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Upshot Article Oversimplifies “Solution” to Complicated Problem Congress Created
Yesterday’s NYTimes featured an article by Upshot writer Kevin Carey written on July 24 titled “It’s Easy to Forget, but a Program to Forgive Student Loans Already Exists“. There are two problems with the article from my perspective.
First, the “program to forgive student loans” is so convoluted that it’s “existence” is arguable. Contrary to the sub-headline that reads, “Democrats are campaigning to fix an issue that is already starting to resolve itself for many teachers and other public servants“, the article describes an issue that desperately needs to be fixed because the laws underpinning it were ill-conceived, allowed only five days for the initial application process, and changed directions several times over the course of time.
Second, and most importantly, the implementation was botched because Congress failed to provide the funds needed to provide the staff required to make the implementation possible. Here are the most telling paragraphs from Mr. Carey’s article:
“(The borrowers) needed some good advice. Whom would they call? Not the Department of Education, which subcontracts the work of helping borrowers to “loan servicing companies”. Unfortunately, the servicers didn’t prove up to the task.
Loan servicers are paid a flat rate per borrower for processing loan payments and helping people navigate the repayment process. That means that the more time and effort a borrower requires, the less money the servicer makes. Someone who sets up an automatic debit from a checking account and never picks up the phone is a source of profits. Borrowers who need a lot of time-consuming assistance to ensure that their job, their loan and their repayment plan are all eligible for the forgiveness program are a financial liability.
The results were predictable. In June 2017, a few months before the first public servants were (theoretically) eligible for loan forgiveness, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau issued a report describing the many ways loan servicers were messing things up.
This sums up the whole problem with government today: it is understaffed and therefore incapable of functioning effectively. Taxpayers want the government to come up with a FAST, CHEAP solution to complicated problems and to run like a business. As Mr. Carey explains later in the article, when USDOE outsourced their work to “loan servicing companies” they operated like a business and got a FAST and CHEAP “solution” to the complicated problem Congress created… a “solution” that padded the wallets of the “loan servicing companies” but left the borrowers high and dry…. and “proved” that government is the problem. The headline to this should read: “It’s Easy to Forget that an Effective Government Requires Bureaucrats”….
Mr. Carey concludes his article with evidence that more and more borrowers are becoming eligible, and seems to think that since the percentage of approved borrowers has increased the problem is taking care of itself. After reading the article and looking at the daunting amount the government is on the hook for, I’m not confident that there will be sufficient funds available to honor the promises they made to public employees— especially since the current administration is intent on keeping its promises to the billionaires and shareholders who received massive tax breaks.
Will NYS’s Review of Graduation Requirements End Regents Tests? Alas… I Doubt It
A recent Chalkbeat article by Reema Amin reports that New York State will be launching a blue ribbon commission to look at graduation requirements. The commission, whose members have not been named, will examine four big questions, one of which is this:
How much does passing the state’s vaunted Regents exams improve graduation rates, student achievement, and college readiness?
Over two decades ago, when I was Superintendent in an Upstate New York district, the Board of Regents adopted a new set of graduation standards calling for all students to pass five Regents examinations on the pretext that doing so would signal that the high school graduates were ready for work or ready for higher education. The content supervisors in the district were not alarmed about the consequences for students, assuming that the cut scores for passing the Regents tests would be adjusted to ensure that more students would be able to pass. But several were concerned about the consequences for teachers, many of whom would need to change the content of their courses to focus on passing the test instead of focussing on important but difficult to measure skills like interpersonal communication, creative problem solving, and teamwork.
The committee examining graduation standards will have a tough sell if they choose to abandon the Regents, for there are generations of high school graduates who view the Regents as evidence of excellence even though study after study has shown, in Ms. Amin’s words:
…these assessments don’t better-prepare graduates for life after high school and can harm certain students, such as students of color from low-income families.
The four questions the committee will wrestle with are these:
what should children know and be able to do before they graduate;
how should they be able to demonstrate their knowledge;
to what degree does requiring the passage of Regents exams improve student achievement, graduation rates and college readiness;
and what other measures of achievement can signal high school completion.
Responding to the first question will require consensus building among employers, post-secondary admissions counselors, and high school educators. Reaching consensus will be difficult but attainable. It is the metrics that will challenge the committee… for doing any kind of portfolio review is a laborious, time-intensive, and— therefore– costly process that the committee will likely find too daunting.
