Making Sure the College Completion Numbers Add Up

Earlier this month, the U.S. Department of Education released an action plan that would revise how colleges and universities are evaluated, with graduation rates to now reflect students who attend part-time, as well as those who are returning to school.

The new formula is particularly important for community colleges, which have long complained that two significant segments of their student populations were being underreported. And a new web tool launching today from the College Board could offer more perspective on how community colleges are performing.

The revised evaluation model “has been a long time coming,” said Dewayne Matthews, vice president for policy and strategy at the Lumina Foundation, which has launched an aggressive campaign to boost postsecondary student success. “This data might help answer questions about whether students are actually finishing their degrees. Right now, we don’t even know that. Without that answer, it’s difficult to figure out how to improve.”

Lumina’s Goal 2025 campaign seeks to increase the percentage of the nation's population with high-quality degrees and credentials to 60 percent. In 2010, the most recent year for which statistics are available, 38.3 percent of working-age Americans (ages 25-64) held a two- or four-year college degree. That’s a slight improvement from 2009, when the rate was 38.1 percent, and 2008, when the rate was 37.9 percent.

To reach the 60 percent goal by the year 2025, Lumina is proposing four steps:

1. Rewarding institutions that improve completion rates;

2. Rewarding individual students who finish their degrees;

3. Expanding opportunities for nontraditional and low-cost degree options;

4. And investing in business practices that support this mission.

While much of the attention is on the nation’s relatively poor rate of higher education completion, a surprising number of adults – 22 percent of the population – have taken some college courses. That’s 37 million Americans who have at least a few college credits even if they don’t have a degree. Many of them actually have enough credits to qualify for a two-year associate’s degree, or are well on their way to a bachelor’s degree, Matthews said.

But even if those students were to return to school -- which is something Lumina, other nonprofits, states and higher education institutions are working hard to support – their progress would be excluded from the overall completion rates until the revised formula is put into place.

Community colleges, long relegated to second-class status behind institutions that award four-year degrees, are now facing both fresh scrutiny and higher expectations as a key element of the country’s continued economic recovery.

At the same time, community college systems are struggling with a huge influx of nontraditional students. Many of them are working adults looking for short-term certification programs in order to find new careers or hold on to the ones they have. From Massachusetts to California, community college educators and administrators are trying to find a balance between supporting students who are likely to complete their degrees, and maintaining an open door to higher education.

In California, a community college task force has issued a controversial set of recommendations for reaching those goals, which included severely restricting the number of majors that are offered; requiring students to complete a long-term academic plan before beginning their studies; and mandating that students complete any remedial classes at the start of their studies. The report also called for better coordination between the K-12 education system and community colleges in efforts to reduce the need for remediation and improve completion rates.

The tension between access and success is a false dichotomy, Matthews said.

“Access means nothing if it’s not access to success,” Matthews said. “Students that are moving forward should have access to classes, good advising and counseling, and the financial support to complete as quickly as possible. It’s in their interest, and in the national interest, to see that happens.”

Lumina created the Achieving the Dream Project, a collaborative initiative among nearly 30 community colleges to improve student completion rates, with a special emphasis on minorities and low-income individuals. But data for the first five years of the project (2004-09) found that even though community colleges overhauled their practices, student outcomes in core English and math classes remained unchanged. A final report is due at the end of the year.

Completion is "the Achilles heel of community colleges," Matthews said. The premise of Achieving the Dream is to develop a “culture of evidence” that guides decisions about instruction, programs and services that will ultimately help community college students find greater success, Matthews said.

The push for better data on higher education student outcomes is one of the reasons the College Board Advocacy & Policy Center developed its new “Completion Arch,” which is being introduced today. The new searchable, digital database compiles state-level data on community college students in five areas: enrollment; developmental education placement; progress; transfer and completion; and job placement/workforce outcomes.

The digital tool uses a wider lens to view the data – there are no campus-level statistics available. But users can access the free site to compare outcomes among states, as well as against national averages.

Discussing the Completion Arch with education reporters in an EWA webinar last week, Christen Pollock, a vice president at the center, said the initiative “recognizes the need for solid data and metrics beyond the traditional enrollment and graduation rates to really understand progress in the two-year sector” of higher education.

The effort is “really a testament to the importance of community colleges to meet the nation’s education goals and economic strengths,” Pollock said. “We understand that these goals are not going to be met without a significant and sustained participation of the community colleges.”

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

For California, the SIG Program Has Shown Some Success, Study Finds

A new study found student test scores improved in California’s lowest-achieving campuses that implemented aggressive reform measures, suggesting the federal School Improvement Grant program is showing early promise in the Golden State.

The federal SIG dollars – with more than $4.6 billion awarded nationally since 2009 -- are earmarked for schools ranking in the bottom 5 percent for student achievement in each state. California received over $400 million in SIG funds, the most of any state, and the first-round grant awards went to 82 of its lowest-performing campuses.

Thomas S. Dee, a professor of public policy and economics at the University of Virginia, compared California public schools that were “just eligible” enough to receive the SIG funds with those that were “just ineligible.” Both groups shared similar baseline characteristics, including staffing, student demographics and prior achievement. A slim statistical margin separated the campuses that met the eligibility threshold and those that did not make the cut.

For the first year that the state's SIG program was evaluated, a typical low-performing campus closed 23 percent of the achievement gap when it came to meeting the state’s performance targets for student test scores, Dee said. The SIG reforms (while by no means an inexpensive approach) also appear to have produced relatively cost-effective improvement, particularly when compared to high-price initiatives such as class size reduction, Dee said.

