The Education Gadfly Weekly

Editor's note: This post originally appeared in a slightly different form at National Review Online.

It has taken liberal school reformers almost no time at all to throw the race card into the debate about reauthorization of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2002.

Eager to retain an expansive federal role, but finding it tough to argue this position on the merits, liberal reformers have rushed to charge that the current effort to dial back the federal role is a thinly veiled attack on minority children.

Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon was provided just the other day by a Daily Beast column penned by Jonah Edelman, CEO of the education advocacy group Stand for Children. Edelman is the scion of two liberal icons: Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children’s Defense Fund, and Peter Edelman, a Clinton administration official who famously resigned to protest welfare reform. Jonah is also a friend and a smart guy, and Stand for Children has done some laudable work.

Unfortunately, that’s what makes his column so notable when it denounces any effort to reduce the federal role as a surrender to the forces of “racism, politics, ignorance, [and] indifference.” Edelman perfectly illustrates the problems with liberal-flavored school reform and its hollow calls for “bipartisanship.”

In the piece, Edelman denounces efforts to shed some of No Child Left Behind’s more onerous and unworkable provisions as a “threat” to “your kids’ future.” He then recounts a parade of horribles from the last century. “Linda Brown was denied the opportunity to attend a nearby public school because she was black,” he reminds us. “Black students were denied access to a public high school by segregationist Governor Orval Faubus.” And states and districts weren’t meeting the “special needs” of students with disabilities.

This is a shopworn parlor trick—equating conservatives concerned about federal micromanagement of schooling in 2015 with the “states’ rights” segregationists of two or three generations past (who, for what it’s worth, were overwhelmingly Democratic). The teachers’ unions employ similar tactics when they argue that charter schooling will give rise to the kind of “segregation academies” that sprung up throughout the South in the 1950s.

But this sort of rhetorical sleight of hand has not held up particularly well. Debating whether the federal government should tell states how to label, manage, and “improve” schools (all on the basis of reading and math scores) is a far cry from debates over whether states should be allowed to deny black students access to elementary and secondary schools. Moreover, those who, like Edelman, celebrate Uncle Sam’s expertise and the effectiveness of federal bureaucrats fail to acknowledge how often federal bureaucrats have gotten it wrong—and put in place laws and regulations that have gotten in the way of smart, promising reforms at the state and local level.

What are the issues that have Edelman so worked up? Republicans on Capitol Hill make no secret that they envision a reauthorization of No Child Left Behind that will significantly reduce the strings attached to federal education dollars. Among the possible actions: Allowing states to test students every few years rather than annually; getting the federal government out of the business of telling states how to design school-accountability systems or address low-performing schools; and making clear that (contrary to the Obama administration’s designs) the federal government should have no role in dictating state reading and math standards.

Casual followers of the education debate might notice that these changes seem both modest and sensible. Yet Edelman insists that if Congress dares to go down this path, “disadvantaged students will lose out, and millions of young people who could have become hard-working taxpayers will end up jobless, in prison, or worse.” (Worse?)

Edelman is not alone in his histrionics. He reflects an assumption held by many liberal reformers that a commitment to a sprawling federal role is the only acceptable course if one believes that “black lives matter.” Only Uncle Sam’s watchful eye will ensure that poor and minority kids will get a fair shake, and anyone who thinks differently is willing to consign millions of minority children to prison.

The deeper problem is that Edelman and his allies fail to grapple with the very real harm that federal education policy has caused, especially in the past decade. This is baffling, given his own admission that No Child Left Behind is “deeply flawed” and that “federal interventions don’t always work as intended.” But his solution — to simply update the law more regularly — indicates a misunderstanding of the realities of the legislative process (Congress updates laws when it will, not on the schedule of us pundits) and of the root problem. The real issue is not just that specific provisions of NCLB are problematic (though they are); it’s that the federal government is destined to mess up whatever it touches in education. That’s because it’s three steps removed from actual schools, with states and local districts sitting between its good intentions and its ability to ensure good results.

