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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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Why getting a good education and a good job doesn’t necessarily mean going to a four-year college

By James Pethokoukis

December 30, 2011, 2:54 pm

As I mentioned earlier, I am currently reading Real Education by Charles Murray. In the book, Murray makes four big points: a) Ability varies; b) half of the children are below average; c) too many people are going to college; and d) America’s future depends on how we educate the academically gifted. It’s the third point I am concerned about for the moment. Here is President Obama is his recent Osawatomie, Kansas, speech:

But we need to meet the moment. We’ve got to up our game. We need to remember that we can only do that together. It starts by making education a national mission — a national mission. Government and businesses, parents and citizens. In this economy, a higher education is the surest route to the middle class. The unemployment rate for Americans with a college degree or more is about half the national average. And their incomes are twice as high as those who don’t have a high school diploma. Which means we shouldn’t be laying off good teachers right now — we should be hiring them. We shouldn’t be expecting less of our schools –- we should be demanding more. We shouldn’t be making it harder to afford college — we should be a country where everyone has a chance to go and doesn’t rack up $100,000 of debt just because they went.

Obama’s words remind me of this passage in the book:

The problem begins with the message sent to young people that they should aspire to college no matter what. Some politicians are among the most visible offenders, treating every failure to go to college as an injustice that can be remedied by increasing government help.

Murray makes several points that dispute Obama:

1. Only 20 percent of all students have the academic ability to do college work without decreasing the difficulty level.

2. For the student who wants to become a hotel manager, journalist, software designer, farmer, hospital administrator, four years of class work at a brick-and-mortar college is unnecessary — especially if K-12 did a better job a providing a classical liberal education.

3. The income for the people in a wide variety of  occupations that do not require a college degree is higher than the average income for many occupations that do require a BA. For some, being an electrician is a better career path than being a middle-level manager, both in terms of wages and job satisfaction.

Now this is not to say education should end at high school. Certainly not, as Joel Kotkin points out in City Journal:

The shortage of industrial skills points to a wide gap between the American education system and the demands of the world economy. For decades, Americans have been told that the future lies in high-end services, such as law, and “creative” professions, such as software-writing and systems design. This has led many pundits to think that the only real way to improve opportunities for the country’s middle class is to increase its access to higher education.

That attitude is a relic of the post–World War II era, a time when a college education almost guaranteed you a good job. These days, the returns on higher education, particularly on higher education gained outside the elite schools, are declining, as they have been for about a decade.  …  The reason for the low rewards is that many of the skills learned in college are now in oversupply. … The oversupply of college-educated workers is especially striking when you contrast it with the growing shortage of skilled manufacturing workers.  …  Two-year colleges will be crucial to the effort to train skilled workers. One of these schools, Central Ohio Technical College, has recently expanded by 70 welding students and 50 aspiring machinists per year. Many of the college’s certificate programs are designed and partly funded by companies, which figure that they’re making a wise investment. …

Such shorter educational alternatives will become ever more important as industrial workers retire. The average skilled worker in the industries supplying the gas boom is in his mid-fifties. “At our plant, you have lots of people with 20 to 30 years’ experience,” says Kirk, who has three high-skill openings that he can’t fill. “But there’s no apprenticeship program—no way to fill the future growth. We are simply running out of people.”

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How to best educate smart kids

By James Pethokoukis

December 30, 2011, 12:38 pm

As AEI’s Charles Murray writes in the brief-but-great “Real Education: Four Simple Truths for Bringing America’s Schools Back to Reality”:

“… we are unrealistic about students at every level of academic ability — asking too much from those at the bottom, asking the wrong things from those at the middle, and asking too little from those at the top.”

The question of how to best educate the most gifted and promote academic excellence is tackled by the Manhattan Institute’s Sol Stern in a recent City Journal article:

Regrettably, the states haven’t done much better in helping gifted youngsters achieve their best. Perhaps the best indicator of the states’ neglect is that fewer than 100 science and math high schools currently exist across the country, and they enroll only 47,000 students. This is an absurdly low number, particularly when you consider the declining number of American students pursuing advanced science and engineering degrees.  … Many states lack specialized math and science public high schools altogether. …

A decade after passing No Child Left Behind, Congress needs to correct one of the law’s most damaging oversights. An amended NCLB could direct the federal Department of Education to offer financial incentives to states to boost the number of competitive, specialized high schools like Gotham’s, but free of their bureaucratic and union constraints—just as the department already rewards states for such reforms as increasing the number of charter schools and creating new teacher evaluations based on students’ test scores.

These specialized high schools, in fact, could be charter schools. Education reformers under the sway of NCLB’s reigning philosophy have viewed charters almost exclusively as a way to lift up the educationally disadvantaged. But charters could also play a constructive role in improving instruction for the smartest students. Why shouldn’t we encourage universities’ engineering schools, say, to create charter engineering high schools? Competitive entrance exams for such a school could take place at the sponsoring university’s campus. Top students at the school could take college-level engineering courses and even obtain early admission to the university. Companies like IBM and Microsoft could sponsor similar charter schools for science and math.

America will gain if school reformers get over the idea that elite education is undemocratic or comes at the expense of the disadvantaged.  … ” The next iteration of No Child Left Behind should have a great deal more of this Jeffersonian belief that, though America’s schools should educate all children well, they should also nurture academic excellence for the good of our democracy.

