Dear Commons Community,

New York Times columnist, Nicholas Kristoph, while visiting Liberia, comments today about the sad state of government-run public schools.  Teachers don’t come to classes, books are not available, and students can’t read or do arithmetic.  He blames this on government corruption. and then puts in a plug for private, for-profit schools operated by Bridge International Academies,  Here is an excerpt:

“The status quo has failed,” George Werner, Liberia’s education minister, told me. “Teachers don’t show up, even though they’re paid by the government. There are no books. Training is very weak. School infrastructure is not safe.

“We have to do something radical,” he added.

So Liberia is handing over some public schools to Bridge International Academies, a private company to see if it can do better.

So far, it seems it can — much better. An interim study just completed shows Bridge schools easily outperforming government-run schools in Liberia, and a randomized trial is expected to confirm that finding. It would be odd if schools with teachers and books didn’t outperform schools without them.

If the experiment continues to succeed, Liberia’s education minister would like to hand over “as many schools as possible” to private providers. Countries in Asia and others in Africa are also interested in adopting this model.

The idea of turning over public schools to a for-profit company sparks outrage in some quarters. There’s particular hostility to Bridge, because it runs hundreds of schools, both public and private, in poor countries.

“Bridge’s for-profit educational model is robbing students of a good education,” Lily Eskelsen Garcia, president of the National Education Association, America’s largest teachers union, declared last fall. Education International, which represents the N.E.A. and other teachers unions around the world, similarly excoriates Bridge and the  Liberian government.

I understand critics’ fears (and share some about for-profit schools in the U.S.). They see handing schools over to Bridge as dismantling the public education system — one of the best ideas in human history — for private profit.”

Kristoph concludes:

“We can all agree that the best option would be for governments to offer better schools, with books and teachers in the room. Indeed, Liberia is trying to improve all schools, and it is winnowing out payments to “ghost teachers,” who don’t exist except on paper.

But my travels have left me deeply skeptical that government schools in many countries can be easily cured of corruption, patronage and wretched governance, and in the meantime we fail a generation of children.

In the United States, criticisms of for-profit schools are well grounded, for successive studies have found that vouchers for American for-profit schools hurt children at least initially (although the evidence also shows that in the U.S., well-run charters can help pupils).

The situation in countries like Liberia is different, and when poor countries recognize that their education systems are broken and try to do the right thing for children, it doesn’t help to export America’s toxic education wars.”

From my own limited travels in developing areas, I tend to agree with Kristoph.  The culture of corruption that permeates in many government services in some countries is too widespread to be solved in the near future.  For the sake of children shackled to non-functioning public schools, any alternative even, if it is for-profit, should be considered. 

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Brigham Young University-Idaho is emerging as a leader in the world of online higher education. One of its certificate programs, PathwayConnect, begun in 2009, has graduated nearly 24,000 students, more than 14,000 of whom have continued on for an online certificate or degree from BYU-Idaho. BYU-Idaho’s online degree programs have also seen significant growth — enrollment has increased tenfold, to more than 13,000, over the past five years.   Here is a description of BYU-Idaho PathwayConnect as featured in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“As with the rest of BYU, a Mormon character is inseparably woven into PathwayConnect. Required religious offerings, like a two-course sequence on the Book of Mormon, mix with secular courses in writing, mathematics, and life skills, in which students learn about goal-setting and “provident living.” Students can use the program as an entry point to college, says Clark G. Gilbert, president of BYU Pathway Worldwide, “and a path back to the faith.”

But at a time when colleges of all stripes are expanding online to meet the needs of a diversifying student population, PathwayConnect is a model worth paying attention to. Several features of the program could make it relevant — and, in some form, adaptable — to other institutions, religious or not.

Most obvious of these is the price. Students in the United states pay $68 per credit — and even less if they’re overseas. If they later enroll in BYU-Idaho online, they can continue to take the rest of their courses at the same price they paid for PathwayConnect. In the United States, that adds up to just over $8,100 for the 120 credits needed for a bachelor’s degree, half the price of traditional BYU-Idaho. That’s a striking bargain in a world where many political figures still openly dream of creating a $10,000 degree.

How can the program promise such a low price? One reason is BYU-Idaho’s heavy reliance on adjunct instructors. But another key is that most of the student recruiting comes through word of mouth and the 16-million-member church, so Pathway’s marketing and recruiting costs are low. Until recently, its marketing involved primarily some Facebook promotions and asking its missionaries around the world to hand out small promotional cards to prospects.

Until recently, Pathway’s marketing involved primarily some Facebook promotions and asking its missionaries around the world to hand out small promotional cards to prospects.

