Whatever Happened to Affordable College Education

I enjoy the blog Curmudgeon Central not just because the name makes us some sort of internet cousins, but because the writer, a college professor in Texas, makes me look like Little Mary Sunshine.

Recently, he published a post that jumps off from this internet meme

 

If you are of a Certain Age (say, mine) then you recognize this is more-or-less accurate. I graduated from college in 1979, but it was a pricey liberal arts school, but my summer job certainly amounted to Real Money in that context. Fast forward to my children, college grads of the 20-Tens, and we're looking at tuition bills that weren't even covered by my full-time job, let alone their summer jobs.

Politico's infamous fact (kind of) checker (sort of) took the meme on, but Curmudgeon Central is not a big truster of Politico, so he did some math of his own.

So… what are the real figures? Well, that summer job: 13 weeks, 40 hours a week, minimum wage ($2.65 at the time) would generate $1378 in income (before taxes). A year’s tuition and fees at the average four-year public university at in-state rates in 1978-79: $688. The summer job, it other words, would for tuition and about half of room and board at the average four-year state university, where the total year’s bill would be $2145. That’s 200% of the cost of tuition, or 64% of the total cost of attendance. Yeah, yeah, sure. Some flagship state universities would have cost more. Students still had to buy books and other supplies. The occasional late-night beer and pizza was de rigeur. And that wages figure was before taxes. [Please note: all figures below exclude taxes. Curmie isn’t so naïve that he thinks they don’t matter, but inserting a qualifier every time I cite a statistic is going to get really old for both of us. Please consider it stipulated throughout.]

The piece delves into the real numbers, and then addresses the Big Question-- why the hell did college get so expensive? He presents four reasons:

1) Wages haven't kept pace with inflation. As noted by a gazillion different people, in real dollars, minimum wage has been drifting slowly backwards.

2) Increasing expenses. Everything from additional student amenities to the kudzu-like spread of administrative associate assistants to vice-deans of pudding has upped the costs of operating a university.

3) Fees. Extra fees. Fees that look like options, but which are not. Some universities have taken lessons from the phone company and now use a price structure based on a $10 charge augmented by $150 in fees.

4) State funding. Or rather, the cutting thereof. Here in PA, where we can boast the lion's share of the most expensive public universities in the country, we have this mastered. 

Maybe it's my heightened sensitivity because I teach high school and because I expect to be paying off Parent PLUS loans until I die, but I'm always mystified at the degree to which college affordability is not more vehemently and repeatedly discussed in this country. 

We have let a college education become a luxury item available only to the well-off and in the process turned higher education from an highway that provides mobility between socio-economic classes into a huge wall that helps keep the classes separated. We have made it the goal of all public education to make students ready for college while paying little or no attention to their ability to go there. We might as well teach all of our students classes in How To Do Maintenance on Your Lexus Fleet or How To Properly Manage a Staff of 25 Servants.

At any rate-- take a look at this article. It has actually facts and stuff, with plenty to think about as well.

Survey Shows CCSS Support Plummeting

Support for the Core among teachers has been cut almost in half. That is just one of the findings in a survey released today by Michael Henderson, Paul Peterson and Martin West in Education Next.  
The survey, administered in May and June of this year to 5000 adults, provides info on several issues. With charts and graphs! All of this has to be viewed through a careful filter-- EdNext is a reformster advocacy outfit. But that's part of what makes some of these results surprising.

The Core

The survey is not loaded with good news for fans of CCSS, and that's a group which includes the people at Education Next. By this survey's measure, the picture has changed considerably since just last year. Take a look at this handy chart.

 

The actual surprise in this data-- that support for the Core has stayed strong among Democrats. And make sure to note the phrasing of the question-- this poll was conducted by a group that supports the Core, and this is a question that has put the best possible spin on the Core. And this is still the result they got.

Interesting sidelight-- when they dropped the actual words "Common Core" from the question and just asked about "standards," they found public support increased to 68%.  

