Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a featured article focusing on the online education approaches that elite colleges and universities are considering.  Basically the article describes three strategies.

1. Free online courses for everyone.

Develop or acquire MOOCs and other free, non-credit online courses that will be offered separate from a residential degree program. Even if the MOOCs lose money, wealthier universities can afford them — especially if it means increasing their visibility in overseas markets. There appears little interest in MOOC courses that translate into academic credit at these institutions (or anywhere else).

2. Paid online courses for professional graduate programs.

Yale University recently unveiled a new master’s program for aspiring physician’s assistants, offered through its medical school. The program will also involve a lot of fieldwork, but much of the academic coursework will be delivered online. It is the second program Yale has created along these lines; the other is a partially online doctoral degree in nursing, which the university announced in 2011.  Online degrees in fields like health care and teaching are also in high demand.  Online does not fundamentally threaten the appeal of graduate-level professional programs, where the “student experience” is not as sacrosanct as it is at undergraduate colleges. Most people who enroll are working adults who already went through dorm life, student organizations, and late-night philosophical chats with fellow students.

3. Adding Online components to face-to-face (blended models) undergraduate courses.

Take advantage of high quality online course content (MOOC or otherwise) and add these components to face-to-face courses.  In my opinion, this blended model is where the future is for quite awhile for most of higher education.

Those of us at the public universities, the community colleges, and the tuition-driven private non-profit colleges who have been doing a lot of online and blended learning for almost two decades wish our colleagues well.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I went to see the film, Woman in Gold, last night starring Helen Mirren and based on a true story of the legal struggle of Maria Altman, an Austrian Jewish émigré who fled Europe after the Nazis marched into Vienna. The title refers to “Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” a celebrated portrait by Gustav Klimt seized by the Nazis and later put on display in the Austrian State Gallery.  Eventually it wound up on display at the Belvedere gallery in Vienna, where it became a national icon — Austria’s own “Mona Lisa,” as the film puts it.  According to Austrian sources, in her will, Adele Bloch-Bauer asked her husband to donate the Klimt paintings to the Austrian State Gallery upon his death. She died in 1925 from meningitis. When the Nazis took over Austria, her widowed husband had to flee to Switzerland. His property, including his Klimt paintings, was confiscated. In his 1945 testament, Bloch-Bauer designated his nephew and nieces, including Maria Altmann, as the inheritors of his estate.

In 2000, Maria Altmann sued Austria in US Court for ownership of Adele Bloch-Bauer I and other paintings from her uncle’s collection. As Bloch-Bauer’s pictures had remained in Austria, the Austrian government took the position that the testament of Adele Bloch-Bauer had determined that these pictures were to stay there. After a court battle, binding arbitration by a panel of Austrian judges established in 2006 that Maria Altmann was the rightful owner of this and four other paintings by Klimt.

In June 2006 the work was sold for US$135 million to Ronald Lauder for the Neue Galerie in New York City, at the time a record price for a painting. It has been on display at the Neue Galerie since July 2006.

I found it to be a very well-done film although the New York Times review was not that enthusiastic.  The scenes of Vienna past and present were particularly well-done and Helen Mirren is a fabulous actress.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

New York City Comptroller Scott Stringer in a news conference yesterday stated that over the past 10 years, New York City’s five major pension funds have paid more than $2 billion in fees to money managers and have received virtually nothing in return.  As reported in the New York Times:

“We asked a simple question: Are we getting value for the fees we’re paying to Wall Street?” Mr. Stringer said. “The answer, based on this 10-year analysis, is no.”

Until now, Mr. Stringer said, the pension funds have reported the performance of many of their investments before taking the fees paid to money managers into account. After factoring in those fees, his staff found that they had dragged the overall returns $2.5 billion below expectations over the last 10 years.

“When you do the math on what we pay Wall Street to actively manage our funds, it’s shocking to realize that fees have not only wiped out any benefit to the funds, but have in fact cost taxpayers billions of dollars in lost returns,” Mr. Stringer said.

Why the trustees of the funds — Mr. Stringer included — would not have performed those calculations in the past is not clear.

