Former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings has been chosen as the new President of the 17-campus University of North Carolina system. She will be paid $775,000. Spellings was Secretary of Education during the second term of President George W. Bush.
Spellings has a B.A. in political science from the University of Houston.
According to her Wikipedia biography,
Margaret Spellings earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in political science from the University of Houston in 1979 and worked in an education reform commission under Texas Governor William P. Clements and as associate executive director for the Texas Association of School Boards. Before her appointment to George W. Bush’s presidential administration, Spellings was the political director for Bush’s first gubernatorial campaign in 1994, and later became a senior advisor to Bush during his term as Governor of Texas from 1995 to 2000….
In September 2005, Spellings announced the formation of the Secretary of Education’s Commission on the Future of Higher Education, which has also been referred to as the Spellings Commission.[11] The commission was charged with recommending a national strategy for reforming post-secondary education, with a particular focus on how well colleges and universities were preparing students for the 21st-century workplace. It had a secondary focus on how well high schools were preparing students for post-secondary education. Spellings described the work of the commission as a natural extension into higher education of the reforms carried out under No Child Left Behind, and is quoted as saying: “It’s time we turn this elephant around and upside down and take a look at it.”
The new president of the distinguished UNC campus has no record as a scholar, has no advanced degrees, and is prepared to bring NCLB reforms with her. Good luck to all!
Diane Ravitch's blog 
There is a wise old adage that seems to apply to this appointment: “It’s not what you know but who you know.”
It boggles the mind, Duane.
This woman has almost zero academic creds in education…or anything. And now she will earn at least $250K more than Janet Napolitano who runs the many campuses of the U.of California system, and who was a Governor, and head of Homeland Security. Our world is getting totally insane. The policy makers and those who are in charge of hiring seem to be the lowest of the low.
Today, the LA Times has a long article on how, and who, our LAUSD geniuses and our equally high IQ BoE mavens are looking to hire. They are discussing as a prime candidate, John King. Yes, folks, John King of NY traumas, and now Duncan’s replacement at DoE.
Read it and a weep. Howard Blume only quotes comments from all the Broadies like United Way and E4E, but did not contact any of the solid activists who are not included in this decision.
Does anyone still live with the delusion that America is a democracy? It is beyond a plutocracy and/or oligarchy, and has become a very demoralized and frightening place.
Wonder how close Spelling is to Obama/Duncan/Broad/Gates…as well as the Bushie Bros.?
Cronyocracy
“. And now she will earn at least $250K more than Janet Napolitano who runs the many campuses of the U.of California system, and who was a Governor, and head of Homeland Security. ”
I think the salaries are pretty much set in the UCA system. The profs’ salaries certainly.
The Ohio State University president makes $1 million.
The average salary of the president of a PhD granting institution is $400K in this country. That’s the salary of the US president.
She was the “bridge” between Rod Paige and Arne the Dunkster Duncan as Sec. of Ed. Wiki lists her as a “politician”. Seems as that moniker might be being a tad kind.
They also circumvented all established rules and procedures to get her. The Faculty of all of the UNC system is not happy.
STATEMENT OF THE UNC FACULTY ASSEMBLYON THE UNC PRESIDENT SEARCH PROCESS
The Leadership and Policy Statement of the University of North Carolina notes that the
institution “operates under an arrangement of shared governance” that “honors the
important traditional role of the faculty in the governance of the academy.”
(http://www.northcarolina.edu/content/leadership-and-policy )
Regrettably, for the better part of a half decade, the UNC Board of Governors has
repeatedly failed to follow its own stated principles of good governance.
The UNC Faculty Assembly has faithfully advised the Board on best practices regarding
admissions, tuition, financial aid, leadership appointment processes, curricular design,
research and freedom of inquiry, and processes of peer review, yet the Board has
repeatedly refused to acknowledge – let alone discuss – points of counsel they have been
offered. Instead, they have frequently promulgated ill-advised policies and practices that
have proven detrimental to the best interests of public higher education in this state.
The recent mismanagement of the Executive office of the University, from the firing of
Thomas Ross, to the hiring of the new President, is but the most egregious in a long train of problematic governance actions. The failure of the Board to seek the advice and counsel of the staff and faculty is both shortsighted and troubling. No student attends our campuses, no funding agency or organization provides grants of research support, and no business, governmental entity, or civic organization has come to our institutions seeking public service expertise, because of the teaching, research and service achievements of the Board of Governors or the President of the University. Yet the Board continues to act without the advice and counsel of the constituencies whose expertise they need to effectively govern the institution.
