The Education Gadfly Weekly

Elizabeth G. Hill, Legislative Analyst???s Office
January 2004

This report to the California legislature summarizes key points from a recent RAND analysis, (see our earlier coverage of that piece at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=108#282) in order to provide policy recommendations about the Golden State's charter schools. It notes that the state's 409 charters generally perform as well academically as traditional public schools, and that, because they receive fewer state and federal dollars than public schools, they are "cost effective." (Charter people might prefer the term "starved.") The Legislative Analyst then recommends that the state lift the cap on the number of charter schools allowable (currently set at 750), as charters "remain neither new . . . nor untested," which was the rationale for setting a cap in the first place.  The report also makes many specific recommendations designed to remove bureaucratic hurdles in charters' way, including the "complex" and "opaque" funding system and the inflexible authorizing process. Currently, California charters may generally be sponsored only by local school boards, which is a recipe for disaster (they often lack the capacity to be good authorizers, and may not have the incentive to try); instead, the LAO argues that a wide variety of organizations should be eligible to become authorizers. In addition to addressing these California-specific issues, and offering a nice summary of the RAND work, the report explains several national trends in charter school legislation and authorizing that even those on the right coast might find useful. It's a short, accessible report that you can find online at http://www.lao.ca.gov/2004/charter_schools/012004_charter_schools.htm.

Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard University
September 2003

One of the great things about charter schools is that they provide an outlet for passionate parents and committed educators to shoulder real responsibility for helping children learn. Yet passion and commitment can turn to frustration and resentment when things get tough. This Hauser Center case study of the Brooklyn-based Community Partnership Charter School is apposite. The protagonists were well-educated parents who germinated the idea and ultimately gave birth to the school; a local family foundation committed to helping provide "outstanding education to an underserved population"; hired school leaders and teachers; and the State University of New York (SUNY), which issued the charter in 2000. The founding parents sought to create a school that was "more progressive and child-centered" in its educational approach and "more economically and racially diverse" than those in the neighborhood. They also reached out to the Beginning with Children Foundation for support. An administrator was hired to "meld the Beginning with Children Foundation philosophy with that of the parents, and bring it all together to get a charter approved by SUNY." It quickly became clear, however, that the Foundation's need for accountability and desire to replicate a "proven model" conflicted with the progressive, "crunchy granola" approach of the parents. The differences seemed bridgeable at the start but less so as time passed; as the Foundation invested more money in the school, it sought more control and the parents felt more alienated. Stuck in the middle were the school's director and the teachers. In time, the teachers sought a "voice" on the school's board and even considered the need for a union. This story isn't over, but the case study - reminiscent of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's celebrated Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding - makes sober reading for anyone with dreamy notions about starting new schools (or new anythings). The report is not available online, but if you're interested in tracking down a copy for yourself, email [email protected].

Sixteen long years ago, I wrote in the Chronicle of Higher Education that "consumers need a 'no-frills university' to turn the higher-education marketplace upside down." I lamented, "It costs $20,000 to attend some of the nation's more illustrious colleges this year, prices having risen an average of 9 percent over last year. That means the $80,000 bachelor's degree is upon us, and the $100,000 edition cannot be far away."

Today, you can double those numbers. We're headed toward the quarter-million dollar baccalaureate. Someone once quipped that sending your child to college was like buying a new car every year. Today, that vehicle is a fully loaded luxury SUV. The total cost of four (or five or six) years exceeds that of homes in much of America.

In 1987, I was touring small private colleges with my kids, and was also affiliated with a respectable university. I found myself shaken by two realities: first, the absence of any sort of productivity gains in higher education, amid an economy whose principal engine of growth was (and remains) improved output per unit of worker input. Indeed, the campus mind-set denied that one should even EXPECT greater efficiency from higher education. Second, the tendency of U.S. colleges to compete for desirable students by adding upscale amenities, what a Mount Holyoke dean once termed the "Chivas Regal strategy." (During our campus tour, one of my children remarked that it was like comparing resort hotels.)

Fortunately, my daughter and son are finished with all that and, in the end, the colleges (and grad schools) they chose served them well. No regrets, aside from the big hole in our bank account. But my 1988 suggestion - creating some "stripped down, no-frills" college models offering "the educational equivalent of reliable basic transportation" - seems even more apt today.

What would such places look like? I sketched eight key features:

• A lean administration, little non-teaching staff, and most campus jobs performed by students or outsourced to private vendors.
• Amenities (entertainment, food courts, fancy gyms, etc.) left to entrepreneurs - and paid for by those who use them - rather than provided by the college and billed to everyone.
• A fee-for-service basis for college-delivered services that not all students avail themselves of: placement offices, art studios, psychological counseling, health care, etc.
• A year-round, four-quarter calendar with facilities in constant use, steady work for employees and the opportunity for energetic students to finish in three years.
• Faculty paid well but worked hard: a full teaching load, no tenure, and the expectation that their job is to teach. (Those wanting to engage in research raise grant dollars and "buy out" some of their teaching time.)
• A trimmed-down curriculum with a solid core and strong majors in a dozen fields. Those wanting to study social work, broadcasting, expressive dance, or contemporary Somali politics would see that No-Frills U is not the school for them. It makes no pretense of teaching everything.
• Rigorous exit standards with diplomas equivalent to an intellectual "warranty."
• Students pay for themselves, with outside grants and loans and suchlike for those who are eligible but no "Robin Hood" behavior within the college's own budget.

