Tag: Free college

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Latest Edu-Reads

As the charter school debate becomes increasingly partisan, Bellwether has a new report on autonomous schools, schools that occupy the middle ground between “traditional” and “charter.”

Brandon Lewis talks with Shaniola Arowolaju, a D.C. native and parent organizer, about how challenging it can be for parents to find the right school for their child.

“So for now, the thousands of minority parents relying on charter schools are on thin political ice, with indifference coming from the Republicans and hostility coming from the now-dominant wing of the Democratic Party.” That’s from Andy Rotherham and Richard Whitmire in The Hill on the deteriorating politics around charter schools.

Beth Hawkins interviews outgoing Louisiana schools chief John White.

Colleges that are part of the American Talent Initiative are on track to meet their collective goal of recruiting 50,000 more low- and middle-income students, but there are signs the gains are slowing. H/t to Goldie Blumenstyk.

The Urban Institute has a fun graphic on who would benefit from free college programs.

Mike Goldstein and Scott McCue on how they took the risk away from people wanting to become teachers: they guaranteed candidates a teaching job, and let students pay back their tuition after they graduated and found a job.

A big new CALDER paper looks at academic mobility. How much does a students’ relative performance in third grade predict how they will perform in later grades? The authors find quite large correlations (aka very little mobility) across six states. Moreover, the districts that see gains tend to help all of their students improve:

We also show that school districts exhibit statistically and economically significant variation in academic mobility. The predominant driver of cross-district variation in total academic mobility is absolute mobility, not relative (within district) mobility. That is, districts differ much more by whether they are effective in raising achievement throughout the entire distributions of their students than they do in their ability to improve lower-performing students’ relative ranks internally. Indeed, we do not find evidence of large differences across districts in relative mobility, which suggests that districts do not, in fact, differentially specialize in educating students at different achievement levels within their distributions (e.g., high versus low achievers).

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Holiday Edu-Reads

This Wall Street Journal story is worth your time. Financial companies buy their way into teachers lounges with offers of free food or other perks, only to sell teachers on expensive, fee-laded 403(b) plans. Meanwhile, state and national teachers unions are willing middlemen who get kickbacks from these deals. Lest you don’t trust the Wall Street Journal, here’s a similar story from The New York Times and many more horror stories from the nonprofit 403bwise.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is this ProPublica story from New Jersey, where health plans for school employees cover the full cost of out-of-network expenses. The results are what you might expect:

In recent months, teachers across New Jersey have been protesting, even striking, for higher wages and more affordable benefits. Meanwhile, a state analysis shows, the glut of out-of-network payments has consumed hundreds of millions of dollars in the past four years. That’s money that experts say could have helped fund the teachers’ demands. And New Jersey residents are also pitching in to pay the bills: Homeowners in the towns where the schools are located are chipping in through higher property taxes.

Health care costs can be controlled with more aggressive oversight. Here’s a story about a Boston union and how they did it:

It required union members to make a trade-off that many, at first, found unpalatable — giving up access to some of the city’s best known, and most expensive, hospitals.

In return, however, workers not only kept their insurance premiums under control, they saved so much money that housekeepers like Rajae Nouira saw their hourly pay increase from $16.98 to $23.60 in five years, a 39% jump.

 

Evan Coughenour is not Catholic, but he has a growing appreciation for Catholic schools.

Tresha Ward has some tips for principals on how to lead autonomous schools, and how that’s different than leading any other school.

Elizabeth Ross and Kelli Lakis look at licensure rules for teachers crossing state lines.

The FAFSA is about to be simplified, here’s Evie Blad on what that means for students and Lamar Alexander’s favorite prop.

Matt Chingos surveys the landscape on free college proposals and explains why, “A plan that simply pays whatever colleges are charging would bail out states like Vermont at the expense of states like Wyoming — and encourage states to raise tuition to capture more federal money.”

EdSource has a deep dive, with a cool map, into community college transfer rates in California. About 40 percent of community college students in California eventually transfer to the state’s university systems, but those rates vary widely based on geography.

Nat Malkus is worried about screen time for kids. As a parent, I wish my kids’ school would send them home with some homework this holiday season. Or at least extra library books. Instead, all I got was a reminder of my kids’ login for online learning platforms so they could spend their break with MORE screen time. No thanks…

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Latest Edu-Reads

Education Week has a big new report on reading instruction. For example, here’s Liana Loewus on how reading is really being taught in schools:

Our new survey showed that 75 percent of teachers working with early readers teach three-cueing, an approach that tells students to take a guess when they come to a word they don’t know by using context, picture, and other clues, with only some attention to the letters.

Similarly, more than a quarter of teachers said they tell emerging readers that the first thing they should do when they come to a word they don’t know while reading is look at the pictures—even before they try to sound it out.

And Sarah Schwartz looks at the evidence behind and, in many cases, missing from popular reading programs.

Bellwether has a new deck out this week on rural schooling in America.

Dale Chu has an interesting look at the intersection of finance, choice, and accountability reforms in Indiana.

David Kirp writes, “The goal is not to lure high-schoolers into college with zero tuition, it’s to assure that those who do enroll graduate.”

James Shuls wants to ask what people mean when they say charter schools should be held to the “same standards” as traditional public schools.

As I warned earlier this week, we should be careful about ascribing Mississippi’s rising NAEP scores to any one thing. Here’s Todd Collins on Mississippi’s student retention policies.

