Dear Commons Community,

According to a national study by the University of Colorado’s National Education Policy Center (NEPC), there are serious and systemic problems with the nation’s full-time cyber schools.

Released May 2, 2013, the Virtual Schools in the U.S. 2013: Politics, Performance, Policy, and Research Evidence report reviews the 311 virtual schools operating in the United States. According to University of Colorado, Boulder Professor Alex Molnar, who edited the report, there are “outsized claims, lagging performance, intense conflicts, lots of taxpayer money at stake, and very little solid evidence to justify the rapid expansion of virtual schools.”

As reviewed by the Center for Digital Education:

“When it comes to both academic and non-academic performance indicators, such as attendance and percentage of students taking a state exam, virtual schools lag significantly behind traditional brick-and-mortar schools, according to Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) metrics.

In the 2010-2011 school year, for instance, 52 percent of brick-and-mortar district and charter schools met AYP, compared to 23.6 percent of virtual schools – a 28 percentage-point gap, according to an NEPC press release, which also stated that virtual schools enroll a far smaller percentage of low-income students, special education students and English language learners than their brick-and-mortar counterparts.

Despite this track record, however, states and districts continue to expand virtual schools and online offerings to students: Between 2008 and 2012, 157 bills categorized by the National Council of State Legislatures as related to “distance/online/virtual/learning” took effect across the United States and its territories.”

The report’s conclusion:

“Although virtual education may hold promise, the NEPC report asserts that the consistently poor performance of full-time virtual schools deserves more attention.

“The current climate of elementary and secondary school reform that promotes uncritical acceptance of any and all virtual education innovations is not supported by educational research,” said Stanford University Professor Emeritus Larry Cuban, who contributed a review of current research knowledge on virtual education to the NEPC report.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Joe Nocera’s column today focuses on Holden Thorp, the departing chancellor of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.  U.N.C. has long been regarded as one of the top universities in the country and on all academic counts advanced well during Thorp’s five-year tenure.  The university went from 19th to 9th in federal research grants. Undergraduate applications rose 43 percent. And, at a time when university budgets are under extreme pressure, Thorp helped keep U.N.C. an affordable public university.   However, as Nocera points out, a scandal in the athletics program has forced Thorp to resign, some would say in disgrace.

“But you won’t find a lot of people giving Thorp, 48, a pat on the back. For the last three years, North Carolina was mired in an athletic scandal. And the fact that it took place on Thorp’s watch overshadows everything else he did.

Though it started out as an N.C.A.A. rules-violation investigation, it morphed into an academic scandal when it was discovered that the chairman of the African and Afro-American Studies Department had long allowed students — athletes very much included — to take no-show classes.

For a university that had long held itself out as one of the “good schools” athletically, the scandal has been humiliating. The N.C.A.A. meted out penalties to the football team. The football coach, Butch Davis, was fired. The athletic director resigned. Even the college accrediting agency got involved.

By his own admission, Thorp was shell-shocked by the experience of dealing with the scandal. As a lifelong North Carolina partisan, he had bought into the myth of the university as a place that harvested genuine student-athletes. The scandal showed him a reality he never before had to face.

It also engulfed him. If you are a college chancellor or president, you can’t delegate when there is a problem in the athletic department. “The governing board, the newspaper, the fans, the faculty, they all expect you to sort it out,” he said. He was spending, literally, half his time dealing with the football team. Yet he had no real experience with the business of college athletics — nor, for that matter, do most college presidents.

He found himself buffeted this way and that. At first, he supported his coach, but then he finally felt he had to fire him. He did so at the worst possible moment: on the eve of a new season. His press conferences dealing with the scandal were, by his own admission, “terrible.” He was, to be blunt, in over his head.”