I hope I am wrong… but I think the Regents will survive yet another review in the same way that the entrance examinations to elite NYC high schools and SATs hang on despite evidence that they are not valid screening assessments. Like the entrance exams and the SATs, the Regents are a cheap, fast, and seemingly precise measure of “academic knowledge” that are “proven”— especially in the minds of those who succeeded on them in the past, who are those who will be making the decisions for the future.
Vermont Story on Delayed Test Results Illustrates Everything Wrong with Testing
Our local paper, the Valley News, reprinted an article by Lola Duffort titled “School Test Score Data Nine Months Overdue“. This is unsurprising given the ambitious scope of the State’s new Annual Snapshot “dashboard” and the fact that the current State Department of Education is woefully understaffed. And this problem of ambitious analytics combined with understaffed state departments is not limited to Vermont. This toxic combination is a systemic problem brought about by federal legislators allowing and encouraging states to include more and more data on their “report cards” on the heels of states deciding to cut back staffs following the 2008 economic collapse, often making those cuts on data collection departments where much of the work was outsourced.
In an earlier article Ms. Duffort described the new expanded “dashboard” as follows:
The Vermont Agency of Education has released its first Annual Snapshot, a new online dashboard that will allow anyone to take a look at how each of the state’s public K-12 schools are doing, using a variety of new indicators.
The Snapshot is an intentional pivot away from the standardized-testing focused era of the federal No Child Left Behind Act, which was widely criticized by educators — particularly in Vermont — for emphasizing too narrow a measure of school performance. The successor law to NCLB, the Every Student Succeeds Act, still requires testing, but it also allows states to name several new standards for appraising schools…
…the Snapshot aims to allow the public to see not just traditional measures of school performance – like test scores and graduation rates – but also information about school climate, staffing quality, spending priorities, and personalization.
As one who has written frequently about the inanity of rating schools based solely on test scores, I fully support this new direction by Vermont. But, as one who worked with state departments for 29 years and witnessed their de-staffing over that time period, I also understand that delivering on this promised expansive data will be difficult… and it will be especially so in Vermont where it appears the new commissioner is loathe to add staff:
The agency is “seriously understaffed,” said Sen. Phil Baruth, D/P-Chittenden, who chairs the Senate Education Committee.
“It’s resulted in delays and errors and a general inability to do their jobs. I’ve been trying to light a fire under Secretary French and this administration for a year now, to pick up the pace of hiring, but they seem content to continue running the agency well below full strength,” he said.
Staffing capacity at the agency worried House lawmakers enough last session that House Education chair Rep. Kate Webb, D-Shelburne, and Government Operations chair Rep. Sarah Copeland-Hanzas, D-Bradford, held a joint hearing on the subject. The agency has lost about a fourth of its staff to budget cuts since the Great Recession.
But Webb said that, as for the test scores, she was “not concerned at this time,” since students, teachers, and districts have access to their individual results.
Sorry, Ms. Webb… but the whole point of providing the Snapshot was to provide MORE information than test results and providing those results nine months after the tests were administered is, to be blunt, ridiculous and useless. If a teacher failed to return a high-stakes test to a student nine months after the test was administered they would be looking for a new career. For the Annual Snapshot to serve ANY valid educational purpose it needs to be in the hands of teachers, administrators, and Board members within weeks— not nine months later. Moreover, between October 2018 and August 2019 it is likely that 1/4 of the school board members and a similar percentage of principals and teachers will change, especially in the small rural schools that constitute much of Vermont. Complicating matters even more, there are several new Boards in place now as a result of Act 46, making the late delivery of data even more problematic.
The solution, as always, is more resources— in this case for State Departments of Education. But finding support to pay for “bureaucrats” whose primary purpose is enforcement of regulations adopted by the legislature and State Board and the delivery of reports on a wide array of issues is not easy. It’s far easier to outsource data gathering, skimp on regulatory enforcement, and complain about the inefficiency of the State Department of Education…. because, well, “government is the problem”.
Vote even if you think it doesn’t matter…. and be grateful you still can!
Network Schools - Wayne Gerseny to https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/04/03/magazine/thomas-piketty-interview u w B l.html?h I’ll smid=url-share the Is for 