Mr. Stringer, who was a trustee of one of the funds when he was Manhattan borough president before being elected comptroller, said the returns on investments in privately traded assets, such as real estate, have traditionally been reported without taking fees into account. The fees have been disclosed only in footnotes to the funds’ quarterly statements, he said.

The stakes in this arena are huge. The city’s pension system is the fourth largest in the country, with total assets of nearly $160 billion. It holds retirement funds for about 715,000 city employees, including teachers, police officers and firefighters.

Most of the funds’ money — more than 80 percent — is invested in plain vanilla assets like domestic and foreign stocks and bonds. The returns on those investments are generally reported after the fees, which are usually paid as a percent of the assets each firm manages.

Over the last 10 years, the return on those “public asset classes” has surpassed expectations by more than $2 billion, according to the comptroller’s analysis. But nearly all of that extra gain — about 97 percent — has been eaten up by management fees, leaving just $40 million for the retirees, it found.”

Thank you Mr. Stringer for taking on this issue.  For the dollar value of these funds, New York deserves a good return on its investments.  We do not need Wall Street messing around with them.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Norman H. Nie passed away on April 2, 2015.  Dr. Nie was a political scientist who was the major initiator of the development of SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences).  He was on the faculty of the University of Chicago for most of his career.  As a student in the late 1960s, SPSS was a godsend for me and many others willing to take the plunge into computer software to do statistical analysis. In addition, the clarity of the SPSS user manuals (I still have the 1st edition) which he and his colleagues wrote, were a breadth of fresh air.  I must confess that I learned most of my statistics from using his materials. I continue to teach research methods in the Ph.D. Program in Urban Education at the CUNY Graduate Center and I never fail to mention my gratitude to Dr. Nie and his colleagues.

May he rest in peace!

Tony

Below is Dr. Nye’s obituary as it appeared today in the Idaho Mountain Express

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Norman H. Nie passed away peacefully surrounded by family and friends at his home in Sun Valley, Idaho, on April 2, 2015.

(April 8, 2015)

Norman H. Nie passed away peacefully surrounded by family and friends at his home in Sun Valley, Idaho, on April 2, 2015. He was 72 years old.

He is survived by his wife of 51 years, Carol P. Nie; daughters Anne Nie and Lara Slotwiner-Nie; son-in-law Peter Slotwiner-Nie; and granddaughters Sophia Slotwiner-Nie and Helena Slotwiner-Nie. In addition to his beloved family, Nie leaves a legacy of pioneering innovation as an academic social scientist and technology entrepreneur. He was a professor of Political Science and chair of his department at the University of Chicago until his retirement in 1998, and then subsequently at Stanford University, his alma mater. Nie met his wife Carol during their college years at Washington University in St. Louis.

While completing his Ph.D. at Stanford, he collaborated to invent a computer software package to automate the analysis of quantitative data, SPSS. He was the CEO of SPSS between 1975 and 1992 and continued as chairman of the board. Nie was honored as the KPMG Technology Entrepreneur in 1986. Throughout his tenure at SPSS, he simultaneously produced academic research in U.S. political behavior and public opinion.

Nie authored many articles and award-winning books and was a nationally recognized expert on voting behavior. In 2006, he was awarded a lifetime achievement award from the American Association of Public Opinion Researchers, and three years later he was elected as a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His scholarly books were honored with the Woodrow Wilson Award (two times) and the Gladys M. Kammerer Award from the American Political Science Association. While at Stanford, Nie co-founded the Internet survey research firm Knowledge Networks, where he was the chairman of the board. He was also the CEO of Revolution Analytics, a commercial software company, and served on the boards of numerous high technology firms.

Nie mentored hundreds of students throughout his career and was often described by colleagues as a force of nature; a man of vast energy and ambition, omnivorous curiosity, deep intellect, immense creativity, and everyday humanity. After work, he could usually be found on the tennis court.

A private burial will be held in St. Louis, and a public memorial is planned for the coming months. In lieu of flowers, his family requests contributions be made to: Hospice and Palliative Care of the Wood River Valley in Ketchum, Idaho.

Arrangements are under the care of Wood River Chapel of Hailey, Idaho. Friends can visitwww.woodriverchapel.com to share a message, photo or story and to light a candle.