 

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Andrew P. Kelly

Arne Duncan talks the talk on containing college costs

By Andrew P. Kelly

December 1, 2011, 8:58 am

On Tuesday, Education Secretary Arne Duncan delivered an important address on the imperative to contain college costs. Like his speech on the “new normal” in K-12 (delivered at AEI last November), Duncan called on higher education leaders to take on the challenge of doing more with less. As the secretary put it,

I want to ask [the higher education community] to look ahead and start thinking more creatively—and with much greater urgency—about how to contain the spiraling costs of college and reduce the burden of student debt on our nation’s students. . . . I believe that postsecondary institutions and states also have yet to fully tackle the cost containment challenge in a comprehensive and sustainable fashion. . . . I know that there are no simple solutions, no silver bullets here. But the difficulty of reducing the price of college and student debt cannot become a discussion-ending excuse for inaction.

The speech represents a refreshing, if overdue, shift in the administration’s approach to the college cost problem (I’m also biased: the speech cited Reinventing Higher Education, a book I co-edited with Kevin Carey and Ben Wildavsky).

For the last three years, the Obama administration has been preoccupied with student aid and affordability issues. They have eliminated private lenders from federal student loans, increased spending on Pell Grants, and recently made changes to loan repayment that will make some borrowers’ lives easier.

But there is a critical distinction between affordability (the cost to students) and the actual cost of providing postsecondary education (to taxpayers). While we can use additional student aid dollars to affect the former, this approach provides no incentive for institutions to change the latter. It feels good to hand out larger Pell Grants or reduce the monthly payments of debt-laden graduates. But these solutions attack the symptoms of the disease (high tuition and debt) rather than the ailment itself (runaway college costs).

Thankfully, Duncan recognizes this: “Why has this tremendous expansion in student aid not been matched by equally dramatic progress in containing college costs and student debt? Part of the explanation has to be that the higher education system provides few long-term incentives to control student costs and debt.”

It will be interesting to see how the administration translates these priorities into policy. For now, applause to Secretary Duncan for drawing much-needed attention to the real college cost problem.

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Banter #31: Are teachers underpaid?

By Stuart James

November 10, 2011, 1:03 pm

Are teachers paid too much? Andrew Biggs, AEI resident scholar, sits down with Stu and Andrew to make the case that they are, and to discuss his Wall Street Journal op-ed on the topic. We discuss the various factors used to measure teacher compensation, including pension plans, health benefits, and jobs security. Andrew Biggs also responds to some counter arguments from AEI’s own education department. As a bonus, Andrew discusses why he almost became a potato farmer. You can listen to the podcast here and subscribe on iTunes here.

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What to consider when evaluating teachers

By Jenna Schuette Talbot

November 9, 2011, 11:41 am

If we don’t have a good system to evaluate teachers, how can we assess progress or reward the best ones? Yesterday, the Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) Committee held a hearing on the Harkin-Enzi bill to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA)—the nation’s largest federal education law. Despite the controversy around mandating these systems during the committee negotiations, there was little mention of this during the hearing.

The original version of the Harkin-Enzi ESEA bill sought to require all states to develop teacher evaluation systems that relied in part on student achievement. However, as part of the tireless effort to dial back federal involvement in education, the GOP successfully insisted that these requirements apply only to those states who participate in the voluntary Teacher Incentive Fund. The Fund federally supports states and districts who want to develop performance-based teacher and principal compensation systems.

As new evaluations become more promising, states and districts are likely to opt in to the Fund to receive resources and political cover for building better systems. These more comprehensive and objective ways of evaluating teachers allow leaders to better identify the best teachers.

Right now, more than 99 percent of our 3.4 million teachers are categorized as “good” or “great” teachers, even in schools where students fail year after year—a fact that has confirmed skepticism about the efficacy of our current teacher evaluations. However, as we start systematizing these evaluations, many fear that we have yet to get it right.

But there’s a way forward. Harvard researchers Heather Hill and Corinne Herlihy provide policy  makers with recommendations to consider when designing teacher evaluation systems in their just released Education Outlook, “Prioritizing Teaching Quality in a New System of Teacher Evaluation.”

Here are steps we can take:

1.    Invest in a system that assesses individuals directly on teaching, not teacher, quality.

2.    Use multiple criteria to evaluate teachers—including student growth, contributions to the school community, and parent feedback.

3.    Be cautious of systems that rely too heavily on teacher’s value-added scores.

4.    Worry less about the tools used to evaluate teachers, and more about which data schools are using to evaluate.

As teacher evaluations continue to be lauded—at both the federal and state level—Hill and Herlihy’s recommendations should be thoughtfully considered by policy makers and education leaders.

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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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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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Categories:  Economic Policy, Education, U.S. Economy   |   Tags:

Nick Schulz

The upside of inequality

By Nick Schulz

October 27, 2011, 9:47 am

Jim, let’s hope liberals take the CBO findings seriously, but odds are they will draw all the wrong conclusions. Your point about the returns to human capital formation are on point. In a counter-intuitive piece, here’s what Gary Becker and Kevin Murphy had to say about rising income inequality:

We conclude that the forces raising earnings inequality in the United States are beneficial to the extent that they reflect higher returns to invest­ments in education and other human capital. Yet this conclusion should not produce complacency, for the response so far to these higher returns has been disturbingly limited. For example, why haven’t more high school graduates gone on to a college educa­tion when the benefits are so apparent? Why don’t more of those who go to college finish a four-year degree? (Only about half do so.) And why has the proportion of American youth who drop out of high school, especially African-American and Hispanic males, remained fairly constant?