I'm hoping leadership in both unions takes a good hard look at this result. Again-- a group that is committed to promoting CCSS, that has a vested interest is being able to say that people and teachers love the Core, has determined that teachers do not love the Core much at all. Please pay attention, union leaders.

What exactly has kept Democrat support so strong is a bit of a mystery, but it tells us who needs to be taken to school on the issue. The drop in support among teachers is predictable, given that many teachers spent the last year learning that the Core was not the benign set of standards laden with teacher freedom-to-interpret that we had been told previously. Familiarity has, in fact, bred contempt. The GOP drop in support is also predictable given the onslaught of conservative opposition. The real mystery there is how much of the opposition comes from people who actually know what they're talking about.

Oh, wait! They asked that question, too, sort of...

Trying so hard to skew this survey. Note that they only asked these questions of people who claimed to have heard of Common Core. For teachers, that was 89%, but for the public, a mere 43%. So if you wanted to play correlation days, you could argue that the better people know the Core, the less they like it. Though, of course, the "knowledge" questions depend on statements that neatly sidestep issues such as how "free" local districts are in their decision-making.

Let's Talk About Teachers

The survey also looks at some teacher issues, with an eye toward tenure and related issues.

First, let's see what people think on the How Many Teachers Actually Suck issue.

 

So, the consensus  is, not that many. How about tenure?

Perhaps because the public is concerned about the performance of some teachers, 50% of those interviewed oppose “giving tenure to teachers” altogether. Only 32% favor the idea (and another 18% take no position). We followed this question with another asking whether teachers should demonstrate that their students are making adequate progress on state tests in order to receive tenure. Overall, 60% of the public liked the idea. Even 65% of respondents who favor tenure say it should be based on student performance. Only 9% of Americans favor “giving teachers tenure” and oppose using student performance on state tests to determine tenure.

You'll note that the survey did NOT check for how well the respondents actually understand what tenure is. Nor did they as if respondents believe that teachers should be protected from being fired for arbitrary, political, or personal reasons. So we have no way of knowing how many people oppose tenure because they incorrectly believe it is a job for life.

On merit pay, which the survey expressed as “basing part of the salaries of teachers on how much their students learn,” 57% of the public supports it, but only 23% of teachers do. No surprises there.

School Choicey Stuff

Still reading? Good for you, because there's more in the survey. They next addressed the issue of alternatives to public school.

They asked an interesting question-- what sort of schools have the children in your home attended? The breakdown between public, private, charter, homeschool-- that's all interestingish, but the really interesting news is that the results were basically identical for teachers and non-teachers. In other words, teachers are just as likely to private school, charter school, or home school their kids as anybody else.

They also asked about support for voucher programs. This has interesting implications for those who think that the best way to get voucher programs going is by using them for low-income students.

 

So, tax credits for business is great, but giving vouchers to those poor folks, not so much.

Also, the results for "blended learning" were about even.

Spending Money

The bottom line here is that people favor spending money on schools until they understand how much money we're talking about. Support for class-reduction is high, then drops when you tell people who much it will cost. Support for paying teachers more was high; then the surveyors explained how much teachers make, and the support dropped. The writers do not say what they used as figures for their explanation of what teachers actually make.

There is plenty to chew on here, and it bears repeating that there's no reason to expect scientific objectivity from EdNext; the article makes several recommendations about how reformsters need to use spin and PR to sell their ideas better educate the public. Mostly they conclude what teachers already know-- it's not just how you teach 'em, but what you teach 'em.

CCSS & the Men Behind the Curtain

Starr Sackstein is over at Education Week trying to make a case for the Core once again. And I'm going to disagree with her, once again.

Sackstein has apparently evolved. The last time I responded to her, she was espousing the old "teach to the standards and the tests will take care of themselves" line. She has now moved on to "Well, yes, the tests are not good, but the Core is still delightful." So, she's moved a bit, but she's still wrong.

Arguing against testing but for the Core always produces arguments with sudden jumps of logic (because that's the only way you can produce such an argument). Sackstein puts hers right in plain sight.

