The US Department of Education describes it as the "largest-ever federal investment in education reform": $4.35 billion in "Race to the Top" funds that the federal government will hand down to states who are succeeding in four crucial areas school improvement:

1.) Adopting rigorous standards and assessments;
2.) Recruiting and retaining effective teachers, especially in classrooms where they are needed most;
3.) Turning around low-performing schools; and
4.) Establishing data systems to track student achievement and teacher effectiveness.

Sec Ed Arne Duncan wrote about the plan in a Washington Post op-ed, and the president announced the plan and its conditions Friday.

Already, the plan has precipitated the exact kind of race that was hoped for as states respond to the fund's criterion. Seven states have already lifted caps on charter schools--Tennessee, Rhode Island, Indiana, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Colorado and Illinois--and other states are posturing and even revising other laws on the books so as to be eligible for the funds. California's Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger even commented, "We will seek any reforms or changes to the law deemed necessary, including changes to our data system laws, to ensure California is eligible to compete" for the funds.

So the funds are having the desired effect in that they're inspiring (or coercing, if you listen to some commentators) states to take action.

But are they good actions from a what's-best-for-kids perspective? Time will tell, but right now the answer looks like yes. All of the four criteria--improving data systems to track student performance and improvement at the classroom level; high state standards; improving teacher quality especially in high-needs areas; and school turnarounds--are controversial but aimed at closing the achievement gap and improving American competitiveness. A chorus of op-eds and articles has even started to emerge that support the federal plan and chastise states who are not in compliance and who therefore lose out on an opportunity to receive the funds.

What's really remarkable, though, is the administration's theory of action here. Typically when the federal government has an idea for how to fix a policy problem in the states, it sets a broad federal mandate and gives dollars to the states to carry out that mandate. That's generally how medicare, medicaid and welfare work, and it's the norm as well for federal education spending so far in the form of Title I. But here, the government isn't giving the dollars as an initial matter with strings attached, it's setting conditions as a pre-condition to eligibility for the dollars to begin with! By analogy, the federal government is doing the equivalent of a health care proposal that would say to states, "the federal government is making a chunk of money available to any state that requires all of its citizens to have health insurance; provides subsidies to low-income citizens; and demands employer participation."

Would such a proposal work in the health care arena? Who can say for certain--but probably not unless the states thought the promise of federal money at the end of the rainbow would be worth the pain. Evidently states who are changing their education policies to be eligible for race to the top funds think the money is worth it... or perhaps there's something else going on: law-makers know that the four fund conditions are the right ones as a matter of policy, but simply did not have the political capital to implement them (i.e. teachers unions and other interest groups opposed them). The carrot of doing it for extra dollars, in other words, may just be the political cover that state law-makers desperately need to execute controversial policy change.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 05:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Can more schooling actually be a bad thing in some cases?

According to a new report issued by the Center for Reinventing Public Education, the answer may be yes--at least as relates to teacher pay. The basis for the argument is two-fold. First, research evidence reveals that teachers who have gotten their masters degrees in education demonstrate no enhanced ability to improve student learning as compared to teachers who only have a bachelors degree. Second, because teacher pay is typically tied to advanced degree completion, the amount of money US schools spend on pay raises for teachers who have gotten their masters is substantial: about $8 billion annually. As a result, schools are pouring huge sums of money down the equivalent of a toilet--if the goal is producing positive results for children.

Let's look at each of those propositions a little bit closer. The conclusion that a teacher's advanced degrees have little impact on student achievement has been reached by numerous researchers--at least when the advanced degrees in question are in the field of education (this report famously concludes, "consistent with prior findings, there is no evidence that a master's degree raises teacher effectiveness."). It does turn out that advanced degrees in specific content areas like science and math do have positive impacts on student learning in those subjects--but alas the vast majority of teachers who have masters have them in education, not in science or math.

Does all of that make sense? Well, if you've ever participated in or read about run-of-the-mill teacher training programs at most schools of education in the United States, you'll agree with the conclusion. Put simply, apart from elite institutions that offer highly selective and rigorous teacher training programs, schools of education just don't do much to turn teacher candidates into good teachers. I took a couple of teacher prep classes at Missouri Baptist University in order to obtain an emergency credential in St. Louis when I taught there in 2007-2008--and the classes actually hurt my ability to help students learn since they needlessly wasted hours of my time on fluffy journals, pointless online assignments, and so on.

So if masters degrees in education do so little for our children, why should adults who have obtained them earn more than those who haven't (sometimes as much as $10,000 per year more, in places such as Washington State)? I can't think of a good reason. Ordinarily, individuals with masters degrees earn more than their counterparts in the same field because their additional training--in finance and accounting, engineering, etc.--represents a skill or knowledge set that will improve their productivity and effectiveness as an employee. In a typical profession, if an employee has a masters degree but nonetheless fails to add value for the company, that employee will stand to get fired or demoted. In the absence of the ability to fire and remove teachers at will (or, at least those who are on tenure), the same kind of controls don't exist in education. When combined with the faulty assumption that a master's degree actually confers beneficial skills for teachers in the first place, the result is a lot of wasted money.

