Data and Data Systems

For more on this issue, check out this post from Amy Laitinen on our sister blog, Higher Ed Watch.

Establishing a commission to study an issue is, in the words of President Obama, “Washington-speak for ‘we’ll get back to you later.’” This week, House Education and Workforce Committee member Rep. Luke Messer (R-IN) proposed yet another to study how to collect higher education data and which data points to include. The bill falls well short of resolving the concerns of students, families, businesses, and policymakers who don’t know what they’re getting for all the time and dollars spent on postsecondary education.

While the House bill, the Improving Postsecondary Education Data for Students Act, is still debating the question of whether we even need better data other members of Congress have rightly moved on. Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) authored the Student Right to Know Before You Go Act along with Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) and Sen. Mark Warner (D-VA). The bill, also supported in the House by Education and Workforce Committee member Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) and Rep. Robert Andrews (D-NJ), would collect student-level higher education data in state data systems from colleges and universities, making it available to students, policymakers, and other stakeholders.

The data would include remedial education rates, graduation rates, transfer rates, post-graduation employment, and student debt levels. And for the first time, it would move beyond the “first-time, full-time” reporting model currently in place – an embarrassingly incomplete glimpse of the higher education landscape, given that only a quarter of full-time undergraduate students lived on campus in 2008 and more than half of students were over the age of 23.

Some critics have expressed concern about students’ privacy if we collect outcomes at the individual level. Those complaints grew out of a fearmongering campaign back in 2007 during the Higher Education Act reauthorization that ultimately led to a ban on a student unit record system. But the data under the Wyden-Rubio bill would be anonymous, so student privacy would be protected.

Amy Laitinen, deputy director of higher education for the New America Foundation’s Education Policy Program, has a rundown of the support proffered in recent years for improved higher education data over at our sister blog, Higher Ed Watch. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) announced late last year that better data would be at the top of the House Republicans’ agenda. He joins the Chair of the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training Virginia Foxx (R-NC),  the congressionally created Committee on Measures of Student Success, the White House, the Chamber of Commerce, Young Invincibles and other advocacy and research groups, the National Governors Association, and many more education leaders in a chorus of voices calling for data and transparency in higher education.

The Student Right to Know Before You Go Act is a critical piece of legislation. It will help answer the questions of whether students are graduating from certain colleges and universities, whether they’re shouldering excessive debt or earning enough to pay back their loans, and how “nontraditional students” – the new majority – are faring in institutions around the country. In the words of Senator Wyden, the new legislation will move the debate from access to higher education to “access plus.” Stakeholders will be able to demonstrate the value institutions can (or cannot) provide their students. That’s the kind of information students and families need to ensure they sign up for a good investment – not another brushoff from Congress.

For more on this issue, check out this post from Clare McCann on our sister blog, Ed Money Watch.

For those who care about increased higher education transparency, the last few days have been a trip through the Congressional looking glass, culminating with yesterday’s introduction of a bill to “study” higher education transparency. On Thursday a bipartisan group of senators and representatives introduced the Student Right to Know Before You Go Act, which would help provide students, families, and taxpayers with answers to critical questions like whether students at particular institutions graduate, whether they get jobs, and whether they can comfortably pay back their loans. A televised discussion among Senators Wyden (D-OR), Rubio (R-FL), and Warner (D-VA), Representatives Hunter (R-CA) and Andrews (D-NJ), students, and guidance counselors underscored the urgent need for better information about higher education outcomes and value.  

It seems pretty straightforward. Students, families, and policymakers have questions. And this legislation would provide answers. But the day after the legislation was introduced, an unnamed senior Congressional education staffer said of the effort, “But a federal unit record system is only designed to answer questions no one is asking, namely: how do we bring No Child Left Behind and its command and control mentality to higher education.”

Let’s ignore the intentionally distracting NCLB reference and instead focus on this doozy: “designed to answer questions no one is asking.” Perhaps the staffer has fallen through the looking glass, because from this side it seems like everyone is asking these questions.

Both political parties spent much of last year’s election cycle talking about the need for better college information for students and families. The GOP platform called for greater transparency around “completion rates, repayment rates, future earnings, and other factors that may affect their (college) decisions.” House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-VA) put “making it easier for parents and students to make informed decisions about what type of post-high school education is right for them” on his short legislative to-do list. Representative Virginia Foxx (R-NC), chair of the House Subcommittee on Higher Education and Workforce Training, said at a hearing on college data, “We have so much data, and we seem to know so little. What a tragedy for all the money that we’re spending in this country.” President Obama used his State of the Union to unveil a college scorecardthat provides comparable, easy-to-understand indicators of college value. Organizations that represent business and students, including the Chamber of Commerce and Young Invincibles, have been calling for better information for students and employers.

All of this was just in the past year. But the bipartisan drumbeat for transparency started much earlier. Three years ago, the National Governors Association launched its Complete to Compete initiative, which called for answers to a basic set of higher education outcomes questions. And long before that a commission appointed by former Secretary of Education Spellings “urge[d] the creation of a robust culture of accountability and transparency throughout higher education” in the form of a searchable database.