Sadly, as Thorp departs, his message is that virtually all college presidents are in over their heads when it comes to their athletic departments. They have no background, no experience, that would prepare them for overseeing the $6 billion entertainment complex that big-time college sports has become. In the early 1990s, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics issued a series of reports saying that college presidents needed to regain control of their athletic departments and restore “integrity.” Unfortunately for Thorp, he did not and paid the price.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

An article published yesteray in the New York Times was sent by Jeff Allred to the Hunter College Listserv.     It describes New York City’s newest private school (Avenues) which was founded by the media and education entrepreneur H. Christopher Whittle; Alan Greenberg, a former publisher of Esquire magazine; and the former Yale president and current CUNY Chairman of the Board of Trustees, Benno C. Schmidt Jr.   The article goes on to state:

“[Avenues] hired seasoned teachers and brought in consultants on everything from responsive classroom training to stairwell design. Mandarin or Spanish immersion begins in nursery school; each kindergartner gets an iPad in class. Students will someday have the option of semesters in São Paulo, Beijing or any of the 20 other campuses the school plans to inaugurate around the world. The cost for all this: $43,000 a year.

In September, Avenues opened with 740 students, from pre-K to ninth grade. And with those students came 740 sets of parents, many of them determined to design the perfect 21st-century school in their own high-earning, creative-class image. They were entrepreneurs and tech millionaires, talent agents and fashion designers, Katie Holmes, hedge-fund managers and artists who refuse to live above 23rd Street. And they wanted to be heard. The school subsequently formed a parents’ association, but it had no rules. So there was a debate about who got to go to the meetings and who got to vote. Bylaws had to be created, which, in Avenues’ case, meant collecting the rules and regulations of 30 other private schools so as to determine the best way to even make bylaws. “There was nothing in place,” says Jacquie Hemmerdinger, head of the standards and values committee on the Avenues Parents Association, “and they empowered 700 parents.”

The article provides the views of one set of parents:

“Ella Kim, a merchandising consultant for Coach, organizes a kind of salon for moms to discuss everything from neuroscience to technology to bilingualism in child-rearing. Kim, a voracious researcher, invited Ph.D.’s in child development to run the group so that it had a scientific basis and not just anecdotal musings. Petite, with long black hair, Kim is sharp and warm and aware of the hazards of overthinking how to be a good parent. “Our generation of parents, we are self-realized in that we know it’s not just about achievement,” she said. “The end of just achievement is a lot of disappointment. Our kids will find their excellence and their contentment in finding themselves.”

Kim’s husband, Charlie, who was born in Hawaii and raised in Nigeria, talked to the Avenues administration and ACE — Avenues Community Engagement — about what he learned in running his own technology company, Next Jump. When he and his co-founder started the company, while he was still in college, they hired the smartest, most motivated engineers they could find. Ultimately they fired two-thirds of them and mined their data to figure out the common thread of weakness. It was arrogance, he said. The success stories, Kim discovered, all pointed to humility. “Not meekness,” he said, “but a sense of failing fast and using it to grow.” The Kims said they chose Avenues because of the mission statement’s phrase about humility. “How do you build humility as early as possible?” Charlie wondered aloud.

The better question might be: How do you build humility at a school that costs $43,000 a year? Where students are tended to by a 10-person success team and are expected to find a passion — any passion — around which expertise, confidence and college admission may come? As the Kims spoke in their West Village town house, their son, Jackson, emerged in checkered pajamas from playing a “Star Wars” game on a Mac and broke into a number of songs in Mandarin, including “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.” His aquarium was buzzing in the background, and his scooters, strollers and bikes filled up the entryway. The Kims may be concerned with ensuring that Jackson is humble, but they are also acutely aware of the advantages that speaking Mandarin will give him. “He will have such a leg up compared to his peers,” Ella said. “He’ll be so marketable coming out of college with that language fluency. There’s enough competition domestically!”

Now if we can only find a way to offer an option for this type of education to all children.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New academic programs in big data, analytics and data science are mushrooming around the country.  In the fall, Columbia will offer new master’s and certificate programs on data analytics. The University of San Francisco will soon graduate its charter class of students with a master’s in analytics. Other institutions expanding data science programs  include New York University, Stanford, Northwestern, George Mason, Syracuse, University of California at Irvine and Indiana University.  The New York Times interviewed several individuals associated with Columbia University’s program:

“Rachel Schutt, a senior research scientist at Johnson Research Labs, taught “Introduction to Data Science” last semester at Columbia (its first course with “data science” in the title). She described the data scientist this way: “a hybrid computer scientist software engineer statistician.” And added: “The best tend to be really curious people, thinkers who ask good questions and are O.K. dealing with unstructured situations and trying to find structure in them.”

