Section » Michigan Schools
Wanted: A higher education system for a global economy
Our view of the purpose of higher education is taking a dangerous step in the wrong direction. As reflected in a recent Bridge article increasingly policy makers and opinion leaders are making the case that Michigan’s public universities should primarily be in the business of preparing students for a professional job in the student’s major with a Michigan employer immediately upon graduation. In a previous post I have dealt with why the immediate job standard is harmful. Here I want to explore why “for a Michigan employer” is just as bad.
For more than a century what it has meant to be a Michigan resident and taxpayer is access at affordable rates to a world class system of public higher education that prepares students to better take advantage of life’s opportunities no matter where you choose to live and work after college. It was one of the great benefits of being a Michigan resident. And it served us well – both as individuals and as a state. All of a sudden there is a movement to constrain our world class system of public universities by cutting state support, imposing price controls and now arguing that the system should give priority to preparing students for jobs that are available today and projected to be available in the near future with Michigan employers. Big mistake!
Our Governor, Larry Page and Eli Broad are among the thousands of kids who grew up in Michigan, graduated from a Michigan public universities and made their fortune elsewhere. Were they well served by our public higher education system? Of course they were. Did they do something wrong – rip off Michigan taxpayers – when they decided to use their terrific education someplace other than Michigan? Of course not. Limiting public higher education to just focusing on the current needs of Michigan employers or what some government analysts think Michigan jobs of the near future will be will inevitably reduce the quality of our public higher education system. Courses and other programming that make a university great will be eliminated because they are not aligned with the needs of Michigan employers. The consequence: the same proportion of the next generation of Snyder’s, Page’s and Broad’s will still choose to live and work outside of Michigan but now they will be far more likely to go to college outside of Michigan as well. They will want an education – as you do for your kids and grandkids – that prepares them for global opportunities, not just those available in Michigan.
And this assumes that we actually know what the jobs of the future will be (here in Michigan or across the planet) and what the skill requirements of those jobs will be. Both of which are extraordinarily difficult to project accurately in an economy being constantly transformed by globalization and technology. Machines will continue to both do more and more of the work humans used to and create new products and processes that will make obsolete current work. And countries from across the globe will increasingly compete with us in a broader set of occupations and industries. Which adds up to a new reality that your job, the enterprise you work for and even your occupation are less secure today than yesterday and will be even less secure tomorrow than today. In that world are we really willing to trust government analysts (or anyone else) to predict what jobs and skills of the future will be that our public universities should be preparing us for?
If that weren’t bad enough, turning public higher education into vocational education for local employers will substantially reduce the attractiveness of the institutions to students from elsewhere. Somehow or the other we have come to view higher education as a supplier to the real economy, not a major sector of the economy. Think again! Higher education is both a growth industry in and off itself and a high wage employer. It is the source of lots of good paying jobs that Michigan so desperately needs. In many regions in the state and across the country colleges and universities are one of – if not the – major employer. One of the reasons for that is their ability to attract students from across the planet. (And our research universities ability to attract billions in federal funding.) All of that would be jeopardized in a system primarily designed to serve the needs of Michigan employers. Why is it bad that we train lots of teachers for a national, rather than just a state, market? What happened to the economic development goal of expanding high-wage, export-based enterprises? Serving a global market is always better for economic growth than serving a local market. Only in higher education is reducing the customer base of a major sector of the Michigan economy up for discussion. Not smart!
Unlimited charters: not smart II
Three recent articles further highlight the risks in simply opening up the right to anyone to operate a k-12 school.
The first comes from Ed Week reporting on a study by the National Bureau of Economic Research. The study found that Massachusetts charter schools in central cities significantly improved student’s math and language arts achievement but those operating outside of central cities did not. In fact in some cases lowered student achievement. The article quotes the study’s lead researcher Joshua Angrist: “In the nonurban schools, there are students there that have relatively high scores with or without charter schools,” Mr. Angrist said, “but the charters add nothing to that and, in some cases, take a relatively high level of achievement and lower it, especially in middle schools. You wouldn’t think parents would welcome that.” More than likely the growth of charter schools in Michigan in an uncapped environment will be beyond central cities. What has the industry done to earn the right to do that without limits?
The second is about online learning. This is where the risks of an unlimited right to operate are the highest because theoretically a single operator could enroll every child in state. Really not smart! A recent New York Times article makes that clear. As the article – titled In Classroom of the Future, Stagnant Scores – reports: “But to many education experts, something is not adding up … In a nutshell: schools are spending billions on technology, even as they cut budgets and lay off teachers, with little proof that this approach is improving basic learning.”
