My simple thoughts on Madison’s latest Superintendent, Jennifer Cheatham:

How is the new Superintendent Doing?

Our community faces several historic challenges:

Despite spending double the national average per student, Madison’s reading results are a disaster. The Superintendent has been talking about this and there are indications that at least administrative attention to this urgent problem has changed.

Perhaps the most significant challenge our community faces is that school districts largely remain as they were a century ago: doing the same thing over and over yet becoming more costly each year. The rest of the world is obviously not standing still (www.wisconsin2.org)

The organizational stasis continues despite:

A. The information revolution:
I had dinner with some college students recently. All bright and motivated, they mentioned using the Khan Academy and many other online resources to learn. Sometimes supplementing coursework and in other cases replacing inadequate classroom lectures.

B. A few public schools are re-thinking their models:
Some Wisconsin Public schools are moving toward year around schedules:

Madison, meanwhile, seems largely content with the status quo:

C. Substantial growth in property taxes over the years, despite big changes in homeownership trends, demographics (rental growth) and the local economy.

https://www.schoolinfosystem.org/2013/06/09/madison_schools_89/

http://www.waxingamerica.com/2006/02/nineteen_financ.html

D. Michael Barry (the Madison School District’s Business Services Director) recently confirmed to me via email that 25% of the District’s 2014-2015 budget is spent on benefits (!)

Those trends will be very difficult to address within the current structure.

In summary: two big challenges: disastrous reading problems and an organization structure created for 1914.

It is too early to tell how things are going, though the District could certainly share reading results throughout the most recent school year, via its test results.

The interested reader would do well to review previous Superintendent coverage before, during and after. It is revealing. Pat Schneider takes a quick survey, here.

Henry Whitehead:

Dear Editor: While I bet much of sleepy Madison loved your article on new super-intendent Jennifer Cheatham, I found it both revolting and a perfect microcosm for the extreme flaws in the way we talk about student issues in Madison. The Madison School District and local media refuse to ever put the focus of these types of conversations on students. “Locals,” to you, means 11 bureaucrats and one graduated student. I have no interest in hearing from self-serving members of various boards and committees.

What I want, and what I never get, is testimonies from actual kids in the district who are struggling, who have had a problem during their K-12 years, and who could be better served by the Madison School District. I want to hear from a kid whose only meal comes at school, telling me the actual truth about whether their situation has improved or worsened, not 12 nearly identical, nondescriptive praises by adults. Put the focus where it belongs.

Gillian Tett:

Last week, my daughters experienced a very modern American childhood ritual. The teachers at their Manhattan school suddenly locked the classroom door and told everyone to hide under their desks, or inside the cupboard. Then somebody walked along the corridor outside, banging on the doors in a menacing manner, shouting, “Let me in.”

The teacher kept the door shut and told the children to silently crouch down, as part of a so-called Code Red drill. “It was very scary,” one of my daughters observed. “But this is what we have to do if a stranger comes into school.”

Welcome to one of the quirks of America in 2014. When I was a child at a British school 30 years ago, I often took part in fire drills, to prepare for the remote risk of a fire. But these days, American schools are not just conducting fire evacuations. In the wake of recent attacks on educational establishments – such as the tragic shootings in Newtown, Connecticut in late 2012, or the attacks on a California college last week – they are actively drilling children on how to respond to violent attacks as well.

These drills vary across the country. In some American schools, teachers have decided that they want “realistic” drills, so children huddle in places such as the gym while somebody fires a blank gun. In other establishments, teachers keep the threat relatively vague. Meanwhile, in the trendier parts of Brooklyn, the schools are so worried about psychological distress that they offer counselling to pupils after the drills.

Ben Austin, via a kind email:

Last week was an important moment in the Parent Power movement.

On Friday, LAUSD Superintendent John Deasy came to West Athens Elementary School in South LA to sign a groundbreaking Partnership Agreement with the leadership of the West Athens Parents Union, called the “Aguilas de West Athens” (AWA) – all without the parents having to gather a single Parent Trigger petition.

This negotiated Partnership Agreement is the result of collaboration and cooperation on the part of both the school district and parents. It invests $300,000 in new staffing positions (including a school psychologist and psychiatric social worker) to address issues of school climate and student safety; increases focus on Common Core implementation and professional development for teachers; and commits to strengthening parent voice and parent power in the school over the coming year.

There has been a ton of good media coverage (which you can read on our blog here), but we thought you might be most interested in hearing directly from the parents themselves who have led this effort. Below is a short video from Winter Hall, one of the parent leaders from West Athens, sharing her story about why she got involved and how the Parents Union was able to win these changes for their kids:
Winter Play

The efforts at West Athens are an important barometer of where the idea and the movement behind parent trigger are heading in California. As more and more districts come to terms with the political power and moral authority that organized parents now possess, we will continue to see more and more proof points of parents able to use their power to create “kids first” reforms at their school, regardless of whether or not they actually use the law to “trigger” the change.

Thank you again for your support. We will continue to keep you updated on everything happening at West Athens Elementary and elsewhere.

Parent Revolution

Related MTI (Madison Teachers, Inc.) Red Fills Doyle Auditorium; Collective Bargaining to Begin.

Related links:

Oconomowoc & Madison.

Madison’s Distastrous Reading Results.

2005: When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before.

2008: Commentary & Links on Madison’s reading results.

Jessica Arp:

–

A local family is fighting with officials at Edgewood High School over allegedly failing to stop racial harassment.

The family is asking for tuition money back, while school officials said they handled things appropriately.

Blake Broadnax spent two and a half years as a student at Edgewood High School, played on the basketball team and was active in school events. But he said that throughout that time, he was the victim of racially motivated harassment, which escalated into his junior year. Blake and his mother Rena told their story to News 3 from their new home in Indiana.

“I think the worst situation for me, out of everything that had happened, was in public speaking,” Blake Broadnax said. “I had asked a kid to edit my speech and he gave it back to me and crossed out my name, Blake Broadnax, and wrote ‘My little niglet.’ Then he wrote the n-word on the paper about 10 more times.”

Documents provided by Edgewood High School to the Broadnax family attorney detail the incident in March of last year. The student was pulled from classes, given an out of school suspension, required to apologize and put on disciplinary probation.

But Blake Broadnax said this was not the only incident. In November, he walked out of school after a student allegedly discussing rhyming vocabulary words told him that “trigger” and the n-word rhymed. Blake claims he’d been hearing the n-word every day for months.

“I expected racial things to happen so much that I would be relieved when it did happen because then I could go on with my day,” Blake Broadnax said.

Joseph Epstein:

For those who have not yet caught up with it, in the academic world the phrase “trigger warning” means alerting students to books that might “trigger” deleterious emotional effects. Should a Jewish student be asked to read “Oliver Twist” with its anti-Semitic caricature of Fagin, let alone “The Merchant of Venice,” whose central figure is the Jewish usurer Shylock? Should African-American students be required to read “Huckleberry Finn,” with its generous use of the “n-word,” or “Heart of Darkness,” which equates the Congo with the end of rational civilization? Should students who are ardent pacifists be made to read about warfare in Tolstoy and Stendhal, or for that matter the Iliad? As for gay and lesbian students, or students who have suffered sexual abuse, or those who have a physical handicap . . . one could go on.

Pointing out the potentially damaging effects of books began, like so much these days, on the Internet, where intellectual Samaritans began listing such emotionally troublesome books on their blogs. Before long it was picked up by the academy. At the University of California at Santa Barbara, the student government suggested that all course syllabi contain trigger warnings. At Oberlin College the Office of Equity Concerns advised professors to steer clear of works that might be interpreted as sexist or racist or as vaunting violence.

Movies have of course long been rated and required to note such items as Adult Language, Violence, Nudity—ratings that are themselves a form of trigger warning. Why not books, even great classic books? The short answer is that doing so insults the intelligence of those supposedly serious enough to attend college by suggesting they must not be asked to read anything that fails to comport with their own beliefs or takes full account of their troubled past experiences.

Libby Nelson:

It’s graduation time, an occasion for commencement speakers, academic regalia, and celebrating achievement. One achievement has become a lot more common over the past few decades: the master’s degree, the fastest-growing college credential in the US.

More than 16 million people in the US — about 8 percent of the population — now have a master’s, a 43 percent increase since 2002.

And as master’s degrees have grown, so has the debt that comes with them. The typical total debt for a borrower with an undergraduate and graduate degree is now more than $57,000, up from $40,200 in 2004. (This includes medical and law degrees.)

Alan Borsuk:

I was there when dozens of heavily armed men descended on Clarke Street School, bringing life inside the school and in the surrounding neighborhood to a halt.

This was good. They were members of the Secret Service and the Milwaukee Police Department. And they were there because the president of the United States had come in person to N. 27th St. and W. Center St. to sing the praises of the school.

George W. Bush watched as students demonstrated their reading ability in a classroom and then spoke to about 200 students and adults in the gym. He called Clarke Street “a center of excellence.” It was a school having the kind of success Bush argued could occur in similar schools across the nation.

That was May 2002. Now it’s May 2014 and no one comes to Clarke Street to sing its praises any more. On the playground — a place where I’ve stood and watched kids play — a 10-year-old Clarke Street student, Sierra Guyton, was shot and severely wounded in daylight last week, innocent victim of others’ fights and stupidity.

In the fall of 2001, I wrote a long piece for this newspaper about the recipe for the success of Clarke Street, which consistently outscored not only MPS but the state in reading and math. Clarke had no entrance standards, no specialty program, and not much parent involvement.

Sumatha Reddy

Children still in kindergarten or even younger form cliques and intentionally exclude others, say psychologists and educators who are increasingly noticing the behavior and taking steps to curb it.

Special programs are popping up in elementary schools to teach empathy as a means of stemming relational aggression, a psychological term to describe using the threat of removing friendship as a tactical weapon. Children also are being guided in ways to stand up for themselves, and to help others, in instances of social exclusion. Though both boys and girls exhibit relational aggression, it is thought to be more common among girls because they are generally more socially developed and verbal than boys.

“I think it’s remarkable that we’re seeing this at younger and younger ages,” said Laura Barbour, a counselor at Stafford Primary School in West Linn, Ore., who has worked in elementary schools for 24 years. “Kids forget about scuffles on the playground but they don’t forget about unkind words or being left out.”

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Board of Education meetings on May 12 and 15 were a sea of red, as MTI members produced an overflow crowd, calling for Contract negotiations for the 2015-16 school year. Numerous MTI members, supported by four past-presidents on the Board of Education, State Representatives Melissa Sargent, Dianne Hesselbein and Chris Taylor, spoke to the Board. Congressman Pocan sent a strong statement of support for MTI which was read into the record by Rep. Sargent.

Rep. Sargent also read into the record a petition calling for negotiations. It was signed by Senators Jon Erpenbach, Mark Miller, Fred Risser and Representatives Sargent, Hesselbein, Taylor, Pope, Berceau and Kahl. The petition stated, in part:

“We all share a common interest in making sure every child has access to a quality public education and in supporting our teachers’ efforts to create the best public schools in the state and nation. When teachers are prohibited from coming to the bargaining table, our public school children and schools suffer. Our teachers’ firsthand experience in the classroom gives them a unique perspective in developing best practices and firsthand knowledge of the needs of our public school children.

In Dane County, we have seen 50 years of positive and productive labor relations. This benefits our children and helps create strong schools and communities. Positive employee relations are developed, in part, through the collective bargaining process where employers and employees create the best possible working environment together. Unfortunately, Act 10 eroded the ability to negotiate in good faith.

Guaranteeing that teachers have a voice in what goes on in their classrooms is critically important in ensuring every child is learning in the best possible environment.”
Congressman Pocan’s statement, in part, follows: “Employees are the most important component to the success of any employer, and working with these unions makes good sense, as the employees have the institutional knowledge of the operation. Collective bargaining is an opportunity to address important issues together.”

Also stepping up to the plate in calling for negotiations was the District’s Student Senate. Led by Student BOE representative Luke Gangler (Memorial), they submitted a petition to the Board which stated, in part, “… Whereas, international courts and human rights organizations have since identified collective bargaining as a fundamental right of workers; and Whereas, the right of school staff to collectively bargain has a direct impact on the learning environment of students … Resolved, that the MMSD Student Senate recommend that the MMSD Board of Education approve extensions of employee contracts with MTI, AFSCME, and the Building Trades Council through 2015-16.”

Bargaining will begin today. Those represented by MTI, in all five bargaining units, are reminded to watch the MTI website and MTI Facebook for an urgent call to a Contract ratification meeting. Notice will be sent to all members for whom MTI has a personal email address. Notice will also be sent to the members of all MTI Boards of Directors & Bargaining Committees, MTI Faculty Representatives and EA-MTI Building Representatives.
The presentations to the Board can be viewed on the District’s website.

I wonder if parents have used the “crowd a meeting” tactic successfully? Fascinating.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

This is the natural evolution of every enterprise under the curse of success: from making a good into selling the good, into progressively selling what looks like the good, then going bust after they run out of suckers and the story repeats itself … (The cheapest to deliver effect: “successful” cheese artisans end up hiring managers and progress into making rubber that looks like cheese, replaced by artisans who in turn become “successful”…).

Nassim Nicholas Taleb.

Olga Khazan:

Los Angeles Unified, the country’s second-largest school system, is home to more than 650,000 students, and 42 percent of them are overweight or obese. In 2011, the district decided healthier school lunches were the best way to help them not be.

At that point, Los Angeles was already on the julienning edge when it came to fighting childhood obesity through food: It outlawed sodas in schools in 2004, banned selling junk food on campus, and swapped the bulk of its canned and frozen produce for fresh.

But the new menus were the most austere measure yet, cutting kid-friendly favorites like chocolate milk, chicken nuggets, corn dogs, and nachos. Instead, little Jayden and Mia would dine on vegetarian curries, tostada salad, and fresh pears.

A student rebellion ensued—kids brought Flamin’ Hot Cheetos to school rather than much on quinoa salad—and L.A. Unified was forced to settle for a middle ground between Alice Waters and Ronald McDonald.

Rebecca Ryan:

We need to talk about the Race to Equity report, the project launched to reduce racial disparities in Dane County. No, I’m not talking about talking about the data. Or whether we’re surprised by the data. We need to talk about our role in this. Forty years of crappy outcomes for Black people didn’t happen overnight. If you’re north of thirty years old and have lived in Madison as an adult, it’s happened on our watch. We share responsibility.

I have wrestled with this thought since I read the report last fall: I am complicit in these results. And it’s time for us, the majority culture, to face this head-on. We can’t sit idly while Reverend Alex Gee’s Black caucus designs a way forward. And Madison schools superintendent Jennifer Cheatham isn’t going to solve this for us, either.

We, the majority population, need our own focused response to improve outcomes for Black citizens. Black Madisonians have a sense of urgency; they’ve been living in the narrows of opportunity for two generations. White people don’t have the same now-or-never attitude. Over forty years, we’ve allowed and enabled these issues to grow silently, like an undetected cancer, through our community.

There are so many things we whites must do to move in a better direction for all Madisonians. Here are some that I’ve been thinking about.

Associated Press:

The University of Wisconsin-Superior is cutting nearly half of its graduate programs as it deals with a looming deficit.

Chancellor Renee Wachter said this week that 11 of 25 graduate programs will be suspended, meaning the programs won’t admit any more students, but those currently enrolled will graduate. The programs include masters’ degrees in art history and communication, and masters’ degrees in education for reading and library media specialists.

The theater program is also under review, Wachter said.

Wachter said the university has to make up $4.5 million with either budget cuts or additional revenue in the next five years.

The university began a self-study in the fall of 2013 to identify areas for potential cost reductions.

Jessica Rodrigue:

A handful of cities across the country are becoming laboratories for an invigorated school reform movement—the result, depending on whom you ask, either of great political courage or massive budget shortfalls. Since 2005, the number of students in charter schools in Chicago has more than tripled, and Philadelphia has replaced traditional public schools with a new arrangement in which a mix of public and privately run schools are overseen by a central entity. “If we don’t make these changes, we haven’t lived up to our responsibility as adults to the children of the city of Chicago,” Mayor Rahm Emanuel said last year of his plan to overhaul the Windy City’s sprawling school system.

But these reform efforts are not without casualties, as the number of shuttered schools in urban communities from New Orleans to Newark can attest. In the past year alone, 24 schools have been closed in Philadelphia and 50 have been closed in Chicago—the largest number of any school district in the country. Last week, community activists filed three federal civil rights complaints in Newark, New Orleans and Chicago, charging that students of color have been disproportionately affected by the wave of school closures. Jessica Rodrigue, a Chicago-based photographer, visited the schools in her own city last summer to document the closures. Her photos of moving boxes, empty auditoriums and papered-over signs reflect the suddenness of the change that threw so many young lives into uncertainty.

