(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Golf clap…
Obama vs. Obama on Health Care Mandate
March 28, 2012
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Posted by matthewladner
Ed Week on 3rd Grade Retention
March 27, 2012
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Ed Week on the 3rd grade retention debate, including quotes from my Foundation for Excellence in Education colleague Jaryn Emhof and Marcus Winters on his forthcoming research on persistence of the retention effect. I am very proud of our lawmakers in Arizona and especially Governor Brewer and Senator Crandall for taking action to close loopholes in the Arizona law.
Arizona has a sad history of punting on tough reforms, having dummied down the state AIMS test by dropping the cut scores and having delayed the enactment of using the AIMS test as a high school exit exam several times. The 3rd grade retention law that passed in 2010 put the new standard in place for incoming kindergarteners the following year, giving an ease-in adjustment period for the districts. Last year at the Arizona School Boards Association conference, an Arizona Superintendent confided in me that “we’ve found the loophole in the retention law, and we are getting ready to use it.”
Fortunately, Governor Brewer’s team found the loophole as well, and are taking action to close it. This law is going to be a tremendous test of character for the Arizona education community of the sort we have failed in the past. Reading intervention should have the top priority for every dime of federal funding received for K-3 students. All of the Title programs can be used to support early reading intervention, remediation, and professional development. So long as we are really going to see the policy through, I support Governor Brewer’s call for additional state resources without reservation.
The only time Arizona officeholders garner attention seems to be when they do something controversial or downright nutty. Kudos for getting some things right!
1 Comment | social promotion | Tagged: 3rd grade retention, Ed Week, Jaryn Emhof, Marcus Winters | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
David Gergen on Teach for America
March 27, 2012(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Leave a Comment » | teacher quality | Tagged: Bob Bowdon, David Gergen, Teach for America | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Administrative Bloat Study Successfully Replicated
March 26, 2012Replication is the engine of scientific progress. That progress feels especially good when it confirms one’s work.
A little more than a year ago I wrote an analysis for the Goldwater Institute along with Brian Kisida and Jonathan Mills on the growth in non-instructional professional staff at major universities — or administrative bloat. Then last year the State Higher Education Executive Officers (SHEEO) issued what appeared to be a rebuttal analysis in which they claimed that “public colleges and universities are operating more efficiently than before, and with appropriate numbers of staff.”
Recently the Pope Center examined both of these studies and then conducted their own new analysis. They concluded:
the Pope Center analyzed the two studies and also roughly replicated both of them for the 16 campuses of the University of North Carolina system. While we do not claim to be the definitive voice on the matter, we discovered that one of the two studies—the one that said excessive staffing is a serious problem—seemed to be on the mark. The other contained some truth but also raised a few questions about its objectivity….
Our findings, which focused entirely on the UNC system, corroborated the Goldwater study for the most part. Between 1993 and 2010, total UNC system staffing indeed grew faster than enrollment: 51 percent against 42 percent; the number of total staff members per 100 students grew 5.9 percent….
The failure to mention the more recent upward trend in staffing [in the SHEEO report] was puzzling—certainly anybody who has looked at statistics professionally would be able to pick up the trend reversal and realize its significance. Such an important omission raises the possibility that the SHEEO researchers also “cherry-picked” 2001 as a starting point in order to show an overall decline in staffing, rather than the real long-term trend that staffing is rising. (There are no such concerns about the Goldwater study—the researchers chose 1993 because that was the first year for which this type IPEDS was available.)
Ahh. Vindication is sweet.
3 Comments | higher education | Tagged: administrative bloat, Goldwater Institute | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
The Way of the Future: Creative Destruction in Higher Education
March 23, 2012
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
You thought I was crazy back in 2009 when I predicted that we would see free, high quality university training made available online. I thought I might be crazy too, and for the record it hasn’t happened (quite) yet.
Inspired by Khan Academy, two Stanford professors however just put a graduate level Computer Science course online, complete with reading assignments, tests and a “Certificate of Completion.” Wired Magazine reports that a mere 200,000 students from around the world took the course.
The good professors decided to form a company, called Udasity, to pursue online higher education. Money quote from the article:
He’s thinking big now. He imagines that in 10 years, job applicants will tout their Udacity degrees. In 50 years, he says, there will be only 10 institutions in the world delivering higher education and Udacity has a shot at being one of them. Thrun just has to plot the right course.
Personally I don’t believe there will only be 10 institutions delivering higher education in 2062. I think the demand for in-person instruction will be considerably stronger than that. Having just visited the Stanford campus a few weeks ago, I dare to wager that there will always be a Stanford.
I do however believe that by 2062 we will see far fewer universities than we have today. The technology exists to put high quality undergraduate and graduate level courses online and make them available for free or next to free. Stanford and MIT have been moving in this direction, and if they don’t close the deal eventually someone else will do so.
