Even ESPN calls poker a “sport.”  But as more students develop a gambling addiction, should colleges come to the table with new policies? (Politics Daily)

Research shows that abstinence-only sex education doesn’t actually promote abstinence.  But could the new health care bill require schools to teach it anyway? (Education Week)

Remember how schools were once mocked for banning dodgeball?  Now they’re getting thumped for not banning it. (New York Daily News)

So even if Boston AP teachers qualify for a bonus based on their students’ scores, the union says no go? (Ed is Watching)

Since when did Finding Nemo become a movie kids would watch in science? (Joanne Jacobs)

What does the coach of Real Madrid have in common with the coaches of the Crimson Tide and the USC Trojans? (Business Pundit)

Are reading scores really soaring?  Or is it just the new forms of assessment? (Washington Post)

Trend setters are abandoning baggy pants for skinny jeans. But what are the odds of wearing them in one Texas district? Slim to none. (Dallas Morning News)

Which doesn’t mean we shouldn’t compare ourselves to other countries and act on the results. The legitimate methodological questions raised in this recent report from Cliff Adelman at IHEP notwithstanding, I think it’s clear that, overall, America’s historic advantage over other countries in college attainment has shrunk, and if you throw associate’s degrees into the mix we’re no longer number one. If Canada can help roughly 50 percent of its adult population get some kind of post-secondary degree and we’re only at 40 percent, then 50 percent seems like a reasonable goal to shoot for. And if other countries can achieve significant increases in college attainment over the course of one generation, it’s reasonable to think that we could too.

But that’s not the same as saying that it’s bad for America that lots more Canadian students are earning college degrees. One of the reasons Canada is our biggest trading partner is that it has a stable democratic government and a highly-developed economy full of well-educated people who make enough money to buy products like iPods from the United States as well as provide universal health care to fellow citizens who then do useful things like make very good indie rock albums that people in America buy in turn. And if you run down the list of our closest higher education competitors—Finland, New Zealand, Norway, Japan—one can make similar observations. By contrast, none of our competitors are destabilizing their respective regions or miring U.N. troops in internecine warfare or letting large segments of their populations starve. That’s probably not a coincidence. Think of it this way: If, from a position of pure American self-interest, we could press a button and reduce the college attainment rate of every other country to at least five percentage points below ours, should we? I’d say the answer is obviously no.

Granted, there are a couple of clear complications to this idea. First, it wasn’t that long ago that the country which invented the research university and produced some of the greatest works of art and philosophy the world has ever known decided to direct its intellectual and productive capacity toward waging a massive campaign of slaughter and world domination. All I can say is that I hope those two things are orthogonal to one another because if not, we’re all doomed. Second, Canada, New Zealand et al are a lot smaller that we are. What if a country that’s much bigger exceeds our proportional level of human capital? If that means it becomes harder for us to buy consumer goods produced in foreign sweatshops on the cheap, I’m not sure that’s a bad thing. The question is bound up in larger cultural, political and geostrategic issues that are hard to predict. Again, I’d like to believe we’re all better off in a world where more people escape the immiseration of ignorance and poverty and have access to the universe of human potential that higher education affords.

Why, then, are international comparisons so often framed in threatening terms? Politics, mostly. People are invigorated by competitive pressure laced with fear. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard someone say, “What we need is another Sputnik.” Insofar as this is more or less the same thing as saying “What we need is for the populace to be so terrified by the prospect of nuclear annihilation and / or worldwide subservience to a totalitarian and dehumanizing ideological system highly correlated with genocide that they’ll invest some more money in science and math education even though it’s not entirely clear what the one really has to do with the other,” I’ve always wondered if those people were really thinking things through. Better that we should invest in higher education with the aim of spreading its benefits as far and wide as possible, not just for our own good but for everyone, since in the long run they’re really one and the same.

What happens when a mayor’s plan to tax college tuition payments hits the public eye? Pretty much what you’d expect. (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette)

What if students who signed up for college math could, you know, do college math? (The Diamondback)

Andy wanted a whole new name – but Jay ups the ante: What one word would you most want to see in the name of the new education law? (Class Struggle)

Want a Job Beyond Description? (University of California Santa Cruz)

Also, tomorrow there’s an event on extending time, this one by the Campaign for High School Equity.