Julia Schmalz

The president of Saint Paul’s College, Millard (Pete) Stith, has the unusual mandate of selling his institution. He took over management after the historically black college was unable to pay its debts, lost its accreditation, and closed in 2013. Along with a staff of 22, he maintains the campus in hopes that another college will purchase it during a sealed-bid auction, on June 25.

TRANSCRIPT

MILLARD (PETE) STITH: I’d like for them to come just live with me for a week and see what you have to do when your school is about to go belly-up. There’s no course you can take. You know everyday you are making a decision that you never thought you’d have to make in your life.

(TEXT) 1888: Saint Paul’s College was founded by Rev. James Solomon Russell in Lawrenceville, Virginia.

(TEXT) 2013: Unable to overcome financial difficulties the school closed its doors to students.

MILLARD (PETE) STITH: Saint Paul’s was started in 1888. It was an elementary and high school, and then, in the 1940s, the General Assembly gave him permission to start a college, a four-year college.

Joshua Rothman:

A few years ago, when I was a graduate student in English, I presented a paper at my department’s American Literature Colloquium. (A colloquium is a sort of writing workshop for graduate students.) The essay was about Thomas Kuhn, the historian of science. Kuhn had coined the term “paradigm shift,” and I described how this phrase had been used and abused, much to Kuhn’s dismay, by postmodern insurrectionists and nonsensical self-help gurus. People seemed to like the essay, but they were also uneasy about it. “I don’t think you’ll be able to publish this in an academic journal,” someone said. He thought it was more like something you’d read in a magazine.

Was that a compliment, a dismissal, or both? It’s hard to say. Academic writing is a fraught and mysterious thing. If you’re an academic in a writerly discipline, such as history, English, philosophy, or political science, the most important part of your work—practically and spiritually—is writing. Many academics think of themselves, correctly, as writers. And yet a successful piece of academic prose is rarely judged so by “ordinary” standards. Ordinary writing—the kind you read for fun—seeks to delight (and, sometimes, to delight and instruct). Academic writing has a more ambiguous mission. It’s supposed to be dry but also clever; faceless but also persuasive; clear but also completist. Its deepest ambiguity has to do with audience. Academic prose is, ideally, impersonal, written by one disinterested mind for other equally disinterested minds. But, because it’s intended for a very small audience of hyper-knowledgable, mutually acquainted specialists, it’s actually among the most personal writing there is. If journalists sound friendly, that’s because they’re writing for strangers. With academics, it’s the reverse.

Professors didn’t sit down and decide to make academic writing this way, any more than journalists sat down and decided to invent listicles. Academic writing is the way it is because it’s part of a system. Professors live inside that system and have made peace with it. But every now and then, someone from outside the system swoops in to blame professors for the writing style that they’ve inherited. This week, it was Nicholas Kristof, who set off a rancorous debate about academic writing with a column, in the Times, called “Professors, We Need You!” The academic world, Kristof argued, is in thrall to a “culture of exclusivity” that “glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience”; as a result, there are “fewer public intellectuals on American university campuses today than a generation ago.”

John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge

Fifty years ago, Lyndon Johnson unveiled his vision of the “Great Society”. This would be one in which no child would go unfed and no youngster unschooled; a society in which the ancient evils of racism and injustice would be combated; a society, above all, in which the state would deliver justice and opportunity.

Most anniversaries pass unnoticed, and rightly so. But this one matters. The era of the Great Society was perhaps the last time Americans thought government could improve their lives. The 1964 election pitted Johnson against Barry Goldwater, an unapologetic advocate of a minimal state. Johnson won in a landslide.

The 1960s were also the heyday of the European welfare state, first outlined by Fabians such as Beatrice and Sidney Webb. Their ideas at first failed to take flight in America. But after the Great Depression and the collectivist success of the second world war, state planning was finally in fashion. Johnson’s Great Society was the Democrats’ version of the British Labour party’s New Jerusalem. Even the phrase, the “Great Society”, was stolen from a British Fabian, Graham Wallas.

Today US politics is in a stalemate and the “big government liberalism” of Johnson is in retreat. Ever since the 1970s, when the Great Society began to lose its “wars” on poverty, crime and inequality (and North Vietnam), American voters have embraced conservatives such as Ronald Reagan, who said government was the problem, not the solution; and Democrats such as Bill Clinton, who proclaimed the era of big government over. Only one in 10 Americans trusts politicians to do the right thing, compared with 60 per cent in Johnson’s time.

Imani Perry

In the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education opinion, the Supreme Court declared that state laws requiring segregation in public schools were unconstitutional. But change didn’t come easily, nor are schools all that integrated today. Sixty years after Brown, let’s examine some myths about the landmark court decision.

1. Brown v. Board of Education was only about school segregation.

It’s true that the case concerned segregation in public schools, but its impact went far beyond education. Brown overturned the 1896 Supreme Court ruling in Plessy v. Ferguson , which declared that segregated train cars did not violate the equal-protection clause of the 14th Amendment. While it wasn’t immediately clear, Brown would eventually dismantle segregation in all public facilities such as train cars, restaurants, department stores and more. The case emboldened civil rights protesters, who, for the first time in nearly 100 years of struggle and defeat, found the federal courts on their side.

Susette Min:

On March 11, 2014, at around 5:30am, students installed three sets of banners about student debt around the UC Davis campus. Three hours later, one set of banners was taken down, and two hours after that, another set had disappeared. The students, eager to retrieve the banners they worked many hours to design and create, asked around, only to be answered with a wall of smoke and mirrors from an administration that in short can be described as a complicated, top-heavy structure of managers, marketers and messengers of all sorts. The students pressed their case, and the banners were found in the possession of Grounds and Landscaping Services. The removal of the banners was ordered after a complaint from someone in the Administration: why some, but not all of the banners were taken down remains a mystery.

The location and motivation for the installation of the banners were not a mystery. Part of an assignment for an art history course on curatorial methods that I teach at UC Davis, the banners were part of an exhibition on the student debt crisis. AHI 401 introduces students to exhibition-making. The course, in addition to provoking thought about how an exhibition functions as a space and relation, engages students’ interest in a growing and intellectually demanding field by challenging them to take the lead in producing and displaying not only objects but also visual information. The final assignment for the course is to curate an exhibition either at the Richard L. Nelson gallery or somewhere else on the UCD campus. This quarter, one group of students curated an exhibition, Art as Translation, that included prints and lithographs drawn from the University’s art collection.

The other group curated an exhibition on student debt, which required them to construct both the frame and its contents.

The primary stated aim of One University One Debt was to create awareness about the trillion dollar student debt crisis—what it means for students to be in debt and in default—in addition to serving as a platform that could complicate and invite discussion about and possible solutions to this growing crisis.

Sarah Kendzior

In 2000, New York Times columnist David Brooks published a sociological study of the United States that now reads like science fiction. Bobos in Paradise chronicled how a new upper class of “Bobos” – bourgeois bohemians – struggled to navigate life’s dazzling options in a time of unparalleled prosperity. As presidential candidates Al Gore and George W Bush debated how to spend the projected $5trn government surplus, Brooks took on the micro crisis: How would baby boomers handle the psychic strain of making money at fulfilling jobs?

“This is the age of discretionary income,” Brooks declared, noting that liberal arts majors were “at top income brackets” and journalists made “six-figure salaries”. The WASP aristocracy that had long ruled the US had been replaced with a meritocracy based on hard work and creative prowess. Anyone could join – provided he or she had the right education.

Therein lay the hidden anxiety. According to Brooks, baby boomers had surmounted class and ethnic barriers through the accumulation of credentials. A degree from Harvard now carried more prestige – and provided more opportunity – than the bloodlines that had propelled the Protestant elite.

But the appeal of a college degree was also its fatal flaw: Anyone could get it. The formula could only work once. The same educational system that created new elites now threatened the prospects of their heirs.

“Members of the educated class can never be secure about their children’s future,” Brooks wrote. “Compared to past elites, little is guaranteed.”

He claimed the burden of maintaining success fell on the children themselves, who would have to “work through school” just like their parents.

As it turned out, there was another way.

Malcolm Harris:

On May 7, the federal government conducted its regularly scheduled auction of new Treasury bills, a monthly ritual in which investors compete to lend the state money. This, however, was no ordinary auction. Last year, after much debate, Congress tied federal student loan interest rates to the 10-year Treasury note’s each year’s pre-June rate at auction, finally linking student and government borrowing costs.

The results of May’s auction have serious and possibly lifelong consequences for the students on the other end of this year’s 20 million government higher education loans. When all the paddles were down, the Treasury sold $24 billion in 10-year notes at a yield of 2.61 percent — good news for bond traders, bad news for student borrowers.

Last year, an unusually low Treasury yield of 1.81 percent pushed down student loan interest rates — which Congress retroactively included in the 2013 deal — to their lowest levels, but this year’s 0.8 percentage point increase directly affects the linked loans, pushing them back up. This 0.8 percentage point represents a 20 percent increase in the rate charged to undergraduate borrowers, boosting it from 3.9 to 4.7 percent. Six years after the government nationalized the student loan industry, when so many Americans are rightly worried about the escalating costs of higher education, why is the government raising the cost of borrowing money to go to college?

There were three main issues at play in the 2013 Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act: How to anchor the interest rates, how much add-on for each category (undergraduate, graduate and parent loans) and where (or if) to cap the rates. After a long game of chicken with other people’s children, Congress ended up attaching the interest rates to the 10-year Treasury notes, with 2.05, 3.60 and 4.60 percentage point markups and 8.25, 9.5 and 10.5 percent caps, respectively. The bill looked most like the proposals from Rep. John Kline, R-Texas, and Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., whose ideas weren’t that far off from President Barack Obama’s plan. Kline’s proposal (attached to 10-year rates, with 2.5, 2.5 and 4.5 point markups and 8.5, 8.5 and 10.5 percent caps) was found by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to generate more new revenue on the backs of students: $3.7 billion. That the final bill’s interest schedule was even harsher than Kline’s proposal points to how little daylight there is between the major parties on this issue.

Bob Samuels:

In my last post, I discussed how UC was fulfilling its obligation to accept every eligible Californian student by admitting them to Merced instead of Berkeley and UCLA. I also pointed out that some campuses are cashing in on the new policy that allows schools to keep all of the tuition dollars they generate. The end result of this system is that some campuses have a huge incentive to accept a high number of non-resident and international students and reject a great number of students from California.

During recent meetings with state officials, I warned that we will see a backlash from Californian residents who feel that their deserving children are being shut out of an institution the parents have helped to support, and in fact, there has been a constant stream of editorials and letters voicing this concern. In one recent article, we are told the following: “As more California high school seniors fight for spaces at popular UC campuses, the universities have flung open their doors to students from other states and countries, more than tripling the ranks of out-of-state freshmen in the past five years. Freshmen from outside the Golden State now make up almost 30 percent of their class at UC Berkeley and UCLA, up from just over 10 percent four years earlier.”

When I presented these statistics to state officials, I was told that the implicit arrangement was that UC had to maintain its current number of in-state students even though the governor has removed enrollment targets from his recent budgets. However, recent statistics so that it is unclear if this deal is being upheld: “The UC system enrolled about 700 more California freshmen in 2013 than in 2009, a 2 percent increase, and nearly 5,000 more freshmen from other states and countries — a 273 percent increase. About 57 percent of the added spots went to international students, and 30 percent to students from other states, while about 12 percent went to Californians. UC Berkeley enrolled 800 fewer California freshmen this academic year than in 2009, but it accepted about 580 more from other states and about 500 more from other countries.” Although we still do not know about actual enrollments, it should be clear that UC has changed its admission priorities.

Noah Kulwin:

The day after a November 9 “Day of Action” on which police arrested seven Occupy activists, the atmosphere was tense. A video of police armed with batons and riot gear beating students had gone viral. This prompted a now infamous press release from the administration, calling the actions of the student protesters (“linking arms and forming a human chain”) “not non-violent civil disobedience.”

The incident would later be rehashed on national news, The Colbert Report, and elsewhere. Former U.S. Poet Laureate and Berkeley professor Robert Hass wrote a moving op-ed for The New York Times. For more details on the whole saga, The Daily Californian has since put together a great post aggregating their coverage.

At the time of the November 9 protests, then-Chancellor Robert Birgeneau was traveling in Asia. He later claimed to be in “limited contact” with campus officials while the police were drawing their batons. The ACLU submitted a Freedom of Information Act request, and learned a couple months later that Birgeneau had in fact lied. Birgeneau “was told that campus police had used batons, and … he did not call for a more passive approach” in dealing with the protestors, the majority of whom were students.

Thomas Frank:

Welcome to the wide world, Class of 2014. You have by now noticed the tremendous consignment of debt that the authorities at your college have spent the last four years loading on your shoulders. It may interest you to know that the average student-loan borrower among you is now $33,000 in debt, the largest of any graduating class ever. According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, carrying that kind of debt will have certain predictable effects. It will impede your ability to accumulate wealth, for example. You will also borrow more for other things than people without debt, and naturally you will find your debt level growing, not shrinking, as the years pass.

As you probably know, neither your parents nor your grandparents were required to take on this kind of burden in order to go to college. Neither are the people of your own generation in France and Germany and Argentina and Mexico.

But in our country, as your commencement speaker will no doubt tell you, the universities are “excellent.” They are “world-class.” Indeed, they are all that stands between us and economic defeat by the savagely competitive peoples of Europe and Asia. So a word of thanks is in order, Class of 2014: By borrowing those colossal amounts and turning the proceeds over to the people who run our higher ed system, you have done your part to maintain American exceptionalism, to keep our competitive advantage alive.

Here’s a question I bet you won’t hear broached on the commencement stage: Why must college be so expensive? The obvious answer, which I’m sure has been suggested to you a thousand times, is because college is so good. A 2014 Cadillac costs more than did a 1980 Cadillac, adjusting for inflation, because it is a better car. And because you paid attention in economics class, you know the same thing must be true of education. When tuition goes up and up every year, far outpacing inflation, this indicates that the quality of education in this country is also, constantly, going up and up. You know that the only way education can cost more is if it is worth more.

Julianne Hing:

Editor’s note: Our series “Life Cycles of Inequity” explores the ways in which inequity impacts the lives of black men. Each month, we focus on a life stage or event in which that impact has been shown to be particularly profound. This article is part of a package focused on implicit bias in schools.

Enikia Ford-Morthel speaks of Amo (a pseudonym) with the fondness of an auntie talking about a beloved nephew. She recalls watching Amo at his fifth-grade graduation from Cox Academy in Oakland two years ago. The memory of him walking across the stage still fills her with emotion. “He looked so cute in his little white suit, with his jewelry on,” Ford-Morthel says of his graduation. “I just cried.”

Ford-Morthel and Amo are not actually each other’s family. Ford-Morthel was Amo’s principal at Cox Academy, a charter school in a particularly rough section of East Oakland. Nor did they always share such closeness. Amo, an African-American boy, arrived at Cox as a fourth-grade terror. “He was hell on wheels,” Ford-Morthel says of those early days. On his very first day Amo was in class for just 10 minutes before he got sent to Ford-Morthel’s office for starting some kind of trouble, and for the month after that he was never in class for longer than half an hour before he started swearing at his teacher or otherwise interrupting instruction.

He was headed for the discipline track, Ford-Morthel says, and even as a fourth grader, he would easily have been suspended for his behavior in many other schools. “But we sat with him and we had to figure out how to learn him,” she says. It turned out that Amo’s parents had split up and his dad had a new girlfriend with whom Amo’s mom didn’t get along. “Most of his experience with adults was them not working together, so he didn’t respect very many adults,” Ford-Morthel says. “He had huge trust issues, and his academics were horrible—which of course they were, because he was never in class.”

Stephen Moore:

Looking for the biggest bargain in higher education? I think I found it in this rural Missouri town, 40 miles south of Springfield, nestled in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. The school is College of the Ozarks, and it operates on an education model that could overturn the perverse method of financing college education that is turning this generation of young adults into a permanent debtor class.

At this college the tuition is nowhere near the $150,000 to $200,000 for a four-year degree that the elite top-tier universities are charging. At College of the Ozarks, tuition is free. That’s right. The school’s nearly 1,400 students don’t pay a dime in tuition during their time there.

So what’s the catch? All the college’s students—without exception—pay for their education by working 15 hours a week on campus. The jobs are plentiful because this school—just a few miles from Branson, a popular tourist destination—operates its own mill, a power plant, fire station, four-star restaurant and lodge, museum and dairy farm.

