Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press is reporting that Hillary Rodham Clinton and Jeb Bush, potential foes in the 2016 presidential contest, said yesterday that higher education has the power to transform lives and be a force for democracy around the globe.  As reported by the AP:

“Clinton and Bush spoke separately at the Globalization of Higher Education conference The event, co-organized by Bush, offered a bipartisan twist for the nation’s two dominant political families, both of whom could return to the presidential campaign trail next year. Bush, a former Florida governor, is the brother and son of Republican presidents. Clinton’s husband, Bill Clinton, served two terms in the White House before she returned to political life as a senator from New York and President Barack Obama’s first secretary of state.

Onstage in solo performances, Clinton and Bush each focused on education policy and the need to make higher education affordable and accessible across the globe.

“When people around the world have access to this kind of American model of education it illustrates … that we believe in spreading opportunity to more people, in more places, so that they too have the chance to live up to their own God-given potential,” Clinton said at the Dallas event. She’s worried, she added, “that we’re closing the doors to higher education in our own country so this great model that we’ve had that has meant so much to so many is becoming further and further away from too many.”.

She thanked Bush at the start of her speech, citing his focus on education and his “passion and dedication” to the issue in the private sector.

Bush spoke briefly at the start of the conference.

“Higher education in America has a growing affordability problem while billions in the developing world struggle with accessibility. Exporting U.S. post-secondary education and global consumers at scale can help really resolve both issues simultaneously,” Bush said. “Expanding access through technology can bring down the cost of delivery at home and abroad.”

These are laudable positions.  However, Jeb Bush has evolved as a spokesperson for school privatization.  He and his foundation (Foundation for Excellence in Education) receives significant financial support from education technology and testing companies.  The real game changer in this country would be to move to a system of free higher education. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It is hard to believe that Gloria Steinem will be eighty years old tomorrow.  Gail Collins has a fine piece on Ms. Steinem who was and continues to be the image of the women’s movement that started in the 1960s.   Collins provides a number of interesting insights such as:

“There are two reasons that Steinem turned out to be the image of the women’s liberation movement. One did indeed have to do with her spectacular physical appearance. For young women who were hoping to stand up for their rights without being called man-haters, she was evidence that it was possible to be true to your sisters while also being really, really attractive to the opposite sex.. The other thing that made Steinem unique was her gift for empathy. Women who read about her or saw her on TV felt that if they ran into her on the street, they would really get along with her. And women who actually did run into her on the street felt the same way. More than a half-century into her life as an international celebrity, she remains stupendously approachable, patient with questions, interested in revelations. When she goes to events, young women flock around her. All celebrities draw crowds, of course. The difference is that when Steinem is at the center, she’s almost always listening.”

And this quote from Steinem:

“Fifty was a shock, because it was the end of the center period of life. But once I got over that, 60 was great. Seventy was great. And I loved, I seriously loved aging. I found myself thinking things like: ‘I don’t want anything I don’t have.’ How great is that?” But, she added, “80 is about mortality, not aging. Or not just aging.”

Happy Birthday, Gloria!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

It was a verbal slug-fest on yesterday’s Face the Nation between Mitt Romney and Dick Durbin.  Former Governor Romney slammed President Obama as having lost the confidence of international allies claiming:

“The president’s naivete with regards to Russia and his faulty judgment about Russia’s intentions and objectives has led to a number of foreign policy challenges that we are facing.  Unfortunately, not having anticipated Russia’s intentions, the president wasn’t able to shape the kind of events that may have been able to prevent the kinds of circumstances that you’re seeing in the Ukraine.”

Senator Dick Durban in response said

“Governor Romney’s suffering from political amnesia. Does he remember the reaction of the rest of the world to our invasion of Iraq?  The fact is that many of our stalwart allies of the past thought it was a terrible decision. What President Obama has done is restore a working relationship.  Osama bin Laden is gone. The war in Iraq is over. Afghanistan is coming to a close. … I’m afraid Governor Romney’s forgotten those facts.”

I believe that the bitterness of his presidential defeat has clouded Romney’s vision and sense of history.  Iraq was one our country’s greatest follies in terms of the loss of life and expenditure of resources.  Our credibility with the international community was eviscerated when no weapons of mass destruction were ever found.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York Democratic Mayor Bill de Blasio has taken a lot of flack including from members of his own party such as Governor Andrew Cuomo  for his stand on taxing millionaires to pay for universal pre-kindergarten.  In Illinois, Speaker Michael Madigan earlier this week made a similar proposal.  As reported by Reuters:

“Illinois’ powerful speaker of the House of Representative on Thursday unveiled a plan that would slap a tax surcharge on millionaires in the state in an effort to raise $1 billion a year for public schools.

