1. Tell Congress how they can make a difference in the economic lives of young people - college affordability, health care, jobs, etc.

2. Press Congress to work for an end to global warming and toward a clean energy future!

9:00 AM - 2:00 PM
The Center for American Progress
1333 H Street NW, 10th floor
Washington D.C.

In response to the study done by the Association of University Women detailing the lack of a boys crisis in education, many have pointed two possible methodological flaws. One, the group doing the research is self-interested - in 1992, they did a study decrying the state of girls in public education, and it's impossible to imagine them publishing research saying that there is a boy crisis. The second line of criticism is that the study focuses on high school testing and other federally recognized measures of achievement as opposed to more "meaningful" metrics like GPAs and bachelor degrees awarded.

The first criticism could be important, if less obviously self-interested parties hadn't come to virtually identical conclusions. But Sara Mead, in a paper for Education Sector, reached much the same conclusions. So let's just deal with the second criticism, that the AAUW and Mead are using the wrong metrics. The main point that Mead makes in her paper is that both boys and girls are improving their academic achievement, it's just that girls are doing so faster. In math and reading, boys - especially younger ones - have either been holding steady since the 1970s, or have actually improved (on math especially).

And even though much boy crisis rhetoric is framed as a relative decline to girls, the fact that there's no evidence of a real decline in absolute measures like test scores certainly takes out the dire urgency that many boy crisis believers have. And even when you compare boys and girls, Mead concludes that "there has been no radical or recent decline in boys' per­form­ance relative to girls. Nor is there a clear overall trend—boys score higher in some areas, girls in others." And in so much as there is stagnation in achievement, it occurs at around 17 ( the oldest age the NAEP tests at) for both genders. So it's not that high schools have to be fixed for boys, it's for both genders.

But what Ronald Bailey and others point out is that perhaps we should look at GPAs, drop out rates and college performance instead of high school academic achievement, the gap emerges. But when it comes to college enrollment, we see that men have been going to college more, just at slower rates than women. When two groups are improving, and one is doing so faster, the proportions are always going to change. And when it comes to graduate degrees - which are a good indicator of educational and occupational achievement and status - women get less than half of the professional and doctorate degrees.

Basically, the data is muddled as to how real or important any educational gender gaps are. What we do know is that there are very real gaps when it comes to women's earnings in the workplace as well as real educational achievement gaps based on race and class. Those should be the disparities that we focus on, not the phantom of a boy crisis.

According to a new study done by the American Association of University Women, the "boy crisis" in education isn't actually real. Yes, it turns out that an argument based on hazy gender essentialism (boys are too impatient to raise their hands and turn in their work on time!) is seriously faulty.

The study looked at 40 years of academic achievement between 4th grade and college and found that "academic success is more closely associated with family income than with gender." This doesn't mean, however, that there aren't gender gaps in education. The study found that there is a gap in math scores among 17 year olds (boys do better), a literacy/reading gap across the age spectrum (girls do better) but that among students entering college, these gaps basically dissapear. 

And even though women tend to have higher grade point averages (3.09 to 2.86) and receive 57 percent of all bachelor's degrees, it's still hard to make an argument that the educational system is hurting boys when women still earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn. Also, more men than ever are going to college and getting degrees.

So while it's nice to know that reports of a boy crisis are greatly exaggerated, it's still distressing that there are very real educational gaps that plague our society, and they are based on race and class. 

Kevin Carey (via Yglesias) notes that the Cato Institute has moved from supporting vouchers for private schools to tax credits. Yglesias and Carey both go over the basic objection to this scheme: not only are all the problems with vouchers still applicable to tax credits - the results aren’t any better, voucher programs often “leave behind” kids in special education programs in public schools, they drain resources etc etc - but the credits are incredibly regressive. Carey estimates that using Cato’s “sample legislation” that a DC family making 20,000 dollars a year would only get a credit of $200, hardly enough to pay tuition at a private school. And if the credit is for income taxes, it does nothing for those who are too poor to pay income taxes - who, of course, are the very people that Cato et al want to be going to private schools.

