Dear Commons Community,

A ruling by Maricopa County Superior Court Arthur Anderson says DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrrivals) recipients have a right to reside in the state, according to federal law, and Arizona law shouldn’t interfere with that.

“Federal law, not state law, determines who is lawfully present in the U.S.,” the ruling says. It adds: “The circumstance under which a person enters the U.S. does not determine that person’s lawful presence here.” With this ruling, undocumented immigrants living in Arizona while their deportations are deferred are lawfully residing in the state and therefore eligible to pay in-state tuition to attend state colleges, a judge has ruled.  As reported in The Huffington Post;

“Tuesday’s ruling in a case filed against the Maricopa County Community College District has implications for the state’s roughly 20,000 recipients of deportation relief under President Barack Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. DACA, as the policy is known, defers deportation and offers work authorization to many undocumented immigrants who were brought to the country as children.

“It’s very exciting,” Erika Andiola, a Phoenix immigrant rights activist and DACA recipient. “For us, it’s showing that we’re on the right side of the law.”

Andiola said activists like her will be watching to see if the Arizona Board of Regents puts the state’s university system on the same path as the colleges.

“The Arizona Board of Regents is committed to broadening access and affordability for all students in Arizona and, as part of that mission, supports lawful opportunities to increase access for DACA students,” Eileen Klein, the board’s president, said in a statement following the ruling. “We are currently reviewing the court’s decision. As we do with all board policies, we will comply fully with state and federal law.”

The regents will meet on Thursday at 10 a.m. to discuss how to handle tuition rates for DACA recipients in light of the ruling, board spokeswoman Katie Paquet said.

Tom Horne, a former Republican state attorney general, sued Maricopa County Community College District in June 2013, arguing that charging DACA recipients in-state tuition for the district’s 10 colleges violated a 2006 law passed by referendum that prohibits undocumented immigrants from receiving the in-state price, which is considerably cheaper than out-of-state tuition.

“I’m very pleased with Judge Anderson’s ruling in this important case,” Maricopa County Community College District chancellor Rufus Glasper said, according to the Phoenix New Times. “Since our founding, the Maricopa Community Colleges have stood for accessible and affordable education for all members of our community, and this ruling endorses our mission. The real winners in this case are the students of Maricopa County, and each one can continue to count on us to help them fulfill their educational goals.”

Good ruling and good news for DACA recipients.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

ProPublica, the non-profit investigative news service, is reporting that most of the traditional higher education lobbying groups signed onto a recent letter to Congress stating their support for Republican legislation that would block new restrictions on for-profit colleges, as well as undo or weaken other accountability rules for colleges. And a new report on higher education regulation commissioned by the Senate and overseen by the American Council on Education, the leading lobby group for traditional schools, slammed the rules on for-profit colleges as part of a broader critique of the administration’s approach. As reported by ProPublica:

“The Obama administration is set to achieve one of its top domestic policy goals after years of wrangling. For-profit colleges, which absorb tens of billions of dollars in U.S. grants and loans yet often leave their students with little beyond crushing debt, will need to meet new standards or risk losing taxpayer dollars.

But as the July 1 deadline approaches, the troubled [for-profit] industry has been mounting a last-ditch effort to avert or roll back the new rules. And suddenly it’s getting a lift from a set of unlikely allies: traditional colleges and universities.

For years, the higher education establishment has viewed the for-profit education business as both a rival and an unsavory relation — the cousin with the rap sheet who seeks a cut of the family inheritance. Yet in a striking but little-noticed shift, nearly all of the college establishment’s representatives in Washington are siding with for-profit colleges in opposing the government’s crackdown…

This bid for GOP favor may seem counter-intuitive, given that many conservatives view academia as a bastion of pampered liberalism. In reality, the higher education lobby represents an industry as self-interested as any other—the two largest of the its many trade groups reported spending $500,000 on federal lobbying last year—and it spies an opportunity in the deregulatory instincts of the Republican majority.