At Michigan Future we are very interested in exploring online learning as a way to improve teaching and learning. Two of the eight high schools we have made grants to will rely heavily on online learning to deliver content. But we know that this is an experiment: an unproven way to raise student achievement.
The final article comes from what I call planet ideology. This time from the left. Not the kind of reasoning I like or trust. Even though I don’t agree with lots in it, I do believe it is important to read. Because it balances the case we have been told over and over again, from those on planet ideology on the right, about public school teachers, administrators and Boards putting their self interest ahead of the children. The article points out the same self interest is driving many who are advocating charters.
The article is by David Sirota for Salon.com and is titled The bait and switch of school “reform”. Behind the new corporate agenda lurks the old politics of profit and self-interest. It makes a strong case that many who are labelled as reformers are motivated, at least in part by profits and/or political interest in weakening unions. I agree wholeheartedly with Sirota when he writes: “None of this is to argue that teachers unions don’t act out of self-interest. They do. The point, though, is that they do not have a monopoly on self-interest in the education debate. As the modern-day version of what Franklin Roosevelt would call “organized money,” the underwriters of the corporate education “reform” movement are just as motivated by their own self-interest. It’s just a different portfolio of self-interest.”
To us the data are clear: there are good traditional public schools and there are bad traditional public schools, just as there are good and bad charter schools. What matters is quality (as measured by student achievement), not governance. When it comes to online/virtual schools there is an even weaker case of superior student achievement. And there are self interests on all sides of the public vs. charter debate. Given those realities it seems to us far better to develop a system that allows for replication of good schools, new entrants and innovation (all needed) with controls and oversight. As we wrote previously it seems to us the best way to do that is to give authorizers the ability to earn the right to exceed the cap based on the student achievement of the schools they authorize. The better their students do, the more schools they can authorize.
Relearning the GI Bill lessons
What is so distressing about a recent Center for Michigan’s Bridge feature article is that it positions higher education as a combination of vocational training and supplier to Michigan employers. Where the chief purpose of Michigan’s public universities should be to prepare students for a professional job in the student’s major with a Michigan employer immediately upon graduation. This has never been – nor should it be – the purpose of higher education. Moving in that direction would be a huge mistake for today’s and tomorrow’s college students, the state and the country.
In this post I want to deal with the notion of higher education as vocational education: preparing students for a job today. In a future post I will write about why defining the purpose of Michigan public universities as preparing students for Michigan jobs is also really dumb.
Let’s start with a personal story. I write about it because it is typical of many Boomers coming out of college. It took me nearly a year to find a professional job after I received my masters degree in urban planning from the University of Michigan. Was I poorly served by UM and/or was my degree of little or no value because I didn’t find a professional job in my field immediately after graduation and for nearly a year worked in a low wage, low skill job? Of course not. And I only worked in the field of urban planning for the first three years of what now is a 37 year career. Does that mean that my degree was of little or no value? Once again, of course not. I learned more than vocational/specific job skills in that urban planning program. And it is those broader skills that have served me well throughout my career.
The main reason I didn’t find a job immediately after graduation is that college graduate Boomers flooded the labor market. There were more of us looking for a job than jobs available. I had no idea – nor did I care – if urban planning was on the official government approved hot job list when I got my degree. (The odds are it wasn’t.) But despite no immediate professional job and a degree in something that was not on the list of future high demand jobs I did fine. And so did most of the many Boomers in the same situation. (For the big picture see the terrific Education Sector article I wrote about previously.) Why do we think it will be any different for today’s college students?
The main reason there are some unemployed and lots of underemployed college graduates today is that the national economy is not producing enough jobs. Since 2001 there has been basically no job growth in America. That isn’t the fault of Michigan’s or America’s higher education institutions. Nor does it mean that the value of a college degree is low and declining. The exact opposite is the case. The lifetime value of a four-year degree or more is higher today than ever before and almost certainly will be higher in the future.
Since the start of the Great Recession America has lost 7 million jobs. 6.4 million of them in the low education attainment sectors of the economy (primarily factories, construction, hospitality, retail, and temporary services). The high education attainment sectors (primarily health care, education, finance and insurance, information and professional and technical services) have lost around 550,000. This is a continuation of a two decade long pattern. Since 1990 high education attainment industries – those where at least 30 percent of their employees have a four-year degree – have employment growth of 36 percent compared to 7 percent in the rest of the economy. The odds are great that that trend will continue and that Michigan’s and America’s long-term challenge is we don’t have enough college graduates not that we have too many.