Finally, this Matt Barnum and Gabrielle LeMarr LeMee Chalkbeat piece on GreatSchools.org is a must-read. It’s sparking a lot of debate over whether it’s better to share information that might not be perfect, or whether imperfect information will inevitably lead to imperfect decisions.

I don’t have a particular dog in that fight. I respect GreatSchools’ incredible reach–43 million annual site visitors!–and think the organization deserves praise for attempting to improve their ratings over time. The remaining flaws in their rankings–they’re still highly correlated with student demographic factors–are often true in other rating systems as well. Moreover, I’d much rather have a free rating system that’s open to all (and which is working to improve and reach all audiences) than no information at all. GreatSchools is waaaay better than relying on word-of-mouth or other snap judgments of the “best” schools in a neighborhood. We’ve seen what that looks like, even in today’s world, and it isn’t pretty.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman

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Latest Edu-Reads

Several people have sent me Alia Wong’s piece for The Atlantic on “The Financial Calamity That Is the Teaching Profession.” After reading it, I couldn’t help but conclude that Wong was trying to weave too many different things together into one broader narrative. In a relatively short piece, she touches on the problems with the Public Service Loan Forgiveness program, costly Master’s degree programs, the multiple and conflicting teacher loan forgiveness programs, the crappy 403b plans many teachers are sold, rising housing costs, and teachers moonlighting as Uber drivers and Airbnb hosts.

In the process of trying to connect all these dots, Wong’s piece lost a lot of nuance. As an example, to support the point about teachers taking on second jobs, Wong cites a Vox.com article to claim that teachers are “five times more likely than the average full-time worker to also have a part-time job.” That’s a gross overstatement, caused by Vox cherry-picking two different survey results. This Brookings piece does a better job of making an apples-to-apples comparison using data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The BLS data finds that 14 percent of teachers work a second job, compared to 11 percent of non-teachers. That’s a 3 percentage point gap, or a 30 percent difference. A 30 percent gap is not nothing, but it’s a far cry from the “5 times” figure calculated by Vox and repeated by Wong.

I don’t mean to diminish the real struggles teaches are facing, but most of the factors Wong cites apply at least in some degree to non-teachers as well. Those factors also have very different causes and solutions, and it would have been nice to unpack exactly how and why teachers are and are not different from non-teachers.

Speaking of how education is different than other industries, check out this piece on the trucking industry. In contrast to the fear over autonomous cars, the trucking industry is facing a massive worker shortage. Wages have been flat, and companies are starting to respond with hiring incentives and other bonuses, although, as the article notes, workers are not experiencing those in the same way their employers are describing them. Lots of edu-implications on things like training, expectations, and employer responses to worker shortages.

Here’s what Bellwether staff have been up to.

Everything you wanted to know about buses and the school transportation industry.

The Trump Administration is proposing a regulation that they estimate would take food stamps away from about 3 million people. This Twitter thread from Rebecca Vallas goes into the details and how it would affect schools and students.

States are leading the “free college” push, and Democratic candidates for President are promoting to take the policy national. Frankly, I find this David Deming proposal the simplest, most persuasive argument I’ve read about how and why the feds should get involved. Kevin Carey outlines a similar, more detailed version for The Washington Monthly that would cut out the middleman (states).

Brandon Lewis is in Education Week on the importance of assessment literacy for teachers.

And finally, a call for partners: Over the past two years, Bellwether has been supporting the work of public agencies to improve education outcomes for youth who experience disruptions to their education pathways. Those disruptions include, but are not limited to: an experience with homelessness, a placement in foster care, an incarceration, or an early unplanned or unwanted pregnancy.

We are now inviting a new cohort of leaders to submit a preliminary letter of interest to engage in an 18-month planning process to improve the ways in which local, regional, and state agencies communicate and collaborate across their historical silos to better meet the needs of youth and families who experience significant disruptions to their educational and life pathways.

Letters of interest are due September 30. More information about the opportunity, including application instructions and additional deadlines, can be found in this call for applications.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman 

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Universal Student Loan Forgiveness Solves the Wrong Problems

Bernie Sanders is proposing to forgive all student loan debt, an outstanding balance of about $1.6 trillion. Lots of people have pointed out flaws with this idea, but Matt Bruenig has one of the simplest explanations for what’s wrong with the Sanders proposal:

Thus it appears that the universe of people selected for this program is both over-inclusive and under-inclusive. It is over-inclusive because people who graduate from Harvard’s MBA program in 2021 will receive hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt relief (though, strangely, people who enroll in that program in 2022 will receive nothing). It is under-inclusive because people who drained $50,000 off their net worth to pay for an undergraduate degree at a public college — but who do not currently carry student debt — will receive no reimbursement for their ongoing financial suffering.

$1.6 trillion is a lot of money. If we’re sticking solely in the education world, that would buy a lot of Pell grants for poor students or slots for Head Start or universal pre-k. Heck, the federal government could wipe out all state pension debt for that kind of money, which would translate into boosting teacher salaries by an average of about 12 percent.

Maybe Senator Sanders is so attached to the idea of universal programs that he just doesn’t care about how well they target benefits. Maybe I’m missing the point, but if we’re going to invest that kind of money, I’d prefer we target it to individuals who need it the most.

–Guest post by Chad Aldeman