Dear Commons Community,

Janey Flanagan (BMCC), a doctoral student in our Ph.D. Program in Urban Education, alerted us to an article in the Wall Street Journal entitled, An Early Report Card on Massive Open Online Courses.   She posted: ”“I thought it provided a fairly objective look at MOOCs and confirmed a lot of the issues we discussed in class last week. An interesting note is the suggestion that blended MOOCs might offer a better solution; however, then I think this type of course will cease to be a MOOC and it will become something else, whatever you want to call it!  The article is available at:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303759604579093400834738972.html

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Thousands of parents, students and teachers marched across the Brooklyn Bridge in a show of support yesterday for the city’s publicly funded, privately run charter schools. Republican mayoral candidate Joe Lhota also turned out for the demonstration that ended at City Hall Park, but families there were more interested in sending a message to frontrunner Bill de Blasio, who has vowed if elected to reverse the city’s policy of giving charters free space.

The issue of providing free space has been hotly contested especially since the mayoral candidates have stated their positions.   Charter operators such as Eva Moskowitz who was one of the organizers of yesterday’s march have been most critical of de Blasio.  Others including groups of public school parents have sued the NYC Department of Education over the free rent policy as a violation of NYS law.  Article 56, Section 2853, Part 4(c) states: “A charter school may contract with a school district or the governing body of a public college or university for the use of a school building  and  grounds,  the operation and maintenance thereof. Any such contract shall provide such services or facilities at cost.”

The NYC DOE provides free space and services for approximately 100 co-located charter schools. Using figures from the New York City Independent Budget Office, parents estimate that the space and services these charter schools currently receive is worth more than $100 million annually. Furthermore, this practice contributes to the fact that these schools receive about $2,000 dollars more per student in public funds annually than traditional public schools.

During Tuesday’s rally, marchers wore T-shirts and held signs with messages that included “Let My Children Learn” and the word “Rent” with a slash through it.

About a dozen counterprotesters brandished their own signs that read “Pay Your Rent.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A staff writer for Science  concocted a study (really a sting) to determine the quality of the peer review publication process at over 300 open access online journals.  John Bohannon, who has a Ph.D. in biology, crafted a fraudulent cancer-research article, sent it out for review,  and painstakingly tracked the responses to it and reported that 157 of 304 online journals had agreed to publish it.  He described his study/sting as:

“Between January and August of 2013, I submitted papers at a rate of about 10 per week: one paper to a single journal for each publisher. I chose journals that most closely matched the paper’s subject. First choice would be a journal of pharmaceutical science or cancer biology, followed by general medicine, biology, or chemistry. In the beginning, I used several Yahoo e-mail addresses for the submission process, before eventually creating my own e-mail service domain, afra-mail.com, to automate submission.

A handful of publishers required a fee be paid up front for paper submission. I struck them off the target list. The rest use the standard open-access “gold” model: The author pays a fee if the paper is published.

If a journal rejected the paper, that was the end of the line. If a journal sent review comments that asked for changes to layout or format, I complied and resubmitted. If a review addressed any of the paper’s serious scientific problems, I sent the editor a “revised” version that was superficially improved—a few more photos of lichens, fancier formatting, extra details on methodology—but without changing any of the fatal scientific flaws.

After a journal accepted a paper, I sent a standard e-mail to the editor: “Unfortunately, while revising our manuscript we discovered an embarrassing mistake. We see now that there is a serious flaw in our experiment which invalidates the conclusions.” I then withdrew the paper.”

Dr. Bohannon wrote of his findings in Science which has received a lot of flack suggesting a bias by the journal against online journals.

“The pique is less about Mr. Bohannon’s 4,200-word article, which suggests he confirmed a problem throughout academic publishing, than his magazine’s 200-word press release (read it here; scroll down to see it), which repeatedly emphasized his findings as an indictment of the open-access model. The sting operation, Science said in its promotion, “exposes the dark side of open-access publishing.”

