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DeVos to Judge: “Don’t Lock Me Up”

By dianeravitch
October 16, 2019 //
25

Politico reports that the Trump administration is apologizing profusely for hounding students whose loans for attending the predatory (now closed) Corinthian Colleges should have been forgiven. The judge in the case had threatened to punish Betsy DeVos for violating her court order. This is a case of “accountability for thee, but not for me.”

MAKING THE CASE AGAINST CONTEMPT FINDING: The Trump administration, in a court filing on Tuesday night, outlined why the Education Department and DeVos shouldn’t be held in contempt or face fines for violating U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim’s May 2018 order to stop collecting the student loans of former Corinthian Colleges students.

— Justice Department attorneys wrote that the Education Department “has been working diligently and in good faith to correct the errors” that led to the agency collecting on the student loans of thousands of borrowers despite the order. Kim is now deciding whether to hold the department and DeVos in contempt and impose sanctions, including fines, against them.

— “Loan servicers made an error on a small # of loans,” DeVos tweeted last week. “We know & we’re fixing it.” She also accused Sen. Elizabeth Warren of lying about the issue.

— The Trump administration’s filing mostly strikes a conciliatory tone. The department said it appreciates the “gravity” of the situation and the effect it had on affected borrowers. The department also said it was committed to coming into full compliance with the court’s order and asked that any sanctions be “forward-looking” rather than punitive.

— The Education Department conceded, though, that it had been “negligent” in its oversight of student loan companies. The “errors at issue here were not the result of any willful or intentional conduct on the part of the Department, but, as the Court has recognized, gross negligence, including negligent oversight of the Department’s servicers,” attorneys for the department wrote.

— Education Department officials last week sent letters admonishing its loan servicers over the issue and moved to discipline two department officials.

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, Education Reform, Fraud, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

“Education Deans for Justice and Equity” Speak Out Against Market-Based Disruption

By dianeravitch
October 10, 2019 //
8

 

At last! The leaders of 350 teacher education programs have issued a bold statement in collaboration with the National Education Policy Center denouncing attacks on teacher education and market-based “remedies.”

The group calls itself Education Deans for Justice and Equity.

Their efforts contrast with those of a group called “Deans for Impact,” funded in 2015 by the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, which supports charter schools (such as KIPP, Achievement First, and Uncommon Schools), Teach for America, Educators for Excellence, New Leaders, TNTP, Conservative Leaders for Education, Teach Plus, Stand for Children, and a long list of other Corporate Reform ventures. Deans for Impact has 24 members. The founder and executive director of Deans for Impact is Benjamin Riley, former director of policy and advocacy at the NewSchools Venture Fund, which is heavily endowed by billionaire foundations to launch charter schools and promote education technology.

The statement of Education Deans for Justice and Equity criticizes such disruption agents as Teach for America (which places inexperienced, unprepared college graduates into challenging urban and rural classrooms), the National Council on Teacher Quality (which pretends to evaluate teacher education programs without having the knowledge or experience to do so and without ever setting foot in the institutions they grade), the Relay “Graduate School of Education” (a program intended to grant master’s degrees to charter teachers that lacks the necessary elements of a graduate institution, such as scholars and research), and Pearson’s EdTPA (which seeks to replace human judgement of prospective teachers with a standardized tool).

Their statement begins:

Teachers are important, as is their preparation. We, Education Deans for Justice and Equity, support efforts to improve both. But improving teaching and teacher education must be part of larger efforts to advance equity in society.

Whether crediting teachers as the single most important factor in student success or blaming and scapegoating them for failing schools that only widen social and economic dispari- ties, many of the stories that circulate about education presume that it’s all about the teacher. Concerned less with the system of education and more with the individual actor, this rhetoric tends to reduce the problem of education to the shortcomings of individuals. The solution correspondingly focuses on incentives and other market-based changes.

Without a doubt, teacher-education programs cannot and should not operate as if all is well, because it is not. Several current efforts to reform teacher education in the United States, however, are making things worse. Although stemming from a wide range of actors (includ- ing the federal government, state governments, and advocacy organizations), these trends share a fundamental flaw: They focus on “thin” equity.

