In 2006, every 3rd grader in the state of Texas was asked to read and interpret the meaning of a Pagago Native American folktale entitled, "The First Butterflies." Later on in the test, students were asked to demonstrate comprehension of a modern-day story concerning Native American powwows. (The actual 3rd grade Texas proficiency test can be viewed here.)

Reading comprehension tests with passages like these are often cited by critics of standardized tests as paradigm examples of how poorly suited the test-based standards and accountability movement is to improving the quality of education that our children receive. While the aforementioned passages might be relevant to some portion of Texas students who are familiar with Native American culture, critics suggest that comprehension passages such as those, which were selected to be on tests at random, tend to discriminate against a wide section of the student population, in this case against those who have no familiarity with Native American culture. Opponents to standardized testing often continue to point out that the result of these tests is classrooms where teachers feel the only way to prepare students for similar random-topic tests in the future is to make them take the random-topic tests of the past.

This critique of standardized testing is correct only in the narrowest sense, as widely renown education theorist E.D. Hirsch notes in a recent op-ed piece that appeared in the NY Times. The area in which the criticism is apt is in regard to the irrelevance of the chosen theme--Native American culture--to many of the 3rd graders being tested. After all, Texas's statewide curriculum standards don't require social studies teachers to mention Native Americans until the 4th grade, and even then they do so primarily with regard to Native American governments and economics. Further inquiry into Native American culture is mandated as part of the 7th grade social studies curriculum. So it's a convincing argument that the 3rd grade test is unfair to the extent that students in downtown Houston and Dallas who have never met a Native American family in their life, much less studied their culture, are asked to show comprehension (or even concern) for such passages.

But the solution is not to scuttle the entire enterprise of standardized testing as a means of finding out whether our schools are doing their job and providing our children with the life skills they deserve. The solution is to make the tests relevant, by aligning the subject matter of reading comprehension passages with the knowledge that experts in each state have already decided is essential to a well-rounded education.

Put it this way. No one argues (or at least, very few people argue) that a tenth grade reading teacher shouldn't be able to test his students on their comprehension of To Kill A Mockingbird when the class just read and discussed the book as a unit. Many would agree that such a test would serve valid educational purposes: in the narrow sense it puts accountability on the students to actually read and study the novel; in the broader sense it gives students an opportunity to demonstrate mastery over the literary concepts implicated in the story and if the test is written well, it requires students to apply grand themes (such as equality, determination) to new situations--the crux of critical thinking. But everyone would argue that a teacher would be accomplishing nothing of educational value if he followed up a unit on To Kill A Mockingbird with a test on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Yet that's exactly what a great number of states are doing in today's standardized testing world. As E.D. Hirsch says, "the key to reading comprehension is familiarity with the subject." That's why a 1988 study showed that low-level junior high school level readers who knew a good deal about baseball performed better than high-level readers in the same grades who knew nothing about baseball on reading tests where the comprehension passages were about baseball. It doesn't necessarily affect the underlying reading ability--the high level readers were still better readers than the low-level readers in a strict sense of word recognition and so on--but it does affect reading comprehension, which is what is so vital about learning how to read at the end of the day.

So what does that mean? Maybe critics of standardized testing would have less to criticize if each grade's reading tests covered subject matter that was itself deemed inherently important. If, for instance, a state's expert-created standards require 8th graders to show mastery of US history from the period of our founding through the end of Reconstruction, why not have the reading comprehension passages include sections having to do with the Boston Tea Party, the debate over the Constitution, and the underground railroad? If we want certain books or science topics to be on the 8th grade reading and science curriculum, why not include state test questions about those concepts on the standardized test? Ultimately, if we agree at the outset that we want our children to learn certain important knowledge sets in each grade, there's nothing wrong with testing to see if schools have actually taught those knowledge sets at the end of the year. If they have, kudos to the school and its educators (and by "kudos" I mean compensation, not just a high five). If not, all of the negative elements of accountability should be on the table.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 08:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most of the conversation around school reform these days centers on how to improve the quality of education that is offered in our nation's K-12 schools. That's fitting, of course, since the vast majority of American children are educated in school, and since the underlying premise regarding those one million or more youth who drop out each year is that they--and our society as a whole--would do better if we could keep them in school through graduation.

But a New York Times article published last week highlighted the reality that faces many of those high school dropouts today: high school just isn't for everybody. It's not defeatist to point out that even in a drastically improved American education system there will still be a significant number of young people who decide that school is not for them. Our challenge as a nation is to do right by these young people nonetheless. And the Times article describes an interesting program to assist high school dropouts that is, as it turns out, as successful as it is old-school.

