President Obama proposed a plan to rate colleges much as
schools are rated now. Their federal assistance would be based on
performance indicators. This is supposed to save money but 75% of
college instructors are already adjuncts, working for peanuts. More
likely, the President loves Big Data and wants metrics. Next step:
technology to replace adjuncts. That will cut costs for sure. The
ideal university: a President overseeing 4,000 computers and an IT
staff to repair them.
For some strange reason, the Obama administration wants to extend federal control over the world’s greatest system of higher education. It is not as if there is evidence for anything they propose. It never occurs to them that they could break the system by Imposing the cost and burden of federal mandates.
Dare I say that I predicted this in January 2012
when speaking to the National Association of Independent
Colleges and Universities? How will they test and measure the value
of art history? Latin? Sociology? Music? Who ARE these
people?
Diane Ravitch's blog 
Reblogged this on Kids in the system.
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Is he going to include Sasha and Malia’s college(s) in this?
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Yes, looks like it would.
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Yes, private colleges are included because most of them accept students who are on financial aid and the rankings are intended to be tied to financial aid.
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Of course not. His kids are saved.
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Seriously, if they can’t rustle up a Real, Old-Fashioned, Paleo-Democrat pretty darn quick, the party will soon be as dead-headed as that other one.
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It already dies with Clinton. Now there are only a handful of real progressives left, like Bernie Sanders . . .
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But Bernie is an (I) …
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Maybe we can convince them to form a ‘neoliberal’ party so we wouldn’t vote for them by mistake as Democrats.
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They could brand it the “Genetically Modified Democratic Party”.
But it would probably take an Act of Congress to make ’em wear labels …
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just because you CAN measure something doesn’t mean you SHOULD measure it. i would suggest that the things we value and cherish most in this life are those that are the most resistant to measurement. a college education, like a PK-12 education, is exactly the sort of thing that can’t truly be measured in the way that these metrics obsessed folks think it can.
due to being starved of needed resources, and relentless attempts at privatization, our public schools are now in trouble. when someone is drowning you throw them a life preserver, you don’t measure the depth of the water.
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measuring liberal arts learning is as silly as measuring love…
http://oneteachersperspective.blogspot.com/2013/02/along-with-learning-lets-measure-love.html
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The bidness & industry dilettantes have wanted to marginalize “useless” (their word) liberal arts studies for years. They’d be perfectly happy to see literature, poetry, art, sociology, and psychology go away.
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Maybe they are not people but robots?
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I have been warning my colleagues who teach college of this reform movement’s penetration into higher education, and they’ve always looked at me like I had two heads. . . .
I am not into “I told you so” moments, but it is only a matter of time where the rich facilities, like Harvard and Yale, will be able to insulate themselves from this metrics obsessed direction, just like private I have been warning my colleagues who teach college of this reform movement’s penetration into higher education, and they’ve always looked at me like I had two heads. . . .
I am not into “I told you so” moments, but it is only a matter of time where the rich facilities, like Harvard and Yale, will be able to insulate themselves from this metrics obsessed direction, just like private schools and schools in wealthy municipalities. There will be a parallel in both realms of education, and it will be based on money.
This will also spell the death knell of the Democratic party because they have crossed the aisles on education so much and have become just as monied and bought. With no two party distinctions, straddlers and moderates will go back to the GOP, figuring that less government involvement is better than that the brand offered by the Democrats and Obama.
The Democrats, who I have only supported, are enfuriating and an outright disgrace. They have alienated people like me, and have shown their true colors.
Of course, there are severe exceptions to this, but such people are few and far. . . Perhaps that will change if they choose to wake up to popular sentiment, the very element that used to drive most politics, the very core that makes up a democracy.
Remember populism in the 1930’s?
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This is illegal…federal interference with schools and education is against teh Constitution..Education like voting is left to the states…Eric Holder is suing Texas and now Obama is messing with higher education. This Obama Adm is disastrous!
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Obama/Duncan have circumvented the Constitution before, but my understanding is that this still has to pass Congress.
We have to organize and let our representatives know that we strongly oppose the federal intrusion on P-20 education.
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Let’s see if the bought out Republicans go along with it. A real Republican would never allow this much Federal interference. The modern Republicans are a bunch of hypocrites and prob will go along with it all.
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Correction: Please ignore second paragraph in my last comment. I edited it and forgot to delete the old version. . . .
I can’t stand the lack of editing capabilities . . . oops!
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I can’t imagine he could “force” this on private colleges. He has to be targeting public or semi-public universities.