Granted, no one likes to change curriculum maps that have taken them forever to generate, but when one looks closely at what the Common Core is saying, it's not really bad... not bad at all.
As a matter of fact, most of us do it already and advocate for it. [her emphasis]

Which brings me back to my same old question. If all the Core is really asking us to do is stuff that all fine teachers are already doing, why do we need it. Why should we change curriculum maps and buy new materials and generally spend a buttload of the taxpayers' money if we already have sound educational practices in place? Either we are wasting a whole lot of taxpayer money that could be spent elsewhere, or we aren't really already doing what the Core says we're supposed to. Pick A or B-- I cannot think of any other options.

To pivot to the next part of her argument, Sackstein asks a rhetorical question:

If each of us is trying to prepare students for life, why not have a common set of standards nationally that help to define what those standards are?

First, the question needs a rewrite, because when we discuss CCSS, we're not talking about anything that is trying to "help us define" the standards. So here's the question Sackstein means to ask:


If each of us is trying to prepare students for life, why not have a common set of standards nationally mandated so that all schools and teachers must follow them?

Sackstein's version of the question sidesteps one of the central issues of the Core, which is that they are mandated, top-down standards, imposed from above. Sackstein either doesn't know or chooses to gloss over that concern. For instance, earlier in the piece, she says, in defense of the infamous 70/30 split, "They [the standards] put the emphasis on non-fiction texts, presumably to prepare students for career or college readiness."

Presumably? Who exactly is doing the presuming? And why do we have to presume? Isn't there some research to back up that presumption? (spoiler alert: no)

See, this is where Sackstein and I part ways. She seems to assume that standards come from some objective, trustworthy Higher Source, as if they were delivered on stone tablets and a burning bush. She has reproduced a paragraph's worth of the Core's own puffery to show how reasonable the standards are. Let me interrupt in red to demonstrate my issues:

"As a natural outgrowth (natural according to whom) of meeting the charge (whose charge is that, and who gave it to the chargees?) to define college and career readiness, the Standards also lay out (the standards did not lay out a thing-- some guys in a committee did that) a vision (their vision) of what it means to be a literate person in the twenty-first century (based on what-- what special prescient skills did the people on the committee have that lets them see this more clearly than anyone else?). Indeed, the skills and understandings students are expected (by whom?) to demonstrate have wide applicability outside the classroom or workplace. Students who meet the Standards readily undertake the close, attentive reading that is at the heart of understanding and enjoying complex works of literature (who says so?). " (Taken from the Common Core website)

Nothing in that paragraph suggests that a teacher will be stifled by these new standards. It's about moving education into the 21st century. It's about making kids viable in this world.

Oddly enough, I find that most of that paragraph suggests that teachers will be stifled, because what I see is a group of faceless individuals hiding behind a mask of Objective Standards in order to impose their ideas about what an educated American citizen should look like. I don't see a call for dialogue or an attempt to sway my professional judgment. Instead I see a requirement that I not only ignore the man behind the curtain, but pretend there is no man and no curtain, just the great and powerful Wizard of CCSS.

Like the Constitution, it's all about interpretation. Here are the standards, how we define and implement them in our classes is on each of us.

Except that it isn't. And it was never going to be, and to fulfill the promise of the Core, it can't be.

The whole point of having national-level standards is to get everyone the same page, to make sure that education is one-size-fits-all across the country. And that means we cannot have people deciding on their own how to define and implement the standards. Check out the unusually candid Rob Saxton, Oregon Deputy Superintendent, explaining that he will not tolerate "independent contractors."

And he has a point. If each teacher is going to come up with her own definition of the standards, why do we need the standards?

No, the Core promised that we would all be on the same page. It promised that one textbook would be marketable in every state in the union. And it promised to hold us all accountable for doing What We're Supposed To Do (as determined by the men behind the curtain). And that means tests-- big fat standardized tests, all across the country.

