Education in the News: Nevada's Voucher Program and Corinthian Colleges

There have been two big education stories in the news this past week:

First, Nevada became the first state to offer vouchers to every public school student (regardless of income), which can be used for tuition at a private school or for supplies for home schooling. The vouchers will be worth approximately $5,400.00 per student. The Washington Post's story is here.

The law was passed by Nevada's Republican-controlled legislature and signed by Governor Brian Sandoval (he's in the picture to the left). Teachers' unions and public school superintendents are very upset about the law, fearing that it could permanently damage the public school system.

I studied Milton Friedman's philosophical underpinnings of vouchers (along with charter schools) when I wrote my law review article in 2003-04. I think it's interesting that, as charter schools have continued to gain popularity and support, there is now a state that's willing to try the voucher experiment. I think it's an appropriate experiment and will be curious to follow its effects.

The second story is that Arne Duncan announced a loan forgiveness program for students at Corinthian Colleges (the NYT's story is here).

Corinthian is a network of for-profit colleges that declared bankruptcy this spring amid widespread allegations of fraud. Many of its students use federal loans to pay the bulk of their tuition.

The amazing detail in this story is that, if all Corinthian students take advantage of the loan forgiveness, US taxpayers would be footing the $3.5 billion bill! This is a significant amount of money and I am actually surprised that the Department of Education has the authority to make this decision without Congressional input. That said, it sounds as though there are some Republicans (including John Kline, head of the House Education and Workforce Committee) who support Duncan's position.

Lamar Alexander, on the other hand, objects strongly:

“Students have been hurt, but the department is establishing a precedent that puts taxpayers on the hook for what a college may have done,” said Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, and chairman of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. 

“This is one more reason it was a bad idea to make the U.S. Department of Education the banker for students as well as the regulator of their colleges,” he continued. “If your car is a lemon you don’t sue the bank that made the auto loan; you sue the car company.”

Upon initial reflection, I'm inclined to agree with my old friend, the sweater-wearing Lamar (I always appreciated his moderation): it seems that the appropriate target for students' frustration would be Corinthian rather than the US government. That said, I do appreciate that Corinthian is not in a position to forgive the student loans and, therefore, it's up to the Department of Education to make the decision about whether to pursue the loan payments.

Here's some background about the company, from today's story in the Times:

Founded in 1995, Corinthian became one of the country’s largest for-profit education companies, buying up struggling vocational colleges across the country. It formerly had more than 110,000 students at 100 Heald, Everest and Wyotech campuses nationwide. The company was a longtime target for federal and state regulators, with a host of investigations and lawsuits charging falsified placement rates, deceptive marketing and predatory recruiting, targeting the most vulnerable low-income students.

Charter Schools Remain a Focus

There is an interesting article in The Washington Post this morning (here) about tensions between charter schools and traditional (neighborhood) schools.

The specific focus of Bill Turque's reporting is funding disparities in Washington. Whereas charter schools with soaring enrollment have to improvise to find library, gym, and auditorium space, traditional schools (including those with declining student populations) have received major upgrades in the past few years:

Even as charter schools soar in popularity, D.C. officials have often relegated these schools to second-class status, maintaining funding policies and practices that bypass charters and steer extra money to the traditional city school system. D.C. officials contend that the differences are not inequities but the hallmarks of a different educational model.

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While traveling last week, I read articles in the Atlanta and Memphis newspapers about debates related to charter schools in those jurisdictions.

In Atlanta, for instance, there is significant political debate about a proposed state-level entity that could authorize charter schools in order to bypass reluctant local school boards. 

551. As the charter movement continues to expand, will the tension between charter schools and neighborhood systems increase?  Are there any new responses/defenses to the claim that charters will lead to a "two-class" public school system?  The standard pro-charter argument is that the competition introduced into the system will cause the neighborhood schools to likewise improve. I gather from the various local debates that the issue is far from settled.

Changes in the Federal Education Agenda for 2011?

An article in yesterday's Times (by Sam Dillon, here) says that Arne Duncan and Obama's education team are having to "recalibrate" their education agenda in light of the Republicans' pending takeover of the House.

In particular, the reauthorization of No Child Left Behind may not occur because of different priorities/emphases of the two parties.  The Republicans (led by John Kline, a Minnesotan who will chair the Houe education committee) want to focus on scaling back the federal government's role, while the Democratic focus is on whether/how a school system is deemed adequate.

