Dear Commons Community,

I was recently ask to write a short piece on the commoditization of higher education focusing on for-profit higher education.  It was published this morning by evoluTTTion, an online journal dedicated to providing a forum for “the lifelong learning community to provoke ideas, re-imagine education, inspire collaboration and create action to lead the transformative change in higher education.”

In this piece, I specifically considered the interplay of human capital proponents, for-profit higher education providers and the move to professional/career academic programs.  My conclusion:

“… as lives and livelihoods extend beyond localness, it is the broadly-educated among us who have the tools to understand, adapt to and succeed in new environs, with diverse peoples and cultures..”

Take a look!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The backlash against high-stakes standardized testing in public schools received a significant boost yesterday when Governor Rick Perry of Texas signed legislation reducing the number of tests students need to take to graduate high school.  The significance of this legislation is important because Texas was a leader in implementing standardized tests in the early 1990s.  As reported in the Huffington Post:

“Texas Governor Rick Perry (R) signed a law Monday that significantly decreases the number of state tests students are required to take before graduating. Starting in fall 2014, students will have to complete only 5 tests, down from 15.

While House Bill 5 was unanimously passed by both the Texas House of Representatives and the Texas Senate, Perry’s feelings on the bill were previously unknown, reports the Austin-American Statesman. Despite pressures from pro-business groups concerned about students’ job readiness, Perry signed the bill into law, saying that it maintains “proper classroom rigor,” according to the Associated Press.

The bill also reduces maximum hours students prepare for tests (from 90 down to 21), creates more flexible diploma plans and abolishes the rule that end-of-year tests count for 15 percent of a course’s grade…

“House Bill 5 was a great step forward for public education because it marks a time where we can say we quit depending on tests to show us that schools are meeting students’ needs,” said Brock Gregg with the Association of Texas Professional Educators.”

This is indeed a great step forward.  The U.S. Department of Education as well as other state legislatures should examine carefully what Texas has done.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a short piece/announcement about a new research initiative funded by the Gates Foundation, to examine student experiences/perceptions of MOOC instruction.

As reported in The Chronicle:

“The MOOC Research Initiative, financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will award grants of $10,000 to $25,000 to researchers seeking to explore issues such as student experiences in MOOCs and the free courses’ systemic impact.

The initiative is aimed at “any group of academics who’ve ‘heard death by MOOCs’ and want to move past the hype and start looking at the actual research around open online courses,” said a co-founder of the project, George Siemens, associate director of the Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute at Athabasca University, in Alberta. Mr. Siemens was one of the first professors to teach a MOOC, in 2008.

Mr. Siemens acknowledged the deep impact of such courses, but he said he wanted to find out exactly what that impact looked like. “A lot of proclamations are being made by prominent media folks talking about just how wonderful MOOCs are,” said Mr. Siemens. “The voice absent has been that of the faculty and the learners. We want to target the designer experience and faculty experience as well.”

The initiative, which kicked off on June 5, will accept research proposals until July 7. Grantees will present preliminary findings at a conference in December, and their final results will be released in early 2014. Mr. Siemens acknowledged the aggressive nature of the project’s timeline, but he said that given the speedy adoption of MOOCs at universities nationwide, it is appropriate to produce evidence and disseminate it as quickly as possible.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In the wake of the growing outrage that the National Security Agency is engaged in a wide-ranging surveillance program of Internet users through a system called Prism, the world’s biggest technology companies responded by unilaterally denying any involvement in the government’s spying apparatus.

Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s founder and chief executive, declared: “Facebook is not and has never been part of any program to give the U.S. or any other government direct access to our servers,” adding that, “We hadn’t even heard of Prism before yesterday.”

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder and chief executive, went slightly further. “The U.S. government does not have direct access or a ‘back door’ to the information stored in our data centers,” he said. Apple, Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo followed with denials as well.

And yet President Obama and the United States director of national intelligence, James R. Clapper Jr., have publicly confirmed the existence of the Prism system, without providing any details about it.

Who is telling the truth here?  As reported in Dealbook:

“They are in a very difficult position,” said Thomas A. Sporkin, a former S.E.C. enforcement official and now a partner at Buckley Sandler. “On one hand they want to project an image of protecting your privacy. On the other, they have statutory obligations to keep government programs confidential” or potentially risk criminal charges if they exposed a secret government program.

Companies could also face a problem if their disclosures were misleading to investors, but only if they materially affected the stock price or had some other adverse effect, lawyers said.

These companies did not just say “no comment.” They flat-out denied involvement. Mr. Sporkin said, “They are probably not being completely forthcoming, but they are probably not lying.” He noted that the statements were highly vetted by legal teams…

So while the nation’s biggest technology companies may not be a part of systematic large-scale spying program, it is clear that they are legally required to play a significant role in funneling data to the government. That leaves them on a tightrope balancing what they can say to their customers and investors while complying with their obligations to keep the government’s secrets.”

