Dear Commons Community,

I am at the Online Learning Consortium’s (OLC) Blended Learning Conference in Denver. The actual conference does not start until tomorrow. Most of my day was taken up with a business meeting of the OLC Board of Directors. In the evening, I had dinner (photo above) with many of the members of the planning committee for the first Blended Learning Conference in 2003. Colleagues above are: Karen Swan (U of Illinois – Springfield), Joel Hartman (U of Central Florida (UCF)), Patsy Moskal (UCF), Mary Niemiec (U of Nebraska), Tanya Joosten (U of Wisconsin – Milwaukee), Chuck Dziuban (UCF), and yours truly.  All of us have attended every Blended Learning Conference over the past twelve years. There was a great spirit and energy as we discussed passed conferences and the future of online and blended learning. In addition to discussions about our families, our scholarship, and the work at our home institutions, we talked about research, social media, content creation and distribution. Meg Benke (SUNY Empire State) and Dale Johnson (Arizona State U) joined us a bit later. Meg and Dale discussed the workshop they would be doing tomorrow on adaptive learning.

It was an enjoyable evening in the company of dear colleagues and the reason why I keep coming back to this conference each year.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, with colleagues Meg Benke and Karen Swan, I watched the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team win the World Cup in a stunning fashion with a barrage of early goals. At the Yard House here in Denver, it was like watching a super bowl. As reported in The Huffington Post:

“For the first time since 1999, the FIFA Women’s World Cup is back in the hands of the U.S. Women’s National Team, who defeated Japan 5-2 on Sunday before an estimated crowd of 53,341 in Vancouver, Canada.

The U.S. squad set the pace early and continued to dominate throughout what would become the highest scoring final in Women’s World Cup history. The match was hardly a repeat of the 2011 World Cup final, when the U.S. lost to Japan in a penalty shootout, as the U.S. shot out of the gate on Sunday, scoring four goals in the first 16 minutes of play.

“Pure elation. I’m just so, so proud of this team,” head coach Jill Ellis said after the match. “I’m so happy for them, so happy for every little girl who dreams about this,” she added.

Carli Lloyd led those efforts with a historic match of her own. Lloyd scored three of her squad’s goals, earning the only hat trick in Women’s World Cup final history. Her first goal, which came in the third minute, was also the fastest scored in a Women’s World Cup final.”

This U.S. Team will be an inspiration for many youngsters for years to come.  A great day for women’s sports! 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Post had a short article yesterday describing the remedial needs of NYC high school graduates who attended CUNY community colleges. The article quotes CUNY’s own David Bloomfield. As reported:

“An astonishing 78.3 percent of CUNY community college students who graduated from city high schools in 2014 enrolled in remedial courses this past school year, up from 77.6 percent the year before. Students who failed CUNY admissions tests in math, English or writing had to take the extra courses in their freshman year to catch up.

“Education experts said the city must better prepare kids for college.

“Clearly, grads continue not to be college-ready,” Brooklyn College professor David Bloomfield said.

“In theory that’s what all this new testing and curriculum is supposed to ensure, but the promises of the Common Core have not been realized. It will be a long road.”

About a third of city high-school graduates go on to attend CUNY schools.”

Fifteen years of zealous testing policies have not improved learning for most students in NYC schools.  Credit recovery programs push up high school graduation rates but do little to teach basic skills.  A sad situation.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Today is a travel day as I will be attending the Online Learning Consortium’s Blended Learning Conference in Denver, Colorado. The theme of this year’s conference is Blended Learning: Leading Education’s Digital Future.    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 one session with colleagues, Chuck Dziuban, Charles Graham, and Patsy Moskal, entitled, Conducting Research in Online and Blended Learning Environments: New Pedagogical Frontiers, on Tuesday.  I also will be on a panel entitled, Fostering Blended Learning Leadership, with Liz Ciabocchi, Mary Niemiec, and Meg Benke on Wednesday.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Associated Press had an article on Wednesday tracing the rise of for-profit colleges to the policies of the George W. Bush administration. The article is quite critical and in addition to Bush mentions Sally Stroup, the top regulator on higher education at the Education Department at the time and now general counsel for the for-profit’s chief lobbying arm, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities. Here is an excerpt:

“How did trade schools go from being mom-and-pop shops that trained mechanics and hair stylists to making billions on Wall Street? And if the industry is as predatory as the Education Department and many lawmakers suggest, why didn’t they stop it?

In 1990, there wasn’t a single publicly traded college. Now, there are more than a dozen with most of them being investigated by state and federal regulators for fraud or deceptive business practices. Among the allegations is that many of these schools enrolled unqualified students, taught bogus coursework, and encouraged prospective students to lie on financial aid forms so they could access federal dollars.

Several consumer advocates interviewed by The Associated Press point to 2002 as the beginning of a dangerous rise of for-profit colleges. That’s when an Education Department memo written under President George W. Bush suggested colleges wouldn’t be severely penalized if they compensated college recruiters for getting students in the door. The memo became a tacit endorsement for the kinds of high-pressured sales tactics that emerged.

The next big change, they say, came in 2006, when Congress passed legislation backed by the Bush administration that erased a requirement that colleges deliver at least half their courses on a campus.

The top regulator on higher education at the Education Department during this time was Sally Stroup, now general counsel for the for-profit’s chief lobbying arm, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities.

“That’s when these guys took off,” said Tom Harkin, a former Democratic senator from Iowa who led a 2012 investigation into the for-profit industry. He said moving everything online made it easier for private investors to snap up failing schools and hide from regulators. Meanwhile, the schools invested heavily in lobbyists and making political connections that guaranteed access to federal student aid would be protected, he said.

