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Dear Commons Community,

The NYC Department of Education released its first report on the teacher education programs that serve its public schools.  In a press release, Mayor Michael Bloomberg presented scorecards yesterday for twelve teacher-preparation programs in the city.   The report provides data on six measures:

1. Graduates with Highest Need Licenses
2. Employed in Highest Need Schools
3. Growth in Test Scores (2011-12)
4. Tenure Decisions
5. Unsatisfactory Ratings
6. Retention of Teachers

While scores were mostly positive for the twelve programs, New York City officials cautioned against drawing sweeping conclusions from the data, saying the numbers were meant to provoke conversation, not rivalry. They noted that in some cases, the sample sizes were small; that test scores were available only in certain grades, in math and English; and that the data reflected only information from the past four years.

As reported in the New York Times:

“The release of the scorecards places the city at the forefront of a national effort, backed by the Obama administration, to use data to upend the teaching profession and the pathways to it. Critics have said subpar teaching programs too often hamper school systems, churning out graduates familiar with theory but lacking in practical classroom skills. A study by the National Council on Teacher Quality released in June argued that teaching colleges were too lenient in their admissions criteria and had not adequately prepared teachers in subjects like reading, math and science.”

However, the data in these scorecards suggest that for the most part, these teacher education programs are doing an above average job of teacher preparation.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Martha Kanter, a former community college chancellor who became President Obama’s top higher-education official four years ago, is leaving the Education Department this fall.  As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“In an e-mail sent to her colleagues Tuesday evening, Ms. Kanter said she was stepping down as the under secretary of education and returning to academe “to build on the work and considerable outcomes we have achieved…”

Ms. Kanter, a former chancellor of the Foothill-De Anza Community College District, is the latest in a string of high-ranking policy makers to leave the Education Department Her departure comes as President Obama is promising to “shake up” higher-education, and as the Education Department is preparing to reopen negotiations over its controversial “gainful employment” rule.

Ms. Kanter, who represented the president at numerous conferences and Congressional hearings, has been a steadfast presence at an agency that has seen considerable turnover in its higher-education offices. As the head of postsecondary education, adult, and career-technical education, and federal student aid, she has been the public face of the administration’s effort to make the nation the world’s leader in college completion.”

It is too bad she is leaving,  Kanter was one of the DOE’s top officers who had a good deal of experience working in education, both K-12 and post-secondary.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

For the first time in this year’s Democratic primary race, New York City Public Advocate Bill de Blasio leads the field according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Tuesday.   As reported by the New York Daily News:

“Among likely Democratic voters, de Blasio took 30 percent of the vote, followed by City Council Speaker Christine Quinn at 24 percent, former comptroller Bill Thompson at 22 percent, former Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-N.Y.) at 10 percent, comptroller John Liu at 6 percent and former council member Sal Albanese at 1 percent. Another 7 percent was undecided.

De Blasio also held the lead in three potential runoff scenarios, beating Quinn by 54 percent to 38 percent, Thompson by 50 percent to 40 percent, and Weiner by a whopping 72 percent to 22 percent.

But voters’ choices are hardly set in stone: 34 percent, including 37 percent who backed de Blasio, said there was a good chance they’d change their minds.

While there was little evidence of a gender gap among voters, there was a “measurable racial divide,” according to the poll. Thompson led among black voters, with 39 percent, followed by de Blasio and Quinn. Among white voters, de Blasio led with 39 percent, followed by Quinn and then Thompson.

De Blasio’s 30 percent is the greatest share of the vote any candidate has attracted so far in polling on the race. In the weeks since Weiner’s numbers dropped after new revelations of his inappropriate behavior, most surveys have shown Quinn leading the field, although generally with support in the mid-20s, far below the 40 percent threshold needed to avoid a runoff.

The new poll found City Council Speaker Christine Quinn dropping to second, with 24%, followed by former city Controller Bill Thompson (22%). Former Rep. Anthony Weiner, battered by sexting scandal, fell to a distant fourth, at 10%.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I am passing along this message from Hayley Worthman of the Sloan Consortium alerting our community of the upcoming 19^th Annual International Conference on Online Learning.  I can say without any hesitation, this conference is the number one venue for information and research on online learning.

Tony

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19th Annual Sloan Consortium International Conference on Online Learning

November 20-22, 2013 – Orlando, Florida

Early Bird pricing ends September 20th, 2013. Register now and save $50! The full program is now posted here. Sloan-C welcomes the conferences’ 3 keynoters:

Hal Plotkin – Senior Policy of Advisor in the Office of the Under Secretary of Education (OUS), United States Department of Education, will be reviewing “The Role of Online and Technology-Enabled Learning in Meeting President Obama’s 2020 Graduation Goal.”

Dr. Daphne Koller – Rjaeev Motwani Professor in the Computer Science Department at Standford University, will be speaking about “The Online Revolution: Learning Without Limits.”

