Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an editorial today pleading with NY Governor Andrew Cuomo to take a stand in the on-going battle with G.E. to clean up the Hudson River.  The essence of the issue is that G.E. has spent the last six years and $1 billion dredging up much but not all of the toxic chemicals it put in the riverbed, and it is now getting ready to dismantle its cleanup operation. Environmental advocates and scientists are making urgent pleas to the federal Environmental Protection Agency and to New York State to make sure G.E. does not leave before the river job is finished.  Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who should be leading this battle, is a nonparticipant. He has bowed out, kept his Department of Environmental Conservation on the sidelines, and tossed the ball to the feds.  As stated in the New York Times editorial:

“G.E. says, rightly, that it has fulfilled the terms of the settlement it agreed to with the federal government — a job it spent years trying to evade — and that the river is better off now that 300,000 pounds of polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, have been removed. But it is refusing to spend a day or a penny more than it has to, and alarms are going off. Two of the three government agencies tasked with guarding the health of the Hudson as the river’s “natural resource trustees” — the federal Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — wrote the Environmental Protection Agency in late September urging that the dismantling be postponed until the E.P.A. conducts a review.

The river and fish are still contaminated, the federal trustees said, echoing the concerns of advocates dismayed that the cleanup won’t reach 136 contaminated acres that lie outside the area covered by the dredging agreement. This includes a silted-up stretch of the Champlain Canal, beside the Hudson, that is unusable for deep-water commercial shipping but cannot be safely dredged until the PCBs are removed.

Oddly, and conspicuously, the third trustee, New York State’s Department of Environmental Conservation, did not sign the letter.

The department answers to Mr. Cuomo, who has absented himself from the clamor against G.E.’s departure. Mr. Cuomo has other priorities — he is trying to persuade G.E. to move its headquarters back to New York. He evidently would rather disappoint New Yorkers who love the river than jeopardize a corporate courtship.

E.P.A. officials say that their options are limited — that the agency can’t reopen the original agreement with G.E., and that the trustees’ letter is not the right tool to compel G.E. to stick around and finish the job. But limited legal recourse does not preclude old-fashioned pressure and moral argument. If New York and Mr. Cuomo went after G.E. over the crippled Champlain Canal — an economic burden on taxpayers and citizens — it could get results.”

G.E. polluted the Hudson River for decades and it has grudgingly taken responsibility for the clean-up.  It should make sure the job is completed.  Unfortunately, during his second term in office, Governor Cuomo’s has consistently sided with corporate interests over those of the people of New York.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Department of Defense has put the University of Phoenix on probation and prohibited it from enrolling new students who are using the department’s Tuition Assistance Program that provides financial aid to active-duty service members. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

The department’s (U.S. Department of Defense) action comes several months after Phoenix’s parent company announced that the Federal Trade Commission had opened a broad investigation into the for-profit university’s practices and following a report by the Center for Investigative Reporting that detailed the company’s strategies for recruiting service members and veterans. The center’s website, Reveal, reported on Thursday that the Pentagon had also barred Phoenix officials from recruiting at military facilities.

For-profit colleges have long been criticized for their reliance on — and aggressive recruitment of — service members and veterans, who pay tuition largely through federal financial aid and through military educational benefits like the Post-9/11 GI Bill and the Tuition Assistance Program. Federal rules prohibit for-profit colleges from receiving more than 90 percent of their overall revenue from federal financial aid, and many companies approach that level, even though the military education benefits are not counted toward the 90-percent cap...

One of the for-profit sector’s most ardent critics in Congress, Sen. Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, cheered the department’s decision on Thursday, saying its “decisive action” would “protect servicemembers and taxpayers from a company that offers degrees of questionable value.” Mr. Durbin, a Democrat, asked the department in July to launch an inquiry into the company’s recruiting practices.”