Regardless of his motives and methods,  Dr. Bohannon raises the question of the quality of peer review not only in open access but in all scholarly journals.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

inBloom, funded primarily by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, with infrastructure built by a division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, was in the media with a featured article in the New York Times Business Section today.  Using Jefferson County School District in Colorado as a case study, the reporter, Natasha Singer,  interviewed the superintendent, Cynthia  Stevenson, who was hoping to be more efficient in  data management of her student records but after contracting with inBloom faced a firestorm five months later with school board members and parents.  As reported in the article:

“We are joining the new generation of data management,” Dr. Stevenson said enthusiastically in the March issue of “Chalk Talk,” the school district’s newsletter for parents.

She did not imagine that five months later, she would be sitting in a special school board meeting in the district’s headquarters, listening as a series of parents, school board members and privacy lawyers assailed the plan to outsource student data storage to inBloom. What troubled the naysayers at that August session was that the district seemed to be rushing to increase data-sharing before weighing the risks of granting companies access to intimate details about children. They noted that administrators had no policies in place to govern who could see the information, how long it would be kept or whether it would be shared with the colleges to which students applied.

“Students are currently subject to more forms of tracking and monitoring than ever before,” Khaliah Barnes, a lawyer at the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington who appeared via video conferencing, told the room packed with parents. “While we understand the value of data for promoting and evaluating personalized learning, there are too few safeguards for the amount of data collected and transmitted from schools to private companies.”

Jefferson County is not the only place where parents have challenged the adoption of inBloom. Parents in Louisiana raised a ruckus after discovering that their children’s Social Security numbers had been uploaded to inBloom. In April, Louisiana officials said they would remove all student data from the database. Of the nine states that originally signed up this year to participate, just three — Colorado, New York and Illinois — are actively pursuing the service.

Still, that accounts for a lot of children. New York State has already uploaded data on 90 percent of 2.7 million public school and charter students — data stripped of identifiers like students’ names — into inBloom; state education officials plan to upload a complete set soon, including names.

In New York City, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio who is the Democratic nominee for mayor,  sent a scathing letter to city and state officials earlier this year protesting the contract to inBloom, stating:  “I don’t want my kids’ privacy bought and sold like this,” he said.

States and school districts would be wise to steer clear of participating in any national database.  The federal government which spearheaded the inBloom project is incapable of guaranteeing privacy.  And any product developed by the Gates Foundation in concert with a Rupert Murdoch operation should send red flags to every school administrator who cares about their children.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Maureen Dowd parodies the dysfunction of our federal government to an “end of the world” science fiction movie where great American cities have been left in ruins.   She opens with “The year is 2084, in the capital of the land formerly called North America”  and describes what has become of Washington, D.C.:

“The white marble monuments are now covered in ash, Greek tragedy ruins overrun with weeds. Tea Party zombies, thrilled with the dark destruction they have wreaked on the planet, continue to maraud around the Hill, eager to chomp on humanity some more.

Dead cherry blossom trees litter the bleak landscape. Trash blows through L’Enfant’s once beautiful boulevards, now strewn with the detritus of democracy, scraps of the original Constitution, corroded White House ID cards, stacks of worthless bills tumbling out of the Treasury Department…”

A gaunt man and sickly boy, wrapped in blue tarps, trudge toward the blighted spot that was once the World War II monument, scene of the first shutdown skirmishes. They know they may not survive the winter.

“How did this happen, Papa?” the boy asks.

“Americans had been filled with existential dread since the 9/11 attacks, but they didn’t realize the real danger was coming from inside the government,” the man says. “It started very small with a petty fight over a six-week spending bill but quickly mushroomed out of control.”

“Whose fault was it, Papa?” the boy presses.

The man tries to explain: “The Grand Old Party, the proud haven of patriots who believed in a strong national security and fiscal responsibility, was infected with a mutant form of ideology. It was named the Sarahcuda Strain after the earliest carrier. Remember when you saw that old science fiction movie, ‘I Am Legend’? A scientist described the virus that burned through civilization as being like ‘a very fast car driven by a very bad man.’ That’s what happened: In the infected Tea Party politicians, brain function decreased and social de-evolution occurred. They began ignoring their basic survival instincts….It’s hard to believe now, but they were fixated on stopping an effort to get health care to those who couldn’t afford it. It eventually led them to destroy all the things they said they held most dear.  The boy is confused. “They killed America because they didn’t care about keeping Americans alive?” he asks.

