From Stephen Dyer of Innovation Ohio:
“New Ohio state report card data show that Ohio charter school grads are far less likely to earn college degrees than Ohio school district grads. These data give us an idea of how schools prepare stduents for success beyond the test score. And results aren’t good for Ohio charters overall.”
John Hechinger recently published an explosive book (TRUE GENTLEMEN: THE BROKEN PLEDGE OF AMERICA’S FRATERNITIES) about the fraternity culture of binge drinking and sexual assault, behaviors that typically are ignored, tolerated, and excused.
This piece is an excerpt from his book. It explains who is protecting the current fraternity culture. Just a few days ago, a student at Louisiana State University died during a fraternity hazing ritual that involved binge drinking.
Why is this allowed to continue?
Each spring, scores of fresh-faced undergraduates flock to Capitol Hill to lobby Congress in support of legislation sympathetic to Greek organizations and to network at a cocktail reception and $500-a-plate fundraiser. In April 2016, at the elegant Liaison Hotel, U.S. Representatives, flanked by American flags, posed for photos with fraternity men and sorority women. The lawmakers were the honored guests of the Fraternity and Sorority Political Action Committee, commonly known as FratPAC, which bills itself as the largest political action committee “focused solely on higher education issues.”
Since 2005, when it was founded, FratPAC has given more than $1.3 million in campaign contributions to members of Congress, almost two-thirds to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonprofit group that tracks money in Washington. Fraternity and sorority alumni, who make up less than 4 percent of the adult population, are disproportionately represented in the capital. Thirty-nine percent of Senators in the 113th U.S Congress, and one-fourth of U.S Representatives, belonged to Greek organizations, primarily fraternities—as well as one-third of all Supreme Court justices and about 40 percent of U.S. presidents, according to the North-American Interfraternity Conference, which represents most of the oldest and largest fraternities. (Presidents Trump and Obama were not fraternity men.)
In 2012, FratPac helped forestall the introduction of a bill that would have revoked federal financial aid from anyone that a school disciplinary board found responsible for hazing. The fraternity lobby has also defended the due-process rights of college men in sexual-assault cases. In 2015, it backed a bill that would have required the victims of sexual assault to report the allegations to law enforcement before requesting a campus hearing. Fraternity and sorority trade groups and three national fraternities spent $250,000 lobbying for the bill.
If you want to know the meaning of Betsy DeVos’ indifference to sexual assaults on campus, you should read John Hechinger’s engrossing book TRUE GENTLEMEN: THE BROKEN PLEDGE OF AMERICA’S FRATERNITIES.
It was reviewed in the Washington Post by T. Rees Shapiro, who wrote:
“Here is how Hechinger details one young woman’s experience inside an SAE house in the fall of 2014 at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where she found herself on a dingy bathroom floor littered with beer cans. “The man pushed her head down and forced her to perform oral sex and, then, intercourse, leaving her raw and bleeding inside. But it wasn’t over yet,” Hechinger writes, continuing the account using the woman’s real name with her permission. “The second man took his turn, forcing Gabriela to perform fellatio.” The encounter ended with a third man entering the bathroom and finding the young woman helpless, Hechinger writes. A savior he was not. “Gabriela was slumped on the floor of the shower, leaning against a wall, her leggings stained with semen, her shirt pulled up over her shoulders,” Hechinger writes. “ ‘Button up your shirt,’ he told her. Afterward, he urinated and left her on the floor, scared and alone.”
“Interestingly, the men who assaulted Gabriela were not members of the fraternity, Hechinger notes, questioning whether SAE acted negligently in allowing conditions for such a brutal attack to transpire amid a party at an SAE house.”
Hechinger writes that between 2011 and 2016, sexual assaults took place at 15 SAE houses out of 230 across the country. Insurance companies, Hechinger notes, “have rated fraternities just above toxic-waste dumps because of claims related to drinking, hazing, and sexual assault.”
Would Gabriela have been able to find witnesses to back up her complaint of sexual assault?
Betsy DeVos keeps trying out different metaphors and analogies in her effort to persuade the public that school choice is way better than public schools.
She has referred to cell phones (you choose among many different providers but the government doesn’t underwrite your choice), Uber (you choose but the government doesn’t underwrite your choice), food trucks outside the U.S. Department of Education (because there are no nearby restaurants but the government also doesn’t pay for your lunch).