“These schools went out and ran wild with government money,” Harkin said.

Consumer advocates also blame fear of litigation and a culture at the Education Department that views itself as a partner with schools, rather than a regulator working on behalf of students. In a statement provided to the AP, Education Secretary Arne Duncan denies this, saying the administration “put students first in everything we do.”

Perhaps the biggest obstacle to reform, however, has been Congress, which has been lobbied heavily by the industry to leave it alone. House and Senate Republicans are pushing legislation that would block the latest regulatory plan by the Education Department.

Republican Rep. Tom Cole of Oklahoma, who chairs the House appropriations subcommittee that oversees education spending, says the administration’s new rules will make it “much more difficult for institutions to serve their students” and “is likely to cause programs to cease operations, preventing students from benefiting from the valuable job training.”

Joel Spring and I wrote about the rise of the for-profit colleges in our book, The Great American Education-Industrial Complex, published in 2012. Bush, Stroup, John Boehner and several other congressmen were heavily involved in the orchestrated changes in policy that allowed the for-profit colleges to become what they are today.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday Mayor Bill de Blasio came out swinging at his fellow Democrat, Governor Andrew Cuomo, accusing him of sabotaging the city’s interests, being blinded by political scheming and showing no interest in honest policy making. He said he expected the governor to seek revenge, but added that he wasn’t taking it any more. “I started a year and a half ago with a hope of a very strong partnership,” Mr. de Blasio said. “I have been disappointed at every turn.”   The New York Times in a strongly worded editorial is supporting de Blasio stating that everything he said was true. Below is an excerpt:

“Mayor Bill de Blasio left town for a family vacation out West on Tuesday. He left behind one enormous piece of baggage, which he dropped with a thud on his way out. In an interview with the City Hall press corps, he unloaded on Gov. Andrew Cuomo…

The surprise attack — there is hardly another way to describe it — came days after the end of a discouraging session for the mayor in Albany, in which major pieces of his agenda were eroded, upended or ignored, too often at the hands of his fellow Democrat, the governor…

The important point is that everything he said is true. By any fair reading of the events of the last Albany session, the governor has acted disgracefully toward the 8.5 million people of the city Mr. de Blasio leads. Though Mr. Cuomo poses as liberal and reform-minded when it suits him, his indifference to the city’s needs, and his poorly disguised disdain for the mayor, are further discrediting an already disheartening second term.

Mr. Cuomo’s hand was acutely evident when crucial goals for Mr. de Blasio — like extending mayoral control of the New York City schools, repairing crumbling public housing, investing in mass transit — became needless struggles. An important deal that Mr. de Blasio struck with the real estate industry this spring, to reform a tax break for developers called 421-a, would have added many thousands of units of dearly needed affordable housing. In Albany it was nearly sabotaged. Efforts to extend and update rent-control laws governing more than one million city apartments were similarly undermined.

When the governor wasn’t playing Tommy Lee Jones in the upstate manhunt for two escaped killers, he was saying it was too late to fix 421-a, although it was not, or challenging the mayor over managing wage rates for construction workers or costly disability-pension giveaways to police officers and firefighters. Mr. de Blasio said the governor’s vindictiveness had even extended earlier in the year to surprise state inspections of city homeless shelters.

Mr. de Blasio’s many critics say he was foolish to go on the attack and are waiting for Mr. Cuomo to bury the hatchet, in Mr. de Blasio.

But really — what should he have done?

State law gives the Legislature and governor far too much control over New York City’s business, and whenever the mayor — any mayor — takes his petitions to Albany, he has to beg, wheedle, cajole and bargain.

For a year and a half, Mr. de Blasio — maybe naïvely, maybe cunningly, maybe because he had no other choice — played nice with Mr. Cuomo, stressing their decades-long acquaintance and going out of his way not to pick fights. Sometimes it worked, as when the mayor won funding for a huge expansion of prekindergarten. Sometimes it didn’t. He was never going to eliminate longstanding mayor-governor tensions. But he has seemed to be making an effort to get past the nonsense, with a steadfast focus on policy over personality and power plays.

Some are now wondering whether Mr. de Blasio’s stand-up-to-the-bully tack will backfire. If it does, it will make clearer than ever who the bully is.”

The fighting between New York Democrats is historic and keeps rearing its ugly head to the detriment of the people of the state and the city.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Mayor Bill de Blasio, in candid and searing words, accused Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo on yesterday of stymieing New York City’s legislative goals out of personal pettiness, “game-playing” and a desire for “revenge.” As reported in the New York Times:

“In an extraordinary interview, Mr. de Blasio, appearing to unburden himself of months’ worth of frustrations, said that Mr. Cuomo — who, like the mayor, is a Democrat — “did not act in the interests” of New Yorkers by blocking measures like reforming rent laws and the mayor’s long-term ability to control the city’s public schools.

“I started a year and a half ago with a hope of a very strong partnership,” Mr. de Blasio said of the governor, whom he has known for two decades. “I have been disappointed at every turn.”

Mr. Cuomo, the mayor said, had acted vindictively toward the city, citing cuts in state financing for public housing and what he called an abrupt ramp-up of state inspections of city homeless shelters “with a vigor we had never seen before…

Of particular ire to Mr. de Blasio was the question of mayoral control of schools, which the State Legislature must approve. The mayor noted that the Legislature — including the Republican-led Senate — gave his predecessor, Michael R. Bloomberg, a six-year renewal; Mr. de Blasio received just a single year.

“Nothing fundamentally had changed here in the city,” the mayor said on Tuesday. “I think the governor’s influence played substantially in their decision to limit it to one year.”

The article offers insights into New York politics where Democrats cannot seem to work together for the betterment of all.

Tony