Universities have been increasing their costs at a rate exceeding health care inflation for decades. The pink cloud of academic euphoria is going to meet the cold howling wind of creative destruction, and that includes the current stock of for-profit online providers. Once Stanford or MIT or Oxford starts putting degree programs online for little to no cost to the student, many dominoes will begin to fall.
Far more important than the incumbent interests of the status-quo is the remarkable benefit that this trend with have for human progress. Making world-class graduate level training available to subsistence farmers in Bangladesh will change the world for the better, regardless of whether it forces changes in business models for online companies and/or puts painfully mediocre and expensive universities out of business.
The Amazon first mover advantage for a serious brand name to move into the free-for-user higher education space with a Google funding model is out there, waiting for someone to seize it and make history. Cry Havoc and let slip the dogs of war!
19 Comments | Uncategorized | Tagged: the Stanford Education Experiment, Wired Magazine | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
Opinion Journal Talks About Head Start
March 22, 2012Check out this interview that Jason Riley of the Wall Street Journal did with me regarding my blog post on the delay and manipulation of Head Start research by the Obama Administration.
I still haven’t figured out how to embed from WSJ, but here is a screenshot:
5 Comments | research reports | Permalink
Posted by Jay P. Greene
WSJ: Council on Foreign Relations Endorses School Choice
March 20, 2012The Council on Foreign Relations is the clubhouse of America’s establishment, a land of pinstripe suits and typically polite, status-quo thinking. Yet today CFR will publish a report that examines the national-security impact of America’s broken education system—and prescribes school choice as a primary antidote. Do you believe in miracles?…
The military can’t tap the 25% of American kids who drop out of high school, and 30% of those who graduate can’t pass the Armed Forces Vocational Aptitude Battery. In Afghanistan, according to one report cited by CFR, 33 of 45 U.S. officers in positions requiring foreign-language skills weren’t proficient by State Department standards.
The good news is that this grim data is helping to change the education debate, moving away from the dogma that fixing schools requires more money. Even excluding teacher pensions and other benefits, per-pupil spending today is more than three times what it was in 1960 (in 2008 dollars).
The CFR reports says this “suggests a misallocation of resources and a lack of productivity-enhancing innovations. . . . U.S. elementary and secondary schools are not organized to promote competition, choice, and innovation—the factors that catalyze success in other U.S. sectors.”
Spoken like Milton Friedman, but now endorsed by a Council task force led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and former New York schools chief Joel Klein, who is an education executive at News Corp., which owns this newspaper. The authors also include former Fortune 500 executives, leading researchers, and even Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers….
Five members out of 30—including Ms. Weingarten, no surprise—offer dissenting views with familiar complaints that charter schools can’t grow “to scale” and that private vouchers undermine the ethos of common schooling. As if failing public schools don’t undermine far more.
But the real story is how much progress the reform movement has made when pillars of the establishment are willing to endorse a choice movement that would have been too controversial even a few years ago.
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
Coulson Returns Serve to Dorn
March 19, 2012
(Guest Post by Matthew Ladner)
Andrew Coulson has replied to Sherman Dorn on the productivity implosion chart. Turns out that I had been using an old version of the chart, and Professor Dorn has conceeded the larger point over the broad sweep of the spending and academic trends, but who doesn’t enjoy a tussle over methods?
Leave a Comment » | methodology | Tagged: Andrew Coulson, Sherman Dorn | Permalink
Posted by matthewladner
AEFP and St. Patrick’s Day in Boston
March 19, 2012The Association for Education Finance and Policy just completed its meeting in Boston, punctuated at the end by celebration of St. Patrick’s Day. In Boston.
Department of Education Reform faculty, staff, and students were present in force and did a great job of presenting their research and developing ideas for the future.
Here was one of the best presentations:
UPDATE:
And here is a recording of Mike and Anna (I think) singing in Southie
And their photo:
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Posted by Jay P. Greene
Ed Week on Distorted Special Ed Counts
March 15, 2012
(Guest post by Greg Forster)
Ed Week dives into details on the difficult issue of how special education counts get distorted by a variety of factors. The article gets into a lot of interesting issues that make it difficult to get a clear picture of how many disabled students are served by the program. See also here for the researchers’ take on the issue.
One factor not canvassed in the Ed Week story – unsurprisingly – is the role of financial incentives in public school special education programs. Public schools are incentivized to label studnets as disabled in order to access additional funding. Study after study after study after study has confirmed the empirical relationship between the presence and strength of these incentives and rising rates of special education diagnosis in public schools. Private schools have no such distorting incentive and will thus report lower numbers of disabled students. (All this is true regardless of whether you think the true rate of disabilities is higher, as in the public system, or somewhat lower, as in the private system.)
2 Comments | special ed, vouchers | Tagged: Greg Forster, Milwaukee, School Choice Demonstration Project, special education | Permalink
Posted by Greg Forster
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