As was the trend nationally, the majority of California’s SIG schools (60 percent) opted for “transformation,” the most flexible of the federally approved reform models, which requires significant changes to instructional approaches and professional development. Roughly a third of the state’s SIG schools opted for the more aggressive “turnaround” model, which mandates that the principal and at least 50 percent of the staff be replaced. The first-year achievement gains attributed to the SIG-funded reforms were largely concentrated at the “turnaround” campuses, Dee said.

There were significant changes to the schools' learning environments in the wake of receiving the SIG grants. As a result of turnover and new hires, the average level of teacher experience at the SIG schools dropped by two years. The restructuring also meant class sizes also got smaller, with the average ratio dropping by about five students for every one teacher.

Dee said he was surprised to find any measurable effects of the SIG program in its first year.

"My presumption had been that schools sought out this money largely because they were in fiscal crisis," said Dee, who is a research associate with the National Bureau of Economic Research. "I worried that the local buy-in to the required reforms would be poor, and that the implementation would be uneven.”

What he found instead “were sizable first-year improvements in school performance as a result of the SIG-funded reforms," Dee said. 

Even the SIG program’s most ardent supporters, like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, are careful not to give too much weight to results that are based on relatively limited data. Dee recommended similar prudence.

Until there’s more information as to whether early gains will turn into long-term growth, as well as how SIG schools are performing nationally, “we have to be cautious about how we judge this historic effort,” Dee said. But “the clear inference” is that SIG dollars and whole-school reforms “catalyzed meaningful improvements in California’s lowest-achieving schools.”

Another factor, as was pointed out by researchers at the Center on Education Policy, is whether states will be able to sustain progress once the federal grants run their course. As Diane Rentner, CEP’s deputy director told me in a prior interview, “the fear is the school is going to slide back on any progress that is made. There has to be some thought about how the progress can be sustained. I don’t think you can pull out this support all at once and expect the schools to succeed.”

Dee made an additional observation worth emphasizing. The SIG program can also be seen as part of a broader debate about whether schools by themselves can reduce inequities in education.

In that context, Dee identified two camps – the “no excuses” crowd pushing for new leadership and practices, and the “broader and bolder” reformers who say a school can’t succeed without a comprehensive safety net to address the many socioeconomic challenges that can influence student achievement.

In a sense, Dee said, the SIG schools represent an amalgam of those two central philosophies -- bringing in new leadership and better staff development, as well as funding for wraparound student services.

“That to me is one of the most fascinating aspects to the whole endeavor,” he said.

And if that multi-pronged approach turns out to lead to sustainable school improvement in California and beyond, it could end up being a bright point of light in what has been a persistently dark tunnel.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily. 

Higher Ed: Are Foreign Students More Valuable to U.S. Universities?

Fiscally challenged public universities are relying on international students -- who pay significantly higher tuition than their in-state classmates -- to boost the bottom line, a move that's potentially at odds with the underlying mission of higher education.

The Los Angeles Times wrote about the dilemma recently, highlighting the popularity of California's university system among students from overseas. And now the New York Times reports that the University of Washington is profiting from an influx of international students who pay close to $30,000 annually -- three times what it would cost for an in-state student to attend.

There are many ways to read these stories. One take is that hard-working American students are seeing their college dreams -- and seats -- usurped by foreigners. A more positive view might be that the extra tuition collected from wealthy foreigners supports scholarships for low-income American students, who might otherwise not be able to attend. That is indeed the case at the University of Washington, according to the New York Times' reporting.

But the stories also raise important questions about what the trend might mean in the long term for the nation's colleges and universities. How are international students, who often require specialized instruction to help them acclimate, influencing the campus environment? Does a more globally diverse campus suggest American students might ultimately be better prepared for global competition?

The University of Washington's increase in foreign students doesn't sit comfortably with everyone. There was a mistaken perception among at least some of the in-state students – the New York Times interviewed 36 of them – that international students now make up at least half of their class. (In reality, nearly two-thirds of this year’s freshmen are from Washington.)

That perception was strong enough for Farheen Siddiqui, a freshman at the university who comes from south of Seattle, to say she felt like a minority among her classmates. She told the New York Times that “morally, I feel the university should accept in-state students first, then other American students, then international students.”

The idea that a moral obligation is at stake is an interesting one. Public universities have long positioned themselves as engines of the local economy, pledging to turn out graduates who ideally become productive members of society. Communities want, and need, more from post-secondary students than just their relatively short-term contribution of tuition dollars. It would be interesting to revisit the University of Washington in four years, and to ask the international students in the class of 2016 about their post-graduation plans.

There is an underlying reason why high-paying foreign students are in such demand: brutal budget cuts. This is not a dilemma unique to California or Washington. Flagship universities in other states (including Colorado, Illinois, Indiana and Ohio) are paying recruiters to seek out higher-paying international students.

Will families, educators or lawmakers be concerned by increases in international student enrollment and push for more state funding for higher education? Even if they push, would it make a difference? In the long run, could the nation's public colleges and universities benefit from a trend toward more international students, if it might also be a way to subsidize socioeconomic diversity, as well?

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily. 

With a Spike in Brain Injuries, High School Football Faces Questions About Safety

The  National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research is reporting an increase in catastrophic brain injuries among high school football players, raising questions about whether recent changes to safety protocols are enough to protect young players, and if the game is worth the risk.