It is inconceivable that the NSA could have carried out its massive spying operation without the cooperation of these companies.  There will be more to this story.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Diann Woodard, President of the American Federation of School Administrators, has a post today exposing the philanthropic priorities of corporate-affiliated foundations. Her major point is that 64 percent of major foundation K-12 giving was directed to private groups rather than public education.  Here is an excerpt:

“Independent research in recent months has documented that the nation’s wealthiest philanthropic foundations are steering funding away from public school systems, attended by 90 percent of American students, and toward “challengers” to public education, especially charter schools.

Education Week recently reported that at the start of the decade, less than a quarter of K-12 giving from top foundations was given to groups supporting charter schools and privatization, about $90 million in all.

By 2010, $540 million — fully 64 percent of major foundation giving — was directed to these private groups, including KIPP, Teach for America, the NewSchools Venture Fund, the Charter School Growth Fund, and the D.C. Public Education Fund.

The best-known alumni of groups now getting the lion’s share of funding from the nation’s eight largest foundations are Michelle Rhee, John White of Louisiana, and Kevin Huffman of Tennessee, all of whom support vouchers and charters.

The extent to which these groups will go to supplant the public school system is deeply disturbing. In Louisiana, for example, the scheme to redirect public funds to private groups through a voucher system under emergency circumstances in the wake of Hurricane Katrina was especially egregious. As a result of legal action taken by our union, the American Federation of School Administrators (AFSA), Louisiana’s Supreme Court last month ruled 6-1 that the funding scheme violated the state’s constitution.

The foundations reshaping America’s education landscape are less devious than Louisiana privateers, but no less troubling in their commitment to dictating policy without regard to demonstrable performance outcomes. As New York University Professor and former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Education Diane Ravitch points out: “None of the main recipients of foundation funding are models for American education.”

In 2009, Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, which tracks student performance in 25 states conducted a large-scale study showing that only 17 percent of charter schools provided a better education than traditional schools, and 37 percent actually offered children a worse education.

Despite the growing number of studies showing that charter schools are generally no better — and are often worse — than their public school counterparts, “the state and local agencies and organizations that grant the charters,” The New York Times reports, “have been increasingly hesitant to shut down schools, even those that continue to perform abysmally for years on end.”

This disconnect between the claims of “reformers” bent on privatization and demonstrable outcomes in student performance has been enabled, in large part, by the nation’s mainstream media, which has been sold a bill of goods about so-called “school reform.” As a result, the agenda of the nation’s public school system is at risk of being bought out by a relatively small number of corporate billionaires and their tax-sheltered foundations whose privatization models do more to raise profits than student performance.”

The education-industrial complex continues to thrive at the  expense of public school students, their parents, and American taxpayers.

Tony

P.S.  If interested in this topic, consider reading The Great American Education-Industrial Complex:  Ideology, Technology and Profits by myself and Joel Spring (Routledge, 2012).

Dear Commons Community,

Andrew Hacker, emeritus professor of political science at Queens College, City University of New York, and Claudia Dreifus, adjunct professor at Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs, have an opinion piece in today’s New York Times on the new Common Core curriculum that has been implemented  in most of the states in our country.  They cover a lot of ground and try to be balanced in their examination of what is probably the most significant change ever in American K-12 curriculum and assessment.  They start their review:

“These students, in grades 3 through 8, are taking part in what may be the most far-reaching experiment in American educational history. By the 2014-15 academic year, public schools in 45 states and the District of Columbia will administer Common Core tests to students of all ages. (Alaska, Nebraska, Texas and Virginia have so far held out; Minnesota will use only the Common Core English test.) Many Catholic schools have also decided to implement the Common Core standards; most private, nonreligious schools have concluded that the program isn’t for them.

Many of these “assessments,” as they are called, will be more rigorous than any in the past. Whether the Common Core is called a curriculum or not, there’s little doubt that teachers will feel pressured to gear much of their instruction to this annual regimen. In the coming years, test results are likely to affect decisions about grade promotion for students, teachers’ job status and school viability.

It is the uniformity of the exams and the skills ostensibly linked to them that appeal to the Core’s supporters, like Education Secretary Arne Duncan and Bill and Melinda Gates. They believe that tougher standards, and eventually higher standardized test scores, will make America more competitive in the global brain race. “If we’ve encouraged anything from Washington, it’s for states to set a high bar for what students should know to be able to do to compete in today’s global economy,” Mr. Duncan wrote to us in an e-mail.

But will national, ramped-up standards produce more successful students? Or will they result in unintended consequences for our educational system?

