At Least Education Reform Seems To Be Moving Swimmingly

There actually is one area of President Obama's agenda which could be plausibly described as a government takeover. That would be his plan to streamline the student loan market, eliminate the middlemen who provide no service, and allow students to borrow from the government directly, with the massive savings from that plowed into Pell Grants to help more kids go to college. If Obama were this swift with the middlemen in the insurance industry he'd be praised on the left as another FDR. As such, Sallie Mae and the others in the private student lending market, who get subsidies to do what the government can do on their own for much cheaper, don't have the power and influence to stop their own destruction.

Educational institutions currently have two ways to offer federal loans to students. In the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL, pronounced "fell") program, the government pays subsidies to banks and lenders to dole out money to borrowers and reimburses companies up to 97% of the cost of any loan that is not paid back. The second way is the direct-loan program, created in 1993 as an alternate option, in which the government cuts out the middle man, lends money directly and gets all the profits. If the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) passes both houses of Congress, the approximately 4,500 colleges and universities that are currently signed up for FFEL will have to abandon the program and start using the direct-loan option by July 1, 2010.

The House will likely pass the bill this week, and if it runs into trouble in the Senate, it could easily move through reconciliation since the whole point of it is to end wasteful subsidies to the private lending market, which expand the deficit. I think there will be 50 votes for this, as Pell Grants are popular, the private loan market serves no purpose whatsoever, and another part of the bill offers challenge grants for early childhood education, another broadly popular priority. We're going to see change - we can actually believe in! - in higher education. And the students who supported Barack Obama in record numbers will recognize this almost immediately. Savvy play.

The Education Agenda

I know I've said once before that education looks to be the area where Republicans could find some common ground with Barack Obama's agenda. Interestingly, that's where Democrats found common ground with George Bush over No Child Left Behind early in his term. That's not an endorsement of NCLB, but a description of where the politics were at the time.

There is a split in the Democratic Party on education policy between reformers and those who favor a more traditional approach. While Obama is borrowing from both sides of that divide, he is definitely siding with the reformers on key issues, like merit pay and charter schools.

WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama laid out his "cradle to career" agenda for education Tuesday, including a controversial plan to boost pay for teachers who excel.

In a speech to the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Obama said he backs the idea of merit pay for the best school teachers.

"It is time to start rewarding good teachers and stop making excuses for bad ones," he said. Teacher unions have strongly opposed bringing such a system to public education. But in his talk, Mr. Obama said the time has come to do just that.

He said, "too many supporters of my party have resisted the idea of rewarding excellence in teaching with extra pay," and the resistance has continued "even though we know it can make a difference in the classroom."

The merit pay proposal would significantly expand a federal program that increases pay for high-performing teachers to an additional 150 school districts.

Obama is really begging to be seen as selling out teacher's unions, although I'm not convinced that merit pay really would do that. For one thing, as Dana Goldstein notes, he's not even actually proposing merit pay, and this is a bad job by traditional media for not understanding the difference:

Teacher pay: Obama promised a federal investment in developing "performance pay" plans in 150 school districts. The language here is key. "Performance pay" is supported by teachers' unions, and awards salary bonuses to teachers based on a variety of factors, including classroom observations, teaching in hard-to-staff subjects and schools, and improving student achievement. "Merit pay," on the other hand, is understood as directly aligning teacher salaries to student test scores.

I don't agree with merit pay because it judges teachers on the cognitive ability of their students, which is neither static nor constant. A child who was not well-prepared before stepping into a teacher's classroom and gets the expected low test scores as a result is not the fault of the teacher. But performance pay sounds like it's based on better metrics.

As far as the other proposals, I really like his plan for cutting out middlemen in the student loan business. If the government is supplying loans, they don't need private companies to be doing work that adds nothing but cuts them into the deal with a profit. What's more, President Ben Nelson doesn't like it because it would hurt a private student lending firm in his home state of Nebraska. Gotta love those "fiscal conservatives" stoking wasteful parochial interests.

In addition, there is a strong push toward early childhood education, a clear predictor of success for young people. Obama would lift caps on charter schools, which encourages experimentation but has had mixed results, and he would move toward promoting a national standardized curriculum. Finally, he talked about lengthening the school year to provide more intensive education. That's just a question of funding, IMO.

If a Republican was looking to draft off of the President's popularity, it would seem that supporting his education initiatives, particularly charter schools and performance pay, would be the smart thing to do. Education has such a real-world effect on constituents, too, that it's a natural. I haven't heard much from Republicans in Congress on this, because they're too busy trying to self-immolate, I guess.

...Maybe Obama could jump on the rubber room at the New York City Board of Education. This is nuts - hundreds of teachers put on probation who show up at a room, with full pay, for sometimes years, and do nothing. Somehow, I think we can do better than this.

Duncan - The Center of Education

I always kick myself that I haven't learned more about education policy, despite the fact that my mother has taught in public schools for 30 years. I have a broad set of beliefs, that teaching kids to fill in bubbles on a sheet doesn't prepare them for the real world, and that in general our public schools are underfunded, but the granular stuff has always escaped me. So I don't have a whole lot to add about Arne Duncan, the new Secretary of Education, beyond what I'm hearing: he is a pick-up basketball buddy of Barack Obama's, but unlike George Bush, Obama's friends have measurable skills, like being the head of Chicago's school system.

More broadly, Duncan, according to most, represents a balance on the split inside the Democratic Party on education policy, between the reform side of the education equation and the protections for teacher's unions and administrators. He believes in incentives for teacher quality that may rankle the unions, but they view him as someone they can work with. Dana Goldstein has more details on Duncan's role in this split, which is not entirely in the middle.

But although Duncan is being hailed as a compromise between free-market education reformers and teachers' unions, we shouldn't delude ourselves as to the nature of Duncan's relationship with the Chicago Teachers Union. Duncan closed schools (never a popular move), removed teachers from the classroom, and supported charter schools, which now make up about 10 percent of the Chicago system. To get a sense of the grassroots opposition to Duncan, check out the Caucus of Rank and File Teachers and Substance News. Notably, these two groups, critics from the left, believe the Chicago Teachers Union is corrupt and little better than management at representing teachers' and students' needs; on the other hand, a more centrist observer, Alexander Russo, writes that Duncan hasn't been tough enough in his negotiations with the union, and should have done more to attract middle class and affluent families to Chicago's public schools. Russo also snarks that national union chief Randi Weingarten's recent kind words about Duncan's relationship with the CTU could hardly have been made "with a straight face."

Any pick of an actual superintendent to head the Department of Education, as opposed to a governor relatively ignorant of the nitty gritty of education debates, is a move by Obama in the direction of serious, hands-on reform. That's good news, I think, for those of us -- regardless of ideology -- who hope education will become a first tier issue under the Obama administration.

One thing I am cheered by is that Duncan supports early childhood education. It's been documented over and over again that getting your child learning early is a powerful predictor of how successful they will be over their educational career. Early childhood ed is an important anti-poverty program. What's more, if failing schools need to be shuttered, there's a stock of teachers that can be brought into the early childhood programs and maintain their jobs.

In effect, Duncan is a mirror of Obama - seeking consensus, in the center of the debate and hoping to listen to and work with everyone. The Wonk Room has more. And this Malcolm Gladwell article, about educational success and teacher performance, and how you can't necessarily divine one from the other, is worth a read.