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What gathering storm?

18 November 2009

Several weeks ago the Chronicle of Higher Education published an interesting article about the research of two professors from Rutgers University and Georgetown University into the supposed dearth of scientists and engineers being produced by American universities.

Everywhere you turn in the higher education world, you hear policy makers trumpeting the importance of producing more STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) graduates. Indeed Rising Above the Gathering Storm, a significant report issued by the National Academies several years ago, argued that America was on the verge of losing its competitive edge because it was not producing enough STEM graduates and urged national goal-setting.

After reviewing thirty years of educational and labor data, however, the Rutgers and Georgetown researchers have concluded that we’re producing more than enough STEM graduates. The problem, if there is any, is that fewer than half of STEM graduates work in STEM fields 10 years after they graduate.

I have a hunch this is an important study (I’m not saying it’s correct, just important) that will receive little additional attention as states like West Virginia charge headlong into STEM graduate program expansion. I make this observation in part because no one seems to have paid any attention to published data that suggest that West Virginia loses an overwhelming number of its STEM graduates to other states, making West Virginia’s return on its hefty STEM investment very poor.

The race to the top?

17 November 2009

Last month the Brookings Institution published a white paper discussing policy interventions most likely to be successful as the Obama Administration prepares to invest $4 billion in education reform with its “Race to the Top” initiative. Titled “Don’t Forget Curriculum,” the white paper makes a compelling case for curriculum investments, rather than governance investments. Some policy levers discussed:

Charter schools. The only quality studies showing significant positive effects are for popular, oversubscribed charter schools operating in large urban school districts (of which we have so many in West Virginia).
Reconstituting the teacher workforce. Studies demonstrate that teachers affect student outcomes, but how do we recruit, reward and retain the best teachers? That’s not so easy, suggests the white paper.
Early childhood programs. Studies of two expensive early childhood programs implemented in the 1960s and 1970s found significant long-term effects, but later studies of other programs are less favorable.
Content standards. ”The lack of evidence that better content standards enhance student achievement is remarkable given the level of investment in this policy and high hopes attached to it.” Enough said?
Curriculum. While recognizing the challenge of evaluating the differential impact of curricula, the white paper points out that study after study has found significant effects in a wide variety of contexts.

After reading the Race to the Top guidelines and this white paper, I am confused. Surely we’re not preparing to spend $4 billion to promote questionable educational policies.

We shall … surrender

16 November 2009

The London Times ran an interesting article last week about new software for marking British students’ English papers.

In a test of the software’s effectiveness, it was given several of Winston Churchill’s famous wartime speeches, as well as Ernest Hemingway’s, William Golding’s, and Anthony Burgess’s prose, to decipher.

Some of the more humorous conclusions:

Churchill’s call to ‘fight them on the beaches’ was too repetitive, and he used ‘upon’ and ‘our’ too frequently. His reference to the ‘might of the German army’ lost him points because the computer assumed he meant to use ‘might’ as a verb, not a noun.
Hemingway needed to write with more care and detail and was rated below average.
Burgess’ opening lines in “A Clockwork Orange” were incomprehensible.

Such software, of course, is all the rage in the United States.

Bring on the due diligence

13 November 2009

Last month the Charleston Daily Mail and others were very critical of the West Virginia Board of Education’s new rule on innovation zones. The theme of the comments was that the legislation and rule were so burdensome that no one would bother to innovate. What are the burdensome requirements?

The proposer much show that the innovative idea has community (e.g., parents, students, county of board of education) support. Is any innovation zone going to succeed without such support? No.
The proposer must have the support of 80 percent of school employees. Is any innovation zone going to succeed without such support? No.
The proposer must demonstrate “quality of innovation design.” Is that a bad thing? No. Do you want your child attending a school where the innovation has not been well thought out or is inconsistent with educational best practices research? I hope not.
The proposer actually must undergo an interview and a school visit before we hand over the keys to our children’s futures. A radical requirement? I don’t think so.

Do firms that provide business start-ups with venture capital adopt the laissez faire approach advocated by the Daily Mail for schools? Of course not. They expect business plans that include everything from hiring plans to marketing plans to budgets. And they don’t give away their money without someone (generally quite a few people) meeting with the applicant. Why should our schools be any different? If anything, the stakes are higher.

It’s one thing to be critical of the bureaucracy within existing school systems. It’s another thing altogether to be critical of the “due diligence” that the State Department of Education seeks to perform to ensure that our children are entrusted to people with solid plans to educate them innovatively.

Measuring student achievement at postsecondary institutions

12 November 2009

The National Governors’ Association’s Center for Best Practices published an issue brief earlier this week titled “Measuring Student Achievement at Postsecondary Institutions.” The brief raises some important points about higher education accountability systems:

The brief takes policymakers to task for relying too heavily on graduation rate calculations that examine only first-time, full-time fall cohorts. If we assume that all students start in the fall as full-time students, the measure works. But more than half of all community college students, for example, do not meet these criteria.
The brief criticizes policymakers for not taking “inputs” (e.g., numbers of disadvantaged students being served) into consideration when evaluating an institution’s success in graduating students. To paraphrase (rather loosely) former Texas Governor Ann Richards, it’s not too hard to score a home run when you were born on third base; not so for those less fortunate.
The brief suggests that policymakers should place greater emphasis on remediation milestones because most students, particularly at the community college level, need it and because so few students who need it succeed in college.
The brief suggests that policymakers should gather data on whether students actually put their degrees to work by obtaining jobs in their fields of study or jobs that require the most recently attained credential.

It’s amazing that someone has to write a report making these points. All are obvious and well known.

What gathering storm?

The race to the top?

We shall … surrender

Bring on the due diligence

Measuring student achievement at postsecondary institutions

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