Data reported by school divisions to VDOE show that while African-Americans make up 26 percent of the statewide student population, only 12 percent of students identified as gifted are black. Hispanics make up nine percent of the student population and five percent of students identified as gifted.

Racial disparities in gifted vs. regular education classes seemed obvious enough to me when I attended public schools in Virginia. One can only hope that this study will put some momentum behind addressing those disparities.

And if the Virgina DOE isn’t already planning to take a look at the state’s magnet schools, I’d recommend special attention to them in the study. While these schools provide an excellent public school option for many families, there isn’t much information right now on whether they are a realistic choice for low-income or minority students–or if they just provide another nice option for the state’s middle- and upper-income families.

Loan default rates are one of the few federal performance metrics that give any sense of whether students are struggling with too much to repay in debt. This measure is usually presented in what is known as a cohort default rate. This is calculated by establishing a cohort for each year, which is defined as the number of individuals that took out student loans and left their institution (through graduation or dropping out) in that year. The default rate is then calculated by dividing the number of students from that cohort who default on their loans by the end of the next federal fiscal year by the total number of borrowers from that group. In other words, student loan borrowers who left their institution in 2007 are tracked until Sept. 30, 2009, the end of the federal fiscal year, but not further.

While this measure provides some insight into student loan repayment success, it also has numerous flaws. Chief among them is that cohort default rates say nothing about long-term repayment prospects, making it impossible to see if failing to pay back loans is something largely confined to the first few years after leaving an institution, or if it grows over time. (This 2007 Education Sector report talks more about cohort default rates.)

The annual report released yesterday by the Federal Student Aid Office, however, provides some interesting longer-term measures known as the Cumulative Lifetime Default Rate (CLTDR). In contrast to the cohort measure, which treats all borrowers the same regardless of how many loans they took out, the CLTDR calculates the percentage of loans that entered repayment in a given year and then sees what percentage of them had defaulted by different points in time. In other words, the CLTDR for 2003 loans as reported in 2009 shows the percentage of loans that entered in repayment in 2003 that had defaulted by the end of the 2009 fiscal year. The annual report also has data for the same group of loans over several years, making it possible to see how much the percentage of defaulted loans increases over time.

The table below shows the CLTDR for the 1999 through 2007 loan cohorts by the number of years after that group entered repayment.* The black shaded part represents data points that have yet to be collected because insufficient time has elapsed.

Not surprisingly, the data show that longer measurement windows results in higher default rates. Only 5.5 percent of loans that entered repayment in 2003 defaulted within two years, but by 2009 that rate nearly doubled to 10.9 percent. With the exception of the 2007 cohort, this same pattern seems to hold for the other loan groups as well. But this substantial increase over time raises the question of whether this is the result of a rapid increase in defaults, followed by a leveling off, or does it reflect a more prolonged and steady expansion?

To answer that question, the table below shows the  year-to-year percentage point changes in the default rate. The 1999 and 2007 loan groups have been excluded because neither has multiple data points.

As the data show, the most pronounced percentage point increases in the CLTDR do occur in the first few years after entering repayment, with most groups showing annual increases of around 2 percentage points in their default rate. This then slows to a change of about 1 percentage point in the fifth and sixth years. But even though the rate of change does slow down over time, it is still around 1 percentage point a year, even six years into repayment. This suggests that student loan default is not a short-term worry, but something that persists for a long period of time.

At the same time, the high default rates displayed here should be cause for concern, especially among the most recent group. For starters, it’s likely that looking at loans rather than borrowers in terms of defaulting actually undercounts the problem. Consider the following hypothetical group of two borrowers with eight loans total, four each. Under the CLTDR method, if a single student defaults on one of his or her loans, then the default rate is one out of eight, or 12.5 percent. By contrast, if one student defaulted on any of their loans, the cohort default rate for that population would be 1 out of 2, or 50 percent. This explains why the Department’s estimates for cohort default rates measured under a three- or four-year window are somewhat higher than CLTDR examined for the same period of time.

Just like all other default measures, the CLTDR is not without its flaws. But until the Department provides better longer-term cohort default rate data, it is one of the few longer-term metrics available.