Thankfully at the end of World War II policy makers didn’t define the purpose of higher education as filling jobs immediately available. There were hardly any. Certainly no where near enough to provide jobs for the millions of returning service men and women. The approach policy makers took was to heavily subsidize higher education for returning service personnel to train for jobs when the economy was growing again. Not only did the government pay full tuition they also paid a stipend to cover living expenses. And they didn’t put any restrictions on what jobs/careers one could train for. My father, who already had a law degree, took post graduate classes to learn import/export law. A specialization he only used decades later. The man who cut my hair when I lived in Lansing used the GI Bill to go to barber college. They both benefited and so did the country.
In fact the growth in human capital, in a broad set of occupations chosen by students/consumers not government, was a major factor in a generation of stellar American economic growth. That is why the GI Bill is still broadly viewed as one of the most effective public programs ever. It was focused on investing for the long term.
As Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz demonstrate in the must read The Race Between Education and Technology American economic strength has for more than a century been aligned with education attainment. Leading economy on the planet when education attainment was rising, losing ground internationally as education attainment stagnated the last three decades. The lesson from the GI Bill is that when there are no jobs don’t blame higher education for graduates not finding jobs. Rather provide a stipend to cover living expenses (think something like AmeriCorps) for college students and generous tuition support to increase human capital for the jobs and careers that will be there when the economy expands again. Those who get degrees – in any field – will be big winners over their career and so will the country.
Unlimited charters: not smart
From their inception in the Nineties Michigan Future, Inc. has been an enthusiastic supporter of charter schools and public school choice. Still are. We have been involved in helping create charter schools for more than a decade. But our support is tempered by the reality of student performance in charter schools. It is mixed at best.
The ideological rhetoric is that traditional public schools with elected school boards, strong unions and big centralized bureaucracies face permanent gale force winds that make it almost impossible to deliver effective teaching and learning leading to high student achievement. And that freed from all those evils plus having parents and students choose their school, charters will get far better student achievement. And that university authorizers, not having local elected schools boards, will police quality far better so only high quality charters will be allowed to operate long term. Sounds great in theory, but the reality is much different.
Detroit is where the state’s charters are most concentrated. Both in the city and in the inner ring suburbs where it is easy to attract students living in the city. Add to that, according to most pundits, policy makers and business leaders here and nationally that DPS is the worst school district in the country, you can’t have an easier environment for charters to demonstrate their superiority.
But they haven’t. Not even close. Excellent Schools Detroit (ESD) has developed a report card that ranks schools on student achievement. It includes schools in and out of the city where at least 40% of the elementary and middle school students and 30% of high school students are Detroiters. ESD then hosted a series of shoppers fairs to highlight high performing schools for Detroit parents. To be invited to the fair elementary and middle schools had to have at least 75% of their students rated as proficient on both the MEAP reading and math tests. For high schools it was 16.5 on the ACT. Both standards are quite low.
How did the charters do? Not great to say the least. Of 59 charter elementary schools, only 8 met the standard to be invited to the shoppers fairs. For middle schools only 5 out of 48. And for high schools only 3 out of 22. Most embarrassing for charters is that there were more DPS schools that met the standard at each level than chaters: 12 elementatry schools, 7 middle schools and 4 high schools.
DPS’s reputation as an awful school district is well deserved. That they can operate more higher performing schools at all grade levels than the more than 100 charters with large numbers of Detroit students is not evidence that they are a better district than their reputation, but that charters by and large do not deserve their reputation as delivering high student achievement. Some do, most don’t.
That experience leads one to believe that eliminating the cap on charter schools as has been proposed in Lansing will almost certainly lead to the creation of far more low performing than high performing new schools. Not a good way to raise student achievement. A better idea, that we proposed nearly a decade ago, is to give authorizers the ability to earn the right to exceed the cap based on the student achievement of the schools they authorize. The better their students do, the more schools they can authorize.
We want innovation and new entrants so a fixed cap is not ideal. But we also want schools vetted for quality before they are allowed to open and held accountable for student achievement once they are open so no cap is not ideal either. We need something that gives us the best chance of more good schools and fewer bad schools. Seems to us that a system that rewards authorizers for good student achievement gives us the best chance of doing that.
