Month: October 2013

Increased Assessment in Education: At What Cost?

/ Joanna Masingila / Leave a comment

There has been much discussion about increased and new types of assessment at various levels of education—of K-12 students, of teachers and principals in K-12 education, and of prospective teachers in K-12 education.

Some of the discussion has focused on what has happened to the education K-12 students receive as a result of the increased emphasis on standardized testing, fueled by No Child Left Behind. Kenneth Bernstein, a retired teacher, wrote an article that appeared in Academe in February 2013, and was reposted by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post, “A Warning to College Profs from a High School Teacher” in which he laid out the effects he sees that result from the heightened testing environment. In August 2013, Bernstein followed this up with another article, “Teacher Who Left: Why I am Returning to School“.

As Bernstein notes in his second article, the stakes have continued to rise with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the tests associated with these standards. Voices from students (e.g., Nikhil Goyal, “Why I Opted Out of APPR“) as well as principals (e.g., Carol Burris, “What Big Drop in New Standardized Test Scores Really Means“) have joined the conversation on the negative effects of this increased assessment on student learning.

Alongside this increased testing of student learning, are new systems of assessing teacher effectiveness. In New York State, assessment of teacher performance occurs through Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), which was adopted by the Board of Regents in 2000. Changes that were approved in 2010, require school districts to conduct an annual review of each teacher and principal resulting in a single composite effectiveness score and a rating of “highly effective”, “effective”, “developing”, or “ineffective”. This change to the APPR has not been without controversy, as evidenced in this story from October 4, 2013 of hundreds of teachers appealing their APPR.

The emphasis on increased testing has moved to the higher education arena as well, with the new requirement that all teachers seeking certification in New York State pass the edTPA (a teacher performance assessment developed at Stanford University). While the edTPA tasks assess things that teachers need to be able to do—plan for instruction, lead students in learning, and assess student learning—what has many teacher educators (e.g., teacher educators at the University of Massachusetts; Julie Gorlewski at SUNY New Paltz) and others concerned is having a prospective teacher’s performance over an entire teacher preparation program, including weeks of student teaching, come down to a snapshot of the teacher’s performance scored by a person hired by Pearson.

Commonalities among current assessment of K-12 student learning, K-12 teacher and principal performance, and prospective K-12 teacher performance are the high-stakes nature of the assessment, the use of snapshots of performance, and the critical assessment roles of persons other than the ones most familiar with the performance. Critics have already raised concerns about this increased assessment. What will be the cost to education? Kenneth Bernstein notes that we are already seeing some of the costs in the students who are now at the college level.

Calculating the Economic Cost of the Federal Shutdown

/ Edward Thater / Leave a comment

Let’s set aside for a moment the politics of the shutdown.  Regardless of political views, we can all generally agree that the shutdown costs the economy something.  The bigger question is what that number is.  The national media have more or less universally been reporting a number calculated by IHS Global Insight, a Massachusetts-based economic forecasting firm, of $12.5 million per hour.  For you non-mathematically inclined readers, that works out to $300 million a day. The problem with that number is that it represents only the dollars that the federal government spends on goods and services each day.  It does not represent the actual economic costs of the shutdown.

The main reason for this is something called the multiplier effect.  One dollar of spending by any economic actor does not just raise GDP by that same dollar.  Instead, my spending is someone else’s income that the next person can spend.  If I buy a hot dog and a soda from the vendor down the street, I spend $3.  The hot dog vendor, in turn, uses those $3 in income to purchase buns for tomorrow’s sales.  (Yes, I know, the buns cost more than $3.  The idea is that part of the money to buy the buns is my $3.)  The grocery store uses those same $3 to pay the employee who put the buns on the shelf.  And so on. Thus, my initial $3 ends up creating an increase of more than $3 in GDP.

Obviously, the real word is more complicated.  Some of the $3 is taken out at each transaction in taxes, some of it is saved by various economic actors instead of spent, etc.  However, you can measure this effect.  The Congressional Budget Office generally calculates the multiplier for federal spending as a range between 0.5 and 2.5.  (Here is sample source,  but there are lots of CBO reports using the same numbers.) So this means that, in reality, the shutdown is costing the US economy anywhere between $150 million to $750 million a day in lost GDP.  In any event, the costs are almost certainly more than $300 million per day number that is being widely reported in the media.