Some big online colleges spend as much as 20 percent of their budgets on marketing and recruiting. By contrast, marketing costs for PathwayConnect amount to 0.14 percent of the BYU Pathway Worldwide budget, officials there say, although that parent operation spends more than that marketing the rest of its online courses.

For most students, Pathway also serves as the first stop in BYU-Idaho’s online academic program, which is deliberately designed as a series of “stackable credentials” — bite-size certifications that have gained popularity nationwide as a way to give people marketable credentials in the short run that could eventually lead them to to full degrees. After Pathway, every certificate a student earns can count toward an associate degree, and every associate degree can count toward a bachelor’s. The 14-credit professional sales certificate, for example, counts toward the 60-credit applied associate degree, which counts toward a full 120-credit bachelor’s in business management.

“We have a phrase: ‘no credit left behind,’” says Mr. Gilbert, who was president of BYU-Idaho before taking on the new Pathway Worldwide post in February. Certificates and degrees are developed in consultation with an arm of the church called Self-Reliance Services, which assists in deciding which degrees to develop and where they should be offered, based on research it does on local-market employment needs.

The pedagogy is also based on proven ideas, including a hybrid model that combines online education with real-world encounters: The mandatory weekly in-person session, which is called Gathering, divided into one section for students 30 and under and another for those who are older, provides students a live support network of peers, separate from the group of students they interact with online through their formal online classes.

PathwayConnect requires every student to take a turn as “lead student” during Gathering, directing the group in a review of the week’s work. Learning by teaching is a time-honored educational technique. Sharing this responsibility also fits with the teachings of Mormonism, explains Becky Michela, 66, the lead student for the older students’ religion course, “The Eternal Family,” this particular evening explains. “As Latter-Day Saints, we say there’s truth everywhere,” she says.”

Congratulations to BYU-Idaho for its program.  Hybrid/blended model, low-cost, active student learning, and student support services make for a successful program.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In light of  Donald Trump Jr.’s  meeting with a Russian lawyer and subsequent misstatements, the New Yorker magazine gave a sneak preview of its cover for next week.   It’s titled ‘Grounded’ and shows a seemingly agitated President Trump pulling Donald Trump Jr. by the ear as they are getting off Air Force One.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

David Brooks, in his New York Times column this morning, examines four generations of the Trump family and their affect on Donald Trump Jr.  Brooks comments:

“I don’t think moral obliviousness is built in a day. It takes generations to hammer ethical considerations out of a person’s mind and to replace them entirely with the ruthless logic of winning and losing; to take the normal human yearning to be good and replace it with a single-minded desire for material conquest; to take the normal human instinct for kindness and replace it with a law-of-the-jungle mentality. It took a few generations of the House of Trump, in other words, to produce Donald Jr.

Brooks further comments:

Once the scandal broke you would think Don Jr. would have some awareness that there were ethical stakes involved. You’d think there would be some sense of embarrassment at having been caught lying so blatantly.

But in his interview with Sean Hannity he appeared incapable of even entertaining any moral consideration. “That’s what we do in business,” the younger Trump said. “If there’s information out there, you want it.” As William Saletan pointed out in Slate, Don Jr. doesn’t seem to possess the internal qualities necessary to consider the possibility that he could have done anything wrong.

That to me is the central takeaway of this week’s revelations. It’s not that the Russia scandal may bring down the administration. It’s that over the past few generations the Trump family has built an enveloping culture that is beyond good and evil.

The Trumps have an ethic of loyalty to one another. “They can’t stand that we are extremely close and will ALWAYS support each other,” Eric Trump tweeted this week. But beyond that there is no attachment to any external moral truth or ethical code. There is just naked capitalism.”

Right now the “naked capitalist” Donald Trump, Sr. is the face of the United States to much of the rest of the world.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Peter Wood, President of the right-leaning National Association of Scholars, has a commentary on The Chronicle of Higher Education’s story about the recent Pew Research Center survey on American attitudes toward higher education. The survey of 2,504 adults found a dramatic shift in the percentage of Republicans who see colleges and universities having “a positive effect on the way things are going in the country.” The finding has been widely reported: In just two years, Republicans have flipped from a majority (54 percent) saying higher education has a positive effect on the country, to a majority (58 percent) saying the opposite.  Here is Wood’s position:

“I am heartened by the news. It has taken a lot to break through the complacency of these voters. In my role as head of the National Association of Scholars, I’ve given speeches at countless grassroots events, written or published hundreds of articles, and spent hours on talk radio in an effort to persuade ordinary Americans that something is terribly amiss in higher education. The Pew survey suggests that at least some people have begun to listen…

…The parallel question about Democrats matters at least as much. Why are only 28 percent of Democrats in the Pew poll worried about higher education’s effect on the future of the country? Shortsightedness. It might be energizing to believe that the university is wholly on your political side, but the danger of raising a generation steeped in the politics of resentment, power for its own sake, and loathing of intellectual disagreement ought to alarm liberals. This can come to no good end.

