Dear Commons Community,

We have heard so much over the past several years that tuition and other fees at our colleges and universities are  a major problem that needs to be addressed and reformed.  A  report, by the College Board  shows that the net cost of tuition, fees, room and board has not changed that much over the past decade.  For example, the average student at a private, nonprofit college is about 57 percent of the sticker price, down from 68 percent in 2003-4. That works out to about $23,000 this year, a figure that, adjusted for inflation, has not varied much for 10 years. (Looking only at tuition and fees, the inflation-adjusted net price is actually lower than it was a decade ago.)  As reported in the New York Times:

“The cost of college, in real terms, did rise significantly in the 1980s and ’90s, and the report is not meant to play down the fact that college is often expensive and a burden, said Sandy Baum, one of the authors of the report.

“It’s not hard to find instances of people genuinely struggling to pay the prices they’re being asked to pay,” said Ms. Baum, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute and a research professor at the George Washington University Graduate School of Human Development. “But I think the hand-wringing about the trend is greatly exaggerated.”

That hand-wringing tends to focus on the full, published prices that — without inflation adjustment — have jumped more than 50 percent in the past decade. In particular, news reports cite the higher-than-average sticker prices at the most prestigious colleges, though those universities tend to give the most financial aid and the deepest discounts, too. “

In looking at the report, I found the most telling table was the breakdown by sector and state in current dollars. See:http://trends.collegeboard.org/college-pricing/figures-tables/tuition-and-fees-sector-and-state-over-time

It basically shows disparities by states and the public and private sectors but that many states have held the line in tuition for in-state students attending public colleges and universities.

Those (i.e., the U.S. Department of Education and the Gates Foundation) who keep calling for reforming American higher education and the need to rein in tuition should examine this report carefully.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

When I was an undergraduate majoring in political science, one of my professors discussing our political parties said something to the effect that  the Democratic Party has the right goals and objectives for our country but are not very good at implementing them.

I have thought about this comment recently given all the publicity surrounding the glitches with the website for signing up for the Affordable Care Act aka Obamacare. The Associated Press reported:

“The leading contractors on the Obama administration’s troubled health insurance website told Congress Thursday that the government failed to thoroughly test the complicated system before it went live.

Executives of CGI Federal, which built the federal HealthCare.gov website serving 36 states, and QSSI, which designed the part that helps verify applicants’ income and other personal details, testified under oath before the powerful House Energy and Commerce Committee.

The contractors said they each tested their own components independently but that the Health and Human Services department was responsible for testing the whole system from end to end. That kind of testing didn’t happen until the last couple of weeks before the system’s Oct. 1 launch.

It quickly crashed once consumers tried to use it.

Representing QSSI, Andrew Slavitt told the committee that ideally, end-to-end testing should have occurred well before the launch, with enough time to correct flaws.

How much time?

 “Months would be nice,” said Slavitt.

“We would have loved to have months,” concurred CGI vice president Cheryl Campbell.

The administration’s determination to go live on Oct. 1 despite qualms about testing quickly became a focus of the hearing, which turned sharply partisan at times.”

If this is true then it indicates a real lack of administrative expertise in the President’s appointed top administrators in the Department of Health and Human Service.     

In the past year, other federal agencies (NSA surveillance, IRS scandal, US Dept. of Education rushing the Common Core Curriculum) have also had serious administrative problems which have shaken the confidence of the people in  President Obama’s administration.  Add to this the performance of the Republican-controlled House of Representatives with the government shutdown debacle, and it is no wonder that most Americans have come to the conclusion that we have a real problem in Washington D.C.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The debate last night right here at the CUNY Graduate Center between New York City mayoral candidates, Bill de Blasio and Joseph Lhota, provided a good indication of the passions that both candidates have for the positions they have taken.  Charter schools, taxes, and past associations (de Blasio with David Dinkins and Joe Lhota with Rudy Guiliani) evoked spirited give and take on the part of both candidates.  Their lecterns angled toward each other, the two men stared and pointed at each other throughout the night.

The most intense exchange came when the candidates clashed over an advertisement by Mr. Lhota that used imagery from the 1991 Crown Heights riots to portray the Democrat as soft on crime. “It’s race baiting and it’s fear mongering and you know it,” Mr. de Blasio said, adding: “Anybody who looks at that ad knows what he is up to” and compared it to the Willie Horton ad used during the Bush-Dukakis national election in 1988.