According to the center's annual report, 13 high school football players sustained catastrophic brain injuries in 2011, up from nine in the prior year. The injuries included subdural hematoma requiring surgery, as well brain trauma resulting in strokes and comas. In most of the cases, the players had not fully recovered.

There was an average of five catastrophic brain injuries among high school players between 1992 and 2001, but that 10-year average jumped to 8.2 for the years 2002-11. Fred Mueller, director of the center at the University of North Carolina and the report's lead author, told the Charlotte News & Observer that the jump “is a major problem.”

The center makes specific recommendations for continuing to improve the safety of high school football, including the proper execution of blocking and tackling. Pre-season physical exams are advised for all student players, and coaches and athletic trainers must make sure helmets fit properly. Another recommendation – have a physician on the field to assess players in the event of an emergency.

“I think a part of it is that we are educating people better, and injuries that might not have been reported in the past are being reported now,” Bob Colgate of the National Federation of State High School Associations told the News-Observer. “But we also have a responsibility to keep emphasizing that the head has to be taken out of tackling and blocking.”

The total number of young players seriously injured each year represents just a tiny fraction of the estimated 1.1 million high school students who play football. But that doesn’t negate the seriousness of the injuries or the potential benefits of learning from the statistical data.

To be sure, football safety is under intense scrutiny from Pop Warner leagues to the NFL. Each year there are about 67,000 concussions among high school players, a figure researchers say would top 100,000 if more of the head injuries were properly diagnosed and reported.

And there could be more to fear than just one unlucky hard hit. Recent studies have found football-related head trauma – even injuries that might once have been considered minor – can result in long-term health problems, particularly when players have successive concussions. A new study by Purdue University researchers, looking at high school football players over a two-year period, suggests that repeated hits over time, and not just one massive blow, cause concussions.

Over the past decade, emergency room visits for children and adolescents with sports-related traumatic brain injuries has jumped 60 percent, according to the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The most common injuries were among football players, with an incident rate of 0.47 per 1,000 athlete exposures. The second-place finisher for riskiest sport? Girls’ soccer, with an incident rate of .36 per 1,000 athlete exposures. (And those are just the figures from the emergency rooms, and don’t include injuries diagnosed by private physicians or neighborhood clinics.)

After a weekend of particularly brutal collisions among NFL players in 2010, Michael Sokolove, a contributing writer to the New York Times Magazine, asked “Is it morally defensible to watch a sport whose level of violence is demonstrably destructive? … What if the brain injuries are so endemic — so resistant to changes in the rules and improvements in equipment — that the more we learn the more menacing the sport will seem? Where will football, and its fans, go from there?”

I asked Sokolove for his take on the new report on brain injuries among high school players, and he said he was surprised the numbers had gone up given the increased focus on improving the safety of the game. He wondered if greater awareness of the risk of concussion, along with better methods to recognize the subtleties of the symptoms, might be a factor.

“It’s a difficulty injury to diagnose – there’s no broken bone you can see on an X-ray,” Sokolove said. “In the past the phrase people used was you `got your bell rung.’ The coach said you were OK, and they pushed you back out on the field. Clearly, there’s less of that happening, and that’s a good thing.”

While football gets the most attention, the safety protocols for other high school athletics – particularly girls’ soccer – also need scrutiny, said Sokolove, author of three books, including “Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports.”

Keeping young players safe requires diligence among coaches and trainers to follow recommended protocols, Sokolove said. That would include cognitive testing and clearance by doctors before an athlete with a suspected concussion returns to play and, where possible, even preseason cognitive testing to establish an athlete's baseline, Sokolove said.

“Everyone has to pay attention to these things,” Sokolove said. “And every parent has to be aware of them. If the protocols aren’t being adhered to, the parents have to step up.”

Sokolove’s discussion of the ethical dilemma posed by watching football was focused on professional players for whom the level of contact and potential for harm is arguably higher. But given the relative risk of injury that comes with high school football, should there be a similar discussion of the ethics of supporting the game, particularly as a school-sponsored activity?

High school football is too deeply ingrained in the nation’s fabric to ever be entirely eliminated, Sokolove said. So then the question is how to make it safer for players, something he said will be hard to do when many school districts and community teams lack the certified trainers and experienced coaches. Had any of his own children wanted to play football, Sokolove said he would have tried to talk them out of it.

“It’s never going to be entirely safe -- that’s difficult to do when the culture of football is about toughness,” Sokolove said. “It’s a destructive sport. It’s a great sport, and I still watch it. But I can’t defend it.”

Have a comment, question or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Will Merit Pay Make Teachers More Effective?

Teachers often say they don't do their jobs for the money, but surely financial incentives are a factor in just about any career decision. Would you work harder at your job if there was a cash bonus on the line? More importantly, would the extra money alone somehow make you a more effective employee?

Under a new law being implemented over the next several years in Indiana, student test scores will now be used as a factor in whether a teacher receives a pay increase.  The Indianapolis Star, in partnership with The Hechinger Report, is closely monitoring the state's reform measures aimed at boosting teacher effectiveness.

The state's teachers are questioning whether the law can be fairly applied, and whether merit raises will ultimately result in students learning more, according to the recent entry in the newspaper's series. There are also fears among educators that the unpredictability of the pay scale will discourage people from considering teaching as a career.

"The level of concern from our teachers is through the roof," Wayne Township Superintendent Jeff Butts told the Star. "It's higher than I've ever seen it."

Schools districts across the country continue to tinker with merit pay, despite a dearth of evidence showing it's an effective tool for reform.  Boston Public Schools is exploring whether offering cash bonuses to faculty helps boost student achievement, handing out more than $400,000 in the first round of cash incentives to teachers and staff at schools that made gains on standardized tests.