The kicker though, is that all universities have a high amount of selectivity in who they accept (so there isn’t the same creaming problem public schools have with charters).
I imagine they will push through or otherwise much more strictly enforce laws to try to ensure equality – and those colleges that are rated will be ranked and sorted, and closed one by one as their admissions will drop as students will perceive less “value” and tuition will have to go up in response to less funding.
It will be interesting to see who colleges perceive as “college ready” when we haven’t given the new “college and career readiness standards” a chance to kick in – why are we always putting the cart before the horse?
So we’re going to shut down access to public colleges to all but the competitive elite by restricting more and more choices? What are they going to do – purchase more college campuses?
Replace college with a computerized education? What is indeed WRONG with these people. How do they arrive at the solution before they’ve even looked at the problem. How are they saying that this can POSSIBLY be good for higher education when it hasn’t even produced consistent or even good results in secondary or elementary education except for the consistency of gaming statistics.
What is the perfect test that measures exactly what you want it to and screens out the stuff you don’t want?
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Because this is all based on money, money, money, money, money
Everything the Obama Adm has done deals with making $$$
How does that song go???
Corporates (Walton, Gates, Rhee, Broad, Christie, Jindal, Bloomberg etc etc) and Obama go together
like a horse and carriage….
They are all in bed with one another. It does not take a rocket scientist to see this… but it will
take a grass roots movement and a lot of convincing to parents,to prove that what these “self serving”
“seeking profit and even more profit” billionaires advocate is destructive to public education.
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There IS no “left-right” in American politics anymore. It’s the tiny few against the rest of us.
It’s a fight to the death, folks.
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It applies to any school that accepts students who receive federal financial aid, which is virtually all public AND private colleges.
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Many argue that tuition has already gone up as a response to less funding; decades of fed & state cuts to higher ed have everything to do with today’s outrageous tuitions.
Forty years ago as a middle-class kid I was able to get a private Ivy League arts education for the same [very reasonable] price as SUNY kids thanks to a regents scholarship (& I was no Nat’l Merit Scholar). In the 2000’s such monies were not available to my kids, nor were on-campus jobs available to any but the poorest kids; as to FAFSA, gov-subsidized loans were only for those paying 40%+ of their income to college tuition (tho I was welcome to take out 6.8% loans from private banks servicing the gov’t).
The funds I got in the ’60’s were thanks to a roaring economy, & today’s dreary higher-ed picture is thanks to an economy in the doldrums. NCLB, RTTT, & the current suggestion to apply the same ideas to higher ed, simply reflect our leaders’ plan to eliminate what’s left of education overhead from the American wage. Third world, here we come!
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INSANE!!!
But it’s not going to happen.
Let them just try to move forward with this! So far, they’ve found it fairly easy to push around PreK-12 teachers, though that is changing. But they will find that if they try to tell professors in universities how and what they must teach, how they and their schools must be evaluated, what “standards” they must teach to, and so on, they will have a war on their hands. This will not be pretty.
The presumption of these people is astonishing. Incredible. Truly mind-blowing.
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And don’t forget–the abolition of tenure, which in higher ed IS a lifetime appointment, although tenure-track positions are increasingly rare in higher ed.
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Thank you Mr Shepherd, your excoriations give me hope!
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My only tolerable hope is that this won’t go through because higher ed is composed primarily of males, whereas P-12 is mostly women.
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It’s interesting that a few months ago, Gates penned an editorial calling for just such a system.
We are ruled by the wind-up toys of plutocrats.
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That’s all the Dept of Ed does. Ask Gates what they should do and then do it. Can you believe Obama turned out this way? He must be one of the worst presidents this country has ever had.
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Let’s see.
I am a music major
I gave up a highly paid career in data processing to become a teacher.
While my alma mater, Haverford College, has produced some very successful people – Howard Lutnick and Barry Zubrow immediately come to mind – given its Quaker roots many alums like me choose careers of service whose remuneration is far less. Does that mean our excellent alma mater would be downgraded by Obama?
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Yes!
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You are obviously a slacker and should be taxed more. Your brains and talent are being wasted on the poor. Shame on you for choosing a life of service to others when you could be making MUCH MUCH more by making multinational corporations richer.
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Really sad.
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The book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: with this title one would never guess the most serious question posed by it.
” How does one measure QUALITY in contrast to quantity?
Pirsig was so right on………………..so perspicacious.
Cyborg 1939 ( site has misspelling of Cyborg!)…
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Some colleges sat quietly and was complicit in the K-12 takeover now it has come and bit them on the behind.