To reiterate, the standards are NOT the tests, even if the testing companies have adopted and abused them. We can't let testing companies control how we run our classrooms or how we interpret the standards.

Sackstein is sort of correct-- the standards are not the tests so much as the tests are, in fact, the standards. Particularly in those states where the tests will determine school closings, teacher job security, and teacher pay, the testing companies are in fact telling us exactly how we are supposed to run our classrooms and interpret the standards.

Without testing, the Core Standards are nothing but a list full of mild suggestions, pointless, unnecessary (and as Sackstein says in her piece-- twice-- things we are already doing, anyway). The people who created the CCSS had no intention of letting them languish as mild suggestions that teachers might interpret (or ignore) as they wished. A national-scale accountability measure-- a standardized test-- has to be part of the CCSS program, or the Core will just be a waste of everybody's time. High stakes testing are like a law threatening imprisonment for anyone who fails to describe the Emperor's new clothes correctly.


It should not surprise us that the Core and testing go hand in hand. Not when so many people tied to the testing industry are among the men behind the curtain.

Sanders's Charter School Not Ready for Prime Time

The problem of athletic academies that push sports and ignore academics is not a new one.

One recent growth industry has been the post-grad prep school, schools set up so that athletes who failed to make the necessary scores to qualify for NCAA play can take another year to make their numbers while still maintaining their sports edge. That tightening in standards grows out of repeated "discovery" by NCAA schools of athletes who can barely read. But private sports academies that gave students full days of practice with scant language or math studies were around long before the current growth in the charter school biz.

There has been an allure for decades in the prospect of finding fame and fortune on the court or the field. Add a famous name to the mix, and you have marketing gold for a rising charter enterprise.

Prime Prep Academy was just such an enterprise, launched to cash in on the charter movement and the star power of Hall of Fame cornerback Deion Sanders. In the New York Times, reporter Michael Powell lays out the crashing and burning of that Texas enterprise. You should read the story-- it's a great piece of reporting.

The goal of a powerhouse sports giant that would rank nationally-- that they achieved. Academics, not so much. Instead, athletes receive the grades they need to stay eligible, and the staff and faculty who stay work in an atmosphere-- well, the former executive director is quoted in the article "I would say there was not a culture of safety at that school.”

The lesson here is twofold. One lesson we already know-- turning the charter school business into a handy way to get rich without having to actually prove that you know what you're doing is not healthy for schools. And really-- there's nothing else like it going on in any other sector. No state has said, "Sure, pretty much anybody can set up a law practice or a hospital." In state after state (I'm looking at you, Ohio) we are seeing charter authorizers who are less vigilant than my dog (who would greet a burglar with invitations to play with his chew toys and share slobber). "Hey, this guy is famous" is not much of a charter school plan. And yet as the article makes clear, that was the plan.

The second lesson is for free market school choice fans. One of the articles of faith in the choice crowd is the notion that the market, once freed from its government-forged chains, would rise up and demand educational excellence. What we find again and again is that a fair-sized portion of the market rises up and demands things like a school where students can play sports all day and don't have to worry about ever being challenged in academic classes. And the we get scholastic train wrecks like the Prime Prep Academy.

Accountability in the Age of the High Stakes Test

We've marched steadily toward accountability for over a decade now. Teachers must be held accountable. Schools must be held accountable.

And not just in some fuzzy, non-specific manner. This accountability must come with real, hard consequences, say reformsters. Accountability means real consequences, financial consequences. If teachers aren't doing a great job, they should not get paid more. If they do a lousy job, they should be subject to losing their jobs. If schools fail to provide excellence, we should be able to close them, replace them with new schools that will promise to do better.

Because, you know, that's how things work in the business world.

Unless, of course, you're a educational testing corporation.

News has broken of the latest Pearson testing mistake, and this one in particular gives us a picture of corporate accountability in this new age. The mistake itself is the result of an actually-understandable screw-up. A civics and economics test in Virginia included a question for which the answer changed between the writing and the scoring (can VA residents register to vote online). The answer key was incorrect, and many students who should have passed were marked as failing.