Armed with sizable federal grants intended to spur reform and improve student learning, dozens of states are experimenting with incentive pay using a wide range of formulas. In some schools, individual teachers earn bonuses based on the progress of their students. Other districts, like Boston, reward the entire staff for overall achievement.

The Boston teachers union president, Richard Stutman, says his organization supports the all-for-one, one-for-all approach to incentives. “Individual rewards set up an unnatural competitiveness in schools and leads to a potential divisiveness and a potential lack of sharing of best ideas among teachers,” Stutman told the Boston Globe. “Teachers work hard regardless of a reward.”

The District of Columbia Public Schools rewards teachers, sometimes with as much as $25,000, for successive years of achievement. As Jason Kamras, DCPS’ chief of human capital, recently told the New York Times, “We want to make great teachers rich.”

What’s not yet clear is whether such bonuses will improve student learning. The National Center on Performance Incentives at Vanderbilt University looked at three years of data from Nashville’s public schools and concluded that a merit pay pilot program had little or no effect on instruction or student achievement.

The Nashville pilot program, where teachers could earn up to $15,000 for improved student test scores, “was focused on the notion that a significant problem in American education is the absence of appropriate incentives, and that correcting the incentive structure would, in and of itself, constitute an effective intervention that improved student outcomes,” according to the report’s executive summary. However, “results did not confirm this hypothesis,” according to the researchers.

The notion that teachers might work more effectively if they know there’s a cash reward at the finish line is an interesting one. (Stutman, the Boston teachers union chief, told the Globe he doubted it was a motivating factor.)  But how many other professions use merit pay to push performance, and does it work?

A 2009 report on teacher performance pay and accountability from the Economic Policy Institute in Washington, D.C.,  found that “relatively few private-sector workers have pay that varies in a direct, formulaic way with their productivity, and that the share of such workers is probably declining.” Merit pay systems in the private sector have been found to hurt job performance, rather than improve it, the report concluded. The researchers also make the case that student test scores are not a reliable measure of how well teachers do their jobs.

If that's the case, then why are so many policymakers willing to bet that extra money will improve teacher -- and as a result, student -- performance?

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Education Stories at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Patriot-News Win Pulitzer Prizes

The Philadelphia Inquirer's remarkable series on the dangerous climate of violence in the city's public schools was rewarded Monday with the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.

The higher education beat also yielded a Pulitzer this year. Sara Ganim and the Patriot-News staff won the local reporting prize for coverage of the Jerry Sandusky sex abuse scandal at Penn State. Ganim's dogged coverage outshone national media outlets that were late to jump on the story.

(California Watch's "On Shaky Ground" series examining shortfalls in school construction, which made the short list for the local reporting prize, is also worth a read.)

The time and resources the Inquirer devoted to its year-long project were substantial. Five reporters spent months visiting campuses, conducting hundreds of interviews, and building a comprehensive database of campus crime statistics.

The resulting seven-part series, "Assault on Learning," was nothing short of astonishing. More than 4,000 Philadelphia teachers had been assaulted over a five-year period. Violent behavior among students started as early as kindergarten. Efforts to curb violence were fragmented, and the more successful initiatives were not replicated on a wider scale. School communities were struggling to reclaim their campuses.

As the Pulitzer citation points out, the series used "powerful print narratives and videos to illuminate crimes committed by children against children and to stir reforms to improve safety for teachers and students."

At a time when newsroom resources are shrinking across the country -- including in Philadelphia --the Inquirer's Pulitzer win is a reminder of just how many important stories are waiting to be told, particularly when it comes to the education beat.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

When it Comes to Humor, Three College Campuses Aren't Laughing

Here’s a tip for college journalists contemplating wading into the murky waters of satire: There pretty much isn't anything funny about Hitler.

The gray zone between edgy humor and offensive language can be tough to navigate, even for experienced writers. In recent weeks, students from Boston University, the University of Missouri, and Rutgers University have found themselves under fire for satirical editions of their campus publications.

At Rutgers, a student-run satirical newspaper ran spoof column entitled “What about the good things Hitler did?” The piece was attributed Aaron Marcus,  a Jewish student and columnist at the campus' independent newspaper, who said he had relatives perish in the Holocaust.

“To say anything praiseworthy of someone like Hitler and to have people actually believe it was coming from me, even in a satirical manner, is just really painful for me and my family," Marcus said in an interview with a local television news station.

The faculty advisor for the Rutgers’ student newspaper, Professor Ronald Miskoff, told the New Jersey Star-Ledger that "College is a time in people’s lives when they test boundaries and learn the results of errors." He also said the student editors are “extremely aware that they have hit a hot-button issue, and I am sure they will learn something valuable from the experience."

Boston University’s Chelsea Diana, editor of the campus’ student newspaper the Daily Free Press, resigned amid outrage over an April Fool’s edition that included stories of Snow White being drugged and raped by “seven frat dwarves,” and Cinderella under arrest for prostitution.

Diana, who issued a written apology, said the attempt at humor was called “pretty sophomoric” by her journalism professor.

“But, guess what? I’m a sophomore,” Diana wrote in a piece posted on Boston.com. “College is the time to learn and make mistakes before we enter the workforce, and from this horrible situation I’m gaining experience that most student journalists cannot put on a resume. As for my future, it’s in journalism and I will not succumb to those calling for me to give up for a mistake I made as a 19-year-old.”