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First they came for the….
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But they stayed for the prices!
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Only while supplies lasted.
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Well played.
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Well said, Dienne!
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This is about destroying the public system of higher education, including community colleges and limiting ALL educational access for the 99.9 percent.
Only the Ivy League and the very few similar schools of the rich and powerful will be immune from this attack.
Where is the movement to impeach Obama and Duncan?
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The Ivies could stand to lose a lot with the proposal, given that they receive a disproportionate amount of federal aid. Depends on the details. I’d hold off before blowing the “this is about destroying public education” horn.
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I can’t imagine the Ivies will be affected all that much. This is basically abolishing the public system of higher education, just as Obama and Duncan want to abolish K-12 public ed.
Those two need to be impeached and removed, but the problem is almost ALL of our politicians are bought off by the same crooks who back Obama and Duncan.
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I think Susan is right. If this plan is anything like current Obama/Duncan education policies, then standardized testing and national standards will be mandated and I believe that will affect public colleges much more than private schools. In any case, I think those components would dramatically lower the quality of higher ed everywhere.
It’s unbelievable that this administration has respect only for business people, makes draconian decisions that are life-changing events for the masses, based on corporate influences and priorities, and listens to no one who actually knows anything about education.
Since I’m one of the 75% contingent faculty and I am destined to work until I die, because I have no pension and SS won’t pay even half my rent, I believe that I am watching my only remaining livelihood disappear today.
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My main problem with this is I have no idea what it means. Standardized tests in colleges? I don’t see the basis for that fear at all. I see a lot of other problems, but I don’t see that one.
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Did you watch Diane’s video? She predicted this and it’s not a vision that is free from the accountability requirements that the Obama administration has imposed on P-12 education.
They have not told us the details yet, but other things came out previously that point to similar accountability requirements in higher ed. Obama/Duncan let it be known they want the test scores of children to be linked to their teachers’ teachers in higher education and it is not just Schools of Education who train those teachers. A minimum of half of what teachers study in universities is learned in Colleges of Arts and Sciences. So who will be held accountable when children don’t score well on tests in Math? The School of Ed professor who taught the teacher the Math Methods course or all of the Math professors who taught Math courses to the teacher?
And will a test obsessed administration be satisfied letting accountability just be based on the children’s standardized test scores and not the scores of people when they are going through college?
BTW, in lower ed, just because teachers don’t teach tested subjects does not mean they can escape the same test-based accountability requirements as those who do…
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No, I haven’t watched it yet. I think K-12 is very different for a whole bunch of reasons (financially, politically, historically). And Obama isn’t Mike Bloomberg. It’s 2013, not 2009, and I see no indication that he’s interested in opening up a huge new war on a new front when his K-12 initiatives are in the balance.
Maybe I’m really naive, we’ll see. But to me this sounds extraordinarily paranoid and irrational. I’d prefer people to focus on the parts of the plan that are known and which seem like horrible ideas to me. Those important points just get obscured by the conspiracy theory.
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Diane was speaking to college presidents in her video.
In many ways, the federal government can actually have more control over higher ed due to the fact that both public and private colleges accept financial aid.
Rather than characterizing this as a “conspiracy theory,” I think you need to give some credence to people here who are from higher education.
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I’m always ready to give credence to arguments that make sense and draw reasonable inferences from facts. So far I haven’t seen any argument that remotely supports the claim that Obama or the Ed Department intends to make financial aid contingent on colleges and universities’ demonstrating student proficiency through annual standardized tests. It seems like a conspiracy theory to me so far.
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“We understand that the U.S. Department of Education, with broad input from the field through a formal negotiated rulemaking process, is developing or has developed regulations that would require states to: 1) meaningfully assess teacher preparation program performance; and, 2) hold programs accountable for results…. we are pleased to see they came together behind the idea of tying teacher preparation program quality directly to the student outcomes of their graduates (including outcomes for students with disabilities and English Language Learners).”
Click to access CoalitionRevisedFile.pdf
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I warned about some of this last February, in this piece which went viral at Valerie Strauss’s blog. Allow me to quote myself:
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whatever happened to the dumpduncan crusade? Why start another when there is one in place?