Anant Agarwal – President of edX, an online learning venture of Harvard and MIT, will be discussing “Reinventing Education.”

Have you made your hotel reservation, yet? Reserve now for conference pricing- the deadline is October 25th. Click here to reserve your room at a discounted rate and don’t miss the Sloan-C Awards Luncheon Thursday, November 21st!

Dear Commons Community,

A federal judge ruled on Monday that the stop-and-frisk policy of the New York City Police Department violated the constitutional rights of minorities in the city, repudiating a major element in the Bloomberg administration’s crime-fighting legacy.  The use of police stops has been widely cited by city officials as a linchpin of New York’s success story in seeing murders and major crimes fall to historic lows. The police say the practice has saved the lives of thousands of young black and Hispanic men by removing thousands of guns from the streets.

As reported by the New York Times:

“…the judge, Shira A. Scheindlin, found that the Police Department resorted to a “policy of indirect racial profiling” as it increased the number of stops in minority communities. That has led to officers’ routinely stopping “blacks and Hispanics who would not have been stopped if they were white.”

The judge called for a federal monitor to oversee broad reforms, including the use of body-worn cameras for some patrol officers, though she was “not ordering an end to the practice of stop-and-frisk.”

In her 195-page decision, Judge Scheindlin concluded that the stops, which soared in number over the last decade as crime continued to decline, demonstrated a widespread disregard for the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unreasonable searches and seizures by the government, as well as the 14th Amendment’s equal protection clause.

Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg angrily accused the judge of deliberately denying the city “a fair trial” and said the city would file an appeal.

Striking a defiant tone, Mr. Bloomberg said, “You’re not going to see any change in tactics overnight.” He said he hoped the appeal process would allow the current stop-and-frisk practices to continue through the end of his administration because “I wouldn’t want to be responsible for a lot of people dying.”

The judge found that for much of the last decade, patrol officers had stopped innocent people without any objective reason to suspect them of wrongdoing. But her criticism went beyond the conduct of police officers.

“I also conclude that the city’s highest officials have turned a blind eye to the evidence that officers are conducting stops in a racially discriminatory manner,” she wrote, citing statements that Mr. Bloomberg and the police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, have made in defending the policy…

About 83 percent of the stops between 2004 and 2012 involved blacks and Hispanics, even though those two demographics make up just slightly more than 50 percent of the city’s residents. Mr. Bloomberg and Mr. Kelly have explained that disparity by saying it mirrored the disproportionate percentage of crimes committed by young minority men. But Judge Scheindlin dismissed the Police Department’s rationale.

“This might be a valid comparison if the people stopped were criminals,” she wrote, explaining that there was significant evidence that the people being stopped were not criminals. “To the contrary, nearly 90 percent of the people stopped are released without the officer finding any basis for a summons or arrest.”

While no one doubts its effectiveness in helping to reduce crime, “stop and frisk” was long overdue for a review.  The judge made the right decision here.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an article today on the “community learning center” model that has been adopted by a number of schools in Cincinnati.  The model seeks  to change years of dysfunction in schools in high-poverty areas by becoming “community learning centers,” replete with dental clinics, mental health therapists and mentors from local banks and churches. The school buildings themselves are also renovated to include new libraries, “over-the-moon” teachers and a host of volunteers.

“As a whole, after years of poor performance and an exodus of middle-class families to the suburbs, Cincinnati has made some of the greatest gains in test scores in Ohio in recent years, even though it lags behind state averages. School officials here credit the city’s embrace of the community-schools model, which is now fully in place in 34 of 55 schools in the system.”

The article goes on to comment:

“Four Democratic candidates for mayor — Bill de Blasio, Christine Quinn, John C. Liu and William C. Thompson Jr. — visited Cincinnati last year at the invitation of the United Federation of Teachers, New York City’s teachers’ union. For years, antipoverty organizations like the Harlem Children’s Zone and the Children’s Aid Society have operated forms of community learning centers at a small number of New York City schools, but some candidates are hoping to extend the idea to hundreds of them.

“It makes so much sense,” Quinn  said.

“Endless potential,” de Blasio said.

Last year, the teachers’ union partnered with the City Council and the Partnership for New York City, a coalition of businesses, to test the model at six New York schools. This fall, 10 more will join the endeavor. Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has pledged $15 million to help start community schools in the state.

In New York, supporters of the model said that test scores alone should not determine the success of community schools, and that the public also needed to judge them on their effectiveness in improving student health, attendance and parental engagement.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Sunday morning talk shows were abuzz  with various politicos and pundits opining about various issues but perhaps the most provocative comment was uttered by David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine.   On ABC’s This Week, during a discussion of the plight of major newspapers and sale of the Washington Post to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos,  David Remnick stated:

“Michael Bloomberg “detests” the New York Times. “Mike Bloomberg is a great innovator, but I’ve have to say, I’ve heard straight from the horse’s mouth that he detests the New York Times… Mike Bloomberg thinks that the New York Times has an opinion page on the front page and he loathes it.”

