David Gamberg is superintendent of the Sourhold district in
Long Island, Néw York. He
understands something that state commissioner John King
does not. Children are different. They develop in different ways
and at different rates. They have different strengths and
weaknesses. Experienced educators know this. The standard for high
achievement in mile-long races is 4 minutes. Runners tried for
years until 1954, when Roger Bannister
broke the barrier. Now many runners have, and it is the
standard. Does that mean you are a failure if it takes you 9 or 15
minutes to run a mile? No. Should all children score “proficient”
on a test that was deliberately made so hard that only 30/35% would
“pass”? What about the kids who are gifted artists and musicians?
What about those who can fix things and are great at solving
practical problems? What about those who are English language
learners? Should they “fail”? Should they be denied a high school
diploma? Sure, it is necessary to test kids periodically to see how
they are doing, but tests should be used to help kids and teachers,
not to punish them.
After much deliberation, I have decided to support Bill de Blasio for mayor of New York City.
I thought long and hard, because I know and respect some of the other candidates.
I issued the following statement to the de Blasio campaign.
Now that President Obama has turned his attention to the problem of college affordability, it is also time to revisit a very important report that was released last year and buried by Beltway lobbyists.
Senator Tom Harkin of Iowa, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, released a blistering report in 2012 about for-profit “universities.”
They have high attrition rates, low graduation rates, and large numbers of their students leave without a diploma but with a large debt to repay.
Senator Tom Harkin released a hard-hitting report about the need to regulate them.
The report found that:
- Between 2008 and 2009, over a million students started attending schools owned by the companies examined by the Committee. By mid-2010, fully half (54 percent) of those students had left school without a degree or certificate. For Associates-degree students, 63 percent left without a degree.
- Most for-profit colleges charge much higher tuition than comparable programs at community colleges and flagship State public universities. The investigation found Associate degree and certificate programs averaged four times the cost of degree programs at comparable community colleges. Bachelor’s degree programs averaged 20 percent more than the cost of analogous programs at flagship public universities despite the credits being largely non-transferrable.
- Because 96 percent of students starting a for-profit college take federal student loans to attend a for-profit college (compared to 13 percent at community colleges), nearly all students who leave have student loan debt, even when they don’t have a degree or diploma or increased earning power.
- Students who attended a for-profit college accounted for 47 percent of all Federal student loan defaults in 2008 and 2009. More than 1 in 5 students enrolling in a for-profit college-22 percent-default within 3 years of entering repayment on their student loans.
Tamar Lewin wrote in the New York Times:
According to the report, which was posted online in advance, taxpayers spent $32 billion in the most recent year on companies that operate for-profit colleges, but the majority of students they enroll leave without a degree, half of those within four months.
“In this report, you will find overwhelming documentation of exorbitant tuition, aggressive recruiting practices, abysmal student outcomes, taxpayer dollars spent on marketing and pocketed as profit, and regulatory evasion and manipulation,” Mr. Harkin, an Iowa Democrat who is chairman of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, said in a statement on Sunday. “These practices are not the exception — they are the norm. They are systemic throughout the industry, with very few individual exceptions.”
Over the last 15 years, enrollment and profits have skyrocketed in the industry. Until the 1990s, the sector was made up of small independent schools offering training in fields like air-conditioning repair and cosmetology. But from 1998 to 2008, enrollment more than tripled, to about 2.4 million students. Three-quarters are at colleges owned by huge publicly traded companies — and, more recently, private equity firms — offering a wide variety of programs.
Enrolling students, and getting their federal financial aid, is the heart of the business, and in 2010, the report found, the colleges studied had a total of 32,496 recruiters, compared with 3,512 career-services staff members.
Among the 30 companies, an average of 22.4 percent of revenue went to marketing and recruiting, 19.4 percent to profits and 17.7 percent to instruction.
Their chief executive officers were paid an average of $7.3 million, although Robert S. Silberman, the chief executive of Strayer Education, made $41 million in 2009, including stock options.
Why did the Harkin committee’s expose of these frauds go nowhere?
The for-profit institutions hired the best lobbyists money can buy, from both political parties, as reported here in the New York Times:
The story of how the for-profit colleges survived the threat of a major federal crackdown offers a case study in Washington power brokering. Rattled by the administration’s tough talk, the colleges spent more than $16 million on an all-star list of prominent figures, particularly Democrats with close ties to the White House, to plot strategy, mend their battered image and plead their case.
Anita Dunn, a close friend of President Obama and his former White House communications director, worked with Kaplan University, one of the embattled school networks. Jamie Rubin, a major fund-raising bundler for the president’s re-election campaign, met with administration officials about ATI, a college network based in Dallas, in which Mr. Rubin’s private-equity firm has a stake.
A who’s who of Democratic lobbyists — including Richard A. Gephardt, the former House majority leader; John Breaux, the former Louisiana senator; and Tony Podesta, whose brother, John, ran Mr. Obama’s transition team — were hired to buttonhole officials.
And politically well-connected investors, including Donald E. Graham, chief executive of the Washington Post Company, which owns Kaplan, and John Sperling, founder of the University of Phoenix and a longtime friend of the House minority leader, Nancy Pelosi, made impassioned appeals.