In their recently published book, Reclaiming Accountability in Teacher Education,1 Marilyn Cochran-Smith and colleagues contrast two understandings of equity. “Thin” equity defines the problem as the curtailing of individual rights and liberties, and the resulting solutions focus on equal access and market-based changes. In contrast, “strong” equity defines the problem as the legacies of systemic injustices, and the resulting solutions focus on increas- ing participatory democracy. Because thin-equi ty reforms obscure the legacies of systemic injustices, and instead focus narrowly on student achievement, teacher accountability, re- wards, and punishments, improving teacher education requires moving away from these and toward strong-equity reforms.

Below, we identify seven current trends impacting teacher education (including at many of our institutions) that are grounded in thin-equity understandings. In a number of ways, these approaches lack a sound research basis, and in some instances, they have already proven to widen disparities. Following a discussion of these trends, we present our alternative vision for teacher-education reform.

First, marketizing teacher education. Most teacher education in the United States happens at universities, and with much variability. Nonetheless, the long-touted claim that higher education’s “monopoly” over teacher education results in mediocrity and complacency has resulted in increased competition by way of “alternative” routes—some that meet state stan- dards (and some that do not), and some that involve little to no formal preparation via fast- track programs. These include non-university-based programs like the American Board for Certification of Teacher Excellence; programs that partner with universities, like Teach For America; and programs that identify as institutions of higher education, like the Relay Grad- uate School of Education. Such faith in the market to drive improvement frames Congress’s recent rewrite of Title II of ESSA, which allows for public funds to support both non-profit and for-profit alternative certification programs and routes. The problem? Merely expand- ing competition without building the capacity of all programs to prepare teachers has led not to improvement, but to widened disparities among students and increased corporate profiteering off of education.

Second, shaming teacher education. The assumption that shaming will spur effort to com- pete is another way to place faith in the market to drive improvement. Such is the approach of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ) in its annual Teacher Prep Review, which scores (and, for the most part, gives failing grades to) teacher-education programs using an eight-dimension framework. Since its inception, the vast majority of programs nationwide have opted not to participate and share materials for review, citing NCTQ’s faulty methods of review and the lack of research basis for its framework.

Third, externally regulating teacher education at the federal level. The twice-proposed, Obama-era Teacher Preparation Regulations were never implemented, but their “value-add- ed” logic reverberates in other reforms, including NCTQ’s review and the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation (CAEP) accreditation. Measurement experts warn that the use of value-added modeling to determine the effectiveness of teachers to raise test scores, and in turn, the effectiveness of programs to prepare teachers to do so, are neither reliable nor statistically valid.

These are three of the seven malign trends they discuss. Open the link to read the statement in full. It is short and won’t take more than five minutes of reading time.

It is very encouraging to see the leaders of teacher education stand up for professionalism and research-based practice, and to take a stand against quackery.

Categories Equity, Higher Education, Justice, National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), National Education Policy Center, Teach for America, Teacher Education

Betsy DeVos Breaks the Law by Continuing to Collect Debt from Students After Judge Told Her Not to

By dianeravitch
October 8, 2019 //
50

Will billionaire Betsy DeVos go to jail for defying the direct order of a judge?

In 2015, for-profit Corinthian Colleges went bankrupt after state attorney generals complained of fraud. Thousands of its former students were left in the lurch with a mountain of debt for a worthless “education.” After the company filed for bankruptcy protection, the federal department of education ruled that as many as 335,000 students might have their debts canceled, “under The Borrower Defense to Repayment program—an initiative started in 2016 to provide loan relief for students who had been defrauded by predatory schools.” This was during the Obama administration.

However, when DeVos became Secretary of Education, she limited the program of loan forgiveness and began to hound many of the students who had been defrauded. The applications of some 160,000 students for loan forgiveness were shelved. DeVos was ordered by Judge Sallie Kim to stop hounding students to repay student loans that should have been forgiven.

