U.S. Department of Education

There are bad actors in every sector of higher education. But the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (NAICU) would like you to believe otherwise. During a panel discussion with Congressional staffers at their annual conference, private college presidents expressed frustration with increased federal scrutiny and regulation. They argued that problems with debt and default are just for-profit problems, not private nonprofit problems. A Republican staffer for the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, Brian Melnyk, agreed in part saying, “There are some bad actors among for-profits,” but he added, “bad actors can be found in every sector of higher education.” This comment was not well received. Several audience members yelled, “Name them.” Melnyk declined. But I won’t.

In October, the Department of Education released the first official 3-year cohort default rates (CDR) for postsecondary institutions, which measure the percentage of students who have defaulted on their federal loans within three years of leaving college. Having a rate above 30 percent starts an institution on the road to federal student aid sanctions. And although institutions with 3-year CDRs over 30 percent are overwhelmingly for-profits (73 percent), private nonprofits still account for 11 percent of the schools. Of that 11 percent, almost half are NAICU members.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a division of the U.S. Department of Education, is proposing to collect data for the annual State of Preschool Survey, which for the last nine years has been administered by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER).  Public comments on this proposal are due February 12.

President Obama called an afternoon press conference today to request that Congress circumvent the across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration scheduled for March 1. Instead of allowing the cuts to take effect, he said, Congress should head them off with a package that cuts spending and closes tax loopholes.

Welcome to the Syllabus, a weekly guide that provides insight into what’s happening in higher education.

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This week New America’s Education Policy Program published Rebalancing Resources and Incentives in Federal Student Aid. In this policy paper we make more than 30 recommendations on how to improve our complex federal financial aid system so that it works better for students and taxpayers. With this many proposals, there was something for everyone to be happy about or frustrated over—sometimes simultaneously.

Inside Higher Ed, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and ProPublica offer great summaries of our proposal if you haven’t already read it. We also have this one-page explainer that will help get you up to speed.

The Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP) today announced new higher education data available on its website from the 2011 year.  The data are available for more than 7,500 institutions of higher education, as well as every state across the country, and include college prices, financial aid, demographics, and outcomes data.

We also added a new data point: graduate student enrollment at institutions of higher education for 2009 through 2011. As graduate school – with its students’ substantial debt burdens – continues to inch its way into the higher education debate, a greater understanding of graduate students’ particular circumstances will be increasingly critical. FEBP’s data on graduate student enrollment and Grad PLUS loan disbursements at the institutional and state levels can play a critical role in that.

The data provide a five-year snapshot of each institution, and allow users to examine many facets of the school’s costs and performance. For an example, we looked at Morehouse College. Our colleague Rachel Fishman wrote about the school on Higher Ed Watch last fall. Morehouse is a historically black, all-male college. And as Fishman pointed out, the data in FEBP tell a story of a school with a Parent PLUS problem.

Enrollment at Morehouse was just under 2,500 students last year, and 55 percent of students received federal aid – but even more, 76 percent, took out federal loans. Parent PLUS loans at the school totaled $21.7 million last year, more than $8 million more than parents took out only five years ago (accounting both for the now-defunct FFEL program and the new Direct Loan program). Given the high interest rate and substantial fees associated with the Parent PLUS program, Fishman argues that they make a bad strategy for affording the school. As we can see by examining the school in FEBP, its total price has increased by more than $10,000 over five years to more than $43,000 per year in 2011 – apparently supported largely by Parent PLUS loans.

The data also give a picture of some broader national trends. Here at Ed Money Watch, we’ve written frequently about the skyrocketing costs of the Pell Grant program since funding for the program nearly doubled in 2009. All those additional federal dollars are being distributed to students across the country, so the Pell Grant disbursements by state have increased dramatically in recent years. California postsecondary students, for example, received about $1.6 billion in 2007. Just five years later, the state received nearly $3.9 billion in Pell Grants, a 140 percent increase in federal Pell Grant dollars.

Click here to check out the data for yourself. How has your alma mater fared over the last several years? What about your home state?

The data are also downloadable as an open data file here.

Syllabus: Week of January 20

Welcome to the Syllabus, a weekly guide that provides insight into what’s happening in higher education.

Read:

The Curious Birth and Harmful Legacy of the Credit Hour, Amy Laitinen
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Almost all colleges and universities use the credit hour to measure student progression. But these time-based units were never intended to be a measure of student learning. They were developed and widely adopted so that colleges and universities could participate in a free professor pension program administered by the Carnegie Foundation.  New America’s Amy Laitinen explains that the nation can no longer afford to use time to measure learning and instead should move toward assessing competencies. “Measuring time is easy, but measuring learning is hard,” writes Laitinen, “However, that doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be done.” There are already some promising practices, like the Lumina Foundation’s Degree Qualifications Profile and Tuning process, but changes to federal policy are needed to encourage wide adoption of these efforts by leveraging the government’s ability to use financial aid to pay for learning, not time.

