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Posts Tagged ‘education reform’

Frederick M. Hess

Why we shouldn’t oversell the benefit of having more students in ‘advanced’ classes

By Frederick M. Hess

February 13, 2012, 11:50 am

Last fall, I wrote about the problems with our decade-long national mania for “closing [race- and income-based] achievement gaps” in K-12 education. Our relentless efforts to boost reading and math proficiency among the most disadvantaged students have caused us to slight the needs of everyone else—especially high-achievers.

Gap-closing enthusiasts respond that theirs is actually a win-win exercise that benefits all students. Education Trust Vice President Amy Wilkins has termed it a “false choice” to suggest “that we have to make a choice as a country between equity and excellence.” She argues, “Our policies need to marry both.” The Washington Post’s Jay Mathews argues that enrolling more students in Advanced Placement classes is good for everyone—that it challenges these students and has no adverse impact on rigor or the success of their peers.

Well, last week the College Board released its 2011 AP results, and the Washington DC results should give pause to those who insist there are no trade-offs. DC has seen a half-decade of aggressive gap-closing reforms led by two talented chancellors (Michelle Rhee and Kaya Henderson), both of whom have gauged success primarily in terms of reading and math achievement for the worst-served students.

Last week, the College Board reported that DC has indeed managed to more than double the number of students taking at least one AP test in the past decade, from 467 in 2001 to 1,084 in 2011. Yet, despite this huge increase in the number of AP test-takers, the total share of DCPS graduates passing at least one test has actually declined, from 6.8 percent in 2001 to 6.6 percent in 2011. In fact, the rate had peaked at 7.1 percent in 2006, just before the DC reform efforts started.

The point is simple: Let’s not oversell the benefit of merely having more students sit in “advanced” classes, and we shouldn’t be surprised if reforms wholly targeted on reducing mediocrity don’t do much to boost excellence.

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Chairman Kline discusses Obama education waivers, No Child Left Behind

By Jenna Schuette Talbot

February 9, 2012, 3:20 pm

This morning at AEI, U.S. Congressman and Chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce John Kline (R-Minnesota) explained his new education bills, which seek to bring more local control, more parent involvement, and less federal intrusion to the nation’s schools. Notably, Chairman Kline’s remarks came just before President Obama announced the 10 states that have been granted No Child Left Behind waivers, through which the administration is allowing states to circumvent the act’s consequences. He noted that the waivers were simply a way for the president and secretary of Education to get what they want. Rick Hess also raised serious concerns about the administration’s back-door legislating, noting that their plan lets states “ignore federal legislation in return for promising to do other stuff that they like.”

But Kline’s real intention in joining AEI today was to unveil his bills, which are an attempt to reauthorize the widely unpopular No Child Left Behind Act. He described how the bills will give states the authority to define their own accountability systems, eliminate a highly contested provision of NCLB that dictates teacher eligibility, and offer states more flexibility to spend their federal dollars. He also assured audience member and Idaho State Superintendent Tom Luna that under his bills, Washington would not dictate which standards—such as the Common Core standards—states must adopt.

This morning Kline put forth a sensible, conservative alternative to burning down the Department of Education à la Rick Perry and Michele Bachman. While it is unlikely that these bills—which were introduced to the House today—will become law, they certainly send the message that the days of prescriptive federal involvement in schools are numbered.

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Andrew P. Kelly

Obama tells higher education institutions they’re ‘on notice’

By Andrew P. Kelly

January 27, 2012, 4:32 pm

President Obama gave everyone more detail on his latest higher education reform ideas this morning. The proposals are unlikely to make many friends among the higher education establishment.

The big pieces:

•    A proposal to tie a portion of federal financial aid dollars to whether institutions maintain low net prices and provide “long-term value” to their students.

•    A Race to the Top for College Affordability and Completion: A competitive grant program that incentivizes states to lower postsecondary costs, and a smaller program (“First in the World”) for individual institutions and non-profit organizations to experiment with lower-cost models.

•    An effort to create a College Scorecard for consumers that would (eventually) include measures of labor market success.

What to make of it all? Two quick reflections:

1.    A college scorecard with comparable information on costs and quality makes good sense. I’ve written (repeatedly) about the need for better consumer information, shown that information can affect the way parents evaluate colleges, and discussed the shortcomings of existing efforts to provide it.