But, as we have seen before, Secretary DeVos has great sympathy for for-profit corporations and no sympathy for students who were defrauded.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos has been threatened with the possibility of jail after a judge deemed she was violating a court order for continuing to collect student debts on a now-defunct school.

That ruling, handed down in June of 2018, was made by U.S. Magistrate Judge Sallie Kim and prevented DeVos and her Department of Education for going after former students at the bankrupt Corinthian Colleges Inc.

However, Kim said she was “astounded” to discover that DeVos was violating the court order at a hearing in San Francisco on Monday after a filing by the Education Department earlier disclosed that more than 16,000 former students at Corinthian College “were incorrectly informed at one time or another … that they had payments due on their federal student loans.”

“At best it is gross negligence, at worst it’s an intentional flouting of my order,” Kim said, reported Bloomberg.

“I’m not sure if this is contempt or sanctions,” she added. “I’m not sending anyone to jail yet but it’s good to know I have that ability.”

The same story is here in the Washington Post.

Is it time to chant “Lock her up”?

 

Categories Accountability, Betsy DeVos, For-Profit, Higher Education, Student Financial Aid and Student Debt

Andrea Gabor: To Succeed in Business, Major in the Liberal Arts

By dianeravitch
October 7, 2019 //
49

 

Andrea Gabor blows up the myth that the path to success in business requires a major in business or that there is a “skills gap” in STEM subjects.

If you want to succeed in business, she writes, major in the liberal arts.

The combatants in the U.S. education wars don’t agree on much, but there’s at least one concern that most reformers and educators across the political spectrum seem to share: fear that universities aren’t producing enough science, technology, engineering and math majors. But just as statesand school districts add new technology requirements and open STEM-oriented schools, leading technology companies are heading in the opposite direction, forming partnerships with liberal-arts colleges and seeking to hire their graduates.

It’s a welcome development. Recent research suggests that contrary to the popular idea that majoring in art or literature is a route to personal penury and a contributor to industrial decline, there are actually plenty of science majors, except among low-income students. Moreover, while newly minted graduates with science and technical degrees enjoy a salary premium over their classmates in the humanities, that premium fades over time, in part because technological skills become obsolete faster. Liberal arts majors, by contrast, trained to be creative communicators and critical thinkers, are more adaptable.

Corporations have good business reasons to embrace history, philosophy and English majors. Companies need well-rounded employees conversant in both digital and creative skills. With some additional training and investments by the government, companies can leverage both the liberal arts and digital know-how that is needed for increasingly complex technological systems.

To understand the limitations of a business degree, consider the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue!

Go ahead and major in art history or philosophy or history or comparative literature. You may end up as CEO.

Categories Higher Education

Federal Judge Rules That Harvard Does Not Discriminate Against Asian-American Students

By dianeravitch
October 1, 2019 //
57

In a closely-watched case, a federal judge ruled that Harvard University does not discriminate against Asian-Americans in its admissions decisions.

The case was filed by a far-right group hoping to outlaw affirmative action, which Harvard used to promote diversity in its student body.

The challenge came from a group hoping to overturn a longstanding Supreme Court precedent that allows race to be considered as one factor among many in the admissions process, but prohibits universities from using racial quotas. The group argued that Harvard’s practices had benefited black and Hispanic students at the expense of another minority group, in a strategic reversal of past affirmative action lawsuits in which the plaintiffs denounced a perceived unfairness to white students.

The judge, Allison Burroughs of Federal District Court for the District of Massachusetts, rejected the argument that Harvard was using affirmative action as a weapon against some races and a boon to others, and said that the university met the strict constitutional standard for considering race in its admissions process….

Students for Fair Admissions made four interrelated claims: that Harvard intentionally discriminated against Asian-Americans, that it used race as a predominant factor in admissions decisions, that it racially balanced its classes, and that it had considered applicants’ race without first exhausting race-neutral alternatives to create diversity.

Judge Burroughs cleared the university of all four claims, saying that while Harvard’s admissions process was “not perfect,” the court would not tear down “a very fine admissions program that passes constitutional muster.”

As I noted in an earlier post, the proportion of Asian-Americans at Harvard far exceeds their proportion of the population.