The gambit underscores one of the under-appreciated truths about lobbying in Washington in an era of divided government: Special interests are often as interested in preserving a favorable status quo as they are in getting government to take an action to their benefit. To that end, gridlock can be a feature to be encouraged, not a bug.

At stake in this case is the roughly $150 billion that the federal government shovels annually into colleges and universities in the form of Pell grants and subsidized loans for students. Current and former higher education regulators say the federal government is obliged to assure that taxpayers are getting results for that spending.

“The higher ed lobby doesn’t want any accountability—they want money, and they want money without limitations, without restrictions, without accountability to anybody outside the academy,” said David Bergeron, who served as Obama’s acting assistant secretary for postsecondary education before joining the Center for American Progress, a Democratic think tank that’s close to the administration…

At least one university president is chiming in against the higher education lobby’s new turn. Louisiana State University Chancellor F. King Alexander said the lobby’s complaints of over-regulation ring hollow. “Naturally, [the lobby groups] love the idea of telling the federal government to get your hands off the money and don’t tell us what to do with it—just put it on the stump and leave,” he said.

But in the case of the for-profit regulations, this approach is short-sighted, he said. The more that fly-by-night for-profit programs soak up federal aid dollars, the less that is left for students at traditional colleges, and the more calls there will be to reduce funding for student aid, he said.

“We’re pouring money into places no one’s ever heard of before,” Alexander said. “We’re not going to have any more federal aid unless we have a better handle on who’s getting it.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Richard C. Atkinson, president emeritus of the University of California, and Saul Geiser, research associate at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California, Berkeley, have an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times reviewing the new SAT exam.  Their insightful critique raises several legitimate concerns.  The major issue is that the new SAT remains a norm-referenced rather than a criterion-referenced test.  Here is their argument:

“…the biggest problem is this: While the content will be new, the underlying design will not change. The SAT will remain a “norm-referenced” exam, designed primarily to rank students rather than measure what they actually know. Such exams compare students to other test takers, rather than measure their performance against a fixed standard. They are designed to produce a “bell curve” distribution among examinees, with most scoring in the middle and with sharply descending numbers at the top and bottom. Test designers accomplish this, among other ways, by using plausible-sounding “distractors” to make multiple-choice items more difficult, requiring students to respond to a large number of items in a short space of time, and by dropping questions that too many students can answer correctly.

“Criterion-referenced” tests, on the other hand, measure how much students know about a given subject. Performance is not assessed in relation to how others perform but in relation to fixed academic standards. Assuming they have mastered the material, it is possible for a large proportion, even a majority, of examinees to score well; this is not possible on a norm-referenced test.

K-12 schools increasingly employ criterion-referenced tests for this reason. That approach reflects the movement during the past two decades in all of the states — those that have adopted their own standards, as well as those that have adopted the Common Core — to set explicit learning standards and assess achievement against them.

Norm-referenced tests like the SAT and the ACT have contributed enormously to the “educational arms race” — the ferocious competition for admission at top colleges and universities. They do so by exaggerating the importance of small differences in test scores that have only marginal relevance for later success in college. Because of the way such tests are designed, answering even a few more questions correctly can substantially raise students’ scores and thereby their rankings. This creates great pressure on students and their parents to avail themselves of expensive test-prep services in search of any edge. It is also unfair to those who cannot afford such services. Yet research on college admissions has repeatedly confirmed that test scores, as compared to high school grades, are relatively weak predictors of how students actually perform in college.”

Thank you to Drs. Atkinson and Geiser for raising this issue in the public eye.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Fiat Chrysler Automobiles announced yesterday that it plans to offer free college tuition to the 118,000 workers at its Chrysler, Jeep, Dodge, Ram and Fiat dealerships across the United States.