The answers to these and related questions lie partly in the breakdown of the American family, and the resulting low skill levels acquired by many children in elementary and secondary school—particularly individuals from broken households. Cognitive skills tend to get developed at very early ages while, as our colleague James Heckman has shown, noncognitive skills—such as study hab­its, getting to appointments on time, and attitudes toward work—get fixed at later, although still rel­atively young, ages. Most high school dropouts certainly appear to be seriously deficient in the noncognitive skills that would enable them to take advantage of the higher rates of return to education and other human capital.

So instead of lamenting the increased earnings gap caused by education, policymakers and the pub­lic should focus attention on how to raise the fraction of American youth who complete high school and then go on for a college education. Solutions are not cheap or easy. But it will be a disaster if the focus remains so much on the earnings inequality itself that Congress tries to interfere directly with this inequality rather than trying to raise the education levels of those who are now being left behind.

I’m of two minds about this, in part because Charles Murray’s argument that too many kids are going to college today is compelling. But the human capital problems among America’s poor and middle class are real and one hopes that will be the political takeaway from the CBO’s findings.

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Sadanand Dhume

The Ashkenazim of India

By Sadanand Dhume

October 20, 2011, 2:59 pm

Over at The American, Lazar Berman has a fascinating story about the high proportion of Jewish Nobel Prize winners in the sciences, a subject that has also been written about by AEI’s Charles Murray. In passing, Berman mentions how, relative to its population of 1.1 billion people, India has produced few Nobelists—between six and eight depending on how you count.

In itself, this is hardly surprising for a poor country yet to achieve universal literacy. Drill down further, however, and you come upon an obscure factoid mentioned by the historian Patrick French in his book India: A Portrait. Three of the four Indians or persons of Indian origin who have won a science Nobel come from a community said to number under 2 million people—Brahmins from Tamil Nadu. They include C. V. Raman (physics, 1930), Subrahmanyan Chandrasekar (physics, 1983), and Venkatraman Ramakrishnan (chemistry, 2009). The odd man out: Punjab-born Hargobind Khorana, who won a Nobel for medicine in 1968. The tiny Tamil Brahmin community also accounts for Viswanathan Anand, India’s only world chess champion, and the mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan.

Needless to say, there are perfectly reasonable non-genetic explanations that can explain this peculiar preponderance. For one, Brahmin priests have a tradition of literacy that goes back to antiquity. For much of recorded history, they more or less monopolized traditional education, which gave them, and their descendants, a big leg up when Indians took to modern education under the British. But this still doesn’t explain why only Tamil Brahmins, and not their Bengali, Maharashtrian, or Uttar Pradesh counterparts, stand out in this manner.

In India, public discussion of this subject is more or less verboten. Caste is a touchy subject, and any such debate would likely devolve quickly into an exercise in caste chauvinism and name calling. Nonetheless, maybe it’s time for scientists to study the over-achieving Tamil Brahmin community with a view towards determining how much of its success in math, music, and science can be credited to nurture and how much to nature. Until then, it’s intriguing to think of Tamil Brahmins as the Ashkenazim of India.

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Andrew P. Kelly

What Population Growth Means for Higher Education

By Andrew P. Kelly

October 3, 2011, 3:53 pm

On Friday, the College Board published an important report on the challenge of improving the college completion rates of Hispanic students. The report marshals a ton of useful data on this question, but it’s the projections of the growth in Latino postsecondary enrollment that are the most important. Latinos were responsible for almost 40 percent of the growth in the population under the age of 16 over the last decade; they now make up the largest minority group in America’s elementary and secondary schools. Projections suggest that the number of Latinos enrolled in postsecondary institutions will grow from 2.3 million in 2008 to 3.3 million in 2019. Meanwhile, the College Board reports that only 19.2 percent of Hispanics aged 25 to 34 have attained an associate degree or higher, compared to 48.7 percent of whites.

The College Board report comes on the heels of new research from the Pew Hispanic Center which showed that the enrollment of Hispanic students aged 18-24 grew by a whopping 349,000 between 2009 and 2010 (a 24 percent increase in just a single year). In contrast, African-American enrollment growth was about one quarter of that (88,000) and white enrollment experienced a decline of 320,000 students during this period.

As my colleagues and I warned in Rising to the Challenge last year, these projections suggest that Latino student success will have an increasingly large impact on the nation’s ability to make progress on President Obama’s higher education goals and on its long-term economic competitiveness. Building a highly skilled workforce will require serious attention to the challenges and obstacles that Hispanic students encounter. What to do?

The College Board offers an ambitious slate of suggested reforms that target the entire educational pipeline, from quality early childhood instruction to improved high school counseling to targeted efforts to improve student retention and completion. In all, the report makes ten recommendations, five of which deal explicitly with the postsecondary side of the equation. Suggestions like “keep college affordable” and “simplify the admissions and financial aid processes” are certainly advisable.