Things just keep getting worse for the University of Phoenix!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Barbara Byrd-Bennett,the former head of the nation’s third-largest school district was indicted on federal fraud charges yesterday that accused her of taking bribes and kickbacks for steering more than $23 million in no-bid contracts to a former employer.  As reported in The Huffington Post:

Barbara Byrd-Bennett, 66, the former Chicago Public Schools CEO and superintendent, was charged with 15 counts of mail fraud and five counts of wire fraud. She was cooperating with prosecutors and has agreed to plead guilty, U.S. Attorney Zachary Fardon said during a press briefing.

Fardon said Byrd-Bennett abused her position “to line her own pockets and those of her co-defendants.” The indictment says the scheme netted Byrd-Bennett and her two co-defendants about $2 million in cash and other valuables, which prosecutors will seek to recover.

Byrd-Bennett helped her former employer, an educational training and consulting collective, secure lucrative no-bid contracts for city schools, according to the indictment. In exchange, Byrd-Bennett received hundreds of thousands of dollars in kickbacks, which the collective disguised by funneling them into bank accounts set up under the names of Byrd-Bennett’s relatives, the indictment alleges.

The educational collective lavished the former schools chief with perks, including meals, travel and sports tickets, and promised her another job with more kickbacks disguised as a signing bonus after she stepped down from from the superintendent’s post, the indictment says. 

Byrd-Bennett resigned in June amid the federal probe.  Her lawyer, Michael Scudder, said Byrd-Bennett would plead guilty to the charges.

“As part of accepting full responsibility for her conduct, she will continue to cooperate with the government, including testifying truthfully if called upon to do so,” Scudder said in a statement.

Also indicted were Gary Solomon, 47, and Tom Vranas, 34. The men co-owned and operated the suburban Chicago SUPES Academy and Synesi Associates. SUPES Academy provided training and professional development for principals and other school administrators. Synesi offered educational consulting, performance analysis and turnaround programs. 

The 43-page indictment alleges Byrd-Bennet her co-defendants began scheming almost immediately after she was hired for Chicago’s top schools spot in 2012. “

This is a stain for such a great American city school system trying desperately to succeed amid serious financial woes!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Education Week is reporting that Amplify, the beleaguered digital education division of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp., was sold last week to a team of 11 Amplify executives that includes former New York City Schools Chancellor Joel Klein. The sale happened after massive layoffs within the division.  As reported (subscription required):

“Larry Berger, whose company Wireless Generation’s purchase by News Corp. five years ago had signaled the media giant’s move into education, will lead Amplify as CEO under the new ownership.

The management team buying the education division was supported in the purchase by a group of private investors, according to a News Corp. announcement, which did not reveal terms of the sale. In August, News Corp. indicated that it had written off $371 million in losses from Amplify over the past year, and planned to put it up for sale.

News Corp. has invested $1 billion in the education division since 2010.

The two Amplify Education businesses conveyed in the sale were Amplify Learning, which provides core curriculum in a variety of subjects for K-12, and Amplify Insight, which provides analytics, data, and assessment. The failed Amplify Access, which sold tablet computers with a “K-12 learning system,” has been discontinued, but the company will still support its ongoing project in the Guilford County, N.C., schools.

Berger has been serving as the CEO of Amplify Learning. Klein, the former Amplify Education CEO, will be moving to the new company’s board of directors, according to an email that Berger sent to staff members Sept. 30, the day the sale closed. “

Amplify had several decent education software products but failed horribly with several new ventures during Klein’s tenure.  It will be interesting to see whether the new ownership can turn its prospects around.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Here is a little surprise.  A group of New York prison inmates defeated Harvard University’s undergraduate debating team.  The debate issue was public schooling and illegal immigration.  Here is the brief article as reported by the Associated Press:

“A group of New York inmates has toppled Harvard’s prestigious debate team.

It took place at the Eastern New York Correctional Facility, a maximum-security prison in Napanoch. The Ivy League undergrads were invited last month to debate the inmates who take in-prison courses taught by Bard College faculty.