The move comes a month after Starbucks expanded its online college degree program with Arizona State University, allowing its baristas to study for four years for free. Chrysler also joins McDonald’s, which earlier this year offered to help pay college tuition for workers at its 14,300 U.S. stores. As reported in The Hufffington Post:

“Chrysler’s program is the result of a partnership with Strayer University, a private, for-profit college that offers online classes. The company said it hopes the free tuition will transform it into a more attractive place to work.

“Our goal is to position our dealer network as the ‘employers of choice,’” Al Gardner, the Chrysler brand’s chief executive, said in a statement. “Our collaboration with Strayer demonstrates our focus on building our dealers’ hard-working employees’ skill sets to help them perform at an optimal level while also investing in their long-term success.”

While dealership employees can take Strayer classes online, they can also attend lessons at the college’s Virginia campus or one of its 76 satellite campuses, mostly around the Southern United States. Strayer CEO Karl McDonnell said he expects an even mix of students online and at physical locations.

“I suspect we’ll get a healthy blend of both,” he told The Huffington Post. “We’re somewhat agnostic as to the modality that students choose.”

The program, dubbed Degrees@Work, will be rolled out in phases, starting in the southeast. Employees at dealerships in Florida, Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee can now enroll. McDonnell told HuffPost that each participating dealership will pay a flat fee, no matter how many employees at each choose to attend Strayer classes. It’s unclear how much the fee will be.”

For-profit colleges have come under heightened scrutiny in the wake of a scandal surrounding one of the largest career school chains in the U.S., Corinthian Colleges Inc., which filed for bankruptcy after allegedly misleading investors about its finances and students about job placement after school.

However, a 2012 Senate report on the for-profit education industry called Strayer “one of the best of any company examined.”

Congratulations Chrysler!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

On Saturday, Alex Peysakhovich, a behavioral economist and data scientist at Facebook, and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, an economist, had an op-ed piece in the New York Times on what big data needs to be of benefit- it needs small data as collected in surveys. Using a number of examples such as individual fitness regimens and baseball, the authors provide interesting commentary on the big data approach. They consider that too many users of big data become so obsessed with it that they lose the big picture and purpose. They provide several examples including public education’s use of test scores.

“Thomas Kane, a professor of education at Harvard, told us, “School districts realize they shouldn’t be focusing solely on test scores.”

A three-year study by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation bears out the value of both big and small data. The authors analyzed value-added models, student surveys and teacher observations. They tested how to best predict student outcomes on both traditional state tests and more cognitively demanding challenges in math and English. When they put the three measures together into a composite score, they got the best results. “Each measure adds something of value,” the report concluded.

As at Facebook and in baseball front offices, small data can find holes in the big data. If a teacher raises her students’ test scores but students say she wastes a lot of time, and outside observers rank her poorly, this raises big questions. Conversely, if a teacher does not improve test scores but students say she inspires them and principals think she is imparting profound lessons, we may give her the benefit of the doubt. Most important, while big data can tell us whether certain teachers are helping their students, small data gives us the best hope to answer a crucial question: How are they doing it?”

Peysakhovich and Stephens-Davidowitz have provided a wealth of insight in this one small op-ed piece.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In his New York Times column today, Frank Bruni addresses the excesses of college and career planning that has become an obsession with some students and their parents. He uses as an example, one of Hillary Clinton’s chief campaign strategists, Joel Benenson, who majored in theater at Queens College in New York, dropped out and ran a beer distributorship for much of his twenties, completed college in his thirties and became a journalist, and it wasn’t until he reached his forties that his passion for politics emerged and became his current calling. Benenson is now one of the country’s leading pollsters and political strategists. He played a key role in Barack Obama’s 2008 and 2012 presidential races and is doing likewise in Clinton’s 2016 run. Bruni also describes the paths of several other major political figures:

“David Axelrod was a journalist for a long time before he became a political operative.

David Plouffe left college, at the University of Delaware, without a diploma, and didn’t get the last credits he needed and actually graduate until two decades later, in his 40s.

