Dear Commons Community,

The U.S. Department of Education conducted a sham investigation into allegations that student loan giant Navient Corp. violated its lucrative government contract, leading the Obama administration to mislead the public last year when it proclaimed the company didn’t cheat service members on federal student loans, according to an audit by the department’s inspector general released yesterday.  And thanks to the department, which had contradicted federal prosecutors with its announcement, Navient not only kept its contract — it got a raise, too.  As reported in The Huffington Post:

“The scandal is likely to revive concerns about the department’s sloppy policing of the student loan industry and its cozy relations with loan contractors, many of which have employed former department officials. These contractors together receive about $800 million annually from taxpayers to collect borrowers’ monthly payments and counsel them on their repayment options.

The inspector general’s findings also could complicate the Obama administration’s efforts to convince the Senate to confirm acting Education Secretary John King Jr. for the post. President Barack Obama has repeatedly pushed the department to improve its oversight of loan contractors and their treatment of borrowers. The department, however, has renewed contracts with companies that its own investigators and other federal authorities determined had misled borrowers. Accountability has been rare.

“Today’s report is a stunning indictment of the Department of Education’s oversight of student loan servicers, exposing the extraordinary lengths to which the department will go to protect these companies when they break the law,” Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said in a prepared statement.”

President Obama has done a lot of good things as president but the U.S. Department of Education under Arne Duncan’s leadership will be a blot on his legacy.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The long-awaited Super Tuesday primaries came and went yesterday.  This morning the media will analyze and re-analyze down to fine predictions what the results mean as the 2016 presidential nomination season continues.

Hillary Clinton did well on the Democrat side winning seven of the eleven state primaries over Bernie Sanders.  Right now, Clinton supporters and the Democratic Party establishment are happy about the way the primaries are playing out in favor of Hillary.  Bernie Sanders has lots of appeal but not enough to overcome Hillary’s lead.

For the Republicans, Donald Trump continues to lead but not necessarily surge having won seven states to Cruz’s three and Rubio’s one.  Kasich and Carson did not win any state primaries yesterday.  The results were greeted with enthusiasm by Trump and Cruz supporters but not the Republican Party establishment which would rather support a Rubio-type candidate.  The Republican Party will continue to chug toward its convention with Trump having the most votes of any candidate but not necessarily a majority of votes.  Trump has fervent supporters who want an anti-insider, anti-establishment candidate.  It is not clear that the Republican Party is ready to cede the nomination to them.

Thomas B. Edsall, writing in the New York Times, had a biting comment about Trump’s candidacy”

“The tragedy of the 2016 campaign is that Trump has mobilized a constituency with legitimate grievances on a fool’s errand.

If he is shoved out of the field somehow, his supporters will remain bitter and enraged, convinced that a self-serving and malign elite defeated their leader.

If he prevails, a constituency that could force politicians to confront the problems of the working and middle class will waste its energies on a candidate incompetent to improve the lives of the credulous men and women lining up to support him.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a lead article today focusing on testing the social-emotional skills of students.   A recent update to federal education law requires states to include at least one nonacademic criterion in judging school performance moving school districts and states to come up with appropriate tests and measure.  However, early testing attempts have raised alarms even among proponents who warn that the definitions of social-emotional skills are unclear and the resultant tests faulty.  The New York Times article examines one such implementation in California.  As the article comments:

“I do not think we should be doing this; it is a bad idea,” said Angela Duckworth, the MacArthur fellow who has done more than anyone to popularize social-emotional learning, making “grit” — the title of her book to be released in May — a buzzword in schools.

She resigned from the board of the group overseeing the California project, saying she could not support using the tests to evaluate school performance. Last spring, after attending a White House meeting on measuring social-emotional skills, she and a colleague wrote a paper warning that there were no reliable ways to do so. “Our working title was all measures suck, and they all suck in their own way,” she said.

And there is little agreement on what skills matter: Self-control? Empathy? Perseverance? Joy?

“There are so many ways to do this wrong,” said Camille A. Farrington, a researcher at the University of Chicago who is working with a network of schools across the country to measure the development of social-emotional skills. “In education, we have a great track record of finding the wrong way to do stuff.”

Schools began emphasizing social-emotional learning around 2011, after an analysis of 213 school-based programs teaching such skills found that they improved academic achievement by 11 percentile points. A book extolling efforts to teach social-emotional skills in schools such as the KIPP charter network and Horace Mann in New York, “How Children Succeed” by Paul Tough, appeared the next year.

Argument still rages about whether schools can or should emphasize these skills. Critics say the approach risks blaming the victim — if only students had more resilience, they could rise above generational poverty and neglected schools — and excuses uninspired teaching by telling students it is on them to develop “zest,” or enthusiasm. Groups that spent decades urging the country toward higher academic standards worry about returning to empty talk of self-esteem, accepting low achievement as long as students feel good.

But teaching social-emotional skills is often seen as a way to move away from a narrow focus on test scores, and to consider instead the whole child. It may seem contradictory, then, to test for those skills. In education, however, the adage is “what’s measured gets treasured”; states give schools money to teach the subjects on which they will be judged.”

This is a good article on a difficult subject.  Social-emotional skills such as perseverance and empathy are surely important in children and adults yet testing for them is not easy.  I agree with Duckworth and other experts on the subject that the approaches described in this article are too simplistic.  School districts should be cautious about duplicating them.

Tony