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I don’t know exactly how these ratings would be calculated, or what kind of aid they would apply to (perhaps all federal aid?). But on the surface at least, it seems like there could be some counterproductive consequences to this. On the one hand, it’s my understanding that generally, the more you go down the college prestige ladder, the thinner the operating margins get. The students can’t afford to pay as much tuition and there’s more reliance on government aid versus private donors. So it might be more difficult for community colleges and tons of state schools to reduce their costs than it would be for the Dartmouths and the Browns. To the extent that a ratings formula were based on cost trends (i.e., shifting aid away from schools with the fasting growing costs and toward schools with lower or even negative cost growth), wouldn’t it hurt these “low-end” colleges? (Seems like other performance measures have the potential to hurt low-end schools, too — for example, graduate rate. I don’t now but I would assume 4-year graduation rates have some correlation to the income of students’ parents.)
On the other hand, if costs are compared not on a growth basis but in absolute terms — so that the most expensive schools got the least aid — doesn’t that defeat the purpose of need-based aid? (This is assuming the ratings would apply to need-based aid in the first place.) Other things equal, a student attending Harvard will need more aid than a student attending a community college.
Also, I understand the argument about subsidizing cost increases. But what if private lenders step into the gaps where federal aid recedes? As long as that credit is available (and can be securitized), the subsidies may remain at the same levels, while students themselves get stuck with more of the debt burden.
Conjectural stuff, but seems potentially problematic from a number of angles.
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These are people I wish not to, but am forced by circumstance to associate with. Just thinking… (11 second version).
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Villagers with Pitchforks (Frankenstein)
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Infatuation with metrics is a plague upon our society. It is infecting police departments, hospitals, charities, and most other aspects of civic life. Despite what the tech billionaires believe, not every public good can be measured and quantified. A caring, inspiring teacher or professor cannot be measured and quantified.
It is so wrong, and so frustrating, that school reformers have ruined public schools and now they want to go after universities.
Enough!
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It occurs to me also that this is the capstone to sending students the message that the system will take care of their grades all the way through college.
So expectations will go down at colleges – they’ll have to – or heads will roll.
We’ll eventually arrive at a place where common standards will be demanded for colleges after colleges fail to enforce higher standards or else their departments will face sanctions.
Who will actually be able to THINK in this country after our highest institutions are compromised because teachers can only control the grade and the metrics – not the attendance – not the students’ efforts.
They will leave school at 23 or 24, believing that because they could deliver the “right” answer, that they are prepared for the life ahead of them. What will happen when they discover most problems don’t have 1 good answer and sometimes that there aren’t apparent answers at all.
Colleges are about to be beaten with a financial stick that will hurt them, and hurt their students. How can we possibly go this route when we’ve been here before and we see that it does not work?
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Why would Americans put up with this?
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And like K-12 NCLB, the for profit “solutions” to the “failures” of public higher ed will not be held to the same standards.
With Democrats like this, we need a new national party that isn’t beholden to Wall Street.
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I so agree. It might be pertinent to support the “Get Money Out [of govt] ” campaign (Dylan Ratigan) & other campaign finance reform efforts.
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One of the most important components not mentioned yet is whether the federal government will be mandating standardized testing in colleges. However, considering the ranking that is to take place and the fact this was designed by people who have already demonstrated that they are obsessed with tests, as well as their corporate connections to testing companies, including the College Board, I cannot imagine them not mandating standardized tests THROUGHOUT college.
Honestly, as someone who has taught college for 20 years, I believe that the single most influential factor that would LIMIT the number of students who attend and graduate college would be mandating standardized testing there (not to mention what that would do to decrease the quality of a college education).
So please, don’t fall for the farce that all of this is intended to increase the number of college graduates. I think it would have the opposite effect and intentionally so.
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I just don’t think President Obama and Arne Duncan have any credibility on the “middle class.”
They seem to be following a theory that says the way to make a middle class is to push all wages down to 15 dollars an hour. I guess if “college” (however they envision “college”) gets cheap enough people who make 15 dollars an hour can “afford” it (with lots of interest-generating loans) but that isn’t going to shrink income inequality.
We’ll simply have a very small group of wealthy people and a HUGE group of working poor.
They might do better on this if they expanded their list of education advisors past the same three billionaires. That would be a start.
Looking at how they have privatized K-12 public education, my best bet is to wait them out and hope they don’t “reform” any public preschools and colleges. Limit the damage.
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Organizations where students can take loans without collateral, in amounts dictated by the gatekeepers of those institutions and the government assumes the vast majority of risk for those loans.
And now the government is going to force people to take out larger and larger loans to compensate for reductions in aid to particular colleges, and that money will be put…where?
