Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Department of Education risks becoming a “lapdog” as a result of recent actions toward financial companies such as Sallie Mae, Sen. Elizabeth Warren charged Thursday.

The Massachusetts Democrat said she was “deeply concerned” by a Huffington Post report that the Education Department had recently told Sallie Mae, the nation’s largest handler of student loans, that it intended to renew its federal contract to collect payments on federal student loans, despite pending investigations by at least three other federal agencies over allegations the company violated borrowers’ rights.  As reported in the Huffington Post:

“The Department of Education needs to be aggressive in watching out for students, not for profit-making loan servicers,” Warren said. “They’re there for our students, not to help loan servicers make a profit.”

The criticism comes as Education Secretary Arne Duncan battles perceptions that his department is too soft on the companies it pays to collect on federal student debt, while these companies are alleged to be harming borrowers and violating federal rules. Warren has been among his most outspoken critics, and on Sept. 19 she wrote him a letter demanding answers.

“The whole point of the letter was to make sure the Education Department is making it a priority to review its own contracts with an eye toward how Sallie Mae and others are executing on their responsibilities,” Warren said. “That’s what I’m trying to do.”

Stephen Spector, Education Department spokesman, said Thursday the department had not yet responded to Warren’s letter.

…Warren also has targeted Duncan’s department for the extraordinary profits it has reaped off students who borrow from the government to pay for college. The profits, the result of the difference in what the government pays to borrow versus what it charges students, have increased in part because the department’s debt-relief initiatives have produced lackluster results, despite consistent prodding by the White House to improve.

“This is really important — the United States government should not be making a profit off the backs of people trying to get an education, and the Department of Education is one of the front-line places that we could make real changes in every part of what goes on in the student lending business,” she said.

“It’s tough enough in a world of rising college costs and mounting student loan debt for anyone to manage the cost of college,” Warren added. “The Education Department needs to be on the side of students. Their job is to be a watchdog, not a lapdog.”

The more I hear about Elizabeth Warren, the more I like her.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The University Faculty Senate sponsored a conference today on The Future of Doctoral Education at CUNY (see program below).  This is a timely topic as the CUNY Central Office contemplates moving some doctoral programs out of the Graduate Center and into the colleges.  The lab sciences (Biology, Chemistry, Physics, and Biochemistry) have specifically been designated for reassignment to individual colleges or to consortial arrangements among colleges.  The details of their future organization and governance are still to be worked out.

After welcoming remarks by Dr. Terrence Martell (Chair, UFS), Chancellor Bill Kelly set the stage for the day.  The Chancellor was clear and straightforward and spoke honestly on the state of doctoral study in American higher education.  For example, while cautioning the audience not to rely entirely on some of the published statistics, he indicated that we cannot ignore the fact that only 32% of all courses offered last year at American colleges and universities were taught by faculty in tenure-bearing positions.  The rest were taught by adjuncts or faculty on contract.  At CUNY the percentage is 42%.  The implication was clear that full-time, tenure bearing positions are on the decline thereby limiting traditional academic job opportunities for Ph.D. graduates.  He also expressed concern about the “crisis of the humanities” and supported the need for change in “our monastic enterprise where change at times is glacial”.  He reviewed some of the policies  (more fellowships, health insurance provisions, lowering of admissions) that were  initiated at the Graduate Center during his presidency.  There were a number of questions from the floor after his comments.   In my opinion, his comments were well-received by the audience.

Martin Burke was the next speaker who called on faculty interested in doctoral education to get involved in governance at their colleges and to have their voices heard.

The next panel featured Vice Chancellor Gillian Small who reviewed possible changes in doctoral study as programs move from the Graduate Center to the colleges.  She specifically expressed concern about the availability of positions in the sciences.  She mentioned for instance that only 14% of Biology Ph.Ds had found tenure-track positions within five years of graduation and that approximately 300,000 chemistry positions in private enterprises had been eliminated globally because of consolidations among the large pharmaceutical companies.  She was followed by President Karen Gould of Brooklyn College and Professor Edward Kennelly (Biology, Lehman College and the Graduate Center).  Professor Kennelly was most effective in stating the case for science faculty at the smaller and newer CUNY colleges and that the result of the movement of these doctoral programs to other CUNY colleges whether individually or in consortia would relegate faculty such as himself to second-class citizen status.  He called for continuing these programs at the Graduate Center.

The day concluded with presentations by President Chase Robinson and Provost Louise Lennihan on the state of doctoral study at the Graduate Center and its future. They made the case that many of the programs in the humanities and the social sciences at the Graduate Center were among the best in the country.   They also reviewed recent changes in the Center’s financial aid packages guaranteeing that all new doctoral students would receive some form of fellowships.  Combined with a three-year plan to reduce overall doctoral enrollments by 14%, the Center’s programs were becoming very competitive. They also affirmed their commitment to diversity during this period of adjustment.