That still strikes me as a plausible formula for containing the cost and price of higher education without onerous government controls, and for eking some productivity gains from this enterprise. What's happened since 1988, however, seems noteworthy on four fronts.

First, the troubling trends of mainstream higher education continue in the same familiar pattern, only more so. Students take longer to complete their degrees. The academic week and year grow ever shorter as amenities grow yet more lavish. (Indoor climbing walls? Elaborate electronics in dorm rooms?)

Second, whereas the sticker shock fifteen years ago was felt primarily by those at private campuses, today the public-university price tag is soaring, too. States are strapped for cash while investing more in primary-secondary schooling (and Medicaid, law enforcement, and other costly items). It may also be that society is less inclined to keep generously subsidizing institutions that are seen as wasteful, ungovernable, politically problematic, and philosophically contrarian. Though we still want to help needy students gain access, we're grumpier about underwriting the school itself. (Even the British parliament, after wrenching debate, agreed this week with Tony Blair that students should bear more of the cost of this pricey service from which they benefit hugely.)

Third, higher education has developed a fast-growing sector that (no thanks to me) follows the no-frills formula: the proprietary sector, characterized by the University of Phoenix and kindred vendors of efficient and relatively inexpensive postsecondary schooling. Entrepreneurs have figured out a formula for delivering an acceptable level of instruction and training at reasonable cost to people who are willing to pay for it. More remarkably, while traditional suppliers weep over their deficits and deferred maintenance, the proprietors of these new institutions are making money!

Fourth, technology is making it possible for students to avail themselves of higher education without ever even showing up "on campus." The for-profit sector makes expert use of this delivery system but traditional universities are working at it, too. Because distance learning makes it possible not only to slash campus expenses but also to extend the "reach" of a given professor to far more students than one could ever teach face-to-face, it serves willy-nilly to boost academic productivity. The fact that more students now assemble their college credits from multiple providers - the academic equivalent of "grazing" - puts considerably more leverage into the consumer's hands and correspondingly less in those of producers.

As Congress and state legislatures seek to contain the price of college and devise student-aid formulas that assist the needy without spurring yet more tuition inflation, they would do well to focus on costs as well as prices. They may want to encourage more no-frills institutions and to nudge more students toward the efficient providers. The starting point is to cease treating traditional college economics as immutable and instead to recognize that society has an obligation to reward efficiency and productivity here just as it does almost everywhere else.

The Institute for Justice has a nifty new website on school choice with links to legal briefs, fact sheets, and talking points about the topic. A handy resource for researchers, journalists, and activists. Check it out at http://www.ij.org/cases/school/.

Though testing opponents have made some gains in the court of public opinion, they continue to strike out in the real courts. This week, the Massachusetts Supreme Court unanimously rejected a claim by several Bay State students that the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System is unconstitutional. Striking down the MCAS, the court held, "would undermine educator accountability and hinder education reform." Exactly.

"State's highest court rejects MCAS appeal," by Jennifer Peter, Associated Press, January 27, 2004

"State's high court rejects MCAS suit," by Rebecca Piro, Lowell Sun, January 28, 2004

The poet Longfellow once wrote, "How beautiful is youth! how bright it gleams with its illusions, aspirations, dreams!" And though George Bernard Shaw would respond that youth is wasted on the young, youthful idealism remains a mainstay of our culture and one of the most precious things to be guarded and nurtured by education. So it's a bit depressing to read this year's edition of the American Freshman Survey, now in its 38th year from UCLA. Seems that slightly fewer than 40 percent of American college freshman now think it's important to "develop a meaningful philosophy of life," which is a silly way of describing the important youthful search for one's intellectual and moral bearings. But the most students ever, 73 percent, now feel it's important to be "very well-off financially." Another fascinating tidbit: 47 percent of all freshmen report that they have an A average, despite an increase in the total number of students attending college and annual declines in the average weekly number of hours spent studying.

"College students found to value money over all," by Peter Y. Hong, Los Angeles Times, January 26, 2004 (registration required)

There are at least three possible responses to pressure on teachers to get students up to par on state standardized tests. One is to do the job. Another is to take a pass, not get the job done, and criticize the test. A third is to cheat. Generally, we would characterize these responses, respectively, as the correct response, passing the buck, and unethical. Some teachers evidently don't see it that way. A disturbing article in the New York Post discusses "scrubbing," which the paper claims is a fairly widespread practice in Gotham schools, whereby a teacher revises the Regents Exam essays of students who are on the cusp of passing. "I'm sorry if it's shocking for laymen to hear," said an unnamed Manhattan teacher. "Scrubbing is something we have to do to help kids get their asses out of high school." Teaching them to write an acceptable essay, we guess, is out of the question. And in the magazine District Administration, Texas teacher Thomas Rosengren recounts how he decided to shift from teaching third grade to first grade because he couldn't hack the pressure of getting his students to proficiency on the TAKS. He portrays this as a bold step, while those who "teach to the test" are knuckling under to administrators and legislators. So, in Orwellian fashion, cheating is now virtue, passing the buck is courageous, and getting the job done is cowardice.