Virginia and Pearson were both quick to explain the problem. Pearson is just a contractor, and they just do what they're told.

This is an interesting position to take in our new accountariffic education world of today. I am wondering if it would work for low-rated teachers in NY. Can they say, "Hey, I delivered the engageNY lessons exactly as they are laid out on the website. I followed the instructions to the letter-- if the students scored poorly on The Test, that is not on me."

We're just the contractor. We were just following orders. These do not sound like slogans for the Age of Accountability to me.

This event in VA is of course not just a one-off. Tales of Pearson's screw-ups are legion (here's one list). In one case they offered $600K of "scholarship money," which is an amount I imagine they have rattling around a receptionist's desk in loose change. Sometimes they have to pay a fine, though you generally have to take them to court to get that to work. Mostly life just goes on.

Look, Pearson is a huge corporation. I expect they're going to make mistakes, and I personally accept mistakes as part of the cost of being in the world. But if our new philosophy is that failure is not an option, and that teachers and schools need to be beaten into shape with the big stick of accountability, then let's wave that stick at everybody.

If accountability is not for 800 pound gorilla corporations (or certain select charters, but that's another essay), then what we're living in is not a new Age of Accountability at all, but just the same old Age of Money Talks.

The Opposite of Excellence

It's not really news, and it has certainly been commented on a million times, but I don't think we can be reminded too many times. We've heard it, but it's a slippery well-greased pig of a fact, a detail so unbelievably stupid that it literally numbs the mind and slips away like a half-remembered dream. Unconsciously, our brain's filter says, "Well, that can't be right," and we go back to arguing about bigger picture details.

But at the root of everything-- the attempts to measure teacher effectiveness, the programs to regulate student advancement between grades, the declarations of college readiness, the shutting down of public schools because they aren't good enough-- is a simple definition.

Excellence is high scores on standardized tests of reading and math.

That's it. That is how the current corporation-serving high-stakes test-driven reformster status quo defines excellence for every single child in America (well, almost every child-- as always, children of the rich are exempt).


Think about that. Think. About. That.

If you are a teacher, think about every student you've ever taught that you would have called excellent. The outstanding musician who went on to a creative career entertaining and uplifting thousands. The gifted welder who was in such demand that he had his pick of cities to travel to. The student with such exceptional people skills you knew she would be an awesome doctor. The student who could jump higher and run faster than anybody, or the student who competed athletically on the state level. The student who was a genius at coding.

None of them can be called excellent-- unless they also score well on a standardized math and reading test.

If you are a person living in this world on this planet, think of everybody you know who you would call excellent. The single parent who manages to raise several healthy, happy, capable children while working hard to provide them with a stable life. The married parents who make an awesome team while creating a home for their children. The community volunteer whose donation of hours and time and sweat makes your corner of the world a better place. The local politicians or business leaders who set aside their own lives to work at making everybody's lives better. The doctor. The lawyer. The garage mechanic. The chef. The artist. The ambulance driver. The plumber. Hell, even the teacher.

A vast tapestry of people bringing varied, rich, awesome talents and accomplishments to make the world a better place to be. A great gallumphing mass of individuals who let us understand what it means to be fully human, to fully realize what we can best do with the precious moments given to us. to show the myriad ways in which we grasp our lives and create bright beautiful displays of who we are, what we are, what we can be, what we can settle on for our own purpose, even as we help other people realize their own unique vision for their own unique future.

And the best we can come up with for measuring everything great and excellent in human beings is some scores on a standardized reading and math test (and not even good tests, at that).

Reformsters like to talk about raising the bar and really creating high standards for our young people, because, you know, young people, you may have all sorts of dreams and aspirations and talents and hopes and strengths that you want to realize and express but, really, you know-- what you need to be thinking about is your standardized test scores.

Raising the bar, my ass.