In sum, I thought that this was quite a good program for those of us interested in doctoral study at CUNY.   And a thank you is in order to the University Faculty Senate for making it possible.

Tony

UNIVERSITY FACULTY SENATE FALL 2013 CONFERENCE

“The Future of Doctoral Education at CUNY”

Friday, December 6, 2013

8:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m.

Baruch College

Introductory Remarks – 9:00 a.m.

Dr. Terrence Martell, Chair, UFS

***

First Topic (9:10 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.)

DOCTORAL EDUCATION AND THE UNIVERSITY

Presenter – Interim Chancellor William Kelly

Remarks –  Professor Martin Burke (Graduate Center Governance Leader)

Audience Q & A

Second Topic  (10:00 a.m. – 10:45 a.m.)

RECONFIGURING DOCTORAL SCIENCE EDUCATION

Presenters –    Vice Chancellor for Research Gillian Small

Brooklyn College President Karen Gould

Remarks –  Professor Edward Kennelly (Biology, Lehman)

Audience Q & A

Third Topic  (10:45 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.)

THE PRESENT AND FUTURE GRADUATE CENTER

Presenters –     Graduate Center Interim President Chase Robinson

Graduate Center Interim Provost Louise Lennihan

Remarks –   Dr. Terrence Martell, Chair, UFS

Audience Q & A (11:45 a.m. – 12:15 p.m

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Dear Commons Community,

The American Federation of Teachers union is calling for a “national day of action” on December 9^th against the education reform policies that promote school closings, privatization,  and corporate interests.  As described at the AFT website:

Over the last year, community groups and teachers unions have taken unprecedented steps to forge an alliance to work together to reclaim the promise of public education as our nation’s gateway to democracy and racial and economic justice. The National Day of Action on Dec. 9 is our next step. Teachers, parents, students and communities have been facing unprecedented attacks on their public schools, jobs and civil rights. These attacks raise fundamental questions: Will public education continue as a truly public institution that aspires to provide all students with an equal opportunity to learn? Will the labor movement survive as a strong voice for economic justice? Teachers unions and community groups organizing for educational justice are uniquely situated to help lead the fight for the future direction of our country. But neither the union nor the community can win the battle alone. The promise lies in uniting as genuine partners to develop and organize around a shared vision for improving our schools and creating a more equitable society. The National Day of Action builds upon the alliances that have been established over the last few years among union, community, youth and parent groups on a range of educational and social justice campaigns. Examples of joint work include:

• Fighting back against school closings that adversely affect students of color and their communities;
• Community support of the teachers’ strike in Chicago;
• Organizing against the excessive use of standardized testing;
• Organizing to ensure there are just laws to protect the rights of immigrants; and
• Organizing community-union town hall meetings in cities focused on developing grass-roots solutions for our struggling schools, involving more than 3,000 people and 60 community organizations.

Most recently, more than 100 community groups and teachers unions developed and endorsed a statement that articulates those principles, The Principles that Unite Us, our common vision for public education—a vision distinct from a corporate agenda that rests on a system of winners and losers. Now, these partners are transforming the principles into the seeds of a national movement.

 
It begins on Dec. 9 with our National Day of Action to Reclaim the Promise of Public Education: Our Schools, Our Solutions. We will be saying YES to “The Principles that Unite Us,” and NO to the corporate agenda for our schools; YES to great neighborhood public schools for all students, and NO to privatization, school closings and over-testing of students.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

IBM, Microsoft, Amazon and Google are all expected to spend more than $1 billion annually on their global cloud networks in the coming years.  Even more important, however, is that all these  companies are developing knowledge through their cloud services of how to run truly huge Internet-based computing systems — systems that may soon be nearly impossible for other companies to match.  IBM announced that it will now be upping the ante and making major new investments in cloud computing technology.  The  New York Times reports:

“In 2014, the company [IBM] will make a series of announcements that will shiver all challengers, according to Lance Crosby, chief executive of SoftLayer, a cloud computing company that IBM purchased earlier this year for $2 billion.

More than 100 products, like e-commerce and marketing tools, will be put inside the cloud as a comprehensive series of offerings for business, Mr. Crosby said. So will another 40 infrastructure services, like big data analysis and mobile applications development.

“It will take Amazon 10 years to build all of this,” he said. “People will be creating businesses with this that we can only dream about.”

Maybe. IBM already claims to lead in cloud computing revenue, with $1 billion in revenue in the past quarter alone. That’s impressive, though that revenue includes revenue from software that used to be attributed to a different category at the company. And some of the revenue is being generated by companies IBM recently acquired, including SoftLayer.”