At the end of the day, to really understand the question, all we need to do is ask ourselves this question: is there a better use of $8 billion for American school children than randomly giving that money out to some teachers but not others, without any regard to how good they are at their job? Anyone can come up with answers to that question--there are a lot of good ways to spend $8 billion for kids. The challenge is convincing law makers and teachers unions to agree to let such a change happen.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the first time since the No Child Left Behind Act was passed in 2002, the ranking Republican member of the House Education and Labor Committee does not support the law. Meanwhile, of course, President Obama is a strong supporter of NCLB who has discussed strengthening the law's standards, accountability, and testing requirements.

But wait, isn't standardized testing supposed to be racially discriminatory, culturally biased, and so on? If so, does that mean that Republicans today are the party of compassion, racial tolerance and diversity while Democrats are going back to the days of Jim Crow?

Not a chance. In fact, scrapping NCLB and its standardized testing requirements would be far more racist than keeping it around.

Let me repeat that: when the time comes for re-authorization in the Congress, keeping the Bush-era No Child Left Behind Act and its testing requirements on states would be far more racially sensitive and fair than repealing it.

I know, I know: a true liberal isn't supposed to support standardized testing. Standardized tests are racist, according to some liberal educators, because they serve only to perpetuate institutional racism by punishing minorities and low income children who do not perform as well as majority students for a wide variety of reasons. The questions are racially biased, they reinforce negative stereotypes about minority achievement, and the tests give racists "data" they can use to support other overtly discriminatory decisions.

The problem with that argument is, it can only possibly hold water with regard to "high stakes" standardized testing--that is, a test that actually visits some kind of consequence upon the student who takes it, depending on how well she does. The SAT is the prime example of a high stakes test today, since college admissions are so heavily tied to it--another example is the CAHSEE (California High School Exit Exam) which California students must pass in order to graduate from high school (it requires students to be able to read at the 10th grade level and do math at the 8th grade level in order to graduate). But affirmative action programs in colleges and arguments about the state's duty to ensure that high school graduates have a basic level of skills and knowledge respond to these concerns, even if only partially. What's more, in the history of No Child Left Behind, not a single student has been required by the federal law to take one of these "high stakes tests."

That's right, NCLB says nothing about high stakes tests. It only mandates tests that have no stakes for students; NCLB requires states to measure annually between grades 3 and 8 and once in high school to see how well students are performing on the state's standards and to hold schools and districts--not students--accountable for the results. To be sure, some states and school districts have added their own high stakes requirements to the tests, in effect declaring that students won't get promoted to the next grade or won't graduate without achieving at a certain level on the test, but that's a state and district decision--not the federal government's call. In California, for example, only CAHSEE has any stakes for students--every single other test given (i.e. the vast majority of tests in the state) as part of the state's standards and accountability system is no-stakes for students.

What does that mean for children? Well if a test has no impact on a child's ability to graduate or move on to the next grade, it's hard to see how there might be any racist effects or racism inherent in the system. Some liberals will argue that even attaching a number to a kid and telling them they were below basic or only basic in math in 3rd grade (without any actual consequences) will lead them to be ashamed of their race, or propagate racial stereotypes. But that theory of child-rearing basically says that we should never say anything bad to any child, lest they draw a negative conclusion about themselves or their identity as a result.

Contrast whatever negative impact there might be from telling minority children how well they fared on the state's standards against the negative impact of repealing NCLB and its testing requirements altogether. What's the downside there? For starters, we would no longer have any objective way of knowing just how much our schools and social structure are cheating minority and low income children out of what they deserve. You see, the biggest innovation of NCLB was not that it required states to test students regularly--the biggest innovation was what it did with the data that came from the tests: it forced schools and districts to dis-aggregate the data by sub-group.

In other words, before NCLB, in most states we had no idea what percent of kids were proficient in reading, what percent were basic in math, etc. Individual schools got good reputations by pointing to specific students who were the product of the system who went on and succeeded; wealthy suburban districts pointed mostly to high-achieving majority and high-income children. All the while, however, low-income and minority children were being short changed. NCLB's innovation--and its triumph with regard to racial equality and civil rights--was to pull down the curtain on schools and say no longer can schools only point to rich kids and white kids when declaring their excellence. Under the law, a school must improve achievement among its African American, Latino, special education, and English language learning populations too before it gets a mark of success.

If you get rid of that innovation, you effectively tell schools that they can build opaque walls around their classrooms again. And let's remember: it was within those opaque walls that the achievement gap was built to begin with; the gap has only gotten smaller since NCLB was passed in 2002.