The second part of the proposal that makes no sense is that one of the rationales is that voucher programs lead to direct taxpayer subsidy of private education options that taxpayers could object to. For example, taxpayers could well object to funding Catholic education or Islamic education. According to Cato, with the tax credits, “With tax credits, people are either spending their own money on their own children…No one has to pay for education they find objectionable.” And while the tax credit wouldn’t result in direct, compulsory funding of objectionable educational options, Cato is being sketchy with saying that there’s a substantial difference. After all, the very purpose of these tax credits is to fund private education just like vouchers, without the direct government subsidy. Carey says “The political rationale for the policy, meanwhile, rests on the fiction that there’s a difference between the government handing you a dollar and the government not making you pay a dollar you would have otherwise owed in taxes.”

It’s been less than 48 hours since the most elite colleges and universities in the country made their admissions decisions available to prospective applicants, and already stories are popping up about record low admission rates. As usual, the figures are minuscule: Harvard took just 7.1 percent of its applicants, Columbia 8.7 percent. By contrast, Dartmouth College, with a 13 percent acceptance rate, may as well have just thrown its doors wide open. 

It’s not surprising to see record-low acceptance rates given the surge of applications over the past year, but looking at overall figures fails to answer important questions such as how many of those seven accepted students out of every 100 applicants comes from a low-income family? (For that matter, how many of those rejected 93 do as well?)

These are important questions, especially given the highly trumpeted recent decisions by a number of colleges to eliminate all loans for students that meet certain income requirements. Some of these policies are sensible, such as Washington University in St. Louis’s elimination of loans for families making less than $60,000. Others, such as Harvard’s dramatically slashing costs for families making up to $180,000, are deeply flawed. 

Setting aside the issue of whether these policies will lead to an increase in the socioeconomic diversity of America’s elite campuses, it is worth considering some potentially negative ramifications that could arise if other, less wealthy schools start down the no-loans path.

The problem, as laid out in an excellent piece in Inside  Higher Ed concerns what would happen if schools that are need aware (meaning they factor the applicant’s income into at least some admissions decisions) start eliminating loans. Under this hypothetical situation, a school might offer spots to fewer low-income applicants because each one is more costly (a $40,000-plus scholarship versus maybe half that amount and loans). This would result in an outcome where moves designed to cut costs for poorer applicants led to fewer low-income students accepted. 

While the Inside Higher Ed example is crucial for considering how no-loans policies work within the larger sphere of postsecondary education, it is important to offer a few caveats and considerations. First, it is possible for a school to have generous aid, not be need-blind and still have good socioeconomic diversity. The perfect example of this is Smith College, an all women’s school in Northampton, Mass. Through both its Ada Comstock Scholars Program and a general institutional commitment, the school has succeeded in putting together a student body that has the best diversity among the richest colleges and universities — 33 percent of Smith’s students come from families with incomes below $60,000, 19 percentage points above Harvard’s mark.  

While Smith has not eliminated loans for its students, its experience does show that institutional generosity need not hamper socioeconomic diversity — provided a school is willing to make a strong and concerted effort to admitting low-income students. 

It’s also important to consider the combination of no loans and being need aware in the context of affirmative action. If more and more court cases and state laws continue to side against admissions decisions based on race, then it is likely that income status will become the next criteria for achieving diversity. In this case, colleges would consider income anyway and the issue would become if they guaranteed to meet 100 percent of demonstrated need.

Two Recommendations

From a mere equity standpoint it is important that all colleges, and especially those considering going no loans, commit to a need blind admissions policy. As the numbers at elite schools demonstrate, it is hard enough to get into college these days, the least universities can do is guarantee that the reason the student did not get in was completely unrelated to their ability to pay. 

Second, it is time for colleges to begin doing a better job reporting the socioeconomic diversity of their campuses. Schools are more than happy to trumpet statistics on racial diversity, but data on family income is practically non-existent. The Web site economicdiversity.org, one of the best sites for institutional data, is only able to extrapolate about the low-income makeup of colleges using the income of financial aid applicants and recipients of Pell Grants, which generally go to students from families making under $40,000 a year. Therefore, all schools should be required to report both the average income of their admitted students and the breakdown within income quintiles.