Harvard’s team won the national title this year and the world championship in 2014.

But the inmates are building a reputation, too. The club has notched victories against teams from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and the University of Vermont.

Against Harvard, the inmates were tasked with defending the position that public schools should be allowed to turn away students whose parents came to the U.S. illegally. Harvard’s team responded, but a panel of neutral judges declared the inmates victorious.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Patricia McGuire, president of Trinity Washington University, in a piece in The Chronicle of Higher Education, has advice for the next US Secretary of  Education:  “Listen more to the practitioners than to the philanthropists and corporate titans”.  As reported in The Chronicle:

“Farewell, Arne Duncan!

As Secretary Duncan hangs up his jersey after seven years of leading the U.S. Department of Education, speculation is already underway about the next secretary of education. President Obama has selected Deputy Secretary John B. King, Jr., as acting secretary-designate, but the real focus is on the next administration in 2017 and beyond.

The higher-education policy issues for the next presidential administration are likely to remain much the same as current priorities: student loans and debt burdens, Pell Grants, cost, campus safety and sexual assault, access, accreditation, diploma mills, teacher quality, accountability. College students and presidents alike are grateful to Duncan for enlarging Pell Grants and improving the federal student-loan system, and we hope his successor will continue to champion student financial-aid solutions.

But on many other issues, particularly quality and accountability, the question is whether a new administration will continue Duncan’s style of broad criticism and onerous regulation of all higher education because of deficiencies in cases at individual institutions, or whether new leadership will establish a more nuanced approach to achieve mutually satisfying solutions to the challenges we share. We can hope for the latter, but so much depends on the experience and leadership characteristics of the secretary.

Higher education today is about so much more than traditional undergraduate education, and the new secretary must understand the big picture. The department’s own data warehouse reveals some of the depth and complexity of this industry, starting with the remarkable range of nontraditional characteristics of students and the vast array of academic programs across many degree and credential levels.

But the Duncan-era policies have tended to treat higher education almost like K-12 schools, assuming a monolithic curriculum taught to a largely immature student body across a defined period of time. Lost in the blender are the distinctive differences among students and programs and missions and institutional types that make American higher education the greatest learning and research system in the world….

We need the next secretary of education to express confidence and pride in American higher education as one of the most important assets of this nation, the steward of the American treasury of knowledge and innovation. We’ve heard more than enough rhetoric from the current Education Department about “shaming” colleges and “cracking down” on universities, threats that have simply managed to alienate many academics from the administration they once supported. Too often, the message the American public has heard is that college is a scary, violent, and expensive place that fails to educate students — a strange and misguided rant from an administration that also claims it wants to increase college access and degree attainment.

The next secretary of education needs to listen more to the practitioners than to the philanthropists and corporate titans who have a skewed view of the purpose of higher education. The outsized influence of a few major foundations, with their insatiable thirst for data, has inhibited the ability of real practitioners to get a seat at the table of policy formulation.”

President McGuire has presented a cogent description of what is needed in the USDOE.  Arne Duncan indeed turned over much of his higher education agenda to corporate interests especially corporate-affiliated philanthropies.  

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Our own David Bloomfield in a New York Daily News op-ed yesterday called on NYS Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch to resign when her term expires in April 2016. Here is an excerpt:

“Regents Chancellor Merryl Tisch was noticeably absent last month when Gov. Cuomo announced his own Common Core Task Force, intended as a total “reboot” of the standards — and effectively displacing a 2014 Regents report on the same subject.

The governor’s action is another sign that when her current five-year term ends in April, it will be time for Tisch to go.

Tisch was appointed to the Board of Regents, which presides over the state Education Department, on April 1, 1996 — almost 20 years ago. She became vice chancellor in 2007, then chancellor in 2009, serving in that position ever since.

Upon taking the Regents helm, Tisch promised, “We will embrace innovation with a data-driven approach . . . to raise test scores, raise graduation rates, and finally close the achievement gap.”

