Dear Commons Community,

With the support of faculty, students, and alumni, University of Texas – Austin President Bill Powers has refused an ultimatum to resign but is open to discussing a timetable for leaving office, a well-placed source told the Austin American-Statesman.

UT System Chancellor Francisco Cigarroa gave the president of the Austin flagship the ultimatum last Wednesday in a meeting at the system’s offices in downtown Austin. Simply put, Powers must resign, effective in the fall, or be fired this week, two sources told the Statesman.

“There wasn’t a clear reason given,” said a well-placed source who was not authorized to speak publicly. “As far as we know, it was a quick conversation but there was no specific reason given.”

As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“Sources interviewed on Monday suggested that possible reasons for Chancellor Ciagarroa’s call for Powers’ resignation have been a combination of the following:

• A desire to allow Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, whose term ends on December 31, to influence the selection of a new president. Mr. Perry, a Republican who has been at odds with Mr. Powers for years, has appointed every member of the university’s Board of Regents, and his most recent appointees have been the most critical of Mr. Powers.
• Trouble finding a new chancellor who is willing to step into the fray when tensions between Mr. Powers and system administrators are well known.
• Questions about whether there might be a “smoking gun” in new information Dr. Cigarroa said had come to light about a controversy over University of Texas admissions.

In his statement on Monday night, the chancellor did his best to lay all three theories to rest, and to quell the mounting furor his action had caused.”

The UT System Board of Regents is scheduled to meet this Thursday, and the board’s agenda typically allows for personnel actions.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Delegates of the National Education Association (NEA) adopted a business item on July 4^th that  approved a national campaign to roll back the “test blame and punish” policies that have dominated education policy in recent decades and have called for the resignation of Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, who the union says has spearheaded the Obama administration’s “toxic testing” push. As reported in the website Common Dreams:

“The testing fixation has reached the point of insanity,” said NEA President Dennis Van Roekel in a statement put out by the group. “Whatever valuable information testing mandates provided have been completely overshadowed by the enormous collateral damage inflicted on too many students. Our schools have been reduced to mere test prep factories and we are too-often ignoring student learning and opportunity in America.”

The vote underscores the long-standing tension between the Obama administration and teachers’ unions — historically a steadfast Democratic ally.

Adopted at the NEA’s annual convention in Denver just before the holiday weekend, the proposal itself also stated that “the Department’s failed education agenda focused on more high-stakes testing, grading and pitting public school students against each other based on test scores” are the reasons the group is calling for the secretary’s resignation. Duncan has been the driving force behind the implementation of such policies under President Obama.

“The sad truth is that test-based accountability has not closed the opportunity gaps between affluent and poor schools and students,” added Van Roekel. “It has not driven funding and support to the students from historically underfunded communities who need it most. Poverty and social inequities have far too long stood in the way of progress for all students.”

Tony

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ED9vhLBZojk[/youtube]

Dear Commons Community,

Last week, comedian Shawn Harris posted the video above of his son, Tyler, returning to school after having been absent for a week with a stomach virus. The reactions from Tyler’s classmates upon seeing him are priceless.

After Tyler walks into the classroom, a chorus of little voices starts shouting, “Tyler! Tyler!” One little girl rushes up to him and gives him a big hug. “Tyler! I like your haircut!” she exclaims.  Other children crowd around Tyler to shower him with hugs.

The cute video, showing the genuine love children have for each other, is generating quite a buzz online. It has already received more than 18,000 likes, and 100,000 shares on Facebook.

Harris was delighted with what he saw from the children, writing “This video proves that racism is taught … These little clips may change the way we think about each other as adults,” and, “I love this, #Proudfather. Kids can end racism.”

Facebook users are also flooding the videos with happy comments. Many wrote that the clips made them cry, while others expressed that adults had much to learn from the kids. One Facebook user wrote, “The world would be a better place if everyone treated each other like this.”

God bless the children!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Today is a travel day as I will be attending the Sloan Consortium’s Blended Learning Conference in Denver, Colorado. The theme of this year’s conference is Blended Learning: Pathways to Student Success.   This conference started as an invitation only event in 2003 at the University of Illinois in Chicago, with about 35 attendees. It is expected to draw in excess of 500 on-site attendees this year. The conference has always maintained an intimacy and strong sense of social connections. If you are attending, please stop by to say hello. I will be doing a session with colleagues, Chuck Dziuban, Charles Graham, and Patsy Moskal, entitled, Seeking Evidence of Impact in Blended and Online Learning, on July 8, 2014 – 10:30am in the Governor’s Square 15 Room.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The ongoing saga of for-profit Corinthian Colleges may be coming to a close after reaching an agreement with the U.S. Department of Education on Thursday to sell its campuses and programs. As reported in the New York Times:

“Facing heavy losses and a crackdown by government agencies, Corinthian Colleges, one of the largest for-profit operators of trade schools and colleges, will largely cease operating under an agreement with the federal Education Department.

Corinthian, which has about 72,000 students, will make arrangements in the next six months to sell almost 100 schools in the United States and Canada, and it will close a dozen others, the company said in a statement released late Thursday. That appears to cover all of Corinthian’s schools, but the company left unclear whether it would continue to exist in some form or retain any of its current programs.

The agreement “provides a blueprint for allowing most of our campuses to continue serving their students and communities under new ownership,” said Jack D. Massimino, chairman and chief executive of the company.