For anyone involved with technology procurement, initiatives by IBM and the other players in cloud computing are worth following.  I have come to the conclusion that much of what we do now on our mobile devices, laptops, and desktops will move with increasing speed to the cloud.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) results have been released for 2012. As provided at its website:

“PISA is an ongoing triennial survey that assesses the extent to which 15-year-old students near the end of compulsory education have acquired key knowledge and skills that are essential for full participation in modern societies. The assessment does not just ascertain whether students can reproduce knowledge; it also examines how well students can extrapolate from what they have learned and apply that knowledge in unfamiliar settings, both in and outside of school. This approach reflects the fact that modern economies reward individuals not for what they know, but for what they can do with what they know.”

For Fall 2012, the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development administered PISA  to 510,000 students between ages 15 and 16 in 65 economies, including 34 OECD countries — a sample that OECD says represents 28 million students. Among those 34 countries, the U.S. performed slightly below average in math, scoring 481, and ranked 26 (though the report notes that due to measurement error, the ranking could range from 23 to 29.) Shanghai, Singapore, Hong Kong, Chinese Taipei, Korea and Japan came out on top, followed by such European countries as Liechtenstein, Switzerland, Netherlands, Estonia, Finland and Poland. Peru, Indonesia, Qatar, Colombia and Jordan came in last.

In reading, the U.S. performed around the OECD average of 496, ranking 17 (or between 14 and 20) with an average score of 498. Again, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Finland, Ireland, Taipei, Poland and Estonia came out on top, with Argentina, Albania, Kazakhstan, Qatar and Peru filling out the bottom.

Critics have used the PISA results to express concerns that America’s economic future is in jeopardy because we are losing our competitive education edge.   Others put little credence in these tests .  Mark Schneider, a vice president at the American Institutes of Research, feels that the results have very little bearing on economic development.

“Do I want Israel’s economy, the American economy or Belgium’s economy? Or Taipei, where the fertility rate is 1 percent?  In Korea, they’re closing schools because they don’t have enough kids, they have this whole inverted age pyramid and they’re going to run into giant problems. The U.S. has a dramatically growing population, enormous wealth and entrepreneurial spirit.”

Schneider added, “PISA’s not the thing that matters at all. You want to know you’re not Montenegro or Kazakhstan — then you’re okay. What would we prefer — high PISA scores or Silicon Valley?”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Internet has had significant impact on how we receive our news.  Print media has especially been impacted as more people use freely-available online services.  Yesterday there were announcements concerning two major magazines.

First, Newsweek will be bringing back its print edition after transitioning to an all-digital format late last year.

The New York Times reports that the weekly magazine will start printing again in January or February. Newsweek Editor in Chief Jim Impoco was quoted as saying that Newsweek will “be a more subscription-based model … We see it as a premium product, a boutique product.”

When Newsweek ended its print edition in 2012, the magazine had been printing since 1933. At the time, then-editor of Newsweek and The Daily Beast Tina Brown said, “In our judgment, we have reached a tipping point at which we can most efficiently and effectively reach our readers in all-digital format.”

Second, going in a different direction,  New York magazine announced that it will switch to a biweekly publishing schedule.

The transition will officially take place in March.  In one way, New York is a smashing magazine success. It is a perennial winner at the National Magazine Awards, and its editor Adam Moss is often described as one of the best in the business. New York also has a widely read, widely loved website.

However, as the New York Times’ David Carr, who broke the news on Sunday night, wrote, praise and talent can’t always win out over radical shifts in technology:

New York, with a current subscriber base just above 400,000, according to the Alliance for Audited Media, got clobbered after the 2008 recession when classified ads went missing and stayed that way. So far this year, the magazine is down 9.2 percent in ad pages compared with the same period last year.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Zero tolerance, first grew out of the war on drugs in the 1990s and became more aggressive in the wake of school shootings like the one at Columbine High School in Colorado.  Along with this policy came an increase in the number of police officers stationed in schools leading in turn to an increase in suspensions, expulsions and arrests for minor nonviolent offenses.  But the trend towards zero-tolerance may be ending as educators question the wisdom of arresting students for minor offenses.  As reported in the New York Times:

“…in November, Broward County veered in a different direction, joining other large school districts, including Los Angeles, Baltimore, Chicago and Denver, in backing away from the get-tough approach.

Rather than push children out of school, districts like Broward are now doing the opposite: choosing to keep law-breaking students in school, away from trouble on the streets, and offering them counseling and other assistance aimed at changing behavior.

These alternative efforts are increasingly supported, sometimes even led, by state juvenile justice directors, judges and police officers.