All the federal government can do is pass laws telling federal bureaucrats to write rules for the states, whose bureaucrats then write more rules for school districts, which in turn give marching orders to principals. By the time this game of telephone is done, educators are stuck in a stifling, rule-driven culture that undermines the kind of practical discretion that characterizes good schools.

During the Obama years, this problem has only grown worse. Convinced of their own righteousness and brilliance, Obama’s education officials have pushed all manner of half-baked ideas on the country (especially the demand that states evaluate teachers largely on the basis of test scores); helped turn potentially promising ideas into political hot potatoes (see Common Core); and embarked on ideological, deeply harmful crusades (using legal threats, for example, to discourage schools from disciplining minority students).

In recent years, education reform has been a rare issue where bipartisan cooperation was possible. Charter schools, testing, and teacher accountability have won support from the center-left to center-right, allowing for significant progress in policy and practice. Unfortunately, Edelman’s bombastic enthusiasm for big government, and his willingness to castigate any who disagree as akin to old-style segregationists, shows how liberal reformers are busy fracturing this fragile consensus. Education reformers on the left and right may not agree on Washington’s role in schooling, but here’s hoping we can have that discussion without resorting to playing the race card. 

The president may have stiffed the French at the big solidarity rally that many other world leaders attended over the weekend, but when it comes to domestic policy, he is in love with the universe—and universality.

First, of course, came universal health care. But it was followed in short order by his plea for universal preschool education and, last week, for universal community-college education. All free, of course, at least for the consumer. (Not, obviously, for the taxpayer.)

In health care, there’s at least a rational basis for demanding universal insurance coverage: to apply the “savings” from healthy people who don’t need medical care to subsidize the care of those who need lots of it. (Social Security and Medicare run the same way, except their “do get” and “don’t get” populations are demarcated explicitly by age rather than health status.)

In education, though, the trade-offs tucked into universality are more insidious—and actually harmful to authentic “need lots” people, while conferring taxpayer-financed windfalls on the “don’t need” population.

Most American four-year-olds and many three-year-olds already take part in preschool of some kind, and a great many of their parents have figured out how to pay for it with the help of employers, local school systems, private philanthropy, and others. Many other little kids are satisfactorily looked after by family members and caregivers in their own homes. And lots of them enter kindergarten ready to succeed there. Children like these do not need a “universal” program. For their families, it’s just a windfall—which of course adds to its political appeal, but is not a necessary investment of federal (or in many cases state) dollars.

Worse, it portends too skimpy a preschool program for deeply disadvantaged toddlers who need a great deal of help, starting very young and continuing right up to the threshold of kindergarten and beyond. If they are to have better odds of succeeding in school, they need a lot of preschooling. They won’t get that under a universal program because no universal program can ever afford to do a lot for anyone in particular. (Don’t even get me cranked up again on the scandal of Head Start, an old and iconic federal program that’s well-targeted on needy little kids and spends a great deal of taxpayer money on them, but does not have academic standards, an organized preschool curriculum, or any real accountability for the results it delivers.)

Now Mr. Obama wants to add universal community-college access. This proposal recalls the old joke about the chef who has a lousy recipe for omelets and makes omelets that nobody wants to eat, but insists on adding a couple more eggs to the mix. The result is a larger but still inedible omelet.

It seems that we can’t fix our high schools, which already send hundreds of thousands of graduates into remedial courses at community (and other) colleges. But high school education is universal. So, says the leader of the free world, let’s add two more years of universal education and, somehow, opportunity will be enhanced and justice served.

This is nuts. Community colleges are the least expensive form of postsecondary education in the land, heavily subsidized by their states. (Dayton’s Sinclair Community College charges $6,400 tuition for a year of full-time study, versus $16,000 at nearby Wright State University—and twice that at the private University of Dayton.) Low-income students already qualify for Pell Grants, and scads of other community-college goers can swing it on their own, perhaps with a job on the side or help from parents, spouse, or employer.

Right now, fewer than one in five first-time, full-time students at two-year community colleges finish up within three years. More than 50 percent of them are placed in remedial classes when they arrive. The challenge isn’t access. It’s readiness—which is the precursor to successful completion of a degree or certificate from the community college. If you’re not prepared for college-level work when you arrive, the odds that you will succeed there are grim.