What will happen when we have a generation of adults who have paid more for college than anyone before them, and, they’re not prepared to think for themselves both when they make a decision to go to college, and, that they will not be properly prepared for their fields because their professors will be afraid to fail them once their tenure is broken.
We will have a crisis that will make 2008 look like a warm up – a generation of students told that they have to go to college no matter what, given less aid than ever, given less education and less standards than ever, and not likely be prepared to make the livings they envision once they’re done because so many will get college educations and everyone will be in massive debt.
When high paying jobs fail to materialize to pay back all of these loans, who will be responsible for paying the banks? And who will the government look to in order to recoup all of this private student debt money?
Pensions, Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security. We’re being set up again for another massive implosion that is going to rock the lower classes into multi-generational debt that’s worse than ever before and when the government has to foot the bill, they will do it on the backs of those who can’t afford to contribute to their campaigns.
This needs to end.
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Great post!
I have been thinking about this a lot lately and I think that the lizard people (privatizeers) are aching for the days of labor stocks, a permanent underclass to use and dispose of however they wish – much like South African Apartheid. Except by way of race, it is by metrics and debt, and privatized education serves as a function to destroy any possibility of social order within labor stocks by denying value to human life.
I say this as someone who is taking an online test prep course (Kaplan) and I have to say that if this is the future of education, then there is no other possible future. It’s miserable and alienating, and you’ll have to pay it to play it.
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What you say assumes that families cannot think for themselves and simply follow the gov’t & media mantra. I have to agree that for the most vulnerable in society–those at whom neoliberal policies are aimed– this may be true in large part & I agree that it’s unconscionable.
However there is room for those of us in the middle class, who also suffer under these policies, to move out of this box. There is more than one generation missing from the trades. In the ’90’s in my town I encountered several families whose wise tradesman dads saw the writing on the walls & convinced their college-educated sons to join them in small family ‘handyman’ businesses catering to 2-career families w/neither time nor talent to maintain their homes. Such operations have 6-mo waiting lists now. I had a self-employed plumber w/a mech engrg degree in the same era. I have a brother who has put kids thro college as a home-builder & meanwhile has built a side career in teaching/judging ballroom dancing.
In the 2000’s when my kids were on the college track, I saw a number of their colleagues–after eyeing the declining job market for college grads– choose combo vo-tech/hs degrees & move into immediate small-business work. The pay may not be great, but it beats training for entry-level corporate work which simply is not out there any more.
My kids as musicians w/tech skills needed college, but could find what they needed at the new tech-y 4-yr programs in lower-cost colleges. The key is, they know they’ll have to start at $20/hr, serve local markets, & supplement their income giving lessons, work paying gigs, sell CD’s, network w/an eye to a small-biz future.
None of the examples I cite could have made a living without the benefit of a fine k-12 education. We as parents need to keep our eye on the ball & fight for that, & I think we should have a 2-pronged approach to bring vocational education strongly back into the picture.
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For those who think America can afford to “wait them out,” consider that the next step is very likely to be something akin to Race to the Top – Higher Learning Challenge, much like they did for PreK –which the DoE figured out how to impose on private programs even if they don’t take government funding.
Time to dissolve the federal DoE!
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That’d be one way to get Pell grants down to zero.
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By abolishing the DoE? State DoEs could administer financial aid. We don’t need a federal mediary –and we didn’t have one until 1980.
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I don’t know why we’d expect the states to do that. One of the biggest reasons that college costs are rising so quickly is that states are reducing their assistance.
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I received Pell grants before the federal DoE existed. They are not needed for that.
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You don’t necessarily need a cabinet-level agency to distribute financial aid, true. It may be that it would be more difficult to get the appropriations to fund student aid without a cabinet-level agency. On the other hand, maybe the high visibility of a cabinet-level budget line puts funding at risk when the winds of austerity are blowing. But good point.
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The federal DoE used to be a branch of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Carter changed that and made the DoE separate. Reagan intended to change it back, but while he was busy, his own people at the DoE made themselves indispensable by crafting the shock doctrine of “A Nation at Risk.” We are still dealing with the legacy of that hoax and I think the DoE should go back to being a branch of what is now called the Department of Health and Human Services.
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A lot of us predicted this. Actually I thought they would go after other public service employees such as fireman and policeman first. I mean if crime is high in a city or a part of town then it MUST be the fault of the policeman. OBVIOUSLY if they were good cops then there would be no crime on their beat. Low crime areas are also low crime because they have the good cops so they should also get merit pay. They MUST be doing something right because if crime is dropping then police have everything to do with it – not politicians, poverty, drugs, education, job opportunities etc….