The U.S. population is about 6% Asian, African Americans are 13%, whites are 61%, Hispanics are 18%.

The Harvard class of 2021 is 22% Asian, 14.6% African American, 11.6% Latino, and 2.5% Native American or Pacific Islander.

On the face of the data, it is hard to make a case for discrimination.

Categories Higher Education

Tom Ultican: Relay “Graduate School of Education” is a “MarketWorld” Fraud

By dianeravitch
September 20, 2019 //
34

Tom Ultican, a former teacher of physics and advanced mathematics in California, is diligently analyzing the tentacles of the Corporate Reform Movement, which he calls the Destroy Oublic Education Movement.

Relay Graduate School: a Slick “MarketWorld” Education Fraud

In this post, he scrutinizes the Relay “Graduate School of Education,” a program run by the charter industry to give master’s degrees to charter teachers who have mastered the arcane arts of no-excuses discipline and test-score raising.

You must read the entire post. It is carefully documented and chilling. He names the key players, the funders, and gives powerful insight  the emptiness of the program.

He begins:

Relay Graduate School of Education is a private stand alone graduate school created and led by people with meager academic credentials. Founded by leaders from the charter school industry, it is lavishly financed by billionaires. Contending that traditional university based teacher education has failed; Relay prescribes deregulation and market competition. Relay does not offer “coursework in areas typical of teacher education programs—courses such as school and society, philosophy of education, and teaching in democracy ….” Rather, Relay trains students almost exclusively in strict classroom management techniques.

Ken Zeichner is one of America’s leading academics studying teacher education. In a paper on alternative teacher preparation programs he noted that Match Teacher Residency and Relay “contribute to the inequitable distribution of professionally prepared teachers and to the stratification of schools according to the social class and racial composition of the student body.” Zeichner clarified,

“These two programs prepare teachers to use highly controlling pedagogical and classroom management techniques that are primarily used in schools serving students of color whose communities are severely impacted by poverty. Meanwhile, students in more economically advantaged areas have greater access to professionally trained teachers, less punitive and controlling management practices and broader and richer curricula and teaching practices. The teaching and management practices learned by the teachers in these two independent programs are based on a restricted definition of teaching and learning and would not be acceptable in more economically advantaged communities.”

Relay is another component of the destroy-public-education infrastructure that mirrors Professor Noliwe Rooks’ definition of segrenomics; “the business of profiting specifically from high levels of racial and economic segregation.”

Founding Relay Graduate School of Education

Relay’s foundation was laid when the Dean of City University of New York’s Hunter College school of education, David Steiner, was approached by Norman Atkins of Uncommon Schools, David Levin of KIPP charter schools, and Dacia Toll of Achievement First charter schools. Dean Steiner agreed to establish the kind of Teacher Preparation program at Hunter College that these three charter industry leaders wanted. The new program which began in 2008 and was called Teacher U.

Kate Peterson studied Relay for a Philadelphia group. She noted,

“Receiving $10 million from Larry Robbins, founder of the hedge fund Glenview Capital Management and current board member of Relay, and $20 million from the non-profit The Robin Hood Foundation, the three charter school leaders partnered with Hunter College in New York to implement their program ….”

The following year the newly elected and extremely wealthy Chancellor of the New York State Board of Regents, Merryl H. Tisch, tapped David Steiner to be Commissioner of Education.

Read it all.

Personally, I find it offensive that a charter industry program calls itself a “graduate school of education” when it has no scholars on its “faculty,” no library, no research. It is a training program with one purpose only: to award master’s degrees to charter teachers who know nothing of the history, philosophy, economics, or sociology of education, who know only one form of pedagogy, who know nothing of child or adolescent psychology. Their students are indoctrinated into the charter way of thought, not educated to think for themselves, not exposed to different points of view.

Robert Hutchins, who was president of the University of Chicago and a great thinker, said long ago that the purpose of professional education is to teach people to become critics of the profession.

That will never happen at Relay.