Chicago Democrat Michael Madigan’s plan surfaced just two days after voters in the Republican primary election chose multi-millionaire venture capitalist Bruce Rauner to face incumbent Democratic Governor Pat Quinn in the November general election…

Under the speaker’s plan, annual incomes topping $1 million would be taxed an additional 3 percent over the state’s flat income tax rate, with the additional revenue distributed to schools on a per-pupil basis.

“This plan brings long overdue fairness to the state tax structure and provides a needed boost to education funding to help give our children more of the resources they need to succeed,” Madigan said in a statement.

The proposed constitutional amendment would need approval from the Democrat-controlled House and Senate by May 5 in order to be placed on the ballot for the November general election, according to the statement.

Illinois’ personal income tax rate, which was boosted to 5 percent in 2011, is scheduled to fall to 3.75 percent on Jan. 1 unless lawmakers take action to keep the higher rate in place.“

Madigan and de Blasio are willing to make bold proposals to redistribute wealth in their respective states for the sake of children.  Given the alarming and growing gap in incomes between rich and poor, these proposals have merit and their time has come.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The  US Department of Education released data yesterday that show a pattern of racial discrimination in the nation’s public schools.  Key findings concluded  that racial minorities are more likely than white students to be suspended from school, to have less access to rigorous math and science classes, and to be taught by lower-paid teachers with less experience, according to the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights.  As reported in the New York Times:

“In the first analysis in nearly 15 years of information from all of the country’s 97,000 public schools, the Education Department found a pattern of inequality on a number of fronts, with race as the dividing factor.

Black students are suspended and expelled at three times the rate of white students. A quarter of high schools with the highest percentage of black and Latino students do not offer any Algebra II courses, while a third of those schools do not have any chemistry classes. Black students are more than four times as likely as white students — and Latino students are twice as likely — to attend schools where one out of every five teachers does not meet all state teaching requirements…

One of the striking statistics to emerge from the data, based on information collected during the 2011-12 academic year, was that even as early as preschool, black students face harsher discipline than other students…

In high school, the study found that while more than 70 percent of white students attend schools that offer a full range of math and science courses — including algebra, biology, calculus, chemistry, geometry and physics — just over half of all black students have access to those courses. Just over two-thirds of Latinos attend schools with the full range of math and science courses, and less than half of American Indian and Native Alaskan students are able to enroll in as many high-level math and science courses as their white peers.”

These data confirm what many others have observed in individual school districts. Here in New York City, for example, as study conducted by Denise McNamara, concluded that  many of the new small high schools remodeled in the past decade in poorer, minority neighborhoods were built without wet laboratories and cannot offer any lab-based courses thereby dooming their students to high school careers devoid of meaningful science instruction in chemistry or biology.

This is a sad situation that the US DOE has done nothing about for decades.  It is almost as if there never was a Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court Decision in 1954.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

CREDO, the name of a website created by an activist in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, has established a petition to President Obama to make public higher education free.  I have blogged about this issue in the past. 

The basic financial rationale is that rather than continuing to pour billions more into financial aid programs that often fall short of tuition costs and leave students deep in debt, let’s move to a system of free public higher education. Currently, public colleges enroll 75 percent of all students.  According to data complied for an article in The Atlantic, the case can be made that with a little bit of leadership and will, the federal government could parlay its financial aid funding into a program guaranteeing a free public higher education to all who want it.  As the petition states:

“Making public colleges tuition-free and preventing further debt isn’t just a smart investment in our future — it’s less expensive than what our federal government spends to make college “affordable” now. It’s a lot cheaper than the $69 billion we spent in 2013 on Pell Grants for low-income students, and work-study funding, without even including federal loan subsidies.”

I think this is a cause that is most worthwhile.  If we look at education history in this country, a free public higher education is inevitable.  It is just a matter of when.  Let’s make it happen sooner than later and take a moment to sign this petition.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On Tuesday, the New York Post published an op-ed piece by Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal in which he criticized Mayor Bill de Blasio’s hostility to charter schools, saying that the mayor’s actions have the “markings of a tyrant holding low-income students hostage.” He also accused de Blasio of “[embarking] on a systematic campaign to destroy the city’s burgeoning charter school movement” and said the mayor’s “immoral policies will limit the futures of yet another generation of African-American youths.”  As reported in The Huffington Post:

“Jindal’s op-ed refers to de Blasio’s decision in late February to block the space-sharing agreements of nine city schools, including three schools from high-profile charter school operator Success Academy.

De Blasio has diverted more than $200 million away from charter schools since taking office and has floated the idea of making well-off charter schools pay rent.

Jindal’s op-ed ended with an attack on President Obama and the Department of Justice, whom Jindal has sparred with on the issue of voucher schools. In August, the DOJ filed a lawsuit to partially block the implementation of Louisiana’s voucher program, designed to give low-income children the opportunity to attend private schools.

According to the DOJ’s lawsuit, the program violates previous desegregation orders in more than 30 districts.”

