Dear Commons Community,

In a colossal admission, President Obama said today that he and the US Department of Education bear some of the responsibility for the testing mania that has gripped the country.  As reported by CNN:

“Obama said new guidelines will be issued that call for taking only the “tests that are worth taking”– that are “high quality, aimed at good instruction” and that ensure students are “on track.”

The guidelines recommend that students spend no more than 2% of classroom time taking these tests, and that parents be notified if their child’s school exceeds this limit.

Testing shouldn’t “crowd out teaching and learning” and should just be one of many tools to measure how students and schools are performing, Obama said.

On Monday, Obama will meet with teachers and representatives of states and school districts to discuss the issue. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and his deputy, John King, are expected to attend.

The Washington-based Council of Great City Schools said in a report issued today that “there is no correlation between mandated testing time and reading math scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress.

Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton welcomed the announcement stating:

“I embrace the principles laid out today by the Obama Administration because they move us in the right direction,” her campaign said in a statement. “Standardized tests must be worth taking, high quality, time-limited, fair, fully transparent to students and parents, just one of multiple measures, and tied to improving learning.”

While better late than never, this is a long overdue change in policy.  Educators, parents and students have been clamoring against excessive testing since the mandates of No Child Left Behind legislation were implemented in the early 2000s.  Unfortunately, too many policymakers with minimal education experience including Arne Duncan were driven more by ideology than by sound practice.  This is a first step and more still needs to be done to reduce the testing and test-prep curricula that permeate throughout so many of our schools.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that the University of Florida is canceling its contract with Pearson Embanet to administer its online degree-granting arm, UF Online, after attracting low enrollment. Politico Florida cites an email from Evangeline J. Cummings, the university’s assistant provost and director of UF Online, saying the contract would be terminated in late December.

“In accordance with this shift to integrate UF Online more fully into core university operations we are proceeding with the full termination of the Pearson agreement effective in late December,” the email reads.

Pearson began handling the project, a $35-million effort that was urged on by the Florida Legislature, in 2013. Discouraged by low enrollment — as of last month, UF Online had enrolled just over 1,500 students — administrators decided to re-evaluate the 11-year contract, which could have paid Pearson up to $186 million.

In a statement, Pearson said it was “disappointed” with the decision. “Pearson’s online-program-management services have been successful at a number of colleges and universities across the U.S.,” the statement reads. “We have learned a great deal from the UF partnership that can be applied to helping both Pearson and other university customers improve their delivery of online options for students.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community.

The long awaited decision by Joe Biden came yesterday when he declared he would not be a candidate for the Democratic Party’s nomination for president. Unless some major scandal erupts (i.e., email servers), Hillary Clinton is pretty much assured of the nomination.  As reported in the New York Times:

“Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. announced on Wednesday that he would not run for president, ending a period of remarkably public agonizing and clearing away one of the biggest potential obstacles to Hillary Rodham Clinton’s path to the Democratic nomination in 2016.

with President Obama at his side, Mr. Biden said that he and his family had overcome their grief at the death of his elder son enough to commit themselves to the rigors of a campaign. But with just days until the first filing deadlines, he said he had concluded that it was simply too late.

“Unfortunately, I believe we’re out of time, the time necessary to mount a winning campaign for the nomination,” Mr. Biden said. “But while I will not be a candidate, I will not be silent.”

Indeed, he used the rest of his 13-minute speech to outline the case he would have made as a candidate and even take a few implicit jabs at Mrs. Clinton over her hawkish foreign policy, hostility to Republicans and breaks with Mr. Obama on certain issues…

Mrs. Clinton called Mr. Biden afterward to express her admiration, and former President Bill Clinton spoke with the vice president as well. “Joe Biden is a good man and a great vice president,” Mrs. Clinton said in a written statement. Praising his “passion for our country” and his “devotion to family,” she credited him for a record of fighting for the middle class. “And I’m confident that history isn’t finished with Joe Biden.”

We wish Vice President Biden well and thank him for not pitting the Democrats into what might have been a damaging battle for the nomination.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

According to a report from Politico:

“…George W. Bush let a hundred donors to his brother’s campaign in on a secret. Of all the rival Republican candidates, there is one who gets under the former president’s skin, whom he views as perhaps Jeb Bush’s most serious rival for the party’s nomination.

It isn’t Donald Trump, whose withering insults have sought to make Jeb pay a political price for his brother’s presidency. It isn’t Marco Rubio, Jeb’s former understudy who now poses a serious threat to his establishment support.

It’s George W. Bush’s former employee — Ted Cruz.

“I just don’t like the guy,” Bush said Sunday night, according to conversations with more than half a dozen donors who attended the event.

One donor in the room said the former president had been offering mostly anodyne accounts of how the Bush family network views the current campaign and charming off-the-cuff jokes, until he launched into Cruz.

 “The tenor of what he said about the other candidates was really pretty pleasant,” another donor said. “Until he got to Cruz.”