The parody goes on in grimmer and grimmer detail and concluded that Thomas Jefferson’s utopia had devolved into Ted Cruz’s dystopia.

Tony

Click to enlarge.

Dear Commons Community,

The (British) Times Higher Education World University Rankings for 2013-14 were released earlier this week.  In collaboration with Thomson Reuters, university performance was measured for 13 performance indicators grouped into five areas:

•     Teaching: the learning environment (worth 30 per cent of the overall ranking score)
•     Research: volume, income and reputation (worth 30 per cent)
•     Citations: research influence (worth 30 per cent)
•     Industry income: innovation (worth 2.5 per cent)
•     International outlook: staff, students and research (worth 7.5 per cent).

The rankings for this year were dominated by the United States and Britain, which together held the top 13 spots and more than half the top 200.  The United States had 77 of the top 200 and California Institute of Technology (CalTech) took the top spot for the second year in a row.

While I am not a fan of rankings, I hope our education policy makers, who fixate on numbers to criticize American education, realize that compared to the rest of the world, many of our colleges and universities are respected and admired.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York City voters, by a large margin, are planning to support Bill de Blasio for mayor next month according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released today. With the election just a month away, on Nov. 5, Mr. de Blasio held a commanding lead of 68 percent to 19 percent among likely voters.

However, the same voters want to keep Raymond W. Kelly as police commissioner. They want more charter schools. And nearly half of them support the Police Department’s use of the stop-and-frisk tactic.  All positions that Bill de Blasio promises to change if elected.  As reported in the New York Times, Mr. de blasio’s appeal comes from the fact that:

“By almost four to one, voters thought that he would do a better job than Mr. Lhota in improving public education. By almost three to one, they supported Mr. de Blasio’s proposal to increase taxes on high-earners to finance an expansion of prekindergarten education. And by almost two to one, they believed that Mr. de Blasio, not Mr. Lhota, would keep the city safe from crime or a terrorist attack or during a natural disaster….

And a majority of voters suggested that they want the next mayor to prioritize reducing the gap between rich and poor, a key plank for Mr. de Blasio, rather than to create a climate that would reduce taxes and regulation to sustain job growth, something emphasized by Mr. Lhota.”

While anything can happen, Joseph Lhota has a huge hill to climb to get elected while Bill de Blasio has to keep doing what he has been doing.

Tony

Dear Commons Community

According to an article in The Hechinger Report, in the short term, most schools and colleges will likely be unaffected by the federal government shutdown that went into effect on Tuesday. But if the impasse in Congress lasts a long time, schools may feel the financial squeeze. The shutdown is a result of the House and Senate’s failure to agree on a funding bill, which forced more than 800,000 federal employees into furlough Tuesday morning.   As reported:

“If the shutdown lasts beyond one week, the government interruption is expected to delay funding to school districts, colleges and universities that rely on federal funds, according to a U.S. Department of Education contingency plan. With more than 90 percent of its employees expected to be furloughed, officials at the Department of Education will be unavailable to assist school districts or answer questions as they attempt to implement reforms, The Washington Post reports.

The biggest immediate impact could be felt in Head Start programs, though, which are still reeling from federal sequestration cuts that pushed 57,000 children out of the preschool program for low-income children. According to the National Head Start Association (NHSA), an advocacy group, 23 programs in 11 states with grant cycles that begin Oct. 1 are poised to lose grant money due to the shutdown.

“Beyond the headline numbers, this shutdown has real consequences,” said NHSA Director Yasmina Vinci in a statement. “Government shutdown is one cut atop an already deep wound.”

In Prentiss, Miss., a town of about 1,100 people an hour south of Jackson, the Five County Child Development Program closed its Head Start classes on Tuesday after failing to receive funding. “The only funds we have coming in are the federal dollars,” said Jonathan Bines, director of the Head Start program, which serves about 900 children.

Bines says he has received phone calls from parents who are struggling to deal with the closure. In Jefferson Davis County, where Prentiss is located, the median household income is about $26,000, and about one out of every four residents lives in poverty.