In all, industry advocates met more than two dozen times with White House and Education Department officials, including senior officials like Education Secretary Arne Duncan, records show, even as Mr. Obama has vowed to reduce the “outsize” influence of lobbyists and special interests in Washington.
The result was a plan, completed in June, that imposes new regulations on for-profit schools to ensure they adequately train their students for work, but does so on a much less ambitious scale than the administration first intended, relaxing the initial standards for determining which schools would be stripped of federal financing.
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wants students with disabilities to take the same standardized tests as students without disabilities, reports Joy Resmovits at Huffington Post.
The change “could have profound effects on some of the nation’s most vulnerable learners.”
“Since President Barack Obama came into office, his administration has upheld and advanced policies that have increased the stakes of standardized testing, arguing that student progress ultimately matters above all other concerns. Policies such as the Race to the Top competition derive from the 2001 No Child Left Behind Act, which tied federal school aid to standardized test results.”
In the immortal words of Butch Cassidy
and the Sundance Kid:
WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?
Robert Scott is president of Adelphi College in Long Island, New York.
Here, he offers his ideas about how to strengthen higher education and direct federal aid more thoughtfully to students.
First, he suggests a year of mandatory national service in communities after high school graduation. Rationale: This service year would help young people develop knowledge, skills, abilities and values outside of school by doing supervised, constructive work in communities and with organizations that need assistance. They would gain maturity needed to succeed in advanced study and save money for postsecondary opportunities.
Second, direct federal research grants to regional and community institutions of higher education. Rationale: The criteria for selecting such institutions for competitive grants could be based not only on their expertise, but on their success in enrolling students from low-income families and in graduating students in a timely manner without large amounts of debt.
Third, provide grant and loan forgiveness funding to students who enter high-need professions like nursing, health-related services (and, I might add, teaching). Rationale: We know that students’ employment decisions are influenced by the debt they accumulate in college. This program could not only help students manage their debt but encourage them to consider less well-paid employment and still help stimulate the economy.
President Scott subtly adds that some of the funding might be enhanced by reallocating federal aid from “institutions with high loan default rates and low graduation rates.” He refers to the large numbers of for-profit online “universities” that match those two criteria. Those institutions have high default rates and low graduation rates; they are protected by lobbyists from both parties in Washington, who keep these failed institutions eligible for federal aid despite their disservice to students and society.
Reformers love to test and rate and grade and rank everyone and everything: students, teachers, schools, etc.
They love school report cards–where schools are assigned a single letter grade–because it sets up the D and F schools to be closed, then privatized.
This enables them to churn the schools and introduce the principle of constant disruption, their favorite state of being.
Disruption, you see, is supposed to create innovation and improvement.
In reality, it produces teaching to the test, narrowing the curriculum, teacher attrition, student push-outs, and unending anxiety for everyone, as they watch the axe poised over their heads.
But what is most embarrassing to the “reformers” is when their beloved charter schools get grades no better than the public schools.
That is what happened with the release of the latest state-created reports cards in Ohio.
As blogger Plunderbund reports,
“After 15 years of charter school expansion, the new Ohio school report cards provide the strongest evidence yet that this method of using charter schools to supposedly reform education in our state is a complete failure. The latest results from the state make it clear that the large urban districts are not dramatically improving and the charter schools that are supposed to be transforming educational practices while being given every advantage (including a greater amount of state funding) are doing no better.”
Plunderbund reviews the data and concludes:
“Look, we’re not saying that the urban schools are knocking it out of the park – they wouldn’t be under attack so much by politicians if they were showing dramatic improvement. But the reality is that the charter school experiment in Ohio has failed as a method of public school reform and it’s time to pull the plug.
“Ohio’s children need a better plan than the one drawn up by our legislators and their donors.”
A terrific interview in USA Today with John Owen, who patiently explains what is really happening today in education.
A sample:
Q: You call yourself a “bad” teacher. When did this idea first occur to you?
A: I was a bad teacher because I was a teacher. Today, “bad teacher” and “teacher” have become almost interchangeable. Listen to billionaire “visionaries” such as Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg, as well as “experts” such as Michelle Rhee. The problem with our schools is bad teachers. Almost immediately, I realized that I was destined to be a bad teacher because many of my eight- and ninth-graders had learning problems, and I couldn’t fix them in the 46 minutes I had them each day. Many of my students had behavior problems, and I couldn’t fix those problems either. And I wasn’t very good at masking these problems, so my “scholars” didn’t look like they were learning when they weren’t learning. I also couldn’t keep them from getting excited and boisterous when they were learning.
David Sirota has a thoughtful and provocative column in Salon in which he argues that access to college has become so important that college should be funded like high school.
In other words, public institutions of higher education should be paid for by taxes so that higher education is accessible and does not burden students with a mountain of debt.
Citing Matt Taibbi, Sirota writes:
“…economic and political trends are now converging to force an entire generation into a truly no-win situation: either don’t get a post-secondary education and severely harm your ability to get a job in an already weak economy, or get a post-secondary education and condemn yourself to a lifetime paying off debt that you may never be able to pay off because the economy is so weak and your job prospects are still not guaranteed.”