By definition, America has never had a national education policy; this has indeed contributed to our country’s ambivalence on the subject. As it stands, the Common Core is currently getting hit mainly from the right. Tea Party-like groups have been gaining traction in opposition to the program, arguing that it is another intrusion into the lives of ordinary Americans by a faceless elite. While we don’t often agree with the Tea Party, we’ve concluded that there’s more than a grain of truth to their concerns…

In sum, the Common Core takes as its model schools from which most students go on to selective colleges. Is this really a level playing field? Or has the game been so prearranged that many, if not most, of the players will fail? “

Hacker and Dreifus  conclude by referencing education and media people of all persuasions:

“Debate is now stirring within partisan circles. Glenn Beck sees the Common Core as “leftist indoctrination.” The Republican National Committee calls it “an inappropriate overreach to standardize and control the education of our children.” Republican governors and legislators in Indiana, Kansas, Georgia and several other states are talking about reconsidering their participation. Yet conservative scholars at the Manhattan and Fordham institutes laud it as promising “a far more rigorous, content-rich, cohesive K-12 education.” Some corporate C.E.O.’s favor it because they say it will upgrade the work force. Mr. Duncan is one of the lone liberal voices in support of the program. Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, supports the plan, which she calls “revolutionary.” That said, she has called for a moratorium on judging teachers and schools by the first round of assessments, which she fears are sometimes being implemented hastily and without needed support.  For Diane Ravitch, a historian of education and former assistant education secretary, the program is predicated on “the idea that you can’t trust teachers.” If we want our children taught from standardized scripts, she told us, let’s say so and accept the consequences.

For our part, we’re tired of seeing teachers cast as scapegoats, of all the carping over unions and tenure. It is time teachers are as revered in society as doctors or scientists, and allowed to work professionally without being bound by reams of rules.

Still, there’s an upside to the Common Core’s arrival. As the public better appreciates its sweep, there is likely to be much discussion about schools and what we want them to do. Ideally, this will involve a reconsideration of the contours of knowledge and the question of how we can become a better-educated nation.”

The issue of the Common Core and its assessment requirements will dominate much of the education policy debates over the next several years.  Right now it has essentially been fostered upon many of the states by Arne Duncan and the U.S. Department of Education.  There has been no real debate about it in the Congress.  At some point, when (if ever?) bipartisanship returns to Washington, D.C., the Common Core will receive an extensive hearing and evaluation.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

First we had Benghazi, then the F.B.I. investigation of journalist James Rosen for security leaks, then the IRS scandal, and now the collection of telephone and email records of millions of Americans with the cooperation of Verizon, Microsoft, Google, and other major technology companies.  Many Americans dismissed the first three as minor to modest issues sensationalized by the right-wing press and especially Fox News, but this latest revelation of massive data collection has tipped the balance and has us wondering whether President Barack Obama is morphing into George W. Bush.  Here is an example from The Huffington Post:

“Five years into his presidency, Barack Obama presides over a national security apparatus that in many ways still resembles the one left behind by President George W. Bush. Drones are killing terrorism suspects, the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, holds “enemy combatants” and the government secretly collects telephone records of millions of Americans.

This from a president who in 2008 ran as the anti-Bush candidate who would get the U.S. out of Iraq, put an end to torture and redefine U.S. policies abroad.

But even as he has ended the war in Iraq, changed interrogation standards and sought to build foreign alliances, the former constitutional law professor also has disappointed some allies by embracing, and in some cases expanding, the counterterrorism policies that caused Bush to run afoul of civil libertarians.

Over the past two days, news accounts have revealed that the government has collected millions of Americans’ phone records in the name of national security and has also conducted an Internet surveillance program that tracks people’s movements and contacts that the Obama administration says is aimed exclusively at non-citizens outside the U.S. Both programs rely on the Bush-era Patriot Act, which Congress has since twice reauthorized with Obama’s support.

The disclosures come two weeks after Obama declared in a major speech that when it comes to the nation’s security “America is at a crossroads” and proposed a more targeted counterterrorism strategy. But even while calling for a national debate over the appropriate balance between security and freedom, that speech, and the reports of phone and Internet surveillance by the National Security Agency, underscored that Obama, like Bush before him, has an overriding preoccupation about a terror attack on U.S. soil.

In the United Kingdom, the Brits sing out “God Save the Queen”.  Here in America we will be singing “God save us from our government”!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The online version of The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting on a study of student performance in a MOOC course offered at M.I.T.   The major finding was that online learners who took the first session of “Circuits & Electronics,” the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s hallmark MOOC, those who worked on course material offline with a classmate or “someone who teaches or has expertise” in the subject did better than those who did not.

As The Chronicle article states:

“The research, published this week by the journal Research & Practice in Assessment, is one of the first peer-reviewed academic studies based on data from a MOOC. Advocates for the massive online courses have cited their potential value as engines of educational research.

The journal’s summer issue takes stock of MOOCs as a research medium and outlines an agenda for further study. The issue includes literature reviews of assessment methods, such as automated grading software, similar to those that many MOOC professors use in their massive courses.