Valerie Jarrett was supposed to take the degrees that she got from Stanford (undergraduate) and the University of Michigan (law school) and be a high-powered, highly paid attorney. But she gave that track a try and it didn’t suit her. So she went to work for decidedly less money in government, initially for Harold Washington, who was then was the mayor of Chicago.

Bruni adds:

“There’s only so much in life that you can foretell and plan…the biographies of many accomplished, contented people aren’t formulaic. They’re accidents of a sort, except for this: By taking approaches that weren’t too regimented, these people were able to color outside the lines and surprise themselves. And their learning transcended their formal studies.”

Joel Benenson’s advice for young people:

“Don’t think about what you want to do for the rest of your life,” he said. “Think about what you want to do next.” Maybe, he said, you “have a big goal out there and pursue it, but along the way, that line from A to B is not a continuum. The key will be identifying what you are passionate about in each of those steps along the way.”

He said that parents were too focused on mapping a straight-line journey from cradle to lucrative career.

“Stop making the focus of your kids’ education a job,” he said. “College is about learning how to think critically, learning how to write and communicate your ideas.”

Amen!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

May Day marchers and protesters yesterday in U.S. cities demanded more rights for workers and immigrants and an end to police brutality. Rallies were held in Minneapolis, Minnesota Oakland, California, New York, Los Angeles, Seattle, and a number of other cities.  As reported in the Associated Press:

“In Chicago, some parents brought children to demonstrations to teach them how to interact with police officers. Meredith West, who is white, took her 9-year-old daughter to the protest, where many carried signs with slogans such as “Police Brutality Must Stop!”

“White people are not aware of police brutality that happens in the African American community,” she said.

While labor unions have long led demonstrations on International Workers’ Day, the marches got a boost in 2006 when stringent immigration legislation drove hundreds of thousands of demonstrators to rally in the streets. Since then, attendance in the annual rallies has been much smaller.

Some labor and immigrant advocates broadened their message this year to also address police brutality, joining a series of protests underway in several cities over the in-custody death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore. Six police officers were charged Friday in his death.

In Minneapolis, the group Black Lives Matter encouraged students to leave school, and some high school students did. They staged a die-in that briefly stopped local traffic.

Several hundred people marched in Oakland, California, with some holding signs saying “Racism is the Disease.” Others said they wanted better wages and working conditions for the masses.

In Los Angeles, a dozen protesters rallied before dawn to encourage the implementation of President Obama’s program to protect millions of immigrants in the country illegally from deportation.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

David Brooks has a column  this morning commenting on the recent urban unrest in Baltimore. I don’t agree with everything he says in this piece where he walks a fine line of putting the blame on the community. However he makes several important points about poverty and neighborhoods especially his references to Jane Jacobs and social psychology.

“…the real barriers to mobility are matters of social psychology, the quality of relationships in a home and a neighborhood that either encourage or discourage responsibility, future-oriented thinking, and practical ambition.

Jane Jacobs once wrote that a healthy neighborhood is like a ballet, a series of intricate interactions in which people are regulating each other and encouraging certain behaviors.

In an interview that David Simon of “The Wire” gave to Bill Keller for The Marshall Project, he describes that, even in poorest Baltimore, there once were informal rules of behavior governing how cops interacted with citizens — when they’d drag them in and when they wouldn’t, what curse words you could say to a cop and what you couldn’t. But then the code dissolved. The informal guardrails of life were gone, and all was arbitrary harshness.

That’s happened across many social spheres — in schools, families and among neighbors. Individuals are left without the norms that middle-class people take for granted. It is phenomenally hard for young people in such circumstances to guide themselves.

Yes, jobs are necessary, but if you live in a neighborhood, as Freddie Gray did, where half the high school students don’t bother to show up for school on a given day, then the problems go deeper.

The world is waiting for a thinker who can describe poverty through the lens of social psychology. Until the invisible bonds of relationships are repaired, life for too many will be nasty, brutish, solitary and short.”

Tony