The last attempt to revise NCLB, in 2007, failed.  This past year, the Obama Administration focused its education agenda on the Race to the Top grants rather than NCLB. 

I had been wondering why NCLB was not in the news more often in 2010, but I gather from Dillon's piece that the law continues in effect from year to year, unless Congress amends its provisions (I was under the impression that NCLB requires affirmative reauthorization).

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For 2011, Obama has requested an additional $1.35 billion for Race to the Top grants, but the House and Senate have only approved $550 million.  The decrease in funding could limit the program's reach/effects ("Experts said the decreased financing would not inspire as much enthusiasm among states as $4 billion did").

Meanwhile, there is a major pending NCLB deadline: by 2014, every student in the USA must be "proficient" in math and reading. To that end, there's a same-page article in the Times about a major testing scandal in the Atlanta school system ("The allegations center on dozens of employees who are suspected of changing test answers to improve scores on state standardized tests").

Elizabeth Green on Lemov's Taxonomy and M.K.T.

There's a good, very thorough article in yesterday's New York Times magazine called Building a Better Teacher, by Elizabeth Green (here).

Green writes about the difficulty of pinning down what makes some teachers "good" (or great). The first part of the article reminded me of the "teaching as science vs. teaching as art" debate that we explored at Teachers College.

In the second part of the article, Green highlights two practitioner-theorists who have promising ideas.

Doug Lemov, who used to be the dean of students at the Academy of the Pacific Rim in Boston (!), spent several years locating and then analyzing the methodology of teachers who "succeed" more than most. The result of his work is Lemov's Taxonomy, a set of techniques -- most of which are focused on classroom management rather than subject-matter content -- which lead to success in the classroom:

While some education schools offer courses in classroom management, they often address only abstract ideas, like the importance of writing up systems of rules, rather than the rules themselves. Other education schools do not teach the subject at all. Lemov’s view is that getting students to pay attention is not only crucial but also a skill as specialized, intricate and learnable as playing guitar.

Deborah Loewenberg Ball takes a different tack: Ball focuses more on content than management. Rather than the E.D. Hirsch "essential knowledge" approach, however, Ball explores the way that successful teachers think about content from the perspective of how their students will process it:

Mathematicians need to understand a problem only for themselves; math teachers need both to know the math and to know how 30 different minds might understand (or misunderstand) it. Then they need to take each mind from not getting it to mastery. And they need to do this in 45 minutes or less. This was neither pure content knowledge nor what educators call pedagogical knowledge, a set of facts independent of subject matter, like Lemov’s techniques. It was a different animal altogether. Ball named it Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching, or M.K.T. She theorized that it included everything from the “common” math understood by most adults to math that only teachers need to know, like which visual tools to use to represent fractions (sticks? blocks? a picture of a pizza?) or a sense of the everyday errors students tend to make when they start learning about negative numbers. At the heart of M.K.T., she thought, was an ability to step outside of your own head. “Teaching depends on what other people think,” Ball told me, “not what you think.”

Both Lemov and Ball sound like great thinkers in teacher training / pedagogy. It was very fun to read this article about people who are coming up with concrete ideas about how to improve the teaching profession.

Carlo Rotella on Arne Duncan and the Race to the Top

I initially wrote about Arne Duncan last March, when I first heard about the "Race to the Top" grants (here). In October, I noted that David Brooks was giving props to Duncan's early efforts (here).

The Race to the Top grants are due to be awarded this spring, and I've read a number of articles about the program recently. For instance, Kevin Huffman reported that the quality of the states' applications varies wildly (here), though I struggled with understanding the differences in approach between the states that Huffman applauded (Louisiana) and those he dissed (New Jersey).

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In last week's New Yorker, Carlo Rotella has a profile of Duncan. It struck me as a balanced examination of perspectives on Duncan's work, one year in.

Rotella places Duncan squarely in the camp of education's "free-market reformers" ("his appointment represented a defeat for the unions"), and he cites as his two major pieces of evidence Duncan's support for (1) charter schools and (2) merit pay for teachers.

It is downright amazing how central charter schools have become to education policy discussions in America. I still have not read an article that clearly frames how charter schools can reach enough students to dramatically affect the education dynamic (affecting students directly --- not just by stimulating the traditional schools through competition), though that article must be out there somewhere.

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I learned in Rotella's article that Arne Duncan's mother was a major influence in his life; she started an after-school program that has become enormously successful and which shapes Duncan's argument that schools need to be open longer (14 hours a day -- I love this idea) in order to reach more kids more of the time.

