Sara Mead's Policy Notebook

Kevin Carey is really, really good at explaining things, which is why I highly recommend his recent blog post unpacking the flaws in the thinking behind tuition tax credit programs, such as the Arizona program on whose constitutionality the Supreme Court heard arguments last week.

New America's Steve Burd has a very informative post on the potential for Pell grant funding levels to create an early test of incoming conservatives' resolve to cut spending. While much of the post-election edu-discussion (including more insightful commentary from two Andrews—Kelly and Rotherham) has focused on K-12 and implications for ESEA/NCLB reauth, in the near term, the biggest impacts are likely to be around student aid and higher ed, because the nature of the policies and politics means there's just a more constant stream of action around higher ed issues than K-12, and because of the money involved.

Good post-election edu-commentary from Eduwonk and Eduflack.

Matt Yglesias flags an interesting poll showing that Americans dramatically overestimate the percentage of American households with incomes greater than $250,000 a year. Matt draws this out into a broader conclusion that Americans tend to underestimate how well off they are economically relative to their fellow citizens. But I think the converse is equally likely and important: Thanks to high levels of residential segregation by income and what Matt elsewhere calls "the near-total disenfranchisement of genuinely poor people in American politics and American political media" (although the absence of poor people is hardly unique to the political media), poor people are largely invisible to many middle-class Americans, leading folks to underestimate how many Americans really are poor or low-income.

You may have heard that there's an election tomorrow?

I've been writing a lot* lately about instructional quality, particularly about new models with promise to help us both better measure and also improve the quality of instruction in early childhood settings. But I thought it might be helpful--and more engaging--if I actually showed you what I'm talking about here.

One follow-up note to the previous post. I believe it's shameful and immoral that a nation as wealthy as the United States allows 21% of our children to live in poverty, and over 40% of children to live in low-income families. My belief that this is wrong and needs to change is reflected in my voting, charitable, and volunteer decisions, where I try to support policymakers, causes, and organizations that I believe can make a difference in reducing child poverty and increasing income equality. But in my professional life, I work on education policy, not other child poverty issues, and I believe that the point of working in education policy is to try to advance policies that make our schools as effective as possible with the population of students they serve--not to complain about policy and other factors outside of education that keep that population from being different. I do this because I think improving educational outcomes for low-income children is both possible and essential to enabling us to reduce rates of child poverty over the long term. If I ever stop believing that, I will quit working in education policy and go do something else that I think has greater potential to help children in poverty. And every time I hear someone in education policy debates say that poverty, lack of health care, or other factors mean we can't improve the results our schools produce for low-income kids, I want to ask "Why, then, are you participating in this education policy debate? If poverty and health care are the most important factors here for child outcomes, why aren't you working on those policy issues, rather than education?"

My colleague Andrew Rotherham and the Century Foundation's Rick Kahlenberg engaged in a bit of a back and forth over the merits of increasing socio-economic integration as a strategy to improve educational opportunities for low-income students. Rick is a strong proponent of public school choice and inclusionary housing policies that enable low-income students to attend predominantly middle-class schools. Andy acknowledges the appeal of this strategy, but points out that geographic and logistical constraints significantly limit its potential to help more than a fraction of low-income children.

Over the past 10 years, the universal pre-kindergarten movement has made tremendous strides: Annual state spending has grown at a roughly 10% annual rate since 2001, roughly doubling to some $5 billion today. The number of children served in state pre-k has nearly doubled as well: from less than 700,000 in 2001 to more than 1.2 million today. These are tremendous accomplishments, and while the current state budget shortfalls pose some threats to recent gains, they are unlikely to completely, or even substantially, undo them.

In response to my blog post last week about "Waiting for 'Superman'," Robert Pondiscio writes that a lack of attention to instruction is not unique to "Waiting for 'Superman'," but more broadly symptomatic of the education reform movement—a sentiment echoed by commenters on this blog.

Apologies for being a lousy blogger this week. I was traveling in Houston this week, where I visited some very cool early childhood education programs--KIPP:SHINE and the Children's Learning Institute at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston, which, among other programs, operates the Texas School Ready! program to improve the quality of teaching across a range of early childhood settings in Texas. It was a great and thought provoking learning experience for me, and one I'll share more about next week.

I finally got around to seeing Waiting for Superman--which, I have to confess, I wasn't particularly eager to do. I'm solidly in the camp of people who think movies should be about escapism, and the only thing I can think of less escapist than a documentary about a pressing social issue is a documentary about a pressing social issue that I spend the majority of my waking hours working on.

Linda Perlstein asks "does the NEA have laryngitis?" referring the union's relative reticence in the face of current media attention to education reform--particularly Waiting for Superman and NBC's Education Nation coverage this week. And it's true that, compared to some education reform groups (who've at times seemed a bit like 3-year-olds who got into a bag of pixie sticks around this stuff) and the AFT's Randi Weingarten, NEA's been pretty absent from the national media press on Waiting for Superman and Education Nation. But it would be an error to mistake that media reticence for non-engagement. Education reform groups, for all their recent successes, are still small and scrappy, and engaged in a battle to change hearts and minds around public education--because of this, education reformers have to be aggressive in fighting the fight in the media, seizing any opportunity to make their case to the public. But the NEA already has the power here, with their 3.3 million members, $56.3 million in state and federal campaign spending last cycle, and a host of federal, state and district policies designed with their approval--so they don't necessarily need to fight their fights in public--particularly when it seems likely to be a loser's game for them to do so.