Wishy-Washy Thoughts on Gates

I'm no Diane Ravitch.  If I were, I'd use this blog to bravely state my concerns about the direction the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is heading with educational policy. I'd follow her lead and ask hard, pointed questions about the role that people with money play in driving major decisions in a democracy.

But I won't.  Because while I'm tenured, I am still fearful.  I have receiving more than $1 million in support from the Gates Foundation for my research on financial aid, and I am grateful for it-- and in need of much more.  That's the honest truth.  It's harder and harder to find funding for research these days, and while my salary doesn't depend on it, getting the work done does.

So I won't say all that Diane just did.  Yet I have to say something, and as I wrote recently, I always attempt to do so.

Her questions deserve answers.  And they should be asked of the higher education agenda as well.  Why the huge investment in Complete College America, an outfit that is pushing an end to college remediation unsupported by the work of top scholars like Tom Bailey?  Why the growing resistance to funding basic research in key areas where massive federal and state investments persist absent evidence of effectiveness? Why sink $20 million into performance-based scholarships, based on a single tiny randomized trial in one site?

I'm sure there are good answers out there.  It's not the first time I've asked these questions.  And perhaps unlike Diane, the time I've spent with the Foundation has imbued me with some confidence that there are very smart, well-meaning people inside the place-- people I like quite a bit.  There's also a lot of turnover, and the outfit is a bit gangly in some areas, kinda like a teenager.

Actually, that's exactly it. The Foundation is one heck of a powerful adolescent.  And maybe that's ok, as long as it recognizes its stage in life, and continues to seek expert advice and wisdom.  Adolescents are good at asking questions and not so great at listening. That's something to work on. Places like the William T. Grant Foundation are full-fledged adult foundations who make smart and highly effective investments daily.  I'd love for Gates's ed portfolio to seek advice and hear from them.  It'd make a world of difference.

Have I just torpedoed my own chances for future support?  Well, I guess only time will tell....

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Remedial Education is Worthy of More Attention-- Agreed, But Now What?

Over at the Chronicle of Higher Education, Mike Rose has a solid piece about the need to "re-mediate" college remediation. I love a professor willing to air his own laundry, in this case confessing to having been a remedial student once himself. And one of my favorite lines comes towards the end, where Rose places remedial education front and center as a key "second chance" function of our higher education system-- and one deserving of more "intellectual resources." Right on, good stuff.

But here's the rub. Remedial education really does need more intellectual firepower aimed at it-- so much so that it's kind of startling. The truth is, one reason remedial education tends to come out in empirical analyses as accruing a "penalty" for those who engage it in is that we know far, far too little about how to do it well. How thick is the body of "what works" evidence on remediation? Woefully, woefully thin. What we know, best of all, is that it doesn't. We also know we likely spend way too little on it (at least in the 2-year sector). I've seen one decent paper by Alicia Dowd that compares the costs of remedial education for decent outcomes to typical costs; she finds that effective remediation costs closer to what 4-years spend, and maybe $3000 per FTE more than what 2-years spend.

I'd love to see a plethora of studies over the coming years employing the kinds of mixed-methods research needed to establish causal impacts of good remedial models and account for those impacts. That's why I was psyched to see the recent announcement that Gates/Hewlett/Carnegie just made $2.5 million in grants to identify in a rigorous way remedial practices that ought to be brought to scale. As Tony Bryk said in his press release, the R&D needs here are massive.

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