In Broward, which had more than 1,000 arrests in the 2011 school year, the school district entered into a wide-ranging agreement last month with local law enforcement, the juvenile justice department and civil rights groups like the N.A.A.C.P. to overhaul its disciplinary policies and de-emphasize punishment.

Some states, prodded by parents and student groups, are similarly moving to change the laws; in 2009, Florida amended its laws to allow school administrators greater discretion in disciplining students.

“A knee-jerk reaction for minor offenses, suspending and expelling students, this is not the business we should be in,” said Robert W. Runcie, the Broward County Schools superintendent, who took the job in late 2011. “We are not accepting that we need to have hundreds of students getting arrested and getting records that impact their lifelong chances to get a job, go into the military, get financial aid.”

Nationwide, more than 70 percent of students involved in arrests or referrals to court are black or Hispanic, according to federal data.

“What you see is the beginning of a national trend here,” said Michael Thompson, the director of the Council of State Governments Justice Center. “Everybody recognizes right now that if we want to really find ways to close the achievement gap, we are really going to need to look at the huge number of kids being removed from school campuses who are not receiving any classroom time…”

Juvenile judges were among the first to express alarm over the jump in the number of students appearing in court on misdemeanors, an increase they said is tied to the proliferation of school police officers.

“We started to see the officers as a disciplinary tool,” said Judge Elijah H. Williams of Broward County Circuit Court, a juvenile judge who said he was “no flaming liberal” but saw the need for change. “Somebody writes graffiti in a stall, O.K., you’re under arrest. A person gets caught with a marijuana cigarette, you’re under arrest.”

The move by Broward and other districts to rethink zero tolerance is most appropriate.  Subjecting minors to arrests and expulsions do nothing to rehabilitate the children.  Zero tolerance simply pushes the students out of schools without providing any meaningful treatment and ends up subjecting them to a lifetime of problems.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Coming on the heels of Udacity founder, Sebastian Thrun’s comments that his MOOCs are “a lousy product”, The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article of “told you sos” among long-time online learning professionals.  The article quotes George Siemens among others:

“We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished. We have a lousy product,” Mr. Thrun told reporter, Max Chafkin. “It was a painful moment.”

For critics of MOOCs and the hype surrounding them, that admission was perhaps the reddest meat in a lengthy profile that cast Mr. Thrun as a fierce competitor who came to online education only recently—after watching Salman Khan, the founder of Khan Academy, give a TED Talk about his popular online tutorials.

But academics who have studied online education for longer than a few years were not surprised by the Udacity founder’s humbling.

“Well, there it is folks,” wrote George Siemens, a researcher and strategist at Athabasca University’s Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute, on his blog. “After two years of hype, breathless proclamations about how Udacity will transform higher education, Silicon Valley blindness to existing learning research, and numerous articles/interviews featuring Sebastian Thrun, Udacity has failed.”

“Thrun seems to have ‘discovered’ that open-access, distance-education students struggle to complete,” wrote Martin Weller, a professor of educational technology at the Open University, in Britain. “I don’t want to sound churlish here, but hey, the OU has known this for 40 years.”

I will offer a slightly different outlook. Without a doubt, MOOCs were over-hyped by the media, by the their corporate investors, and faculty course developers.  However,  as I blogged earlier, the MOOC  companies have significant resources at their disposal and they will refine and develop online learning materials from which we will be able to learn.  In all likelihood, MOOC companies like Udacity will become content providers and their products integrated with face-to-face instruction in a variety of blended formats.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Earlier this year, six urban school districts announced a partnership, the Urban School Food Alliance,  to coordinate menus to improve purchasing power from food providers so that costs are kept low. The aim of the partnership is to serve the same lunch menus across the six school districts, which together represent 2.9 million daily lunches served a day.  The districts in the Alliance are:  New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Dallas, Miami-Dade County Public Schools,  and Orange County Public Schools in Orlando.  As reported in the New York Times: 

“This show of solidarity is unprecedented,” said Los Angeles Unified School District Food Services Director David Binkle. “It demonstrates that all the school districts in the alliance can work together to implement the same programs while serving nutritious meals to our students.”

A new initiative of the Alliance is to bid for eco-friendly lunch plates that can be collected and turned into compost.

“With any uneaten food, the plates, made from sugar cane, can be thrown away and turned into a product prized by gardeners and farmers everywhere: compost. If all goes as planned, compostable plates will replace plastic foam lunch trays by September for more than 2.6 million others nationwide.

That would be some 271 million plates a year.

“I want our money and resources for food going into children, not in garbage going to the landfill,” said Penny Parham, the Miami school district’s administrative director of food and nutrition.

Compostable plates are but the first initiative on the environmental checklist of the Alliance to create new markets for sustainable food and lunchroom supplies.”

This sounds like a great idea that can be a win-win for everybody and the environment.

Tony