Dear Commons Community,

Facebook announced on Thursday that it was working with a local charter school network, Summit Public Schools, to develop software that schools can use to help children learn at their own pace. The project has been championed by Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s co-founder and chief executive, and one of his top lieutenants, Chris Cox. As reported in the New York Times:

“We’ve seen that there’s an opportunity to help apply our skills to the future of education, and we all wanted to find a way to help make an impact by doing what we do best — building software,” Mr. Cox wrote in a blog post announcing the initiative.

Eight Facebook employees have been assigned full time to work on the project, which began quietly last year after Summit’s chief executive, Diane Tavenner, asked Mr. Zuckerberg for help improving the tools developed by Summit’s lone software engineer.

“It’s really driven by this idea that we want to put learning in the hands of kids and the control back in the hands of kids,” Ms. Tavenner said in a telephone interview. The software, she said, allows students to work with teachers to create tailored lessons and projects. Teachers can also administer individualized quizzes that the software can grade and track.

The platform, which is separate from the Facebook social network, is now being used by nine Summit schools and about 20 others. Ultimately, Ms. Tavenner said, “our motivation is to share it with everyone and anyone who wants it,” including other charters and public school districts. The software would be free for all users.

Facebook and Summit said that they adhered to the student privacy practices recommended by the federal government, and that Facebook could not use student data for its other businesses.

Critics were skeptical of such commitments.

“Facebook does not have the greatest reputation when it comes to privacy,” said Leonie Haimson, executive director of Class Size Matters, a nonprofit group that has criticized technology companies, contending that they violate student privacy.

Although the effort is still small, Facebook said it was making a long-term commitment to education. That ambition echoes the company’s other big save-the-world effort, Internet.org, which aims to bring Internet access to the billions of people who do not have access now.”

It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s entry into the education software business evolves.  The issue of student privacy is real and serious.  Regardless, we wish Facebook good luck with its new venture.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Republican presidential hopeful Marco Rubio says the U.S. doesn’t need a federal Education Department, arguing that its recommendations to state and local governments often turn into mandates tied to money.  As reported by the Associated Press:

“The Florida senator made the comments Tuesday during a town hall meeting in Carson City. About 200 people attended the gathering in a community center, part of a tour of northern Nevada.

“What starts out as a suggestion ends up being, `If you want money from us, you must to do it this way,’ and you will end up with a version of a national school board,” Rubio said. “We don’t need a national school board.”

Democrats pointed out that Rubio’s expensive college costs were footed in part by Pell Grants and Stafford Loans, which are administered by the Education Department.

Rubio said the department administers certain programs that have merit but those could be transferred to other agencies. “I honestly think we don’t need a Department of Education,” he said.

The candidate drew claps and cheers when he told his audience he opposed Common Core education standards. “I do support curriculum reform,” he said, but that should be done at the state and local level.

Rubio spoke in Reno on Monday and is campaigning in the rural Nevada communities of Yerington and Fallon on his trip through the state.”

My opinion is that the country does need federal-level department of education.  However, Rubio is right in that we do not need a national board of education and quid pro quo money deals which have come to characterize the U.S. DOE for the past two administrations.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a featured story (subscription required) today analyzing Governor Scott Walker’s “utilitarian” view of higher education.  Tracing his days as a student at Marquette University to the present, Eric Kelderman, the author of the article, reviews many of Walker’s controversial proposals for the University of Wisconsin. As an example:

“In the spring of 1990, Scott Walker, then a senior at Marquette University, decided to leave college before finishing his degree. A job in finance had opened up at the American Red Cross in Milwaukee, and Mr. Walker, now the governor of Wisconsin and a Republican candidate for president, leapt at the opportunity. “Certainly, I wanted an education for more than a job,” he has since said, “but my primary purpose was to get a job.”

It’s impossible not to consider that statement when regarding the governor’s recent gambits in higher-education policy.

In January, when Governor Walker released his proposed budget for the next two years, he put the finances and mission of Wisconsin’s university system front and center. He recommended granting the system autonomy from several state regulations, but as part of the deal, he proposed to cut $300 million from the University of Wisconsin budget over two years while freezing tuition. In addition, he pushed to remove protections for tenure and shared governance from state law.

Those proposals set off a storm of controversy within the state and led to head-shaking from higher-education advocates across the country. With the cuts, Wisconsin became one of just a handful of states planning to reduce its spending on higher education. The plan for autonomy, which came with a high price, smelled too much like part of the governor’s privatization agenda, which had already made many observers in the state wary.

The kicker came when it was discovered that the Governor Walker’s budget proposal would have gutted the “Wisconsin Idea” — the university system’s mission statement, ensconced in state law, that had long been a point of pride in the state. The Wisconsin Idea sets the system’s goals to “extend knowledge and its application beyond the boundaries of its campuses and to serve and stimulate society.”

“Inherent in this broad mission are methods of instruction, research, extended training and public service designed to educate people and improve the human condition,” reads the state law. “Basic to every purpose of the system is the search for truth.” The proposed budget sought to excise “knowledge,” “truth,” and “public service,” while adding a goal for the system to meet the state’s work-force needs.