The Boston Globe’s editorial board defended Diana, pointing to her strong track record of guiding the student publication on more serious topics.

“Under Diana’s direction, the paper had written several well-reasoned articles and editorials about sexual assaults on campus,” the Globe editorial stated. “The paper’s board of directors would have had a justifiable case to stick up for their editor, not push her out.”

The spoof “was rude, for sure,” the editorial concluded, “But it also had some satirical merit, especially on a campus grappling with how to prevent sexual assaults.”

The student-run Maneater, billed as the “the student voice of Missouri University since 1955,” has issued multiple apologies in the weeks since its April Fool’s edition ran, renamed for the day as the Carpeteater. Editor Abby Spudich issued an apology that stretched more than a thousand words, asking for forgiveness from the campus community.

While she admitted she had erred by allowing the spoof paper to include profane language that degraded women, Spudich also said she “truly did not know that 'carpet eater' is a derogatory term used for a lesbian."

Her “poorly thought out rationale, Spudich wrote, “was that since they were not used in a way that glorifies the mistreatment or objectification of women, they were not offensive … I realize now that these words in and of themselves can contribute to further prejudice, no matter the context.”

When it comes to attempts at campus parody and satire, “you want to absolutely stay away from any attempts at humor involving rape or sexual assault,” said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, a First Amendment advocacy organization based in Arlington, Va. “Those are such incredibly sensitive topics for those who have been through that experience, the last thing they need is for people to treat it like a joke.”

The Rutgers’ spoof raises particular concerns in the age of the Google search as a background check. Potential employers or admissions officers might hit on the link to the fake publication and not realize that the mock-up – which used the same photograph of Marcus and page layout as his legitimate newspaper column – isn’t real.

That’s one argument for not posting spoof editions online as individual articles, but rather collecting the entire issue into one document that is clearly labeled as “humor,” LoMonte said.

“The best defense against defamation in a humor publication often is that the overall context of the publication makes the humor readily apparent,” LoMonte said. “But if the story is capable of being viewed out of context, then you risk weakening that defense.”

College should be a place where it's safe to try, fail, and try again. Campus publications can serve as valuable proving grounds for student journalists to test their skills, and develop their senses of humor. Thanks to the wonders of technology, such literary endeavors are easier to produce, creating greater opportunities for diversity of opinion.

But students must also be aware that their experiments testing the boundaries   -- even the "sophomoric" ones -- don't expire on April 2. Instead, they are laying a digital trail that will follow them far beyond the relatively forgiving boundaries of higher education.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Coming to a Newspaper Near You ... Are School Turnarounds Working?

Three national organizations covering education issues — Education Week, the Education Writers Association, and the Hechinger Report at Teachers College, Columbia University — are collaborating with news organizations around the country to examine the federally funded School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, which has received more than $4.6 billion since 2009.

The project looks at how states, districts and individual schools are using this huge influx of money, and whether the money is achieving the intended goal: helping improve student outcomes in the nation’s most troubled schools. Education reporters provided a team of national writers with insights into school reform in nearly 20 cities. The findings are significant, raising critical questions about the progress of the SIG program, and how communities are responding to the massive push to remake failing campuses.

Beginning Sunday, the project's centerpiece stories -- along with companion pieces written by local and regional reporters -- will be published both in print editions and online. (If your local publication isn't one of the project participants, you will be able to find the national stories online at Education Week.

Interestingly, the publication date comes on the heels of a new report from the Government Accountability Office examining the SIG program. The federal audit urges closer oversight of consultants hired by states and districts using SIG funds, and that more information be provided to on school progress to help states decide whether to renew an individual campus' grant.

You can read more about the audit  from Ed Week's Alyson Klein, who (along with Hechinger's Sarah Garland, and Andy Brownstein of Thompson Publications Group) is one of the collaborative project's national writers.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA public editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Ed Story Updates: The Science of Sportsmanship, Texas District Gets Helping Hands

A scoring error won't keep a Las Vegas high school Science Olympiad team from representing Nevada at the national tournament next month in Florida, dashing the hopes of a rival team claiming to be the rightful champions.

Clark High School was told it had won the statewide competition. But 10 days later a scoring error was uncovered that would have given Centennial High School the win. Centennial's coach asked Clark to step aside, but the coach refused.

Officials from the National Science Olympiad have since announced that Clark will get the berth at the tournament, the Las Vegas Sun reported. The national organization's policy is that all results are considered final -- even if errors are later discovered -- 24 hours after a winner is named.

The situation yielded some thoughtful discussion on ethical lessons that might be drawn from the experience. But there were also some heated exchanges among both school's feuding supporters on social media sites that only inflamed the dispute.

However, Emma Berkowitz, Centennial Science Olympiad team captain, offered an impressively measured and pragmatic view of the the national organization's  decision to tap Clark for the tournament.

“It’s sad we’re not going to go,” Berkowitz told the Sun. “But everyone keeps telling us this is a good life lesson. Things happen, and you’re not always going to get what you want in life, even if you deserve it."

**
The New York Times took a trip to rural  Premont, Texas and found -- as the Associated Press' Chris Sherman did a few months back -- a struggling school district fighting to stave off a threatened state takeover and possible closure.

But the Times' story also had some hopeful notes that are worth sharing: Neighboring districts are chipping in funds to restore Premont's science labs, and corporations have also donated cash to support programs and services. The district has also been given an extension on repaying a $400,000 line of credit.