These two changes won’t fix all the problems of access and equity, but they will ensure that when those gaudy admission figures come out in the future we will know for sure that all students, regardless of income, got a fair shot, and we shall see just whether the wealthiest schools are elite, or just for elites.

There has been a lot of speculation recently about how the slowing economy could harm access to student loans. A few lenders have announced that they will stop offering, or originating, new loans — moves that have prompted hearings by both the House and the Senate. Given this uncertainty (and some overly alarmist stories by respected news outlets) its worth saying a few words about what really is, and is not, at risk in the student loan “crisis.” 
 

What’s at Stake?

What is not at risk is federal student loans. The decision by the Pennsylvania Higher Education Assistance Authority, a large lender, to stop offering federal loans received numerous press hits, but it obscures the fact that there are over 2,000 other private lenders still offering loans. Even if large numbers of lenders went under, students would still have two viable options for loans: loans of last resort and the direct loan program

The lender of last resort program is a rarely invoked provisionthat guarantees students will receive loans through a guaranty agency, a middle-man that reinsurances loans for the government, if their loan application has been denied twice. The Direct loan program, meanwhile, involves the U.S. Treasury providing loan funds through the Department of Education. This is in contrast to the Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), in which students get funding through private companies such as Sallie Mae. (Click here for more on the difference between the two programs). Regardless of how students get the loan, their borrower benefits remain exactly the same.
 
So what is at risk? The answer so far appears to be students trying to take out private loans at some for-profit schools. A lot of these are subprime loans given to students at questionable institutions that put a greater emphasis on enrollment figures than teaching quality. This represents an estimated 2 to 3 percent of all borrowers — many of whom are likely to fall in the 50 percent of borrowers who turn to private loans before exhausting the up to $46,000 that students can annually take out in federal loans. 

A number of prominent individuals, such as Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings, Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-MA) and Rep. George Miller (D-CA), have echoed this argument in letters to college presidents.
 

Congressional Action

Then there are the Congressional hearings. Kennedy held his own in Boston on Monday, but it wasn’t available online or on TV. Miller, the chairman of the House Education Committee, also held his own hearing last Friday, but this revealed less about the state of student loans and more about how partisan any issue can become. Despite his previous calm, Miller used the hearing as a chance to badger Spellings and other members of the department about their preparedness for enacting lender of last resort provisions or expanding the direct loan program. This came across more as a chance to skewer a political opponent, rather than genuine concern.

The Republicans on the House Education Committee weren’t much better. Howard “Buck McKeon” (R-CA) mostly ignored the issue of availability after his initial statement, turning the focus instead to a fight over direct vs. FFELP loans (Republicans oppose direct loans, seeing the program as an unnecessary expansion of government).
 

The Big Picture

During all the bluster on student loan availability, there has been one major issue noticeably absent: the cost of college. Students would never need such large loans had the cost of college not increased at such an astronomical rates over the past few decades. It doesn’t help that many states (and the government) have announced plans to slash some higher education funding for the coming year — decisions that will undoubtedly lead to larger tuition bills. Given that federal loans continue to be widely available, perhaps Congress would be better served to stop obsessing over a “crisis” and take action that would reduce the need for loans in the first place.

Last week, the assistant principal, Steve Thomas Rooney, 39, allegedly molested a student at the new campus, Markham Middle School. He was arrested and charged with five counts of forcible lewd acts on a child, stemming from allegations that he sexually assaulted the 13-year-old girl March 1 and at least one other occasion.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials declined to comment Wednesday about how Rooney had been reassigned to Markham last fall, saying they are conducting an internal investigation and citing a policy barring them from speaking publicly about cases under those circumstances.

District policy requires officials to conduct their own investigation into employee misconduct regardless of whether the allegations result in criminal charges. Officials would not say Wednesday whether such an inquiry occurred in the earlier case.

In the NYT magazine piece, author Elizabeth Weil profiles Dr. Leonard Sax, a family doctor from Washington, D.C.'s Maryland suburbs and a leading advocate of gender-based schooling. She also describes 3 different public schools implementing single-sex education--an all-male and an all-female New York City charter school, as well as a coed district school in Alabama teaching children in sex seggregated classrooms. And she does a decent job in laying out some of the key critiques of Sax's work. Sax and Gurian exaggerate the neuroscience and get some of it flat-out wrong. Much of the science they do cite is primarily descriptive--it's not adequate to serve as a guide to making decisions about teaching or policy. And they ignore the fact that variation among both males and females often far exceeds average differences between the genders.