But the plan faces a major hurdle: finding buyers. College enrollment has been declining, particularly in the for-profit sector, and several other companies are having financial and regulatory troubles of their own…

When Corinthian shed four campuses in California last year, it had to pay another company to take them. Its other recent attempts to sell schools have found no takers, and in some cases, it closed the campuses instead.

In the first nine months of its 2013-14 fiscal year, Corinthian reported a net loss of $94 million and a cash cushion that shrank to $28 million from $46.6 million. Its efforts to have students with poor credit borrow money from private lenders have resulted in especially heavy losses.

The California attorney general, Kamala D. Harris, sued the company last year, charging, among other things, that it had lied to students and investors about job placement rates for its graduates and about its financial condition. For months, the Education Department has demanded job placement data from Corinthian, to no avail, prompting the department to threaten last month to cut off federal money to the company.

Like other for-profit school chains, Corinthian relies overwhelmingly on government funds — $1.4 billion last year in federal student loans and financial aid to low-income students, out of $1.6 billion in revenue. So a cutoff would have quickly put the company out of business, preventing students from finishing courses and abruptly leaving thousands of people unemployed.”

While we hate to see any college or university have to close its doors, Corinthian was one of the more egregious in using federal financial aid to reap large profits for its investors while delivering little in the way of a meaningful education to its students.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Schools in New York City are becoming more congested, federal and state aid has dropped, and the number of students in “temporary housing situations,” including homeless shelters, has shot up, according to a report on the state of public education by the New York City Independent Budget Office (IBO). The IBO has issued a number of excellent and enlightening reports on the state of New York City’s public schools since its creation in 2009. This report is sixty plus pages and contains good information about the NYC public schools. For example:

“Nearly 450,000 students were enrolled in overcrowded buildings, defined as those at greater than 102.5 percent capacity, in the 2012-13 school year, the most recent covered by the report from the agency, the Independent Budget Office. The average class size is rising, too, particularly in the lower grades: The average elementary and middle school class had 25.5 children, up from 24.6 just two years before. This was true even as the total number of students in traditional and charter schools has hovered around 1.1 million for more than a decade, and as the city has created tens of thousands of new seats.”

Well-worth a read!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On July 2, 1964, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law by President Lyndon Johnson, officially banning discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. It also ended racial segregation in schools, at the workplace and in general public facilities. It was one of the most important pieces of legislation to come out of the 1960s and one of the hallmarks of Johnson’s presidency. While this act did not resolve all of America’s racial problems (no single act of our government could), it was an important step in the right direction. America still has a number of racial issues with disparities in education, income, incarceration, etc. but I would like to think that socially we are in a better place than we were in 1964.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Coming on the heels of a march and protest at the Gates Foundation last week, John Thompson, historian, lobbyist, and inner city teacher, comes out swinging at Bill Gates      Essentially he calls for Bill Gates and “the billionaire boys club” to get out of education reform and to respect the “fences” of American democracy. As posted in his blog:

American constitutional democracy seeks a balance between the empowerment of individuals and the checks and balances necessary to protect the rights of the community. Bill Gates, like so many other billionaires, does not seem to respect the wisdom of poet Robert Frost. “Good fences make good neighbors.”

…When the Gates Foundation first became involved in education, it could be argued, they were not necessarily unneighborly. They should have taken the time to communicate with educators before jumping into their expensive small schools initiative. But, many of its first contributions were beneficial.

The Billionaires Boys Club was notoriously impatient, however. They were not willing to earn a seat at the head of the table. Corporate reformers quickly concluded that it was necessary to break eggs, as they saw it, to make omelets. They called it “disruptive innovation.” Destroy local school boards, university education departments, and the power of unions, and “transformational change” would presumably occur.

So, before long, Gates and the other elites replaced win-win policies, that teachers would have welcomed, with metrics for reward and punishment. For their policy preferences to win, others had to lose.

Gates and Arne Duncan were at the forefront of tearing down the walls that protect educators and students but that would have slowed risky experimentation. The most notorious example was their ridicule of the firewall between the individual teacher’s test score growth data and evaluators.

Corporate reformers were contemptuous of the very valid reasons of why some sort of fence needed to be maintained between the guestimates produced by value-added models and HR Departments.

Gates and company were just as oblivious to the necessity of a wall between administrators who conduct professional development sessions and those who evaluate teachers. Remove the barrier between the two and the free flow of ideas about teaching and learning often stops.

They were similarly obtuse about the need for a balance between the autonomy of principals and the autonomy of teachers. Without some sort of fence between the longterm needs for an open classroom culture, and the shortterm need of management to maximize test score numbers, the fundamental principles of public education were placed at risk.

The Gates Foundation has been equally dismissive of the fences designed to protect student privacy. I was shocked the first time I entered a high-performing charter elementary school and saw publicly displayed data walls that violated federal privacy and special education laws. But, then, the Gates InBloom betrayed an even greater insensitivity to the difference between the corporate use of data and the barriers needed to protect students’ rights and welfare.

And, that gets us to the reason why teachers are protesting at the Gates Foundation. We did not invite Gates into our classrooms in order to conduct reckless gambles for advancing his vision of disruptive change. We never approved of his jumping the fence and turning our students into lab rats.”

Thompson is very much correct in his analysis. Gates and company had a lot to offer public education but instead approached it like a monopolistic company (i.e., Microsoft) seeking to destroy all competition. Educators and parents need to fight back by simply refusing to cooperate with anything funded by Gates, Broad, Walton and the other billionaires.  The protest in Seattle last week by teachers at the Gates Foundation Headquarters is a step in the right direction.

Tony