but the history of education is filled with promising success stories that didn't pan out. Until a model is replicated and sustained, it should generally be approached with caution.

Fixing performance pay

Derek Neal, Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago makes an interesting argument about the poor performance of performance pay for teachers:

"Many accountability and performance pay systems employ test scores from assessment systems that produce information used not only to determine rewards and punishments for educators, but also to inform the public about progress in student learning," Neal writes in the paper, "The Design of Performance Pay in Education."

These testing systems make it easy, in theory, for policymakers to obtain consistent measures of student and teacher performance over time. But Neal argues that the same testing regimes also make it easy, in practice, for educators to game incentive systems by coaching students for exams rather than teaching them to master subject matter.

"As long as education authorities keep trying to accomplish both of these tasks (measurement and incentive provisions) with one set of assessments, they will continue to fail at both tasks," he adds in the paper, which was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research and is a chapter in the upcoming Handbook of Economics of Education.

...

Separate assessment systems that involve no stakes for teachers, and thus no incentives for manipulation, should be used to produce measures of student performance over time, Neal contends. This two-system approach would discourage excessive "teaching to the test."

"The designers of assessment-based incentive schemes must take seriously the challenge of designing a series of assessments such that the best response of educators is not to coach, but to teach in ways that build true mastering," Neal said.

I'm not sure I'm in full agreement here. For one thing, the problems with our current methods for evaluating student progress are deeply flawed even when not asked to do double duty. Second, in my experience, most of the pressure to inflate scores comes from above. As long as test scores affect the fortunes of administrators, the less ethical superintendents and principals will find a way to influence teachers (even without the option of dismissal, a principal can make a teacher's life very tough).

Just to be clear, almost all of the administrators I've worked have been dedicated and ethical but I can think of at least one guy, two time zones and two decades from here and now, who managed to pressure a number of tenured but spineless teachers into spending weeks doing nothing but prepping for standardized tests.

What we need is a more comprehensive and better thought out system for measuring student progress.

AP classes and college development

I'm a big believer in acceleration and giving students the opportunity to test out of courses (I always advised students to explore CLEP). I have never been that impressed, however, with the AP approach. It always struck me as badly thought out and prone to play to the weakest parts of our education system.

I'll make a partial exception for calculus. Because of the extensive prerequisites in majors such as engineering, having cal I or, better yet, cal II out of the way can be a tremendous advantage to an incoming freshman. Add to that the fact that the nature of the subject makes teaching to the test much less of a concern.

With that exception noted, I never saw that strong a case for AP. On the whole, I suspect that college level material is better taught by college faculty, particularly given the test-prep approach of many of the AP classes. If anything, I'd like to see more anti-AP programs. Instead of giving college credit for high school courses, give high school students more opportunities to take college courses (either on site or through distance learning or some kind of independent study). There are certainly precedents: even back in the dark ages, I was in a program where as a high school senior I could attend the local college half-time. With the advent of distance learning, email and digital media, the argument for AP has only gotten weaker.

At this point, I should segue gracefully into a discussion of this paper (via TNR) on the impact of AP courses but to be perfectly honest, I'm in a hurry so I'm just going to give you the abstract and let you all talk it over amongst yourselves:

The Advanced Placement (AP) Program was originally designed to provide students a means to earn college credit and/or advanced placement for learning college-level material in high school. Today the program serves an equally important role as a signal in college admissions. This paper examines the extent to which AP course-taking predicts early college grades and retention. Controlling for a broad range of student, school, and curricular characteristics, we find that AP experience does not reliably predict first semester college grades or retention to the second year. We show that failing to control for the student’s non-AP curricular experience, particularly in math and science, leads to positively biased AP coefficients. Our findings raise questions about recent state policies mandating AP inclusion in all school districts or high schools and the practice of giving preference to students with AP course experience in the university admissions process.

Student Assessment

From Dana Goldstein:

The good news is that Campbell’s Law does not mean we should give up on assessing students and holding school systems accountable for their academic success. Research shows that certain kinds of exams—those that require essay writing on broad themes, for example—enhance student learning of key concepts. We can also assess students by requiring them to give oral presentations, or by looking for growth in portfolios of their work over the course of a year. Effective teachers produce students who excel when held to these more sophisticated standards, which are difficult to fudge or cheat.