Mr. Lhota shot back. “Don’t tell me I threw out the race card,” he said. “Bill, you cannot stoop to that level.”

In my opinion, Lhota did much better during this debate than the first one but I don’t think it will change the minds of most voters.  The city is tired of twenty years of Republicans leading the city and want new ideas and approaches.  Thomas Edsall, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, and sometimes columnist for the New York Times, thinks that this might be because of changing, liberal-leaning demographics in the city and increasingly across the country.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Nearly two decades ago, a landmark study found that by age 3, the children of wealthier professionals have heard words millions more times than those of less educated parents, giving them a distinct advantage in school and suggesting the need for increased investment in prekindergarten programs. Now a follow-up study has found a language gap as early as 18 months, heightening the policy debate. As reported in the New York Times:

“The new research by Anne Fernald, a psychologist at Stanford University, which was published in Developmental Science this year, showed that at 18 months children from wealthier homes could identify pictures of simple words they knew — “dog” or “ball” — much faster than children from low-income families. By age 2, the study found, affluent children had learned 30 percent more words in the intervening months than the children from low-income homes.

The new findings, although based on a small sample, reinforced the earlier research showing that because professional parents speak so much more to their children, the children hear 30 million more words by age 3 than children from low-income households, early literacy experts, preschool directors and pediatricians said. In the new study, the children of affluent households came from communities where the median income was $69,000; the low-income children came from communities with a median income of $23,900.

Since oral language and vocabulary are so connected to reading comprehension, the most disadvantaged children face increased challenges once they enter school and start learning to read.”

This study surely gives further evidence for the need for universal pre-K programs.

Tony

Click to Enlarge

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, I posted on a report issued by the Southern Education Foundation based on the number of students from preschool through 12th grade who were eligible for the federal free and reduced-price meals program in the 2010-11 school year.

“The analysis done by the Southern Education Foundation indicated that by 2011, almost half of the nation’s 50 million public-school students — 48 percent — qualified for free or reduced-price meals. In some states, such as Mississippi, that proportion rose as high as 71 percent.”

The report also indicated that overall children in families with higher incomes did better on standardized tests such as NAEP than students from lower income families.

To follow-up on this report, I did a comparison of states showing family income and student performance on the NAEP 4^th Grade Reading scores.  The results are in the table above.  In general, states with the lowest percentage of children in poverty scored higher on NAEP while states with the highest percentage of children in poverty scored lower on the NAEP.  More specifically, nine states which ranked the highest on the NAEP had lower percentages of children in poverty while seventeen states ranked lowest on the NAEP had higher percentages of children in poverty.

Tony

NOTE:  Data for the NAEP rankings were accessed from the Kansas Open Government website at:

http://www.kansasopengov.org/SchoolDistricts/StudentAchievement/NAEPRankingsbyState/4thGradeReadingScaleScore/tabid/2168/Default.aspx

Dear Commons Community,

Diane Ravitch in her blog yesterday directed attention to the shameful fact that the United States has a greater proportion of children living in poverty than any other advanced nation in the world.

As reported by Lyndsey Layton of the Washington Post, the majority of public school students in the South and the West now qualify for free or reduced price lunch. By federal standards, that means they are poor. The analysis by the Southern Education Foundation, the nation’s oldest education  philanthropy, is based on the number of students from preschool through 12th grade who were eligible for the federal free and reduced-price meals program in the 2010-11 school year.

“The analysis done by the Southern Education Foundation indicated that by 2011, almost half of the nation’s 50 million public-school students — 48 percent — qualified for free or reduced-price meals. In some states, such as Mississippi, that proportion rose as high as 71 percent.

Southern states have seen rising numbers of poor students for the past decade, but the trend spread west in 2011, to include rapidly increasing levels of poverty among students in California, Nevada, Oregon and New Mexico.

The 2008 recession, immigration and a high birthrate among low-income families have largely fueled the changes, said Steve Suitts, vice president of the Southern Education Foundation and an author of the study.

Maryland and Virginia were the only Southern states where low-income children did not make up a majority of public-school students.