Our colleges and universities may get some things right — even that is disputable — but they are getting civic education wrong. They are graduating students whose “activism” is rooted in an odd conjunction of utopian wish and apocalyptic fantasy. A significant portion of those campus activists are nihilistic, bitter, mean-spirited, and, of course, self-righteous. Their worst impulses, those impulses to put the pursuit of power ahead of the desire to learn, are encouraged by the identity politics of the faculty and the expediency of college administrators.

The Pew poll suggests far more than it can plausibly show. It suggests that Republican voters have at last begun to relinquish their fond hope that our colleges and universities are, despite numerous defects, still a net good for the United States. The exorbitant costs, the student-debt crisis, the immolation of the humanities, the trivialization of much of the curriculum, the turn to making an accusation of “sexual harassment” into proof of guilt — none of that was enough to cancel the patience of conservatives with an institution they are by nature inclined to love. But Middlebury? Taken in company with the other such fiascoes, yes, that was enough.”

I don’t agree with everything that Wood says.  I believe the Pew survey reflects more the fact that the American people have become tribal with regard to their politics.  You are either with them or against them.  Higher education has moved more and more to the progessive Democratic Party alienating those in the Republican camp.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A New York Times editorial this morning highlights a lawsuit filed in Federal District Court in Washington, in which attorneys general from 19 states and the District of Columbia served notice that they will resist any attempt by the Trump administration to weaken regulations that protect students and taxpayers from predatory schools.   The lawsuit focuses on regulations that schools provide students with clear information about whether their graduates were earning enough money to pay down their loans. Most crucially, it made sure that schools — not taxpayers — would foot the bill for discharging the loans of students who had been defrauded.

The regulations were completed last fall, after years of negotiations and a review of more than 10,000 comments from students, colleges, government officials and consumer advocates. But shortly after the Trump administration took office, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos put the most important changes on hold. Ms. DeVos said she was responding to a suit filed by an association representing for-profit colleges, which have fought to block the rules. But the attorneys general believe the move is a natural extension of the department’s new open-door policy toward the for-profit industry.

The full editorial is below. 

Tony

===========================================

States Fight to Protect Students of Schools

By the Editorial Board

July 13, 2017

Long before the federal government roused itself, individual state governments were fighting to bring discipline to an unruly and untrustworthy corner of the educational market — for-profit schools that saddle students with crushing debt in exchange for degrees that are essentially useless.

The states are still fighting the good fight: In a lawsuit filed last week in Federal District Court in Washington, attorneys general from 19 states and the District of Columbia served notice that they will resist any attempt by the Trump administration to weaken or ignore hard-won regulations that protect students and taxpayers from predatory schools.

One such attempt has already been identified. This spring, the Education Department abruptly suspended federal rules that allow students who have been defrauded by colleges to have their federal loans forgiven. The state coalition, led by Attorney General Maura Healey of Massachusetts, says that in so doing the department broke the law. The suit asks the court to declare the action illegal and to order the department to implement the rule without delay.

The idea of compensating borrowers when schools mislead or defraud them dates back to the 1970s, when federal officials saw that some colleges were looting the federal student aid program while giving students nothing in return. In 1993, Congress ordered the secretary of education to develop a process allowing defrauded students to seek loan forgiveness. The Obama administration streamlined the process after the collapse and bankruptcy, in 2014, of the giant for-profit chain Corinthian, which left thousands of students mired in debt and without degrees.

The Obama administration took other important steps. It required schools to provide students with clear information about whether their graduates were earning enough money to pay down their loans. Most crucially, it made sure that schools — not taxpayers — would foot the bill for discharging the loans of students who had been defrauded.

The rules were completed last fall, after years of negotiations and a review of more than 10,000 comments from students, colleges, government officials and consumer advocates. But shortly after the Trump administration took office, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos put the most important changes on hold. Ms. DeVos said she was responding to a suit filed by an association representing for-profit colleges, which have fought to block the rules. But the attorneys general believe the move is a natural extension of the department’s new open-door policy toward the for-profit industry.

The Department of Education is free to change these rules, but only if it writes new ones in a process laid out in federal law that could take a year or more to run its course. Meanwhile, the court should require the department to enforce the rules that are already on the books.