Much like preschool, the problem in need of solution is not the absence of universality. It’s the failure of existing schools and programs to do right by those who need the most help. And the push for universality, alluring as it is on the hustings and cherished as it is by President Obama, not only fails to solve the problem: It diverts resources and creates windfalls in ways that diminish the likelihood of ever solving the real problem.

• This week, President Obama announced three ways his administration intends to better safeguard student data. The first is new legislation modeled off of a California statute that aims to permit and encourage data-based research while also preventing targeted advertising to students and the selling of student data by third parties. The second is a pledge, signed by seventy-five companies, to educate parents, teachers, and kids about preventing misuse of student information. The third is a sort of toolbox meant to further these ends, including a model terms of service and teacher training. Applauded by the Data Quality Campaign, they’re important steps in an ongoing battle against threats to our privacy. But let us suggest a fourth step, Mr. President: Tell your own agencies to stop collecting intrusive, sensitive information about our children.
• “ESEA week” has lived up to its promise. We might be on the verge of the law’s first reauthorization since NCLB’s enactment thirteen years ago. On Monday, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan gave a speech in which he criticized NCLB and called for changes, but also urged Congress to keep what he considers to be its important elements, such as annual testing. Yesterday, things heated up even more when Senator Lamar Alexander released a draft bill that proposed lots of cuts. Maligned provisions like Adequate Yearly Progress and Highly Qualified Teachers didn’t survive. Still, it’s hardly a complete evisceration of the law, as it still requires states to adopt standards, test students regularly, release disaggregated data, and identify schools that need improvement. Next up is lively debate as Democrats try to save parts of the law and hard-right Republicans aim to shrink the federal role even further. Stay tuned. The week isn’t over yet.

Cellphones in schools, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, universal community college, and charters without lotteries.

SOURCE: Atila Abdulkadiro?lu, Joshua D. Angrist, Peter D. Hull, and Parag A. Pathak, "Charters Without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper  20792 (December 2014).

A core assumption of the education-reform movement is that excellent schools can be engines of upward mobility. But what kind of schools? And to what end?

In tandem with the release of several papers, this path-breaking conference will consider thorny questions, including: Is “college for all” the right goal? (And what do we mean by “college”?) Do young people mostly need a strong foundation in academics? What can schools do to develop so-called “non-cognitive” skills? Should technical education be a central part of the reform agenda? How about apprenticeships? What can we learn from the military’s success in working with disadvantaged youth?

Keynote Address: Hugh Price, Senior Fellow, Brookings Institution “What the Military Can Teach Us About How Young People Learn and Grow” 

Ah, January is upon us: The wind is howling, the thermometer is plummeting, and we are greeted by the nineteenth consecutive edition of Quality Counts, Education Week’s compilation of mostly useful data, analysis, rankings, and commentaries. The best thing about QC is its focus on states, which both enables state leaders to view external gauges of their own performance and compare it with other states and also—especially valuable today—reminds everyone that states remain the central players in matters of K–12 education quality. The analysts and authors of QC keep fussing with the variables, metrics, and weightings by which they grade state performance. This year, the variables that made the cut are sorted into three buckets, two of them focused on processes, practices, and inputs. Only the achievement bucket focuses on outcomes. Along the way, some issues of key interest to education reformers—most conspicuously school accountability, teacher quality, and choice—have vanished from the QC calculus. The most troubling element of the new QC, however, is the editors’ handling of this year’s focus topic, namely preschool. They’ve climbed onto the “preschool for everybody” bandwagon, which is not a good place to be. This climb-aboard is most obvious in QC’s rankings and ratings of states, where all the metrics deal with participation rates by the state’s children in preschool, Head Start, and kindergarten. To the analysts’ credit, they avoid the input-centric gauges of preschool “quality” dearly beloved by many in the early-childhood field. To their discredit, however, they’ve made no visible effort to deal with the educational effectiveness of any state’s preschool program, nor tell whether the state has academic expectations for its preschools and whether it uses any sort of kindergarten-readiness measures to determine which preschool “graduates” are prepared to grapple successfully with the stiffening cognitive demands of today’s kindergartens. The overarching problem with QC 2015’s whole approach is its loud signal that, if everybody went to preschool, all would be right with the world. That’s just wrong. Millions of middle-class families have already found satisfactory, affordable preschooling for their little ones. The proper focus for state policy is to get exceptionally needy youngsters into intensive preschool programs that impart the knowledge and skills they will need to thrive in primary school. Such programs are deep, long-term, and costly. If states are instead encouraged to spread their resources across everybody, as QC’s authors clearly yearn for, they’ll never do right by the kids in greatest need of serious early-childhood education. Quality does count. But this year’s QC, at least in the preschool realm, insists instead that quantity counts.

