Morning Shots

(Note: Dan Losen was quoted in this Washington Post story on graduation rates.  We linked the story in today’s news, where Dan left the following comment.  We are posting it here with his permission. -ed.)  

I’m among the experts debating this issue. I’m disappointed in Mishel whose work I usually hold in high esteem. I’ve read Mishel’s book and it misleads the reader by ignoring obvious inconsistencies in data on New York City, Florida and Chicago that he relegates to the appendix. In fact, wherever Mishel looks at actual student record data that he deems reliable, he too finds a dropout crisis. This is contrary to his own conclusions based on surveys with admitted problems of years surveyed, sample design, and undercounts. Specifically, Mishel’s survey-based estimates of the national rate graduation rates are 15% to 35% higher than the actual record data he argues are accurate in Florida, Chicago and New York City, the places he looked at more directly.

Mishel finds that Florida’s four year graduation rate for Blacks is about 55%, and Hispanics about 60%, and these rates Mishel admits are inflated by counting GED recipients as graduates. In Chicago, Mishel finds that Black 19 year old males have a graduation rate of 39% and Hispanic males 51%. In New York City Mishel points to an extended 7 year completion rate for all students of just 60%. The New York City rates he cites are actually about 44% for the 4 year graduation rate according to the State of New York. Mishel ignores the fact that only the 4 year rate meets the requirements for evaluating schools and districts under the No Child Left Behind Act.

These alarmingly low numbers are consistent with the analysis from Chris Swanson and many other researchers, besides

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Proposition 82 on the June ballot in California, like all things that are too good to be true, sounds great  until you really take a look at exactly what it will do and exactly who will benefit. The fact is Prop. 82 will do very little to help our struggling K-12 system or the kids most at risk.

California’s K-12 education system struggles with a 30% dropout rate and additional tens of thousands of students that cannot pass a basic skills exit exam geared to 8th and 9th grade curricula. Dismantling today’s public-private preschool system that works and gives parents choices in favor of duplicating our public education bureaucratic morass makes no sense.

The current preschool system already serves 62% of California four-year olds.  Under the most optimistic scenario for new enrollments the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst can devise, Prop. 82 will add 99,000 new four-year olds in 2010 when it takes full effect, raising those served to 80%.  The irony here is that the majority of kids that will be served by Prop. 82, including 76% of children from California families in the top one-third of incomes, are already being served by our current system.

So how much will the new preschool bureaucracy cost?  With $2.6 billion in new taxes the cost would be $6,753 per student for three hours of instruction—easily the most expensive program in the country and nearly as much as California taxpayers pay to fund a full day of instruction in the current K-12 system. But when you look at the costs for new enrollments—meaning kids who are not served by the current system—the astronomical cost is $26,262 for each of those new four-year olds!

Moreover, a significant percentage of this public money will flow to affluent families.  Only 8.4% of funding from the new tax will enroll

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I started the Education Intelligence Agency nine years ago, with the idea that those who needed to know about the teachers’ unions would welcome a single, comprehensive source for such information. One-stop shopping, as it were.

I assumed that NEA and AFT members had a pretty good working knowledge of how their unions operated and what they were up to, so it seemed to be a good bet that most of my readers would be outsiders. But from the very beginning, EIA picked up a lot of union members as readers.

Outsiders ask all the time if I’m “afraid” of what the unions might do to me. Many of them cannot believe that I annually attend the NEA convention (and biennially, the AFT convention) in perfect safety and comfort.

“Don’t they hate your guts?” is a question I’ve heard many times.

Let me state for the record that NEA and AFT members, officers and employees as individuals are no different in person than any other group of people in any other walk of life – liberal or conservative, rich or poor, dog or cat people.

By and large, they are courteous, kind and even-tempered. Some of them do hate my guts. Some of them disagree with me loudly. But I’ve never received as much as a minor threat, a pie in the face, or anything more frightening than the mal occhio. On the contrary, the overwhelming majority of union people I encounter are very nice to me.

We’ve had long and sometimes heated discussions… about the Crusades, the Civil War, running marathons, web page layout, and the best method for cracking a polyalphabetic cipher.

Regardless of how they feel about my views, they read – and seem to enjoy – the EIA Communiqué. I’ve thought a lot about why this should be so, and

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