One final note. If you're asking, who am I to speak on behalf of America's low-income children and children of color, you've got a fair point. Don't take it from me that NCLB is better for those children than the pre-NCLB days; take it from the NAACP, National Council of La Raza, and other civil rights groups who have all come out in staunch support for standardized testing and Bush-era education policies.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 02:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's not a great time to be graduating from college, particularly if you're one of millions who are saddled with student loan debt. In an economy that is still shedding jobs at faster rates than economists predicted, prospects are dimmer for this class of graduates than perhaps any class in recent memory.

All of which makes the federal government's new income-based college loan forgiveness plan, slated to begin today, so much more timely. The plan ties monthly payments to graduates' income levels, offering a measure of predictability and proportionality to the school loan industry that has been sorely lacking.

Interested graduates should visit the government's loan repayment website to see if they are qualified. By clicking on the handy calculator tool and entering basic information about their loan burden, income level, and family size, a graduate can see how much they'd be required to pay each month.

What does it look like in practice? Imagine a student who graduates with $100,000 in debt and takes a job as a teacher earning $40,000 a year and who lives by herself. With the income-based repayment plan, the student would owe only $295 / month--a number that is calculated by taking 15% of the difference between 150% of the federal poverty figure and the graduate's annual salary.

Seems sensible right? It ties the interests of the borrower with the interest of the lender (in this case, the federal government only--the loan program is only open to students whose debt is owed directly to the fed) because lenders have no interest in demanding such exorbitant monthly payments that their borrowers default. But here's the best part of the deal: after twenty-five years of payments, if the borrowing graduate still has any debt remaining, the remainder of their debt is completely forgiven.

That's right. The government will let you walk away from whatever else you owe if you've made payments reliably. And the deal is even sweeter if you're a student working in a public interest job like teaching: the government will forgive your loans after only 10 years.

Why is the government going bucky willy to help college grads all of a sudden? Part of it can be chalked up to good intentions and the sound logic of a long-term investment in a skilled workforce, the American dream and so on. Part of it also owes to the government and the Obama administration's self interest in meeting a particular political goal: slowly but surely moving the federal education loan system off of the private-bank oriented subsidized loan system and towards the more efficient direct loan program. The loan forgiveness and income-based repayment plans accomplish both goals: they help people pay for school while giving them an incentive to elect into the direct loan program on their own volition. For more info on the direct loan versus subsidized loan controversy, check out this previous entry.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 06:51 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's a question that serious school reformers and education advocates have been tackling for years: what's the best way to reduce a drop-out rate in America that hovers around 30%, and that approaches 50% in certain low-income and minority communities?

In a maneuver that completely misunderstands the nature of the debate, Louisiana is poised to answer that question in a non-sensical fashion: by making it shockingly easy for a student to get a high school diploma. As it currently stands in the state, a student must score at the "basic" level on either the math or reading 8th grade test and at the "approaching basic" level in the other subject in order to attend and graduate from high school. Not a particularly lofty hurdle, right? Seems only logical that we would want our students to at least read and do math at or near an 8th grade level before giving them a diploma, right?

Yet Louisiana lawmakers have noticed that a large number of students are dropping out of high school. Their solution? Not to increase the quality of school programming so that students learn more, feel more engaged, feel safer, or recognize the value of a quality education. Not to increase funding for after-school and extracurricular programs that might increase student involvement in their schools. No, the legislature, by overwhelming majorities (38-0 in the state Senate and 87-10 in the house) has decided that the best way to reduce the drop out rate is to make it easier for kids to coast through high school without learning much of anything at all. The only kicker? Those students who take that track won't get a regular diploma, they'll get a "career diploma" on graduation day.

I don't even know where to begin when discussing how big of a mistake this act will be for Louisiana's future. In a day and age where we are rapidly realizing that today's children will need to master complex skills in order to succeed at the cutting edge of the 21st century economy, Louisiana's plan is tantamount to societal suicide--it gives license to educators who don't believe their students can learn and it tricks students into believing that they can succeed in the world without knowing how to read and write or do math and science at a basic level.

What Louisiana should be doing is the opposite of this bill: it should be demanding more of its schools and students, not less. Demanding more in the way of student achievement must come, of course, with providing more in the way of educational resources--finding quality teachers and paying them for their successes, ensuring adequate facilities and educational materials are present for every student, etc. But that's a trade that will do much better for Louisiana's kids than the trade Governor Bobby Jindal and state law-makers have effectively pulled: they've traded the future of their children for a short-term political gain they can cite since they will have "fixed" the drop-out rate problem.

The thing is, fixing the drop-out rate in high schools is not the end goal for our efforts to improve education. If all America needed to ensure its long term success was 100% of its 18-year-olds owning a piece of paper that says "high school diploma" on it, the federal government could solve that problem by printing out a bunch of the darn things and mailing them out to every adult in the state. That theory of education reform fundamentally fails to understand our challenges much like a basketball coach who, seeing that his players can't shoot during games, decides to lower the hoop to 5 feet and triple the circumference of the rim so that his players make every shot during practice. Yet that's exactly what Louisiana lawmakers have inflicted upon their children, with only a handful of dissenters voicing their opinions.

Posted by Aaron Tang at 02:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)