But, since the critiques don't appear until roughly halfway through a very long article--the first part of which reads like a puff piece on Dr. Sax--many readers may miss them. Moreover, while Weil's airing of critiques gives the article an appearance of balance, she glosses over a bigger issue: There wouldn't be a "controversy" over gender-based public education at all if Sax and Gurian weren't aggressively marketing their idiosyncratic--and flawed--notion of gender-based education.

I thought a less sophisticated version of this as I read the article. There's no problem with noticing that boys and girls do things differently, but the trouble comes in when you start pretending that that's the only variable in education and making broad generalizations about how all girls or all boys are alike. What's next, girls learn better in pink classrooms and boys learn better in blue ones?

California students today filed an unprecedented ballot initiative with the Attorney General that would freeze tuition increases at University of California and California State University schools for five years, and to tie tuition increases to the price of inflation after the freeze expires.

According to a study by the nonpartisan National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, abstinence-only sex ed has no effect on the sexual practices of teenagers.

And, according to the researcher, comprehensive sex ed programs

improved teens' knowledge about the risks and consequences of pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases and gave them greater "confidence in their ability to say 'no' to unwanted sex."

I had pretty fabulous sex ed at my public high school, and I'm always shocked when I hear about the ridiculous stuff that my friends observed in less competent programs--hearing about their experiences makes me realize how crucial it is to make comprehensive sex ed a priority in public education. This study is one more in a long line of reasons to ditch abstinence-only programs and instead respect high school students enough to offer them practical knowledge about sexual health.

via Feministing, naturally.

This event is certainly star-studded, and I nearly (literally) ran into Angelina Jolie on the way to the bathroom. (Note: For all you young women out there, in real life she looks like a totally normal, very skinny woman.) The photo flashes go into high gear when she walks into the room. I guess we're all suckers for movie stars.

Introduced by Gene Sperling, Jolie talks about her cause of support for refugee children in relation to education. Her speech is laden with the overly American viewpoint that an education will be the difference and these refugees sitting on a dirt floor in Africa can, with an education, become the prestigious leaders of their countries. Toward the end of the speech, she addressed Iraqi refugees and said a few hours of war funding would pay for the educations of 150 million children.

Update: Where do the refugees go? Recently, attentention has come to the millions of refugees who have left Iraq, meanwhile, the United States, arguably the incitor of the conflict in Iraq, has absorbed very few of the refugees. Also, refugees are also in a semi-permanent situation, so that's why this working group is working toward building schools. 

One questioner says that India is affected by the lack of education as well, but the major cause is simple poverty. 

Update II: The American Association of Young People (who broght you idealist job fairs in the past) asked about tuition reimbursement in exchange for doing public service. CGI's education group sounded open to partnernships, but didn't go into depth.

Black students across the nation receive harsher discipline than whites, an article in yesterday’s Chicago Tribune notes.  Teachers dole out suspension, expulsion, and detention disproportionately to black students, who, researchers have shown, are not more likely to misbehave.

The most articulate proposal yet:

Harvard University announced the other day that it posted a 23% gain in its endowment for the 2007 fiscal year, raising it from $33.5 billion to $41 billion, or to about the total annual GDP of Luxembourg.  $41 billion dollars can go a long way, like giving $10,000 college scholarships to 4.1 million students.  Thankfully, Harvard is starting to recognize its potential to equalize all the inequities in higher education.  Students from families now earning less than $60,000 a year attend the school for free, which resulted in a record 22,995 applicants this past year.  I guess all we need now is for all well-endowed schools to start giving back to middle and lower class students who can’t afford the same education that the wealthy can.

One of Chronicle's blogs today discusses how journalism schools are slow to adapt to the changing nature of media. At a conference of J-School educators this weekend, "citizen journalism has moved from heresy — a topic to be considered, if at all, only in side conferences and hallways — to something that, while still not widely accepted, is at least of interest."