Better yet. Have the the prisoners rate the policemen and tie scores to pay and employment. Made 30 arrests and 15 say you exhibited some form of police brutality then you will be let go because we all know prisoners would be totally impartial. This would also save millions by weeding out the bad cops before they do something stupid and get the department sued. Heck, you might even be able to get rid of some of the fat like internal affairs. No need for that kind of oversight – the tests and surveys will weed out the bad ones.
This is what I expect to see in 10 yrs. I know it seems stupid, illogical and completely divorced from reason but so is everything happening in education now.
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Bob the Science Guy,
The authorities will not go after the police and firefighters so much because they will depend on them to contain the protesting and demonstrating crowds that comprise the rest of us . . .
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Until they stabilize their own private police forces, that is.
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Forgot to add this thought:
Think of the money that could be saved if police protection was privatized. Someone once explained to me why police and firemen get compensated so good and have such good retirement options is because in 20-30 yrs there is a good chance you might catch a bullet or get seriously injured.
If police protection is done like the military recruitment then you could have 4-5 year contracts. In 4-5 years your chances of getting shot drop drastically compared to 20-30yrs and therefore the pay will also be reflected – just like the military – low pay.
Laugh now, but we are living in a dark comedy. After education the rich will need someone else to vilify and fleece.
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Hey, the only reason I’m laughing is because otherwise I’d be crying.
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Metrics have been used to degrade police departments already. Here’s a quote from a essay on that topic:
“For crime, the familiar example to many readers will be the TV series The Wire, which clearly demonstrates how the need for police to perform well on statistics often impedes them from doing actual good police work: let’s classify that death as accidental because it will be hard to solve as a homicide. Let’s arrest lots of low-level drug dealers on the corners rather than their bosses because our arrest stats go up. Etc. And this has been well documented in non-fictional police departments as well. There is an underlying goal: reduce crime. But the ways we measure this – number of cases solved, number of arrests made, etc – is crude, and is subject to manipulation by individual officers and departments. In the end, the use of these metrics probably becomes a bigger hindrance to crime fighting than a help.”
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My response to an appeal from Obama.
Dear President Obama,
This is personal for me too. I am an educator at a community college and I don’t want NCLB and RTTP BS brought to higher education. Hell, as a public school parent. I’m sick of it in public education. I am curious how Duncan and his gradgrinds will rate the effectiveness of art history and music programs on future earnings. Stop the number crunching and over testing and concentrate on educating our children! You are such a disappointment and are mis-educating our children!
Steven Levine
P.S. If you are looking for models for education, you should look no further than what you are familiar with: Harvard, Columbia and Sidwell Friends.
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When will the Secretary of Educ. be held accountable? Why doesn’t he have any metrics attached to his performance? I guess when billionaires own you the standards and accountability are nowhere to be found.
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Accountability for Duncan? He is happy that Common Core tests will cause scores to collapse but he should be held accountable just as teachers would be. It is on his watch, and caused by his choices.
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I mean, I have similar concerns about the quality of the assessment, but the White House is actually pretty clear about how they want to measure. It’s distributing federal financial aid according to a rating system that measures graduation rates and percent of students receiving Pell grants. There’s no NCLB-style standardized tests and teacher oversight here.
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Because this administration doesn’t believe in testing and evaluating teachers, or because they have not told us all of the details yet?
If I’ve learned anything from Obama, it’s to observe his patterns of behavior, rather than listen to what he says, because they typically differ dramatically.
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Comments at the nytimes article are closed. Here are mine on Obama’s proposal to apply NCLB-type ratings to higher education:
1. The obvious comment: Oh, that would be since NCLB has worked so well.
2. A sharp commenter at the site said, ” It seems this proposal will do little more than reduce the number of schools that low-income students can get aid from.” Sustitute the words “public education” for “aid” & you’ve got the NCLB connection.
3. Another sharp insight: “It’s this misguided attitude that education is a commodity, and parents should be savvy consumers, shopping around for the best refrigerator deal.” On target! Check out Chile for the 40-yr perspective on education-as-consumer good: exacerbated inequality, in effect, a return to 19thc elitism.
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Dear President Obama,
There is no way I can support you, because frankly, as a retired teacher, education is also very personal to me. It is time to stop measuring, collecting data, and printing score cards. Education is not a score. It is personal, it is relationship, it is the best of what you, Michele and I experienced during our college years. Students need financial aid, grants, scholarships, not data collection. Of course, your plan will not be popular, as it diminishes and demoralizes lifelong educators. Who will benefit? Pearson? The billionaire boys’ club? Eli Broad? David Coleman? I am thoroughly disappointed in the policies in place by your administration for public school students. What is being done to children today is not education, and I weep for the future of our country. I cannot in good faith believe your intentions for college are different.