Categories Accountability, Charter Schools, Corporate Reform, Education Industry, Education Reform, Higher Education, Privatization

How a Billionaire Bought the Right to Put His Name on the Yale Commons

By dianeravitch
September 16, 2019 //
55

Yale opened a dining hall for its students in 1901, called The Commons. It was a common meeting ground for students who lived in many different buildings.

A recent history of The Commons described it like this:

They say Hogwarts’s Great Hall, home to treacle tarts and pumpkin juice, was modeled after it. That’s not true — the honor belongs to the dining hall in the College of Christ Church at Oxford University — but it may as well be. High, cavernous ceilings; lights strung around the interior as if it is never not Christmas; long, dark auburn tables; and portraits of mythical (mostly) men who have had some affiliation with the school. Commons is the wizarding world come alive for a few hours a day; it’s the Harry Potter series of dining spaces — some patrons are diehards, others poo-poo the popularity, but everyone recognizes the cultural importance.

But times change, and money talks. Yale has a large endowment, but all big institutions are always on the lookout for more money.

In 2015, billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, class of 1969, gave Yale University $150 Million. He wanted one thing, and one thing only: the historic, culturally significant Commons must be renamed the Schwarzman Center.

The president of the university agreed to the billionaire’s terms.

At the 50th anniversary dinner of the class of 1969, Schwarzman spoke proudly of his gift, but his classmates did not appreciate his beneficence.

At the class of 1969’s 50th reunion dinner in May, Stephen Schwarzman ’69 — a business mogul who founded The Blackstone Group — rose to the podium. Standing under a tent on Old Campus, Schwarzman explained why he donated $150 million to the University in 2015 to transform Commons dining hall into the Schwarzman Center.

“People who have resources get some unwanted friends, and [University President] Peter [Salovey] came to me with a list of projects Yale wanted to fund,” Schwarzman said, as Salovey stood several feet away from him. “I said, ‘I don’t give a shit about this list.’”

Schwarzman went on to discuss his experience as a lonely first year who often ate alone in Commons. He explained that the new student life hub is personally significant to him because he learned to be independent during his time at Yale.

In an email to the News in July, Blackstone spokesperson Christine Anderson clarified that Schwarzman’s comments at the class reunion dinner were “made in jest and in a lighthearted way….”

Still, according to Class Secretary Kenneth Brown ’69, Schwarzman’s comments rekindled the debate around the construction of the Schwarzman Center.

For one, political science lecturer Jim Sleeper ’69, who was present at the dinner, interrupted the business mogul during his speech and criticized Schwarzman for Blackstone’s alleged role in “dispossess[ing] tens of thousands of people out of their homes.” Later, Sleeper revisited the encounter in a blog post on the class of 1969 webpage.

“There is some stuff that Yale simply should not eat, and as I watched some other diners rolling their eyes and shifting uncomfortably in their seats while Steve went on and on, I decided that someone had to object,” wrote Sleeper, who has criticized Schwarzman and his company for their allegedly unethical business dealings in op-eds published in Salon, Dissent Magazine and Washington Monthly, among others.

Moreover, the business mogul’s claims about his indifference towards Yale’s priorities stood at odds with the University president’s previous explanations about the circumstances surrounding the $150 million gift.

In 2015, the announcement of Schwarzman’s gift for a student life hub drew criticism from faculty members and students alike, who argued that the money could be better spent on other projects on campus. Many, including American studies professor and former chair of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Senate Matt Jacobson, expressed concern that major University projects seem to be driven by donors, rather than by faculty members and the University’s mission.

University President Peter Salovey explained that he brought a list of projects to the billionaire, and he wanted his name on the Commons because he “loved” it.

Probably he also loves the New York Public Library, where he donated $100 million, and the library agreed to name its iconic main building—the one with the lions in front—the Stephen Schwarzman building.

Jim Sleeper wrote about Schwarzman’s passion to spread his name on significant cultural institutions in Dissent last year in an article called “Plutocracy Comes to Campus.”

