Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that the  national advocacy group for student veterans that kicked out 40 chapters at for-profit colleges earlier this month for allegedly providing misleading information to prospective students plans to released the names of 26 chapters that remain suspended. The article states:

“The organization, Student Veterans of America, or SVA, revoked the 40 chapters’ membership three weeks ago after officials discovered that the institutions had listed administrators, not students, as primary contacts and used institutional Web sites and recruitment pages as chapter sites. The group has since reinstated 14 chapters, with up-to-date contact information, after verifying that they are indeed led by students.

The announcement on Thursday will name the 26 chapters—including those at 13 campuses affiliated with Education Management Corporation, the nation’s second-largest publicly traded for-profit higher education company—that have not been reinstated.

Michael Dakduk, executive director of SVA, said he was concerned that some for-profit colleges were taking advantage of the organization’s well-known brand to legitimize their programs. If a campus lists a registrar, an enrollment adviser, or other administrator, as the 26 ousted chapters allegedly did, that compromises the organization’s goal of connecting veterans directly to one another, said Mr. Dakduk. It threatens its credibility, he said.

“We’re worried that some may just be using it to appear that they’re veteran- or military-friendly,” he said in an interview.

The student-veterans’ group has 35 for-profit-college chapters in good standing, including the 14 that were reinstated, Mr. Dakduk said. The recent scrutiny is “not because we’re picking on the for-profits,” he said. “It’s because we don’t know that for-profits have the same standards of handling student organizations that traditional brick-and-mortar institutions have.” This week, SVA officials sent a 10-question survey to its 35 for-profit-college chapters to determine how much independence they have from administrators.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A New York Times editorial (see below) is right on target in calling for Congress and especially the Republican leadership to do more to support college students.

Tony

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New York Times Editorial – April 25, 2012

“In 2007, President George W. Bush signed a bill that cut in half interest rates on subsidized student loans until 2012. Those low rates will expire on July 1 — going back to 6.8 percent from 3.4 percent — and, to prevent college from becoming even more unaffordable for millions of students, the obvious move is to renew them. But nothing is that easy or sensible anymore in Washington, where House Republicans are far more interested in cutting taxes, largely for the rich, than they are in helping low- and middle-income students get a college education.

House Republicans say the country cannot afford the $6 billion a year that it costs to pay for the lower rates. The Ryan budget, recently approved by the House, would allow the rates to double, and, at the same time, would cut taxes by $10 trillion over a decade. Representative John Kline Jr., the chairman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, said keeping the rates low would mean “piling billions of dollars on the backs of taxpayers.”

Instead, Republicans would rather pile that burden on the backs of taxpayers-to-be, specifically the 7.4 million students who now have federally subsidized Stafford loans and the millions more who will need them. At a time when many graduates are desperate for jobs, the interest rate increase would add an average of $1,000 a year to their debt. Already, many Republican lawmakers around the country have made it clear that they don’t even want students to vote, imposing identification requirements that would keep students away from polling places.

In the first of several speeches about the cost of higher education, President Obama urged students on Tuesday to demand that Congress renew the rates. “At this make-or-break moment for the middle class,” he said at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “we’ve got to make sure that you’re not saddled with debt before you even get started in life.”

Nothing is more important to this country’s future than ensuring a good education for coming generations. The issue also plays directly into Mr. Obama’s own need to re-energize younger voters, who turned out in overwhelming numbers for him in 2008 but seem far less enthusiastic these days.

Once the White House began its effort, Mitt Romney broke with House Republicans and said Monday that he supports renewing the loan subsidies. As usual, though, that also meant breaking with himself, since he had fully embraced the House budget and never expressed any reservations about the student loan provisions. Indeed, only a few months ago, he argued repeatedly in interviews that student subsidies were a bad idea that encouraged colleges to raise their tuition.

Mr. Romney, along with the Senate Republican leader, Mitch McConnell, said that the $6 billion cost of the subsidy should be offset with cuts to other programs, but predictably neither man said where those cuts should come from. The White House and Democrats have proposed raising the money by ending a loophole used by high-paid employees of S-corporations to avoid paying full payroll taxes.

The Republican response to that idea is also predictable. This is a party that shows time and again that it wants to protect only those who have made it, not help those struggling to get started.”

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting that a majority of New York City voters disapprove of the way Mayor Michael Bloomberg has handled his signature issue, education, and are looking for his successor to take the city schools in a new direction, a NY1-Marist Poll found.

The poll, released yesterday, found that 34 percent of voters approve of Mr. Bloomberg’s handling of the city’s public schools, 56 percent disapprove and 10 percent are unsure.

It also found that nearly two out of three — 62 percent — want the next mayor to move in a new direction, compared with 27 percent who want to see Mr. Bloomberg’s policies continued, and 11 percent who are unsure.