Over the years, the most effective and respected leaders of the University system and its
respective campuses have argued that their success is contingent on the support of staff
and faculty. We now appear to have entered an era when it is not support, but an ill informed indifference, that defines how governing authorities in the University think of their
relationship to those who carry out the core mission of public higher education. No
institution of higher learning has ever achieved excellence and distinction without an active,engaged, and committed community of staff and faculty. It is then incumbent on the Board of Governors to now begin – as it always should have been — cultivating effective shared governance if the University is to continue on the path of excellence and achievement.
The faculty will not prejudge the commitment of new President to the well-being of the
University. But he or she must understand that the secretive character of this search, and
his or her own indifference to consulting with staff and faculty when s/he was an active
candidate for the position, will make it difficult to win the confidence and trust of the
University community.
As this leadership transition unfolds, foremost among those confidence building principles
must be a steadfast and unyielding dedication to seeking the best advice and counsel
possible, and a readiness to stand against the debasement of institutional governance that has brought the future of the University into doubt.
22 October 2015
For the UNC system Faculty Assembly
Stephen T. Leonard, UNC-Chapel Hill, Chair
Gabriel Lugo, UNC-Wilmington, Chair-Elect
“They also circumvented all established rules and procedures to get her. The Faculty of all of the UNC system is not happy.”
Same happened last year at my university. We first had the governor’s friend and his brother’s business partner as interim president, who declared that the university is a business, and allowed the brand new provost change the university accordingly.
Then that provost became the president in a crooked presidential search completely directed from the governor’s office: there was one regular prof on the 20+ member search committee.
The search was documented in the press: according to emails, the Chancellor of the board was pressured (to put it mildly) to nominate the provost. The journalist is gone, and the journalist who wrote about the new president’s dealings has been assigned to report elsewhere.
And what is the university at which you teach?
Name names, or are you afraid of the repercussions that may come? (and that is not meant in my usual sarcastic obnoxious way)
The city is Memphis. And yes, the constitution of most universities is such that a single prof is vulnerable. If, say, 20 profs speak up, that’s different. But profs rarely do that.
If anybody is really curious, I certainly can give names privately.
Wasn’t it Mel Brooks who wrote the line: “It’s good to be a few steps removed from the former king!”
Correction: The faculty members ARE not happy.
FYI: http://pulse.ncpolicywatch.org/2015/10/23/former-u-s-ed-sec-spellings-chosen-as-new-unc-president-gets-big-salary-package-and-tackles-questions-about-background/
Unfortunately, some msspellings can’t be fixed with spellcheck.
TAGO
It seems that msspellings is a triple entendre. Felicitaciones.
That she was chosen by George W. should tell it all.
WHOOPEE!!!!
Are you questioning the decision of The Decider?
🙂
The Decider should have taken a vacation and passed on a few decisions. Maybe he should have stuck to the menu.
OT,
But god told him what to decide.
And then there’s this:
http://wonkette.com/216691/education-sec-loses-to-dude-from-earth-girls-are-easy
Obvious, a WHITE person with a BS in Political Science has the BILLIONAIRES’ world open to them. Best Degree EVER!?
All others, keep working on GRIT & RIGOR to pay off your HUGE student loans.
What, no basketball cred?
She is really a fan.
This is SERIOUSLY horrifying. The UNC Faculty sure as hell better “prejudge” and do it ASAP as they will soon find their academic careers unrecognizable.
In other words, kiss it goodbye.
Spellings resume includes rebranding the conflict ridden Texas Reading Initiative into the conflict ridden Reading First fiasco. Texas contracts funneled to Wireless Generation morphed into contracts across the 50 states handed over to Wireless Generation using billions in federal tax funds.
The Texas Education Agency could not wait to approve millions in state funds for Larry Berger to develop his “hand held” bogus early reading “assessments.” What’s more – the Texas Education Agency and certain individuals receive royalties every quarter for every WG license sold to a school or district – in other words – No Child Left Unmonetized.
I’m curious if Beth Ann Bryan will follow her to UNC.
LLC…weren’t both the Cheneys and Neal Bush involved in those contractual agreements?