Dear Commons Community,

As the Donald Trump Jr. Russian connection gets more sordid, Vice President Mike Pence yesterday offered a statement that can only be interpreted as trying to distance himself from the issue.  As reported in The Huffington Post:

“The carefully worded response from Pence’s press secretary Marc Lotter attempts to absolve the vice president of any responsibility and involvement. It makes a point of mentioning that Donald Trump Jr.’s June 2016 meeting ― which was also attended by Trump’s then-campaign chairman Paul Manafort and Trump’s son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner ― took place before Pence joined the presidential ticket.

“The vice president is working every day to advance the president’s agenda,” the statement from Pence’s office says. “He was not aware of the meeting. He is also not focused on stories about the campaign ― especially those pertaining to the time before he joined the campaign.”

Ron Klain, who served as chief of staff for Vice Presidents Al Gore and Joe Biden, said that Pence’s statement was particularly unusual.

In an interview in January, Pence denied that there were any ties between Trump campaign officials and Russian officials.

“Well, of course not,” Pence told CBS’ John Dickerson. “And I think to suggest that is to give credence to some of these bizarre rumors that have swirled around the candidacy.”

This sounds like the White House ship has sprung another leak and a member of the crew is lining up to make sure he has a seat on a lifeboat.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times editorial this morning characterizes the Trump family and their advisers as perpetrating a culture of dishonesty in light of Donald Trump Jr.’s recent meeting with Russian attorney,  Natalia Veselnitskaya.  Below is the complete editorial.

Other media people including Charles Krauthammer (Syndicated Columnist) are saying the same thing.  On Fox News last night, Krauthammer said:

“that people in President Trump’s orbit have an “epidemic of amnesia having to do with the Russians.”

Krauthammer said that of the three people in the meeting with Natalia Veselnitskaya – Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner – no one remembered anything until now.

Krauthammer said Trump Jr. is similar to Bill Clinton, in that he has an “approximate approach to the truth.”

“As if, saying it is a last resort,” Krauthammer said, adding that the president’s son gave three explanations for the meeting.”

Tony

===============================

New York Times

Editorial Staff

July 11, 2017

—————————–

At a critical juncture in Donald Trump’s presidential campaign last year, his son Donald Trump Jr. met with Natalia Veselnitskaya, a Kremlin-connected Russian lawyer who promised to share political dirt on Hillary Clinton. Paul Manafort, Mr. Trump’s campaign chairman at the time, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law and a key strategist, also attended.

The June 9, 2016, meeting is of obvious interest to Robert Mueller III, the Justice Department special counsel investigating the Trump team’s potential involvement in Russia’s effort to influence the presidential election. In two clumsy statements over the weekend, the younger Mr. Trump on Saturday said the meeting was related to Russia’s freezing of an adoption program popular with Americans. When confronted a day later with a Times story citing authoritative sources that Ms. Veselnitskaya had promised damaging material on Mrs. Clinton, he said that the information she supplied was essentially meaningless and merely a “pretext” for discussing the adoption issue.

On the face of it, this seemed a clear though perhaps unintended admission by Donald Trump Jr. that he had gone into the meeting expecting damaging information, and the episode is clearly grist for Mr. Mueller’s mill. As is a report Monday night by The Times that the president’s son had received an email saying Ms. Veselnitskaya’s information came from Moscow. But his shifty statements are also further evidence of how freely his father and the people around the president contort the truth. Only six months in, President Trump has compiled a record of dishonesty — ranging from casual misstatements to flat-out lies — without precedent in the modern presidency. Equally disheartening is his team’s willingness to share in his mendacity.

On Sunday, before Donald Trump Jr. acknowledged that there was a Clinton-related aspect to the meeting, Reince Priebus, the White House chief of staff, was on Fox News suggesting that the Veselnitskaya episode was “a big nothingburger” for the Trump campaign.

If a culture of dishonesty takes root in an administration, how can Americans believe anything its officials say? Take, for instance, the matter of whether President Vladimir Putin of Russia personally directed Moscow’s hacking of the 2016 presidential election. In statements dating from his first days in office until the eve of his meeting with Mr. Putin in Germany last week, when he said “nobody really knows,” Mr. Trump has deflected and sought to discredit his own intelligence agencies’ finding that Moscow, at Mr. Putin’s direction, tried to disrupt the election to help him win. Rex Tillerson, the secretary of state, said after the American and Russian presidents met in Hamburg that they “had a very robust and lengthy exchange on the subject” and that Mr. Trump had “pressed” Mr. Putin on the issue. Later, Mr. Trump made much the same claim on Twitter. The Russian foreign minister, Sergey Lavrov, had quite a different version of the facts, suggesting that Mr. Trump had characterized the hacking controversy as a “campaign” against Russia in which “not a single fact has been produced.” So whom should Americans believe? In a more credible administration, who would ever ask?