Ravitch takes aim at the education-industrial complex in this country for allowing this to have happened:

“Arne Duncan, Bill Gates, Wendy Kopp, and Joel Klein have said that the answer to poverty is to “fix” schools first? Remember their claims that school reform (more testing, more charters, more inexperienced teachers, larger classes, more technology) would vanquish poverty? For the past decade, our society has followed their advice, pouring billions into the pockets of the testing industry, consultants, and technology companies, as well as the over-hyped charter industry, Teach for America, and the multi-billion-dollar search for a surefire metric to evaluate teachers….

The late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan once remarked on the phenomenon of “feeding the horses to feed the sparrows.” In this case, the horses are the educational industrial complex. They are gobbling up federal, state, and local funding while children and families go hungry, lacking the medical care, economic security, and essential services they need. Instead of helping their families to become self-sufficient, we are fattening the testing industry. Instead of assuring that their schools have the guidance counselors, social workers, psychologists, and librarians the children need, our states are stripping their schools to the bare walls. Instead of supplying the arts and physical education that children need to nourish body and soul, we let them eat tests. Instead of giving the reduced class size where they get the attention they need, they sit in packed classrooms.

Every dollar that fattens the educational industrial complex — not only the testing industry and the inexperienced, ill-trained Teach for America, but the corporations now collecting hundreds of millions of dollars to tell schools what to do — is a dollar diverted from what should be done now to address directly the pressing needs of our nation’s most vulnerable children, whose numbers continue to escalate, demonstrating the utter futility and self-serving nature of what is currently and deceptively called “reform.”

Once these futile programs have collapsed, once they have been exposed as hollow (though lucrative) gestures, we will look back with sorrow at the lives wasted, the billions squandered, the incalculable damage to our children and our society.”

Ravitch is on target.   The education-industrial complex is indeed at the root of many of the problems in our public schools.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

There’s a new group of Democratic mayors with an interest in education beyond the borders of their cities. And they’re hoping to be more subtle about changing public education than their predecessors.  This week, four mayors from smaller cities — Julián Castro of San Antonio; Angel Taveras of Providence, R.I.; Michael Hancock of Denver; and Kevin Johnson of Sacramento, Calif. — kicked off a what they’re calling the “Mayors for Educational Excellence Tour” in Denver. The goal is to “learn how each city is helping spark significant turnarounds in their different regions of the country and how to scale these achievements.” As reported in The Huffington Post:

“The tour is not branded as an education reform effort.

That term often conjures images of Republicans, Democrats and hedge-fund donors who advance policies that promote charter schools and rigorous teacher evaluations, and has become so loaded that a school board candidate in Denver recently referred to it as the “r-word.”

Even so-called reformers have recognized the shortcomings of their good-vs.-evil narrative. John White, the schools chief of Louisiana …recently gave a speech arguing reformers must adapt to survive. He said America’s inherently populist tendencies will topple the movement if it doesn’t move beyond the same old fights and self-righteous justifications.

White may be onto something, If New York’s recent mayoral primary election is a sign. Bill de Blasio (D), the city public advocate, trounced his Democratic opponents by campaigning against Bloomberg’s policies — especially on education. He called for a moratorium on school closures, a centerpiece Bloomberg policy...

“We must not get caught up on the reform word,” said Hancock, of Denver. “Reform has connotations. it brings up a different level of opposition that is not necessary.””

However, we need to be vigilant about the message of these mayors because their tour is being underwritten by Education Reform Now created by Democrats for Education Reform, a political group that has been a driving force behind policies that have pitted mayors and school chancellors against teachers. Democrats for Education Reform have supported the likes of Joel Klein and Michelle Rhee, the polarizing prince and princess of education “r…”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Amid the controversy of the implementation of the Common Core Curriculum in New York, some parents are calling for the resignation of the Commissioner of Education, John King. After last year’s poorly planned implementation of the Common Core, King was to meet with parent groups around the state to explain the program. As reported in The Huffington Post:

“Many [parents] were enraged last week after King canceled a tour of Common Core town hall meetings — scheduled to take place across the state — after only attending one in Poughkeepsie on Oct. 10.

Videos show the town hall became boisterous, with crowds shouting at and heckling King from the audience.

One parent shouted from the audience that her child was being taught curriculum “like a little Nazi” while King’s children were “prospering in the freedom of a private Montessori school.” When the town hall was cut short, audience members shouted “Where’s our hour?” and “Where’s your representation for parents?”