A recent article by Tom White in Medium reported that Schwarzman gave £150 million to Oxford to create the Schwarzman Center for the Humanities. White listed the “dirty money” associated with the Blackstone Group:

Schwarzman’s payment — I decline to call it a “donation” or “gift” — represents a significant transfer of wealth from some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in the world to an already vastly wealthy institution. At a recent open meeting regarding the new centre, senior management were keen to stress that Schwarzman had passed the University’s “rigorous” clearance tests. Precisely what those tests involve wasn’t made clear. Did they take into account UN special rapporteur Leilani Farha’s recent identification of Blackstone, the largest property owner in the world, as the main contributor to the global housing crisis? Or that in 2013, Independent Clinical Services, a NHS care provider owned by Blackstone, was found to have avoided paying millions of pounds in tax? Or that the company has also made significant campaign donations to climate denier politicians like Republican US senator John Barosso, and has made large investments in shale gas drilling? Just last week, amid raging fires in the Amazon, it emerged that Blackstone owns two Brazilian firms that are “significantly responsible” for its rapid deforestation. The University apparently sees no incongruity between these latter facts and its recent commitment to cut its carbon emissions by 50% by 2030…

The grim irony of building a centre for the study of ethics with money amassed through some of the most predatory and socially and ecologically damaging practices of modern capitalism is apparently lost on Oxford’s Vice Chancellor, Prof. Louise Richardson. “Do you really think we should turn down the biggest gift in modern times, which will enable hundreds of academics, thousands of students to do cutting-edge work in the humanities?” Richardson asked in response to criticism of Blackstone’s business practices and Schwarzman’s connections to Donald Trump.

Last year the New York Times published an article about the competition among billionaires to buy monuments to themselves.

Here is a nugget about the one institution that took Schwarzman s money and didn’t put his name on their building.

In 2014, the Metropolitan Museum of Art cut the ribbon on a four-block-long plaza named after Mr. Schwarzman’s downstairs neighbor David Koch, who paid $65 million for the privilege. Shortly afterward, the Met’s leadership announced that the museum was eliminating the jobs of up to 100 people in administrative, conservationist and curatorial positions in an effort to address a ballooning $30 million deficit.

“All that money for a bunch of useless fountains,” said Michael M. Thomas, the best-selling author who preceded Mr. Schwarzman both as a student at Yale and as a partner at Lehman Brothers.

According to Mr. Thomas, Mr. Salovey is right to argue that Mr. Schwarzman is one of many people at Yale with a space named in his honor. But that reveals the extent of the problem with modern philanthropy, not its absence, he said.

“That’s why I’m not going to my 60th reunion,” he said. “Yale is Whoresville, U.S.A. You can quote me on that.”

Earlier this year, Mr. Schwarzman gave $25 million to the high school he had attended in Abington, Pa. But plans to rename it after him were scrapped when people in the town nearly had a conniption.

 

Categories Accountability, Billionaires, Higher Education

The Whistle-Blower at MIT Knew That Jeffrey Epstein’s Money Was Tainted

By dianeravitch
September 15, 2019 //
13

The Chronicle of Philanthropy published a fascinating story about a  young woman who worked in the development office at MIT when the institution was seeking Jeffrey Epstein’s money. She knew it was wrong, but she was young, a newcomer, and who would care what she thought.

Development support staff are rarely in the limelight, even within their own organizations. But Signe Swenson has had a whirlwind of a week. The former development associate at the MIT Media Lab helped inform New Yorker reporter Ronan Farrow’s exposé about the center’s financial ties with the late Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender.

In previous interviews, Swenson recalled her and her colleagues’ concern that young women who accompanied Epstein on a campus visit and looked like models may have been victims of trafficking. “We literally had a conversation about how, on the off chance that they’re not there by choice, we could maybe help them,” she told NPR. Employees even checked the trash for any pleas for help scribbled on napkins and discarded. Among the lab’s staff, she told Farrow, “All of us women made it a point to be super nice to them.”

Swenson was in her mid-20s at the time and left the lab in 2016. Now director of marketing and operations at an education nonprofit, she spoke with me about what happened when she initially raised concerns to leaders and why she felt like she was one of the only people who could blow the whistle on Epstein’s relationship with the institution. This transcript has been edited for length and clarity.