Dear Commons Community,

Henry Reichman, Chair of AAUP Committee on Academic Freedom and Tenure, sent a letter to the membership yesterday alerting it to a case at the U. of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center.  The letter refers to a report issued by the Committee that found that the Cancer Center administration violated “commonly accepted academic standards” when it terminated the appointments of two professors. One professor had twelve years of service and the other had thirty. Both had been recommended for “renewal of tenure” by the faculty personnel committee.

MD Anderson is one of the country’s foremost cancer centers, and among them unique in lacking a system of indefinite tenure. Instead, MD Anderson employs a system of so-called “term tenure” in which “tenured” faculty members serve on renewable seven-year appointments.

The full letter is below and the report is available at the AAUP website.

Tony

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

Dear AAUP Member:

I’m writing to let you know that today the AAUP is releasing an investigative report, Academic Freedom and Tenure: University of Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center. The report finds that the cancer center administration violated commonly accepted academic standards when it terminated the appointments of two professors.

MD Anderson is one of the country’s foremost cancer centers, and among them unique in lacking a system of indefinite tenure. Instead, MD Anderson employs a system of so-called “term tenure” in which “tenured” faculty members serve on renewable seven-year appointments.

Both professors at issue in this case had been recommended for “renewal of tenure” by the faculty personnel committee. One professor had twelve years of service and the other had thirty.

Neither of the two professors at MD Anderson received the due process recommended by the AAUP for full-time faculty members with more than seven years of service: an opportunity for a faculty hearing, in which the burden of demonstrating adequate cause for dismissal rests with the administration. Instead, after being notified that their appointments would not be renewed, the professors were limited to appealing the decision to the same administrative officers who made it.

The report also finds that the MD Anderson administration disregarded normative standards of academic governance, as set forth in the AAUP’s Statement on Government of Colleges and Universities, by refusing to provide “compelling reasons stated in detail” when it rejected the faculty personnel committee’s recommendations. The academic senate at MD Anderson has for some time been resisting inappropriate administrative interference. The decisions in these cases therefore represent, as the report reveals, wider problems in shared governance.

AAUP investigating committees, which are authorized in a few selected cases when significant violations of academic freedom, tenure, or governance have been alleged and persist despite AAUP staff efforts to resolve them, are generally composed of AAUP members from other institutions with no previous involvement in the matter. We all owe a debt of gratitude to those who willingly take on these assignments. This is just one of many ways in which AAUP members like you serve our profession.

If no steps are taken to remediate the MD Anderson policies, it is likely that the AAUP membership will consider imposing censure on the MD Anderson administration at our annual meeting on June 13.

Direct link to the report: http://www.aaup.org/report/academic-freedom-and-tenure-university-texas-md-anderson-cancer-center.

Sincerely,

Henry Reichman, Chair
AAUP Committee A on Academic Freedom and Tenure

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a lead article today reviewing the operations of Eva Moskowitz’s Success Academy charters schools.  It is a fairly balanced piece giving the pros and cons of these schools’ operations.  On the plus side, test scores are high, there are longer school days, they serve large numbers of minority students, and many parents want to see their children in these safe, productive environments.  As for the cons, the entire school operation is mostly about test preparation, there are incredibly high suspension rates for students who do not perform accordingly, there are much small percentages of special education and students whose home language is not English,  and there is a very high turnover rate – as much as fifty percent – of teachers.  Anyone who is not familiar with charter schools, would do well to read this article.  However, there were two comments that were very troubling to me.  One was that these schools receive almost a third of their funding from private donations. As described in the article:

“Success Academy supplements the public money it receives with money raised from private donors. In its 2013 fiscal year, the most recent for which fund-raising figures are publicly available, it received nearly $72 million in public funds and $22 million in donations.

Beginning teachers at Success are paid comparably with those in city public schools though instead of a pension, they receive contributions to a retirement account. Unlike public-school teachers, who often have to use their own money for basics like photocopies, Ms. Jones and her colleagues do not worry about supplies. The closets teem with notebooks, folders, pencils and pens. Each middle school student receives an iPad. Success Academy schools are also rich in the kind of extracurricular activities that have increasingly been cut from public schools, such as art, music, chess, theater, dance, basketball and swimming.”