Some students from low-income homes also spend 12 weeks of summer on campus working to cover their room and board. Part of the students’ grade point average is determined by how they do on the job and those who shirk their work duties are tossed out. The jobs range from campus security to cooking and cleaning hotel rooms, tending the hundreds of cattle, building new dorms and buildings, to operating the power plant.

Spot on. Related: Financial Aid Leveraging (or, leveraging students).

Pat Schnieder:

Maybe the formal deliberations on strategy don’t start until a closed session of the Madison School Board on Thursday, May 15, but engagement over a proposed extension of the teachers contract already has begun.

School board member Ed Hughes is stirring the pot with his remarks that the contract should not be extended without reconsidering hiring preferences for members of Madison Teachers, Inc., extended under the current contract.

John Matthews, executive director of MTI, replies that Hughes probably didn’t mind preference being given to internal transfers over external hires when he was in a union.

“When Ed was in the union at the Department of Justice, I doubt he would find considering outsiders to have preference over an internal transfer to be satisfactory,” Matthews said in an email.

Members of MTI are planning to offer their arguments for extending the contract when the school board meets at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton St.

Mary Burke votes for labor talks with Madison teachers. Matthew DeFour weighs in as well.

Allen Ruff @ WORT:

Do we have a public education crisis in this country? Is standardized testing ruining our kids’ chances at a meaningful and productive education? What are the downfalls of privatizing education? Listen to this addition of AP to find out more!

44MB mp3 audio file.

Much more on Timothy Slekar, here.

Daniel Henninger:

It’s been a long time coming, but America’s colleges and universities have finally descended into lunacy.

Last month, Brandeis University banned Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as its commencement speaker, purporting that “Ms. Hirsi Ali’s record of anti-Islam statements” violates Brandeis’s “core values.”

This week higher education’s ritualistic burning of college-commencement heretics spread to Smith College and Haverford College.

On Monday, Smith announced the withdrawal of Christine Lagarde, the French head of the International Monetary Fund. And what might the problem be with Madame Lagarde, considered one of the world’s most accomplished women? An online petition signed by some 480 offended Smithies said the IMF is associated with “imperialistic and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” With unmistakable French irony, Ms. Lagarde withdrew “to preserve the celebratory spirit” of Smith’s commencement.

The students are revolting, and this time they have the gizmos to get their message across

If you are a capitalist, you should be worried right now. The children of Facebook and American Idol are rebelling in the US – and that spells trouble for many of you later on.

The uprisings have taken the form of protests against big-name guests invited to attend university graduation ceremonies. Those who have been rebuffed include such well-known people as Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund; Condoleezza Rice, the former US secretary of state; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the human rights activist.

It’s not the end of the world. There’s no reason to shed dollar-denominated assets, diversify into Bitcoin or identify escape routes to the nearest hills. Our graduates aren’t really revolutionaries.

They are hard to please. Socially networked and sure of themselves, they can turn quickly on anyone or anything – and dealing with them as consumers is going to be tricky for businesses of various kinds.

Hughes deserves credit for even raising this possibility. @CapTimes http://t.co/yfBEsLkDdC

— Chris Rickert (@ChrisRickertWSJ) May 15, 2014

More. Vis a vis Pat Schneider’s recent article.

Elaine S. Povich

State Sen. David Argall thinks Pennsylvania’s law to fund schools with property taxes, which dates from the 1830s, has outlived its usefulness. He is pushing a bill that would eliminate property taxes levied by school districts and replace the revenue with higher state income and sales taxes.

For the first time, his idea is gaining some traction.

Argall, a Republican, has tried before to scrap the property tax collected by school districts, but this year he got more than half the state senators to co-sponsor his bill. He said the problem with property taxes is that “the tax has very little connection to the ability to pay.”

Poll results make Emanuel’s Chicago property tax hike a tougher sell.

Related: Madison Schools’ 2014-2015 Budget Update; Assumes 16% Increase in Redistributed State Tax Dollars, 2.11% Property Tax Growth; About $400,000,000 for 27,186 students.

Judge halts Illinois pension reform law.

Additional charts & data on Madison’s tax & spending growth, here.

Lindsey Burke:

Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., has introduced a proposal to fundamentally restructure higher education accreditation. The proposal would allow states to establish flexible accreditation models that would infuse a level of customization in higher education that is currently impossible under the existing accreditation system. The Higher Education Reform and Opportunity Act—or HERO Act—would empower states to allow any entity to credential courses and pave the way for a more flexible college experience for students and make possible a dramatic reduction in college costs.

Currently, accreditation is a de facto federal enterprise, with federally sanctioned regional and national accrediting agencies now the sole purveyors of accreditation.

The result has been a system that has created barriers to entry for innovative start-ups—insulating traditional brick-and-mortar schools from market forces that could reduce costs—yet has made it difficult for students to customize their higher education experience to fully reach their earnings and career potential. And because entire institutions are accredited instead of individual courses, accreditation is a poor measure of course quality and a poor indicator of the skills acquired by students.

Stephan & Abigail Thernstrom:

In conventional liberal circles, there is never any good news about race. Thus, as the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation case nears, mainstream media outlets lately have been depicting American schools as resegregated.

Thus we read that in New York City “children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality,” the New York Times NYT -2.65% reports. The Los Angeles Times describes more Latino children increasingly attending segregated schools, while the segregation of black students is virtually unchanged from the early 1970s. That conclusion is drawn from the work of a research team led by UCLA professor Gary Orfield, the left’s go-to man on race and schooling. For decades Prof. Orfield has been successfully peddling a story of dashed hopes for school desegregation.

On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared in its unanimous Brown decision that state-imposed, single-race public schools violated the 14th Amendment. Separating children on the basis of race, the justices said, denied black pupils “equal educational opportunities” and hence deprived them of the “equal protection” of the laws, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote. The watershed decision marked the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow South, applying to more than 10 million children who were enrolled in color-coded schools in 21 states and the District of Columbia. They made up roughly 40% of the nation’s public-school students, and more than two-thirds of all African-American pupils.

Kevin Helliker:

When sports psychologist Travis Dorsch set about studying the effect of parental spending on young athletes, he expected to find a positive correlation. After all, recent research suggests that young athletes benefit from parental support.

But his study, just completed, found that greater parental spending is associated with lower levels of young-athlete enjoyment and motivation. “When parental sports spending goes up, it increases the likelihood either that the child will feel pressure or that the parent will exert it,” says Dr. Dorsch, a Utah State University professor and former professional football player.

The study adds to a small but growing body of research suggesting that parents ought to temper their investments in youth athletics. The problem, at root, isn’t financial: It is that big expenditures tend to elevate parental expectations. “The more parents do, the more they expect a return on their investment,” possibly reducing their chances of a favorable outcome, says Daniel Gould, director of Michigan State University’s Institute for the Study of Youth Sports.

Insider Higher Ed:

Navient, the loan-servicing company formerly known as Sallie Mae, disclosed to investors Friday that it expects to pay an additional $103 million to settle two federal investigations, on top of the $70 million it already set aside last year for that purpose. The company is facing investigations from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Department of Justice, and other federal and state agencies over how it managed and processed the payments of student loan borrowers, including active-duty servicemembers.

The spin-off of Sallie Mae’s loan-servicing business into its own independent company, Navient, was officially completed at the end of April. Navient now inherits all liability stemming from the federal and state investigations of Sallie Mae’s loan-servicing business, the company said. The FDIC has cited Sallie Mae for unfair or deceptive acts involving the way it made disclosures to borrowers and assessed certain late fees.

Navient said Friday that, based on its discussions with the FDIC, the company believes it will be required to refund $30 million worth of certain late fees to borrowers of Sallie Mae loans dating back to November 2005. In addition, in an effort to “treat all customers in a similar manner,” Naveint said it also expected to “voluntarily” reimburse $42 million in late fees for borrowers whose loans were not owned by Sallie Mae but were serviced by them.

Bonnie Rochman:

Mention you’ve got a picky eater to a fellow parent, and the choruses of “me too!” come quick. Some fed-up parents—embarrassed, at their wits’ end or worried about their children’s nutrition—are hiring picky-eater coaches to expand their kids’ palates.

Leslie Springer was tired of acting like a short-order cook for her twin girls in second grade and daughter in preschool. Day-Glo orange mac and cheese was a staple. Snacks consisted of Goldfish crackers, Cheez-Its, potato chips and Oreos. Her girls devoured french fries but wouldn’t touch other kinds of potatoes. She would offer cauliflower and carrots only to get rebuffed.

Ms. Springer sought help from food coach Tara Roscioli, who had recently begun a Fit Moms group in New Jersey geared at encouraging healthier choices for mothers. Ms. Roscioli suggested some initial substitutions: steel-cut oats with a pinch of brown sugar and raisins instead of heavily presweetened oatmeal packets. Brown rice instead of white rice. Apple chips instead of potato chips.

“When Tara suggested this, I thought, ‘This is never going to happen,’ ” says Ms. Springer, a clinical social worker in Maplewood, N.J.

Douglas Belkin:

A word to high-school seniors rejected by their first choice: A degree from that shiny, elite college on the hill may not matter nearly as much as you think.

A new Gallup survey of 30,000 college graduates of all ages in all 50 states has found that highly selective schools don’t produce better workers or happier people, but inspiring professors—no matter where they teach—just might.

The poll, undertaken this spring, is part of a growing effort to measure how well colleges do their jobs. This survey adds an interesting twist, because it looked not only at graduates after college; it tried to determine what happens during college that leads to well-being and workplace engagement later in life.

The poll didn’t measure graduates’ earnings. Rather, it was rooted in 30 years of Gallup research that shows that people who feel happy and engaged in their jobs are the most productive. That relatively small group at the top didn’t disproportionately attend the prestigious schools that Americans have long believed provided a golden ticket to success. Instead, they forged meaningful connections with professors or mentors, and made significant investments in long-term academic projects and extracurricular activities.

“It matters very little where you go; it’s how you do it” that counts, said Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education. “Having a teacher who believes in a student makes a lifetime of difference.”

Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):

The value of positive employer-employee relationships being highly valued in Madison and the surrounding area has moved the County of Dane and the City of Madison to continue to negotiate contracts with their employee unions. While the 2011 legislated Act 10 was designed to strip employees of their contractual rights and benefits, Judge Colas’ ruling that much of Act 10 is unconstitutional enables bargaining to continue.

Given the value placed on positive employer-employee relationships by Mayor Soglin and the County Board, MTI, AFSCME and the Building Trades Council, all of which represent bargaining units of District employees, have petitioned the Board of Education to enter Contracts for 2015-16. The Board will consider these requests at a special meeting this Thursday, May 15.

MTI – 7, State of Wisconsin – 0
MTI representation has resulted in the dismissal of charges against all MTI members who were issued citations by the State for participating in the Solidarity Sing Along, with one case still pending. MTI provided representation because of the State depriving members of their Constitutional right to freedom of speech in protesting Act 10’s impairment of collective bargaining.

Madison Teachers, Inc. members fill the school board work group room, and the hallway outside. pic.twitter.com/UaIN004Pf7

— Molly Beck (@MollyBeckWSJ) May 12, 2014

Related: Collective Bargainain, Act 10 and Retired Ripon Superintendent’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club.

Gayle Worland:

Monday through Friday, Maya Reinfeldt is an eighth-grader at Savanna Oaks Middle School in Fitchburg.
But on Saturdays, while her classmates are at soccer practice or gymnastics lessons, the 13-year-old is back at a desk studying literature in her mother’s native Russian.

Maya is one of more than 50 students enrolled at the Madison Russian School, a weekly immersion program where students can take classes in math, language, literature and drama, often using the same texts as their counterparts in Russian schools.

It’s not all academics. Students also do many performance events, sing together in a choir and participate in cultural gatherings with their families. And because they spend years together in the same classroom, they often develop deep friendships linked by a faraway culture.

“Sometimes I get more out of it than normal school,” said Maya, whose mother helped co-found the Russian School in 2003 so that her daughter, then 2, could master the language. “It’s a pretty good way to spend a Saturday morning. Otherwise I’d just be wasting my time.”

Alan Borsuk:

So what’s it going to take to move the needle around here?

The wealth of data that has come out in recent weeks on educational achievement hasn’t justified much celebration. For Wisconsin as a whole, the picture was not bad. The high school graduation rate has gone up a bit and is tied for second highest in the nation, but the percentages of kids rated as proficient in reading and math at all grades remain concerning.

As for Milwaukee, what can you say?

So much has been done and so little has changed. The percentage of kids graduating in the conventional time frame of four years actually went down. Other achievement measures have barely budged.

But we keep trying. In itself, that may be the best thing going for us. I’d like to think some of the things underway now are better thought out, more realistic, and ultimately more promising than things that haven’t borne fruit.

I’d like to use this space for the last few weeks of the school year to check in on what is happening with several improvement efforts underway here.

Are they accomplishing anything?

What has been learned about what it takes to have positive impact?

I’ll start with the GE Foundation grant of $20.4 million to Milwaukee Public Schools. It was announced with great hoopla on Jan. 19, 2011, at Morse-Marshall Junior and Senior High School. Superintendent Gregory Thornton called it an investment “that will make a huge difference in the academic lives of our children.”

Paul McGeough:

We’ve seen it over and over in Hollywood movies – American youngsters arriving at college for the first time, invariably with Mom shedding a few tears, Dad hovering awkwardly and siblings hauling cartons filled with home comforts to the freshman student’s new digs.

It’s a right of passage towards an as yet unformed career. It’s been an emotional roller coaster to get this far, committing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to study at one of the ‘best’ colleges – to attend Mom or Dad’s alma mater or to strike out for something more experimental.

But increasingly, it all defies economic good sense. And if critics of higher education in the US are to be believed, it also defies educational good sense.

Lest we be seen to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater in Australia, an analysis by The Economist declares American higher education, ‘on the face of it’, to be still in rude health. More than 50 of its colleges are in the top 100 in the world; eight of them in the top 10; they are unparalleled in scientific output – they produce most of the world’s Nobel laureates and scientific papers; and American college graduates, on average, still earn far more and receive better benefits than those who do not have a degree.

Then came a big ‘BUT’. It was in the vein of a critique last year by Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, whose key points in a reason.com forum are cause for wonder about an education system that Australia might attempt to emulate. Here are the eyes plucked from the Vedder piece:

Jordan Weissmann:

College graduation season is approaching fast, which means we’re also heading for the annual round of horror stories about the job market for young B.A.s. At least, I expect we are, because said market is still a mess.

You can spend a long, long time arguing about precisely how bad freshly minted grads have it these days and why. But for now, let’s stick to broad strokes. In its recent chartbook on youth joblessness, the Economic Policy Institute reported that roughly 8.5 percent of college graduates between the ages of 21 and 24 were unemployed. That figure is based on a 12-month average between April 2013 and March 2014, so it’s not a perfect snapshot of the here and now. Still, it tells us that the post-collegiate job market, just like the rest of the labor market, certainly isn’t nearly back to normal. (For comparison, the unemployment rate for all college grads over the age of 25 is 3.3 percent, which is also still higher than normal.) More worrisomely, the EPI finds that a total of 16.8 percent of new grads are “underemployed,” meaning they’re either jobless and hunting for work; working part-time because they can’t find a full-time job; or want a job, have looked within the past year, but have now given up on searching.

Fareed Zakaria:

The United States has high levels of education and a large percentage of its workers in adult learning and training programs, and it spends lots of money on all these activities. And yet, it does worse than many countries with few advantages and resources. (And no, it isn’t just because of immigrants. About half of the OECD countries now have a larger percentage of foreign-born adults than does the United States)

What we learn from this study is really just an extension of what we have discovered in the PISA results. The biggest force behind falling American rankings is not that the United States is doing things much worse but that other countries have caught up and are doing better. The U.S. system of education and training is inadequate in the new global environment.

And things show no signs of improving. The bipartisan backlash against the Common Core — a set of national standards agreed to by governors — is a tragic example. Parents raised on a culture of low standards and high self-esteem are outraged that the tests show that many American schools are not teaching their children enough. (The tests must be at fault because they know that their kids are brilliant!) Some liberals and teacher groups are upset with the emphasis on testing (though Randi Weingarten, the head of the American Federation of Teachers, has endorsed the Common Core). And Republicans now oppose it — despite having championed it only a few years ago — largely because the Obama administration also backs the project.

Wisconsin Reading Coalition, via a kind email:

Kids with dyslexia are among those most affected by poor reading instruction. The Children’s Dyslexia Centers around the country (there are three in Wisconsin) train tutors in the Orton-Gillingham approach and provide free tutoring to children. It’s a game-changer for these kids who have so much to offer. Here is a glimpse inside the CDC-Milwaukee. Other centers are in Madison and Eau Claire.