This actually matches my experience with teaching quote well. Standardized tests are the only feasible way to handle large classes (how else do you assess 400 students?). But my best results come from asking essay questions (in free hand) and requiring many, many class presentations. Not only is the assessment a lot more complete but I gain a very good idea of what concepts and ideas that I failed to communicate well.

This type of assessment is a valuable tool in making next years class better than the one before it (a process I hope never stops). Sadly, it is not well suited for mass comparisons between schools. But then complex phenomena rarely summarize well (just consider confounding by indication for how hard it is to use summarized data to capture complex processes).

What exactly are the localized benefits of a university?

I grew up in a small university town and I can say definitively it was a great environment. There were plays and concerts and speakers. When I started writing fiction as a high school sophomore, I got to sit in on a class taught by a well-established novelist. When I was a senior there was a program where I could take my remaining high school requirements in the morning and take college classes in the afternoon.

I am, as you might imagine, a great supporter of colleges and college towns as is Joseph, my co-blogger. This puts us in an odd position. We are always looking for an excuse to promote higher education but the current line of argument about the economic benefits of universities at the local level is so weak and ignores so many counter-examples that it may do more harm than good.

The focus on local benefits is almost fatally flawed from the beginning by the fact that most of the benefits accrue at the state or more often national level. Both innovations and people tend to flow with the market. When we fund research and produce skilled workers, the chances of a big long-term pay-off are very good but predicting the exact form and location of that pay-off is all but impossible.

Keeping in mind that we are leaving out the majority of the return we expect on our investment, what benefits do we expect a university to provide to its host?

First there are the soft benefits such as enriching an area's intellectual and cultural life, providing role models, enhancing reputation. Viewed from a high enough level, the soft benefits may turn out to be the far most important, but they are difficult to measure and plan around. For now let's focus on the hard benefits.

University as employer

Universities are often seen as an almost ideal industry -- pollution-free, creating a number of stable, middle-class jobs and generating charming, highly liveable neighborhoods.

The problem here is that, if the suburban model takes hold and the town doesn't have a lot to recommend it outside of the school, the results can be really ugly, leaving the area with no tax base, an economy based on delivering pizzas and thousands of poor, badly-behaved students who get loud and drunk on Thursday night then head back to their parents' houses on Friday.

How do you avoid this fate?

One way is simply to stay small enough to maintain that Mayberry quality where it is possible for a professor to afford a decent little house within three or four miles from the school. I could give you some examples but while they may be charming, they aren't relevant to this discussion.

Another solution is to have a university in a large, economically diverse town where the economy and quality of life won't be completely overwhelmed by the ebb and flow of the academic calendar. Unfortunately, even very large universities only have twenty or thirty thousand employees (academic and administrative). College Station can build an economy around a university. Seattle really can't.


University as incubator

Call this the SAS model. Entrepreneurs who began as students and faculty decide to start some innovative new business just down the street. It's great when these things happen, but they don't seem to happen frequently enough, particularly not on the scale we'll need if we want to count on them to revitalize a stagnating city.

To further complicate matters, this desire to start a business in the vicinity of a school is directly related to the appeal of the area (students who hate to leave a town are more likely to find a way to stay). The vibrant urban areas that are likely to attract these small businesses are the very areas that don't need them.


University as labor supplier

This is probably the most commonly cited effect and it's certainly true that many of the more attractive industries require highly educated workers. It is not, however, so clear that these workers have to be in the area before the jobs are there or that the advantages of being able to recruit from an area college are that great. With only one very small nationally ranked school, Houston can't hope to supply itself with the first string academic talent it needs but that hasn't stopped its phenomenal growth (plenty of Ivy League grads are willing to move south), nor have the advantages of a local school caused Microsoft to focus its attention on UW instead of Waterloo.