The next day, the New York State PTA Facebook Page announced that King’s office decided to cancel the remaining four town hall meetings.

“While our goal was to provide an opportunity to learn and share, based on review of the initial October 10 meeting, the Commissioner concluded the outcome was not constructive for those taking the time to attend,” the post read.

On Monday, King said he would work with the Parent Teacher Association to try and plan other forums for parents. However, he said “special interest” groups at the Poughkeepsie meeting made it impossible for a constructive dialogue to take place, according to Capital New York.

Now, parent groups aligned with New York State Allies For Public Education are calling for King’s resignation, saying he “refuses to participate in the democratic process and refuses to hear the concerns of parents.” They’ve also taken issue with his insinuation that parents constitute as “special interests,” according to a press release.

The groups have called on parents, educators and concerned citizens to call and write state politicians to express their lack of confidence in the leader.”

The responsibility does not rest simply with the Commissioner but also with the NYS Board of Regents that oversees King’s department.  The Board approved and defended the implementation of the Common Core even though many if not most school districts including New York City were not ready to handle it.  The result was the majority of students scoring poorly on state standardized assessment tests.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting today on the second of a series of papers challenging optimistic assumptions about massive open online courses.   As reported in The Chronicle:

“The coalition of faculty-advocacy organizations asserts that online instruction “isn’t saving money—and may actually be costing students and colleges more,” but that “snappy slogans, massive amounts of corporate money, and a great deal of wishful thinking have created a bandwagon mentality that is hard to resist.”

The paper, “The ‘Promises’ of Online Higher Education: Reducing Costs,” was released by the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, whose backers include a number of faculty unions. Drawing on news articles and public-opinion surveys, it says that while the business model supporting MOOCs is “still a work in progress,” the trend is to offer courses free but charge for “a degree or a certificate or anything from the MOOC that carries real value.”

Merely having taken one of the courses, the paper says, is “virtually valueless in the marketplace.”

“The bottom line for students? The push for more online courses has not made higher education cheaper for them. The promise has always been that it will—but that day always seems to be in the future,” the paper says.

MOOCs may also cost colleges money, the paper says, citing an agreement between Udacity and the Georgia Institute of Technology to offer an online master’s degree in computer science.

“Udacity gets the intellectual content for a master’s program of 20 courses at an upfront cost of $400,000,” the paper says. “It borrows Georgia Tech’s reputation as its own, at a huge discount (no training of graduate students, no support for labs, no decades of accumulated know-how through which Georgia Tech earned its reputation).  It acquires these courses for a proprietary platform: Georgia Tech cannot offer these OMS CS courses, created by its own faculty, to a competing distributor.”

The paper continues: “Udacity expects Georgia Tech faculty members to maintain and update course material, and can use their latest version. While requiring that Georgia Tech not compete with it, it can take Georgia Tech-created courses and offer them to tens or hundreds of thousands of nonregistered students—and sell a program certificate for those courses.”

The full paper goes into more detail and is well worth a read.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Congressional Republicans conceded defeat on Wednesday in their bitter budget fight with President Obama over the new health care law as the House and Senate approved last-minute legislation ending a disruptive 16-day government shutdown and extending federal borrowing power to avert a financial default with potentially worldwide economic repercussions.  As reported in the New York Times:

“With the Treasury Department warning that it could run out of money to pay national obligations within a day, the Senate voted overwhelmingly on Wednesday evening, 81 to 18, to approve a proposal hammered out by the chamber’s Republican and Democratic leaders after the House on Tuesday was unable to move forward with any resolution. The House followed suit a few hours later, voting 285 to 144 to approve the Senate plan, which would fund the government through Jan. 15 and raise the debt limit through Feb. 7.

Mr. Obama signed the bill about 12:30 a.m. Thursday.

Most House Republicans opposed the bill, but 87 voted to support it. The breakdown showed that Republican leaders were willing to violate their informal rule against advancing bills that do not have majority Republican support in order to end the shutdown. All 198 Democrats voting supported the measure.

Mr. Obama, speaking shortly after the Senate vote, praised Congress, but he said he hoped the damaging standoff would not be repeated.”

Amen but I am afraid we will be revisiting this fiasco again in January!

Tony