Rotella also focuses a fair amount on the role of basketball in Duncan's life. This is interesting to me because his belief in the power of competition to reform public education is probably rooted in the positive role that competition (on the court) has had in his own life. It's also interesting to think that Duncan is probably closer -- emotionally, on-a-friend-level -- to Obama than any of the other Cabinet officials, since they actually play ball together.

Obama Will Increase Federal Education Funds

A big story this week has been that President Obama announced a three-year spending freeze to cover many parts of the federal government.

I do not understand this policy: on the one hand, we are increasing federal spending (for instance, the stimulus package) in order to generate more jobs, but then on the other hand we are freezing spending? The two policies seem inconsistent to me.

I assume that Obama is trying to capture some of the anti-deficit fervor that propelled Scott Brown to victory, but won't the effect of the freeze be to eliminate jobs at the same time the stimulus creates them?

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Notwithstanding the freeze, Obama announced yesterday that he plans to raise federal spending on education by about $4 billion during the next fiscal year. Nick Anderson and Michael Shear have the story in this morning's Post, here.

The additional money will include $1.35 billion more for "Race to the Top" grants and $1 billion more for the overhaul of No Child Left Behind. An interesting tidbit from the Post article is that Obama's plan includes a streamlining of the federal education bureaucracy:

Obama is expected to propose the consolidation of federal education programs. The budget he submits next week will collapse 38 K-12 programs into 11 and eliminate six programs.

Bravo to Obama for keeping funds flowing into the public education system, in particular through the innovation grants. Amidst all the brouhaha about reforming the health care system, I worry that people are forgetting that public education is the most important thing our governments (the plural is intended) do. I am glad that Obama's not losing his focus on education.

Winnie Hu on Selling Lesson Plans Online

The New York Times had an article on Sunday about the growing number of teachers who sell their lesson plans online. The article, by Winnie Hu, is here.

According to Hu, some school districts are pushing back on the practice -- or at least arguing that the district should share in any revenues that are generated:

"'To the extent that school district resources are used, then I think it’s fair to ask whether the district should share in the proceeds,' said Robert N. Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents."

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Whenever teachers can share ideas and techniques with each other, it is incredibly valuable. It's great that teachers are sharing their lesson plans online (this was just starting to happen when I was at Robinson; it sounds as though it's totally exploded now). To the extent that there's a market for the plans, I say by all means teachers should be allowed to reap the benefit of their hard work. I guess there's the potential problem of teachers selling plans that aren't in fact theirs, but that's a legal question as opposed to an educational one.

One of the difficulties/frustrations with teaching is the lock-step compensation -- working ten times harder than the teacher next door who's relying on fill-in-the-blank worksheets, but getting no validation for your efforts (at least no financial validation -- there is of course the intrinsic reward). If selling lesson plans rewards the teachers who put time and energy into making great plans, then I think that's a nice subtle pinch of capitalism that could have a positive effect.

There is, I realize, a comeback to my argument: the educational setting should not be corrupted by the profit motive; Hu's article cites to Joseph McDonald to articulate the problem with selling lesson plans:

"Beyond the unresolved legal questions, there are philosophical ones. Joseph McDonald, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, said the online selling cheapens what teachers do and undermines efforts to build sites where educators freely exchange ideas and lesson plans.

'Teachers swapping ideas with one another, that’s a great thing,' he said. 'But somebody asking 75 cents for a word puzzle reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession.'"

And yet, aren't college professors rewarded for their individual contributions to scholarship and learning? Does it corrupt their profession?

David Brooks Gives Props to Obama and Arne Duncan's Education Reforms

In March, I wrote about David Brooks's early enthusiasm for President Obama's education reform efforts (the post is here). Brooks revisited the issue on Friday, in a piece titled "The Quiet Revolution" (here).

Based on conversations with Bill Gates, Jeb Bush, and others, Brooks remains optimistic about the Obama Administration's progress thus far. He says that the Administration has had particular success in convincing some teachers unions to get on board with performance pay. Also, he reports that a number of states (including California, Illinois and Tennessee) have passed new legislation that they hope will qualify their states for some of the $4.3 billion in "Race to the Top" funding. The new state laws include provisions to facilitate the opening of more charter schools.

This is great news, and in light of Obama's lack of progress on many other issues I am happy to hear that the early reports on Arne Duncan and the Department of Education are positive.