Universities are vitally important to our intellectual, cultural and economic future and they have paid for themselves many times over. They do not, however, have that great a record of revitalizing urban areas. It would appear that you need more than a "build it and they will come" attitude, that certain conditions have to be in place and, even with those conditions, the short-term magnitude of the effects may be less than we hope.

New Education Bill

Okay, there was a new law passed today in Florida:

School teachers would lose tenure and see future pay raises based on student performance under a politically charged package of education changes the Florida House sent to Gov. Rick Scott Wednesday on a straight party-line vote.

The new bill:

The legislation will establish a statewide teacher evaluation and merit pay system in 2014 and do away with tenure for new teachers hired after July 1 this year. It also chips away at teachers' due process and collective bargaining rights.

Among the amendments proposed and rejected as poison pills:

Requiring superintendents to offer a written explanation for denying a teacher's contract renewal, if test scores and evaluations make the teacher eligible for the renewal.

In the new system contracts need to be renewed annually. I am unclear how not offering an explanation for failure to renew (for teachers that test well) is an unreasonable requirement. After all, if we trust these test-based metrics than it should be perfectly reasonable to explain why a high performing teacher is being let go (e.g. drop in student enrollment at their school). If we do not trust these metrics to give an unbiased picture of how is an effective teacher then why are we tying pay so closely to these metrics?

It just seems to be inconsistent.

It is also unclear where any money for merit raises might come from in a state focused on tax cuts. Overall, I am underwhelmed.

Mark: Any thoughts?

The Annotated "Evaluating New York Teachers, Perhaps the Numbers Do Lie"

As promised, here are some comments (in brackets) on Michael Winerip's NYT article on the city's teacher evaluation process.

Last year, when Ms. Isaacson was on maternity leave, she came in one full day a week for the entire school year for no pay and taught a peer leadership class.

...

[One thing that Winerip fails to emphasize (though I suspect he is aware of it) is how common stories like this are. Education journalists often portray ordinary excellence as something exceptional. This is partly due to journalistic laziness -- it's easier to describe something as exceptional than to find something that actually is exceptional -- and partly due to the appeal of standard narratives, in this case the Madonna/whore portrayal of teachers (I would used a non-gender specific analogy but I couldn't come up with one that fit as well.)]

The Lab School has selective admissions, and Ms. Isaacson’s students have excelled. Her first year teaching, 65 of 66 scored proficient on the state language arts test, meaning they got 3’s or 4’s; only one scored below grade level with a 2. More than two dozen students from her first two years teaching have gone on to Stuyvesant High School or Bronx High School of Science, the city’s most competitive high schools.

...

[Everything in this article inclines me to believe that Ms. Isaacson is a good teacher but we need to note that this is a fairly easy gig compared to other urban schools, particularly for someone with her background. Students at places like the Lab School tend to be more respectful and attentive toward academically successful people like Ms. Isaacson. In many schools, this can actually make students initially distrustful.]

You would think the Department of Education would want to replicate Ms. Isaacson — who has degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Columbia — and sprinkle Ms. Isaacsons all over town. Instead, the department’s accountability experts have developed a complex formula to calculate how much academic progress a teacher’s students make in a year — the teacher’s value-added score — and that formula indicates that Ms. Isaacson is one of the city’s worst teachers.

According to the formula, Ms. Isaacson ranks in the 7th percentile among her teaching peers — meaning 93 per cent are better.

[One of the fallacies that follow from this Madonna/whore narrative is the idea that, since you have such a clearly bi-modal distribution, any metric that's correlated with teaching quality should be able to winnow the good from the bad. In reality you have a normal distribution with noisy data and a metric that doesn't correlate that well. The result, unsurprisingly, is a large number of teachers apparently misclassified. What is surprising is that more people didn't foresee this fairly obvious outcome.]

This may seem disconnected from reality, but it has real ramifications. Because of her 7th percentile, Ms. Isaacson was told in February that it was virtually certain that she would not be getting tenure this year. “My principal said that given the opportunity, she would advocate for me,” Ms. Isaacson said. “But she said don’t get your hopes up, with a 7th percentile, there wasn’t much she could do.”