As wonderful as these centers are, it would be even more wonderful if they became unnecessary because classroom and special education teachers, reading teachers, and reading specialists were trained to effectively teach all children to read. ​

Laurie Rogers:

Problem # 1. The number of useless administrators varied inversely with the number of qualified math teachers squared.

When there were 200 qualified math teachers, there were 5 useless administrators. As the number of qualified math teachers was cut back to 25, how many useless administrators were there?

Below is a calculation for Problem #1.
Below that is a parody of typical professional development (PD) for teachers and staff, related to Problem #1.

Answer: As the number of qualified math teachers was cut back to 25, the number of useless administrators increased to 320.

This number, of course, is fake. The number of truly qualified math teachers in most public school districts (i.e. those who know enough math to teach it to at least their grade and the grade following) has been purposefully cut back by colleges of education and administrators to “small,” “infinitesimal,” or “a speck, really.”

Will Fitzhugh:

Abstract The superior academic achievement of Asian Americans is a well-documented phenomenon that lacks a widely accepted explanation. Asian Americans’ advantage in this respect has been attributed to three groups of factors: (i) socio-demographic characteristics, (ii) cognitive ability, and (iii) academic effort as measured by characteristics such as attentiveness and work ethic. We combine data from two nationally representative cohort longitudinal surveys to compare Asian-American and white students in their educational trajectories from kindergarten through high school. We find that the Asian-American educational advantage is attributable mainly to Asian students exerting greater academic effort and not to advantages in tested cognitive abilities or socio-demographics. We test explanations for the Asian–white gap in academic effort and find that the gap can be further attributed to (i) cultural differences in beliefs regarding the connection between effort and achievement and (ii) immigration status. Finally, we highlight the potential psychological and social costs associated with Asian-American achievement success.

Is it really fair for them to work harder?

e.g.

Writing a paper for the Review was a completely new experience for me. Suddenly, there were no word limits and no guidelines to dictate what my paper had to look like; these guidelines had previously determined every paper that I had written in past history classes. I was free to pursue whatever aspect of my topic that I wanted to whatever extent that I wanted. It was liberating, but also incredibly intimidating. At first, I admittedly felt lost and even scared about where I was supposed to take my paper.

Begin forwarded message:
From: Janet Chen
Date: March 16, 2012 11:27:57 AM EDT
To: Will Fitzhugh
Subject: Re: Concord Review Authors

Dear Mr. Fitzhugh,

Thank you for taking the time to consider my essay on the unauthorized disclosures of the Pentagon Papers. If you have the time to read this email, I would like to provide you with some background information on the process that I underwent while researching this paper. I am currently a Junior attending (public) high school in Boulder, Colorado. I initially wrote a much shorter version of this essay for my U.S. history teacher, Mrs. Leigh Campbell-Hale.

The process of researching and completing this [9,963-word] paper took two years. In 2010, I decided to study the Pentagon Papers because at the time when I was selecting topics, the Wikileaks incident was all over the news. I became fascinated by the leak of information, the current presidential administration’s handling of it, and the public controversy that the leak ignited. One trend that I noticed throughout many of the news articles that I followed was comparison between the current Wikileaks disclosures and the historical leak of the Pentagon Papers. Fascinated, I thought that a closer study of the historical Pentagon documents might provide me with answers to some of the current questions that I had about contemporary leaks.

I came upon President Nixon’s telephone transcripts by accident; initially, I had not intended to focus upon that aspect of the leak. However, reading the transcripts made me realize that there were a lot of discrepancies between what my secondary sources were telling me (that is, what historians previously believed about the leak) and what the transcripts actually show. I began to realize that because there was new evidence that historians previously did not have the opportunity to consider, this topic demanded a reassessment.

I’d like to thank The Concord Review for pushing me beyond my academic boundaries. After my teacher read the much shorter version of my paper, she suggested that I submit a longer one to The Concord Review. Writing a paper for the Review was a completely new experience for me. Suddenly, there were no word limits and no guidelines to dictate what my paper had to look like; these guidelines had previously determined every paper that I had written in past history classes. I was free to pursue whatever aspect of my topic that I wanted to whatever extent that I wanted. It was liberating, but also incredibly intimidating. At first, I admittedly felt lost and even scared about where I was supposed to take my paper.

In the shorter version of this essay, I relied heavily upon my secondary sources and I did not pursue the primary source telephone transcripts to the extent that I should have. I used various excuses to justify this to myself—the word limit wouldn’t have allowed me to fully analyze the transcripts; moreover, the transcripts didn’t seem to fit the guidelines that my teacher had asked for. However, the truth was, I didn’t think that I had the intellectual capability to take on such a challenging academic task. Directly analyzing primary materials and drawing original conclusions (instead of relying upon secondary material) was something that my teacher called “real history”; I was convinced that only “real historians” and graduate level students were capable of doing that kind of research. However, after reading the essay in the Review about Andrew Jackson and his Indian removal policy, I realized that I had been mistaken. Suddenly, none of my previous excuses seemed legitimate. That weekend, I made calls to the National Archives and the National Security Archives to obtain all of President Nixon’s transcripts from that time period. I also emailed and called the historians whose works I had previously referenced in my research. I interviewed these scholars to find out more about the processes that they underwent in their research; I also discussed what they thought about the new evidence that had come out and how that new evidence could be used to revise the conclusions that they had come to years ago.

In retrospect, this has undoubtedly been the most demanding academic endeavor that I have ever undertaken during my high school years. More importantly, however, it has also been the most fascinating academic work that I have ever had the opportunity to engage in. I have learned so much not only about history and the Pentagon Papers, but also about my own critical thinking process and capabilities. Thank you again for taking the time to consider my essay, and thank you (and The Concord Review) for giving me the opportunity to go beyond my previous academic boundaries.

[She is in the Class of 2017 at Columbia University]

EAVESDROPPING ON THE PRESIDENT: A RECONSIDERATION OF THE NIXON ADMINISTRATION’S DECISIONS CONCERNING THE LEAK OF THE PENTAGON PAPERS

Dahlia Remler:

“90% of papers published in academic journals are never cited.” This damning statistic from a 2007 overview of citation analysis recently darted about cyberspace. A similar statistic had made the rounds in 2010 but that time it was about 60% of social and natural science articles that were said to be uncited. Neither statistic came with a link to supporting academic research papers.

That lack of support was a problem for me. I did not doubt the basic truth that many academic papers are uncited. But to be sure 90% was not urban legend and to learn the context and caveats, I needed to find the original research paper. I was not the only one who wanted the supporting evidence. So, I dove into Google scholar, searching the disparaged academic literature for articles on academic citation rates.

What’s the truth?

Many academic articles are never cited, although I could not find any study with a result as high as 90%. Non-citation rates vary enormously by field. “Only” 12% of medicine articles are not cited, compared to about 82% (!) for the humanities. It’s 27% for natural sciences and 32% for social sciences (cite). For everything except humanities, those numbers are far from 90% but they are still high: One third of social science articles go uncited!

Ten points for academia’s critics.

Alan Borsuk:

“I made a lot of bad jokes about good people, just for a cheap laugh,” the athletic-looking junior from a suburban high school said. “Leave those jokes behind.”

That’s one step he can take to make his school better. And that was his commitment, made before more than 200 students from 14 high schools throughout southeastern Wisconsin at a “responsibility retreat” Thursday at Brookfield East High School.

At his school, another boy told the group, there’s too much sentiment “that giving up is accepted.” He wants to make next year, when he’ll be a senior, a time for demonstrating “a relentless work ethic.”

A lot of kids at her school think YOLO — you only live once — means you can do all sorts of stupid things, a girl told her peers. Recently, some students vandalized property near the school and embarrassed everyone. She wants her senior year to show “YOLO should be a positive thing, to try to make the best impact you can.”

I guessed that there would be a long, awkward silence when organizers of the morning-long event invited students voluntarily to step up to a microphone to name one positive change they would take next year. I was wrong. At the last part of the three-hour session, kids came forward in quick succession, three dozen in all. The line stopped only because time ran out.

Nikil Saval:

But this white collar book: ah, there’s a book for the people; it is everybody’s book. … It is all about the new little man in the big world of the 20th century. It is about that little man and how he lives and what he suffers and what his chances are going to be; and it is also about the world he lives in, has to live, doesn’t want to live in. It is, as I said, going to be everybody’s book. For, in truth, who is not a little man?
—C. Wright Mills, 
letter to his parents (1946)

In or around the year 1956, the percentage of American workers who were “white collar” exceeded the percentage that were blue collar for the first time. Although labor statistics had long foretold this outcome, what the shift meant was unclear, and little theoretical work had prepared anyone to understand it. In the preceding years, the United States had quickly built itself up as an industrial powerhouse, emerging from World War II as the world’s leading source of manufactured goods. Much of its national identity was predicated on the idea that it made things. But thanks in part to advances in automation, job growth on the shop floor had slowed to a trickle. Meanwhile, the world of administration and clerical work, and new fields like public relations and marketing, grew inexorably—a paperwork empire annexing whole swaths of the labor force, as people exchanged assembly lines for metal desks, overalls for gray-flannel suits.

Thomas Lin:

reeman Dyson — the world-renowned mathematical physicist who helped found quantum electrodynamics with the bongo-playing, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman and others, devised numerous mathematical techniques, led the team that designed a low-power nuclear reactor that produces medical isotopes for research hospitals, dreamed of exploring the solar system in spaceships propelled by nuclear bombs, wrote technical and popular science books, penned dozens of reviews for The New York Review of Books, and turned 90 in December — is pondering a new math problem.

“There’s a class of problem that Freeman just lights up on,” said the physicist and computational biologist William Press, a longtime colleague and friend. “It has to be unsolved and well-posed and have something in it that admits to his particular kind of genius.” That genius, he said, represents a kind of “ingenuity and a spark” that most physicists lack: “The ability to see further in the mathematical world of concepts and instantly grasp a path to the distant horizon that’s the solution.”

Inside Higher Ed:

Faculty members in the sciences spend too long on burdensome administrative work, at the expense of their other, more meaningful duties, argues a report out today from the National Science Board. The report, called “Reducing Investigators’ Administrative Workload for Federally Funded Research,” is based on the work of the board’s Task Force on Administrative Burdens, which asked professors to identify through roundtable discussions and requests for information which federal and internal university procedures and requirements were the biggest drains on their time. Financial management, the grant proposal process, progress reports, institutional review boards, and layers of oversight related to working with animals all were common responses.

The paper acknowledges that some oversight is necessary, but says that regulations — once set — are not easily changed or lifted, and that “[principal investigators] at many institutions suggested that a culture of overregulation has emerged around federal research, which further increases their administrative workload.” The paper argues that such problems have been cited for years — including two Federal Demonstration Partnership surveys that found principal investigators spend 42 percent of their time on administrative tasks — but that failure to address them has resulted in “wasted” federal research dollars. “Escalating compliance requirements and inconsistent audit practices directly impact scientists and the time they have to perform research and train students and staff,” said Kelvin Droegemeier, board vice chairman and a member of the Task Force.

Siva Vaidhyanathan:

“I’M GONNA WASH THAT MAN RIGHT OUTTA MY HAIR,” I sang in a full voice from the back row of a University of Texas lecture hall, over the heads of fifty cringing undergraduates. It was the spring of 1995, and I was the oldest student (by at least five years) in a history course called United States Culture, 1945–Present. That day we had a guest lecturer, an American-studies professor who had produced award-winning books on documentary expression in the 1930s and on postwar Broadway musicals. His lecture was on the importance of the latter. He had just asked the room if any of us knew any Rodgers and Hammerstein numbers. Swept away by the enthusiasm of the moment more than by my affection for Oklahoma! or South Pacific, I raised my hand and sang my reply.

Professor William Stott smiled and held his arms akimbo. He paused. Then responded. “I’m just a girl who can’t say no.” His voice was rich and joyful. We had broken the fourth wall of academic performance protocols; the expert’s lecture had somehow threatened to become a song swap. The already befuddled younger students in the class were now on the verge of horror, as this pair of aged show-tune enthusiasts shared a moment of mutual recognition with passion, confidence, and a complete lack of embarrassment.

Adam Kirsch:

The humanities are in crisis again, or still. But there is one big exception: digital humanities, which is a growth industry. In 2009, the nascent field was the talk of the Modern Language Association (MLA) convention: “among all the contending subfields,” a reporter wrote about that year’s gathering, “the digital humanities seem like the first ‘next big thing’ in a long time.” Even earlier, the National Endowment for the Humanities created its Office of Digital Humanities to help fund projects. And digital humanities continues to go from strength to strength, thanks in part to the Mellon Foundation, which has seeded programs at a number of universities with large grants—most recently, $1 million to the University of Rochester to create a graduate fellowship.

Despite all this enthusiasm, the question of what the digital humanities is has yet to be given a satisfactory answer. Indeed, no one asks it more often than the digital humanists themselves. The recent proliferation of books on the subject—from sourcebooks and anthologies to critical manifestos—is a sign of a field suffering an identity crisis, trying to determine what, if anything, unites the disparate activities carried on under its banner. “Nowadays,” writes Stephen Ramsay in Defining Digital Humanities, “the term can mean anything from media studies to electronic art, from data mining to edutech, from scholarly editing to anarchic blogging, while inviting code junkies, digital artists, standards wonks, transhumanists, game theorists, free culture advocates, archivists, librarians, and edupunks under its capacious canvas.”

Gordon Lafer

During the past year, Wisconsin state legislators debated a series of bills aimed at closing low-performing public schools and replacing them with privately run charter schools. These proposals were particularly targeted at Milwaukee, the state’s largest and poorest school district.

Ultimately, the only legislation enacted was a bill that modestly increases school reporting requirements, without stipulating consequences for low performance. Nevertheless, the more ambitious proposals will likely remain at the core of Wisconsin’s debates over education policy, and legislative leaders have made clear their desire to revisit them in next year’s session. To help inform these deliberations, this report addresses the most comprehensive set of reforms put forward in the 2013–2014 legislative session.

Backers of these reforms are particularly enamored of a new type of charter school represented by the Rocketship chain of schools—a low-budget operation that relies on young and inexperienced teachers rather than more veteran and expensive faculty, that reduces the curriculum to a near-exclusive focus on reading and math, and that replaces teachers with online learning and digital applications for a significant portion of the day. Rocketship proposes that its model—dubbed “blended learning” for its combination of in-person and computerized instruction—can cut costs while raising low-income students’ test scores (Rocketship Education 2011).

The call for public schools to be replaced by such tech-heavy, teacher-light operations comes from some of the most powerful actors in local and national politics: the major corporate lobbies, including Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce, Americans for Prosperity, and the Metropolitan Milwaukee Association of Commerce (MMAC). It is these groups, rather than parents or community organizations, that provided the impetus for legislators to consider proposals for mass school closure and privatization in Milwaukee.

The report was discussed recently on Wisconsin Public Radio.

Related: Though not perfect, I think $13,063 (MPS) and $7,126 (MPCP – voucher) are reasonably comparative per-pupil public support numbers for MPS and the MPCP..

Stephanie Simon:

The Obama administration plans to use tens of millions in federal financial aid as leverage to reward teacher training programs that produce teachers who routinely raise student test scores — and to drive the rest out of business.

Education Secretary Arne Duncan will announce the revival of a push to regulate hundreds of teacher preparation programs Friday at a town hall meeting with White House policy director Cecilia Muñoz. He plans to release a draft regulation by summer and aims to enact it within a year.

The goal: To ensure that every state evaluates its teacher education programs by several key metrics, such as how many graduates land teaching jobs, how long they stay in the profession and whether they boost their students’ scores on standardized tests. The administration will then steer financial aid, including nearly $100 million a year in federal grants to aspiring teachers, to those programs that score the highest. The rest, Duncan said, will need to improve or “go out of business.”

Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann:

How do we ensure American middle class prosperity in an era of ever-intensifying globalization and technological upheaval? That is the question we are trying to answer with NEXT—a project at Third Way that taps into cutting edge research by top American academics.

To see into the future, look at 8th grade. If an 8th grader gets As and Bs in school, that student will likely earn a college degree. If that same student gets only Bs and Cs, college completion is unlikely. That is one of the stunning conclusions from authors Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann in their report on gender, mobility, and college attainment.

The implications of their findings are astounding, especially when girls do better than boys in school by 8th grade and continue to widen their lead over boys in education attainment. Because our economy rewards educational attainment and punishes the lack of it, could women soon become the primary economic drivers of the U.S. economy?

Tap for a larger version.

