Click to enlarge.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York media are ablaze with the release of the results of NYS standardized tests based on the new Common Core curriculum.  Only 31% of New York state students in grades 3-8 passed the 2013 math and reading tests, down from 65% in math and 55% in English in 2012 on different tests. And just under 30% of New York City students were proficient in math and 26% in reading – a drop by more than half of city students making the grade in each subject compared to 2012.

Even with the drop in scores, New York City still outperformed the state’s other large school districts — in Rochester, for example, only 5 percent of students passed in reading and math. And despite its large number of disadvantaged students, New York City almost matched the state’s performance as a whole.

But striking gaps in achievement between black and Hispanic students and their counterparts persisted. In math, 15 percent of black students and 19 percent of Hispanic students passed the exam, compared with 50 percent of white students and 61 percent of Asian students.

These results were expected but the decline is still disheartening to students, their families, teachers, and school administrators.  Unfortunately it will be the educators in the schools who will have to explain the issue of the new Core Curriculum and the fact that because it was rushed into New York public schools, many districts including New York City were not prepared to develop materials or do the teacher training needed to teach the new curriculum.

Our federal and state education policy makers will try to explain away these results as setting a higher bar or as establishing a new baseline for the future.  However, if these same individuals were not in such a rush to implement their agendas, many of our children and their families would have been spared the anguish of “failing” these tests.  Shame on Arne Duncan for forcing New York State to implement these standards so quickly.  Shame on John King for caving into the pressure exerted on him by Arne Duncan.  And shame on New York City education policy makers for participating in this fiasco of poor planning and implementation.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

James Traub, author and a columnist at foreignpolicy.com, has an op-ed piece in the New York Times today comparing the Tea Party to the Federalist movement of the early Republic.  The major issue is the Tea Party’s crusade against any amnesty and to prevent illegal immigrants from gaining citizenship. Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, recently told Politico that his members were “more upset about the amnesty bill than they were about Obamacare.”

In comparing the Tea Party to the Federalists, Traub comments that:

“Fearing that Irish, English and German newcomers would vote for the Jeffersonian Republicans, the Federalists argued — unsuccessfully — for excluding immigrants from voting or holding office, and pushed to extend the period of naturalization from 5 to 14 years…

…in the fall of 1814, the Federalists convened the Hartford Convention to vote on whether to stay in or out of the Union. By then even the hotheads realized how little support they had, and the movement collapsed. And the Federalists, now scorned as an anti-national party, collapsed as well.”

Traub’s conclusion:

“Today’s Republicans are not likely to disappear completely, like the Federalists did. But Republican leaders like Marco Rubio and Lindsey Graham understand that a party that seeks to defy demography, relying on white resentment toward a rising tide of nonwhite newcomers, dooms itself to permanent minority status. Opposing big government is squarely in the American grain; trying to hold back the demographic tide is quixotic. The problem is that the Tea Party is not a party, and its members are quite prepared to ride their hobbyhorse into a dead end. And many Republicans, at least in the House, seem fully prepared to join them there, and may end up dragging the rest of the party with them.”

So be it!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Coming on the heels of the sale of the Boston Globe to Red Sox owner, John Henry, The Washington Post was sold yesterday to Jeffrey Bezos, the founder of Amazon.com.  As reported in the New York Times:

“Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive of The Washington Post Company, and the third generation of the Graham family to lead the paper, told the staff about the sale late Monday afternoon. They had gathered together in the newspaper’s auditorium at the behest of the publisher, Katharine Weymouth, his niece.

“I, along with Katharine Weymouth and our board of directors, decided to sell only after years of familiar newspaper-industry challenges made us wonder if there might be another owner who would be better for the Post (after a transaction that would be in the best interest of our shareholders),” Mr. Graham said in a written statement.

In the auditorium, he closed his remarks by saying that nobody in the room should be sad — except, he said, “for me.”