Mr. Walker quickly backtracked on those changes, but the episode made the governor’s position seem clear: The value of a college degree, in his view, can be measured largely by the job that a graduate gets, and colleges are spending too much money and time on things that do not serve that mission.”

Kelderman concludes his article by speculating on whether Walker’s policies on higher education will play nationally as he seeks the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.  He quotes Jay Heck, executive director of Common Cause in Wisconsin, as saying that “If you look at everyone who’s running for president, Governor Walker has very little crossover appeal.”

I agree, Governor Walker has enough financial backing to lock in his position in Wisconsin but not enough in a national election.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The rarity of a public-college tuition cut became a reality this year in Washington State, where lawmakers approved a reduction for state residents over the next two years. At some institutions, the price tag will fall by one-fifth for in-state undergraduate students.  As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required):

“Every campus will see a 5 percent cut this year, and for 2016-17, students enrolled at four-year colleges and universities will see tuition fall by an additional 10 or 15 percent. Lawmakers also will tie tuition levels to the state’s median family income starting in 2017 in an effort to keep college costs down in the future. (Some campuses are raising tuition for nonresidents and graduate students, although the increases vary and are generally small.)

The state’s college officials were cautious about a tuition cut for several months; their support was contingent on the state’s backfilling the millions of dollars in lost revenue with additional financing. But once lawmakers fulfilled that promise with $200 million in state funds over the next two years, college leaders backed the final plan, which the Legislature passed in June.

Given the increasing public attention on college affordability and student-loan debt, including in the 2016 presidential race, Washington State’s move has generated buzz among lawmakers and administrators nationwide. Still, several volatile factors had to align at once — including finances and politics — for Washington’s tuition cut to take place.

In some states grappling with budget deficits, such a reduction is probably out of reach for now, and tuition cuts might not be sustainable in Washington State or elsewhere without new taxes or an economic boom. Some observers also assert that extra state funds should be used as financial aid for low-income and middle-class students, not wealthier students who can already afford to pay.”

Congratulations to the lawmakers in Washington for their bold action.  They are an example for the rest of the country.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Various media are reporting that Pope Francis will give all priests discretion to formally forgive women who have had abortions during the Roman Catholic Church’s upcoming Holy Year.

In Church teaching, abortion is such a grave sin that those who procure or perform it incur an automatic excommunication. Usually only designated clergy and missionaries can formally forgive abortions.

But from Dec.8 to Nov. 26, during an extraordinary Holy Year or “Jubilee” on the theme of mercy announced by Pope Francis in March, all priests will be able to do so, he said in a letter published on Tuesday by the Vatican.

In the letter, Francis described the “existential and moral ordeal” faced by women who have terminated pregnancies and said he had “met so many women who bear in their heart the scar of this agonizing and painful decision”.

For Roman Catholics this is a mega-change in church-teaching. God bless Pope Francis for the way he has been reaching out to many Catholics whether gay, divorced, or have had abortions and opening up possibilities for them to participate in the sacraments.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Lisa Feldman Barrett, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University, has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times allaying concerns about the failure to replicate research in the field of psychology.  Her piece is in response to an initiative called the Reproducibility Project at the University of Virginia which recently reran 100 psychology experiments and found that over 60 percent of them failed to replicate — that is, their findings did not hold up the second time around. The results, published last week in Science, have generated alarm (and in some cases, confirmed suspicions) that the field of psychology is in poor shape.  Barrett writes:

“…the failure to replicate is not a cause for alarm; in fact, it is a normal part of how science works.

Suppose you have two well-designed, carefully run studies, A and B, that investigate the same phenomenon. They perform what appear to be identical experiments, and yet they reach opposite conclusions. Study A produces the predicted phenomenon, whereas Study B does not. We have a failure to replicate.

Does this mean that the phenomenon in question is necessarily illusory? Absolutely not. If the studies were well designed and executed, it is more likely that the phenomenon from Study A is true only under certain conditions. The scientist’s job now is to figure out what those conditions are, in order to form new and better hypotheses to test.”

She concludes:

As with any scientific field, psychology has some published studies that were conducted sloppily, and a few bad eggs who have falsified their data. But contrary to the implication of the Reproducibility Project, there is no replication crisis in psychology. The “crisis” may simply be the result of a misunderstanding of what science is.

Science is not a body of facts that emerge, like an orderly string of light bulbs, to illuminate a linear path to universal truth. Rather, science (to paraphrase Henry Gee, an editor at Nature) is a method to quantify doubt about a hypothesis, and to find the contexts in which a phenomenon is likely. Failure to replicate is not a bug; it is a feature. It is what leads us along the path — the wonderfully twisty path — of scientific discovery.”

Dr. Barrett is correct in her response.  The world is constantly evolving and the people who inhabit it are not at all uniform. Research that focuses on the human condition is subject to great variation depending upon the circumstances, setting, and time.

Tony