Where the report falls short, however, is in making recommendations about how to change policies such that:

1. Institutions of higher education have incentive to not only enroll Hispanic students, but to ensure that they graduate and;

2. Hispanic students have a better sense of which colleges are likely to serve their interests most effectively.

In particular, despite our recommendations, there has been no effort to augment the federal definition of what constitutes a Hispanic-Serving Institution (HSI) to reflect student success as well as enrollment. Currently, the definition hinges only on the percentage of student enrollment that is Hispanic (25 percent) and avoids any outcomes-based criteria (degrees awarded to Hispanic students, completion or retention rates, etc). Research shows that almost half of the Latinos enrolled in higher education attend the 200+ four- and two-year colleges that are certified as Hispanic-Serving Institutions by the federal government. Yet there is little conclusive evidence that these institutions promote higher levels of Latino student success than non-HSIs. Shouldn’t we reserve the distinction of being labeled an HSI (and given the federal grant money that goes with it) for those institutions that have the best track records of serving Hispanic students, not only those that enroll them?

When asked in April 2010 about reforming the HSI program, Education Secretary Arne Duncan signaled a willingness to consider outcomes-based criteria, stating that “access is critical … but at the end of the day it is about completion.” However, when asked if he specifically supported changing the HSI grant criteria to reflect outcomes, he deferred, saying, “Let me get back to you on that.”

A year and a half later, the College Board and Pew reports reveal that the challenge of Hispanic college completion looms larger than ever.

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Michael Rubin

Yale Loses Its Edge

By Michael Rubin

September 28, 2011, 10:26 am

For decades, residential colleges have both been Yale University’s chief selling point and the feature by which the university differentiates itself from its Ivy League companions and other top tier universities. All freshmen are subdivided randomly into one of 12 colleges, remaining affiliated with it for four years and living there for three or four years. The net effect is that the colleges provide a sense of community—the chief benefit of a small college experience—with the classroom and campus resources of a much larger university. In a society in which identity groups often self-segregate themselves, the residential colleges also enable Yalies to meet a diverse array of people.

While in theory each residential college is equal, over time, they develop different characteristics. Each college is led by a master. Some masters are disinterested: When I was an undergraduate, I was in Davenport College. In my freshman year, the master was a professor of 19th-century Germany and ran the college like a Prussian general. In my subsequent three years, the master was a retired admiral, who, it turned out, was retired not only from the Navy but also from anything which required effort. In contrast, when I was a graduate student, I was for a year a resident graduate affiliate in Pierson College. Harvey Goldblatt, a professor of medieval Slavic literature, was master and quickly catapulted Pierson into the envy of all other colleges: He knew each student not only by name, but also made an effort to interact with everyone. He cheered on the residential college’s intramural sports teams, and even undertook his own alumni endowment to allow, for example, a spring break trip to Italy for most seniors. Behind the scenes, he was involved in administrative issues and stayed on top of everything from employee morale in the dining hall to the length of time scaffolding remained up after work was completed.

Alas, Yale has changed. In the twelve years since I have left New Haven, faculty members tell me that the number of administrators has almost doubled. While Yale University once encouraged autonomy among students to set up organizations, fix problems, and take responsibility for their own decisions, today, an ever-increasing number of deans get involved to regulate all aspects of life and administration. Whereas Yale students could once choose to excel in extracurricular activities or academics, today there is little differentiation: grade inflation and administration intervention has evened the playing field so that a lazy and irresponsible student will, from his or her record, appear equal to one who in the past might have been able to differentiate themselves academically.

The quest for equality and the bolstering of safety nets has not only blurred distinctions amongst students, but also faculty. At some point, administrators—for whom bureaucracy rather than education is a career—decided that it was unfair to have inequality among colleges. After all, if a college master managed to energize both students and alumni, students in other colleges might resent that another master was not up to the job.

Enter President Richard Levin: Replicating what too often happens in liberal society, rather than celebrating success or encouraging competition to keep up, Levin instead sought to encourage mediocrity by “equalizing” the college experience. Alumni who have donated money to their college will now find that their money has been put into a general fund. Perhaps the university will assure donors that their donation did go to the college, but the university—according to multiple faculty members—will simply reduce the budget allotment to the college by the same amount. At the same time, deans regulate what college masters can sponsor and how often: When I was a resident affiliate in Pierson, the college brought in perhaps 50 speakers over the course of an academic year to interact with students, often in intimate settings over dinner. Now, with the university’s embrace of mediocrity, it would be hard to bring in one-fifth that many, because the administration dissuades competition.

Governments and administrators can take two general approaches to governance: They can try to create equality of opportunity, i.e., an even playing field, or they can try to create equality of experience. The first encourages competition and individual liberty, while the second embraces paternalism and mediocrity. Certainly, there is something very wrong at Yale when administrators choose the latter.

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Andrew P. Kelly

The Advantages of Charter Schools

By Andrew P. Kelly

September 23, 2011, 10:17 am

The charter school movement officially turned 19 this year, and things have never looked better. From the first school in St. Paul, Minnesota, in 1992, the charter idea has gone mainstream, attracting the support of Republicans and Democrats alike and serving as the centerpiece of a high-profile Hollywood documentary about education reform. As of the 2010-2011 school year, there were 5,300 charter schools serving 1.7 million students in 40 states and the District of Columbia. In cities like New Orleans, Washington, D.C., and Detroit, charter schools have taken between 35 and 60 percent of the public school market.

A recently released paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research suggests that all of this attention and expansion is warranted. One side effect of the maturation of the charter school movement is that more and more charter school graduates are moving through college and into the workforce, meaning researchers can now compare student outcomes that go far beyond standardized test scores and high school graduation rates. Though student achievement is an important intermediate outcome, there is an appetite for proof that charters help guide their students to better life outcomes overall.