Eurry Kim, a 30-year-old “wannabe data scientist,” is studying at Columbia for a master’s in quantitative methods in the social sciences and plans to use her degree for government service. She discovered the possibilities while working as a corporate tax analyst at the Internal Revenue Service. She might, for example, analyze tax return data to develop algorithms that flag fraudulent filings, or cull national security databases to spot suspicious activity.

Some of her classmates are hoping to apply their skills to e-commerce, where data about users’ browsing history is gold.

“This is a generation of kids that grew up with data science around them — Netflix telling them what movies they should watch, Amazon telling them what books they should read — so this is an academic interest with real-world applications,” said Chris Wiggins, a professor of applied mathematics at Columbia who is involved in its new Institute for Data Sciences and Engineering. “And,” he added, “they know it will make them employable.”

Universities can hardly turn out data scientists fast enough. To meet demand from employers, the United States will need to increase the number of graduates with skills handling large amounts of data by as much as 60 percent, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute. There will be almost half a million jobs in five years, and a shortage of up to 190,000 qualified data scientists, plus a need for 1.5 million executives and support staff who have an understanding of data.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In the past week, there have been several articles in the New York newspapers on the attempt of Cathleen Black and Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s staff to quell concerns about her nomination as New York City schools chancellor in 2010.  The New York Times reported on May 2^nd:

“As a groundswell of criticism threatened to capsize her appointment as New York City’s schools chancellor, Cathleen P. Black, a publishing executive with no background in education policy, was increasingly focused on one question: What would Oprah Winfrey say?

Eager for Oprah Winfrey to offer a testimonial on her behalf, Ms. Black dispatched a deputy mayor to broker an endorsement through Gayle King, a mutual friend. Later, Ms. Black went as far as to suggest talking points for the television star to keep in mind when describing the would-be chancellor.

“Tremendous leadership, excellent manager, innovator, mother of two and cares about the future of all children,” Ms. Black wrote in an e-mail to Ms. Winfrey on Nov. 17, 2010. “Grace under pressure.” She ended the message: “I owe you big time.”

The exchange was revealed on Thursday after the Bloomberg administration lost a legal battle to withhold a series of e-mail exchanges between Ms. Black and city officials, which the city had fought for two years to keep private.

The messages, written in the days before and after Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg appointed Ms. Black, capture the anxious efforts within the Bloomberg administration to quell the poor public reception to her selection, as education experts and lawmakers alike questioned her readiness for the job.

Even as City Hall aides arranged for Ms. Black to introduce herself to leading public officials, she appeared focused on securing endorsements from celebrities and socialites.

…The Bloomberg administration hoped the endorsements could help persuade the state education commissioner to grant Ms. Black a waiver to become chancellor, which she needed because of her lack of education credentials. Ms. Black eventually received the waiver, and the job. But she resigned just 95 days into her tenure, after Mr. Bloomberg concluded that the situation could not be salvaged.

Mr. Bloomberg overruled several of his top advisers in choosing Ms. Black, then the chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, to replace Joel I. Klein as chancellor. An outcry almost immediately ensued, forcing City Hall into a frantic public relations campaign to shore up her reputation with the public.”

In a second article published yesterday, the New York Times reported that it was not just Ms. Black’s initiative to garner the support of prominent women but a feminist strategy on the part of Mayor Bloomberg’s chief advisers.

“The idea was simple: a letter signed by some of the country’s most prominent women endorsing Cathleen P. Black, chairwoman of Hearst Magazines, to lead New York City’s schools.

But to gain the support of dozens of celebrities, authors and feminist leaders, aides to Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg privately advanced an argument they had mostly shied away from in public: that some of the opposition to Ms. Black’s candidacy in 2010 was grounded in sexism.

A trove of e-mail messages released on Thursday revealed the deliberations of Mr. Bloomberg’s political maestros as they sought to salvage Ms. Black’s candidacy.

As they prepared to contact dozens of famous women, his aides planned to use several talking points, among them Ms. Black’s managerial and business accomplishments, according to the e-mails. The aides also planned to argue that there was “clearly a difference” between the ways the public treated Ms. Black, “a female publisher without educational experience,” and her predecessor, Joel I. Klein, “a male prosecutor without educational experience.”