The project, called the National Guard Youth ChalleNGe Program, was started in the early 1990s when Congress recognized the value of National Guard training as a means to instill core values in otherwise struggling youth. Each year, the program graduates more than 7,000 high school dropouts between the ages of 16 and 18 who are drug-free, have no felony records, and agree to abide by the rules. The program itself involves two primary phases. The first phase is a 20-week boot-camp type training (hopefully led by persons more adept, if not more effective, than Major Payne portrayed below), where youth participate in daily activities and service in a disciplined atmosphere. The youth wake up at 4:30 every morning, make their beds neatly, go on an hour-long run, wear uniforms, march, and study long hours in classes to prepare them to pass the GED.

After graduating from this initial camp, the second phase is a year-long period during which the graduates either return to their communities and pursue work or higher education, or enter the military. In both cases, the program pairs each graduate with a life mentor to provide support for difficult life choices and to assist in career planning.

The program's impact is hard to argue with. More than 70% of the program participants go on to receive their high school diplomas or GED's, almost double the rate of high school or equivalency completion for similarly situated youth who don't participate. The impacts are also felt in the employment arena, as program participants are almost 50% more likely to have a job within nine months of completing the program than are similar youth. An independent research study done on the program's effectiveness finds consistent results--all at the mere cost to taxpayers of $28 per day per youth (which is far less than the nearly $200 / day per youth for incarceration).

I'll admit - when I first heard about Youth ChalleNGe, my first instinct was to worry that this was an implicit way to stockpile our armed forces with low-income and often minority youth who had largely been failed by their public schools. But it turns out that only one in eight of the program graduates goes on to actually join the military, while more than two in eight continue on in higher education and more than half get paying jobs. In sum, when wayward high school dropouts enroll in the National Guard's youth initiative, commit to participating, and complete the program, they are far more likely to become contributing members of society. Maybe there are other downsides to relying on a military-focused institution to educate these youth, but the alternatives don't seem to be much more compelling.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The big news in the world of education reform this week is a speech the President delivered yesterday to the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce. I've embedded some of the most controversial portions of the speech in a video below for you to judge for ourself, but the bottom line from the speech is similar to what Mr. Obama has been saying for more than a year now, dating well back into his campaign. In sum, President Obama is taking the same kind of post-partisan approach to school reform as he has to many other issues, trying to find common ground with disparate elements of both parties on issues such as early childhood education, funding, teacher pay, and charter schools.

But I want to talk about a particular sentence of the President's speech because it caught my attention, especially in light of a pretty revealing study I just came across. About halfway through his speech, Mr. Obama declared:

"I'm calling on our nation's governors and state education chiefs to develop standards and assessments that don't simply measure whether students can fill in a bubble on a test, but whether they possess 21st century skills like problem-solving and critical thinking and entrepreneurship and creativity."

Now this is a loaded statement. The only way to read it free of any controversy is to suggest that Mr. Obama was simply calling on educators and policy makers to devote more resources and attention to improving the quality of standardized tests, which is how I hope and largely believe he intended it. But perhaps a more natural reading is that the President, like a large segment of the educator population who support a liberal view of curriculum, wants schools to focus less on facts, rote memorization, and test-taking and more on critical thinking and creative problem solving--the kinds of skills our children allegedly lack but will need in the 21st century.

Now I've done a fair bit of talking with students across the country, and one thing you can say to a room full of young people to get their agreement is that their schools should stop teaching them to memorize random facts and should instead teach them the kinds of "critical thinking skills" that they'll need in life. The line works well with parents too; it's a no-lose statement. No reasonably intelligent person, it would seem, would build an education on a foundation of fact memorization and test-taking when they could instead be learning how to solve problems on their own. And if only America's schools could get back to the glory days where we were #1 in the world in education and where our kids all thought critically in schools instead of being forced to take the same boring basic subjects, memorizing facts and so on and so on.

Sound right to you? Sure. Except the whole premise of the argument is unfounded. America has never had an education system that emphasized "critical thinking" over learning basic facts, memorization, and other boring standardized test type materials. This Phi Delta Kappan study bears out that fact rather convincingly: a host of studies on classroom instruction over the past four decades have shown striking consistency: around 90% of the time in school classrooms is made up of teacher-directed instruction and individual student work today, just as it was in a 1983 study and a 1984 study based on data going all the way back to 1970.