So she tried again: You choose your college, why not choose your school?
Peter Greene explains here why this analogy fails.
Here a few of his wise observations:
“In the higher education system, it is primarily the interests of students that are at stake. In K-12, all of society has a stake in the system. Public schools do not exist to serve only parents. The interests of the students, their future employers, their future neighbors and co-workers, their future fellow voters, the community as a whole– all of these interests are represented. That’s why all taxpayers chip in (unlike the higher ed system). That means that all stakeholders get a say, and all public schools should be subjected to a considerably higher level of oversight and accountability than a school ike Harvard.
“Why is choice wrong for K-12? Believe it or not, I don’t think it has to be wrong. But as currently proposed and practiced, it’s wrong because
* There must be accountability for where and how public tax dollars are spent (that includes both issues of quality and issues of violating separation of church and state)
* The system must be fully funded. You cannot run three schools for the money previously spent on one. Don’t make it a zero-sum game– fully fund it.
* Do not leave leftover students behind. Do not push students out because they don’t fit your model. If you want choice, make it parents’ choice, not the school’s choice.
* Students before profits. No for-profits choices. And stringent rules on not-for-profits, most of whom are currently just for-profits with good money-laundering systems.
* Total transparency and complete local control.
“None of these are features of the system that brought those students to Harvard. That’s why choice in higher education, while not always very successful, is less objectionable than choice for K-12.”
David Coleman led the creation of the Common Core, which has been mired in controversy since it was released.
Now he is president of the College Board, where he oversaw the redesign of the SAT. Confusion reigns.
The good news is that nearly 1,000 colleges and universities are now test-optional, meaning students don’t have to take the SAT or the ACT to apply. The word is out than the students’ four-year grade-point-average is a better predictor of college performance than a standardized test.
What next for David Coleman?
This is an alarming article about the invasion of corporate and philanthropic money into higher education, not to underwrite the purposes of higher education, but to buy control of policy and thinking.
The most obvious example is the millions donated by Charles Koch to spread the gospel of free markets and individual responsibility.
All told, the Charles Koch Foundation has invested some $200 million in higher education activities since 1980, with more than $140 million of that money allocated since 2005, funding over fifty free-market research centers and institutes at universities. And these beachheads of private campus cash have become lush islands of ideological purity by partnering with like-minded philanthropists such as Papa John’s CEO John Schnatter and the recently deceased Philadelphia Flyers owner Ed Snider.
But all this high-profile private funding has also provoked a backlash. Groups such as Kochwatch and UnKoch My Campus have galvanized public attention and even sparked protests at campuses nationwide. So the Kochtopus has rebranded. Starting in 2014, Charles Koch introduced the “Well-Being Initiative” with a blog post under his signature and a conference at the Charles Koch Institute in Washington, D.C.
One speaker was Koch beneficiary James Otteson, a philosopher and executive director of the BB&T Center for the Study of Capitalism. BB&T is a bank holding company formerly chaired by a man named John Allison, who retired in 2010 and now serves as “executive in residence” at the center. He was also president and CEO of the libertarian Cato Institute. In 2011 he caused a stir by promising through the BB&T Charitable Foundation to provide grants as high as $2 million to schools that established courses on the first principles of modern capitalism with Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged as required reading. That novel, of courses, preaches naked self-interest as a virtue. At conferences like these, however, the candid celebration of capitalist predation doesn’t always align so cleanly with the institutional interests of the Koch Foundation. So the focus has been rejiggered to explore “what enables individuals and societies to flourish and how to help people improve their lives and communities.”
Koch is far from alone. Read the article and see how many other billionaires have stepped into the game to buy scholars and whole departments.
This is the auctioning off of academic freedom and intellectual pursuit. It is a scandal. Call it intellectual corruption.
Betsy DeVos changed the standard of evidence required in cases where there are allegations of rape on campus. The change will make it more difficult to sustain a claim of rape.
The most controversial part of the Obama-era guidance was that the outcome of investigations should rely on the preponderance of the evidence in each case to determine guilt. Critics said that was too low a standard, and DeVos has said that some innocent men were falsely accused under the standard.