Congress itself has asked these questions. In 2008 it created a federal advisory committee to recommend changes in how graduation rates and other measures of success are calculated for two-year institutions. The Committee on Measures of Student Success issued its recommendations in 2011, which included broadening whose success “counts” to include part-time, transfer, and other students who don’t fit the antiquated first-time, full-time model. Since we currently have no idea how the students who receive hundreds of billions of dollars in federal financial aid are faring (either in or after college), the Committee recommended counting them, too. The success measures weren’t limited to two-year institutions, and they included post-college outcomes like employment. This Congressionally established committee not only identified the questions, it provided specific recommendations on how to answer the questions.

But despite this rare bipartisan agreement on the need for better data, and on the already-identified ways to get the data, Representative Messer (R-IN) introduced a bill yesterday that would require the formation of yet another commission to conduct yet another study on what college information is needed, or whether anyone needs it.

Where have these folks been for the last seven years? Students, families, taxpayers, and policymakers don’t need another study. They need better information. And they need it now.

In a blog post from earlier this week I examined the issues of funding streams and dosage. We currently have no way to track a state-funded pre-K center’s level of funding or the different ways it is funded. We also have no reliable way of measuring how some pre-K programs supervise children for much longer than others because we rely on a vague binary measurement of “half-day” versus “full-day”. In this post I will explain how we can fix these problems.

In today’s blog post, I will examine some basic problems with current data collection processes in pre-K, kindergarten and across the PreK-12 landscape. Look for Part 2 later this week, when I’ll propose hourly tracking -- an outside-the-box approach to solving some of these issues. 

The Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP), Ed Money Watch’s parent initiative, maintains the most comprehensive education database available on funding, demographics, and outcomes for every state, school district, and institution of higher education in the country. This week, we’re announcing an update to the database: FEBP’s federal special education funding at the school district level is now up to-date for years 2010 and 2011.

Special education funding comprises the second-largest federal K-12 program, behind Title I grants to economically disadvantaged students. In fiscal year 2012, Congress allocated $11.6 billion to special education grants to states under the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA), Part B.  The funding is divided across the states according to a complicated formula that factors in fiscal year 1999 levels of funding, the share of children ages 3 through 21, and the share of those children living in poverty. (To learn about some of the complicating factors of IDEA, check out our background page on the subject.)

States then divide the money across school districts through a number of different formulas. That’s why FEBP collects its district-level IDEA data directly from the states. The data are displayed at edbudgetproject.org, where you can plug in your own district and compare it to others of similar funding levels and locale types, within or across states, alongside other related data points like student poverty rates and per-student spending levels.

For example, we looked at one large urban district – Clark County School District in Nevada, which encompasses Las Vegas. Funding for the district increased slightly for IDEA Part B each year from 2009 through 2011 – up from $37.3 million in 2009 to $39.5 million two years later.

Meanwhile, though, special education enrollment held relatively steady – fluctuating by a tenth of a percentage point over the same period from a low of 10.3 percent to its peak of 10.5 percent. And student poverty rose quickly from 15.6 percent to 21.7 percent. Although it’s hard to make comparisons across state lines without significant caveats, the data still provide valuable micro-level analyses. 

The latest update also includes IDEA Sec. 619 preschool grantsfor 2010 and 2011, as well as the number of children served by those early intervention programs, for those states which are able to provide the data at a school district level.

Head to edbudgetproject.org to look up your school district, compare it to other districts, and perform your own analysis. The full data file is also available for download here.  And for more background on special education grants and other federal education programs, check out FEBP’s background and analysis pages here.

While many education advocates prepare for the looming sequester on March 1, the education policy news in D.C. wasn’t all bad this week. The nation is now on track – for the first time– to reach a 90 percent high school graduation rate by 2020, according to the fourth annual Building a Grad Nation report. Released at the Grad Nation Summit, hosted by America’s Promise Alliance, the report analyzes trends in the national graduation rate, which increased from 71.7 percent in 2001 to 78.2 percent in 2010, and celebrates the significant advances states have made.

States’ progress has accelerated since 2006, thanks in part to an outsized 2.7 percentage point increase in the graduation rate between 2009 and 2010. The recent gains are also largely due to improved graduation rates for Hispanic students (10.4 point gain) and for black students (6.9 point gain). Two states – Wisconsin and Vermont – have already hit the 90 percent mark, and eighteen more are on pace to meet it by 2020.

Notably, these gains come at a time when many states also increased high school requirements and when schools faced heightened accountability measures under No Child Left Behind. In 2012, nine states required students to pass end-of-course exams to graduate, compared to only two in 2002. Six more states required students to take end-of-course exams in 2012, but did not require a passing score. States are also continuing to raise the bar with adoption of the Common Core and other college- and career-ready standards.

Further, Grad Nation reports that over a million students are no longer attending dropout factories, compared to 2002, and the overall number of dropout factories fell by nearly 600 schools. Dropout factories are high schools where twelfth grade enrollment is 60 percent or less then ninth grade enrollment three years earlier. Again, the beneficiaries of this trend were mostly minority students: in 2002, almost half of America’s black students attended a dropout factory, but in 2011, only a quarter did so – a fifty percent decline.