336. Brooks mentions that there will be pushback in the months/years to come ("over the next months, there will be more efforts to water down reform. Some groups are offering to get behind health care reform in exchange for gutting education reform"). Who are the most influential education/teachers union leaders on the national level currently? Does Duncan have good relationships with them? Is he focused more on working with the national leaders or is he really emphasizing the state-level reforms?

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In a July 12 opinion piece for the Washington Post (here), Kitty J. Boitnott -- who is the president of the Virginia Education Association -- argued against additional state-level funding for charter schools in Virginia.

Boitnott stated that Virginia's local school boards already establish a wide variety 0f innovative schools with special focuses (engineering, international studies, communication, etc.), so in her view new charter legislation would be superfluous. I did not find Boitnott's arguments at all convincing, and her piece strikes me as the kind of reflexively-anti-charter position that unions often adopt.

Education in South Africa: Doron Isaacs, Zackie Achmat, and Equal Education

This picture is by Pieter Bauermeister and is from yesterday's New York Times. The picture appears with Celia Dugger's article "South African Children Push for Better Schools" (here).

Dugger reports about a movement called Equal Education, which is attempting to mobilize South Africans -- including the students themselves -- to demand improvements to the education system. 29 year old named Doron Isaacs and veteran activist Zackie Achmat lead the movement. One of their initial projects was to give students in schools in Khayelitsha (a Cape Town slum area) disposable cameras in order to create a documentary record of problems with the schools which could be used to demand greater government investment.

According to Dugger, one of the pictures -- a bank of shattered window panes -- was especially powerful; I've been searching online but haven't been able to track down the picture. The campaign worked, as the provincial government invested significantly more in local schools than it otherwise would have. In another campaign, Equal Education agitated for a science teacher at a school without one.

Dugger's story brings to mind some of the issues we discussed in Jim Ryan's race and education course. Initial attempts at education reform focus, by necessity, on physical and practical needs: facilities, teachers, books. Only once those issues are addressed can reformers move on to the more intractable systemic problems such as inequality in the "intangible" resources (quality of teachers, expectations, availability of remedial help) with which so many American public school systems continue to struggle.

At any rate, this was an inspiring story -- particularly because Equal Education has gotten the kids themselves invested in the project of improving their educations. My favorite quote: '“We want more information and knowledge,” said a ninth grader, Abongile Ndesi.'

Obama's Community College Initiative

About 1 million Americans graduate from community colleges each year. President Obama, in a speech at Macomb Community College in suburban Detroit yesterday, announced a $12 billion initiative to help community colleges expand and reach more students.

Obam's plan includes:

• $2.5 billion for construction and renovation
  
• $500 million to develop new online courses
  
• $9 billion for "challenge grants" aimed at spurring innovation

The Post's article about the initiative says that community colleges, like many institutions, are struggling with significant budget cuts and that leaders are enthusiastic that the federal funds will enable them to address some of those cuts. It also points out, however, that there are questions about whether the funds will be available for hiring new faculty.

253. What's the budget situation at PVCC currently? Have they had to cut any programs or teaching positions? What percentage of PVCC's funding (if any) comes from the state or federal governments?

A Response To My Entry About Kipp

I received a thoughtful and informative response to my entry, earlier this week (here), about Sara Mosle's review/critique of the KIPP schools.

I am hoping this person does not mind my highlighting his/her comment (I assume not, since he or she posted it?) - here is an excerpt from the response:

Wanted to chime in quickly to clear up something that was - and there's really no other way to put it - simply wrong in Mosle's Slate article. Full disclosure - I teach at a KIPP School in Newark.

You write "Mosle claims that KIPP has intentionally limited the number of its schools in most cities (typically, opening just one school in each city) so that it can dramatically highlight the performance of students in its schools versus the performance of students in traditional public schools in the same city."

Ms. Mosle simply didn't do her homework, and she misunderstands the history and structure of KIPP. Until recently, 'KIPP' as one entity didn't really exist. KIPP's early growth was largely decentralized, and driven by school leaders. If you were interested in opening a KIPP school, you got in touch with KIPP, studied the practices of the existing schools, and replicated them in the city you were in. It was entirely bottom-up, not top-down.

Now, if we have an economy of scale problem, it is that KIPP is being *prevented* from clustering and growing in the way that Mosle would like to see. I can't stress this enough - in New York there is a charter cap, which has stopped countless new charters from opening, and in many other states the main impediment to opening more KIPP/KIPP-like charters is the application process.