In the most rigorous study of longer-term outcomes to date, a team of economists followed students from charter and regular public schools in the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district through high school and into college. The researchers compared those students who had won a seat in a charter school lottery to those who had applied but not won the lottery to estimate the effect of attending a charter school on college attainment.

The results are impressive: among students whose local public schools were low-quality, lottery winners were more likely to graduate from high school, start a four-year degree program, and earn a bachelor’s degree. Even more impressive: lottery winners were twice as likely to attend a highly selective college. The authors argue that these effects reflect real gains in college preparedness rather than superficial differences such as extra help in completing college applications.

As is the case with every piece of research in the charter school debate, it’s best not to overstate the implications of these findings. For one thing, the context in which these findings were produced is important. These charter schools were so popular that they had to use a lottery to fill seats and were competing against neighborhood schools that are bad to begin with. These findings suggest that high quality charter schools can produce better life outcomes for their students, particularly when the alternative is a lousy public school. This is certainly positive news for the charter school movement. But it is also a reminder that policymakers and the public would be wise to emphasize quality, and not just the charter label, in the promotion of charter schools as a promising reform strategy.

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Mark Schneider

College Costs Outpacing Ability of Consumers to Pay

By Mark Schneider

September 21, 2011, 2:54 pm

The recent news about wages for most Americans has been bleak. Median family income has been relatively flat for most of the decade and has fallen around 6 percent since its peak in 2007, just before the current Great Recession began. As is well-known, income stagnation has created a decline in demand for many consumer goods, especially housing, where median home values throughout the nation have collapsed.

After housing, usually the single most expensive item that many Americans purchase is a college education for their children. However, the costs of attending college is outpacing the ability of families to pay, by a long shot.

In the figure below, I take the average cost of attendance at bachelor-degree-granting institutions as a percentage of median family income. I report these percentages for each of the three types of campuses we have in the United States: public institutions (e.g., the University of California, Ohio State); private not-for-profits (Harvard, Adelphi); and private for-profits (Kaplan, University of Phoenix). We can think of this figure as charting out how much of their income the median household would need to spend each year to pay for a student enrolled on average in one of these colleges. Obviously, there is great variation in the costs between different campuses, even within each of these three categories, but the graph communicates the state of affairs of higher education in the United States: as their customer base loses the ability to pay, colleges and universities continue to become more expensive.

Consider the most expensive campuses in the nation: the private not-for-profit institutions of higher education. In the 2000/2001 academic year, the cost of attending one of these campuses absorbed roughly 40 percent of median family income. Over the past 10 years, this percentage increased year after year, and last year, the cost of attendance equaled 60 percent of median family income.

Public colleges and universities are heavily subsidized by taxpayers, so their cost of attendance is much lower than the cost of attending a private college. Here too we see a steady increase in the percentage of family income needed to pay a year’s attendance, growing from about one-fifth of family income  at the beginning of the decade to just about one-third now.

Private for-profit institutions are the fastest growing segment of the higher education industry in the United States. Traditionally, their cost of attendance has been in the middle of the high priced not-for-profits and the subsidized publics. Their cost of attendance has increased from about 30 percent in the 2000/01 academic year to 37 percent the last academic year. It is interesting to note that for-profit institutions actually decreased their costs relative to family income between the 2009/2010 academic year and the 2010/11 academic year. Perhaps being more subject to market pressure than the other sectors, the declining income of their clientele has begun to force them to figure out how to reduce prices.

Not many industries can keep outrunning the ability of their customers to pay. During the last decade, higher education was one of them. How much longer can this go on?

Notes:

The numerator is from the U.S. Department of Education Integrated Postsecondary Educations Data Systems (IPEDS). The cost is for the modal type of student in each of the three types of campuses: for public institutions this is the price of attendance for full-time, first-time undergraduate students (academic year programs), total price for in-state students living on campus; and for not-for-profit campuses, this is the price of attendance for full-time, first-time undergraduate students (academic year programs), total price for out-of-state students living on campus. Very few for-profit institutions have on-campus housing, and the price of attendance is for full-time, first-time undergraduate students (academic year programs), total price for out-of-state students living off campus (with family). Note that this is based on “sticker price” and that many schools discount their tuition.

The denominator is Median family income from the U.S. Census, Current Population Survey, Table F-6.  Regions—Families (All Races) by Median and Mean Income:  1953 to 2010.

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Andrew Biggs

How Much Do D.C. Teachers Value Job Security?

By Andrew Biggs

September 20, 2011, 5:47 pm

In my work on public sector pay with Jason Richwine, we’ve attempted to place a monetary value on the extra job security that government employees receive. Job security is like an insurance policy against unemployment. Also, it can protect a position that pays a salary or benefits premium relative to the private sector. We find that the baseline value of protection against unemployment is worth an extra 2 to 3 percent of pay.

Job security is an area where our critics have taken our work the least seriously. Other studies on public employee pay, such as those from Jeffrey Keefe and the Center for State and Local Government Excellence, make no real attempt to value job security. Others have simply scoffed, such as the Ohio Public Employees Retirement System, which placed the phrase “job security” in quotes, as if to deny that public employees actually do have greater job security.

This morning’s Washington Examiner reports that growing numbers of elite teachers in Washington, D.C., are willing to trade higher salaries for lower job security. Looking at who was eligible for the raises, how much job security they would give up, and how many took the deal can give us an idea of how public employees value job security.