One of the least-discussed federal special education programs is the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) Part C grants for infants and toddlers. IDEA Part C is a $443 million program housed in the Department of Education. It currently offers early intervention (EI) services to 350,000 infants and children between birth and age 2.

Much like the rest of President Obama’s signature education programs from the first term, the policy around ESEA flexibility seems to be shifting. The focus is no longer on how to win a waiver, but rather, on how to implement and monitor the commitments states made. Most states have secured their waiver, with only a handful waiting for approval from the Department of Education. While I’d encourage states to continue to refine their waivers based on lessons learned during implementation, no one has forced states (besides Virginia) to change their plans mid-course. Further, the Department has already shifted their attention to initiatives in early education and higher education.

So where does that leave the NCLB waivers in the second term? As I’ve written before, the waivers are insanely complicated, making it difficult for the public and even policymakers to parse out what states should be doing. That’s why it’s notable that the Senate HELP Committee wants to hold hearings on the waivers as soon as February, with testimony from Education Secretary Arne Duncan and state chiefs overseeing the waivers in their states. The House Education and Workforce committee is also mulling their role in providing oversight.  These hearings would likely involve some of the most controversial issues around graduation rate accountability, super subgroups, and different goals for minority and disadvantaged students.

While the hearings will likely shed light on the best – and worst – attributes of ESEA flexibility, the real question is whether they will lead to any meaningful action. The 112th Congress was the least productive and most polarized in history, and the 113th is not off to an auspicious start, with a so-called triple cliff to resolve before April: sequester, debt ceiling, and the expiration of the last budget continuing resolution. Add to that an unprecedented ‘to-do’ list for education – ESEA, IDEA, HEA, Perkins, WIA, CCDBG, Head Start, and the Education Services Reform Act are all pending renewal – and you have an environment where Congress will likely gripe about the waivers, but fail to reach a consensus on what to do about them.

The Obama administration seems to be betting on it. Over the next three years, states will implement their waivers and work through the kinks. By the time Congress gets its act together, states will have gone so far down the road with their new accountability and teacher evaluation systems that legislators will be hemmed in to passing a reauthorization that mirrors the flexibility policy. Secretary Duncan relayed this game plan in a speech to state chiefs: implementing the waivers “will have a big impact on shaping any reauthorization bill that might emerge.”

Given this context, here is what I’ll be watching in the second term:

District Waivers

For months, there have been rumblings of the Department offering district-level waivers for school systems in states that did not apply or were not approved for the larger flexibility plan – namely, California and Texas. Unsurprisingly, governors and state chiefs are not fans of the idea, and it is unclear what relief exactly the Department could give to districts without undermining the authority and autonomy of state education agencies. That said, eight districts in the California Office to Reform Education, or CORE, signaled their intent to apply for a waiver last week, before the Department even formally offered flexibility to them. How will Secretary Duncan respond to this request? Will the California Governor Jerry Brown or the State Board support their efforts? The CORE districts are some of the largest in California and have adopted reforms – like teacher evaluations – that doomed the state waiver request. Will other districts follow their lead?

Waiver Amendments

The waivers require states to overhaul accountability systems, implement college- and career-ready standards and assessments, and craft teacher evaluation systems based in part on student achievement. While many of these reforms could improve the state of education in the long term, the benefits are contingent on effective implementation.

Monitoring states’ waiver plans presents a significant challenge moving forward. In some states, new school grades and teacher evaluations appear arbitrary or inconsistent with past guidelines. Will states be receptive and responsive to feedback from educators, legislators, and the public? Just as states negotiated with the Department to draft their initial proposals, they have the opportunity to amend their plans at any time – Florida, Oklahoma, and South Carolina have done so already. Further, the Department should not rely on states alone to self-monitor their progress. With more states operating under a waiver than the original NCLB law, does the Department have the capacity to successfully monitor states’ activities? And if states do not follow through with their promises, will they intervene?

Stay tuned to the Waiver Watch for continuing coverage of these issues, and more, as states implement their flexibility plans.