Neil’s “cows” are now in landfills –
Ignite, founded by Neil Bush in 1999, includes as investors his parents, former President George H. W. Bush and his wife, Barbara. Company officials say that about 100 school districts use the Curriculum on Wheels, known as the Cow, which is a portable classroom with software to teach middle-school social studies, science and math. The units cost about $3,800 each and require about $1,000 a year in maintenance.
Bush profiteers include Sandy Kress, Bill Bennett and Neil Bush –
http://www.projectcensored.org/12-bush-profiteers-collect-billions-from-no-child-left-behind/
Other Kress clients, including Ignite! Learning, a company headed by Neil Bush, and K12 Inc., a for-profit enterprise owned by Bill Bennett, tailored themselves to vie for NCLB dollars.
And we still don’t really know why Tom Ross was pushed out.
Well, except for obvious political readings, a resentment for true intellectual thought, and a new mindset about what qualifies as visionary leadership.
I think she will flop.
Political reasons, rather
Good luck to the students, parents and NC taxpayers! Bush, Spellings, Kress and Rove are in now in charge.
http://www.katu.com/news/education/3622296.html
As Bush’s domestic policy adviser, Spellings has helped shape the news while staying out of it herself. Karl Rove, the president’s political strategist, was quoted this fall as saying Spellings is “the most influential woman in Washington that you’ve never heard of.”
Spellings worked for six years as Bush’s education adviser in Texas, pushing policies on early reading and student accountability. They became the model for the federal law, No Child Left Behind, that Spellings helped put together from the White House after Bush’s election in 2000.
“She understands what he thinks. They’re very, very close,” said Sandy Kress, a lawyer who worked at the White House for Spellings when he was Bush’s senior education adviser.
I’ll probably get booted out of here for this, and I have no opinion if Margaret Spellings is qualified for the position or not, but those advanced degrees can be very overrated.They have no relation to intelligence, abilities, and certainly common sense or real world job skills.
One thing that bugs me about the education arena, academic elitism. I have a friend who is a high school drama teacher. Evey time he gets a new sheepskin he gets a raise. His job never changes. I am not sure he becomes a better, more effective drama teacher with each new sheepskin, but he gets a bump in pay.
I recently had to fire a family law attorney The man had obviously gone to school for 7 years, passed the bar, etc.. One would assume he was qualified. But he was anything but qualified to handle a child custody case and the drama and emotion that goes with the job. He was a glorified overpaid legal clerk, with an oversize ego to boot. One would assume that four years of college, and three years of law school would have prepared the man for his chosen profession. That assumption would be wrong.
Texans know that Spellings is an unqualified political hack – degree or no degree.
I agree that more degrees does not make a person more competent but she is now my boss but has less experience in academia than my graduate students. I usually look to have leaders who can do my job or at least have close familiarity with what I do. I do not see her having the qualifications to judge something like teaching and research that she cannot do and has never done herself. If she is an advocate for us then I promise to apologize but I doubt that is why they hired her.
In NJ, it costs, out of your own pocket in certain districts that contracted out any tuition assistance whatsoever, approx. $30,000 to get a Masters degree. The following salary “bump” in one particular district takes 10 years to recoup the outlay of $30,000. Many districts no longer care if you have a Masters degree because they don’t want to pay more, and I would imagine eventually that bump will be contracted out.
Considering the average new-ish teacher in NJ earns between $35,000 and $48,000, an outlay of an additional $30,000 when one is already saddled with $70,000 to $100,000 of student debt and paying rent, insurance, buying food, clothes and the basics, doesn’t seem to make sense when it takes 10 years to recoup the cash, and by then your district may have already fired you. Many teachers are foregoing further degrees because their employers really just don’t care, and they can’t afford the new debt.
I can’t speak to your drama teacher friend, but assuming you are a lawyer, your rates increase every year, and you get a big bonus, because your post indicates to me that you are not a sole practitioner. It doesn’t seem like you respect your friend’s occupation, or his advanced degrees.
P.S. You or your firm needs better hiring practices.
Well put, Donna.
I’m not a lawyer. I hired a lawyer to represent me in a case. I was the client, therefore the attorney worked for me. I fired him due to his incompetence and his lack of aptitude for the job. His “advanced degree” had failed to prepare him for the real world job of family law, IMO.