But don't take my word for it - do a simple search for KIPP and "clustering" and you'll see that Ms. Mosle is wildly off base. To be real, I'm sort of astonished that the editors at Slate green lighted this article without doing some basic fact checking. There are certainly problems associated with scaling the network, but the desire to do so is not one of them.

After receiving this comment, I read the 2006 Education Week article to which the commenter referred me. It's called "KIPP Schools Shift Strategy for Scaling Up" and is here.

According to this article, KIPP has had a strategy of opening multiple schools in certain urban areas:

"'You’re going to see geographic concentration be the center of our growth strategy,' said Richard Barth, KIPP’s chief executive officer...

Although KIPP officials emphasized that they remain committed to supporting all existing KIPP schools, the foundation is now starting to focus its school growth on the cluster model. KIPP officials named several communities where they are looking to grow clusters of schools, from Philadelphia and Denver to San Antonio and Chicago. The first cluster, now with four schools, is in New York City."

This is interesting - the Education Week article contradicts Mosle's premise that there's an effort to limit the KIPP presence in particular cities -- at least as of 2006, the organization was aiming to do the opposite via the cluster concept.

The Ed Week article also gave me additional insight into what exactly it means to "be" a KIPP school:

"The KIPP Foundation licenses its name to independently run schools, or clusters of schools. It recruits, trains, and supports principals as they open and run schools. The foundation may revoke the KIPP name if it is dissatisfied with a school’s quality and fidelity to the model."

This model could be tricky, since it depends on oversight of the individual schools by an outside body (and since outside oversight is an analog to traditional school system bureaucracy, which the charter school philosophy criticizes as misguided (at least in some respects?)).

KIPP - A Review of the Knowledge is Power Program

The "Knowledge is Power Program" (KIPP) (the website is here) was founded in 1994 by David Levin and Michael Feinberg, two Teach for America alums in Houston.

I have come across frequent references to KIPP over the past five years as I read articles about the charter school movement. They now have 66 schools in 19 states, most (all?) of which are charter schools.

KIPP's educational philosophy tracks, quite closely, the philosophy of Nativity Prep and the other Nativity schools: an emphasis on family involvement (memorialized in the form of a contract signed by parents), long school days (plus half-a-day every other Saturday, similar to Nativity's Saturday field trips), lots of homework, rigorous discipline (including the teaching of social skills like continuous eye contact with someone to whom you are talking (I love this!)), and an emphasis on the basic skills of reading and writing.

KIPP has always struck me as an excellent operation and I have been heartened when I read about their expansion into different cities.

Yesterday, though, Sara Mosle wrote in Slate (the article is here) an interesting critique of KIPP. Her article takes the form of a book review of Jay Mathews' new book "Work Hard. Be Nice." - which she portrays as a glowing, overly laudatory examination of the KIPP approach to education.

Mosle claims that KIPP has intentionally limited the number of its schools in most cities (typically, opening just one school in each city) so that it can dramatically highlight the performance of students in its schools versus the performance of students in traditional public schools in the same city. The core of Mosle's argument is that KIPP has yet to show that it can replicate -- on a broad scale -- its successes with those urban students who are fortunate enough to enroll in its schools and, moreover, that the students/families who seek out KIPP are self-selecting (therefore, comparisons with traditional schools are flawed from the get-go).

Mosle is on to something here. In my article about charter schools in '04, one of my major concerns was that charters would reach only the families who were predisposed to seek them out and would be prevented from reaching all students because traditional public schools satisfy an economies-of-scale problem.

That said, I think she is a little bit too negative about KIPP, particularly in light of their steady expansion over the years -- I think the people involved with this program do view it as something that can be replicated on a broad scale, and I am not as pessimistic as Mosle about their potential to effect systemic change.

David Brooks Supports Obama's Education Plan

David Brooks, in today's NYT, applauds Obama for his education plan - in particular for his willingness to break with teachers' unions on merit pay.

131. For the school systems that have begun to use merit pay, how are assessments of "merit" made? Purely on test scores? Student and parent interviews? Assessments by other teachers?

132. How strongly are the unions coming out against Obama on this point? Are they bending to his will at all?

Brooks's analysis of education reform that works is misguided in this way: he recognizes the extreme importance of the teacher/student bond ("We’ve spent years working on ways to restructure schools, but what matters most is the relationship between one student and one teacher. You ask a kid who has graduated from high school to list the teachers who mattered in his life, and he will reel off names. You ask a kid who dropped out, and he will not even understand the question."), but he spends the entire second half of the article arguing that "standards" are the critical piece in improving public schools.