What CCSS and its attendant clamoring kudzu of reforms really offers is a tiny, cramped vision of humanity. We should be taking our young people to the edge of the Grand Canyon and saying, "Your life is out there somewhere. Let's go explore." Instead, reformers hold out a suitcase and say, "Okay, get in here. Just curl up and make yourself as small as possible."

Human beings are huge. We contain multitudes. CCSS and its various slices of baloney are devoted to making students small, to measuring them with the tiniest of rulers.

Remember. When they talk about highly effective teachers and excellent schools and proficient students, all they are talking about is the scores on a standardized math and reading test. That's it. It would be a joke if it weren't twisting American public education out of shape. Because if life really is a multiple choice test, it's one with a gazillion answers, and every one of them could be correct. But reformsters want us to bubble in just one. And that is the opposite of excellence.

Local vs. Global

One of the advantages that the reformsters have in the ongoing debate is that their POV is one-size-fits-all large scale national by its very nature, while those of us in the resistance are fighting largely local battles. And each one of those is different. It's a single ocean on one side and a million Dutch boys and girls on the other, each with a finger in a different hole in a different part of the dike.

This plays out in many ways. My home state of Pennsylvania is always a study is divisive politics-- on every issue you find Philly-Pittsburgh-Harrisburg on one side and every other place in the state elsewhere. Where we are not urban, we are exceptionally rural. The district covered by my House Representative is huge-- to drive along either the east-west or north-south axis would take a good three hours.

So while I would love to say that the rural teachers of PA totally have the backs of the teachers in Philly, I'm not sure that's true. Because PA's divisions run through everything on the state level, including PSEA. But here in the northwestern corner of the state, we don't know much about what it's like to be in Philly's setting. We're also kind of prickly about how we tend to be ignored. Retailers, media outlets, just plain people from Pittsburgh either ignore us completely or talk about us as if we are a suburb of the Burgh, as if, of course, we want to be part of the city, even though we are a 90 minute drive away.

There are whole different issues between city and country. In rural areas, homelessness is far less of a problem than a lack of transportation. Racial issues look different. Employment issues look different. And education issues look different.

Community works differently. In small towns, every relationship is several relationships. In other words, your boss is also your sister's neighbor and your nephew's godparent and your co-chair on that church committee and the person you play in town band with. Strong-arm tactics that work well in big cities are overkill with far too much collateral damage in a small town, while small town quiet leveraging of relationships would accomplish nothing in a big city.

Rural voices are often shut out of conversations, and rural voices often contribute to the problem by enjoying our quiet isolation a little too much . On top of that we can throw in the mid-size cities like Erie and Altoona, and you get a very broad range of issues in schools overlaid with a difficult struggle for voice, resources and attention. And that's just one state.

And the reformsters, by the very nature of what they're pushing, can come into the state and treat all of those many and varied communities as identical widgets in a machine. "Does your district face unique challenges? Don't care. Everybody drink this snake oil down. It fixes all problems."

Meanwhile, all the different local communities struggle to pull together. We argue over priorities and perspective (this issue that matters hugely to us should matter to everybody). Identifying the concerns that should unite all of us is an ongoing conversation. Meanwhile, the reformsters have no such stumbling block in their paths.

Still, their strength can easily become their weakness. They are not well tooled for dealing with a hundred different little problems in a hundred different places, and they are not well-equipped to put out a hundred little fires. Fordham can only send its response team so many places.

So I don't have a dream that everyone in the resistance will join hands, sing Kum Bay Yah and unite behind one universally accepted vision or set of tactics. Personally, I have always thought part of the beauty of American public education is that is NOT one monolithic vision, but a big messy conglomeration of visions and goals and strengths and weaknesses reflecting people and places and hopes and dreams. I know that there will always be people who want to neaten it all up and get it organized, and God bless them, their inevitable failure is an interesting thing to watch.

Point is, it's natural and normal and a point of strength that we can't all agree on the same exact priorities or methods. It's natural and normal that we all have to fight our own local battles, but it is powerful when we can share what we know, what we understand, what we see. That kind of power is only unleashed when we listen without dismissing people for seeing different things or being in a different place.