Under D.C.’s Impact Plus program, teachers who are rated “highly effective” two years running are eligible for annual raises of up to $20,000, in exchange for which they give up the right to stay on the rolls and seek retraining and other options if their teaching position is eliminated. Importantly, under the teaching contract signed under former Chancellor Michelle Rhee, layoffs are now at least partially performance based. As Washington Teachers Union head Nathan Saunders has said, “Excessing is the new teacher firing.” If so, elite teachers presumably have much less to fear compared to layoffs based solely on staffing needs and seniority.

Two-hundred and ninety teachers were eligible for the raise, the top 7 percent of the district’s teaching force. The district illustrates the scale of the salary increases using a teacher who holds only a bachelor’s degree and has a salary level of $51,716. That teacher’s salary would immediately rise to $69,132, a 34 percent increase that puts the teacher at the level ordinarily granted to a teacher on Step 7 of the master’s degree scale.

Of the eligible teachers, 80 percent accepted the raise. This has been interpreted as a positive sign for the program (and it probably is). But look at it this way: one-fifth of the very highest rated teachers turned down a one-third increase in pay to avoid reducing their job security. Presumably, the average teacher would have given up an even larger raise, since he’d have more to fear from a loss of job security. And all teachers would likely give up larger raises if the trade-off had taken job security fully down to private sector levels, where there is employment “at will.”

Now, public employees are more risk averse, and therefore may value security more, than the typical private sector employee. And there’s also the chance that some of the teachers turned the raise down for philosophical reasons; if we can obtain better data on which teachers accepted and which refused, we can get a better handle on that aspect of things.

But all of this tells me it’s worth our while to put a dollar value on job security.

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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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Andrew P. Kelly

College Courses from Groupon?

By Andrew P. Kelly

September 7, 2011, 10:03 am

On Labor Day, the Chicago Tribune reported on a news item that is akin to pigs taking flight: an institution of higher education had taken the unprecedented step of lowering the sticker price of one of its courses. National Louis University, a private non-profit university in Chicago, has offered its masters-level “Introduction to Teaching” course on Groupon, the site that offers discounts at local retailers to savvy shoppers. Groupon prices the course for $950—less than half the usual tuition of $2,232—though it only counts for 3 of the 36 credits needed for the master’s in teaching and the discount will be limited to 25 students.

Putting aside debates about the value of a master’s in teaching programs—and the evidence is pretty good that these paper credentials don’t make much difference—let’s congratulate National Louis for being so bold as to <gasp> cut the price of anything on a college campus. When was the last time a college did anything but jack its tuition at twice the rate of inflation?

The problem is, in the strange world that is higher education, making any facet of “college” cheaper leads people to question its quality rather than consider why college courses are priced so outrageously in the first place.

Gawker’s coverage of the National Louis experiment is a case in point. The blog describes National Louis as “an actual real college created to commemorate the moment that the St. Louis Browns joined the National League in 1934” rather than what it really is: a teachers college with more than 100 years of experience in training educators, and the birthplace of the kindergarten movement. And the poor dupes who choose to take up the offer? “Think of what a great story you’ll have to tell your students at your failing school one day: ‘Your teacher comes from Groupon.’”

The right question to ask in response to the Groupon deal is not whether National Louis is some fly-by-night diploma mill, but how it is that the school can offer this course for less than half of what they normally charge and pass those savings onto students. Maybe the high cost of providing a college course isn’t completely “fixed,” and other courses—even entire degree programs—could be provided at a lower price tag. More generally, why couldn’t we have a system where colleges price-compete for students?

Alas, Groupon is not the way forward in higher education reform. But this kind of competitive pricing would be a welcome change from the high-cost, high-price model we have today.

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Frederick M. Hess

Don’t Slam Alabama Schools for Counting Illegal Immigrants

By Frederick M. Hess

August 29, 2011, 4:49 pm

As the nation’s schools wrestle with strapped budgets and policy makers push schools to do a much better job of serving the millions of students, it’s estimated that 3 million or more illegal immigrants are enrolled in American schools. Apparently, merely trying to gauge the number or location of these students is now enough to get one labeled racist.

Yesterday, the Washington Post devoted its lead Sunday editorial to slamming Alabama’s tough new anti-illegal immigration statute. Titled “Alabama’s immigration travesty,” the editorial charged that the law is “poisonous” and seemingly opposes denying illegal immigrants any privilege enjoyed by citizens and legal residents.

The Washington Post argued, “Perhaps the most obnoxious provision of the law is its requirement that public schools confirm all students’ immigration status and report those who lack proper documents to school officials.” While Alabama officials acknowledged that established law requires them to serve these students, the WaPo opines, “But whom are they kidding? The measure is meant to frighten youngsters and their parents and will have precisely that effect.”

Trying to document the number and nature of the illegal immigrants who are enrolled in Alabama’s schools strikes me as useful information when it comes to debating immigration policy, school spending, service provision, and the rest. The question of how many dollars, teachers, and resources are being consumed by children who are in this country illegally seems to me a perfectly fair and valid question, given that every dollar and every instructional hour devoted to meeting their needs is necessarily denied to a student who is an American citizen or a legal resident. (It’s also noteworthy that the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights has just completed a massive effort to collect all kinds of new data on an array of sensitive subjects—without a peep of protest from the Washington Post—such as the number of high school counselors in schools, availability of pre- K and kindergarten programs, districts operating under desegregation orders or plans, and whether districts have written policies prohibiting harassment and bullying on the basis of race, color, national origin, sex, or disability.)