**

It's become something of a truism that teachers don't do the job for the paycheck. But it was still nice to read a story about the "Three Amigos" who stepped forward to claim their share of the record-busting Mega Millions lottery. All three of the winners work in local schools. Two of them are classroom teachers who plan to stay on the job, saying "I can't give up my kids."


Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA Public Editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Is the State of U.S. Public Schools a Threat to National Security?

A Council on Foreign Relations task force, led by former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, claims that the poor quality of America’s public education system represents a threat to national security. But the group's recommendations for fixing schools have no shortage of detractors, including some of the  experts who were asked to serve on the task force.

According to the task force, the nation’s education system is failing to turn out enough engineers or students competent in foreign languages. And as a whole, the nation’s youth doesn’t have a deep enough understanding of the wider world.

The solutions, as laid out in the final report released in March, are: more choice (in the form of vouchers and charter schools); an expanded version of the Common Core curriculum being adopted by most states that includes skill sets such as foreign languages, science and technology;  and a national security readiness audit to make sure students are being adequately prepared for the challenges ahead.

In a dissent included in an appendix to the report, Stanford education Prof. Linda Darling-Hammond wrote that the report’s “great strength is that it properly highlights the critical and too often ignored nexus between education and national security.” However, Darling-Hammond takes issue with the suggestion that vouchers and charter schools would solve the underlying problems facing public education.

The countries that routinely score at the top of the chart on international exams such as the PISA tests, including Finland and South Korea, “have invested in strong public education systems that serve virtually all students,” wrote Darling-Hammond, who was joined in her dissent by Harvard international relations Prof. Stephen M. Walt, education advocate and Global Kids founder Carole Artigiani, and American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten.

At the same time that some countries are seeing measurable returns on their investment in public education, Darling-Hammond wrote, “nations that have aggressively pursued privatization, such as Chile, have a huge and growing divide between rich and poor that has led to dangerous levels of social unrest.”

Walt, taking the lead in another section of the dissent, argued that vouchers and charter schools have not proven to be "sustainable or systemic ways to improve our schools." (Research on charter school effectiveness has been at best mixed, with recent studies suggesting they perform no better, and in some cases, do even worse, than traditional public schools.)

Additionally, the task force’s recommendations "go to great lengths to blame a current generation of educators for their assumed institutional resistance to innovation when, in fact, the problem is less about an opposition to change than it is about too much churn and change," Walt wrote. "This adds to disrespect and the sharp demoralization of our current teaching force—something that is never seen in the countries that outcompete us.”

I asked Marc Tucker, president of the National Center on Education and the Economy, for his take on the task force's report, and he said it was “stunning” that the Council on Foreign Relations didn’t look abroad for answers.

“That is the last organization in this country I would have expected offer up what amounts to an isolationist view of education,” Tucker said. “They looked for solutions inside a country that hasn’t been able to find a way out of this box, instead of countries that are beating the pants off us on every measure of student success.”

Tucker, whose new book is “Surpassing Shanghai: An Agenda for American Education Built on the World’s Leading Systems,” said the U.S. is being outpaced when it comes to teacher quality. The countries with the most robust public school systems are more selective in their recruitment of teachers, train them better before they let them take charge of a classroom, and pay them respectable salaries that reinforce their societal status as valued professionals, Tucker said.

John Jackson, president and chief executive officer of the Schott Foundation for Public Education, which focuses on issues of equity and opportunity in preschool through 12th grade, suggested to me another place the task force might have looked for solutions – the U.S. Department of Defense. American students attending schools on military bases, which are freed from the rigorous testing and accountability requirements of No Child Left Behind,  routinely outperform their civilian peers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as 'The Nation's Report Card." 

As the New York Times' Michael Winerip noted in a particularly pithy column in December, "It has become fashionable for American educators to fly off to Helsinki to investigate how schools there produce such high-achieving Finns. But for just $69.95 a night, they can stay at the Days Inn in Jacksonville, N.C., and investigate how the schools here on the Camp Lejeune Marine base produce such high-achieving Americans — both black and white."

The military base schools "have already realized that to have strong outcomes, you need equitable solutions,” Jackson said. “Regardless of a military person’s rank, they all send their children to the same school on base. You don’t have soldiers or officers living in impoverished situations without the appropriate support for their families to survive.” 

Indeed, the nation’s public schools have seen sharp increases in populations of high-need students, and the numbers remain high even as the economic recovery progresses.

Socioeconomic status is a better predictor of academic success in the United States than in all but four of the other countries in the database of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which administers the international PISA exam, Tucker said. What’s more, coming from a low-income household and/or a home with one parent seems to take a greater toll on an American student’s academic performance than it does on their peers in most other countries.

If the state of public education does indeed pose a risk to the security of the United States, “let’s approach it with a national plan that includes appropriate levels of federal support,” Jackson said. “Anything short of that is not a serious conversation or plan to address the national threat."

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA Public Editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

Campus Cops Pepper Spray Community College Protestors

Protestors angry about a California community college’s tuition hike proposal to charge more for top-demand courses were pepper-sprayed by campus police after they tried to force their way into a trustees’ meeting, raising serious concerns about just how much stress the state's higher education system can take.

As the video of the incident at Santa Monica College indicates, this episode appears to be a vastly different scenario than what unfolded at the University of California, Davis when police used pepper spray on students who were peaceably taking part in an Occupy Wall Street-inspired campus demonstration. At Tuesday's confrontation in Santa Monica, there is pushing, shouting and a surge toward the doorway of the meeting room before police sprayed the crowd.