Your administration was one I believed in, had faith in, with dreams and hopes for a better America. I no longer believe.
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If folks don’t see this as part of the bigger picture that big business has drawn for American education, now might be a good time to remind people of the memo by Lewis Powell, who wrote extensively about higher education and making colleges more like the University of Walmart, which many have seen as the blueprint for corporate domination:
http://reclaimdemocracy.org/powell_memo_lewis/
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Vote 3rd party like 1/3 of the younger voters did.
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The problem is you have to worry whether or not the billionaire mob controls all of the third parties.
I didn’t bother with Obama or Romney–I was one of the 38,000 who voted for Rocky Anderson.
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And some of us experienced voters did as well!
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I was under the impression that this rating was about how colleges were delivering the highest value for the dollar, given annual tuition increases far outpacing inflation.
Diane, I know you are good at presenting alternative ideas. So, what are we to do about these ginormous tuition hikes? I myself have suggested states doing audits of universities/colleges to find administrative waste and areas where they are overspending in a “war of comparative opulence”. What say you? I’m sure everyone would like to know.
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Lois Weiner says it best about what is happening to education. This is all about neoliberals such as those in the World Bank who want to limit education access for all but the tiny few since we are going to compete with semi-literate people in third world countries. Those people don’t need much education to work, so why should we need it?
Neoliberals/libertarians don’t believe in the concept of the “public good.” Everything is for sale, and everything is to enrich the tiny few, because, after all, they are better than the rest of us who support them.
Robert Reich has a great piece about what I call “User Fee America”:
http://robertreich.org/post/59021478207
His last paragraph sums up the situation nicely.
Neoliberalism is a cancer on any country. It is killing America, and it is killing countries around the world in some demented infatuation with “the market.” Neoliberalism is actually a “philosophical” rationalization of unbridled greed and parasitism of the few (billionaires and near-billionaires, Wall Street hedge fund crooks, and policy makers) at the expense of everybody else.
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Susan, Thanks for providing the link to the Robert Reich post. Is there one to Lois Weiner? I looked on her website but couldn’t locate it.
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I’m no Republican but the Obama administration is a pack of idiots and underachievers. I’m still trying to figure out what his legacy will be. I think it will be on a par with the presidents of the 1920s.
It seems he just talks to the wealthiest and then makes his decisions based on their ideas.
I went to a very small private college because I had the opportunity to participate in an honors program with a full-time professor who mentored students through a core curriculum that lasted for four years. My little college was not the highest rated but this program within the school was outstanding. With these ratings, I doubt that my school, with its unique approaches would last a decade.
It’s a shame that everything seemingly must be measured. Even though the measurements rarely reflect what’s really going on. Qualitative experiences matter but mot to these fools who must place a number or value on everything. Here’s a number that measures the value of this administration: 0.
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A ship of fools. It is just too bizarre.
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You’re being generous with that rating of “0”.
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I think that one of the key reasons we are having all this nonsense that is destroying education is that the tests our children take measure the wrong things. If I am a farmer growing corn and choose to measure the success of my crop by measuring the height of the corn plants or how many leaves they have per stalk, I can obtain very precise, accurate data. However, until I actually measure the amount of corn per acre or per stalk, I don’t have good information about how much corn will be produced.
Standardized tests can measure retention of content, processing abilities, speed and efficiency of test taking. But, until we actually define what a well educated child should know and what skills he/she should possess to become good citizens, then we don’t really know what to measure.
Education is a complex process and the desired outcome is not the same for everyone. So, it is not simple to define what needs to be tested. It has become clear that, with the testing currently being done, we are misusing the results and destroying our educational system. We are measuring the wrong things!
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True. And there serms to be no knowledge of or application of developmental or foundational learning.
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*seems
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What’s your view, then, of what a high school graduate must know, the floor, so to speak. Hasn’t NCLB tried that? Isn’t RTTT trying that? Aren’t the CCSC attempting to define that? Do we want a criterion referenced high school diploma or a norm referenced?