It’s reasonable to discuss the impact of these students on schools who are pushed to do more with less. Given their family demographics, it wouldn’t surprise a bit if these children are particularly costly to serve due to their language status and family circumstances (of course we don’t know, because no one has collected this data). If this “frightening” law prods some families that are illegally in the U.S. to voluntarily return to their native lands, that would seem an eminently desirable way to boost the ability of Alabama’s schools to focus on serving schoolchildren who are citizens or legal residents—whatever their race and creed. And the Washington Post regards this as an unquestionably bad thing?

I’ll readily concede there are complex questions of moral philosophy here, and that our commitment to serving children who are in this nation illegally is admirable, in its own way, and perhaps sensible. And many are aware that the courts have required schools to educate every child who shows up, regardless of their legal status. But I find it peculiar to see those who regard illegal immigration as, you know, illegal, summarily pilloried as xenophobic racists. It marks me as a reactionary in education circles, but I find it bizarre that we’ve come to a place where seeking legal ways to perhaps focus more educational resources on American citizens and legal immigrants is immediately suspect.

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A Closer Look at ‘Conservative Cannibalism and Fiscal Terrorism’ in Michigan

By Whitney Downs

August 29, 2011, 10:52 am

Last week, Michigan lawmakers took another step to rein in public sector employee spending, passing a bill giving municipalities, local governments, and school districts a choice: cap your employee healthcare benefits, or forfeit 10 percent of your state funding.

School districts must choose to either limit healthcare payouts to $15,000 per family or cap their healthcare contribution at 80 percent of the plan’s total cost. Districts failing to do so will forfeit 10 percent of their state funding. For context’s sake, that would equal a $44 million dollar hit to Detroit Public Schools’ general fund alone.

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Andrew Biggs

Teachers Earn Less for a Reason

By Andrew Biggs

August 26, 2011, 3:55 pm

Mark Perry posts regarding the new AEI Education Outlook by University of Missouri economist Cory Koedel which shows Education to be by far the easiest course of study in most colleges. Mark finds additional evidence from Cornell University to back up Koedel’s claim. Education majors enter college with lower SAT scores than students majoring in other fields but leave college with higher GPAs. Unless something truly magical happens in education schools, we can only conclude that Education is simply a less demanding course of study. As Koedel points out, this lack of rigor undermines rewards to students who work harder, makes it more difficult for schools to distinguish good teaching candidates from poor ones, and may contribute to a professional culture that cares little about standards of quality.

But, as a forthcoming paper that I have co-authored with Jason Richwine will show, the low standards applied in education degrees also complicate the task of determining whether public school teachers are fairly paid. Teachers claim to be underpaid because they receive lower average salaries than private sector workers with similar levels of education. (Our paper shows that, even if this is true, they more than make up the gap through generous benefits, but we’ll ignore that for now.) But note that the control variable here is the level of education — meaning, Bachelor’s degree, Master’s degree, and so on — and not the quality of education nor, more importantly, the ability or productivity of the worker.

In most public-private pay comparisons we can use the level of educational attainment as a proxy for individual ability (For instance, see our paper on federal pay). This isn’t because every college major has the same level of difficulty or that every college provides the same quality of education. It’s because a large number of different college majors are distributed across a large number of different occupations, so given an adequate sample size the inadequacies of education as a proxy for productivity wash out. The fit of the estimate isn’t as tight as if you had some better measure of employees’ ability (meaning, in stat-speak, that the R-squared value of the regression isn’t as high) but the results aren’t biased in one direction or the other.

But when examining teacher pay the problems with educational level don’t wash out: most teachers have degrees in education and most people with degrees in education work as teachers, so if an education degree signals lower ability or a less rigorous education — and Koedel’s paper and other sources indicate that’s the case — then regressions using education as a control variable may falsely show public school teachers to be underpaid.

Put bluntly, public school teachers enter college with below-average SAT scores, major in the easiest undergraduate course of study, take Master’s degrees in education that have no appreciable impact on teaching quality, and then wonder why they’re not as well paid as someone who got a Master’s in chemical engineering. They shouldn’t.

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Mark J. Perry

Cornell University’s Online Median Grade Reports Confirm a Culture of Low Standards for Education Majors

By Mark J. Perry

August 24, 2011, 9:05 am

In a new AEI Education Outlook “Grade Inflation for Education Majors and Low Standards for Teachers: When Everyone Makes the Grade,” University of Missouri economist Cory Koedel reports that grades awarded to education students at America’s universities are considerably higher than grades in every other academic discipline. What makes those findings especially striking is that education majors score significantly lower on standardized college entrance exams like the SAT and ACT than students majoring in other academic areas like science, business, social sciences and humanities. In other words, it’s a case of the least academically qualified college students getting the highest grades and GPAs on campus.


Median grade reports by academic department are now available online from Cornell University and provide further evidence of significant grade inflation for education students. Using Cornell’s interactive grade database, the chart above displays median grades for courses taught in three representative departments at Cornell: Economics, Education and Math.