Madison School District PDF:

100% of elementary schools have began implementation of Mondo
– 12 schools in year 2 of implementation; and 20 schools in Year 1 of implementation

Site visit model of professional learning

All elementary schools are implementing the shared reading and oral language components of Mondo, based on district professional development focus

Implementation of other components is variable across schools

Consistent implementation of the literacy block which includes non-negotiables:

MMSD CCSS scope and sequence with model units of instruction, Mondo, and Calle core materials

oral language instruction until students meet benchmark on Mondo Oral Language assessment

consistent research-based phonics instruction using the Mondo materials (K-1)

daily use of whole group shared reading using grade level texts
– small group instruction

Related: Madison’s disastrous reading results and

When all third graders read at grade level or beyond by the end of the year, the achievement gap will be closed…and not before (2005).

Lauren Weber:

It seems like a perfect solution: employers need qualified employees. Apprenticeships offer an opportunity for workers to get the exact skills they need. So why are apprenticeships in decline? Lauren Weber is here with the story. Photo: Getty Images.

Ask CEOs and corporate recruiters whether they’re finding the workers they need, and they’ll lament about a skills gap that threatens productivity and growth—not just in their companies but in the economy at large.

Yet employers and state legislators have been decidedly lukewarm about a proven solution to the problem: apprenticeships.

Apprenticeships can offer a precise match between the skills employers want and the training workers receive, says Robert Lerman, an economics professor at American University.

“It’s a great model for transferring skills from one generation to the next,” says John Ladd, director of the Department of Labor’s Office of Apprenticeship.

Nevertheless, according to the Labor Department, formal programs that combine on-the-job learning with mentorships and classroom education fell 40% in the U.S. between 2003 and 2013.

Colleen Flaherty:

Brown University’s investigation into a professor accused of plagiarism was supposed to remain confidential. But after it was leaked to the student newspaper, the professor is speaking out both to apologize for what she says was unintentional plagiarism and to assert that her thoughts – if not always her words – remain her own.

While some colleagues criticized the university’s response to its inquiry into Vanessa Ryan, assistant professor of English, especially in light of the fact that she recently was named as an associate dean who oversees a graduate teaching program, others have come to her defense. Plagiarism is often framed as an ethical choice, they say, but unintentional plagiarism is easier and maybe more common than many believe.

“In August 2013, I learned that my book contains inadvertent errors of attribution, which resulted from mistakes I made in documenting my research as I worked on the project over many years,” Ryan said via email. “I take full responsibility for these mistakes.”

At the same time, she said, “While, as a result of these mistakes, my book uses words from other scholars’ writings without attribution, the substance of the ideas in the book is my own.”

Jenna Ashley Robinson:

Across the country, student health centers are showing signs of financial bloat and costly mission creep. Funded by both hefty campus health fees and payments from students’ insurers, university health centers spend their extra cash on boutique services and progressive programs.

In universities’ early days, the campus infirmary was simple. As a primary care practice on campus, it was a convenience for students who caught the flu or a cold at school. The infirmary’s services were available to insured and uninsured alike. Now, however, all students must carry health insurance. Many schools, including the 16 campuses of the University of North Carolina system, put in place an “individual mandate” years before the Affordable Care Act. With the Act’s passage, all students must be insured.

And they are–often with “Gold” plans that cover everything from maternity care, to prescription drugs, to substance abuse counseling. If they use the student health center, students’ co-pays are waived. But at many schools, they pay through the nose for the privilege. Saving $25 in co-pays hardly seems to justify paying health fees ranging from $50 to nearly $1,000.

Harvard and Stanford are two of the worst offenders. At Harvard, the student health fee is $958.00. Health insurance, which students must also purchase, is $2,190. At Stanford, the fee is a more modest $573 for the 2014-15 academic year. But the student health insurance plan costs a whopping $3,936 per student!

Edward Luce:

America – so the song says – is the land of the free and home of the brave. It does not always feel that way. Last week the Food and Drug Administration said it would regulate e-cigarettes like normal tobacco. This is in spite of the fact there is no proof it leads people on to the real ones. Quite the reverse – the whole point is to help people kick the habit. Chicago, Boston and Los Angeles have gone further and banned e-cigarettes in public places. There is no evidence their vapour causes harm to users or bystanders. The sight of it alone is apparently offensive enough.

The US has always struggled between its impulse for freedom and a Calvinistic urge to meddle. The pendulum in early 21st-century America is swinging back to intrusion. Whether it is workplace safety, traffic, public health or social behaviour, there is a creeping impulse to micro-regulate.

Far from the freedom of the open road, today’s US offers a spider’s web of local and federal rules. Fancy bicycling without a helmet or unleashing your dog? Or perhaps opening a can of beer on the beach? There is an ordinance forbidding it. New York is trying to ban 16-ounce soda. Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew would not feel out of place in Rahm Emanuel’s Chicago. Sugar is the new tobacco, we are told. How soon before we get to caffeine?

Madison Teachers, Inc., Newsletter, via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):

Pursuant to changes in MTI’s Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement, teacher contracts for the 2014-15 school year will now be issued in MAY instead of March. Signed contracts of all teachers returning for the 2014-15 school year must be received in the MMSD Human Resources Office no later than June 16. MTI strongly recommends that teachers return their signed contracts AS SOON AS POSSIBLE, in person, to assure timely delivery. Take a copy with you, ask that it be stamped “received”, and keep it for your personal records. Failure to return a signed contract by June 16 may result in the District accepting such as one’s resignation.

Joss Winn:

I am writing a paper on ‘academic labour‘ – well, I have been for some time now – and I’m beginning to get a sense of the literature in this field of scholarship. My approach to understanding academic labour is to try to adopt Marx’s social theory and method; to first understand labour abstractly and then, having done so, to examine and explain the way academic labour appears concretely at a particular moment in time. Ideally, it is a dialectical process of both deduction and induction; one which asserts that capitalist society is structured by a “quasi-independent logic” (Postone, 1993) whereby socially constructed abstractions have real concrete existence and power over people (i.e. “real abstraction”). What I’m finding is that the literature on academic labour largely focuses on the latter approach (i.e. attention is give to the concrete labour process) while rarely reaching the former (i.e. abstraction), let alone being grounded in it. One of the problems with such an approach is that the “hypostatisation of the concrete” (Postone, 1986) is a form of reification which more often leads to a sense of helplessness, or even worse, fascism. Postone considers this grasp of the abstract as concrete as “an expression of a deep and fundamental helplessness, conceptually as well as politically.”

Brandon Harris:

As with most things that are prominently featured on television, the recently concluded NCAA tournament is made of money. A lot of it. $10.8 billion dollars to be exact. Money changes hands in innumerable ways – Turner Broadcasting and CBS pay the NCAA that enormous sum over fourteen years, with the organization parcelling out $740 million dollars annually to its member institutions, with those same institutions employing the highest paid public servants in all 50 states — the overwhelming majority of whom are college basketball or football coaches. Generally when broadcasters pay for the rights to broadcast a program in which skill intensive labor goes into its making, the folks putting on the show see a significant portion of windfall. The performers on Downton Abbey or even The Real Housewives of Atlanta don’t keep us entertained for free, after all.

When it comes to the vast treasure trove the NCAA commanded from Turner and CBS however, one supported by millions around the country who endure the most asinine Pizza Hut or Progressive Insurance commercials in order to watch unpaid men play basketball in packed arenas, a whole different set of rules applies. The athletes see no windfall at all, other than, room, board and “training” (i.e. a college education). Regardless of how desirable or valuable a college education is, that this situation almost completely mirrors the definition of indentured servitude (“A person who is bonded or contracted to work for another for a specified time, in exchange for learning a trade or for travel expenses.”) shouldn’t escape us. With such manifestly unfair labor relations, how can you, sports disdaining, labor supporting, coastal liberal of my imagination, avoid your obligation to stand aghast at such a spectacle of injustice? Where is your moral outrage?

Kristina Peterson:

During Congress’ two-week recess, House Republican leaders assigned lawmakers some homework: go visit charter schools.

The field trips were part of a coming House push on education, a topic that has received relatively little attention in Congress lately amid the battles about health care and budgets.

But with major fiscal fights delayed until after November’s midterm elections, leaders of both chambers are preparing to focus on education as lawmakers return to Washington this week. Though the campaign-season sniping about the health-care law shows few signs of abating, Democrats and Republicans alike view education legislation as a key plank in their agendas for expanding opportunity and a comfortable arena in which to seek support from younger voters and families.

The GOP-controlled House is pushing a bipartisan bill aimed at expanding access to charter-school funding and making it easier to open new charter schools modeled after those that have been the most successful. House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R., Va.), long a proponent of broadening school choice, said in a memo Friday that the House would vote on the bill the week of May 5.

Hamilton Nolan:

Interesting little tidbit for all good liberals to chew over: a list of the U.S. cities with the very worst income inequality includes an inordinate number of university towns.

Bloomberg today has published a list of the 50 American cities with the greatest income inequality. The top three are Atlanta, New Orleans, and Miami, all predictable southern metropoli. But take away the major cities, and what really stands out is the fact that the second-tier cities that make the list include a ton of college towns. For example:

Charles Davis:

The calls started when I was a junior in high school—always in the evening, always after The Simpsons and always with an older gentleman on the other end of the line.

“Charles, there’s someone who wants to speak you,” my mother would yell from the kitchen. She showed no concern as she handed me the phone, no alarm in her eyes over all the calls she was getting from strange middle-aged men looking to chat up her vulnerable teenage son. That’s because these creepers called themselves “colonels” and “sergeants,” which lent authority to their predation. These men were military recruiters – and the bed they wanted to get me in was housed in some barracks.

A few weeks earlier, a uniformed Marine had come to my high school, set up an efficient little booth in the cafeteria and, in exchange for a stupid hat or a bumper sticker, convinced me and some other boys desperate to be men to give him our names and home phone numbers. After that, at least once a week I had to deal with a recruiter calling me “dude” or “man” while promising that military service would allow me to see the world and sleep with many of its women.

Scott Jaschik:

A survey of more than 6,000 faculty members, across a range of disciplines, has found that when prospective graduate students reach out for guidance, white males are the most likely to get attention. The survey also found that public university faculty members are much more likely than their private counterparts to respond equally to students of varying backgrounds. And the greatest victims of discrimination may be those with names that suggest they are Chinese women.

The study (abstract available here) — just released by the Social Science Research Network — aims to identify whether academics create pathways for students of all kinds who want to enter graduate school.

For the study, three researchers sent faculty members letters (as would-be grad students), expressing interest in talking about research opportunities in the program, becoming a graduate student and learning about the professor’s work. The letters asked for a 10-minute discussion. The letters were identical in every way except for the names of the fictional people sending them (see text at bottom of article).

Academe:

In this past week’s issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, there is a very revealing graph representing the changes in employment in colleges and universities from 1976 to 2011. The graph is based on an analysis of IPEDs data by AAUP’s John Curtis.

Full-Time Tenured and Tenure-Track Faculty

1976 – 353,681

2011 – 436,293

Increase – 23%

Graduate Student Employees

1976 – 160.086

2011 – 358,743

Increase – 123%

Full-Time Executives

1976 – 97,003

2011 – 233,368

Increase 141%

Full-Time Non-Tenure Track Faculty

1976 – 80,883

2011 – 290,238

Increase – 259%

Part-Time Faculty

1976 – 199,139

2011 – 768,071

Increase – 286%

Full-Time Non-Faculty Professional Staff

1976 – 150,319

2011 – 704,505

Increase – 369%

If we simply could not afford to maintain a level of faculty on tenure tracks proportionate to student enrollment, that would be one thing.

Stacey Patton:

Leigh-Anne Francis wishes she had listened to her pregnant wife, who begged her not to leave the house that night. She could have been at home putting the finishing touches on her syllabi and lecture notes, instead of handcuffed to a bench at a local police station.

It was August 29, 2013, the night before the start of the fall semester at the State University of New York College at Oneonta, a midsize public college in the picturesque foothills of the Catskill Mountains. Francis, a Jamaican-born professor fresh out of graduate school, was prepping for her first lectures when she decided to make a late run to pick up Thai take-out. She was excited about starting her new tenure-track job in black studies and U.S. history at Oneonta—one she had landed months before earning a Ph.D. in history from Rutgers University. (I studied history at Rutgers, too, and I took a few courses with Francis.) Francis and her wife Jenny, who is white, had moved from northern New Jersey just six days earlier.

The Wall Street Journal:

The federal student loan program is becoming so costly to taxpayers that even President Obama is pretending to fix it. Readers will recall Mr. Obama as the man who has spent much of his Presidency expanding this program, creating new ways for borrowers to avoid repayment, and then campaigning about these dubious achievements on campuses nationwide.

Now Team Obama is acknowledging that his policies are turning out to be more expensive than he claimed. Participation in federal debt-forgiveness programs is surging. In a mere six months the number of borrowers who’ve signed up for such plans has increased to more than 1.3 million from less than a million, with total balances rising to $72 billion from $52 billion. Maybe the White House didn’t understand that when you give people an economic incentive not to repay a loan, more people won’t repay.

Jenni Dye:

But when I attended UW for law school, my total debt quickly topped $100,000, with interest rates locked in at 6.8 percent and 8.8 percent due to changes in federal law. Consolidation couldn’t reduce the interest rate, as federal law required my loan remain at the average of my existing interest rates.

But, because IBR payments may not cover accruing interest, after paying roughly $20,000 toward my loans in the past five years, I now owe more than I did when I graduated. Under IBR, any amounts owed after 25 years of repayment may be forgiven, but under current law that forgiveness will be taxable, leaving borrowers to make a large balloon payment to the IRS. Meanwhile, the federal government is projected to earn $127 billion off student loans in the next 10 years.

Multiply my story by the thousands upon thousands of borrowers in Wisconsin alone — and by our families, many of whom have helped us along the way. And multiply it by our kids, who will enter college while we are still trying to pay off our own debt. Then you start to have a picture of the impact of $1 trillion of student debt.

Bob Samuels:

The UC has published its 2014 admissions’ statistics, and while the system is still required to admit all qualified students from California, a secret tactic is being used to make sure that it increases the number of high-paying non-resident and international students. What the UC is doing is admitting students from California, but not offering them places at the campuses of their choice. Simply put, students are applying to Berkeley and UCLA, but they are being admitted to Merced and Riverside.

Looking at the latest statistics, we see that Berkeley accepted 8,391 students from California, 3,071 from out of state, and 1,333 international students. Likewise, UCLA accepted 9,128 from California, 4,095 from out of state, and 2,537 international students. So out of the 28,555 students accepted by both campuses, 11,036 are not from California. These students (39% of the total admittees) each pay $23,000 exrtra for tuition, and they do not receive financial aid. Of course, not all of these students will accept their admission offers, but if all of them did, the two campuses would bring in an additional $254 million.

Gary Silverman:

But I’m revisiting my youthful folly in this forum in the interest of the historical record. Looking back on it, my romantic notions about love and higher education were rooted in a world that is no more – the pre-internet, postwar suburb (mine being located on Long Island, outside New York City).

When I mailed in my university applications a few hours before the start of the American bicentennial year of 1976 – using white liquid paper to correct my typing mistakes on forms of different colours – I was many years away from owning my first cell phone, tablet or personal computer. There was no such thing as Facebook or Twitter, either.

As a result, just about the only other college applicants I knew lived in the same place I did. I’m talking about a corner of the East Meadow public school district that fed the smaller of the two high schools in that jurisdiction – W Tresper Clarke (which was named after a former president of the East Meadow board of education, then and now the only man in my experience who wanted to be called Tresper).

I was provincial in a way that would be nearly impossible today – even in many of the more remote corners of the planet. But the curious thing is that my lack of contact with young people anywhere else bred a near certainty that they would be more interesting than the ones with whom I was raised.

David Perry:

Do you think adjunct rights are a civil-rights issue?” This question came to me from a young scholar about to defend his Ph.D. He’s just finishing a great one-year position but does not have employment yet for next year.

Trying to answer his question led me into an interesting group of writings that link the conditions of adjuncts to historically oppressed and exploited peoples such as slaves, sharecroppers, and migrant workers. This language may be misguided. But its apparent utility reveals one of the big obstacles to improving the condition of adjuncts in higher education today.

Clearly, the conditions of adjuncts are deplorable. From the homeless adjunct protesting in New York to the countless stories of inequity, struggle, hunger, and ostracism, the human toll of adjunctification should appall anyone who pays attention.

Over the past few years, an increasing number of voices have argued that adjunctification is best understood as something especially terrible rather than an all-too-typical example of the rise of contingency across the North American workforce. Why do advocates need to go to such rhetorical lengths to gain our sympathy?

Chris Rickert

Far be it from me to diss two free years of college for every American student.

And there are some decent reasons to support a recent proposal from a pair of UW-Madison faculty that would provide just that.

The problem is that students could get their free rides only at public institutions, and only if the federal government agreed to start stiffing the private ones. That’s as much an ideological shot across the bow as a way to solve problems plaguing higher education.