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I penned a letter to Gov. Snyder and posted it on my blog. It is similar to one you just recently shared by another blogger, but thought you might want to pass it on anyway. http://www.ellenbennett.blogspot.com
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I swore at the radio in the car when I heard him announce this. Seriously we need a new party, a new political party of the middle class. Maybe that’s his legacy, to create this upheaval so things can start to change, fire up the middle class to act, care about an ensuing oligarchy.
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U.S. Dept of Ed has a site called Teaching Matters. You need to read what they are saying/selling over there and they engage students in this so-called forward thinking plan to change schools of education completely.
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I am very nervous about this idea. As someone who is the midst of helping her twelfth-grader navigate the college choice process, believe me I would love to see tuition costs go down, and to know that they reflect value. But I worry about making colleges prove they are “cost-effective.” Liberal arts schools are on the run, this week I heard two college presentations emphasize their “practical” and “experiential” programs that include lots of internships. So, businesses get free labor, and colleges get to point to their relevant curriculum and hands-on experience.
Here’s the thing about education: it is expensive. If you want your child to attend a school with a student teacher ratio of 1:12, with small classes and 95% of the instructors having terminal degrees, it stands to reason that will cost money. And it would be nice to know those teachers, who we hope will give our student lots of quality, personal attention, are fairly compensated. You also have to maintain the buildings and get the trash picked up.
Here’s what I’d like to see: instead of the building boom at places like NYU and the UCs, maybe cut back on all the construction and lower tuition a little? All those billionaires endowing new buildings — how about making a donation to offset tuition or housing costs for students?
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At this point, every time I see a politician speak, I find myself waiting for them to say, “And now a word from my corporate sponsor…”
They really should just wear their sponsors’ logos on their clothes, like Tennis players do.
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I would prefer Nascar, it is more colorful. The only difference between parties is which board owns them. I ask my few conservative friends to tell me the difference between the policies of Bush and those of Obama’s, they have noticed the cabinet is essentially the same. When will we as a people decide it is enough. I remember what the priests in Catholic school used to say, when it hurts enough to fail you will prepare and avoid failure. I guess we, the majority, don’t hurt enough to rid ourselves of these disease carrying parasites. I am waiting for the “this campaign brought to you by……”
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It is my hope that college students across this nation who still have a knowledge of what university education is all about “PRE NCLB at the college level” will react in force and FIGHT THIS nonsense. What is Obama thinking???? Is he going to send his daughters to a school that quantifies and creates endless reams of data via testing his daughters? Where there is not time for discussion because profs must administer tests to students at every turn? Where profs are controlled at every turn by the need to up their students test scores on tests created by non educators? Is this truly what Obama wants for his own children? If the answer is “no” than his plans are NOT GOOD ENOUGH FOR THE CHILDREN OF THIS NATION. I have great concern that a president of our nation hooks so deeply into a bad idea and puts it into every all-important facet of life so it spreads like gangrene- great concern! Why????
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I could not agree with you more. The feds have become increasingly aggressive and inflexible about all of their accountability measures. I have worked with them in establishing rules and regulations for teacher education and they are truly focused on a single agenda. That agenda undermines public education and destroys possibilities for constructive change.
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I cannot even listen to Obama’s empty rhetoric for one more minute, so I don’t know what he said, but I’m sure it’s odious and harmful to U.S. education, just as he’s continually said and done since 2008. Just as he doesn’t listen to us and does not care, I will not listen to him and I do not care what he says. The solution–for all of us–is to act locally (you know, that old canard–“think globally & act locally”–more true than ever before). Elect your Sue Peters, Steve Zimmers, Monica Ratliffs and Glenda Ritzes. Gather your forces and get rid of your Broad superintendents. Denounce your ridiculous “standardized” tests and refuse to use their results for anything. Opt your kids out of testing. Do not waste any more time wringing your hands over Obama & Arne–they are NOT going anywhere (as is the “Dump Duncan” campaign). Save YOUR children and YOUR schools in YOUR communities NOW–there is no more time to waste. It’s not selfish because, as you have seen in this blog (& as Diane always says)–“it is happening.” Make it happen where YOU live, & that will spread all over the U.S.A.
Yes WE can and yes, we WILL!
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The paradox here, it seems to me is, by hating the Common Core, it drives parents to take their kids out of public schools and put them into private charter schools. We are at cross purposes in some ways.
The Tea Party people blame the progressives. The progressives blame the Tea Party. It is quite a mess out there.
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Education should not be compromised, The government needs to be hit really hard in the head to so that they can realized their mistakes.
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Is this like using a hammer just to get the donkey’s attention? What likelihood do you think that the current administration is going to be amenable to sense on ANYTHING?
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