Post Secondary Enrollment and the Governor's Plan for HS Seniors

Eric Fingerhut made some statements in the DDN today that I disagree with strongly. He's either uninformed, making stuff up, or both.

Interviewed by Stephanie Gottsclich, Fingerhut said that high schools discourage partipation in post secondary enrollment option, or PSEO. I would argue that schools don't discourage it at all.

For those who are unfamiliar with the concept, PSEO allows a high school student to leave campus and visit a college campus for coursework that earns college credit and possibly fulfills high school credit at the same time. It would seem to be a model for the dual enrollment programs the governor promoted in his state of the state program.

As Gottschlich points out, PSEO already allows students who choose to go from "senior to sophomore". So when he mentioned this, many educators were scratching their heads, thinking, "we already do this."

Fingerhut argued in the DDN piece that the cost of the program causes schools to downplay it.

While participation in PSEO has steadily increased to more than 12,000 students in fall 2007, the number accounts for only 2 percent of all Ohio high school students, according to a March report from the KnowledgeWorks Foundation, a Cincinnati-based nonpartisan education policy research group.

The report, "The Promise of Dual Enrollment: Assessing Ohio's Early College Access Policy," found that participation rates were not equal throughout Ohio and that high schools lose money for every PSEO course taken by their students.

In 2004-05, the state redirected about $17.8 million in state funds from Ohio schools to pay for PSEO courses.

That causes high schools to downplay the program, said Ohio Board of Regents Chancellor Eric Fingerhut, whom Strickland charged with carrying out his plan. "Some are working around it altogether and using different programs," he said.

Problem: I don't buy it. Just not true. Schools do a lot of things to counsel students into appropriate options. As a high school teacher, and as a community college instructor who's had PSEO students in class, I know that Fingerhut is wrong about this.

There are lots of reasons students might not take PSEO. Social reasons. Lack of transportation. Or the fact that their high school offers excellent AP programs and arts programs during their senior year.

There is a pilot program that would certify hs courses for college credit by having senior year courses (say, fourth year Spanish) align with courses taught at a local college like UC or OSU. The classroom teacher becomes an adjunct faculty member teaching a college course within the HS walls. Maybe that's what Strickland was talking about. If so, I'm all for it. But it will take a great deal of administrative support.

But it's disappointing to have the governor propose something so poorly defined and have the chancellor speak about it with such ignorance.

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Top Ten Education Stories of '07

I've been reading all of the lists of the top stories of '07...but who's writing the list of the top education stories of the year? Don't worry... I've got it covered. After consulting my panel of experts, here's what I've come up with, in no particular order. See what you think, and if there are any I'm missing please add them in the comments.

Top Education Stories of '07

1. Non-reauthorization of NCLB. Passions run high on the controversial law, which critics say has led to a culture of standardized testing, and has not been fully funded. Supporters say it is necessary to hold schools accountable.

House Education and Labor Committee Chairman George Miller blames Bush for being unable to compromise on changes to the law that would grant states and districts more flexibility in meeting the law's requirements. Miller suggests that NCLB may not even be reauthorized in 2008, and may have to wait until Bush leaves office. No tears shed here.

2. Merit pay. Buoyed by the qualified support of Barack Obama and pilot programs in Houston, New York City, and Denver, merit pay has received renewed discussion around the country. Merit pay, or pay for performance, can take many forms, including school wide bonuses (like the recently adopted plan in NYC, or bonuses based on test scores for individual teachers. The fact that these plans have received attention in a presidential campaign means that the idea is growing and becoming part of the national discussion on education reform.

In fact, merit pay has been one of the stumbling blocks in the reauthorization of NCLB. Chairman George Miller became incensed in 2007 when the NEA appeared to reneg on a plan to support merit pay proposal to be included in the draft reauthorization. The NEA is opposed to merit pay.

Meanwhile, merit pay is going on the ballot in Oregon.