By her own measures — and she’s had plenty of time to prove the wisdom of her approach — Tisch has fallen far short. Last month, statewide test scores showed a mere 31.3% of students proficient in English Language Arts and 38.1% in math on the tough, relatively new Common Core-aligned tests.

In June 2012, Tisch bemoaned that “nearly a quarter of our students still don’t graduate after four years.” That is still the case. For students taking up to five years to complete high school, the 2010 graduation rate stood at 77%. Today it is 76.4%.

Meantime, the achievement gap persists. Four-year graduation rates for 2010 and 2014 — one of the best apples-to-apples indicators we have — show exactly the same 25 percentage point difference between black and Hispanic students compared to white students…

Tisch vehemently believes that poor performance should lead to firings and school closures. She argued that position in a letter to the governor’s office last December, stating in no uncertain terms that “if these schools cannot be made to perform, they must be closed and replaced.” She recently repeated the prescription, asking rhetorically, “How long do you stick with a failing school?”

It is time for Tisch to take the medicine she has advised for others. How long, indeed.”

Tough medicine!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

For the past five years, enrollments across the country have been declining (as much as 30 percent) in traditional, college-based teacher education programs.  Eduventures, a for-profit research and advisory service for higher-education, presented data last week at the 2015 Annual Fall Meeting of the Council of Academic Deans from Research Education Institutions (CADREI), that discuss the enrollment problems in teacher education programs but also provided rays of hope.  Here is a recap of their presentation:

Enrollments are indeed declining across all teacher preparation programs:

• Enrollment in traditional teacher preparation programs (at colleges and schools of education) has declined 30% between 2010 and 2014, according to Title II reports.
• Master’s degree programs that prepare and develop teachers have been hit particularly hard, declining at an average rate of 5% annually between 2009 and 2013. Enrollment continued to decline in 2014, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

The grim state of traditional teacher preparation programs is also fueled by the growth of alternative models advertising low cost and accelerated completion. These alternatives, in many cases not based in institutions of higher education (IHEs), include state-approved licensure programs based in school districts and providers like the Boston Teacher Residency, TNTP, and the Relay Graduate School of Education. Between 2010 and 2014, the number of alternative providers not based in an IHE grew at an average rate of 6% annually. During the same period, alternative IHE-based providers grew at an average rate of 3.5% annually.

With fewer students enrolling in teacher preparation programs, the number of providers entering the market exacerbates the recruiting challenge for all programs. As alternative providers continue to garner media attention and grant support, schools of education are left in the difficult position of having to defend their teacher preparation programs and outcomes.

While the number of alternative providers in the market is growing, and enrollment in traditional schools of education is declining, focusing only on these two trends misses the bigger picture. Between 2010 and 2014, alternative providers actually saw greater declines in both enrollment and completion than traditional providers. The real story is that enrollment numbers for traditional providers have slipped more slowly than their alternative counterparts.

This data show that the future of traditional degree programs may not be so grim and that the bright, shiny, alternative models may not be resonating as much as the national narrative would have us believe.

Communicating the Value of Traditional Teacher Preparation

When it comes to gauging the value of teacher preparation programs, there is no better short-term litmus test than the perceptions of principals who hire their graduates. Eduventures’ 2015 Principal Survey asked 755 P-12 principals about their hiring preferences. 87% of respondents said that traditional preparation was an important factor when evaluating candidates, compared to 54% who said that alternative preparation was an important factor. The current workforce reflects this trend, as nearly 90% of teachers are prepared through traditional preparation programs (e.g., bachelor’s, master’s, and certificate programs), despite declining enrollments.

This is not to say that schools of education do not face significant challenges. Enrollments and completions are declining, after all. What this data demonstrates, however, is that traditional teacher preparation programs have a story to tell and need to communicate their value more clearly. As schools of education consider the national landscape of teacher preparation and their own enrollment trends, they should collect and share stories of students and alumni, promote innovative practices and faculty successes, and align their program offerings to the needs of local district partners.