“He’s been offered up as ‘the education mayor’ and this becomes a focal point for criticism,” said Dr. Lee M. Miringoff, the director of the Marist College Institute for Public Opinion. “Clearly there is significant dissatisfaction with the school system in New York.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Sloan-C Conference on Blended Learning is in full swing here in Milwaukee.  The keynote was delivered by David Wiley, Associate Professor from Brigham Young University.   His topic, Openness in Blended Learning:  Perfecting the Blend, focused on open educational resources and courses, affordable computing, open licensing, open access journals and open textbooks.   He was well-received by the audience, made up mostly of faculty and instructional designers.

Tanya Joosten (University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee) gave a brief preview of her new book, Social Media for Educators, and was available at a book signing.  I bought a copy and while I have not read it yet, it appears to have a good deal of useful insights on how to integrate social media into teaching and learning.

Also many excellent workshops, information and poster sessions.

Well done, Sloan-C!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting that New York University will lead a consortium of universities in building a new school for applied science in downtown Brooklyn.  Its partners include the City University of New York, Carnegie Mellon University, the University of Warwick, the University of Toronto and the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay.  The school will be located at the old headquarters of the city’s transit authority at 370 Jay Street. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority had largely abandoned the 61-year-old building, transferring many of its occupants to other offices in Manhattan.

“To move the transit authority’s equipment and remaining employees out, N.Y.U. promised to pay $50 million of the relocation costs. It also agreed to pay as much as $10 million to move the New York Police Department out of some space it occupies in the building.

In exchange, the city agreed to rent the building for $1 a year to N.Y.U., a private university with an endowment of $2.5 billion. The city also offered a $15 million package of breaks on taxes and energy costs and possibly some cash.”

This is the second major announcement of a new school of applied science being built in New York City.  Last year, Cornell University, in partnership with the Technion School in Israel, won a competition with a plan to build a $2 billion campus on Roosevelt Island..

Hurrah for New York City!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post has a brief piece on John Hunstman’s opinion of the Republican Presidential candidates.  Speaking on Sunday about his own presidential candidacy, he commented that he was less than impressed by his fellow candidates when he attended his first debate in August.

“Is this the best we could do?” Huntsman said he asked himself.

He also joked that his wife forbade him to pander to the party’s far-right contingent ahead of Iowa’s caucuses, which likely hurt him with conservative voters in the Hawkeye State.

“She said if you pandered, if you sign any of those damn pledges, I’ll leave you,” Huntsman said. “So I had to say I believe in science — and people on stage look at you quizzically as though you’re … an oddball.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that the American Association of Community Colleges issued a report on Saturday intended to galvanize college leaders to transform their institutions for the 21st-century needs of students and the economy.  The report, “Reclaiming the American Dream: Community Colleges and the Nation’s Future,” is a blunt assessment of the state of community colleges and calls on college leaders to “redesign their institutions, their mission and their students’ educational experiences” to ensure that they meet the needs of a changing society.”

Released here on the opening night of the group’s annual conference, the report acknowledges the sector’s historic growth and success but also argues that even so, far too many community-college students do not graduate. The study also found employment preparation inadequately connected to the needs of the job market, and a need for two-year colleges to work more closely with high schools and baccalaureate institutions.

“As they currently function, community colleges are not up to the task before them,” it says.

The report makes a number of recommendations including:

• Increase completion rates of students earning community college credentials (certificates and associate degrees) by 50% by 2020, while preserving access, enhancing quality, and eradicating attainment gaps associated with income, race, ethnicity, and gender.
• Dramatically improve college readiness: By 2020, reduce by half the number of students entering college unprepared for rigorous college-level work, and double the number of students who complete developmental education programs and progress to successful completion of related freshman-level courses.
• Close the American skills gaps by sharply focusing career and technical education on preparing students with the knowledge and skills required for existing and future jobs in regional and global economies.

As with many calls for education change and reform, the question of funding becomes critical particularly for sustained development.  This will be the  challenge as public higher education is experiencing unprecedented reductions in financial support from states and localities.  The contributors/authors of the report consisted mostly of community college presidents and administrators.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

This week I will be attending the Sloan-C Blended Learning Conference in Milwaukee.   This year’s theme, “Perfecting the Blend,” reflects efforts to further explore the blending of the student experience through practice and research while harnessing the potential of new and emerging technologies, pedagogies, and practices in a greater array of educational institutions facilitating an overall improvement in the state of education.

The keynote speaker will be Dr. David Wiley, Associate Professor of Instructional Psychology and Technology in the David O. McKay School of Education at Brigham Young University.  David also serves as Associate Director of the Center for the Improvement of Teacher Education and Schooling with responsibility for the research unit, where he directs the Open Education Group.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Wal-Mart Stores Inc. hushed up a vast bribery campaign that top executives of its Mexican subsidiary carried out to build stores across that country, according to a published report.