Our 2012 High Schools
• Detroit Delta Preparatory Academy. The school is sponsored by the Detroit Alumnae Chapter of the Delta Sigma Theta Sorority. And will have a social justice theme.
• YMCA – Detroit High School Leadership Academy. The school will allow the Y to offer a compete k-12 education. They opened last year an elementary school and added a middle school this year.
• Detroit Schools for the Future High School. The most innovative of the schools to be awarded a MFS grant. SFF is a national operator which has just opened its first school in Jacksonville, Florida. They are designed to serve students entering the ninth grade at least two years behind chronologically delivering teaching and learning both in the classroom and online.
The schools were selected based on quality, not governance. The three winners were chosen from 18 applicants through a competitive process open to traditional public, public charter, and private schools.
The three new schools join four previous Michigan Future Schools’ grantees. The Detroit Edison Public School Academy Early College of Excellence, now in its second year of operation. And three just opened schools: Dr. Benjamin Carson School of Science & Medicine, Detroit Collegiate Prep and the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy.
These and future new high schools are made possible by the support of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, the Kresge Foundation, the McGregor Fund, and the Skillman Foundation, which have contributed nearly $14 million to the initiative.
A better school ranking system
The Michigan Department of Education (MDOE) recently released their 2011 rankings of all of Michigan’s k-12 schools. They released two rankings. One clearly is a better measure than the other of relative school quality. One ranking is mandated by the federal government. The other was developed by MDOE. The reason there are two rankings is the feds refused to grant the state a waiver to use its ranking system. Big mistake by the feds!
Getting a rating system that reflect school quality matters. Both in terms of providing parents information on what schools to enroll their children in but also now for deciding which schools are going to be sanctioned and which aren’t. Last year was the first for this new ranking system where the bottom 5% of the schools listed were subject to severe sanctions. The state and administration basically adopted a system conforming with federal requirements.
To be frank, it was dreadful! Schools ended up on the lowest 5% list with higher student achievement than many that weren’t on the list. Talk about sending the wrong signal to students, parents and educators. As an example, Excellent Schools Detroit used its report card to choose schools to recommend to parents. At the high school level ESD used three year average ACT scores to rank schools. The lowest 5% list is overwhelmingly urban high schools (a big problem with the rankings in and of itself). One school on the ESD recommended list was on the lowest 5% list while dozens of schools (mainly charters and non Detroit traditional public schools) were not included because of poor student achievement.
MDOE did exactly what you would want. They listened to the critics (which included me), did their own assessment of the initial ranking system and improved it for this year. Ranking schools is hard. People are struggling with this across the country. The only way we are going to get a system that provides students, parents, educators and policy makers with rankings that reasonably reflect school quality is with continuous improvement.
The 2011 MDOE top to bottom rankings is a major step forward in assessing relative school performance. It includes two huge changes that were at the core of the rankings required by the feds: dividing schools into different pools based on all sorts of technical criteria that having nothing to do with student achievement and not including high school graduation as one of the criteria. In addition to those big fixes the new state rankings include all test subjects, not just reading and math. And ranks schools on achievement, improvement and the achievement gap between subgroups. All of which matter. (For detailed information on the two ranking systems start here.)
Using a better metrics gets you far different – and more accurate – results. The bottom 5% in the new state rankings include a mix of school districts; elementary, middle and high schools; and both traditional public and charter schools. As anyone who works in education knows there are good and bad schools in every segment of k-12 schools. The state rankings reflect this, the old system did not. MDOE deserves much credit for developing an improved school ranking system. That the US Department of Education is standing in the way of full utilization of that system is really indefensible. We should work to reverse that.
What’s new at the accelerator
I haven’t written for quite awhile about our high school accelerator – Michigan Future Schools. But we have been busy! Just as a reminder the accelerator is designed to help start at scale new quality high schools serving students from the city of Detroit without regard to governance. We select schools to work with through an annual competition that is open to traditional public, charter or even private schools from across the country. The ultimate goal is to help launch 35 new high schools over eight years.
All the schools we support are open enrollment schools. They must accept all students who apply. The schools will open with a 9th grade and add one grade per year. At full enrollment they will serve no more than 500. They all agree to our student outcome standards: at least 85% of each school’s students will graduate from high school; of those graduates, at least 85% will enroll in college; of those who enroll in college, at least 85% will earn a two or four year degree.