In K-12, the NAEP exam is necessary because the states have no incentive to honestly “keep score” on their own. The federal government has also fulfilled this role in higher education via the National Center for Education Statistics. This latest iteration is an effort to streamline the data that are available, place any given institution’s cost and performance in context, and add some measures that have heretofore been unavailable (earnings and employment).

Two issues to keep in mind:

Measuring earnings and employment information for all colleges and universities seems sure to provoke a firestorm of debate. But the federal government is already collecting similar information for for-profits and vocational programs at community colleges.

Second, making the information available is not enough: policymakers must find ways to proactively put the scorecards in front of consumers. Seems like providing the scorecard for each school a student lists on the FAFSA is the right place to start.

2.    While it’s not entirely clear, it looks like the “First in the World” competitive grant program will be limited to colleges and nonprofit organizations, thereby precluding any for-profit service providers from applying.

This echoes the administration’s stubborn stance on the i3 program in K-12, and it means that some of the most innovative providers in higher education will be left out. Many for-profits (and I’m not just talking about colleges and universities here) are experimenting with promising models of instructional delivery, student services, and credentialing and assessment that are bending the cost curve and promoting student success. Barring these outfits would be a missed opportunity to harvest the best of what the for-profit sector has to offer: the fruits of their R and D. For-profit organizations should be included, at the very least as potential partners to public and non-profit institutions.

Whatever happens, if anyone is considering a career change, now would be the time to get hitched to a higher education lobbying firm. Judging by the initial response to Obama’s ideas, it’s going to be a “growth industry” over the next few months.

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Andrew P. Kelly

Obama’s Stephen Colbert moment in higher education

By Andrew P. Kelly

January 25, 2012, 2:03 pm

“SOTU: Nothing new on education” says Rick Hess? I beg to differ. At least one sentence was “new.”

When the president took aim at higher education, he unexpectedly channeled his inner Stephen Colbert. Colbert routinely places people and groups that offend him in one of three categories—first, you’re “called out” for your behavior; then you are put “on notice”; finally Colbert declares you “dead to me.” (The president is familiar with the Colbert framework: back in the 2008 campaign, Obama himself put political distractions “on notice.”)

Evidently, colleges and universities have officially moved from stage one to stage two in the president’s estimation:

So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down.

It’s about time: over the past quarter century, the cost of college has tripled after controlling for inflation, while family incomes have increased only 10 percent. According to the College Board, in the past year alone, tuition and fees at public universities grew by 8.3 percent.

What this sentence means for policy is unclear: the White House blueprint suggests the president “is proposing to shift some Federal aid away from colleges that don’t keep net tuition down and provide good value.” We will get more detail at the president’s University of Michigan speech on Friday.

For now, a couple things to keep in mind:

1.    Avoid anything resembling “price controls:” Back in 2003, Representative Buck McKeon (R-CA) proposed linking student aid eligibility to a “college affordability index” that linked tuition increases to the CPI. The effort was torpedoed by talk of “price controls” and steadfast lobbying by higher education groups.

Lesson: anything resembling “price controls” will bomb. The focus must be on holding institutions accountable for the way they spend federal money.

2.    “Value” is critical: Thinking in terms of return on investment makes more sense than just out of pocket costs (cheap community colleges may deliver little by way of labor market returns). But doing so requires collecting data on the labor market outcomes of students. Currently, the feds only do so for for-profit colleges and vocational programs at community colleges. Placing value at the center of this larger effort will mean extending those data to all sectors of higher education.

Unless we can get a hold of college costs, it won’t be long before most colleges reach “dead to me” status in the minds of most Americans. Good to see it mentioned forcefully in SOTU, but keep your eyes peeled for more specifics on how this might work in practice.

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Frederick M. Hess

SOTU: Nothing new on education

By Frederick M. Hess

January 25, 2012, 9:55 am

President Obama (like President Bush before him) has used education to signal to centrists and moderates that he’s no ideologue. Where Bush used No Child Left Behind to demonstrate his “compassionate conservatism,” Obama has used education reform to make the case that his calls for higher taxes and more federal activity are about “transformation.”