Bush took a harsh view of Cruz’s apparent alliance with Trump, who stood with the senator at a Capitol Hill rally last month in opposition to the Iran deal. While Trump, the current GOP poll leader, has attacked most of his competitors in the 2016 field, he has avoided criticizing Cruz.

George W. Bush is well acquainted with his home-state senator, who served as a domestic policy adviser on his 2000 campaign before rising to national prominence by distancing himself from — and often going out of his way to antagonize — the GOP establishment. In his book published earlier this year, Cruz ripped Bush’s record, criticizing elements of his foreign policy and faulting the administration for enabling “bigger government and excessive spending and new entitlements.”

While Jeb Bush’s campaign is spending far more time of late pushing out information that contrasts favorably with Rubio, his oldest brother seemed to see Cruz as the biggest threat in the end. According to several donors, the former president said not to doubt Cruz’s strength.

“He said he thought Cruz was going to be a pretty formidable candidate against Jeb, especially in Texas and across the South,” a donor said.”

I don’t think George W. Bush is alone in his assessment.  Cruz to me has the look and feel of  Senator Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s  with his intimidating and hurtful comments during the Red Scare.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Proving that being a liberal is no longer a disparaging word, Canadian voters emphatically reclaimed their country’s liberal identity, by electing Justin Trudeau as Prime Minster.  His election ends 10 years of leadership by Stephen Harper, whose dream was to recast Canada as a more conservative country.

The victory in Monday’s election by Trudeau’s Liberal Party was stunning. The Liberals were on a path to win at least 184 seats out of 338 – a parliamentary majority that will allow Trudeau to govern without relying on other parties. Harper’s Conservatives were winning 100. The Liberals received 39.5 percent of the overall vote compared to 32 percent for the Conservatives and 19.6 for the New Democrats.

Trudeau channels the star power of his father, Pierre Trudeau,  who was one of Canada’s most dynamic politicians. Tall and trim, he is a former school teacher and member of Parliament since 2008. At 43, he becomes the second youngest prime minister in Canadian history and has been likened to Obama.

“Tonight Canada is becoming the country it was before.” Justin Trudeau told a ralley

Trudeau has re-energized the Liberal Party since its worst electoral defeat four years ago when they won just 34 seats and finished third behind the traditionally weaker New Democrat Party. Trudeau promises to raise taxes on the rich and run deficits for three years to boost government spending. He said positive politics led to his victory.

“We beat fear with hope,” Trudeau said. “We beat cynicism with hard work. We beat negative, divisive politics with a positive vision that brings Canadians together. Most of all we defeated the idea that Canadians should be satisfied with less.”

Canada shifted to the center-right under Harper, who lowered sales and corporate taxes, avoided climate change legislation, and strongly supported the oil and gas extraction industry.

“The people are never wrong,” Harper told supporters in Calgary. “The disappointment is my responsibility and mine alone.”

Harper said he had called Trudeau to congratulate him.

Congratulations to Mr. Trudeau and the people of Canada!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

David Brooks in his New York Times column today, posits about how America and the world is moving toward governance by outsiders.  He comments specifically about the presidential candidacies of Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, and Ted Cruz.  He makes several insightful comments to support his argument.

On the world stage:

“…the big loss of central confidence is in global governance. The United States is no longer willing to occupy the commanding heights and oversee global order. In region after region, those who are weak in strength but strong in conviction are able to have their way. Vladimir Putin in Crimea, Ukraine and the Middle East. Bashar al-Assad crosses red lines in Syria. The Islamic State spreads in Syria and Iraq. Iranian proxy armies roam the region.

Republicans blame Obama for hesitant and halting policies, but it’s not clear the foreign policy and defense apparatus believes anymore in its own abilities to establish order, or that the American public has any confidence in U.S. effectiveness as a global actor.”

On the presidential candidates:

“This happens in loud ways in the domestic sphere. The uncertain Republican establishment cannot govern its own marginal members, while those on the edge burn with conviction. Jeb Bush looks wan but Donald Trump radiates confidence.

The Democratic establishment no longer determines party positions; it is pulled along by formerly marginal players like Bernie Sanders.”

Among his conclusions:

“Where is this all heading? Maybe those on the fringes of politics really will take over. Say hello to President Ted Cruz. Writing in The American Interest, Joshua Mitchell of Georgetown argues that we are heading toward an “Age of Exhaustion.” Losing confidence in the post-Cold War vision, people will be content to play with their private gadgets and will lose interest in greater striving.”

Sad but true!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education is reporting that The Online Learning Consortium, in a move to encourage professors to develop and use digital courseware, will offer new prizes for faculty-led teams that advance and adopt sophisticated online courses with “a strong pedagogical focus and a sustained impact on student success in gateway courses.”   As reported:

“The organization, formerly known as the Alfred P. Sloan Consortium, said it would award up to 10 prizes of $10,000 each to the faculty teams, beginning in 2016. It will also provide up to three prizes of $100,000 each, it said, to institutions that showcase sustained innovation “on a broader scale” in the use of the courses.