It was once the case that a high school diploma was prestigious because most people didn’t have one. Once high school became universal (90% of those between 18 and 24 now have a high school diploma), then the high school diploma carried no prestige but became essential for all but the most menial, low-skills job. Now, college diplomas have become entry-level requirements for many jobs. They are not yet as commonplace as high school diplomas, but certainly we are seeing credential inflation, where some employers demand a college diploma for jobs that could be done by a high school graduate.
So the crux of the dilemma is this: How can students pay for college as costs balloon out of sight?
President Obama’s answer was to implement something like No Child Left Behind or Race to the Top for higher education and make federal aid dependent on “value-added” by various measurements.
But measuring the various outcomes of higher education won’t reduce its cost; they might even increase the costs by increasing administrative burdens.
Sirota’s answer: Make public higher education as free as public high school.
When I was in Finland two years ago, the one thing I learned that impressed me most was that all higher education was cost-free to students. The Finns view education as a basic human right and do not believe that people should have to pay for a human right. That would be like paying for the right to vote.
There was a time in the not so distant past when most community colleges were free. They should be tuition-free now. That would be a good place to start.
Yong Zhao, who was born and educated in China and is now a
professor at the University of Oregon, reports on China’s
new education reform plans To relieve the pressure on
young children and to encourage creativity, China is reducing
testing, homework, and tracking.
Yong Zhao reports: “No standardized
tests, no written homework, no tracking. These are some of the new
actions China is taking to lessen student academic burden. The
Chinese Ministry of Education released Ten Regulations to Lessen
Academic Burden for Primary School Students this week for public
commentary. The Ten Regulations are introduced as one more
significant measure to reform China’s education, in addition to
further reduction of academic content, lowering the academic rigor
of textbooks, expanding criteria for education quality, and
improving teacher capacity.” Among the kep points in the draft plan
are: “No Homework. No written homework is allowed in primary
schools. Schools can however assign appropriate experiential
homework by working with parents and community resources to arrange
field trips, library visits, and craft activities. “Reducing
Testing. No standardized testing is allowed for grades 1 through 3;
For 4th grade and up, standardized testing is only allowed once per
semester for Chinese language, math, and foreign language. Other
types of tests cannot be given more than twice per semester.” Just
as the Obama administration and the Common Core are increasing the
number of tests and driving them down even to kindergarten
children, the Chinese are going in the opposite direction.
This is one of the most depressing articles I have read lately.
It is a straightforward article about high teacher turnover in charter schools. It begins with quotes from a 24-year-old teacher in YES Prep in Houston, who is just starting his third year in the classroom, and he is already planning to move on.
The principal of his charter school is 28.
The New York Times reporter Motoko Rich points out:
As tens of millions of pupils across the country begin their school year, charter networks are developing what amounts to a youth cult in which teaching for two to five years is seen as acceptable and, at times, even desirable. Teachers in the nation’s traditional public schools have an average of close to 14 years of experience, and public school leaders and policy makers have long made it a priority to reduce teacher turnover.
The growing charter movement, she write, “is pushing to redefine the arc of a teaching career.” Yes, two years in the classroom, and you leave. What kind of a “career” is that? In what school she visited, the principal was 27 years old, and five of the nine teachers were in their first year of teaching.
She also notes that research indicates that teacher turnover is not good for school climate or student achievement, but Teach for America has a different view:
The notion of a foreshortened teaching career was largely introduced by Teach for America, which places high-achieving college graduates into low-income schools for two years. Today, Teach for America places about a third of its recruits in charter schools.
“Strong schools can withstand the turnover of their teachers,” said Wendy Kopp, the founder of Teach for America. “The strongest schools develop their teachers tremendously so they become great in the classroom even in their first and second years.”
Studies have shown that on average, teacher turnover diminishes student achievement. Advocates who argue that teaching should become more like medicine or law say that while programs like Teach for America fill a need in the short term, educational leaders should be focused on improving training and working environments so that teachers will invest in long careers.
“To become a master plumber you have to work for five years,” said Ronald Thorpe, president of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, a nonprofit groupthat certifies accomplished teachers. “Shouldn’t we have some kind of analog to that with the people we are entrusting our children to?”
Can you imagine that a “teacher” who graduated college in June is already “a great teacher” by September?
Why do we expect entrants to every other profession to spend years honing their craft but a brand-new teacher, with no experience, can be considered “great” in only one or two years, then leave to do something else?
This is a recipe to destroy the teaching profession.
How can anyone say they are education “reformers” if their goal is to destroy the profession?
What other nation is doing this?
This is not innovative. In fact, it returns us to the early nineteenth century, when the general belief was that “anyone can teach, no training needed.” Teaching then was a job for itinerants, widow ladies, young girls without a high school degree, and anyone who couldn’t do anything else. It took over a century to create a teaching profession, with qualifications and credentials needed before one could be certified to stand in front of a classroom of young children. We are rapidly going backwards.
Diane Ravitch's blog 