Obama has enjoyed great success on this front, winning plaudits from the Wall Street Journal and David Brooks for Race to the Top. He and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have been heralded as reformers (even though 95 percent of ARRA education spending subsidized the status quo and not their “reform” agenda).

With the election year ahead, it’s likely that education will be a key piece of Obama’s strategy to woo the middle. Which made it intriguing that the State of the Union devoted seven minutes to education but offered no notable ideas or initiatives. Obama offered banalities about teachers having to work “tirelessly, with modest pay,” and vaguely called for giving schools “the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones” if schools “replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.” (Not that there’s much the feds can, or should, do about any of this.)

The president encouraged states to “require that all students stay in high school until they graduate or turn eighteen.”

He asked Congress to further subsidize student loans, to extend the temporary tuition tax credit, and come up with the funds to double the number of work-study jobs. He also wants states to spend more on higher education and wants colleges to “keep costs down.”

Let me summarize. As best as I can tell, Obama’s election year education program will be:

1) Say nice things about teachers.

2) Tell states to spend more on schools and rewarding good teachers, and to fire bad teachers.

3) Spend more to subsidize college.

4) Tell states to spend more on college, and colleges not to raise prices.

Quite a comedown from the heady days of 2009. But, given that we’re broke and have been living way beyond our means, maybe it signals we’re in for a healthy dose of humility on the education front.

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Frederick M. Hess

6 reasons the House Republicans’ education bill gets it right

By Frederick M. Hess

January 12, 2012, 3:10 pm

Earlier this month, we marked the tenth anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act. While well-intentioned, this sweeping legislation has suffered for its grandiose ambitions and simplistic, incoherent approach to educational accountability. Reauthorization is several years overdue, and the only legislative proposal to get traction to date—the Harkin-Enzi bill passed by the Senate Education Committee last fall—is, at best, a modest improvement.

Happily, under the leadership of Education Committee Chair John Kline, the House Republicans this week offered a bill that would build on the valuable transparency brought by NCLB while scrapping the law’s overwritten and half-baked prescriptions for policing teacher quality, school improvement, and state accountability systems.

The House bill:

1.    Scraps NCLB’s practice of requiring states to label schools as making or not making “adequate yearly progress” based upon a snapshot of reading and math scores by particular demographic populations, but sensibly retains the requirement for annual testing in reading and math in grades 3-8 and that data be disaggregated to show the performance of various student subgroups. In this, the House bill reflects both the Harkin-Enzi bill and what the Department of Education is pushing in its “NCLB waiver” process.

2.    Frees states to write their own policies regarding the proper interventions for low-performing schools—the feds would no longer mandate that all low-performing schools adopt supplemental tutoring or public school choice at a federally mandated point in time. And unlike the Senate, the House would not try to dictate a particular set of federally selected school improvement strategies.

3.    Sensibly insists that states develop academic standards that will have students ready for career or college by graduation, but drops the administration’s unfortunate effort to elbow its way into the (supposedly) state-driven Common Core effort.

4.    Scraps NCLB’s ludicrously bureaucratic “Highly Qualified Teacher” provision, which sought to ensure teacher quality by insisting upon new paperwork requirements.

5.    Scraps federal “maintenance of effort” requirements which have limited the ability of states to trim school spending even when it is prudent or appropriate. Indeed, maintenance of effort has frequently threatened to penalize states that seek to use innovative technologies or staffing arrangements to cut costs.

6.    Offers new flexibility to states and districts when it comes to spending categorical funds. It would allow districts to transfer money aimed at one special population to another, while sensibly ensuring that dollars cannot be moved out of “Title I” schools (schools serving high concentrations of low-income students).

Frederick M. Hess is director of education policy studies at AEI.

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Huntsman’s bold policy agenda just got even bolder

By James Pethokoukis

January 9, 2012, 3:47 pm

With a strong showing tomorrow in New Hampshire, Jon Huntsman’s presidential campaign could gain the spark of life needed to eventually make the former Utah governor and U.S. ambassador to China the last anti-Romney standing. Or the effort could come to a quick end, though polls show Huntsman gaining momentum.