What follows is a Q and A. Here is one answer:

I expressed that I was aware of Epstein’s conviction and that I thought working with him was a terrible idea. I remember learning that if I chose to take the job, this was not going to be my choice, or necessarily Peter’s [Peter Cohen, director of development and strategy]. I did say that I guess it would be OK as long as I’m never in a room with Epstein. I sort of was drawing a line in that moment, but it’s interesting looking back. Clearly, I wanted the job very badly and did speak up, but it does feel as if I was just tested to see how confidential I could be. This was five years ago, and I was less confident than I should have been about my beliefs of what was unethical.

When it comes to fund-raising, there are no ethical standards in higher education or in the museum or library sectors. When robber barons or pedophiles have millions to cleanse their reputation, the institutions will take their  money.

Categories Funding, Higher Education, Scandals

John Thompson: The Corporate Makeover of Tulsa University

By dianeravitch
September 7, 2019 //
94

John Thompson, historian and retired teacher in Oklahoma, writes here about the philanthrocaptalist makeover of Tulsa University. A tale of our times.

Surely we can agree with The Tulsa World’s Randy Krehbiel, who says that the faculty and administration “disagree bitterly … about whether that transformation will be good or bad for the university.”

Krehbiel provides plenty of space for the case made by T.U. President Gerry Clancy and the city’s philanthropists. Its supporters cite economic challenges, as well an opportunity for new revenue from courses that include cyber and health sciences. They claim that the plan is “not etched in stone,” and that it can evolve as the faculty weighs in.

Even so, Kreibiel reports, “a large number of students and alumni are furious about not only the plan itself but the manner in which it was developed … The Arts and Sciences faculty voted 89-4 not to implement True Commitment.” He also cites the participation of EAB, an education consulting firm. EAB’s role is unknown, but such secrecy is likely to be one reason why Krehbiel closed with a faculty member’s words, “I don’t think anyone is really optimistic.”

To get really pessimistic, read Jacob Howland’ articles in the Nation and City Journal magazines. He acknowledges the role of local philanthropies, especially the George Kaiser Family Foundation (GKFF), in “early-childhood education, delivering health care to indigent families, and making Tulsa more vibrant and economically robust.”

Howland writes:

GKFF spent $350 million on Tulsa’s new Gathering Place, the largest private gift to a public park in US history. The foundation has invested more than $100 million in the Tulsa Arts District since 2009. It is the major funder of early-childhood education in the state, and has spent more than $20 million in Tulsa alone on Educare early-childhood education centers.

But Howland suggests that the GKFF has overreached:

It has also pursued a strategy of populating city boards and commissions. In 2017, GKFF staff members headed the Tulsa school board and the Tulsa Airports Improvement Trust, and had seats on the Economic Development Commission, the Tulsa Performing Arts Center Trust, and the Tulsa City Council. For the past two years, a Bank of Oklahoma executive has chaired the board of directors of the Tulsa Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Howland concludes, “the True Commitment restructuring were all part of Kaiser’s plan to gain control of the university.” And he argues that “TU’s administration has employed smashmouth tactics in dealing with faculty opposition to True Commitment.”

I’ve long admired the great job Tulsa edu-philanthropists have done in early education, “two generation” family supports, and criminal justice reform, and I’ve often asked GFKK leaders why they have also supported their opposite – the data-driven, competition-driven corporate school reforms that have failed so badly in the Tulsa Public Schools (TPS). I’ve repeatedly urged an open and balanced, evidence-driven public discussion of the TPS, which is led by the notorious teacher- and union-basher, Deborah Gist.

I was then saddened when the GKFF even joined with the Bloomberg and Walton foundations in funding “portfolio management” directors to “absorb the duties of the director of partnership and charter schools,” and “in the future, implement ‘new school models resulting from incubation efforts of the district.’” I was later stunned to learn that Stacy Schusterman donated almost $200,000 to California union-busting, teacher-bashing campaigns.