The announcement was greeted by what many staff members described as “shock,” a reaction shared in newsrooms across the country as one of the crown jewels of newspapers was surrendered by one of the industry’s royal families…

Mr. Graham stressed that Mr. Bezos would purchase The Post in a personal capacity and not on behalf of Amazon the company. The $250 million deal includes all of the publishing businesses owned by The Washington Post Company, including the Express newspaper, The Gazette Newspapers, Southern Maryland Newspapers, Fairfax County Times, El Tiempo Latino and Greater Washington Publishing.”

It wasn’t clear what would happen to Kaplan, Inc.  (see note below) Kaplan was among those hardest hit when the Education Department put out new regulations on for-profit colleges in 2011.  Kaplan reported an operating loss of $105 million in 2012, compared to income of about $96 million in 2011.

Tony

NOTE:  After making the above post, it was reported that Kaplan, Inc. and its subsidiaries, including Kaplan Higher Education and its mostly online Kaplan University, will remain part of the publicly traded Washington Post Company and will continue operating largely as they were before the sale of the newspaper, said Rima Calderon, a spokeswoman for the Post Company. The parent company will also continue, though under a new, still unspecified name.

Dear Commons Community,

Jack Hammond, a colleague at Hunter College, alerted me to an essay in The Chronicle of Higher Education that examines the question of whether the United States would be better off establishing a policy of free public higher education.  Written by Robert Samuels, president of the University Council-American Federation of Teachers, it raises the question of why not consolidate the myriad of financial aid, federal subsidies, state subsidies, tax shelters, etc. into a financial package that establishes a free public higher education system in this country.  Samuels provides some extensive data analysis:

“The first step is to calculate how much it would cost to make all public higher education free in the United States. In 2008-9, there were 6.5 million full-time-equivalent undergraduate students enrolled in public four-year universities and 4.3 million enrolled in community colleges. In 2009-10, the average cost of tuition, room, and board for undergraduates at public four-year institutions was $15,014; at two-year public colleges, it was $7,703. If we multiply the number of students in each segment of public higher education by the average total cost, we discover that the cost of making all public universities free would have been $97-billion in 2009-10, with an annual cost of $33-billion for all community colleges—or a total of $130-billion.

While $130-billion seems like a large figure, we need to remember that in 2010, the federal government spent more than $30-billion on Pell Grants and $104-billion on student loans, and the states spent at least $10-billion on financial aid for universities and colleges and an additional $76-billion for direct support of higher education. Furthermore, looking at various state and federal tax breaks and deductions for tuition, it might be possible to make all public higher education free by just using current resources in a more effective manner.”

Furthermore, he states:

“Replacing the current mix of financial aid, institutional aid, tax subsidies, and grants with direct support for public institutions would give the government a way to control costs at both public and private universities and colleges. The federal government could also require states to maintain their support for public institutions in return for increased federal support. And once we stabilize financial support and make higher education free, there will be no need for so many students and institutions to go into debt.”

He concludes that our current system of higher education favors and perpetuates wealth inequality and cautions that current funding policies are pushing many of our public colleges and universities to privatize.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

John King, New York State’s Commissioner of Education, issued a warning that results on new standardized tests based on the Common Core Curriculum will not be very good.  The results are due on Wednesday, August 7^th but early information is that the results may be disastrous for some school districts including New York City.  The New York Daily News reported that:

“State education officials will drop a bomb on thousands of city kids and parents Wednesday when they release scores from the controversial and tougher reading and math exams.

State Education Commissioner John King sounded the alarm for disastrous results with a letter sent to principals Friday afternoon.

“Scores are expected to be significantly lower than the 2011-’12 scores,” he wrote, adding that principals should use the scores “judiciously” when making decisions about whether to fire teachers.

The state test scores are used in decisions to promote students, award bonuses to principals and fire teachers. This year, for the first time, the tests were tied to national standards known as Common Core.