On Monday, Donald Trump Jr. hired a lawyer, while maintaining on Twitter that he’d been forthright in answering questions about the meeting last year. Meanwhile, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, deputy press secretary, blew more smoke: The “only thing I see inappropriate” about the meeting, she said, is that it was leaked to the media.

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has a featured article today reporting that as a result of a  “backlash” of racist events in 2015, the University of Missouri is being shunned by both black and white students.  Enrollments along with revenue are plummeting resulting in cuts of more 400 positions.  Here is an excerpt from the article:

“In the fall of 2015, a grassy quadrangle at the center of the University of Missouri became known nationwide as the command center of an escalating protest.

Students complaining of official inaction in the face of racial bigotry joined forces with a graduate student on a hunger strike. Within weeks, with the aid of the football team, they had forced the university system president and the campus chancellor to resign.

It was a moment of triumph for the protesting students. But it has been a disaster for the university.

Freshman enrollment at the Columbia campus, the system’s flagship, has fallen by more than 35 percent in the two years since.

The university administration acknowledges that the main reason is a backlash from the events of 2015, as the campus has been shunned by students and families put off by, depending on their viewpoint, a culture of racism or one where protesters run amok.

Before the protests, the university, fondly known as Mizzou, was experiencing steady growth and building new dormitories. Now, with budget cuts due to lost tuition and a decline in state funding, the university is temporarily closing seven dormitories and cutting more than 400 positions, including those of some non-tenured faculty members, through layoffs and by leaving open jobs unfilled.

Few areas have been spared: The library is even begging for books.

“The general consensus was that it was because of the aftermath of what happened in November 2015,” said Mun Choi, the new system president, referring to the climax of the demonstrations.

“There were students from both in state and out of state that just did not apply, or those who did apply but decided not to attend.”

The protests inspired movements at other colleges. Since then fights over overt and subconscious racial slights, as well as battles over free speech, have broken out at Middlebury College in Vermont, the University of California, Berkeley, and The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Wash. Missouri’s experience shows how a conflict, if not deftly handled, can stain a college’s reputation long after the conflict has died down.

Students of all races have shunned Missouri, but the drop in freshman enrollment last fall was strikingly higher among blacks, at 42 percent, than among whites, at 21 percent.”

A sad situation that will take years to rectify.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Yesterday, President Donald Trump tweeted his support for a new partnership with Russian President Vladimir Putin to craft an “impenetrable cyber security unit” that would work to prevent election hacking.

Some 12 hours later, those plans were dramatically scaled back as the president said even though he discussed them, they “can’t” happen.

The abrupt about-face came after a slew of lawmakers lambasted Trump’s proposal to guard against “election hacking and many other negative things.”

On Meet The Press  Sunday morning, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) called the plan “not the dumbest idea I’ve ever heard, but it’s pretty close.” Graham slammed the president for “forgiving and forgetting” Russian tampering in last year’s election, and said the move only increased suspicion of the Trump administration.

“The more he talks about this in terms of not being sure, the more he throws our intelligence communities under the bus, the more he’s willing to forgive and forget Putin, the more suspicion,” Graham continued. “And I think it’s going to dog his presidency until he breaks this cycle.”

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) doubled down on those assertions on Face the Nation, saying Sunday he was sure Putin could surely help tackle the issue of cybersecurity “since he’s doing the hacking.”

Trump said he “strongly pressed” Putin during their meeting at the G-20 summit in Germany about Russian meddling in the U.S. election, but his counterpart “vehemently denied” any such efforts. Trump has mostly rejected any evidence of interference by Moscow, despite U.S. intelligence agencies saying Putin personally ordered an “influence campaign” to help him defeat rival Hillary Clinton.

Marco Rubio is not on board either with President Trump’s plan to partner with Russian President Vladimir Putin to form a Cyber Security Unit. Rubio expressed his concern in a series of tweets.

He wrote, “While reality & pragmatism requires that we engage Vladimir Putin, he will never be a trusted ally or a reliable constructive partner.”

Partnering with Putin on a ‘Cyber Security Unit’ is akin to partnering with Assad on a ‘Chemical Weapons Unit,” Rubio continued.

We might finally be seeing some crack in Republican support for Trump.

Tony