But whatever the political outcome, the Huntsman campaign has been a policy success. Huntsman has offered easily the most sweeping and pro-growth tax reform plan—dropping the top marginal income tax rate to 23 percent, while eliminating all tax breaks and investment taxes. Same goes for his financial reform plan to eliminate the Too Big To Fail problem by reducing the economic centrality and power of the largest banks.

Now Huntsman has hit a grand slam on education reform, which is vital to creating an innovative, fast-growing U.S. economy in the 21st century. Some key points:

Introducing Market Forces into Education System. Governor Huntsman supports an “all of the above” approach to education. The federal role should be acting as a clearinghouse for information and ideas, empowering states and local communities to take ownership of education reform. To this end, the federal government should attempt to minimize its role in trying to deliver outcomes, and instead encourage the growth of a more innovative educational system.

Creating Transparency. The key first step toward deregulation of education is introducing competition and transparency; free markets work best when given access to clear information. Jon Huntsman’s administration will establish meaningful and transparent national standards benchmarked to the world’s highest achieving educational systems and let states compete on how best to get there. Governor Huntsman believes that American students should be setting international standards, not aspiring to meet them. Our current standards are superficial, embarrassingly unambitious, and confusing for teachers.

Real Accountability. The federal government shouldn’t be in the business of running local schools or picking winners. President Huntsman will make sure schools, their administrators, and their boards are held accountable through data-driven measures of processes and achievement. Incentives matter, and communities whose schools fail to meet Common Core benchmarks should not be rewarded. A possible consequence could be restricting access to federal resources. President Huntsman will also use his bully pulpit to encourage adaptation of a parent trigger wherein a significant number of concerned parents could induce state action. On the other hand, principals who demonstrate sustained innovation and success should be rewarded and held up as models for other educators.

Department of Education Reform. The Department of Education has grown too large and powerful, and is restricting the flexibility of states and local communities to implement education reforms. Massively scaling down the department will clear the way for necessary reforms at the local level and free up precious resources.

Acknowledging Hard Truths. Public policy must be driven by reality. We need an education system that is designed to equip all students to be informed citizens and allows all children to maximize their God-given talents. Governor Huntsman believes that every child has a genius within; the challenge lies in empowering it. In preparing our youth to join an able citizenry, our education system should both provide generous opportunity for students to achieve their highest level of performance, while simultaneously acknowledging economic realities and making graduates both “college” and “career” ready. We need to reevaluate our “at all costs” emphasis on higher education for everyone in an environment where that emphasis only disadvantages individuals in the long run.

Great stuff. Better education is critical to increasing U.S. productivity, innovation, and growth. That means we need to a) expect more from students with greater academic ability, b) create meaningful, post-high school education options other than a four-year, BA program, c) get more kids in front of the best teachers. Indeed, poor schools may be costing the U.S. some $500 billion a year in lost GDP growth. Education has gotten zippo attention during this primary election season. If Huntsman sticks around, hopefully that will change.

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Andrew P. Kelly

For-profits and the Feds: The hits just keep on coming

By Andrew P. Kelly

November 4, 2011, 3:40 pm

It’s no secret that for-profit colleges and universities have been under intense scrutiny over the past three years. Much of that scrutiny is warranted: many for-profits have exorbitant tuition and high loan default rates, and some have been sanctioned for unsavory recruiting practices. Outside of the most ardent for-profit leaders, few would disagree that the sector has had some explaining to do.

That’s why it’s so surprising that for-profit opponents on the Senate HELP committee seem to think it’s necessary to inflate the charges against private sector colleges. Last year it was the flawed “secret shopper” report by the GAO that miscast a series of interactions between for-profit admissions counselors and fictitious prospective students (discussed here by Rick Hess and me; Senator Tom Harkin’s rebuttal to Rick and me can be found here). After the fact, GAO sources came forward to suggest that pressure from their Senate overseers to finish the report quickly led to a breakdown in quality control.

In the latest chapter, yesterday the Senate HELP committee admitted that an analysis of how much GI Bill money flows to for-profit colleges published in September grossly overestimated the amounts. The problem? Researchers had used two years of financial aid data instead of one. In September, we were told that the the amount of GI money going to for-profits grew 159 percent from 2009 to 2010; the corrected data show a growth rate of 86 percent. The University of Phoenix brought in $133 million in GI benefits last year, not more than 1.5 times that amount ($210 million) as was reported initially.