SOURCE: “Quality Counts 2015,” Education Week (January 2015).

The big news in this report from the Education Commission of the States is that fourteen states “require teacher candidates to demonstrate knowledge of the science of reading instruction on a stand-alone assessment” before getting a license to teach. But that overlooks an even bigger story: Thirty-six states license elementary school teachers without making them prove they can teach kids to read. In the immortal words of John McEnroe, you cannot be serious. Let’s try a little thought exercise. Imagine you’re in charge of licensing elementary school teachers in your state. What would be the very first requirement you’d put in place as a barrier to licensure?  Mine would be, “No shirt, no shoes, no certification.” (Pants too. And yes, every day). But number two would definitely be that, if you want to teach elementary school, you have to prove you can teach kids how to read. “Rather than relying entirely on interventions for struggling readers, some states have begun to emphasize the need for all elementary school teachers to possess the necessary skills to effectively teach reading,” the report notes (wait, they’ve just begun doing this?). Access to highly qualified teachers “provides students with the equivalent of a constant specialist” (you mean a teacher?) thereby “ensuring that struggling readers are identified and supported as quickly as possible” (but…but…hasn’t that always been, like, the most important part of the job!?). In fairness, many states may include teacher-candidate assessments that include reading mixed in with other subjects. But given the time and energy that has gone into raising teacher quality and intervening to help struggling early readers, I hope I will be forgiven for being gobsmacked that states—and far too few of them—are only now getting around to connecting these two dots.

SOURCE: Julie Rowland, “Trends in Teacher Certification: Equipping teachers to prepare proficient readers,” Education Commission of the States (January 2015).

A new research paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines how New York City’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP) affects participants’ immediate income, longer-term income, and life outcomes, such as college enrollment, incarceration, and mortality. The program matches enrollees between the ages of fourteen and twenty-one with an entry-level seven-week summer job and pays them New York minimum wage for up to twenty-five hours per week. Jobs are mostly in the private and non-profit sectors, many at summer camps and daycare centers, but also in other fields. It also provides seventeen and a half hours of workshops on job readiness and continuing education. It’s the largest of many similar programs in major cities throughout the country, and demand is high, so participants are randomly selected via a lottery. The authors obtained identifying and demographic information on about 295,000 applicants from 2005 through 2008; 165,000 were accepted and 130,000 weren’t. They combined this with wage data from the IRS, mortality information from the New York City Department of Health, and data on incarceration from the state Department of Corrections. Comparing those accepted to those who weren’t led to three key findings. First, participants enjoyed a net benefit of about $876 in the year they partook in the program compared to non-participants. Second, in the three subsequent years, enrollees saw a decrease in yearly earnings of about $100 compared to non-participants, throwing water on the assumption that these programs make people more “employable.” (After three years, there was no yearly impact, positive or negative, which gives the program a total net lifetime benefit of about $536.) The authors posit that SYEP jobs might too often provide experience in lower-paying industries, or they may interrupt the career development of individuals who already had jobs prior to switching to one provided by SYEP. Third and finally, the program didn’t affect college enrollment, but it did decrease the incarceration rate by more than 10 percent and mortality by almost 20 percent. Not surprisingly, the authors call for more research on summer youth employment programs. They certainly deserve more attention.

SOURCE: Alexander Gelber, Adam Isen, Judd B. Kessler, "The Effects of Youth Employment: Evidence from New York City Summer Youth Employment Program Lotteries," National Bureau of Economic Research, Working Paper No. 20810 (December 2014).