However, “you would think after the outrage resulting from the [UC-Davis] incident, people would be incredibly circumspect on how avidly they used pepper spray to break up an unruly discussion,” said Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center in Arlington, Va., an advocacy organization that supports First Amendment campus activities.

The pepper spray should stay in the holster unless it's necessary to avoid even more severe violence, LoMonte said. At worst the students in the Santa Monica video appeared to be "a little rude," but it's not obvious that the pepper spray was warranted, LoMonte said.

While the incident was unfortunate, “it’s always positive to see students getting passionate about causes on campus,” LoMonte said. “They may have gotten too passionate here, but it’s good that they’re engaged in something other than playing video games in their dorms. They’re the consumers, and the fact that they are making their voices heard to the trustees is something we ought to be encouraging.”

Whether the Santa Monica campus police were justified in their show of force remains to be seen. In the meantime, the incident serves as a vivid reminder of just how bad things have gotten for California’s higher education system.

“We’re not talking about one bad budget year or just one tough semester,” said Scott Jaschik, editor of Inside Higher Ed. “It’s been a long haul of bad news, and many students feel they are at their limits.”

Once the open-access entry point to higher education, community college systems are struggling with a huge influx of non-traditional students. Many of them are working adults looking for short-term certification programs in order to find new careers or hold on to the ones they have. Once relegated to second-class status behind institutions that award four-year and graduate degrees, policymakers at the national level have been putting significant focus on community colleges as a potentially critical element in the nation's economic recovery.

At the same time, community colleges are being flooded with students from four-year universities who find themselves shut out of oversubscribed basic classes at their own campuses. As a result, there is a new element of tension for community college administrators across the country, but particularly in California where cuts to higher education funding have been devastating.

In February, a California task force assembled to address these issues released its recommendations for overhauling the state’s community college system. Among their suggestions: community colleges should severely restrict the number of majors that are offered; that students should be required to complete a long-term academic plan before beginning their studies; and students should be required to complete any remedial classes at the start of their studies. The report also called for better coordination between the K-12 education system and community colleges in efforts to reduce the need for remediation and improve completion rates.

The bulk of those recommendations have been met with sharp criticism by educators throughout the state, including Dean Murakami, vice president of the Faculty Association of California Community Colleges. The task force should have focused on “developing counseling and instructional infrastructure to guide students through college,” Murakami wrote this week in an opinion piece for the Sacramento Bee. What was instead delivered was “a confusing set of recommendations that's short on promise and long on punishment,” Murakami wrote. “If enacted as is, it will frustrate the dreams of tens of thousands of students. Once they drop out – presto – our numbers magically improve. Problem solved.”

The recommendations do seem to skate perilously close to a kind of academic triage. With the shortage of seats, it makes sense for higher education institutions at all levels to focus resources on students who are to most likely to benefit. But how does that fit with the open-access mission that has been the defining hallmark of community colleges?

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA Public Editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

How To Tell When School Turnaround Turns the Corner

In an interview at The Atlantic’s "Jobs & Economy of the Future: Educating the Next Generation to Compete" Town Hall, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan pressed his case on the urgent need for America’s public schools to “get better faster than we ever have.”

But when it comes to the costly School Improvement Grant (SIG) program, a key plank in the Obama administration’s efforts to fix public education, there is no specific framework for measuring whether the initiative has succeeded or failed. What, exactly, qualifies as “better?” How much time do students, teachers and school communities have to satisfy the demand for “faster?”

Almost from its inception, No Child Left Behind was pilloried for setting what many educators (not to mention statisticians) argued was an unrealistic goal: that 100 percent of the nation’s public school students would be proficient in reading and math by the 2013-14 academic year. The SIG program seems to be drifting at the other end of the spectrum, having set expectations that individual schools will improve --  using test scores, attendance and other measures -- without a clear understanding of what will constitute success at the national level.

Conventional wisdom in education circles is that it typically takes at least three years for a new initiative to take root in a school, and for a positive impact to be demonstrated in measurable gains such as student test scores. That’s a long time to wait for improvement, particularly for a hugely expensive federal initiative. It's also a lot to ask of students who only get one opportunity to learn.

Since 2009, the federal government has awarded $4.6 billion in SIG dollars to states, with the money earmarked to help turn around the lowest-performing campuses in each local district. To qualify for the funds, schools have to demonstrate both a high-need student population and a commitment to reform. But not just any reform: Schools must choose one of the feds’ pre-approved models.

According to the U.S. Department of Education, the overwhelming majority of the SIG schools – 74 percent – opted for what’s known as the “transformation” model, which offers the most leeway with replacing staff and is in theory the easiest of the models to implement. Another 20 percent of schools went with the “turnaround” model, which requires replacing the majority of the staff. Only 4 percent of the SIG campuses opted to “restart” with a private operator at the helm, or convert to a charter school. School closures accounted for just percent of the SIG campuses.

At a recent one-day seminar for journalists (organized by the National Education Writers Association) at the University of Chicago, Jason Snyder, who oversees the federal Office of School Turnaround, acknowledged that the “calibrations” are still being fine-tuned for evaluating the SIG program.

Duncan recently announced improved student proficiency scores in reading at math at nearly 60 percent of the SIG schools. At nearly a quarter of those campuses that showed improvement, the improvement in math is in the double digits, and close to 20 percent of schools saw double-digit gains in reading.

While that's good news, Snyder said it’s widely recognized that such early results are not enough to call the initiative a victory. His office is approaching this endeavor “with a strong sense of humility and sincerity, knowing we don’t have all the answers here,” Snyder said.