In a post for the Huffington Post's Education blog, I wrote about the Early Education Initiative's event on January 14 that highlighted three promising strategies for turning around low-performing schools: FirstSchool, AppleTree's Every Child Ready and Cincinnati's

What can you do with $45 million and three years? Well, if you’re the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, you can confirm, empirically, what educators have always known implicitly: great teaching matters, it can be measured, and it improves student learning.[1]

That was one of the many findings released last week in the final report from the MET Project (Measures of Effective Teaching). MET has generated buzz in education and popular media alike, so I won’t provide a full synopsis here. For a basic summary, check out the Washington Post or Huffington Post rundown; for more thoughtful commentary, turn to posts from Chad Aldeman, Andy Smarick, Rick Hess, Marty West, and National Journal Experts Blog. Instead, I want to call attention to two big takeaways from the MET Project.

What teacher evaluations measure is just as important as how they measure it.

Much has been made of the finding that classroom observations are the worst predictor of student learning, compared to state test scores and student surveys. Some have questioned whether observations are worth the significant time and personnel costs involved to do them well. Tim Daly of TNTP even claimed that MET shows “the way that most teachers have been evaluated forever is completely unreliable.”

It’s easy to jump to that conclusion: MET used proven, high-quality observation tools, and observers were trained and certified on their knowledge of them. This isn’t the case with many of the classroom observations used across the country.  Still, observations are a critical component of teacher evaluations, particularly for those in the early grades and in untested subjects. And using observations typically receives greater support from educators compared to test scores. Finally, MET’s research found that although classroom observations didn’t improve the predictive power of the evaluation measure, they did improve its reliability – or stability – from year to year. 

Test scores also don’t have the same diagnostic power as classroom observations: as Amanda Ripley put it, “test scores can reveal when kids are not learning; they can’t reveal why.” Observations can provide teachers with valuable, timely, and clear feedback on their practice. Given their complexity and the timing of state testing, value-added measures are far less teacher-friendly – not to mention, limited in scope. Surely, great teaching involves much more than improving student scores on multiple-choice tests in two subjects.

To this end, it’s laudable that MET’s researchers also used higher-order tests (the SAT 9 Open-Ended Reading Assessment and the Balanced Assessment in Mathematics) to measure student learning. In some states, these assessments are more similar to the Common Core assessments they will offer in 2014-15. Presumably, states should want teacher evaluations that not only function well with today’s tests, but also those of the future.

Still, the tests MET used only consider English Language Arts and math skills. If the ultimate goal of evaluations is to measure whether teachers create learning environments where students achieve a broader set of outcomes (say, the knowledge, skills, and attributes it takes to be college- and career-ready), then there is still a long way to go in developing these systems. In 2014, many states will be simultaneously implementing new teacher evaluations and the Common Core assessments. But the best evaluation systems today do a far better job identifying teachers that improve student learning via state test scores than teachers that improve college and career readiness. MET’s findings suggest that states should carefully consider whether their evaluation systems are measuring the teacher attributes needed to meet the Common Core’s objectives.

How teacher evaluations are used is just as important as what they measure.

Part of the demand for research like the MET Project comes from the push to use teacher evaluation systems to make human resources decisions. Hiring, retention, placement, compensation, and tenure can all be affected. Some of the push can be attributed directly to the Obama administration: developing and using teacher evaluation systems like the ones in the MET study for HR decisions was a major component of both Race to the Top and the No Child Left Behind waivers.

But there is still uncertainty surrounding teacher evaluation systems; the MET Project doesn’t provide a definitive roadmap or specific policies for states and districts looking to measure effective teaching. Many of its findings are ambiguous (with the exception that value-added measures must account for students’ prior test scores). The MET report is inconclusive when it comes to:

• whether student demographics should be included as a control in value-added models;
• precisely how to weight each component within a composite effectiveness measure: value-added data, student-perception surveys, and classroom observations;[2]
• whether measures like the Content Knowledge for Teaching (CKT) tests or subject-based classroom observation tools could be useful additions to composite measures of teacher quality; and
• who should observe teachers, how long these observations should last, and how many observations should occur each year.[3]

The teacher quality measures MET suggests are “better on virtually every dimension than the measures in use now.” But does that mean similar teacher evaluation systems should be used as the deciding factor for whether a teacher is fired? Or promoted? Or receives a pay increase?

Thorny questions, indeed. Yes, the new measures of effective teaching are promising, compared to most old-school teacher evaluation systems where nearly every teacher rated ‘satisfactory.’ But given MET’s lingering questions and inevitable measurement error in these measures of effectiveness, wouldn’t it make more sense to continue developing and refining teacher evaluation systems without rushing to use them for high-stakes decisions? Especially since most schools lack the capacity and resources to implement evaluations of the rigor and quality that the MET study used? States and districts should consider using the results from teacher evaluations in a more diagnostic manner: why not make these measures of effective teaching the first step in the process of providing professional development, determining who receives pay increases or tenure, and making decisions about hiring or firing – rather than the final step?