“They don’t have any childcare,” said Bines. “Some of them are working. They’re trying to scramble to find a place to leave their children.”

While institutions of higher education are expected to largely escape the effects of the shutdown for now, it is still unclear exactly how colleges and universities or postsecondary students would be affected if it continues, according to Inside Higher Ed. Prior to a near-shutdown in 2011, several agencies said they would be unable to award new research grants or help with existing grants. While the administration of student financial aid programs will most likely not be affected, a prolonged shutdown could delay federal funding to colleges and universities.”

A sad state of affairs in our country when small children are the pawns in the political circus we call the U.S. House of Representatives.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Readers of this blog have seen postings before on the influence of corporate-affiliated foundations on education policy in this country.    The Hechinger Report yesterday had an article entitled, Who is Running U.S. Higher Education? and raised questions about the undue influence of Gates, Lumina,  and other foundations that engage in ”advocacy philanthropy”.    The article comments:

“Lumina increased the amount it earmarks annually for programs that drive what is known as student success from $3 million in 2002 to almost $26 million in 2010, and on “productivity” from zero to almost $11 million, according to research conducted at the Claremont Graduate School.

The $36 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, meanwhile, is spending about $73 million a year on grants related to higher education, up from zero in 2004, the researchers found.

About $1 billion a year in all is being poured into education at all levels by these organizations and others, including the Joyce Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, and the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.

“The emergence of ‘advocacy philanthropy’ has resulted in the unabashed use of foundation strategies to influence government action, policy, and legislation,” the Claremont researchers concluded. That’s a departure, they wrote, “from the established norms in higher education philanthropy, norms that generally created a distance between foundation activity and politics.”

The point should also be made that a number of these philanthropies operate collaboratively to focus on certain issues and policies to maximize their influence.

College and university presidents especially those dependent upon state funding have seen their budgets reduced if not slashed by legislators and governors. Hence there is a good deal of appeal to work with these foundations on grant projects.  In the long run, these presidents are selling their souls to the monied interests.  Faculties especially those who influence governance at their institutions need to be aware if not wary of grants from these foundations and should push their administrators to go slow or not at all.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I must say that I had gotten tired of the Republicans threatening to shut down the government every few months in a show of disdain for compromise with President Obama and the Democrats.  But now that a government shutdown has happened, a posting on the matter is necessary.  A column today by Joe Nocera who borrowing from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, refers to the GOP as “banana Republicans” is illuminating.   He summarizes what has happened as follows:

“The House speaker, John Boehner, won’t bring “a continuing resolution [designed to finance the government and avert a shutdown for all of six weeks] without any of the anti-Obamacare language — not because it won’t pass, but because it probably would, which would infuriate the Tea Party wing of his party and jeopardize his leadership post. Indeed, as Boehner well knows, many House Republicans do not want the government to shut down and would probably vote for the Senate’s clean bill if given half a chance. Their unwillingness to speak out against the extreme faction in their party is shameful. And it’s tragic that, at a time when the House desperately needs a strong speaker, it has John Boehner instead.

What was clear on Monday was that if the government does shut down, the Republicans are going to be blamed. All day long, we watched the Democrats, starting with President Obama, make the case that Republican demands were unreasonable, and, indeed, dangerous, given what was at stake. Republicans spent the day on the defensive. Senator Elizabeth Warren, the liberal Democrat from Massachusetts, described Republican tactics to me as “hostage taking.” Harry Reid, the Senate majority leader, told reporters that if “we can’t pass this” — meaning a clean C.R. [continung resolution]— “we’re only truly entering a banana republican mind-set.”

Nocera’s conclusion:

“A party controlled by its most extreme faction will ultimately be forced back to the center. The Democrats learned that when Walter Mondale was losing to Ronald Reagan, and Michael Dukakis to George H.W. Bush. Now it is the Republicans who don’t seem to understand that their extreme tactics are pleasing a small percentage of their countrymen but alienating everyone else.”

Alienating everybody indeed.  The GOP will change and learn to compromise or become irrelevant in national elections.

Tony