Of course, this calculation doesn’t include the medium- and long-term savings we get for not borrowing nearly a third of that money to cover the deficit, but that is a different blog post entirely.

Call for Syria to Open the Door

/ Uzma Gulamali / 1 Comment

Last week the United Nations broke its two-and-half-year deadlock over Syria when it passed two binding demands on the country. First, Syria is to abandon its weapons stockpile; second, Syria is to give chemical weapons experts unfettered access.

This week there is a push to send humanitarian aid to Syria. The 15-member Security Council agreed to a non-binding statement in order to increase aid access. This is a call for Syrian authorities to grant humanitarian organizations entry into the country, to expedite visas for necessary personnel and to “demilitarize” medical facilities, schools and water stations.

There is no doubt the civil war has taken its toll on the country. There are over two million refugees, about five million Syrians displaced within the country and one-third of Syria’s housing is destroyed. Syrian U.N. Ambassador Bashar Ja’afari said the Syrian government would study the council statement before responding. Hopefully, Syria will listen to the United Nations — or at least it’s best friend Russia, who is supporting the United Nations’ request to “lift bureaucratic impediments and other obstacles” in order to allow more humanitarian relief across the country.

As happy as I am at the prospect of Syria being disarmed and hopefully getting help Syrians desperately need, the deal sounds too good to be true to me. How about to you?

To read more check out a couple of my sources: online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303722604579111691747164868.html

abcnews.go.com/US/wireStory/diplomats-back-syria-humanitarian-access-20444294

Should the Federal Government Hop on the College Rankings Bandwagon?

/ Steven Kassirer / Leave a comment

Let me start off by saying that for the most part, I agree with much of President Obama’s domestic policy since taking office. My bias out of the way, I want to take a moment and reflect on the President’s recent visit to New York State, during which he visited two of the State University of New York’s premier, research oriented universities, and Henninger High School, here in Syracuse. During his visit to UB (alas, one of my numerous alma maters), the President outlined his plan to make college more affordable for the middle class. While this is certainly a noble undertaking, part of the President’s “plan” includes a mandate to the U.S. Department of Education to develop a “a new ratings system to help students compare the value offered by colleges and encourage colleges to improve.” The rating system, to be implemented by 2015, would assess factors including access to low income students, based on Pell Grants awarded, affordability, based on average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt, and outcome, based on graduation and transfer rates, ‘graduate earnings,’ and advanced degrees of college graduates.
Now, keeping higher education affordable should be a top priority of this country. After all, without accessible, affordable higher education, where would we really be? The post-World War 2 GI Bill was a major force driving the economic success enjoyed by the middle class during the last half of the 20th century. Likewise, university investment in so called “high tech” fueled the brief period of middle class prosperity at the end of the 20th century and continues to impact our economic stability today.
My issue with the President’s so called “plan” for the Education Department to rate (or rank, if you prefer) U.S. colleges and universities to compete with private rankings such as U.S. News and The Princeton Review is that to effectively rank colleges based on the above standards would require the Department of Education to conduct a long-term longitudinal study to determine which colleges and universities are, in fact, the “best” as deemed by the President’s standards. It would be impossible to determine the “outcome factor” of graduate earnings without conducting such a study. In short, how is the Department of Education going to be able to determine the “value” of a college’s or a university’s degree without tracking graduates over a long period of time? Case in point: A Syracuse College of Law graduate may decide to take a public interest law job, which pays $40,000 per year, while a graduate of Onondaga Community College graduate may get a job at a family company that pays $100,000 per year. Twenty years from now, the same SU law graduate may be the senior counsel at Apple, making millions of dollars per year, while the OCC graduate, through promotion, may be making $200,000 pe year. While this is a very simplistic example, under the President’s mandate to look at “outcomes,” OCC outranks SU as a university.
Keeping higher education affordable to the middle class is a noble undertaking, and I applaud the president for even considering it; however, there are so many possible strategies to achieving this goal, the notion of a Federal Government ranking of colleges and universities is a poorly veiled attempt at making national education policy.

Administration Sets Stricter Carbon Emissions Standards: The End of Coal?