In the end, 28 women signed the letter, including Gloria Steinem, Evelyn Lauder and Whoopi Goldberg.

“Ms. Black has played a critical role breaking through the glass ceiling — not once, not twice, but time and again,” said the letter, which was addressed to the state education commissioner at the time, David M. Steiner.

A few boldface names deemed worth calling in the e-mails were absent from the letter.

One such prospect was Caroline Kennedy, who aides to Mr. Bloomberg thought would be sympathetic because of her awkward experience trying to win appointment to a Senate seat.

Others who did not participate included Bette Midler, Diane von Furstenberg, Liz Holtzman, Anna Quindlen and Deborah Norville. “

As mayor, Mr. Bloomberg has accomplished a good deal for the benefit of the city and its people but the handling of the Cathleen Black appointment was not one of them.  Furthermore, it appears that media spin was common practice at City Hall where officials were not above taking advantage of legitimate social causes to push their political goals and objectives.  In the case of Cathleen Black, she was completely unprepared to run New York’s school system and no amount of spin could have saved her.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The importance of a college degree today is the subject of much discussion and debate.  For example, Charles Blow in his column expressed:

“Being a college graduate is becoming less exceptional. As the Pew Research Center pointed out in November, “Record shares of young adults are completing high school, going to college and finishing college.” College graduation rates are growing even more in other countries. And Anya Kamenetz noted in The Atlantic magazine in December, “During the past three decades, the United States has slipped from first among nations to 10th in the percentage of people holding a college degree, even as the job market has eroded for Americans without one.”

On the other hand, in a featured article, the New York Times provides interesting data on how college graduates have fared in the job market since the Great Recession of 2008.

“The unemployment rate for college graduates in April was a mere 3.9 percent, compared with 7.5 percent for the work force as a whole, according to a Labor Department report released Friday. Even when the jobless rate for college graduates was at its very worst in this business cycle, in November 2010, it was still just 5.1 percent. That is close to the jobless rate the rest of the work force experiences when the economy is good.

Among all segments of workers sorted by educational attainment, college graduates are the only group that has more people employed today than when the recession started.

The number of college-educated workers with jobs has risen by 9.1 percent since the beginning of the recession. Those with a high school diploma and no further education are practically a mirror image, with employment down 9 percent on net. For workers without even a high school diploma, employment levels have fallen 14.1 percent.”

As the article mentions the caveat is whether college graduates are being employed in jobs commensurate with their skills.

“But just because college graduates have jobs does not mean they all have “good” jobs.

There is ample evidence that employers are hiring college-educated workers for jobs that do not actually require college-level skills — positions like receptionists, file clerks, waitresses, car rental agents and so on.”

Regardless, the overall pattern is clear.  A young person today is better off pursuing a college degree than not.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last month I posted on  the growing interest in electronic grading of essays.  I referred to products such as IntelliMetric by Vantage, Intelligent Essay Assessor by Pearson Knowledge Technologies, SAGrader from Qualrus, and Criterion from ETS.  The National Council of Teachers of English have weighed in and have issued a statement aainst the use of these types of products. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Educaiton (subscription required) :

“Critics of standardized tests argue that the written portion of those assessments can short-circuit the process of developing ideas in writing. Using machines to grade those tests further magnifies their negative effects, according to a statement adopted by the National Council of Teachers of English.

As high-school students prepare for college, the statement reads, they “are ill served when their writing experience has been dictated by tests that ignore the evermore complex and varied types and uses of writing found in higher education…

The intent of the statement, which was passed unanimously by the council’s executive committee, is to prompt policy makers and designers of standardized tests to think more fully about the pitfalls of machine scoring.”

The Council’s statement is well-thought out and includes an annotated bibliography for those wishing to read further about the issues associated with electronic grading of essays.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On Tuesday, the New York Times ran an editorial questioning Rudy Giuliani’s judgment in a speech endorsing Joseph Lhota, a Republican candidate for mayor.  So far in his campaign, Mr. Lhota, has taken several fine, moderate positions.  I have  liked his comments on education and the readiness of New York City public school students to do college-level work.  However, Mr. Lhota has to rein in Rudy Giuliani, his former boss in City Hall. The editorial questions Giuliani’s judgment as follows:

“Former Mayor Rudolph Giuliani went to a fund-raiser on Staten Island on Monday for Joseph Lhota, his former deputy who is running for Mr. Giuliani’s old job. Thanks to a blogging reporter, Jacob Kornbluh, there is video of Mr. Giuliani reprising his role as the Mayor of 9/11.