But surely NCLB has torpedoed the level of intellectual freedom our children experience in some way, right? All those standardized tests every year and the "teaching to the test" that must be happening has to have some kind of narrowing effect on what our kids learn, if not how they learn it, right? Kids today aren't learning the arts and music because our schools only care about their reading and math test scores, right? Apparently that's not true either. According to the PDK study, before NCLB and the accountability wave of the late 90s, schools spent 37% of their time on English, 17% on math, and 13% on related arts, with 5% each to science and social studies. Today, the numbers are 34% English, 16% math, 11% related arts, and roughly 6% each on science and social studies. If NCLB has torpedoed our kids diverse learning experiences, it's been a pretty gentle attack.

So at the end of the day, this whole "21st Century Skills" debate is something of a red herring. America's schools have always placed a higher priority on basic math facts, reading and grammar skills, and science and social studies facts than they have on music, the arts, and other non-academic courses. And those subjects have always been taught in teacher-centered classrooms, not in free-flowing, collective project type learning communities. One could certainly argue that this is a problem because it hampers creativity and so on, but in truth, that argument is based in theory, not in the history of our schools.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:09 PM | Permalink

In a bold announcement last week, President Obama charted a striking and controversial new course for college access and affordability. The President's proposals were unveiled as part of the Department of Education's 2010 proposed budget, and they contained two major changes to long-standing higher education spending practices.

For starters, the Department is poised to increase its spending on Pell Grants by $17 billion over each of the next two years, which was part of the stimulus bill passed in February. But the Obama administration is going three steps beyond just increasing the amount of money available to the program, which is the government's chief need-based scholarship program to assist low-income families with college tuition (90% of the grants go to children from families earning less than $41,000 per year).

The first step is that the administration plans to increase the maximum grant allowance from its current amount of $4,731 in the current school year to $5,500 in 2010-2011. Second, the administration plans to move the Pell Grant program in its entirety from the discretionary portion of the federal budget to the mandatory entitlement portion, ensuring that support for low-income college students will never be cut subject to near-sighted political calculations. Finally, the move would require the annual size of Pell Grants to grow at the rate of inflation plus one percent--ensuring that the aid given to needy students keeps pace with the rising costs of tuition. The move comes at a critical time, as Pell Grants at current funding levels cover only 35% of the cost of college compared to 77% just thirty years ago.

In addition to shoring up the Pell Grant program, President Obama took the opportunity to propose sweeping changes to the federal government's college loan policy as well--a proposal that amounts to a solid "Take That!" to the embattled banking industry. As it stands, the federal government provides loans to at-need college students through two different programs. One program, created in 1965 and which provided about four-fifths of all loans to students last year (totaling $56 billion to 6 million students) does so by subsidizing private banks who make the actual loans. In this subsidized program, the private banks who make the loans keep as profit the interest paid by students, but any time a student defaults the federal government steps in and picks up the tab--essentially holding the bank's part of the operation completely risk free. The second program, first created under the first Bush administration and bolstered under President Clinton, offers federal dollars directly to students without the banks in the middle skimming a substantial and risk-free profit margin. President Obama has proposed to eliminate the subsidized program and make all federal loans directly to the students themselves.

Which program is better? Well it depends on who you ask. If you ask the banking sector, the subsidized loan program is better because (privately) it is an easy and major source of revenue for a struggling industry and (publicly) because banks can provide a more efficient loan system through what some have mistakenly labeled a free market. In reality, however, there is nothing "free" about the government loan subsidy market, since it creates an eerily similar perverse incentives problem to mortage backed securities: the group making the loan (banks) have no incentive to guard against default and track down borrowers who are in arrears. On the former front, the banks have been saved by the fact that both loan programs use the same financial aid application process, so borrowers in both programs have the same initial risk of default. But the latter incentive problem has proven all too real: the direct loan program has a student default rate 4% lower than the subsidized program.

That default rate, combined with the handsome profits that banks take off the top (instead of getting those dollars to the needy students) means that President Obama's proposal will save as much as $4 billion a year that can be given to college students who drive our economy and create wealth, rather than the very banks who are partly to blame for our current economic crisis. The plan still has to gain approval in the Congress, where the banking sector's lobbyists have a shot to kill it, but the moment is ripe if indeed there ever were such a moment for reforming a system that disadvantages students and taxpayers to benefit bankers. There's no reason, of course, to spite bankers just for the sake of spite--but when a sound economic decision can help send millions of young people to college, it's hard to find fault in it.

For more on the difference between the two loan programs and why the direct loan program is better, check out this issue brief.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 11:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)