Taking Note

Four Lessons From New York's Test Results

New York State Chancellor Meryl Tisch and Commissioner of Education Joseph Steiner deserve the “Whistle Blower of the Year” award for laying bare the deception and softness of state standards and testing.  In releasing the 2010 state test results on July 28, they expose the majority of states that have been lowering proficiency standards as a part of the No Child Left Behind game.  Their effort to align New York’s tests to what students need to be college-ready sets an example for every state and, one hopes, federal education officials. 

One would be hard-pressed to argue with the assumptions behind New York’s new policies.  First, the goal of a public school education should be college readiness.  With half of “high-need” students not finishing high school and one quarter of first-year college students requiring remedial course work, this goal is obviously not being met.  Second, the state’s curricular standards should be aligned with what high school graduates need to succeed in college.  Third, assessments of those standards should provide a reliable indicator if a student is on the path to college readiness, i.e., if deemed proficient on 8th grade math that there is a strong chance that he or she—with continued effort—will pass the Regents examination and gain admission to college.  

Does Affirmative Action Matter?

In a recent post, Matthew Yglesias of the Center for American Progress Action Fund argues that the battles over affirmative action in higher education don’t matter much in the fight for a fairer society.  But is the issue of who gets in to elite colleges a mere sideshow, or are there important ramifications for individuals and communities?

Yglesias argues that candidates who don’t get into Harvard are likely to end up at Columbia or Penn, a marginal difference.  Every time he hears the debate over whether affirmative action, should be based on race or class, he writes, “I have to wonder why we’re having it.  The presumption that you can solve any significant problem of social justice in America by fiddling with Ivy League admissions policies is dead wrong, as is the idea that the main challenge poor people of any race face education-wise is that they might not get into an elite college.”

If it were true that affirmative action in college admissions were just a distraction, then liberals have wasted an enormous amount of political capital over the fights from Bakke (1978) to Grutter (2003). But evidence suggests that where a student goes to college does in fact matter, particularly for low-income pupils. 

At The Century Foundation, we’ve engaged in three major projects on the issue.  In 2004, we published America’s Untapped Resource: Low-Income Students in Higher Education, which found, among other things, that at the most selective 146 institutions – the very institutions where affirmative action matters –  74 percent of students come from the richest quarter of the population and just 3 percent from the poorest.  Earlier this summer, we published Rewarding Strivers: Helping-Low Income Students Succeed in College, which, among a number of other things, detailed how a class-based affirmative action program might work in practice.  And this fall, we will be releasing Affirmative Action for the Rich: Legacy Preferences in College Admissions, which challenges policies that favor the children of alumni.  Was this all a waste of time?

The evidence suggests it was not.  To begin with, while for upper-middle class students, the difference between attending Harvard or Penn is of course basically immaterial, for low-income students, research finds considerable “under-matching,” whereby students attend far less selective institutions than ones they're capable of succeeding in.  Because elite schools don’t put much value on socioeconomic diversity, a fair number of highly qualified low-income students don’t attend selective institutions of any kind.  Socioeconomic affirmative action – which involves both preferences in admissions and aggressive outreach and recruitment – can open up an entirely new world for working-class students.

Moreover, research confirms that going to a selective college or university does in fact provide considerable advantages. For one thing, wealthy selective colleges tend to spend a great deal more on students’ educations. Research finds that the least selective colleges spend about $12,000 per student, compared with $92,000 per student at the most selective schools.  In addition, wealthy selective institutions provide much greater subsidies for families. At the wealthiest 10 percent of institutions, students pay, on average, just 20 cents in fees for every dollar the school spends on them, while at the poorest 10 percent of institutions, students pay 78 cents for every dollar spent on them 

Furthermore, selective colleges are quite a bit better at retention. If a more-selective school and a less-selective school enroll two equally qualified students, the more-selective institution is much more likely to graduate its student. 

Moreover, future earnings are, on average, 45 percent higher for students who graduated from more-selective institutions than for those from less-selective ones.  Even studies that question the “value added” by selective institutions concede that for low-income students, who would otherwise lack access to professional networks, the benefits of attending selective colleges and universities are substantial.

Finally, as the U.S. Supreme Court has observed, America’s leadership class continues to come disproportionately from graduates of selective universities.  According to research by political scientist Thomas Dye, 54 percent of America’s top corporate leaders and 42 percent of governmental leaders are graduates of just 12 institutions.

Does the debate over affirmative action address “the main challenge” poor people face in education?  Of course not.  The divide between rich and poor in our K-12 schools affects far more people.  But the stakes in the affirmative action debate are real, not just because the policy makes us think hard about what we mean by meritocracy (which it does), but also because having access to great colleges and universities can transform the lives of  poor and working-class individuals in meaningful ways.

Ross Douthat and Affirmative Action

The issue of affirmative action in higher education is about to explode on the scene once again – as an article in this morning’s Texas Tribune notes.  A challenge to the use of race at the University of Texas at Austin will be argued before the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on August 3, and the case could end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Ross Douthat’s column in Monday’s New York Times previews the debate to come as pitting elite universities concerned about racial diversity vs. white working-class Christians from conservative states who should be admitted in greater numbers to promote intellectual diversity.  But as I note in a post in the Chronicle of Higher Education, we should focus less on diversity of voices and more on an admissions process that is fair – and would consider merit in the context of obstacles overcome.