“What you want to do with a terrorist? You don’t want to prosecute him and put him in jail,” he said. “You want to grab him, question him, and find out who else is involved. Find out what these networks are like. That’s how we prevent further attacks. And we’re going in exactly the opposite direction. We need a mayor who can speak up for that. We need a mayor who understands that, from having been at my side virtually every day for 40 days, from the moment the bombs hit until the moment we left office. Joe wasn’t away from me for more than two minutes.”

Let’s pause on that because that is one weird quote.

Does Mr. Giuliani really think that the next mayor should be the one who’s best on terrorist interrogations? And that Mr. Lhota is fit to run the city because he was once attached to His Honor’s hip?

Apparently so.

But remember, voters, this is the mayor who put his crisis-command bunker in the previously bombed and soon-to-be-destroyed, most-famous terrorist target in America: the World Trade Center. Who made his chauffeur the police commissioner, then pushed him for homeland security secretary, until that man was exposed as a crook and liar and sent to prison. We wish we could make a magic spell to stop Mr. Giuliani from posing as a national-security expert. It would be two words: Bernie Kerik.

Then, in his speech, came the subject of crime and civil liberties, where Mr. Giuliani probably should not have gone. He said the police need to keep stopping-and-frisking because: bombers! He said Chicago has so many murders because cops are too respectful of the Constitution: “They’re very worried, very worried about rights — this right, that right, some other right. The only right they’re not thinking about is the right to be safe.”

Mr. Lhota once ran the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, a job relevant to the one he wants but one that Mr. Giuliani did not discuss. Mr. Lhota surely appreciates the endorsement of his old boss, but he probably would prefer that it didn’t resurrect memories of boiling racial tensions, civil-rights abuses, police brutality and a cult of personality at City Hall. Mr. Giuliani did not help him.”

Good advice!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The lines are being drawn and the battle against MOOCs has begun.  I think it was George Otte who first posted in  a private blog about decisions at Duke and Amherst by faculty that was covered in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“The faculty of Duke University’s undergraduate college drew a line in the sand last week on online education: Massive online experiments are fine, but there will be no credit-bearing online courses at Duke in the near future.

The university’s Arts & Sciences Council, the governing arm of the undergraduate faculty, voted down a proposal to join a consortium of top colleges offering for-credit online courses through 2U, a company that specializes in real-time, small-format online education.

2U’s defeat at Duke marked the second time in a month that undergraduate faculty members at a top liberal-arts college had struck down a proposed deal with an online-teaching consortium. On April 16, professors at Amherst College rejected an invitation to join edX, a nonprofit provider of massive open online courses.

Like the Amherst faculty, members of the faculty council at Duke passed an alternative resolution affirming that they intended to pursue online education—just not like this one, right now.”

Yesterday The Chronicle reported that “professors in the philosophy department at San Jose State University are refusing to teach a philosophy course developed by edX, saying they do not want to enable what they see as a push to “replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.”

The San Jose State professors also called out Michael Sandel, the Harvard government professor who developed the course for edX, suggesting that professors who develop MOOCs are complicit in how public universities might use them…

…But the authors of the philosophy department letter are nonetheless worried about what could happen in the future. “Let’s not kid ourselves; administrators at the CSU are beginning a process of replacing faculty with cheap online education.”

Peter J. Hadreas, chair of the philosophy department, said he believed that appealing to Mr. Sandel directly would be the best way to spark a public conversation about the possible unintended consequences of superstar professors working with edX and other MOOC providers.”

Developments at San Jose State are especially interesting given that San Jose is one of the first pubic university that has a major contract with edX for the development of MOOCs.   The salvos have been fired.

Tony

Dear  Commons Community,

The World Wide Web has just  turned 20 years old. On April 30, 1993, the Web went public for everyone to use  and two decades later CERN, Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire (European Council for Nuclear Research), the organization that developed the Web, has brought the first website back to life at its original address. It is elegant in its simplicity.

Happy Birthday WWW and Thank You, CERN!

Tony