3. Bong Hits for Jesus. The Supreme Court ruled that schools had the right to limit speech off of school grounds. It continues a trend of increasing power of schools to intervene in free speech cases. Meanwhile, schools continue to face legal challenges relating to internet and cell phone issues as they relate to students' free speech rights. While the Court has not ruled on these kinds of cases yet, the Bong Hits case seems to indicate that schools have a wide latitude to restrict students' speech.

Read Pierre Tristam's take here.

4. U. S. students fall behind in math and science. In the Program for International Student Assessment, American students were below the average for students in industrialized countries. For Gerald Bracey, this news elicits a yawn.

5. Creationist curriculum gains support of presidential candidates. In a supposedly civilized country, we have candidates running for President--including the current frontrunner, Mike Huckabee--who would rather pander to a religious minority than accept the premises of science. Why is this an education story? Because as the push for national standards grows and grows, the question of what will be taught in science classes in the US becomes a subject of national debate. Will we teach scientific inquiry? Or will we teach religious dogma in the disguise of scientific inquiry? Ron Paul and Mike Huckabee opt for the latter. One leads the field in the polls, and the other in fundraising. Scary.

The next five after the jump.

6. School violence continues. One case, here in Ohio, the other, forever to be remembered in association with Virginia Tech. Both cases remind us that troubled students need regular attention and support. Click through the links for more of my thoughts on this issue.

7. Vouchers rejected at the polls. The vote in Utah has huge significance, especially considering the substantial resources put into it by pro-voucher forces. If vouchers can't get a foothold in conservative Utah, the concept is seriously weakened as a viable issue for conservatives to rally around. I explained why it failed here.

On a related note, here's one of the stupidest statements made about education in 07, from voucher supporter Patrick Byrne:

"I'm ashamed of Utah that this could even be a close vote," said Patrick Byrne, CEO of Overstock.com, who has donated millions of dollars to support vouchers. "This is parents looking at their kids getting a third-rate education and other kids getting basically a death sentence and saying, 'That's OK by me."'

8. The Supreme Court overturns desegregation plans in Louisville and Seattle. See what I had to say here.

9. Teacher preparation in Texas. Maybe not the biggest story of the year, but a pretty important one. The model used by the University of Texas to train math and science teachers has the potential to radically transform teacher preparation--for the better.

10. Value-added rolls out in Ohio. More and more states are jumping on the value added bandwagon, and with Ohio in the camp, two of the largest states (Pennsylvania being the other) are now using value added models. Value added analysis could radically alter how school districts are perceived and how data is reported about school progress. Potentially revolutionary, but whether the change is for the better remains to be seen.

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Do you need college?

Atrios has a point in a post called, Can't outsource the plumber. He argues that from an economic standpoint, more students should opt for what might be called skilled labor that doesn't require a college education:

It's somewhat heretical to say, but I'm one of those who thinks that too many people go to college, though it may be individually rational for them to do so given the signaling nature of it. That is, going to college doesn't really transform people into better works for a lot of jobs, but employers require a college education because it's how people signal they aren't a "complete loser"* who couldn't even manage to graduate from college.

*To be clear, I don't think one needs to graduate from college to avoid loserdom. That's my whole point! It's just that in our society it's become an entrance ticket to a lot of careers even when the education you get in college isn't really training for those careers.

I think this gets to the question of, what is college for? Is college simply to train people for careers? More generally, is school simply to train people for work?

What's wrong with the idea that people who want to work as plumbers still might benefit from receiving an education in art, music, philosophy, literature, or chemistry?

It's well known that the structure of public schooling was originally designed to prepare students for factory life. More and more, business interests are considered in making decisions about curriculum, and every blue ribbon panel on education consists of CEO's and corporate big wigs rather than teachers. What do students need to know to succeed in the economy? At a certain level of course this is fair and appropriate: it's important for graduates of public schools to be able to sell their labor in order to support themselves and move into (or remain in) the middle class. But should higher education be simply a matter of training students for professional jobs?