City and state Education officials have predicted for months that scores would fall by about one-third on the tougher tests — in part because city schools have not yet received a curriculum aligned to the new standards.

But city Education Department sources said Friday that the drop could be even worse than expected.”

Blame for these results will be placed on teachers and principals but should be directed to education policy makers at the federal and state levels who insisted upon rushing into the Common Core.  It makes perfect sense that you implement a curriculum before you test students on it.  But no, policy makers are interested in scoring political points no matter what and then use testing as a stick to embarrass public education.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education and Inside Higher Education are both reporting that a California bill to pass off untold thousands of state college students to nontraditional providers of instruction, some of them for-profit or unaccredited, has been shelved at least for a year.

“The bill, unveiled in March… initially would have required the state’s 145 public colleges and universities to grant credit for low-cost online courses offered by outside groups, including for-profits companies, among them the providers of massive open online courses, or MOOCs. The legislation was the subject of massive media coverage, with many citing it as evidence that traditional higher ed models were doomed.

The plan’s chief backer, Democratic State Senate President Pro Tem Darrell Steinberg, is no longer trying to advance the measure and will not do so until at least August 2014. Rhys Williams, the senator’s spokesman, said Steinberg is waiting to see the results of new online efforts by the state’s three public higher ed systems – the California Community Colleges, California State University and the University of California. The public college systems are working to expand their online offerings internally and without outsourcing their students to ed tech start-ups with little to no track record offering for-credit courses.”

This was a prudent decision on the part of Senator Steinberg.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Jennifer Morton, an assistant professor of philosophy, had an article in The Chronicle of Higher Education earlier this week on the appropriateness of online instruction, specifically the MOOC model, for her students at City College – CUNY.  Her premise is:

“A college education bestows not just cognitive skills—mathematical, historical, and scientific knowledge—but practical skills—social, emotional, and behavioral competencies. Tenacious, confident, and socially competent employees have an edge over equally cognitively talented employees who lack those practical skills. What students cannot learn online are precisely those social skills.”

She goes on to comment that she is not entirely against online instruction:

“The reluctance of some professors to embrace online education would seem to stem from nostalgia for a model of education that is not only unsustainable, but inaccessible for most students. However, I’m not suggesting that public universities should not rely on MOOCs to fulfill some of their teaching needs. Rather, our priority should be to offer students, in particular those who are not already part of the middle class, a classroom in which they can learn to navigate middle-class social norms, be comfortable with and develop relationships with students from different backgrounds, and speak their minds. The onus here is not just on the administration to lower class size, but also on college professors to foster the kind of classroom in which students can develop those elusive practical skills.”

I agree with much of what Professor Morton says in this piece.  It is becoming clear to me that higher education’s future is evolving into one based on models that integrate online learning with face-to-face instruction.  The blending of digital content and stimulating and diverse face-to-face pedagogical experiences can provide powerful learning experiences for all students.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Last week I posted on the debate going on in Congress regarding student loan rates and a version of the bill that passed the U.S.  Senate called for variable interest rates that would rise with the market.  While interest rates are low now and current students would not be affected, future students and their families were at risk of having to repay loans at significantly higher rates.  Happily, the final version of the bill that passed the U.S. House of Representatives yesterday, included a cap on interest rates.  As reported in the New York Times:

 
“Rates for loans taken out after July 1 of this year would be 3.9 percent for undergraduates, 5.4 percent for graduate students and 6.4 percent for those receiving PLUS loans.  The rates are fixed over the life of the loan but would change for new borrowers each year.

In a compromise that pleased many Democrats who had initially been wary of using a rate that was subject to inflation and fluctuated with the markets, Congress set a cap on all loans: 8.25 percent for undergraduates, 9.5 for graduate students and 10.5 for PLUS recipients.”

The new version of this bill was passed by both houses of Congress and is expected to be signed by the President.  This is a much better deal for our future students and their parents.

Tony