The prize money comes from a $2.5-million grant to the consortium from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The foundation has already put more than $20 million into grants to seven organizations and their 18 college partners to develop digital courseware that uses adaptive-learning techniques and other approaches. The goal of that effort is to create general-education courses that would be more engaging to students, particularly first-generation college students, than some of the standardized course materials now in use at many colleges.

Jason Palmer, an official at the Gates Foundation, said it had chosen the Online Learning Consortium to make the awards because of its expertise in the field. The foundation followed a similar approach with grants for colleges working with data analytics to help students, for example, which were recently awarded through Educause.

Consortium officials said they expected to announce the criteria for the new digital-courseware prizes by December. The organization plans to use the rest of the $2.5 million to create a new element for its Quality Scorecard that would be focused on digital courseware.”

I was at the conference last week and this news created quite a buzz.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Donald Trump said yesterday that to cut federal spending, he would cut the Department of Education as well as several other agencies if elected president.

Asked on “Fox News Sunday” how he would cut spending, Trump named the Department of Education and the Environmental Protection Agency as potential targets.

“No, I’m not cutting services, but I’m cutting spending. But I may cut the Department of Education. I believe the Common Core is a very bad thing. I believe that we should be — you know, educating our children from Iowa, from New Hampshire, from South Carolina, from California, from New York. I think that it should be local education,” Trump said.

“So the Department of Education is one,” he continued. “Environmental Protection, what they do is a disgrace. Every week they come out with new regulations.”

Asked by host Chris Wallace who would protect the environment in the absence of the EPA, Trump maintained that “we’ll be fine with the environment.”

“We can leave a little bit, but you can’t destroy businesses,” he added.

Trump’s comments on the Common core are clever and designed to appeal to people across the political spectrum but especially to conservative Republicans who see the Common Core as federal overreach into education.  The Common Core will surely be an issue in the primaries and in the general election regardless who the nominees are.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Zack Carter, Senior Political Economy Reporter for The Huffington Post, has an interesting take on who won the First Democratic Party debate last week.  While most analysts concede it was Hillary Clinton, Carter sees Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator’s as having had the most influence on all of the candidates even though she is not running for president.  Here is his analysis:

“The Massachusetts senator’s [Warren] influence was obvious during almost every discussion of economic policy. All the candidates on stage Tuesday night were eager to tout how tough they’d be on Wall Street.

Clinton, in perhaps her weakest moment of the debate, even tried to claim that her financial reform plan is stronger than Sanders’, although she resists calls to break up big banks. Martin O’Malley went after Clinton for not supporting a reinstatement of the Glass-Steagall Act’s separation between traditional banking and risky securities trading. A stumbling Lincoln Chafee acknowledged that his 1999 vote to repeal Glass-Steagall was a mistake. 

Clinton, O’Malley and Sanders all said they opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership — a major trade pact that tore a very public rift in the Democratic Party this summer, with Warren its most vocal opponent. The importance of curbing income inequality was a constant theme for all of the candidates, and Sanders opened the night by calling the nation’s campaign finance system “corrupt.”

All of these are signature Elizabeth Warren issues. She isn’t running for president, but she seems to be shaping her party’s agenda.”

Yes!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, Chancellor James B. Milliken announced a new initiative to increase graduation rates at CUNY’s community colleges in a keynote address to the Association of Community College Trustees Leadership Congress, in San Diego.  In his address, Milliken argued that the United States faces a “crisis in community college degree attainment” that requires dramatic changes in current policy. “As educators, it is not enough for us to provide just an opportunity for advancement. We have to take responsibility for equipping our students with the tools for seizing that opportunity and be held accountable when they do not.” As reported in Inside Education:

“All six CUNY community colleges will receive support to expand their Accelerated Study in Associate Programs (ASAP) programs, as will three senior colleges that offer associate degrees: New York City College of Technology, College of Staten Island and Medgar Evers College.  The CUNY expansion aims to increase the number of students in ASAP from 4,000 today to more than 25,000 by 2018.  New York City is providing $42 million for the program’s expansion.

…the most dramatic change is planned for Bronx CC, where the general three-year graduation rate is 11 percent, but the ASAP participants’ graduation rate is 61 percent.  CUNY plans to enroll all new full-time students at Bronx Community College in the program.

ASAP is only for full-time students, and about two-thirds of Bronx CC students attend full time. Part-timers will still enroll at the college, but CUNY officials hope that they will be attracted to the full-time program. Currently, 11 percent of full-time students at the college are in ASAP, a share that could go to 100 percent among full-timers during the expansion.

While the anticipated gains from ASAP, both at Bronx CC and across CUNY, are extremely ambitious, outside studies have verified the gains and suggested that the program could be expanded. The studies have found that it is a combination of policies (advising, full-time enrollment) and dollars (waiving tuition and fees) that appear to be making the difference for many students.”

This is good policy and I am sure that CUNY is thankful to New York City and Mayor Bill de Blasio for funding this initiative.

Tony