As a J-School graduate myself, I felt like I started a bit behind the starting gate. It took me a while to acclimate to blogs because in J-School I was taught that they aren't real journalism and we should reject them. This is mainly because journalism classes are taught by more or less retired journalists. The really cutting-edge journalists all have, well, jobs in journalism. Now that blogs have been (rather slowly) adapted to MSM. (Rick Hertzberg is even blogging now, albeit rather badly).

What I was most disappointed about in my J-School education was the way all of my classes basically ignored the fact that the Internet existed. They told us it was better to pick up the phone (it is, although the Internet is a great way to do a lot of background research for a story), go to the library (for what?), and never ever believe anything printed by a blog (!). I didn't learn HTML except by my own initiative. I never learned to write a blog post until I got a job at a magazine.

This makes me wary of the future of journalism, since we seem to have two streams of people entering the field: a group trained in ethics and reporting who think the future is in newspapers (it's not), and a group of people with no ethics or reporting training whatsoever who understand how to write blogs and get them read.

It’s the title of a recent opinion piece and the subject of many conversations we’ve had amongst interns this summer at the Center for American Progress. If you’re interested in working in Washington some day, an internship is on par with your required courses to graduate. And more and more students are recognizing this. As Julianne Malveaux, president of Bennett College for women states in her piece, “this year, nearly one in three will work in corporations, non-profit organizations, government, or elsewhere as interns.”

I just want to add one area of pubilc policy to the transportation issues Matt discusses to this debate: public schools. A major reason the middle-class flees to the suburbs is the decrepit condition of inner-city public schools. Suburban triumphalists like Douthat and Kotkin pretend that the middle-class flight to the burbs proves that everyone wants a lawn, a garage and to have to drive anywhere to buy anything. In fact, a large minority of those people would have been happy to live in an apartment and take the subway to work, but their local school district would be too under-funded and they couldn't afford private school so they reluctantly moved to the suburbs for their kids. Thus, one essential part of any plan to re-urbanize America must include an agenda to improve inner-city public schools and equalize funding between them and their suburban counterparts. You can get at this problem from a number of angles such as a federal plan to subsidize city schools or creating regional governing bodies that distribute school funding from a common pool instead of financing through unequal local property taxes. The point is that we currently incentivize moving to the suburbs in a variety of ways, and we will have to undo all of them to let the free market work its magic and re-create the urban vitality of pre-war America.

cross-posted on TAPPED

The decision to close the schools came after a six-month study commissioned by the Education Department essentially concluded that the girls, eager to earn high school diplomas despite their pregnancies, had been relegated to a second-class tier of schools that treat them more like mothers-to-be than curious students.

The schools offer young women classes in quilt-making and breast-feeding, not in addition to academics, but instead of them. Cutting shapes for the quilt patterns is akin to lessons in "geometry," one principal told the Times. Less than half of the "p-school" students return to regular high school after the birth of their babies; the infants aren't eligible for in-school daycare until they are two months old, effectively enforcing a 2-month break from study for their mothers.

Forty New York City public high schools offer daycare services, so there's hope that once back in the regular system, young mothers can work toward diplomas without struggling to find and pay for childcare. They'll need extra help and services, including workshops on parenting skills and academic catching up. But it's good news that the city is trying to do right by young mothers. More than any other students, they immediately need knowledge and skills-based learning. They have a family to support.

Cross-posted at TAPPED.

An important, but oft-neglected, frontier in the fight for civil rights is disability issues. But as the New York Times reported yesterday, Monday's Supreme Court decision to allow the families of students with disabilities to represent themselves when challenging their school district's plan for educating their child is a major step forward. In the past courts have often held that parents cannot challenge a school district's plan without a lawyer. Naturally this has the effect of preventing poor families, or sometimes families in remote rural areas, from being able to mount a challenge at all, since they cannot access legal representation. The Court, by a 7-2 margin, interpreted the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act as allowing parents to attempt to ensure that their child's education meets his or her needs. Who could possibly oppose that? Scalia and Thomas, natch. At least "Scalito" isn't proving to be as bad as his namesake thus far.

cross-posted on TAPPED.