That’s not the only problem Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile has caused. If the mayor and governor have their way, and layoffs are no longer based on seniority but instead are based on the city’s formulas that scientifically identify good teachers, Ms. Isaacson is pretty sure she’d be cooked.

[Well, as long as it's scientific.]

She may leave anyway. She is 33 and had a successful career in advertising and finance before taking the teaching job, at half the pay.

...
[This isn't unusual. I doubled my salary when I went from teaching to a corporate job. Plus I worked fewer hours and they gave us free candy, coffee and the occasional golfing trip.]
...

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.

The process appears transparent, but it is clear as mud, even for smart lay people like teachers, principals and — I hesitate to say this — journalists.

[There are two things about this that trouble me: the first is that Winerip doesn't seem to understand fairly simple linear regression; the second is that he doesn't seem to realize that the formula given here is actually far too simple to do the job.]


Ms. Isaacson may have two Ivy League degrees, but she is lost. “I find this impossible to understand,” she said.

In plain English, Ms. Isaacson’s best guess about what the department is trying to tell her is: Even though 65 of her 66 students scored proficient on the state test, more of her 3s should have been 4s.

But that is only a guess.

[At the risk of being harsh, grading on a curve should not be that difficult a concept.]

Moreover, as the city indicates on the data reports, there is a large margin of error. So Ms. Isaacson’s 7th percentile could actually be as low as zero or as high as the 52nd percentile — a score that could have earned her tenure.

[Once again, many people saw this coming. Joel Klein and company chose to push forward with the plan, even in the face of results like these. Klein has built a career largely on calls for greater accountability and has done very well for himself in no small part because he hasn't been held accountable for his own record.]

I've left quite a bit out so you should definitely read the whole thing. It's an interesting story but if anything here surprises you, you haven't been paying attention.

The lessons of Motown

Michael Winerip is a much better than average education reporter. He doesn't have a great grasp of the numbers or of the implications of the policies, limitations which have kept him from getting a jump on the story the way, say, This American Life did with the financial crisis, but he has kept up with it while most of his colleagues are still reporting discredited narratives from interested parties.

This article on Detroit is a good example. He doesn't connect some important dots but he does a good job reporting what he sees. (you'll find my comments in brackets):

In 2009, Detroit public schools had the lowest scores ever recorded in the 21-year history of the national math proficiency test.

The district had a budget deficit of $200 million.

About 8,000 students were leaving Detroit schools each year.

Political leaders had to do something, so they rounded up the usual whipping boys:

Wasteful bureaucrats. In 2009, the governor appointed an emergency financial manager, Robert Bobb, a former president of the Washington school board, to run the Detroit district. Mr. Bobb is known nationally for his work in school finance, and recruiting him took a big salary, $425,000 a year. He has spent millions more on financial consultants to clean up the fiscal mess left by previous superintendents.

[A large number of people are acquiring a great deal of money and power through the reform movement. This doesn't mean that these people don't have good intentions or that they are not worth the money they're being paid but it does mean that this group, which includes high profile figures like Joel Klein and Michele Rhee, has a vested interest in these policies. It also means that when Michele Rhee brags about being a counterbalance to the special interests, she's not being entirely honest.]

Greedy unions. Though Detroit teachers make considerably less than nearby suburban teachers (a $73,700 maximum versus $97,700 in Troy), Mr. Bobb pressed for concessions. He got teachers to defer $5,000 a year in pay and contribute more for their health insurance. Last week, the Republican-controlled Legislature approved a bill to give emergency managers power to void public workers’ contracts. If signed by the governor, Mr. Bobb could terminate the Detroit teachers’ union contract.

Traditional public schools full of incompetent veteran teachers. Michigan was one of the first states to embrace charter schools, 15 years ago. Currently there are as many Detroit children in charters — 71,000 — as in district schools. Now there is talk of converting the entire Detroit district (which is 95 percent African-American) to charters. Supporters say this could generate significant savings, since charters are typically nonunion and can hire young teachers, pay them less and give them no pensions.