And who said the culture wars were over?

A TCF Podcast with Gordon Macinnes: From Safe Harbors to Student Loans

From Safe Harbors to Student Loans

Recently, Gordon wrote in Taking Note about the Feds move to protect students against the forprofit educational industry.  In this podcast episode, TCF's Catherine Vieth interviewed Gordon Macinnes about the Obama administration’s proposed regulations on the education industry.  From safe harbors to student loans, Macinnes describes how the proposed regulations would put students’ interests before those of the for-profit industry.  An issue brief on the topic is available at www.tcf.org.

A Turn in the Road? Rerouting Federal School Reform

Since July 1, three developments suggest that the first-year victories of the Obama-Duncan “transformational reform” effort may be in jeopardy. First, the House of Representatives adopted a supplemental appropriations bill that includes an emergency infusion of $10 billion for saving teachers’ jobs, $800 million of which is financed by modest reductions in Race to the Top, the Teacher Incentive Fund, and one other embryonic administration program. The White House threatens a veto.

The second and third developments were non-events: the annual conventions of both the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers excluded any speaker from the administration. Given the longstanding and symbiotic relationship of teacher unions and the Democratic Party, the double cold shoulder is an unmistakable warning about the health of the alliance.

The administration bet heavily on a clever tactic to leverage scarce dollars to entice states to change their rules about charter schools, teacher evaluation, and data-gathering. Many states enacted laws to qualify for Race to the Top grants in the competition for $4.3 billion, the largest discretionary fund ever administered by an education secretary. The administration hopes to extend its vision for reform by using competitive grants—as opposed to funds distributed by congressionally approved formulae—to encourage further policy compliance.

The Feds Move to Protect Students against the For-Profit Educational Industry

For most of the past thirty years, Congress and federal regulators have jiggered the rules to favor aggressive proprietary schools at the expense of poor, vulnerable students. The federal government’s seeming role was to assure the Education Industry (not to be confused with the nonprofit education “sector”) that its revenues and profits would swell using taxpayer grants and guaranteed loans. It worked.

Student loans and Pell Grants were intended to give poor and middle-class students the means to expand their educational and economic opportunities. Instead, hundreds of thousands of poor persons who have sought this financial aid to pursue higher education have been deceived, pressured, overcharged, exploited, and then dropped into bankruptcy—all with the connivance of Congress and federal officials.

White Flight in Higher Education

The other day, I commented in this space on a disturbing new U.S. Department of Education report finding a 42% increase in the proportion of students attending high poverty elementary and secondary schools since 2000.  Black and Latino students attend these schools in disproportionate numbers.

But as I note in a new post in the Chronicle of Higher Education, something similar appears to be happening in higher education: as whites are increasingly fleeing less selective and non-selective schools and African Americans are increasing their representation at those schools.

The Ominous Increase in High Poverty Schools

Richard Kahlenberg responds to Thursday, May 27th's U.S. Department of Education report on the increase of students attending high poverty schools. Listen to it here:

Click Here to Play Richard Kahlenberg's Response to the U.S. DOE High Poverty Schools Report 

Download The Condition of Education 2010 Report

Rewarding Strivers

In Sunday’s Washington Post Outlook section, I outlined five myths about who gets into college.  The myths include:

1. Admissions officers have figured out how to reward merit above connections and wealth.
2. Disadvantages based on race are still the biggest obstacles to getting into college.
3. Generous financial aid policies are the key to boosting socioeconomic diversity.
4. Selective colleges are too expensive and aren’t worth the investment.
5. With more students going to college, we’re closer to the goal of equal opportunity.

Most of the data in the piece are drawn from a new volume that The Century Foundation will releasing at the National Press Club on June 17 entitled, Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College (invitation to the forum is here). The book includes a fascinating chapter by Edward B. Fiske on “The Carolina Covenant,” the University of North Carolina’s innovative program to provide financial aid and support to students earning below 200% of the poverty line.  The volume also has a ground-breaking chapter by Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl on growing stratification in higher education and an analysis quantifying (in terms of SAT points) the various economic and racial disadvantages that students face.  The research is a revised and updated version of Carnevale’s controversial strivers research from the late 1990s.  Carnevale and Strohl’s point is not that we should abandon the SAT, but rather that a student’s scores and grades should be considered in the context or what obstacles she has overcome.  Colleges and universities claim they already do this, but research suggests they do not.  Shouldn’t they?

Charles Murray Sort of Making Sense?

It is striking that just as a Harvard Law School student was being rightly condemned for suggesting in a brief private email that African Americans might be genetically less intelligent than whites, the New York Times offered space on its op-ed page to Charles Murray, who in The Bell Curve publicly and at great length made precisely that argument.

It is even more striking that Murray’s op-ed was about two-thirds correct.

In the piece, Murray, a strong proponent of private school vouchers and charter schools, frankly conceded that the test score results for those policies were underwhelming.  In this regard, Murray is part of a larger retreat from school vouchers.  New York University’s Diane Ravitch has reversed course on her earlier support of vouchers.  And even Harvard’s Paul Peterson, who for years was the nation’s leading academic supporter of vouchers, has acknowledged that the grand expectations of voucher supporters have not been met and has shifted his emphasis to online learning.