The above and other issues related to teacher education will be presented at the upcoming Eduventures Summit 2015, to be held in November in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Former Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in a newspaper interview published yesterday that more corporate executives should have been prosecuted for their actions leading up to the 2008 financial crisis. As reported by Reuters:

“Bernanke told USA Today that the U.S. Justice Department and other law enforcement agencies focused on investigating or indicting financial firms.

“But it would have been my preference to have more investigation of individual action, since obviously everything that went wrong or was illegal was done by some individual, not by an abstract firm,” Bernanke was quoted as saying.

Bernanke, who presided over the U.S. central bank during the financial crisis considered the worst since the Great Depression, said it was not up to him to decide whether to prosecute individuals, noting: “The Fed is not a law-enforcement agency.”

“The Department of Justice and others are responsible for that, and a lot of their efforts have been to indict or threaten to indict financial firms,” Bernanke added. “Now a financial firm is of course a legal fiction; it’s not a person. You can’t put a financial firm in jail.”

Bernanke, who retired from the Fed last year after eight years as chairman, said of the financial crisis: “I think there was a reasonably good chance that, barring stabilization of the financial system, that we could have gone into a 1930s-style depression.”

In the interview, Bernanke, whose memoir is being published this week, acknowledged that analysts were slow to realize how serious the economic downturn would become and faulted himself for not doing more to explain why it was in the public’s interest to rescue the financial firms that helped cause the crisis.

“Every time I saw a bumper sticker which said, ‘Where’s my bailout?’ it hurt,” the newspaper quoted him as saying.”

In sum, the executives of many of America’s financial companies hurt a lot of people in 2008 and the political system protected them.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The National Education Association (NEA) endorsed Hillary Clinton yesterday for president.  The American Federation of Teachers endorsed Hillary in July.  As reported in The Huffington Post:

“The National Education Association, the nation’s largest union, endorsed Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on Saturday.

The union’s campaign arm had indicated that it was recommending the endorsement earlier this week, as Politico first reported. Members of the 3-million-strong union who support Clinton’s main rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), have already protested the move, just as Sanders supporters from the American Federation of Teachers did when Clinton secured that union’s endorsement in July.

“Clinton is a strong leader who will do what is best for America’s students. For more than four decades, Clinton has fought to make sure all children have a fair opportunity to succeed regardless of their ZIP code,” said Lily Eskelsen García, president of the NEA, in a statement. “Clinton will continue to advocate on behalf of students, educators and working families because she understands the road to a stronger U.S. economy starts in America’s public schools.”

In an interview with The Huffington Post, García said that Clinton personally came and spoke to the organization’s 175-person board of directors in a session that left them “blew them away” because of Clinton’s understanding of what a president would have to do on certain education issues.

“As a lifelong fighter for children and families, I am deeply honored to have earned the endorsement of the National Education Association and their nearly 3 million members,” Clinton said in a statement after the endorsement was announced.

The NEA’s campaign arm had said that it believed Clinton was the candidate best positioned to win in the general election next year. But both Clinton and Sanders had received “A” ratings on the group’s congressional legislative scorecard…

..the NEA chose Clinton, García said, because she was the candidate who the union felt would be best able to highlight education issues in the presidential race.

“It was never a discussion about who’s for education who’s against education. People are gonna make up their own minds we get that, we understand that, we respect that,” she said. 

The NEA’s interests include ending competitive block grant programs supported by Obama like “Race to the Top,” and scaling back federally mandated “high-stakes” standardized testing that influences administrative decisions about teachers. Members of the Democratic Party have been divided over the merits of changes in public education, including more funding for charter schools and teacher evaluation systems influenced by standardized test scores.

“It’s just dead wrong to make teachers the scapegoats for all of society’s problems,” Clinton told the AFT earlier this year, according to The Washington Post. “Where I come from, teachers are the solution. And I strongly believe that unions are part of the solution, too.”

Tony