The basic funding premise of charter schools is that they received the same per pupil expenditure as that spent in the public schools.  However, it appears that for every $3 they receive they get another $1 from private donations.   It is no secret that money interests are heavily supporting the charter school movement but I was not aware of the extent of it.  This clearly sets up an unfair playing field.

The other serious observation was the almost cult-like devotion to test preparation as if the only thing that mattered in the schools was for students to pass standardized tests.  There is a most troubling description of the fanaticism of one of the administrators:

“On April 1, 2012, a leadership resident at Success Academy Harlem 2, Lauren Jonas, sent an email to her fourth-grade teachers.

The email, provided by a former staff member, said that the results on a recent, three-day practice test were “not what we had hoped for.”

“You must demand every single minute,” Ms. Jonas wrote. “You must have higher behavioral and academic expectations than ever before.” Every letter was capitalized.

Nine to 12 students had failed to use the test-taking strategies they had been taught, known as the “plan of attack,” Ms. Jonas wrote.

“We can NOT let up on them,” she continued. “Any scholar who is not using the plan of attack will go to effort academy, have their parent called, and will miss electives. This is serious business, and there has to be misery felt for the kids who are not doing what is expected of them.”

At Ms. Jonas’s school, 64 percent of the teachers the year she wrote that email were not teaching there the next year, according to state figures. Researchers have linked high teacher turnover to lower performance by students on tests, but that is not the case at Success. At Success Academy Harlem 2 last year, 91 percent of students passed the state math tests, up from 76 percent the previous year. At Public School 30, which shares the building with Success Academy Harlem 2, 16 percent of students passed.”

Ms. Jonas was promoted and is now principal of one of the network’s newest schools, Success Academy Harlem North West, a middle school.

It is incredible what we have allowed education to evolve to in this city.  Humorless places where children and teachers are scared in the quest for higher test scores.

Tony

Helsinki Classroom

Dear Commons Community,

Finland’s education system, often held up as an exemplary model for the rest of the world, is on the verge of making three major changes based on the following themes:  more interdisciplinary study, student-directedness, and collaboration.  As reported in The Huffington Post and The Independent (UK):

1. Finland Is Instituting “Phenomenon-Based Teaching”

Finnish schools will begin reorganizing their classrooms during the 2016-2017 school year based on the country’s new National Curriculum Framework. Some classrooms in Helsinki, the country’s largest city, have already begun the process, according to The Independent.

The National Curriculum Framework serves as a broad outline for educators, and requires that for at least a couple of weeks each year, educators use “phenomenon-based teaching” — an approach that emphasizes broad interdisciplinary topics rather than single-subject classes. Instead of teaching about history or economics, for example, educators could give lessons on the European Union, blending aspects of history and economics, according to The Independent. Schools and localities will be given some degree of freedom over how they implement this method of teaching.

2. Students Will Be Involved In Helping To Plan Lessons

Finland’s students will be involved in planning new, interdisciplinary projects, and will be expected to evaluate their success.

3. There Will Be An Emphasis On Student Collaboration

Finnish classrooms will literally be redesigned under the new curriculum framework. Instead of a traditional classroom, where kids sit in rows of desks in front of a teacher, students in the near future will work in clusters to promote communication skills, says The Independent.

A press release from the Finnish National Board of Education also notes that the new approach will emphasize the “joy of learning.”

“The core curriculum is based on the learning conception that positive emotional experiences, collaborative working and interaction as well as creative activity enhance learning,” says the press release.

“Some teachers in Finland see these reforms as a threat and the wrong way to improve teaching and learning in schools,” wrote Pasi Sahlberg, a Finnish education expert, in a blog post reprinted in The Washington Post Thursday. “Other teachers think that breaking down the dominance of traditional subjects and isolation of teaching is an opportunity to [effect] more fundamental change in schools.”