While celebrating the achievements of the last decade, the report also cites the challenges that lie between today’s status quo and the 2020 goal. Over twenty states are not on pace to achieve a 90 percent graduation rate. More troubling, persistent achievement gaps remain. In 30 states, at least one-third of students with disabilities fail to graduate. The same is true for English Language Learners in 33 states, black students in 20 states, and Hispanic students in 16 states. In many cases, the proportion of students failing to graduate in these subgroups is much higher.

Another challenge lies within the data. The 78.2 percent mark was determined using the Averaged Freshman Graduation Rate (AFGR), rather than the 4-year Adjusted Cohort Graduation Rate – the uniform methodology states and the federal government agreed to use in 2008. The Cohort Rate will enable a more consistent measure of graduation rates and allow states to more precisely identify schools and strategies that are preventing dropout. But there are technical questions about how to calculate the new rates. After the switch to the Cohort Rate in 2012, the difference between the old and new calculation methods was over five percentage points in nine states. Without a consistent measure, it is unclear how far and how fast states will need to improve to meet the 2020 goal.

Because of these lingering challenges, it is incredibly important for states and the federal government to remain vigilant in reporting accurate data and holding schools accountable for graduation rates, especially for at-risk students. As Ed Money Watch previously reported, many states have backtracked on commitments to graduation rate accountability in their waivers from No Child Left Behind – giving schools equal credit for students that take longer than four years to graduate, or counting GEDs and other non-diplomas. Further, many states are not holding schools accountable for – or even reporting – other measures that are critical early warning indicators of dropout, like chronic absenteeism.

With increased attention on students’ preparedness for college and careers after graduation, schools cannot forget about supporting students who are struggling just to finish their high school degree. To help, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced a new grant competition to place more AmeriCorps volunteers in the nation’s lowest-performing schools. While admirable, this is hardly a comprehensive solution. Federal and state lawmakers must do more and consider both goals – preventing dropout and increasing college and career readiness – equally when creating policies to measure and improve student achievement in our nation’s high schools.

Last week we alerted our readers to a call from the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a division of the U.S. Department of Education, for comments on their proposal to collect data for the annual State of Preschool Survey. The National Institute for Early Education Research has administered this data collection, which they have used in their invaluable pre-K “yearbooks,” since 2003.

On February 12, 2013, the Early Education Initiative submitted comments in response to a request from the National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education on the State of Preschool Survey 2013-2015. The State of Preschool Survey, conducted annually by the National Institute for Early Education Research, is a critical source of data and information for families, researchers and policymakers.

The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), a division of the U.S. Department of Education, is proposing to collect data for the annual State of Preschool Survey, which for the last nine years has been administered by the National Institute for Early Education Research (NIEER).  Public comments on this proposal are due February 12.

The Federal Education Budget Project (FEBP) today announced new higher education data available on its website from the 2011 year.  The data are available for more than 7,500 institutions of higher education, as well as every state across the country, and include college prices, financial aid, demographics, and outcomes data.

We also added a new data point: graduate student enrollment at institutions of higher education for 2009 through 2011. As graduate school – with its students’ substantial debt burdens – continues to inch its way into the higher education debate, a greater understanding of graduate students’ particular circumstances will be increasingly critical. FEBP’s data on graduate student enrollment and Grad PLUS loan disbursements at the institutional and state levels can play a critical role in that.

The data provide a five-year snapshot of each institution, and allow users to examine many facets of the school’s costs and performance. For an example, we looked at Morehouse College. Our colleague Rachel Fishman wrote about the school on Higher Ed Watch last fall. Morehouse is a historically black, all-male college. And as Fishman pointed out, the data in FEBP tell a story of a school with a Parent PLUS problem.

Enrollment at Morehouse was just under 2,500 students last year, and 55 percent of students received federal aid – but even more, 76 percent, took out federal loans. Parent PLUS loans at the school totaled $21.7 million last year, more than $8 million more than parents took out only five years ago (accounting both for the now-defunct FFEL program and the new Direct Loan program). Given the high interest rate and substantial fees associated with the Parent PLUS program, Fishman argues that they make a bad strategy for affording the school. As we can see by examining the school in FEBP, its total price has increased by more than $10,000 over five years to more than $43,000 per year in 2011 – apparently supported largely by Parent PLUS loans.

The data also give a picture of some broader national trends. Here at Ed Money Watch, we’ve written frequently about the skyrocketing costs of the Pell Grant program since funding for the program nearly doubled in 2009. All those additional federal dollars are being distributed to students across the country, so the Pell Grant disbursements by state have increased dramatically in recent years. California postsecondary students, for example, received about $1.6 billion in 2007. Just five years later, the state received nearly $3.9 billion in Pell Grants, a 140 percent increase in federal Pell Grant dollars.

Click here to check out the data for yourself. How has your alma mater fared over the last several years? What about your home state?

The data are also downloadable as an open data file here.