"Teachers cheat," by Carl Campanile, New York Post, January 26, 2004

"Unethically teaching to the test," by Thomas Rosengren, District Administration, January 2004

Education leaders in Georgia and Minnesota are working to revise their state standards for U.S. and world history. And, in both states, a fierce debate has ensued. We've been following the Minnesota story for some time (see http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=8#370) and have watched as social studies ideologues have savaged the state's courageous education commissioner, Cheri Pearson Yecke, for daring to develop standards that expect students to master real historical content. Regrettably, Georgia seems to be headed in the opposite direction.  At least one history teacher says that its new "Performance Standards" for social studies expect less of students, not more. According to Joseph Jarrell, a 25-year veteran Georgia history teacher, "The misguided rationale behind the hastily prepared revision [of the standards] is that we teach too much history in high school. The solution? Eliminate 40 percent of the current coursework." "Interesting formula," quips Jarrell, "teach less, test less, brag more." In Minnesota, on the other hand, where Yecke and her team are working to ensure that the new history standards are more rigorous than the state's widely mocked Profiles of Learning, critics allege the reverse: that the proposed Minnesota standards have "too much content" and demand "too much memory work." Some of the more squalid among them have even defamed Yecke for writing standards that are "implicitly and explicitly racist" because they are "too focused on the experiences of white Americans and Europeans."

"DFLers roll out plans for schools," by Norman Draper, Minneapolis Star Tribune, January 27, 2004

"The Minnesota Senate hearings: social studies," EdWatch.org, January 26, 2004, (click on "Ed Watch updates")

"Social studies standards won't promote Dr. King's cause," by Paul Spies, Minnesotans Against Proposed Social Studies Standards, January 19, 2004

"Dumbing down our past doesn't serve our future," by Joseph Jarrell, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 25, 2004

"Heightened standards delve deep," by Kathy Cox, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, January 25, 2004

Elizabeth G. Hill, Legislative Analyst???s Office
January 2004

This report to the California legislature summarizes key points from a recent RAND analysis, (see our earlier coverage of that piece at http://www.edexcellence.net/gadfly/issue.cfm?issue=108#282) in order to provide policy recommendations about the Golden State's charter schools. It notes that the state's 409 charters generally perform as well academically as traditional public schools, and that, because they receive fewer state and federal dollars than public schools, they are "cost effective." (Charter people might prefer the term "starved.") The Legislative Analyst then recommends that the state lift the cap on the number of charter schools allowable (currently set at 750), as charters "remain neither new . . . nor untested," which was the rationale for setting a cap in the first place.  The report also makes many specific recommendations designed to remove bureaucratic hurdles in charters' way, including the "complex" and "opaque" funding system and the inflexible authorizing process. Currently, California charters may generally be sponsored only by local school boards, which is a recipe for disaster (they often lack the capacity to be good authorizers, and may not have the incentive to try); instead, the LAO argues that a wide variety of organizations should be eligible to become authorizers. In addition to addressing these California-specific issues, and offering a nice summary of the RAND work, the report explains several national trends in charter school legislation and authorizing that even those on the right coast might find useful. It's a short, accessible report that you can find online at http://www.lao.ca.gov/2004/charter_schools/012004_charter_schools.htm.

Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations, Harvard University
September 2003

One of the great things about charter schools is that they provide an outlet for passionate parents and committed educators to shoulder real responsibility for helping children learn. Yet passion and commitment can turn to frustration and resentment when things get tough. This Hauser Center case study of the Brooklyn-based Community Partnership Charter School is apposite. The protagonists were well-educated parents who germinated the idea and ultimately gave birth to the school; a local family foundation committed to helping provide "outstanding education to an underserved population"; hired school leaders and teachers; and the State University of New York (SUNY), which issued the charter in 2000. The founding parents sought to create a school that was "more progressive and child-centered" in its educational approach and "more economically and racially diverse" than those in the neighborhood. They also reached out to the Beginning with Children Foundation for support. An administrator was hired to "meld the Beginning with Children Foundation philosophy with that of the parents, and bring it all together to get a charter approved by SUNY." It quickly became clear, however, that the Foundation's need for accountability and desire to replicate a "proven model" conflicted with the progressive, "crunchy granola" approach of the parents. The differences seemed bridgeable at the start but less so as time passed; as the Foundation invested more money in the school, it sought more control and the parents felt more alienated. Stuck in the middle were the school's director and the teachers. In time, the teachers sought a "voice" on the school's board and even considered the need for a union. This story isn't over, but the case study - reminiscent of the late Daniel Patrick Moynihan's celebrated Maximum Feasible Misunderstanding - makes sober reading for anyone with dreamy notions about starting new schools (or new anythings). The report is not available online, but if you're interested in tracking down a copy for yourself, email [email protected].