“Now that may be the function of being covered day after day and having an ego —”

George Will, another panelist,  had the best comeback line:

“I can’t imagine that any New York mayor thought differently.”

You can view the entire panel discussion at:  http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/08/david-remnick-bloomberg-detests-the-new-york-times/

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Following on the heels of Oregon, New Jersey legislators are considering a study of a “Pay It Forward” program for its public colleges and universities.  This type of program would allow students to attend a pubic college tuition-free with the proviso that they repay their tuition as a percentage of their annual salaries for some period (10 to 24 years) of time after graduation. The Star-Ledger reported:

“[New Jersey] Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D-Gloucester) said today he and Assemblywoman Celeste Riley (D-Cumberland), head of the Higher Education Committee, will introduce legislation to establish a seven-member commission to study the idea, called “Pay Forward, Pay Back.”

He said it would be up to the commission to decide whether to set up a pilot program.

Under the plan, New Jersey public colleges could waive tuition and fees for students who pledge to give the state a portion of their salaries after graduation.

In theory, the idea would reduce the amount of loans students take out to go to college.

“When kids are getting out of college, they’re buried in debt,” Sweeney said. “It gives another pathway to higher education. As someone who didn’t go to college and recognizes how fortunate I am that things worked out for me, you don’t want to leave things up to luck.”

The article also points out that there are financial issues that have to be worked out in such programs:

“While students would get free tuition and fees while they are in school, they will still have to take out loans to cover the cost of living on or off campus, buying books, paying for transportation and other costs that often account for more than half of the expense of attending college.

It is also unclear if asking students in Oregon to repay 3 percent of their income for a quarter century would cover the cost of running a college or if the schools would have enough cash to operate in the first few years of the program. Critics also questioned whether the state would be able to keep track of the incomes of students who move out of state or out of the country.

“It needs a lot more details,” said Mark Kantrowitz, a financial aid expert. “There are a lot of aspects of this that they just haven’t considered.”

Kantrowitz said his preliminary calculations showed Oregon would probably have to require graduates to pay 6 percent of their incomes over 25 years or 10 percent over 10 years to come close to raising the money they would need to keep the program going.”

As with many such sweeping proposals, the devil is in the details but it is heartening to see legislators thinking outside the box in trying to solve student tuition and funding problems for public higher education.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In an interview with Bloomberg Businessweek published yesterday, Bill Gates commented on a number of philanthropic issues related to disease, poverty, and education.  He criticized his tech billionaire colleagues who focus on technological gimmickry rather than helping the poor.

Gates was asked about Google’s Project Loon, an effort to bring broadband to developing countries by floating transmitters on balloons. “When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you. When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that,” Gates said.

I give him credit for his views and activities in the areas of health and poverty, however, his record in education is highly questionable.  Here are a couple of excerpts from the interview where he comments on education policy and MOOCs:

Interviewer: The Gates Foundation has been criticized for being so big that it’s somehow distorting the agenda, particularly in education. What do you think of the argument that you and your allies aren’t being challenged because everyone is angling for your largesse?
Gates: When we get into a field, we do take a point of view, and raising controversy is a symptom. Fortunately, there is what’s called the charter school format that lets you try new things. The system is good at shutting down the ones that don’t work and replicating the ones that do. The big actor is government. If somebody says somebody is too big, it would be strange to point to us.

Interviewer:  What have you learned so far about MOOCs, or massive open online courses? Are they a superior alternative to traditional classrooms, or is this the best available solution for students who can’t attend a traditional university?
Gates:  If you look at who’s used MOOCs so far, it’s an elite phenomenon. The completion rates are very low, and the effect on employability is very low. Yes, it’s promising and exciting. But this notion that “just don’t go to school, just connect to a MOOC,” that’s like telling somebody to read the textbook. You’d have to couple that with student support, study groups, lab activity, and the credential. And until you complete that equation, MOOCs have not changed higher ed.

He is right on both counts.  However, Gates does more than take a point of view.  He has tried to manipulate and control education policy at several levels by using his Foundation’s funds, influence, media connections, and political appointments to manufacture education crises and to pose solutions that fit his agenda.

On MOOCS, Gates was an early unbridled supporter of MOOCs but now that many colleges and universities have determined that they are not the agents for change in higher education, he has abandoned the ship.

Better late than never!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article (subscription required) on the growing disillusionment with MOOCs.  A quote from Sebastian Thrun, founder of Undacity, says it all:

“A medium where only self-motivated, Web-savvy people sign up, and the success rate is 10 percent, doesn’t strike me quite yet as a solution to the problems of higher education.”

Tony