Lawyers are in a service economy and any good lawyer will realize that and provide an all around positive experience. An arrogant attorney will assume he is special and the client needs him more than he needs the client. Not true. There are plenty of starving and hungry lawyers out there willing to take your money.
Here’s an interesting podcast on lawyers. The guest feels one can learn to be a lawyer at a Vo-Tech school, two year program, and I tend to agree with that analysis.
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2011/09/winston_on_lawy.html
Do I respect my friends degrees? I haven’t really thought about it to be truthful. My point is, in the private sector if Corp A pays me X amount to do a task, getting “advanced degrees” that have no bearing on that task, and add zero value to the Corp, well the Corp is not going to give me a raise just for the new degree.
I have not personally worked in Higher-Ed, but I have spent plenty of time in the K12 arena, and seen plenty of academic elitism in my life time to know it when I see it.
Advanced degrees in the education arena are proof that you find education interesting enough that you want to continue learning. They show curiosity. They show passion for growth.
I dance. I don’t just dance 4 x a week, I take classes to improve. In my chosen dance field, there are excellent dancers who continuously improve and take workshops and practice, and boring dancers who never take classes to improve. These latter dancers are always talking about how they don’t need to take classes because they are proficient enough: they are super boring to dance with and blind to how others find them so. My dance teachers have teachers and they improve. Every field has “advanced degrees”, some just more formal than others. If you think academic elitism is having an advanced degree, then maybe you are not curious enough to challenge your poor thinking. Or maybe you don’t have an advanced degree? I don’t know. Maybe you are not expert enough to judge.
Be careful, your elitism is showing, just a little.
It’s not the holding of the advanced degree that makes one an elitist, it’s assuming that only one with a advanced degree has value.
“I usually look to have leaders who can do my job or at least have close familiarity with what I do.”
I agree 100%. I advise you stay out of the private sector then. You’ll be filling out forms and reports for 26 year old MBAs who have no clue what you do. But their Sloan MBAs have convinced them they can run any business with their spreadsheets and algorithms.
Someone said, you want to sell shoes, hire a shoe salesmen, you want to sell software, hire nerds. I think the point is hire people who know their industry. As far as Spelling goes, I think her lack of experience is more a detriment than her lack of advanced degrees. That was my real point.
Say what you will about advanced degrees, but it seems rather bizarre for an institution that confers advanced degrees to hire someone without any advanced degree to be the “face” of the university.
I had the displeasure of hearing Spellings speak at an event in 2011, and she was still saying NCLB was a good thing…
Like any good Republican she has to stay on message. Do you ever watch Hannity just for fun? I love to watch Sean spin and stay on the days talking points message.
“The student letter says that Spellings has earned more than $400,000 from her time as a board member of Ceannate Corp and Apollo Education Group, “companies whose business model is based on privatizing education and exploiting students and faculty.” (Apollo Group is the parent company of for-profit college, University of Phoenix.)”
A big ideological believer in the for-profit model for education, I see. Great. How quickly can she suck all the value out of this public asset and distribute it to private sector (top) managers? 5 years? 10 years?
How do people who support the ed reform “movement” leaders running public schools square that support with their resistance to ed reform “movement” leaders running colleges and universities? Are colleges and universities more prestigious and valuable than ordinary K-12 public schools, so therefore they shouldn’t be subject to monetizing and privatization? If K-12 schools need constant standardized testing and cheap labor policies and privatization, then why shouldn’t that same “market” philosophy be applied to higher ed?
Chiara “How do people who support the ed reform “movement” leaders running public schools square that support with their resistance to ed reform “movement” leaders running colleges and universities?”
Don’t worry, Bill Gates does his magic for colleges as well. He supports community colleges because that’s where he sees the easiest way to implement the performance based merit pay system and the other blessed tools to morph education. This is because the tenure system is weakest at community colleges, hence resistance, in general, is not strong.
Here is Billy talking to university presidents (why they listen to him is another matter). The whole vid is interesting to hear, but I linked to the part where he talks about why he supports community colleges. Listen carefully to why he likes adjuncts.
Why would college presidents seek advice from a dropout? Answer: $
Thanks for the response. I graduated a community college 20 years ago and my middle son finished a 9 month “certificate” program at the same place as a precursor to an apprenticeship in skilled trades, so I could see the “market-based” changes just over that period. I think ed reformers went too far with that focus, as they tend to do with everything.