With tuition and student debt loads soaring, the paper by associate professors Sara Goldrick-Rab and Nancy Kendall was sure to get attention.
To free up the money needed to make their new entitlement possible, they propose cutting private colleges and universities off from the $80 billion money spigot known as federal financial aid.

Privates aren’t worthy of taxpayer dollars, they argue, in part because they aren’t subject to the same oversight as public institutions, and they eat up a disproportionate share of student aid.

While they enrolled only about 29 percent of undergraduates in 2012-13, privates collected 35 percent of Pell grants and 49 percent of Supplemental Educational Opportunity grants, the authors note.

There’s no doubt that some johnny-come-lately, for-profit private colleges have taken advantage of government largesse while failing to graduate students.

In a story last week in the UW-Madison student newspaper, The Daily Cardinal, Goldrick-Rab calls out the University of Phoenix specifically.
But for every University of Phoenix, there’s an Edgewood College or a Beloit College — long-standing, mission-driven, nonprofit and generally positive influences on Wisconsin and the rest of the world.

Simon Kuper

I especially see apartheid in the US. True, the country has made racist speech taboo. Use a racial epithet in public and your career combusts. That’s lovely. However, American school taxes are usually raised locally, and many neighbourhoods are segregated, and so most poor black children attend underfunded schools where they learn just enough to do lowly jobs for whites. The US later tries to airlift a few victims out of the ghetto through “affirmative action”, but by then the damage is done. Like apartheid South Africa, the US ensures through schooling that most black people won’t succeed. It just doesn’t call this “Bantu education”.

My instinctive measure of a society is how closely it resembles South African apartheid. On that score the Netherlands – despite ample racist speech – arguably beats the US, because the Dutch give so-called “black schools” more funding than white suburban schools. Similarly, ethnically mixed-up London has less apartheid than segregated Paris.

South African apartheid determined people’s life paths from before birth. If you were a white embryo, you’d be fine. A black embryo wouldn’t. I remember, aged about 16, sitting on the porch of some ridiculous white adult fraud, listening to him preach about the stupidity of his black servants, and realising: this guy needs to believe he made his own success. Few people at the top can think, “Luckily, I chose the right parents.” Instead they tell themselves a story about work and talent – even though their maid probably outworks them, and nobody ever cared whether she had talent.

Inequality is the new apartheid. Your life path is largely determined before birth. The ruling classes pass on their status by sending their children to exclusive schools, much like in apartheid Johannesburg.

Happily, ethnicity is no longer always decisive. Still, today’s apartheid delivers outcomes as unequal as the old apartheid did. One measure of a society’s inequality is its Gini coefficient. South Africa’s Gini in 1995, just after apartheid, was a shocking 0.59 (where 0 is perfect equality, and 1 is perfect inequality). But Manhattan today has almost exactly the same Gini: 0.6, according to the US Census Bureau. Amazingly, South Africa itself has become less equal since apartheid: by 2009 the country’s Gini had risen to 0.63, says the World Bank.

From the comments:

There are several key errors regarding school funding- many of the poorest performing schools spend the most per pupil. Schools and taxes are funded at the local AND state level, as well as directed by school boards elected locally and state DOE’s … these have been run almost exclusively by one philosophical perspective for more than 50 years, with the corruption and lack of accountability that comes with it … and results have gotten worse, not better. Maybe time for a change of concept!?!

Madison spends about double the national average per student yet has long tolerated disastrous reading results. Money may be a factor, but as the Kansas City experiment reveled, it is hardly decisive.

Consultants for the Madison Schools (PDF):

The leadership has established a director of MTSS with the C&I department, which is critical from both functional and symbolic purposes.

District leadership has a strong Strategic Framework in place to support the MTSS process with the present focus on reading, with subsequent focus on writing and numeracy.

The data suggests with the attenuation of the special education population (i.e., from 17.8% to 14% in the last 3 years), early intervening processes are having a positive effect.

Despite inconsistencies in the process, schools are starting to use similar methodologies to screen (e.g., AimsWeb® & MAP), core materials (e.g., Mondo®) and interventions for students (Voyagers, Rewards, Language!)

The Madison School District (3MB PDF):

Five Priority Areas (just like the “Big 10”) but who is counting! – page 6:
– Common Core
– Behavior Education Plan
– Recruitment and hiring
– New educator induction
– Educator Effectiveness
– Student, parent and staff surveys
– Technology plan

2014-2015 “budget package” 3MB PDF features some interesting changes, beginning on page 92, including:

1. + $986,314 to other Wisconsin public school districts due to Outbound open enrollment growth and $160,000 for Youth Options (page 108)

2. + 5.3% Teacher & Staff Health insurance spending is $44,067,547, or 11% of total spending! (Page 92). Total teacher & staff benefits are $73,248,235 or 18% of total spending. Let’s compare (as best we can):

Madison: 18% budget web page. Note, Madison’s is likely higher than 18% as I did not count all “funds” beyond teachers and certain staff. I’ve sent an email to the District for a complete number.

Middleton: 15.7% 2013-2014 Budget (PDF) Middleton – Cross Plains School District Budget web page. Middleton’s document summarizes spending across all funds (Page 8), something that I did not find in the Madison document (Pages 110-123 summarize aspects of Madison’s spending).

Boston: 14.1% Boston Schools 2013-2014-2015 budget xls file) Boston schools’ budget information.

Long Beach: 15.9% (Long Beach Budget Document (PDF)) Long Beach budget information.

Madison Superintendent Cheatham cited the Boston and Long Beach Schools for “narrowing their achievement gap” during a July, 2013 “What Will be Different This Time” presentation to the Madison Rotary Club.

3. “Educational Services” (Page 96) benefits are $21,581,653 up 4.5%.

4. “Food Services” (Page 98) benefits are $2,446,305, up 4.2%.

5. 10.3%: MSCR’s health insurance cost increase (page 99). MSCR spending and property tax growth (“Fund 80”) has been controversial in the past.

The Madison School District’s per student spending has been roughly constant for several years at about $15,000. Yet, certain budget elements are growing at a rather high rate, indicating an ability to manage effectively by reallocating and raising tax dollars or the presence of a rather fluid budget.

“focused instead on adult employment”

Retired Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman’s 2009 Madison Rotary speech is always worth revisiting:

Zimman’s talk ranged far and wide. He discussed Wisconsin’s K-12 funding formula (it is important to remember that school spending increases annually (from 1987 to 2005, spending grew by 5.10% annually in Wisconsin and 5.25% in the Madison School District), though perhaps not in areas some would prefer.

“Beware of legacy practices (most of what we do every day is the maintenance of the status quo), @12:40 minutes into the talk – the very public institutions intended for student learning has become focused instead on adult employment. I say that as an employee. Adult practices and attitudes have become embedded in organizational culture governed by strict regulations and union contracts that dictate most of what occurs inside schools today. Any impetus to change direction or structure is met with swift and stiff resistance. It’s as if we are stuck in a time warp keeping a 19th century school model on life support in an attempt to meet 21st century demands.” Zimman went on to discuss the Wisconsin DPI’s vigorous enforcement of teacher licensing practices and provided some unfortunate math & science teacher examples (including the “impossibility” of meeting the demand for such teachers (about 14 minutes)). He further cited exploding teacher salary, benefit and retiree costs eating instructional dollars (“Similar to GM”; “worry” about the children given this situation).

Zimman noted that the most recent State of Wisconsin Budget removed the requirement that arbitrators take into consideration revenue limits (a district’s financial condition @17:30) when considering a District’s ability to afford union negotiated compensation packages. The budget also added the amount of teacher preparation time to the list of items that must be negotiated….. “we need to breakthrough the concept that public schools are an expense, not an investment” and at the same time, we must stop looking at schools as a place for adults to work and start treating schools as a place for children to learn.”

The price of budget spaghetti manifests itself via little to no oversight – see legitimate questions on the District’s most recent $26,200,000 maintenance referendum (another tax increase looms). These documents, while reasonably detailed, are impossible to compare to recent budgets.

The demise of Lawrie Kobza’s 2 page “citizen’s budget” will lead to growing cost of living and achievement gaps, including nearby Districts such as Middleton where a comparable homeowner spends 16% less on property taxes.

Ellen Goldberger:

Most of my faculty colleagues agree that Writing Across the Curriculum (WAC), in which the task of teaching writing is one assigned to all professors, not just those who teach English or composition, is an important academic concept. If we had a WAC playbook, it would sound something like this: students need to write clear, organized, persuasive prose, not only in the liberal arts, but in the sciences and professional disciplines as well. Conventional wisdom and practical experience tell us that students’ ability to secure jobs and advance in their careers depends, to a great extent, on their communication skills, including polished, professional writing.

Writing is thinking made manifest. If students cannot think clearly, they will not write well. So in this respect, writing is tangible evidence of critical thinking — or the lack of it — and is a helpful indicator of how students construct knowledge out of information.

The WAC playbook recognizes that writing can take many forms: research papers, journals, in-class papers, reports, reviews, reflections, summaries, essay exams, creative writing, business plans, letters, etc. It also affirms that writing is not separate from content in our courses, but can be used as a practical tool to apply and reinforce learning.

—No, the humanities should step up and proudly proclaim: “We are the purveyors of beauty more lethal than you may possibly be able to bear and knowledge more profound than you can yet fathom. We are your vehicle into the past and into the minds of other human beings. Within our precincts are works of unparalleled eloquence, wit, and imagination; to die without having experienced them is to have led a life shortchanged.” [Heather Mac Donald]

As students and their families rethink the value of the liberal arts, defenders of traditional education are understandably ambivalent. On the one hand, the diminished stature of the liberal arts seems long overdue, and this critical reevaluation might lead to thoughtful reform. On the other, this reevaluation might doom the liberal arts to irrelevance. To that end, Minding the Campus asked a list of distinguished thinkers a straightforward question: should we be unhappy that the liberal arts are going down? Here are responses from Heather Mac Donald, Thomas Lindsay, and Samuel Goldman.

***

Heather Mac Donald, Manhattan Institute

We shouldn’t only be unhappy if the liberal arts are “going down.” We should be ashamed. Our highest duty as a civilization is to keep alive those works from the past that gave birth to our present freedoms and that constitute the most profound expressions of what it means to be human.

I see no evidence that a “critical evaluation” of the liberal arts is underway, beyond an ignorant flight on the part of some college students towards more allegedly marketable majors. This idea of a job-ready major is a fallacy; outside of vocational training and some select STEM fields, few majors, whether economics or philosophy, have a direct connection to most jobs.

But while the marketable major is an illusion, there is no question that the conceit is driving many students away from humanistic study. The irony is that colleges are themselves wholly responsible for endangering those fields that were once their very raison d’être. For it is their sky-high tuitions that are fueling this migration into purportedly more bankable fields and their adolescent politicization of the humanities that is failing to give students a reason to look back.

Tuition levels are the result of universities’ own decision-making—above all, their insatiable drive to expand their student services bureaucracy. No branch of that endlessly growing bureaucracy is more senseless and self-indulgent than the diversity superstructure, founded as it is on a demonstrable lie: that colleges are bastions of discrimination against minorities and females.

Colleges could eviscerate the “I can’t afford to be a literature major” argument overnight by eliminating their wasteful bureaucracies and slashing their tuitions by half. In the meantime, the humanities should fight back against attrition with their strongest suit. Forget the “we teach critical thinking” gambit, and other mealy-mouthed efforts at asserting a vacuous, process-oriented relevance. No, the humanities should step up and proudly proclaim: “We are the purveyors of beauty more lethal than you may possibly be able to bear and knowledge more profound than you can yet fathom. We are your vehicle into the past and into the minds of other human beings. Within our precincts are works of unparalleled eloquence, wit, and imagination; to die without having experienced them is to have led a life shortchanged.”

Obviously, the humanities themselves have rendered such arguments off-limits with their plunge into narcissistic identity politics. Such terms as “beauty” and “knowledge” are deeply “contested,” as they say in High Theory, if not egregiously embarrassing. But if all that a liberal arts degree can offer students is another tour of oppression and victimhood, there’s no reason not to major in sociology. If the humanities go down, the loss will be universal, but they will have only themselves to blame.

============

Thomas Lindsay, Texas Public Policy Foundation

No one should be happy that the liberal arts are going down. Properly understood, the liberal arts constitute the core of the examined life defended in Socrates’ famous statement, “The unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.” In our secular age, the liberal arts represent the last, best hope of ennobling democracy, of liberating us from absorption in the present, of raising our gaze above ourselves, without which we risk sinking below the level of the beasts.

When we understand the liberal arts as indispensable to freeing us from unconscious thralldom to the unexamined assumptions that form our and every culture, we see that they are not “going down.”

They went down some fifty years ago. Beginning with the near-wholesale abandonment by our colleges and universities of a required core curriculum, which was replaced by its present-day impostors–“general education” and “distribution requirements”—our universities have become “multi-versities,” where courses are dished out in nearly as indiscriminate fashion as lunch choices at the campus cafeteria.

Going deeper, what brought down the liberal arts was the denial on the part of universities that there are absolute truths toward which the liberal arts might lead us and therewith liberate us from the unexamined life. In taking down the liberal arts, relativism simultaneously has toppled the authority of the defense of limited government and individual liberty articulated in the Declaration of Independence and embodied in the U.S. Constitution. And this simultaneous takedown is no accident: The American experiment in self-government, like the liberal arts, stands or falls with the power of human reason to discover truth.

In this light, “market pressures” are not the chief factor driving the current, “critical reevaluation of the liberal arts.” More precisely, market pressures on the liberal arts are hardly new—Tocqueville’s time spent here in the 1830s led him to observe that democracy in America favors an education in what is useful toward securing comfortable self-preservation. But while market forces are not new, American society has of late come more and more to realize that the liberal arts, as currently impoverished by relativism, are of less and less value.

Further, the more impoverished the liberal arts become, the greater the ferocity with which they seek no longer to educate but rather to indoctrinate students into relativism’s willfully unexamined assumptions. On this latter point, no less than Harvard’s recent report on the humanities, “Mapping the Future,” agrees. The primary concern of “Mapping” is students exiting the humanities. Since 1966, humanities majors have dropped from 14 to 7 percent of degrees nationwide. In examining the reasons for the exodus, Harvard confesses to driving off independent-minded students repelled by the intolerance too often taught and practiced in the humanities. “Mapping” acknowledges, “We sometimes alienate” humanities students who get the message “that some ideas are unspeakable.”

Another factor often neglected amid our current concern over the fall of liberal arts study is the rise of the societal goal that nearly all should go to college. This educational romanticism fatally neglects the fact that mastery of a coherent, rigorous liberal arts curriculum is achievable by but a fraction of the great numbers now attending college thanks to the college-for-all orthodoxy. Thus, “Mapping’s” concern over the percentage-drop in humanities majors is likely overwrought, because, if the liberal arts are not for everybody, sending ever-more students to college should only be expected to reduce the percentage of humanities majors relative to the now-larger pool. The college-for-all agenda also has played no small role in diluting the rigor of what does remain of the liberal arts, thereby contributing to the popular perception that they lack intellectual respectability.

As to whether or not the critical reevaluation of the liberal arts will lead to their thoughtful reform or doom them to irrelevance, my point in this piece is that the pervasive relativism and concomitant intolerance currently found in the liberal arts already has doomed them in the deepest, most meaningful sense. We can and must, of course, hope that a reevaluation will produce thoughtful reform, but that does not answer the question, “From where and whom will reform come?” From the market? The liberal arts properly constituted were always looked to as a guide to rescue a purely market-oriented focus from falling guilty to the charge that it knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. From politicians? They have feared and likely will continue to fear pushback from those chiefly responsible for dooming the liberal arts, the higher-education establishment, which enjoys an organized, well-funded lobbying effort in both Washington, D.C., and the state capitols–whereas the people lack both the intensity and the organization required to threaten politicians’ electoral imperative.

This is far from saying that we should not hope that a critical reevaluation yields thoughtful reform. But hope is not a strategy. The fundamental question is this: Who will educate the educators? Any successful strategy must entail no less than a refounding of the American academy, which is to say, must entail restoring the quest for wisdom as the highest human possibility. Absent this, the most fundamental of human revolutions, one is hard-pressed to expect anything other than a continued descent into misology, intolerance, and barbarism.

===============

Samuel Goldman, George Washington University

The phrase “going down” is too general. Rather than a single entity, “the liberal arts” designates a far-flung constellation of activities and institutions. In order to assess the fate of the liberal arts, these dimensions have to be distinguished. Here are a few key elements of liberal arts, with some thoughts on challenges and prospects for each:

Liberal arts colleges. Liberal arts colleges are in big trouble. According to a 2012 article in the journal Liberal Education there were 212 liberal arts colleges (LACs) in the United States in 1990. Today, there are only 130.