Victims will have a harder time meeting the new standard because there are seldom witnesses to rape.
Common in civil law, the preponderance standard is lower than the “clear and convincing evidence” threshold that had been in use at some schools. Victim advocates viewed the April 2011 letter as a milestone in efforts to get schools to heed the longstanding problem of campus sexual assault, punish offenders and prevent violence.
DeVos has made it clear for several weeks, as has her Acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights Candace Jackson (who opposes affirmative action and feminism), that they believe that many men have been unfairly accused of rape. They have expressed sympathy for those accused of rape, not their accusers.
This is a really good piece of investigative writing by Alina Tugend on the value of Advanced Placement courses. It doesn’t answer the question posed in the headline of this post but it supplies valuable information and poses the right questions.
I was interviewed and what really bothers me about the demand for “AP for All” is the implicit assumption that taking a rigorous course and failing the exam will improve educational opportunity. As I say in the article, if this is the goal of the College Board, why not offer the test for free? It is easy to forget that the College Board is a business, not a charity.
There are other ways to reduce the achievement gaps instead of putting kids in a class where the reading level is far beyond their reach and they are near certain to fail.
Although AP was originally designed for elite high schools, some of them have dropped it because their own classes are equally demanding. And some elite college don’t give credit for AP courses.
So the strongest claim of the College Board these days is that their tests supply equity. No standardized test has ever increased equity. They are designed not to. If your primary interest is civil rights, fight for funding and desegregation, not a better standardized test.
Since William Buckley wrote his once-famous screed, “God and Man at Yale,” the nation’s colleges and universities have been under attack for liberal bias. During the 1960s and 1970s, the Right complained that political correctness was stigling the voices of conservative students and professors and that affirmative action was causing white students to lose out in the admissions process. Somehow, despite the alleged (and real) leftward tilt of the professoriate, American politics is dominated by rightwing politicians. All three branches are in the hands of conservatives, and rightwing media is enjoying a dramatic resurgence.
But be prepared, warns an intern at the National Review, American higher education is about to become the nation’s scapegoat, serving next year in the role that the media serves now: punching bag for Republican demagogues. It is elitist, it costs too much, it harbors leftist bias, it encourages a proliferation of bizarre majors and courses.
There is more than a grain of truth in all these charges, but that grain is tiny compared to the anti-intellectualism and bile that lies behind these charges. Elected officials have spent decades shifting the cost of higher education from the state’s to students, and the costs are out of reach for many students; for those who do attend, the cost of paying back student loans can take years. Meanwhile, many universities have responded to competition by building lavish student facilities and reducing the number of faculty eligible for tenure. Some 70% of the nation’s professors are adjuncts, or “contingent” faculty, barely able to cobble together a decent living as a “reward” for their years of preparation and study.
The “political correctness” claims have been blown out of all proportion because they are easiest for the uneducated to understand. They play into the well of white resentment that elected Trump, r
The sense that nonegites are getting an unfair advantage over whites.
Since World War II, our nation’s universities have been generally viewed as engines of economic progress and a path to social mobility. They are also considered by many to be the best in the world.
Make no mistake. If the right targets them next as the target of the nihilist steamroller, the future growth of our nation–economy and social–will be at risk.
It is past time for the leaders of higher education to strategize about the future, about cost and accessibility, about how they are perceived, about their role in American society, and about how to respond to the attacks by rightwing politicians that will blame higher education for the erosion of equality and opportunity in our society.
Gary Rubinstein has been bothered by the lies spread about the college completion rates of charter students. He has pointed out that it is unfair to say that X% of your students in twelfth grade finished college without admitting that twelfth grade is not the right place to begin, since it excludes the attrition that may have occurred earlier.
Among charters, KIPP has been honest in stating that it counts the students who completed eighth grade and persisted to high school graduation. Others say they just can’t find the data to learn when their senior started in their school. Can you believe that?
Gary posts a twitter exchange he had with Richard Whitmire, who clearly did not want to engage with Gary. Whitmire wrote a fawning bio of Michelle Rhee, then a book praising Rocketship Charters. Not a high success rate.
What Gary is looking for is candor, not boasting.
It seems the public is beginning to understand that charter school boasting is built on cherrypicking students and pushing out the ones that get low scores.
Diane Ravitch's blog 