Brooks does not seem to appreciate what "standards" mean in practice: standardized tests, which almost always means multiple-choice tests, which means less inspired teaching -- not more. I am oversimplifying, but Brooks does not address the inherent tension between standardization and nurturing/rewarding the kind of teaching -- not focused on drilling answers to multiple-choice tests -- that can actually captures students' interest and imagination.

133. Ross Douthat was announced this week as the replacement for Bill Kristol as a NYT columnist - what a coup for this guy (he's 29). How much do NYT columnists get paid? Will he continue to blog, either on the Atlantic website or the Times website?

Arne Duncan and the Department of Education

A story on the News Hour tonight said that the Department of Education currently has $5 billion in discretionary funds (overall, according to the Washington Post, "public education is slated to receive about $100 billion in new federal money under the stimulus package") -- this is in stark contrast to a typical year, in which the DOE may have $100 or $200 million that's not already allocated towards specific programs.

Wow! I just have been doing some internet research and the $5 billion really is discretionary -- it will take the form of grants awarded to states and districts that provide evidence of programs that work.

The grants program is called the "Race to the Top." Here's the description on the DOE website:

Under the $5 billion in SFSF reserved for the Secretary of Education to make competitive grants, the Department will conduct a national competition among states for a $4.35 billion state incentive "Race to the Top" fund to improve education quality and results statewide. The Race to the Top fund will help states drive substantial gains in student achievement by supporting states making dramatic progress on the four reform goals described above and effectively using other ARRA funds. $650 million of the $5 billion will be set aside in the "Invest in What Works and Innovation" fund and be available through a competition to districts and non-profit groups with a strong track record of results. Guidelines and applications for the competitive funds will be posted expeditiously. Race to the Top grants will be made in two rounds—fall 2009 and spring 2010.

127. Is "Race to the Top" a big deal right now in educational circles? I had not heard about it, but I have to imagine that education reformers are loving this.

128. Obama and Duncan are both arguing that state caps on the number of charter schools (currently there are 26 states which have such caps) be lifted. Do charter schools have a strong lobbying arm right now? If not their results (since the evidence remains mixed), what accounts for their consistent ability to garner support from both political parties?

129. In terms of pedagogy, what's the significant of the national teacher certification that Duncan talks about? How do you get the certification?

130. How often does Duncan actually visit schools? I'd like to read that he was visiting one school a week as part of his regular schedule.

Eliot Spitzer on Reforming the Higher Education Loan System

Eliot Spitzer, in a piece on Slate, advocates an "income contingent" student loan repayment system as a way to reform higher education financing. He points out that such a system was first proposed by Milton Friedman.

Essentially, an income contingent system would base the amount of student loan repayments on the amount of income that the graduate is making at any given time (thus, it could change over time):

"The concept is simple: Instead of paying upfront or taking loans with repayment schedules unrelated to income, students would accept an obligation to pay a fixed percentage of their income for a specified period of time, regardless of the income level achieved. Suppose a university charged $40,000 a year in annual tuition. A standard 20-year loan in the amount of $160,000 (40,000 times four) would produce an immediate postgraduate debt obligation of $1,228.50 per month, or $14,742 per year, not sustainable at a salary of $25,000 or anything close to it. Under a smart loan program, the student could pay about 11 percent of his income, with an initial payback of $243 per month, or $2,916 per year, which is feasible at a job paying $25,000. If, after five years, the student's salary jumped to $100,000, payments would jump accordingly and move up over time as income increases."

The political problem with an income contingent loan repayment system, as Spitzer acknowledges, is that it is redistributionist -- the wealthier students subsidize those making less. My retort to this is that our tax system is redistributionist, and this seems like such a good approach/method for influencing the way graduates choose jobs so that earning-capacity becomes less of a focal point.

115. It's so Slate-ish that Spitzer is writing for them -- who approached who? Did Slate seek him out or vice versa?

116. I think I read an article a few years ago about Australia using this kind of loan system (and Spitzer points out that it is used in foreign countries). Other than the redistribution angle, what are the other drawbacks of this system? Does it create perverse incentives to work less? In terms of reconceptualizing our societal economic "goals" (see my post on February 23), maybe that would be a good thing?