In terms of hard data analysis, the published findings are fairly narrow. But there are some intriguing insights hidden in the 230 million interactions inventoried by the MIT and Harvard researchers, who in their study of “Circuits & Electronics” combined “clickstream” data with traditional data points like test scores and survey responses.

The research team, led by Lori Breslow, director of MIT’s Teaching and Learning Laboratory, tried to drill down to what types of demographic and behavioral factors contribute to student success in a massive online environment.

“On average, with all other predictors being equal, a student who worked offline with someone else in the class or someone who had expertise in the subject would have a predicted score almost three points higher than someone working by him or herself,” write the authors.

The correlation, described by the authors as the “strongest” in the data set, was limited to a single instance of a particular MOOC, and is not exactly damning to the format. But it nonetheless may give ammunition to critics who say human tutelage remains essential to a good education.

Other findings could also raise eyebrows. For example, the course’s discussion forum was largely the dominion of a relatively small group of engaged users; most students simply lurked. “It should be stressed that over 90 percent of the activity on the discussion forum resulted from students who simply viewed pre-existing discussion threads, without posting questions, answers, or comments,” the authors write.

At the same time, students referred to the discussion forum frequently when completing homework assignments or tackling examinations. As a resource for students doing graded work, the forum was more popular than the lecture videos, the tutorials, or the recommended textbook.”

This study follows in the footsteps of a good deal of other research in online and blended learning environments that likewise support the importance of interaction  both online and face-to-face in promoting learning effectiveness.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The National Security Agency and the FBI are tapping directly into the central servers of nine leading U.S. Internet companies, extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.

As reported in The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and other media, the highly classified program, code-named PRISM, has not been disclosed publicly before. Its establishment in 2007 and six years of exponential growth took place beneath the surface of a roiling debate over the boundaries of surveillance and privacy. Even late last year, when critics of the foreign intelligence statute argued for changes, the only members of Congress who know about PRISM were bound by oaths of office to hold their tongues.

Some of the world’s largest internet brands are claimed to be part of the information-sharing program since its introduction in 2007. Microsoft -– which is currently running an advertising campaign with the slogan “Your privacy is our priority” -– was the first, with collection beginning in December 2007.

It was followed by Yahoo in 2008; Google, Facebook and PalTalk in 2009; YouTube in 2010; Skype and AOL in 2011; and finally Apple, which joined the program in 2012. The program is continuing to expand, with other providers due to come online.

When the White House was asked to respond to Wednesday’s disclosure, pertaining to the seizure of telecom metadata, officials defended “the practice as a critical tool for preventing terrorist attacks.” That is presumably the explanation that will be given in support of this data mining program, in which many well-known technology companies “knowingly participate.”

Big brother is here!!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Campus Technology reported yesterday that the California state senators voted unanimously to pass Senate Bill 520 (SB 520), despite opposition from faculty at California Community Colleges, California State University, and University of California. The bill establishes incentive grant programs for the state’s public universities and colleges to develop online courses and massive open online course (MOOC) platforms as a way of reducing the bottleneck for required gateway courses.

Senate President Pro Tempore Darrell Steinberg introduced the bill on February 21 with the goal of helping more students complete oversubscribed courses required for their programs. Many of the lower-division gateway courses have long wait lists, causing students to take more time to complete their programs, register in unnecessary courses in order to maintain a full course load required for student aid, and consequently rack up larger student loans. SB 520 proposed to identify up to 50 of the most oversubscribed courses and allow students to complete equivalent courses through approved online course providers for credit.

Faculty associations opposed the bill, claiming it would lower academic standards and hurt at-risk and disadvantaged students, and suggesting the state instead increase funding to public higher education institutions so they could increase the number of seats in those courses. A petition from the Berkeley Faculty Association received nearly 1,700 signatures.

The bill was amended four times before passing in the senate on May 30 with a vote of 28-0, and it will now proceed to the state Assembly.

The amended bill establishes three separate California Online Student Access Platform Incentive Grant programs, one for each of the three public higher education systems. The programs require each system to identify 20 of its high-demand lower-division courses that are required for program completion and provide up to 15 incentive grants to faculty and campuses to “facilitate partnerships” with online course technology providers to significantly increase online options for students as of the fall 2014 semester.

The courses would be placed in the California Virtual Campus, and students who are enrolled at the public university or college systems or California high schools, and who successfully complete the online course, would be awarded full academic credit for the equivalent course at their institution. The amended bill  softened the language considerably from the original version.  While the bill does not require the online courses to be offered through MOOCs, it opens the door to that option.

Despite the amendments, faculty members remain opposed to the bill and have gone on record stating that the changes haven’t addressed faculty concerns and that the core of the bill remains essentially unchanged.

Tony