Arguments about the higher education bubble would lead one to expect that the colleges that dropped off the list went bust. That’s not the case: only a few of the missing LACs actually closed. Instead, they changed their curricula, emphasizing pre-professional or vocational education.
This trend has affected remaining LACs, too. According to Swarthmore president Rebecca Chopp, only 10 residential liberal arts colleges in the country offer no vocational majors whatsoever. And at 55% of LACs, only about half the students graduate with liberal arts. In sum, there are many fewer liberal arts colleges than there used to be. And those that survive aren’t as humanistic as they used to be.

The weak job market almost certainly discourages students from enrolling in LACs or, if they do, majoring in the humanities. But the real problem is the abandonment of the justification for the LAC. Having rejected many of their traditional religious, civic, and moral responsibilities in the 1970s, LACs now have trouble explaining what they’re for. No wonder students prefer options that seem more likely to lead to employment and often cost less.

More serious teaching and learning goes on at liberal arts colleges than conservative critics sometimes suggest. Nevertheless, it is inconceivable that they will recommit as institutions to traditional ideals. As result, they will likely continue to die out, whether through actual closure or vocationalization. In a few decades, the only survivors may be elite LACs, which offer valuable branding as well as the small-scale setting in which some students thrive, and religious colleges which retain the sense of vocation that inspired the founders of American high education.

Undergraduate Education. The picture here isn’t quite so dire. Recent reports have trumpeted the finding that number of degrees conferred in liberal arts subjects has dropped precipitously since the 1960s. It turns out, however, that most of the drop occurred in the 1970s–long before the current economic crisis or the culture wars of the 1990s. So the challenge to undergraduate enrollments doesn’t seem to be either new market pressures or recent intellectual developments. In fact, much of the drop is attributable to women entering non-humanities fields as their professional opportunities expanded.

But this interpretation offers no cause for self-congratulation. The fact remains that the liberal arts hemorrhaged students in the 1970s–and have done nothing to win them back since. At elite universities, moreover, the number of humanities majors at elite universities has dropped in the last decade. The social sciences appear to be the main beneficiaries of the shift.

Unlike the crisis of liberal colleges, this problem has a solution. Professors and departments of the liberal arts don’t need major institutional commitments to attract more students. They do need to offer better courses. “Better” means two things: First, effective humanities courses need to focus on serious content of enduring importance rather than specialist research or pop culture ephemera. Second, they must include rigorous reading and writing requirements, which equip students with the flexible skills that employers value more than specific job training.

Offering better courses won’t be easy, but it’s certainly possible. For that reason, I’m relatively optimistic about the prospects for liberal arts education within larger universities. The liberal arts will probably not recover the central role they enjoyed in the golden age of American higher education after World War II. But they don’t have to accept irrelevance.

Graduate Education. This subject is almost too depressing to discuss. For mostly self-serving reasons, departments of liberal arts subjects continue to admit far more Ph.D. students than they could ever hope to place in jobs. That wouldn’t be so bad if these students were honestly informed of their prospects and provided with adequate funding. Too often, however, they’re led to believe that chances of employment are much better than they really are and used as cheap labor to staff the classes that tenured faculty don’t want to teach.

The future of the graduate system is murky. For mysterious reasons, enrollment in doctoral programs in the arts and humanities actually increased by 7.7% in 2013. On the other hand, good (meaning pessimistic) information about the risks and rewards of graduate school in the humanities is much easier to find than in the past. So if more people are going forth to the slaughter, they can be expected to know what awaits them.

The Life of the Mind. But liberal education can’t be reduced to colleges, course offerings, or graduate program. As Leo Strauss suggested, these are organized settings for a certain kind of experience: the experience of things that the Greeks described as kalon–the fine, the beautiful, the noble. Do the liberal arts today offer this experience?

It seems to me that this question can’t be answered on the systematic level. The experience of the beautiful is something that happens to and among individuals engaged in study and discussion with and about great works and great minds. All the humanities majors in the world wouldn’t guarantee it. And the economic pressures and intellectual fads can’t preclude it.

So in the long run, I’m optimistic. The traditional objects of liberal arts study—the intellectual and artistic products of Western civilization–are too rich and too rewarding to go down permanently. Plato will still be Plato, Augustine will still be Augustine, Shakespeare will still be Shakespeare in fifty years, or a hundred, or a thousand. Barring social or environmental cataclysm, they will always find readers. And some of those readers will organize themselves for purposes of serious learning and teaching. Perhaps that will occur within universities, perhaps outside them. Either way, the liberal arts will survive.

Shahien Nasiripour:

The U.S. Department of Education is forecast to generate $127 billion in profit over the next decade from lending to college students and their families, according to the Congressional Budget Office.

Beginning in the 2015-16 academic year, students and their families are forecast to pay more to borrow from the department than they did prior to last summer’s new student loan law, which set student loan interest rates based on the U.S. government’s costs to borrow. The higher costs for borrowers would arrive at least a year sooner than previously predicted.

James Kvaal, a top White House official, last year dismissed the possibility that student borrowers would pay higher costs under the new law. The Consumer Protection Financial Bureau on Monday warned borrowers about a “jump” in rates.

The projection, made public Monday by the nonpartisan budget scorekeepers, provides the federal government’s best estimate of how much the government’s student loan program will cost taxpayers. That the program is predicted to generate an average annual profit of about $12 billion through 2024 is likely to fuel calls for the Obama administration and Congress to take additional steps to reduce borrowers’ debt burdens, which the Education Department pegs at an average of more than $26,000.

Tressie McMillan Cottom:

The U.S. higher education crisis has been well documented. College is overpriced, over-valued, and ripe for disruption (preferably, for some critics, by the outcome-driven private sector). At the same time, many Americans are flailing in the post-recession economy. With rising income inequality, persistent long-term unemployment, and declining real wages, Americans are searching for purchase on shifting ground. Not so long ago, the social contract between workers, government, and employers made college a calculable bet. But when the social contract was broken and policymakers didn’t step in, the only prescription for insecurity was the product that had been built on the assumption of security. We built a university system for the way we worked. What happens to college when we work not just differently but for less? And what if the crisis in higher education is related to the broader failures that have left so many workers struggling?

There is a lot of talk right now about how we will work in the future, but it’s mostly based on the realities of how we work today. Many express concerns about the quality and quantity of “good jobs,” which sociologist Arne Kalleberg has characterized as jobs that pay a living wage, are on a ladder of career opportunity, and provide all the material benefits that make for economic security (such as retirement funds and health care). Beneath the surface of debates about yawning income inequality are empirical arguments about job polarization—the idea that the labor market is being pulled at both ends like taffy by global competition, technological change, and policy. At one end are high-skill, high-paying “good” jobs. At the other end are low-skill, low-paying “bad” jobs. The middle, meanwhile, is getting thinner and thinner. And job creation—as underwhelming as it is—is not evenly distributed among the jobs people want and the jobs people have to take. There are more bad new jobs than good. Economists Nir Jaimovich and Henry Siu argue that in the 1980s jobs with lower skill requirements (and pay) started to increase their share of the labor market. That trend has only picked up after the great recession.

Brian T. Hill:

FFor the time being, I’m going to talk about material realities shared by comp/rhet and its others, rather than their differences.

There are all kinds of things I could say about the disciplinary and labor crises in our field, but for now I will focus on an interrelated set of areas with some brief comments, criticisms, or proposals for each: academia’s prestige economy, organized labor, graduate admissions, advisement, the “star system,” and, last and most importantly, undergraduates. Some of these thoughts and recommendations are very small, and some are quite a bit larger.

For starters, campuses, programs, and departments have few if any internal material incentives to make transformational structural changes to the existing divisions of labor. The current arrangement exists for a number of interrelated reasons, but surely one of the most pertinent reasons is that it’s economically beneficial for institutions to organize labor in a tiered wage and title system, with no-contract or low wage or no-benefits work, with labor delivered ‘just-in-time,” etc. Hence the enduring importance and prominence of labor strikes as one of the few bargaining tools still available to workers.

Will Fitzhugh:

While Chester Finn, Andy Smarick, Amanda Ripley, and others are bringing new attention to the methods and structures for the education of our most gifted high school students, for the most part that attention does not get much beyond what the adults do, could do, or should do with gifted students. There is little or no attention to the actual academic work of such students, other than on various tests, and evidently no consideration of how examples of the best work of such students, for instance on their science research, as in the Intel and Siemens competitions or their history research papers, as seen in The Concord Review, could be used to inspire not only their gifted peers at the secondary level, as well as other students, but to demonstrate that we not only wish to recognize the best efforts of adults in the work of educating the gifted, but to honor the actual academic achievements of gifted students as well.

However, it has long been the sad case that most experts and pundits who write about the education of the gifted—and of students in general—restrict their vision to what the adults are doing, and never seem able to notice that high school students are knowledge workers too, and fact that some are writing 15,000-word history research papers of first-rate quality, or conducting, often with the advice of a college professor, original scientific research of value as well.

These EduPundits give none of their limited attention to exemplary academic work by students, so they naturally don’t see it, and they don’t include any in their discussions of the education of the gifted. They fail to notice that in our high schools there are a good number of young autodidacts, and ignoring their work continues to produce a shamefully limited discussion of gifted education in almost every case.

Scholars at several levels have learned from and been inspired by the work of their peers, and it is most unfortunate that such important opportunities have been largely overlooked by the condescension or myopia of those writing about gifted education for our more serious high school students.

A few examples of work by high school students published in The Concord Review:

Albert Shanker was one of a tiny handful of unusual individuals [24 years ago] who understood right away that The Concord Review was not meant to benefit only, or even mainly, those whose work was published, but rather was “equally important” for those students who could be inspired, by reading the diligent work of their peers in this journal, to make more of an effort with their own academic work in high school….as he wrote in The New York Times in 1990: “The Concord Review is also worth thinking about as we consider how to reform our education system. As we’ve known for a long time, factory workers who never saw the completed product and worked on only a small part of it soon became bored and demoralized, But when they were allowed to see the whole process—or better yet become involved in it—productivity and morale improved. Students are no different. When we chop up the work they do into little bits—history facts and vocabulary and grammar rules to be learned—it’s no wonder that they are bored and disengaged. The achievement of The Concord Review’s authors offers a different model of learning. Maybe it’s time for us to take it seriously.”

Jessica Leight [summa cum laude at Yale] (PDF)

Colin Rhys Hill [Christ Church College, Oxford]

Alexandra Petri [summa cum laude at Harvard]

Sarah Valkenburgh [summa cum laude at Dartmouth]

Jennifer Shingleton [summa cum laude at Princeton]

——————————–
“Teach with Examples”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
tcr.org/bookstore
www.tcr.org/blog

“Were the Common Core authors serious about ‘college-readiness,’ they would have taken their cue from publisher Will Fitzhugh, who for decades has been swimming against the tide of downgraded writing standards (blogging, journal-writing, video-producing). To this end, he has been publishing impressive student history papers in his scholarly journal, The Concord Review. The new (CC) standards, to Fitzhugh, enable ‘students to be ignoramuses who may be able to talk glibly about their instant New Deeper critical analysis of selected test passages.’ They will, however, ‘not have enough knowledge to do them a bit of good in college or at any workplace.’ They are effectively being taught the art of propaganda through multimedia rather than the art of writing from a knowledge base in history….”

Mary Grabar, via Will Fitzhugh:

The word “doing” appears frequently in the NCSS guidelines, as it does in the Department of Education’s 2012 report, “A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future,” which was criticized roundly by the National Association of Scholars for using civics education to promote radical activism and anti-Americanism in higher education, instead of providing a knowledge base in history, civics, and geography.

In 2009, when I attended the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS) conference, I learned that most of the educators bristled at the idea of following educational “standards.” Most of the sessions involved sharing strategies for formally adhering to standards, while covertly turning students into activists for radical causes. Among these were repeal of immigration laws, statehood for Washington, D.C., and acceptance of Islam as superior to Christianity. Instead of being given a knowledge base in history, civics, and geography, students were emotionally manipulated into being advocates, attending protests, and lobbying legislators.

Flash forward to 2014. Now the objectives of these social studies teachers are the objectives of Obama’s Department of Education. The Common Core “standards” for math and English Language Arts are the law in 45 states. Those for science and social studies have been written, but are still voluntary.

Eschewing traditional forms of knowledge acquisition and writing (the old standards), “The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) Framework for Social Studies State Standards: State guidance for enhancing the rigor of K-12 civics, economics, geography, and history” promote the idea of doing social studies. Yes, “doing.”

The word “doing” appears frequently in the guidelines, as it does in the Department of Education’s 2012 report, “A Crucible Moment: College Learning & Democracy’s Future,” which was criticized roundly by the National Association of Scholars (myself included) for using civics education to promote radical activism and anti-Americanism in higher education.

In order to advance similar activism, the authors of the K-12 “C3 Framework” caricature traditional education as pouring knowledge into students who are passive vessels. But traditional, classical education, founded on a firm base of knowledge, is the kind that works and best prepares students for adult life. It incorporates three levels of learning outlined by the Atlanta Classical Academy charter school, as taken from their successful petition before the Board of Education:

Grammar Stage (mastery of key foundational facts, rules, and tools, imparted by teachers who are experts in their subject);
Logic Stage (mastery of relationships, categories, and order to create coherent frameworks);
Rhetoric Stage (communication and reasoning).

Notably, Common Core skips the first step, reducing it to a haphazard process of “discovery”—a hallmark of progressive education. The cart is put before the horse through “experiential” learning, where students “practice the arts and habits of civic life.”

There is no sense that students should first acquire a solid foundation of historical knowledge. Rather, students are left to do “inquiry” with “Four Dimensions”: 1) “developing questions and planning inquiries;” 2) “applying disciplinary concepts and tools;” 3) “evaluating sources and using evidence;” and, 4) “communicating conclusions and taking informed action.”

It can hardly be said that children are capable of “taking informed action.” Yet the cover photographs of the report draft (dated April 9, 2013) reveal the authors’ aims by showing children in a public forum, looking at a globe (perhaps plotting their next business move in the “twenty-first century workplace”?), and in a group leaning over plans (mimicking modern-day advertisements of the corporate working world). The final photo shows a street protest with signs saying, “No” to toxic waste.

Such photos belie the authors’ claim that “Advocates of citizenship education cross the political spectrum” and are “bound by a common belief that our democratic republic will not sustain unless students are aware of their changing cultural and physical environments; know their past; read, write, and think deeply; and, act in ways to promote the common good.” Rather, these advocates use children for their own aims, placing adult burdens on them, while denying them a real education.

The Objectives for Second Grade

Age-inappropriateness also becomes evident in a table called “Suggested K-12 Pathway for College, Career and Civic Readiness Dimension 1.” It states that “by the end of grade 2” (emphasis added) the student will construct compelling questions and “explain why the compelling question is important to the student” and “identify disciplinary concepts found or implied in a compelling question.” (A note explains, “Students, particularly before middle school, will need considerable guidance and support from adults to construct questions that are suitable for inquiry.” Of course, they would need “guidance.” That’s where the teacher can impose her own, leading questions.)

The second-grader, furthermore, in a mind-boggling quest, must “make connections between supporting questions and compelling questions” and “identify ideas mentioned and implied by a supporting question” and then “determine the kinds of sources that will be helpful in answering compelling and supporting questions.”

Writing assignments do not follow an age-appropriate progression, either. Dimension 4, “Communicating Conclusions,” calls for second-graders to “construct an argument with reasons” and “present a summary of an argument using print, oral and digital technologies.” High school seniors are to do similar tasks in a slightly more sophisticated form, for example, in constructing arguments, using multiple sources, and acknowledging counterclaims and evidentiary weaknesses.

What can a “college-ready” senior do?

While second-graders are asked to “think like historians,” the high school senior is asked to perform unscholarly tasks, such as presenting “adaptations of arguments and explanations that feature evocative ideas and perspectives on issues and topics to reach a range of audiences and venues outside the classroom using print and oral technologies (e.g., posters, essays, letters, debates, speeches, reports, maps) and digital technologies (e.g., internet, social media, digital documentary).” Even essays and reports get buried amidst posters, social media, and digital documentaries.

The authors refer back to the English Language Arts (ELA) standards for guidance, but these are vague and loose, for example, Standard 7, which “focuses on ‘short as well as more sustained research projects based on focused questions.” The social studies standards also go back to the ELA’s emphasis on “Speaking and Listening Standards,” wherein “students engage one another strategically using different forms of media given a variety of contexts in order to present their knowledge and ideas.” As if these were really vigorous, the authors cite “examples,” such as participating in a “range of conversations and collaborations with diverse partners” and making “strategic use of ‘media and visual display’ when presenting.”