Another factor to consider: Given nation’s long history of failed attempts to turn around schools – mixed with a fair number of success stories that keep hope alive -- the odds are not in the SIG’s program’s favor.

“We know that not every single one of these schools is going to succeed,” said Snyder, who is a deputy assistant secretary in the federal Department of Education. “It’s just not going to happen.”

Researchers already have raised concerns about the SIG program, specifically that schools face a funding cliff when their federal grants run out. Any short-term SIG gains could be replaced with backsliding if the new programs and support services aren’t kept up and running. Some states have struggled to spend their allocated SIG funds, often because of the challenge of replacing staff at failing schools with supposedly more effective teachers and administrators.

There is evidence that states are taking this endeavor seriously. Individual schools had to submit applications laying out how the SIG dollars would be spent, and what gains should be expected as a result of the new interventions. In a few cases states have actually yanked funding  – a rare phenomenon with federal grants -- from schools that haven’t kept pace with those expectations, Snyder said.

So what exactly would be a win for the SIG program? Would it be enough if 10 percent of the schools make dramatic gains? Or would it be better to see at least half of the campuses demonstrate modest growth?

Snyder said after three years, schools should be showing improved student achievement – that means better test scores, fewer dropouts and more high school graduates. Campuses that fail to meet those benchmarks “are not on a trajectory for turnaround, from our perspective,” Snyder said.

Success for the SIG program, Snyder said, would be “proving progress is possible, (showing) how we got to that progress and inspiring others to do the same in other schools around the country that are really in need of this kind of intervention.”

Improving schools means tackling the core elements of a campus – instruction, leadership, parent and community engagement, the professional capacity of the teachers, and the learning environment, said Timothy Knowles, the John Dewey director of the Urban Education Institute at the University of Chicago, who participated in the EWA seminar.

For some of the schools in the turnaround program, failure has been status quo for decades – if not generations, Knowles said. Fixing the problem could require sustained resources and support far beyond the typical time frame that educational reforms are given to prove their worth.

 “It’s not going to happen with just a three or four year investment at the local, state or federal level,” Knowles said. “These places have been broken for a long time, and in most cases it’s the schools serving the poorest kids in our country. We have to invest in them.”

At the same time, there are signs that not everyone is ready to embrace reform, Knowles said. That’s one reason why he’s concerned that nearly three-quarters of the SIG campuses opted for the “transformation” model, which is arguably the least aggressive of the feds’ pre-approved routes to reform.

“The really broken schools are most likely to be the most impervious to change, and the most likely to take the path of least resistance,” Knowles said.

However, having 20 percent of the SIG campuses embrace turnaround is a “dramatic shift from where we’ve been in how we approach this problem,” Knowles said. In that respect, the federal initiative has indeed forced educators to confront and address significant problems at low-achieving schools.

Here, then, is one of the most frustrating aspects to evaluating education reform. The clock typically restarts with every new initiative. That makes it difficult to track long-term progress, and to identify the reasons why students either lost or gained academic ground. Impatience can hurt schools, but so can inertia. Policymakers often seem to be in a perpetual struggle to find a balance between the two extremes.

Whether the progress of schools in the SIG program ends up being enough to qualify as “better,” or speedy enough to satisfy demands for “faster,” this much is certain: Standing still is not an option.

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA Public Editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.

More on 'Bully,' a 'Hungry Heart' for Higher Ed, and a School Board Sit-In

If you haven't yet seen "Bully," you might want to first read Slate's Emily Bazelon and find out what producers chose not to share with audiences when it came to the background of one of the documentary's central figures.

In the film, the parents of 17-year-old Tyler Long blame his suicide entirely on bullying. However, Bazelon reports that Tyler had Asperger's, and was also being treated for bipolar disorder -- both of which have been linked to a higher rate of suicide.

Bazelon makes the case that by withholding those important details about the teen's history, audiences were led to believe that intense bullying alone led to his taking his own life.

The film "is supposed to be a teaching tool, yet it offers some serious misimpressions about the connection between bullying and suicide, misimpressions that could have real effects on young viewers," Bazelon concludes.

**

University of Virginia Prof. Mark Edmundson makes a compelling case in the New York Times for a "hungry heart" when it comes to deciding who will best benefit from a college education.

Edmundson, who has been teaching for 35 years, writes: " The best students and the ones who get the most out of their educations are the ones who come to school with the most energy to learn. And — here’s an important corollary — those students are not always the most intellectually gifted."

This is an editorial that I expect will stir up some important conversations about the inherent value of knowledge, beyond the tradeoff for a potentially bigger paycheck.

**

I have to admit, I don't often miss covering school board meetings. However, there are times when I'm reminded that for many communities, school boards represent the most direct means of allowing the public to voice its views on educational issues. You would also be hard pressed to find a more passionate audience than a board room full of parents who have just been told their child's school is going to close.

That's what played out in Oakland, Calif. late last week when the board announced it would close five elementary schools. Protestors refused to leave the building, and they were eventually arrested. Oakland Tribune education reporter Katy Murphy summed up the scene nicely in her blog, noting that board trustee Alice Spearman, "who serves up at least two colorful quotes and/or insults per meeting," was nonplussed by the protestors.

Spearman is quoted as issuing this pronouncement: "I want to say to these revolutionaries who want to camp out: I hope you've got your tent. I hope you do. Walk your talk."

Have a question, comment or concern for the Educated Reporter? Email EWA Public Editor Emily Richmond at erichmond@ewa.org. She also tweets @EWAEmily.