[Before we go on, this would seem to be an almost perfect test of the large-scale charter school model (as compared to the more limited role I've advocated). Charter schools have been put forward as the solution for this very kind of troubled urban district.]

So now, two years later, how are the so-called reforms coming along?

Not great.

Since Mr. Bobb arrived, the $200 million deficit has risen to $327 million. While he has made substantial cuts to save money — including $16 million by firing hundreds of administrators [Of course, he's spent millions making those cuts] — any gains have been overshadowed by the exodus of the 8,000 students a year. For each student who departs, $7,300 in state money gets subtracted from the Detroit budget — an annual loss of $58.4 million.

[Economic conditions and demographic shifts still trump any educational reform proposed so far. People need to remember this.]

Nor have charters been the answer. Charter school students score about the same on state tests as Detroit district students, even though charters have fewer special education students (8 percent versus 17 percent in the district) and fewer poor children (65 percent get subsidized lunches versus 82 percent at district schools). It’s hard to know whether children are better off under these “reforms” or they’re just being moved around more.

[As mentioned before, there are a number of possible biasing effects (peer, placebo, Hawthorne, selective attrition, etc.) that may be inflating the charter's scores. In other words, they are not outperforming the public schools and they may be doing much worse.]

Steve Wasko, public relations director for Mr. Bobb and the Detroit schools, did not respond to a dozen voice mails and e-mails seeking comment. Those who know Mr. Wasko say he cares about Detroit and is sick of the national media portraying the city as hopeless.

[You have a public relations director who can't work a talk with the New York Times into his schedule. This alone raises questions about the Bobb administration. It also suggests some other options for cost cutting (who do you think makes more, a starting teacher or a public relations director?)]

...

Last spring, Mr. Bobb had planned to close 50 schools with dwindling enrollment. But his list was reduced to 30 after several public meetings at which parents and staff members pleaded their school’s case before the all-powerful Mr. Bobb.

In June, Mr. Bobb held a news conference at Carstens Elementary — one of the schools spared — to announce the 30 closings.

One reason Carstens survived was an article in The Detroit Free Press last March headlined “Carstens Elementary on DPS closing list is a beacon of hope.”

The school, surrounded by vacant lots and abandoned houses, serves some of the city’s poorest children. Thieves who broke into the school last year escaped by disappearing into what the police call “the woods” — the blocks and blocks of vacant houses.

Yet Carstens students perform well on state tests, repeatedly meeting the federal standard for adequate yearly progress.

[As seen before, good teachers and schools often end up bearing the brunt of our current crop of reforms.]

“We try to fill in the holes in our children’s lives,” said Rebecca Kelly-Gavrilovich, a Carstens teacher with 25 years’ experience. Students get free breakfast, lunch and — if they attend the after-school program — dinner.

To have more money for instruction, teachers sit with students at lunch, saving the school from having to hire lunchroom aides. Teachers hold jacket and shoe drives for children who have no winter coats and come to school in slippers. At Thanksgiving every child goes home with a frozen turkey donated by a local businessman. Twice a year a bus carrying a portable dentist’s office arrives, and a clinic is set up at the school so children can get their teeth checked.

Despite all this, teachers worry that Carstens’s appearance on Mr. Bobb’s closing list — even though it was brief — means the end is near. Anticipating the worst, several parents have taken their children out of Carstens, enrolling them elsewhere, including at charters and suburban schools.

Carstens’s enrollment is half of what it was a few years ago. Every hallway has empty classrooms, giving the school a desolate feeling.

Mr. Bobb has set off a vicious cycle undermining even good schools. The more schools he closes to save money, the more parents grow discouraged and pull their children out. The fewer the children, the less the state aid, so Mr. Bobb closes more schools.

[This is a pattern we're seen before. Check Ravitch for specifics.]

Carstens has also been harmed by poor personnel decisions made by the district. Last year, 1,200 teachers took the retirement buyout, and Mr. Bobb laid off 2,000 others in the spring. Then in the fall, he realized he needed to hire the 2,000 back, and chaos ensued.

[Also something we've been warning about.]