Our first grantee – DEPSA – opened a year ago with a 9th grade class of around 100. They add a 10th grade this year. Three other grantees open this week with their initial ninth grade class: Detroit Collegiate Prep, Ben Carson School of Science and Medicine and the Jalen Rose Leadership Academy. Two DPS and two charter schools. We are confident that all are positioned to deliver effective teaching and learning.
Our fifth grantee – Cornerstone Health High School – has delayed its opening until at least 2012. It has not yet secured a facility. Facility financing has turned out to be the biggest challenge we have faced in helping start new high schools.
In addition to the new schools, we will announce soon three new grantees scheduled to open new schools in the fall of 2012. We also have been working hard on building a support system that will increase the chance that our grantees meet our ambitious student achievement standards. Those supports will include:
• For charter schools, assist with facilities financing. MFS has contracted with Clark Hill to provide the equivalent of Facilities 101 for each of it grantees that must secure and finance facilities. Ultimately we need to go beyond training on how to finance schools in the current environment. We need to develop new tools for financing charter schools.
• Improve student achievement. Over the coming year MFS will build the capacity to assist its schools in meeting the goal of students entering college without remediation. Nationally this remains the biggest challenge. (We will release soon a research report on the topic.) The better reform high schools here are getting high graduation and college attendance rates, but far too many of their graduates are not academically ready to do college level work.
• Help attract students to the schools it funds. MFS has begun a large scale quantitative and qualitative market research project to learn better how Detroit parents decide which schools to send their children to. Results are expected in October. The assumption has been that if you create quality schools, students will enroll. That is no longer the experience. It is now clear that we need to pay attention to the demand side (parents as shoppers) as well. Or we run the risk of opening schools that do not get to full enrollment. Kim Trent has joined the MFS staff to design and implement a strategy to ensure that MFS schools get to full enrollment.
• Prepare teachers to work in small urban high schools. MFS, through a competitive process, made a grant to the School of Education and Human Services at the University of Michigan Flint to develop and implement a new program for training teachers. The program will be a partnership between the university and six small Detroit area high schools. The teacher candidates will be trained in the high schools, rather than at the university.
Effective, efficient and expensive
The Detroit Regional Chamber featured Geoffrey Canada at the recent Mackinac Policy Conference. A well deserved recognition for the CEO of the Harlem Children’s Zone. The organization provides cradle to college services for all, predominantly low-income, children who live in a 97 block zone of Harlem.
Canada has earned his recognition by getting results. Children growing up in poverty who graduate from high school and go to college in far higher proportions than those served by traditional service providers, including the public schools . (For those interested in an overview of Canada’s work see a New York Times article or read the terrific book Whatever It Takes by Paul Tough.)
The Harlem Children’s Zone is admired by many for being efficient as well as effective. No unions, no tenure, lots of accountability. Employees that don’t help children meet outcomes are let go. Efficient and effective are clearly important components of Canada’s success. But so is expensive. The Times article estimates that its schools operate with nearly $3,500 per student more than the typical New York City public school. That money largely comes from philanthropy. A lot from Wall Street.
And on top of the $3,500 there is all the after school and summer programming for school aid youth not to mention comprehensive pre-school services for both parents and children. Let’s assume that the cost of all the services the Zone provides is more like $5,000 per year per child more than is available from public sources today. If we are serious about giving all urban kids an equal opportunity to live the American Dream those funds will have to come from public investments. Philanthropy can demonstrate what works, it cannot get to scale.
The Times article describes the service array, in addition to k-12 schooling as: All children who live in the zone have access to many of its services, including after-school programs, asthma care, precollege advice and adult classes for expectant parents, called Baby College. The organization has placed young teaching assistants, known as peacemakers, in many of the elementary school classrooms in the area and poured money into organizing block associations, helping tenants buy buildings from the city, and refurbishing parks and playgrounds. By linking services, the program aims to improve on early-childhood programs like Head Start, whose impact has been shown to evaporate as children age.
Listening to Mr Canada’s Mackinac speech it was clear that two things are true about preparing low income kids to succeed in college and life. You need a leader that will hold all the adults accountable for all students meeting outcomes that we hold for middle class kids. And you need investments far higher than are available today to help low income urban kids. You need both.
For years we have funneled money into schools and other programs that serve low income urban kids and got terrible student outcomes. Big waste of money that needs to end. But now we are going in the other direction – demanding higher student outcomes while reducing funding – that won’t work either. We need to identify those service providers who are getting good student outcomes and provide them with more resources needed to provide the comprehensive set of services that are making the Harlem Children’s Zone a success.
• Copyright 2009 • Twitter: #michiganfuture