But at one point school was also intended to prepare students for citizenship. It's a time honored belief that public education is essential to the functioning of a democracy. In order to make intelligent decisions about voting, young people need to be able to read well, synthesize information, and know a great deal about a wide variety of things. A well rounded education is supposed to be part of the great Democratic experiment. See for example, Noam Chomsky discussing John Dewey:

The topic that was suggested, which I'm very happy to talk about, is "Democracy and Education." The phrase democracy and education immediately brings to mind the life and work and thought of one of the outstanding thinkers of the past century, John Dewey, who devoted the greater part of his life and his thought to this array of issues. I guess I should confess a special interest. It just happened that this was for various reasons, his thought was a strong influence on me in my formative years -- in fact, from about age two on, for a variety of reasons that I won't go into but are real. For much of his life, later he was more skeptical, Dewey seems to have felt that reforms in early education could be in themselves a major lever of social change. They could lead the way to a more just and free society, a society in which in his words, "The ultimate aim of production is not production of goods, but the production of free human beings associated with one another on terms of equality." This basic commitment, which runs through all of Dewey's work and thought, is profoundly at odds with the two leading currents of modern social intellectual life, one, strong in his day -- he was writing in the 1920s and 1930s about these things -- is associated with the command economies in Eastern Europe in that day, the systems created by Lenin and Trotsky and turned into an even greater monstrosity by Stalin. The other, the state capitalist industrial society being constructed in the U.S. and much of the West, with the effective rule of private power. These two systems are actually similar in fundamental ways, including ideologically. Both were, and one of them remains, deeply authoritarian in fundamental commitment, and both were very sharply and dramatically opposed to another tradition, the left libertarian tradition, with roots in Enlightenment values, a tradition that included progressive liberals of the John Dewey variety, independent socialists like Bertrand Russell, the leading elements of the Marxist mainstream, mostly anti-Bolshevik, and of course libertarian socialists of various anarchist movements, not to speak of major parts of the labour movement and other popular sectors.
A college education should really mean more than high level vocational training. As Dewey suggests, it should be a lever of social change. It should be about opening minds up to new ideas, helping students think critically about language, about their own place in the world, learning about cultures and ideas around the world and throughout history. We don't talk enough in this country about what education is really for, whether it's for economic viability or for the growth and maturation of the mind. Sure, education can be both, and often it is. But the idea that "too many people go to college" is only true if we are talking about the economic beneifits of college.

If we're talking about what college means (or should mean) to the growth of the mind, then it becomes a basic human right, something that should be available to anyone whose mind is up to it, whether they dig ditches, plumb, frame houses, or teach English literature.

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Smaller Schools Work

This is the kind of reform that I think has a real chance, properly funded, to transform urban education. The Gates Foundation has been pushing this idea also. I'm a big fan of this kind of thinking.

Forget the stuff in the article about restrictions on hiring and so forth. It's not about breaking the union contract. What's working here is 1) knowing your students and keeping better track of them, 2) site based management principles, and 3) more instructional time by creating a longer school year. Solid research lies behind each of those core ideas, proving that they are effective in improving achievement--especially more instructional time. (But that ain't cheap.)

I hope Ohio policy makers are paying attention.

The five-year effort to break Baltimore's big high schools into smaller, more autonomous schools seems to be paying off with better academic results and attendance, offering new evidence backing a reform that has stalled nationwide in recent years.

An analysis released this week by the Washington-based Urban Institute finds that scores on required state math and English tests in the city's six "innovation schools" are higher than those of students in larger comprehensive schools, neighborhood schools and other schools, even after controlling for skill levels before entering high school. On average, innovation high school students score 14 to 30 points higher on a scale from 240 to 650.

The schools also offer more supportive environments, and innovation school students go to school 16 to 40 days more a year than other students.

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