At Carstens, a kindergarten class of 30 had no teacher until October; teachers at the school took turns supervising the class. “How do you think parents feel when there’s a different teacher every day?” said Mike Fesik, the current teacher.

It’s hard to understand why any teacher who could leave Detroit stays, but they do. Kim Kyff, with 22 years’ experience, is one of the lead teachers at Palmer Park, the elementary and middle school that opened last fall. In 2007 she was the Michigan teacher of the year. She has had offers from suburban schools, but stays because she believes that in Detroit, she has a better shot at being a beacon of hope.

[I should say more but it's late and I'm already depressed as hell. It's times like these when I have trouble not believing that, not only do we not care about children, we actually go out of our way to screw over those who do care. (yes, that's a lot of 'not's but given the hour what do you expect?)]

Nobody talks about the Caulfield problem

This is one of those fundamental, difficult-to-resolve questions with important implications that almost no one in the education debate has any interest in discussing. How do we handle students learning things that aren't "on the list"?

There are valid arguments to be made on both sides. Some of the happiest educational outcomes often start with something far from the standard curriculum. (Goosebumps leads to King who leads to Lovecraft who leads to Machen who leads to Joseph Campbell. Puzzle books lead to Gardner who leads to Smullyan who leads to Gödel and Tarski.)

But as valuable as these excursion may be, there is still a case to be made for a body of essential knowledge, things that everyone should know. Not only are things that make it into the curriculum considered more important; the very fact that they are common is itself valuable. A diverse, democratic society functions better when its people have a shared frame of reference.

Those in the reform movement have come down heavily on the side of valuing only what falls within the curriculum. Schools are actually penalized when students go off-list since time spent reading Gödel, Escher, Bach or the Hero with a Thousand Faces is being taken away from learning those things that are being measured. That is a perfectly defensible position but I get the impression that it is largely an unintentional one, that proponents of a system built around standardized testing often failed to think through the implications of their policies.

A useful table and a few observations

Wikipedia has an interesting article on academic rankings. We could (and probably should) spend a lot of time going over this, but here are a few points to get things started:

1. This list seems to suggest that the USA has the best university system by a good margin. This doesn't mean we shouldn't try to improve it, but this does make a case for being careful about making radical changes. When you're number one, unintended consequences can be a bitch;

2. As Joseph noted, California contains one of the two major clusters of major universities. Most Californians would like to keep it that way. I'm not so sure about most of Sacramento.

3. It's a good idea to go through this list periodically while reading Edward Glaeser (since it's obvious his editors didn't).

In other words, Good Will Hunting understood sigma notation

From Michael Winerip's NYT article:

The calculation for Ms. Isaacson’s 3.69 predicted score is even more daunting. It is based on 32 variables — including whether a student was “retained in grade before pretest year” and whether a student is “new to city in pretest or post-test year.”

Those 32 variables are plugged into a statistical model that looks like one of those equations that in “Good Will Hunting” only Matt Damon was capable of solving.

I'll have more to say about this later. I don't think Winerip really understands what's going on here but the story's definitely worth a read.

Update: it is now later.

Something else that shouldn't surprise people but probably will

I suspect Seyward Darby spoke for a lot of people on the left when she admitted growing disenchanted with Michelle Rhee (despite Rhee's remarkably consistent educational philosophy). Rhee was, of course, part of the Adrian Fenty administration in D.C. and Darby and the New Republic were big supporters, endorsing him in 2010 with the headline, "Why the fate of education reform rides on the D.C. mayoral race."

TNR's editors might be rethinking that support now:

Speaking on Morning Joe Tuesday morning, Fenty -- whose term in office was marked by battles with organized labor in the city, especially the teacher's union -- said that Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) was "right on the substance" and "right on the politics" when it came to the fight with unions and their supporters in the Badger State.

"I think it's a new day," Fenty said. "I think a lot of these collective bargaining agreements are completely outdated."

While 'real' news shows were covering Charlie Sheen...

What is this word, 'contract,' of which you speak?

The Daily Show continues its extraordinary coverage of the stand-off in Wisconsin.