But, I actually agree that community colleges should be more “jobs focused” than universities- that’s why I was there and that’s why my son was there. He didn’t want a college degree- he wanted an apprenticeship in skilled trades.
I’m wondering more about the big state schools- universities- a lot of them support “market based” reforms in K-12. Do they also support this when it comes to their university? If not, why not?
There is no doubt that community colleges should be supported. But not at the expense of four year colleges. The two institutions should be supported together.
Corporate transformation is not useful for either of them: The problem with charter colleges is the same as with charter schools.
The same movement is destroying higher ed as K-12. The same actors are playing their parts.
The signs are bad: college presidents are mostly businessmen, and hence they take advice from their Messiah, Gates, and not the profs or students.
If I were the entering class at UNC or a potential new student, I WOULD LET IT BE KNOWN FROM THE ROOFTOPS that I wouldn’t spend five minutes considering going to or continuing at a university that clearly does not respect academia and hires someone without any standing to hold such a position (not to mention her failure to improve education under her reign). Present and future students need to join with the true academics at UNC and protest loudly!
Didn’t we know we would see more of this kind of thing when Purdue hired Mitch Daniels?
Part and parcel of the neoliberal/neoconservative remaking of public education into a capitalist pig trough for the rentier class of the 1%.
One Florida college got a board of business people loyal to the Tea Party governor and they just voted to eliminate tenure for all newly-hired faculty because that’s not how it works in the real estate business of the chair of the board; he gets to fire anyone and everyone whenever he gets the notion. No tenure for realtors so why should professors have such a perk?
http://www.bradenton.com/news/local/education/article37059513.html
Next on the agenda is eliminating funding for departments whose mission does not directly lead to profits for businesses. The humanities, the arts, the ‘soft’ sciences will all be eliminated through starvation and attrition to make way for the idiocy of economics, business management, and other pseudo-sciences, all propped up by the pseudoscience of psychometry.
This is the new reform: colleges and universities are no longer places of higher learning designed to advance human knowledge and understanding to better the wellbeing of the commonweal.
Schools are merely factories that will produce new worker bees for the sole benefit of increasing the vast wealth of the “makers” and “job creators”.
Tis a brave new world, indeed. Soon, very soon, revolutionary ideas and actions will begin to be born to combat the plutocracy and oligarchy that runs our world today. I pray that I live to see the fruition of the fight against all of this greed, hatred, and stupidity.
At my university, they are implementing a new model where departments are evaluated based on how much external money they bring in, and how many graduates/faculty they “produce”.
We even have a millionaires’ club for those who have grants over a million $.
Similarly to K-12, this assessment corresponds to the one size fits all teacher and student evaluations based on standardized tests: some departments, like law, only teach their own majors, while some, like math, teach thousands of non-majors.
Also, some departments, like music or speech pathology, have an exceptionally large faculty/student ratio since they have to teach one on one.
In math, we also see a push for standardized tests, and online testing grading.
I was most outraged by the salary: $775,000. Basically, the University of North Carolina system is a system in name only. It is really a bunch of very different universities from HBCU’s to the flagship schools of UNC Chapel Hill and NC State with places like ECU and UNCG in between. There is very little in common among these universities, and they are governed by their own presidents. The system office and president don’t really do much. Margaret Spellings is basically getting a sinecure.
The sad thing is that universities still have the power to stop these kinds of things: tenured profs can stop the transformation to corporate universities where research is not done for the public, and students are taught by badly exploted and underpaid adjunct faculty.
But profs usually don’t do much to prevent the corporate university from happening: they just watch as the hard fought academic freedom, tenure gradually go under.
All tenured prof would have to do is act together. But they rarely do.
Now the Moral Monday protesters can have two locations.
Yet another issue for Moral Mondays. Start making those signs!
(&–BTW–we are starting Moral Mondays in Chicago–first up, Monday, November 2nd, 10:30 AM, Thompson Center. Be there!)
One word: HORRORS!
The Republican Right has succeeded because they have successfully taken over state governments. The Spelling appointment is a direct result of this. We can complain all we want, but the Republican strategies will continue to work until we expose state representatives. Part of the problem is that very few know who their representatives are. There needs to be a consorted effort to make citizens aware of who their representatives are, where they come from, what they do for a living, and who their contributes to their campaigns. As long as we allow them to work in the dark, Anti-Intellectualism in America will continue.