Specifically, the chart shows the percentage of courses in each academic department with various median grades. For the economics department, 13.6 percent of courses had a median letter grade of A (and 18.2 percent had a median grade of A-, 50 percent had a median grade of B+, etc.), and for the math department only 12.9 percent of the courses had a median grade of A (and 16.1 percent had a median grade of A-, 41.9 percent had a median grade of B+, etc.). In contrast, almost 78 percent of courses in Cornell’s department of education had a median grade of A, and the rest of the courses (22.2 percent) had a median course grade of A-. No education courses had a median grade of less than A-. Among the 75 academic departments at Cornell, education had the highest percentage of classes with a median letter grade of A at 77.8 percent, which was almost three times the university-wide departmental average of 27.6 percent. When it comes to giving out letter grades of A and A-, Cornell’s education department is the most generous department on campus by far.

Bottom Line: The Cornell University data on median grades by department confirm that there are significantly lower grading standards and inflated grades for education majors. Why does this matter? As Cory Koedel concludes, “Low grading standards in university education departments are part of a larger culture of low standards for educators, and they precede the low evaluation standards by which teachers are judged in K–12 schools. The culture of low standards for educators is problematic because it creates a disconnect between teachers’ perceptions of acceptable performance and the perceptions of everyone else.”

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Mark J. Perry

Perfect Gender Parity in STEM Is an Unrealistic and Unreachable Goal

By Mark J. Perry

August 16, 2011, 8:23 am

A new U.S. Department of Commerce study finds that “women are vastly underrepresented in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) jobs and among STEM degree holders despite making up nearly half of the U.S. workforce and half of the college-educated workforce.” Interestingly, the study reports that the female share of all STEM jobs in 2009 was exactly the same as in 2004 at 24 percent, and the share of jobs held by women in the field of “computer science and math” actually fell from 30 percent in 2000 to 27 percent by 2009.

To explain the stubborn underrepresentation of women in STEM jobs and majors, the Department of Commerce cites three main factors: a) a lack of female role models in STEM fields, b) gender stereotyping, and c) less family-friendly flexibility in STEM fields compared to other occupations. In the conclusion of the report, the Department of Commerce is very clear about its ultimate, long-term goal: perfect gender parity in STEM.

Unfortunately, the Commerce report never addressed what might actually be the most important reason that females remain persistently underrepresented in STEM jobs and college majors, even after decades of concerted effort and federal funding targeted to change that outcome: the continuing and statistically significant gender disparity in mathematical aptitude favoring males.

The chart above shows average test scores by gender on the College Board’s math SAT test, which is taken annually by more than a million college-bound high school seniors. High school boys have scored higher on average than their female counterparts on the SAT math test in every year from 1972 to 2010, and the differences are statistically significant and large, averaging 38 points higher for boys over the last four decades. At the very high end of mathematical ability, high school boys overwhelmingly outnumber girls by a ratio of more than 2:1 for perfect test scores of 800 points on the math SAT test.

Bottom Line: Given the significant gender differences in mathematical aptitude favoring high school boys that have persisted over many generations on standardized tests like the math SAT, it’s perfectly understandable that males are overrepresented in STEM jobs and college majors. Here’s the stark reality overlooked by the Commerce study: Unless and until we see perfect gender parity on standardized math tests like the SAT, we shouldn’t expect to see perfect gender parity in STEM fields. As long as there are such consistently large gender differences in mathematical ability based on the math SAT test, the goal of gender parity in STEM field is unrealistic, unwarranted, and unreachable.

 

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Matt Damon’s Misguided March

By Allison Kimmel

August 5, 2011, 4:24 pm

Amid the thousands of teachers who organized on the White House lawn at the Save our Schools March last weekend, one in particular captured the attention of advocates and reporters alike. Actor Matt Damon, who traveled across the country to support his mother (who is a teacher), gave a speech thanking educators for their hard work and criticizing teacher evaluation systems based on value-added student test scores. Later on, when asked about using incentives to improve performance, Damon dismissed the idea as “intrinsically paternalistic,” in a hardnosed reply that led Anderson Cooper to warn others against “messing” with the well-known movie star.

While Damon rightfully praises teachers for their tireless and noble efforts, his rhetoric around teacher evaluations sends the wrong idea about policies meant to improve teacher quality, not to punish teachers. To be sure, teacher evaluation systems are far from perfect, but they are an important step in the right direction. For years both exceptional and underperforming teachers have flown under the radar, with rudimentary evaluation systems in which 98 percent of teachers were considered “satisfactory.” Efforts to address this egregious lack of information and accountability should not be seen as an indictment against teachers, but rather an attempt to equip teachers with better knowledge and support. In the case that a teacher has not made progress and continues to fail his or her students, evaluation systems ensure that another dedicated teacher is given the opportunity to serve students.

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Duncan’s Dilemma

By Whitney Downs

July 20, 2011, 8:27 am

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, education writer Stephanie Banchero highlighted the increasing impatience among state leaders over Congress’s inability to “fix” No Child Left Behind. Reauthorization of the law, which was enacted during the George W. Bush administration and technically expired in 2007, has been one of President Obama’s top priorities. “I’m calling on Congress to send me an education reform bill I can sign into law before the next school year begins,” he said back in March.

Currently, NCLB requires that individual schools and districts show certain levels of student proficiency on statewide language arts and math tests. Schools must not only have a satisfactory school-wide average, but must also demonstrate proficiency among subgroups of the student population, such as special education and African American students. If schools or districts fail to demonstrate “adequate yearly progress,” then a “remedy cascade” kicks in, which include replacing staff or leadership, reopening the school as a charter school, or placing the district under state control.
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