The New York Times reported that Wal-Mart failed to notify law enforcement officials even after its own investigators found evidence of millions of dollars in bribes. The newspaper said the company shut down its internal probe despite a report by its lead investigator that Mexican and U.S. laws likely were violated.  According to the report:

“In September 2005, a senior Wal-Mart lawyer received an alarming e-mail from a former executive at the company’s largest foreign subsidiary, Wal-Mart de Mexico. In the e-mail and follow-up conversations, the former executive described how Wal-Mart de Mexico had orchestrated a campaign of bribery to win market dominance. In its rush to build stores, he said, the company had paid bribes to obtain permits in virtually every corner of the country.

The former executive gave names, dates and bribe amounts. He knew so much, he explained, because for years he had been the lawyer in charge of obtaining construction permits for Wal-Mart de Mexico.

Wal-Mart dispatched investigators to Mexico City, and within days they unearthed evidence of widespread bribery. They found a paper trail of hundreds of suspect payments totaling more than $24 million. They also found documents showing that Wal-Mart de Mexico’s top executives not only knew about the payments, but had taken steps to conceal them from Wal-Mart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. In a confidential report to his superiors, Wal-Mart’s lead investigator, a former F.B.I. special agent, summed up their initial findings this way: “There is reasonable suspicion to believe that Mexican and USA laws have been violated.”

The lead investigator recommended that Wal-Mart expand the investigation.

Instead, an examination by The New York Times found, Wal-Mart’s leaders shut it down.

Neither American nor Mexican law enforcement officials were notified. None of Wal-Mart de Mexico’s leaders were disciplined. Indeed, its chief executive, Eduardo Castro-Wright, identified by the former executive as the driving force behind years of bribery, was promoted to vice chairman of Wal-Mart in 2008. Until this article, the allegations and Wal-Mart’s investigation had never been publicly disclosed.

But The Times’s examination uncovered a prolonged struggle at the highest levels of Wal-Mart, a struggle that pitted the company’s much publicized commitment to the highest moral and ethical standards against its relentless pursuit of growth.

Under fire from labor critics, worried about press leaks and facing a sagging stock price, Wal-Mart’s leaders recognized that the allegations could have devastating consequences, documents and interviews show. Wal-Mart de Mexico was the company’s brightest success story, pitched to investors as a model for future growth. (Today, one in five Wal-Mart stores is in Mexico.) Confronted with evidence of corruption in Mexico, top Wal-Mart executives focused more on damage control than on rooting out wrongdoing.

In one meeting where the bribery case was discussed, H. Lee Scott Jr., then Wal-Mart’s chief executive, rebuked internal investigators for being overly aggressive. Days later, records show, Wal-Mart’s top lawyer arranged to ship the internal investigators’ files on the case to Mexico City. Primary responsibility for the investigation was then given to the general counsel of Wal-Mart de Mexico — a remarkable choice since the same general counsel was alleged to have authorized bribes.”

Can we get a “Greed is Good” and an Amen!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A reading passage included this week in one of New York’s standardized English tests has become the talk of the eighth grade, with students walking around saying, “Pineapples don’t have sleeves,” as if it were the code for admission to a secret society.

The passage is a parody of the tortoise and the hare story, the Aesop’s fable that almost every child learns in elementary school. Only instead of a tortoise, the hare races a talking pineapple.

While taking the test, baffled children raised their hands to say things like, “This story doesn’t make sense.”

The New York Times is reporting that:

“Antitesting activists have taken up the cudgel, saying that the passage and the multiple-choice questions associated with it perfectly illustrate the absurdity of standardized testing. And by Friday afternoon, the state education commissioner had decided that the questions would not count in students’ official scores.

Daniel Pinkwater, a popular children’s book author who wrote the original version of the passage, which was doctored for the test, said that the test-makers had turned a nonsensical story into a nonsensical question for what he believed was a nonsensical test…”

It turns out the same passage and questions, perhaps with variations, have been used at least as far back as 2007 in states like Illinois, Arkansas, Delaware and Alabama, and every time, elicited roughly the same spectrum of incredulity, bafflement, hilarity and outrage.

“I’m still confused about the WHOLE thing,” a student from Alabama posted on a blog in March 2010.

“Our whole school was talking about that story all day long,” posted Adam from Arkansas, a month later.

“Given all the negative feedback they got in other states, they should have pulled this story,” Diane Ravitch, an education historian and critic of the growth of standardized testing, said Friday.

“When the kids ridicule it when they first read it, you know that something’s wrong here. That’s the scary part.”

The test publisher, Pearson, did not respond to requests for comment about the most recent confusion caused by the passage, which was reported Friday by The Daily News.

In a statement Friday afternoon, John B. King Jr., the New York State education commissioner, said that “due to the ambiguous nature of the test questions the department has decided it will not be counted against students in their scores.”

I have read the passage and I have tried to answer the questions.  I agree with the students, the entire passage and the associated questions are nonsensical.  Just think that this test was developed by a company that made tens of millions of dollars on it, and was vetted by officials in a number of state departments of education.   Profit + Incompetence = Poor Education!!

Tony