These reforms appear to be in keeping with a lot of other progressive ideas about K-12 education. If implemented well, Finland’s education system will continue to be a model for other countries.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York City Department of Consumer Affairs has begun an investigation into four for-profit colleges over concerns about student dropout rates, loan-defaults, and recruitment policies. For-profit colleges have been under increased scrutiny at all levels of government in recent years, amid growing concern that many of their students are left shouldering unwieldy debt but unable to find good jobs, and that tax payers are left footing the bill. As reported in the New York Times:

“What we are concerned about,” said Julie Menin, the commissioner of consumer affairs, speaking about problems within the industry at large, “is that predatory, for-profit colleges are taking advantage of the ambition that so many New Yorkers with low incomes have for a better life, and cheating them out of their dreams and their money.”

The department issued subpoenas in February to Berkeley College, Mandl School, New York Career Institute and Technical Career Institutes, also known as TCI College.

At TCI, more than 77 percent of the school’s revenue is derived from federal student aid, according to federal data. At Mandl, that percentage is about 80. For-profit colleges are prohibited by federal law from receiving more than 90 percent of their revenue from federal student aid.
Ms. Menin said the Consumer Affairs Department had received hundreds of complaints in recent years about for-profit colleges. Department representatives said the four schools were chosen because they have high rates of student loan default, for example, and because students have complained about their recruiting practices, like repeatedly making phone calls to people who request information online, and then pressuring them to commit themselves during their first visit to the campus.

According to federal data, among students who began repaying certain federal loans in 2011, more than 24 percent of TCI students were in default over the course of three years. Of students who began repaying in 2010, that figure was nearly 39 percent. At Mandl, those figures were 17 and 27 percent; at two- and three-year for-profit colleges nationally, they were about 20 and 21 percent.

Some of the schools also have relatively low rates of first-time, full-time students who graduate within 150 percent of “normal time,” for example, within three years at a two-year school, according to federal data; the overall graduation rate at two-year for-profit colleges is about 63 percent. Rates at the four schools under investigation range from 24 percent at TCI to 60 percent at Mandl.

The subpoenas — which request documentation including recruiting procedures and proof of job placement claims used in marketing — seek to determine whether the schools have violated the city’s consumer protection laws. The Consumer Affairs Department holds no power over the schools’ accreditation, but if violations are found, it can level fines or take schools to court to try to recover tuition money for students.
New York Career Institute said it was cooperating with the investigation, and had no further comment. Calls and emails to the three other schools were not returned.

Noah Black, vice president of public affairs at the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, an industry trade group, defended for-profit colleges, saying that their graduation rates were significantly higher than community colleges’ and that their default rates were lower.

“The community college comparison shows that it is the economic situation and background of the student, not the type of institution that they attend, that impacts the default rate,” Mr. Black said.

According to federal data, the default rates for students at for-profit and community colleges are almost identical. But while less than 17 percent of students at two-year public institutions received a federal loan in the 2011-2012 school year, more than 61 percent of students at for-profit schools did.

For-profit colleges enroll 12 percent of the nation’s students, but loans at those schools account for 44 percent of the defaults, according to the Institute for College Access & Success, an advocacy group that tracks college costs and student debt.”

If these allegations hold up, it will be another black mark against this sector of higher education that is already reeling from investigations and lawsuits brought upon it by federal and state authorities.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Two school districts in Kansas announced this week that the academic year would end early because they lack sufficient funding to keep the schools open.

Concordia Unified School District will finish up six days early, on May 15, and Twin Valley Unified School District will let students out 12 days early, on May 8.  As reported by the Associated Press reports.

“In March, Gov. Sam Brownback (R) signed a school funding overhaul, which resulted in the state’s schools losing a combined $51 million meant to help them finish out the current academic year. Members of the Twin Valley school board cited “the present mid-year, unplanned financial cuts recently signed into law” as a reason for the early shutdown.

The school closures are just the latest in a series of drastic measures that Kansas public services have been forced to take in recent years, as Brownback’s radical tax cuts have drained state coffers of much needed revenue. According to the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, Kansas cut per-pupil spending by $950 from 2008 to 2014, more than all but two other states. In May 2014, the Kansas Supreme Court ruled that school funding levels were unconstitutionally inequitable and ordered the immediate reversal of certain spending cuts.”

Shame on Governor Brownback and the Kansas legislators who approved his spending cuts for education.

Tony