This is hardly preparation for college work in the traditional sense. Traditional work would involve sifting through historical material knowledgeably, and compiling it in the well-reasoned format of a scholarly paper. Were the Common Core authors serious about “college-readiness,” they would have taken their cue from publisher Will Fitzhugh, who for decades has been swimming against the tide of downgraded writing standards (blogging, journal-writing, video-producing). To this end, he has been holding contests and publishing impressive student papers in his scholarly journal, The Concord Review. The new standards, to Fitzhugh, enable “students to be ignoramuses who may be able to talk glibly about their instant New Deeper critical analysis of selected test passages.” They will, however, “not have enough knowledge to do them a bit of good in college or at any workplace.” They are effectively being taught the art of propaganda through multimedia rather than the art of writing through a knowledge base in history, civics and geography.

The new social studies standards are not surprising, considering the work of social studies teachers behind the scenes at conferences and elsewhere. They now have an administration that supports their radical aims. Consider the members of the “writing team” of this report, including this large majority:

Kathy Swan, lead writer/project director: associate professor of curriculum and instruction at the University of Kentucky, and coauthor of And Action! Doing Documentaries in the Social Studies Classroom. Her research focuses on “standards-based technology integration, authentic intellectual work, and documentary-making in the social studies classroom.”

Keith C. Barton, professor of curriculum and instruction and adjunct professor of history at Indiana University and co-author of Doing History: Investigating with Children in Elementary and Middle Schools and Teaching History for the Common Good.

Flannery Burke, associate professor of history at Saint Louis University who specializes in environmental history, the history of the American West, and gender studies.

Susan W. Hardwick, professor emerita of geography at the University of Oregon and co-host of the Annenberg/PBS series The Power of Place.

John Lee, associate professor of social studies education at North Carolina State University and co-director of the New Literacies Collaborative, http://newlit.org (connected to Linda Darling-Hammond).

Peter Levine, Professor of Citizenship & Public Affairs at Tufts University, author of Engaging Young People in Civic Life, and a proponent of left-wing “civic engagement.”

Karen Thomas-Brown, associate professor of social studies and multiculturalism at the University of Michigan-Dearborn with research interests in “neoliberalism and the impact of globalization on the operation of secondary urban centers in developing countries.”

Cynthia Tyson, professor in the College of Education and Human Ecology at The Ohio State University, “where she teaches courses in multicultural and equity studies in education; early childhood social studies; and multicultural children’s literature.”

Bruce VanSledright, professor of history and social studies education at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte. His research focuses on “doing history.”

Merry Wiesner-Hanks, professor of history, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, with a special interest in women’s and gender history.

Mary Grabar, Ph.D., has taught college English for over twenty years. She is the founder of the Dissident Prof Education Project, Inc., an education reform initiative that offers information and resources for students, parents, and citizens. The motto, “Resisting the Re-Education of America,” arose in part from her perspective as a very young immigrant from the former Communist Yugoslavia (Slovenia specifically). She writes extensively and is the editor of EXILED. Ms. Grabar is also a contributor to SFPPR News & Analysis.

Glenn H. Reynolds:

Like most professors, I hate doing administrative work. And since somebody has to do it, universities have increasingly built up a corps of full-time administrators. That’s fine, but lately, the administrative class has grown too numerous and too heavy-handed. As colleges and universities increasingly face financial pressures, it’s time to rethink.

Full-time administrators now outnumber full-time faculty. And when times get tough, schools have a disturbing tendency to shrink faculty numbers while keeping administrators on the payroll. Teaching gets done by low-paid, nontenured adjuncts, but nobody ever heard of an “adjunct administrator.”

But it’s not just the fat that is worrisome. It’s administrators’ obsession with — and all too often, abuse of — security that raises serious concerns. At the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth, Clyde W. Barrow, a leading professor, has just quit, complaining of an administration that isolates itself from students and faculty behind keypads and security doors.

Isolation is bad. But worse still is the growing tendency of administrators to stifle critics by shamelessly interpreting even obviously harmless statements as “threats.” A recent example took place at Bergen Community College, where Professor Francis Schmidt was suspended, and ordered to undergo a psychiatric examination over a “threat” that consisted of posting a picture of his 9-year old daughter wearing a Game Of Thrones T-shirt. The shirt bore a quote from the show, reading: “I will take what is mine with fire & blood.” Bergen administrator Jim Miller apparently thought the picture, which was posted to Schmidt’s Google Plus account, was somehow intended as a threat to him. (Schmidt had filed a labor grievance a couple of months earlier.)

Michael Stratford:

Some student loan borrowers have reported to federal consumer protection officials that their private lenders automatically placed them in default when their cosigner died or filed for bankruptcy, even when the borrowers were otherwise paying the loan on time.

The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau highlighted that issue on Wednesday in a report analyzing the more than 2,300 complaints it had received about private student loan companies from the beginning of last October through the end of March. (The volume of complaints was up by more than one-third compared to the same period last year).

The issue is that some private student loans contain terms allowing lenders to demand the full outstanding amount of a loan when a borrower’s cosigner — often a parent or grandparent — dies or files for bankruptcy protection, according to Rohit Chopra, the CFPB’s student loan ombudsman who authored the report.

Virginia Postrel:

The parents and newly admitted students visiting colleges this month are asking questions about social life, study habits and — everyone’s favorite topic these days — job prospects after graduation. These are all important subjects, but if you care about your child’s intellectual development, or just want to keep the kid out of trouble, you should also ask about the university’s attitudes toward free speech.

For more than a decade I’ve been on the board of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, a civil-liberties watchdog group that defends the rights of college students and faculty. As you probably assumed, many cases FIRE gets involved in stem from “politically correct” censorship; but the range of university abuses is much wider than that. The motives often have less to do with ideology than with administrative bullying, paranoia or stupidity.

To take a particularly absurd example, in January a Bergen Community College professor was placed on leave after he posted on Google+ a photograph of his young daughter wearing a “Game of Thrones” T-shirt with the quote, “I will take what is mine with fire & blood.” An administrator deemed the photo a disturbing threat of violence.

Thomas Lindsay:

When Bill Ayers observed that “every revolution is impossible until it happens, and then, looking backwards, every revolution appears inevitable,” it is safe to say that he did not have in mind any endeavors of conservative Texas governor Rick Perry. But with his 2011 state of the state address, Perry may have launched a revolution of his own. Perry challenged Texas’s public universities to craft four-year degrees costing no more than $10,000 in tuition, fees, and books, and to achieve the necessary cost reductions by teaching students online and awarding degrees based on competency.

The idea met with skepticism. Andy Brown, who was then chairman of the Travis County Democrats, labeled Perry’s “scheme to serve up $10,000 college degrees … preposterous,” adding that “nobody in higher education believes that is even possible.” Peter Hugill, a Texas A&M professor who at the time was president of the Texas Conference of the American Association of University Professors, posed the rhetorical question: “Do you really want a stripped-down, bare-bones degree?” Hugill went on to declare that “$10,000 seems to me a number someone pulled out of the air.”

If these reactions suggested Perry was out of step with the higher-education establishment, the public’s reaction suggested that defenders of the status quo had fallen out of step with students, their parents, and taxpayers. Baselice and Associates conducted a public-opinion survey commissioned by the Texas Public Policy Foundation, finding that 81 percent of Texas voters believed public universities could be run more efficiently. Nationally, a 2011 Pew study found that 57 percent of prospective students believed a college degree no longer carries a value worth the cost. Seventy-five percent of respondents declared college simply unaffordable.

USM Economics Blog:

Wanting to look into this, I did a little bit of Googling about Noel-Levitz to see if I could find out anything of use about them. As it mentions above, they are an “enrollment management” consulting firm- the largest in the United States. What enrollment management consulting firms tend to offer universities and university systems is something called “financial aid leveraging.” If you clicked that link, you’ll see that it’s pretty hard to understand exactly what that is. I found that an article from the Atlantic from a few years ago explained it far more clearly than the companies that do it: in short, financial aid leveraging is the act of repackaging financial aid so that it is specifically directed at students that a complex algorithm determines as most likely to make the school more money. Frequently, this means taking financial aid away from the people who need it the most and giving it to people who are more likely to stay in school. If you look at the operating budget documents, you’ll notice that a majority of Noel-Levitz’s recommendations are related to financial aid.

While you can have a discussion of ethics about this practice on its own, something else is what made me uncomfortable:

Noel-Levitz is a former subsidiary of Sallie Mae, the student loan giant. If you’re not acquainted with Sallie Mae’s reputation, a quick Google search should remedy that.

Now, Sallie Mae isn’t what it used to be; it’s no longer officially tied to the government (now it’s publicly traded and has changed its name to SLM). However, in 2013, Sallie Mae was contracted by the Department of Education as the servicer of almost 20% of new federal student loans. That means, in general, that the more federal student loans there are, the more money Sallie Mae makes. In addition, Sallie Mae will sometimes sell off some of its loans in the form of financial securities. However, the income from those contracts ($109 million in 2013) pales in comparison to its income from selling those securities ($13.8 billion in 2012) and offering their own private student loans ($37.5 billion in loans outstanding as of Dec 31, 2013). In fact, the direct federal loan program has been a huge source of competition for Sallie Mae.

In other words, since it’s no longer originating federal student loans (which used to be its biggest source of revenue), Sallie Mae will make more money if there are more private student loans (especially if those private student loans go to the students most likely to repay them. More on that in a minute).

From the Noel Levitz 2014 Discounting Report

Walter Hamilton:

Debbie Rohr lives with her husband and twin teenage sons in a well-tended three-bedroom home in Salinas.

The ranch-style house has a spacious kitchen that looks out on a yard filled with rosebushes. It’s a modest but comfortable house, the type that Rohr, 52, pictured for herself at this stage of life.

She just never imagined that it would be her childhood home, a return to a bedroom where she once hung posters of Olivia Newton-John and curled up with her beloved Mrs. Beasley doll.

Driven by economic necessity — Rohr has been chronically unemployed and her husband lost his job last year — she moved her family back home with her 77-year-old mother.

At a time when the still sluggish economy has sent a flood of jobless young adults back home, older people are quietly moving in with their parents at twice the rate of their younger counterparts.

George Anders:

Meet Alaric Blair, a 47-year-old elementary school teacher from Calumet City, Ill. He is strict, pleasant and ambitious. Right now, he’s taking advanced classes at Chicago’s Dominican University, hoping to recast himself as a school principal. It’s costing him $10,000 — and he has no desire to get tangled up in the current student-loan mess.

Anyone paying for higher education in the U.S. knows we’ve reached a financial crisis. Tuition keeps rising much faster than inflation. Going in debt to cover costs has become so common that education loans now exceed $1 trillion. Borrowers’ fates are shockingly inconsistent. Some graduates rapidly dig their way out of debt and enjoy better lives as fully accredited doctors, actuaries or the like. Others can’t finish costly programs or strike out in the job market, leaving them ill-served by easy credit. There’s no flexibility in this system: repayment schedules keep ticking.

Back in 1955, economist Milton Friedman argued in favor of financing education with variable-repayment systems that tied into students’ eventual earnings. Top earners would repay more. Dropouts and hard-luck cases would be treated more leniently. Modern-day researchers such as Miguel Palacios of Vanderbilt University continue to advocate equity-based financing, tied to a fixed percentage of future earnings. Yet such approaches exist mostly in academic white papers, rather than in the real world.

Minding the Campus:

For years, Washington has failed to make universities accountable to the students and taxpayers funding them. This failure was epitomized by the 2008 Higher Education Opportunity Act, which forbade the Department of Education from creating a “student unit record system, an education bar code system, or any other system that tracks individual students over time.” The bill, argued the New America Foundation’s Kevin Carey, sought to “prevent public officials from asking honest questions about what, exactly, taxpayers are getting in exchange for their support.” Though both Republicans and Democrats have recently called for accountability measures on the federal side, it’s unclear that they’ll make progress anytime soon.

Where Washington has failed, however, Texas already has succeeded. When it comes to Texas public higher education, knowing the truth could make you free–debt-free, that is, or, if not entirely free of debt, perhaps less burdened with it than the average college graduate today.

Texas is credited with having “the most sophisticated and publicly available higher-education data set in the country.” In 2004, Governor Rick Perry signed an executive order which asserted that “the public has the right to demand complete accountability for its investment in institutions of education.” Accordingly, the order, entitled “Relating to accountability of higher education systems and institutions,” calls on the state’s public universities to “provide the citizens of Texas, the Governor, and the Legislature with the information necessary to determine the effectiveness and quality of the education students receive at individual institutions.”

This wasn’t just talk. Last year, the Texas Legislature passed Texas House Bill 1296, which requires the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB) to “prepare information comparing institutions of higher education in this state and post the information” on THECB’s website. This information is to be provided to any “public school student who requests the information.” The mandated information includes identifying “postsecondary education and career opportunities, including information that states the benefits of four-year and two-year higher education programs, postsecondary technical education, skilled workforce careers, and career education programs.”

Jay Matthews:

Walter Fields’s 15-year-old daughter is a sophomore at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J. She scored advanced proficient on state math tests in middle school and received an A in algebra in eighth grade.

For reasons that mystify Fields and his wife, their daughter was not recommended for the ninth-grade geometry course that would keep her on the track to Advanced Placement calculus her senior year. Only when they contacted the principal and the math department chair was she placed in that advanced course. The geometry teacher encouraged her dream to become an engineer. She had a B most of the year but slipped to a C because of the demands of lettering in basketball and track, her father said.

Now she is in a fix. Her Algebra 2 teacher made clear on Parents Night, her father said, that “she did not like school sports and suggested students needed to choose between being involved in a sport and being enrolled in her course.” The teacher has proved to be, her father said, very discouraging. His daughter has struggled.

“The teacher’s response to our questions regarding our daughter’s performance was ‘she just doesn’t seem to get it,’ ” Fields said. “When we pressed the teacher she curtly suggested that maybe this wasn’t the right class for our daughter.” Her geometry teacher was apparently so alarmed that she told Fields’s daughter to come see her if she needed help. Fields and his wife are well-educated African Americans. He thinks Columbia High is hindering his daughter’s progress because of her race. He and other parents are preparing to file a lawsuit on that issue. Fifty-six percent of Columbia students are black, but just 14.4 percent of AP calculus students in the 2011-12 school year were of that race. Seventy-three percent were white.

Michelle Singletary:

A year ago, I was where many parents are right now. My daughter Olivia was faced with the decision of where to attend college.

I’ll admit I was pretty adamant leading up to the choice that many families have to make by May 1, which is the deadline for accepted students to declare where they will attend college. No student loans. No debt for our daughter or us.

However, when Olivia started looking at schools that were out of our financial comfort zone, my husband and I realized this wasn’t going to be as easy as we thought. Our daughter is a great student. She took advanced placement classes and participated in extracurricular activities. And when she said her “I’ll-be-crushed-if-I-don’t-get-in” school was the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, we began to get anxious.

We didn’t have enough saved to cover all the out-of-state expenses for four years at UNC. Absent any aid, the cost at UNC would have been more than $183,000, including tuition, fees, room, board, books and supplies, travel and personal expenses. And that figure doesn’t include the likelihood of price increases.

Still, how could we deny her heart’s desire? She swooned after a tour of the campus. She bought UNC paraphernalia. Even the school color — light blue — is her favorite color.

She didn’t get into her dream school. And honestly, we were relieved.

You might think it’s easy for us now to say we wouldn’t have let her go. Yet, trust me, we would have had to break her heart.

Her rejection made the decision of where she would go easier for us. But what if it’s not as easy for you? What if your child does have a choice, and that choice is beyond your means?

James Gallagher:

Mathematicians were shown “ugly” and “beautiful” equations while in a brain scanner at University College London.

The same emotional brain centres used to appreciate art were being activated by “beautiful” maths.

The researchers suggest there may be a neurobiological basis to beauty.

The likes of Euler’s identity or the Pythagorean identity are rarely mentioned in the same breath as the best of Mozart, Shakespeare and Van Gogh.

The study in the journal Frontiers in Human Neuroscience gave 15 mathematicians 60 formula to rate.

One of the researchers, Prof Semir Zeki, told the BBC: “A large number of areas of the brain are involved when viewing equations, but when one looks at a formula rated as beautiful it activates the emotional brain – the medial orbito-frontal cortex – like looking at a great painting or listening to a piece of music.”

The more beautiful they rated the formula, the greater the surge in activity detected during the fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) scans.

“Neuroscience can’t tell you what beauty is, but if you find it beautiful the medial orbito-frontal cortex is likely to be involved, you can find beauty in anything,” he said.