As was the case with last year’s GAO SNAFU, however, the HELP folks have insisted that the revision does nothing to change the “central findings” that for-profits take a lot of GI money.

But this raises a fundamental question: at what threshold would the central findings change? Is $100 million to Phoenix too much? $75 million? Is it the amount that troubles the committee, or the fact that they get any money at all?

The bottom line: In a policy area where it is hard enough to separate fact from fiction, we should demand that our policy makers do better than get it half-right.

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Categories:  Economic Policy, Education   |   Tags: ,

Andrew Biggs

Disagreeing with Michelle Rhee, kind of

By Andrew Biggs

November 3, 2011, 10:42 am

In response to my recent paper on public school teacher pay—in which Jason Richwine and I concluded that overall teacher compensation, including salaries, benefits, and job security, was roughly 50 percent above market levels—the Washington Post cites a recent comment from former Washington, DC schools chancellor Michelle Rhee:

“The average teacher salary in the United States is estimated to be around $55,000. Surely your favorite teacher is worth more than that.”

But here’s the problem: average total compensation including benefits is around $110,000, significantly more than teachers’ skills would merit in private sector jobs. And that amount isn’t simply paid to my favorite teacher; it goes to my least favorite teacher as well, since good and bad teachers are paid essentially the same. So we could just as accurately say:

“The average not-so-great teacher in the United States receives total compensation of around $110,000 per year.”

Is that too much to pay? Yes.

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Bridget Johnson

L.A. Mayor: GOP Should See School Spending Needs; Dems Should Fight Union Inflexibility

By Bridget Johnson

September 19, 2011, 2:27 pm

(Peter Holden)

The Democratic mayor of Los Angeles said today at AEI that the need to fix schools should rank above both the urge to slash spending and organized labor’s resistance to tough reforms.

Antonio Villaraigosa, who early in his career worked as an organizer for the powerful United Teachers Los Angeles, highlighted his battles with the union in tackling teacher quality, overcrowding, low student performance, and a nearly 30 percent four-year high school dropout rate in the 700,000-student Los Angeles Unified School District.

“I probably terrorize them more than people on the right,” Villaraigosa said after noting that the union hadn’t budged a bit on reform initiatives during his six years in office. “I’m unabashedly pro-union but I’m pro-kid.”

The mayor said the “single most important issue facing cities and indeed the nation today” was raising a generation with the education and skills needed to compete in the new global economy.

“I am not anti-union but I do take umbrage with some of the issues they’ve gotten behind,” he said, adding that one of the biggest problems with teacher union contracts today is that “they’re too focused on rights and not responsibilities.”

“We need union contracts that provide us flexibility to innovate,” he said.

Villaraigosa said the tenure system is “broken” and seniority should not be the deciding factor in teacher assignments, salary, and the like. “Nobody has a job for life.”

He said a “middle ground” that gives greater weight to evaluations and results is needed, particularly as districts ask for more money and the public demands to see change attached to that spending.

“Our schools are starved for dollars and cents; our policies are starved for common sense,” the mayor said.

Villaraigosa said more Democrats need to challenge the powerful unions while Republicans should acknowledge that money is part of the answer. “I have no doubt that we all want the same thing here,” he said. “Our schools are badly broken.”

Villaraigosa was asked how the U.S. Conference of Mayors, of which he is currently president, would reconcile budget cuts brewing in Washington with the need for education dollars. “If there’s a difference between the mayors and the members of Congress it’s that we have a real job,” he quipped, noting that they can’t afford to be “doctrinaire.”

He acknowledged that there is “sticker shock” when people see that the LAUSD has a $7 billion budget, but added, “I guarantee that the money we don’t spend on education right now is money we’ll spend later on food stamps, jail, unemployment benefits.”

“We need funding but we need reform and we need both right now,” he said.

He proudly touted that the LAUSD has more charter schools than any other district in the country and the “vast majority” of them are high performing.

At the conclusion of his address and audience questions, Villaraigosa was presented with the 2011 Champion for Charters Award by the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

“Champion for Charters,” the mayor said as he looked at the award. “Champion for kids.”

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