PreK-12 EDUCATION

http://cal-access.sos.ca.gov/Campaign/Committees/Detail.aspx?id=1372632&session=2017&view=contributions

I would now urge Tulsa philanthropists to follow the links cited by journalists and educators and see if the EAB consultants have evidence to support the policies they promote, and then ask whether the values EAB proclaims are worthy of universities in our democracy.

Nowhere on the EAB website, is there any evidence that it’s approach is beneficial to students or society. EAB’s sales pitch certainly doesn’t sound like it has an appropriate role to play in higher education. On the contrary, its claim to fame is being the “brand police.” But how would its “integrated brand strategy” be able to coexist with the founding principles of universities, and their commitment to the clash of ideas? How could a commitment to academic freedom coexist with EAB brand “that all departments, schools, and colleges were onboard with.”

Its blog proclaims:

At EAB we have an ongoing fascination with organizational charts. (Really, we do.) Org charts can tell a story about a university’s strategy, its priorities, and how it gets things done. And when positions start moving on an org chart, we take notice. The latest example: The rise of the strategic marketing and communications (marcom) leader.

The most advanced marcom departments are strategic marketing partners and get involved in everything from institutional branding to admissions to fundraising. And to make sure that there’s a single source of marketing and advertising truth, they function like an in-house ad agency—their clients are departments, colleges, and offices around campus.

https://eab.com/insights/blogs/strategy/its-time-for-marketing-communications-to-have-a-say-in-campus-strategy-heres-how/

But universities aren’t a corporation where everyone is supposed to be on the same page in the search for a single “marketing and advertising truth.” To take one example, tenure protects the clash of ideas. But, EAB’s approach to “‘what you measure matters’” is a “mentality” that “sparks some ambivalence in academia to put it lightly.” So, how do you reconcile the scholarly and the business advertising mentalities? EAB’s response to tenure is:

One solution is to adopt academic metrics that also capture research effort. These metrics can include:
• The number of proposals or papers submitted
• The dollar amount of proposals
• Proportion of funding from different sources
• Benchmarks for the success rates of proposals and papers

https://eab.com/insights/blogs/strategy/3-ways-to-align-tenure-criteria-with-your-institutional-strategy/

Finally, I have enjoyed many conversations with Tulsa philanthropy leaders at events where they assembled talented professors from the O.U. and O.S.U. medical schools. Even though we disagreed on corporate school reform, I’m sure we would share our respect for those medical professionals who are battling the opioid epidemic. We would likely agree that privatization was a major contributor to the deaths of thousands of people in Oklahoma and across the nation.

I hope that philanthropists, who I am confident will contribute to the battle against opioid addiction, will ask a basic question. How many Oklahomans would still be alive and well if it was university medical professors who educated doctors about painkillers, as opposed to the drug companies’ sales reps who would misrepresent medical science in the name of “so-called unbranded promotion?” In times like these, should we not rally behind the principles which drive our universities’ search for knowledge, as opposed to something called “brand equity,” “integrated brand strategy” or whatever profit-seeking consultants spin?

Categories Academic Freedom, Accountability, Billionaires, Education Reform, Higher Education, Oklahoma, Tulsa

College Board Abandons “Adversity” Score

By dianeravitch
August 27, 2019 //
23

The College Board has dropped the controversial idea of giving students a score for their social-economic circumstances.

The College Board is abandoning its plan to assign an adversity score to every student who takes the SAT, after facing criticism from educators and parents.

Instead, it will try to capture a student’s social and economic background in a broad array of data points. The new tactic is called Landscape and doesn’t combine the metrics into a single score.

The original tool, called the “environmental context dashboard,” combined about 15 socio-economic metrics from a student’s high school and neighborhood to create something college admission officers called an “adversity score.”

Considering a student’s race and class in college admissions decisions is a contentious issue. Many colleges, including Harvard University, say a diverse student body is part of the educational mission of a school. A lawsuit accusing Harvard of discriminating against Asian-American applicants by holding them to a higher standard is awaiting a judge’s ruling. Lawsuits charging unfair admission practices have also been filed against the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the University of California system.

In case the WSJ article is behind a paywall, here is another.

Categories Higher Education, Testing
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