Bobby Jindal is an ultraconservative Republican who has many issues with anyone who thinks progressively.  His attack in this op-ed will be interpreted in New York as a vote of confidence in what Mayor de Blasio is doing.  New York welcomes criticisms from the likes of Jindal, Bachman, Palin, Hannity, and Limbaugh.

Lastly, the fact that the op-ed piece appeared in the New York Post (one of Rupert Murdoch’s tabloids) only adds support for what de Blasio is trying to accomplish which essentially is to improve education for all children in New York not just those in charter schools.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Two colleagues here at the CUNY Graduate Center, David  Monaghan and Paul Attewell, have just released a study that concludes a key reason why students are much less likely to earn a four-year degree if they first enroll at a community college, is lost credits in the transfer process.

The research questions several other explanations for why many community college students fail to eventually complete bachelor’s degrees, such as assumptions about lowered expectations, a vocational focus or inadequate academic rigor during their time at two-year colleges.  An article in Inside Higher Education summarizes the study.  An abstract of the study is reprinted below.

This research adds significantly to our understanding of student attrition.

Well-done!

Tony

==========================================================

The Community College Route to the Bachelor’s Degree

Published online first in:
Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis
March 19, 2014

David B. Monaghan, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York
Paul Attewell, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Abstract

It is well established that students who begin post-secondary education at a community college are less likely to earn a bachelor’s degree than otherwise similar undergraduates who begin at a 4-year school, but there is less consensus over the mechanisms generating this disparity. We explore these using national longitudinal transcript data and propensity-score methods. Inferior academic preparation does not seem to be the main culprit: We find few differences between students’ academic progress at each type of institution during the first 2 years of college and (contrary to some earlier scholarship) students who do transfer have BA graduation rates equal to similar students who begin at 4-year colleges. However, after 2 years, credit accumulation diverges in the two kinds of institutions, due in part to community college students’ greater involvement in employment, and a higher likelihood of stopping out of college, after controlling for their academic performance. Contrary to some earlier claims, we find that a vocational emphasis in community college is not a major factor behind the disparity. One important mechanism is the widespread loss of credits that occurs after undergraduates transfer from a community college to a 4-year institution; the greater the loss, the lower the chances of completing a BA. However, earlier claims that community college students receive lower aid levels after transfer and that transfers disproportionately fail to survive through the senior year are not supported by our analyses.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York State Senate earlier this week voted to reject the Dream Act, which would allow undocumented immigrants to receive state tuition aid.   This is a sad event given the normally  progressive attitude in New York when it comes to assisting students to pay for college tuition.  As reported in the New York Times:

“The narrow vote — the bill fell two votes short of passage — was a bitter disappointment to immigrant advocates who had hoped the state would help make college more affordable for “Dreamers,” young immigrants brought here illegally as children, many of whom are unable to continue their educations once they leave high school…

…advocates were left wondering why Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who had called the Dream Act a priority, didn’t seem to expend much effort to push it through the Legislature.

New York is proud of its long reputation as a progressive state, and the Dream Act is just the kind of pro-immigrant legislation that should have passed easily to the governor’s desk, with the governor’s staunch support. But Monday’s vote puts New York behind California, New Mexico, Washington and Texas, all of which passed Dream Acts providing state tuition aid for their college-bound Dreamers.”

The legislative session and the budget season is still in their early stages in New York and maybe there will be some negotiation on this wrong-headed vote.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Bill Gates has been addressing various groups including teachers defending the Common Core Curriculum standards.  On Sunday morning, he made his  case on the news program, This Week with George Stephanopoulos.  As background, the creation of the Common Core started in 2009, and thanks in part to funding requirements by the federal government via the Race to the Top competition, most states have adopted them. In the past year, as school districts began to implement the standards, the effort has suddenly become controversial and politically volatile.   On the right, organizations such as the American Principles Project and Freedomworks have mobilized their networks to attack the standards, arguing that the Common Core is a federal initiative being imposed on states.  On the left, some worry that the Common Core is untested or will continue to disadvantage poorer students. Teachers unions that initially supported the effort have criticized some states’ messy implementation efforts.  Gates has been pleading with various groups to maintain the Common Core mainly because his foundation has made a huge commitment to it.

While he is the world’s richest man and Microsoft is one of the most profitable companies in the country, Mr. Gates has questionable credibility when it comes to education.  Many of the education projects which his Foundation has funded have been poorly implemented and scattershot.  The Common Core rollout in a number of states including here in New York has all of the fingerprints of a Gates Foundation initiative namely a rushed implementation and an artificial need to test, test, test.  NYS Education Commissioner John King has taken most of the heat for the botched implementation but the Gates Foundation as well as the U.S. Department of Education have been prime movers in pushing the states the adopt the Common Core as quickly as possible.

I believe that the Common Core has a number of beneficial elements but its botched implementation has left it open to criticism.  My advice to Mr. Gates – stick to running technology companies and leave education to educators.

Tony