/ Danielle Kloster / Leave a comment

President Obama and the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) recently announced new restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions from new coal and natural gas plants. A current state-of-the-art coal plant emits about 1,800 pounds of CO2 for each megawatt-hour of electricity it produces, but new plants will be required to emit less than 1,100 pounds per megawatt-hour (1,000 pounds per megawatt-hour for new natural gas plants)(1). The president and the EPA expect new plants to achieve this drastic reduction in emissions using carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology. CCS technology involves “scrubbing” carbon dioxide from smokestack emissions and then injecting that CO2 into reservoirs underground or beneath the ocean. The technology is relatively young, with few industry-scale projects (75 in the world, according to the Global CCS Institute(2)) and slow growth. This latest announcement is a part of the administration’s climate action plan to reduce the emissions of greenhouse gases, which are the likely cause of global climate change. Power plants account for around 40% of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States(1). But what are the actual consequences of these restrictions going to be? There are many potential answers to that question.
The coal industry claims that these restrictions will essentially destroy demand for coal (3). Although currently operating plants do not have to abide by these restrictions, the administration has made it clear that they will not be safe for long. With CCS technology still in a young stage of development, it is expected to be very expensive. Coal and natural gas are currently inexpensive fuels for electricity production, but if CCS needs to be installed in plants the cost of electricity associated with the new plants will increase. If the cost of CCS remains prohibitive, new coal plants may not be built at all. In the future, when currently existing plants are also required to limit emissions, the price increases will affect all coal (and likely, gas) electricity prices.
In fact, some are arguing that the new restrictions are so prohibitively expensive and the technology is so unproven (it is still hotly debated whether sequestration will be adequate in keeping CO2 out of the atmosphere), that the requirements violate the Clean Air Act(3). The Act stipulates that new technology requirements cannot be unreasonably costly to industry and need to be demonstrated adequately at a large-scale. The EPA stands by its announcement, claiming that CCS is viable as a technology.
Increased prices of electricity from coal and natural gas might make production of electricity from renewable sources (i.e., wind, solar, tidal, biomass) cost-competitive with the fuels that are currently significantly cheaper. While this is bad news for the coal industry, environmentalists and the renewable energy industry are very excited about this prospect. Cheap coal and natural gas are difficult to compete with but the costs do not account for the environmental externalities (i.e., greenhouse gas emissions, air pollution, and ecosystem destruction associated with mining). Increased costs from the installation of CCS will at least provide a fairer playing field for other technologies.
Another possible outcome of the new restrictions could be a minimal reduction in carbon emissions due to a legal technicality. Brian Potts writes that the Clean Air Act allows the EPA to create standards for either entire industries (e.g., the coal electricity industry) or on a case-by-case basis for single power plants (4). The Act requires that the case-by-case standards be more stringent than those for all sources. However, the EPA has recently imposed case-by-case standards on existing and proposed coal plants which required very low reductions in emissions (around 5%) and generally just required improvements in efficiency and fuel type (higher quality coal) rather than the installation of expensive technologies like CCS. This could mean that the new restrictions will not go into effect. On the other hand, Potts writes that carbon emissions have been and will continued to be reduced naturally through the regulation of other pollutants, such as mercury, and due to low natural gas prices leading to the shutdown of older coal plants that cannot compete.
It is yet unclear how these new restrictions on carbon emissions will affect the electric industry, but with the power of the coal industry and the continued attractiveness of this cheap and abundant fuel (as long as externalities are disregarded) it seems as though coal will remain king for quite some time (5). However, these new policies from the administration may be the first step to reining in our dangerous emissions levels and helping renewable sources of electricity become cost competitive with the currently cheap fossil fuel sources. Additionally, if the new restrictions lead to the implementation of CCS, economies of scale will hopefully work to lower the cost of the technology and allow the use of abundant coal resources to produce electricity somewhat more sustainably. We will see what direction this story takes over the next several years.

 

(1) http://www2.epa.gov/carbon-pollution-standards/2013-proposed-carbon-pollution-standard-new-power-plants
(2) http://www.globalccsinstitute.com/publications/global-status-ccs-2012/online/47976
(3) http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/18/us-usa-energy-coal-idUSBRE98H0ZD20130918
(4) http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/20/us/politics/obama-administration-announces-limits-on-emissions-from-power-plants.html?pagewanted=all
(5) http://thehill.com/blogs/congress-blog/energy-a-environment/315527-obamas-climate-plan-for-power-plants-wont-significantly-lower-emissions
(6) http://www.reuters.com/article/2013/09/18/us-usa-energy-coal-idUSBRE98H0ZD20130918