Mercedes Schneider has been trying to get Louisiana’s ACT scores, but the State Education Department would not release them. Mercedes would not be deterred, and she explains here how she finally got them. She always sssumed State Superintendent John White didn’t want the scores made public. Now she knows why.
“There is a reason Louisiana Superintendent John White has refused to release these scores to the public:
“The Class of 2014 ACT composite scores for RSD do nothing to support the now-ten-year-old sales pitch that The Reforms Are Working in New Orleans.
“The Class of 2013 ACT composite for RSD was 16.3.
“The Class of 2014 ACT composite for all RSD high schools was 15.6. For RSD-New Orleans high schools, it was 15.7.”
It turns out that the Néw Orleans-Recivery School District ranks 66 out of 70 districts in the state.
Sara Goldrick Rab is a professor of educational policy studies and sociology at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.
In this paper, she explains the likely effects of President Obama’s plan for tuition-free community college. She explains how the plan would affect students who receive Pell grants, how it is likely to affect community colleges, how the plan differs from the Tennessee program, and other frequently asked questions. She seeks to allay the fears of critics. She does not, however, address the question of whether the plan is an effort to impose Race to the Top metrics on this sector.
Adam Bessie is a professor at a California community college. He looks back wistfully to the era when free community college was guaranteed and a path to making one’s way in the world.
But he fears now that President Obama’s plan will turn into a Race to the Top for community colleges, with federal requirements for test scores, VAM, and graduation, along with punishments for not reaching mandated targets.
“I worry that “free” college may be a Trojan horse for implementing a Race to the Top (RTTT) for higher education, which has been a disastrous policy for K-12 education. RTTT, which is essentially No Child Left Behind rebranded, uses the force of the federal government to institute a regime of standardized testing and so-called “competition,” which has narrowed the curriculum (especially in poor schools, which many of my students come from), emphasizing only reading and math, and tossing aside the arts, sciences and other areas which can’t be tested. Beyond this, RTTT has wrested control of classrooms out of the hands of educators and communities, and placed them into the hands of distant technocrats in the federal government and corporate America.
“Free” college might mean that community colleges would cede local, community control to the federal government; thus, the policies of Washington and corporate America would drive the curriculum, rather than the needs of the community. And based on what we’ve seen with RTTT, it’s likely that community colleges again would become junior colleges – designed primarily as trade schools, or for transfer, with a focus on getting students in and out the door as fast as possible, using standardized, impersonal methods more focused on efficiency than education.”
Students who attended public schools were more likely to get a college degree than their peers who attended charter schools.
“The report compared members of the respective classes of 2007 from the city’s high schools and five of our local academies of excellence. Fifty percent of the BPS students had scored a college degree within six years vs. 42% of their charter peers. Now I know what you’re thinking. That equals a difference of eight percent, and eight rhymes with *hate* and also *overstate.* Which is why it’s time to look at the numbers behind those numbers. The 2007 class of Boston high school grads consisted of 1700 students, of whom some 850 have now attained their post-secondary attainment. The 2007 class of Boston charter high school grads, from a total of five charter high schools, consisted of 80 students, of whom 33 have scored their sheepskin.”
This article in The Chronicle of Higher Education tells a fascinating story about the fate of higher education. On February 28, 1967, California Governor Ronald Reagan said that the state could no longer afford “intellectual luxuries,” and that taxpayers should not have to subsidize “intellectual curiosity.”
Dan Berrett writes:
“Sometimes, sea changes in attitude start small, gradually establishing assumptions until no one remembers thinking differently. This is how that happened to liberal education. It’s a story of events on campus and beyond: the oil embargo, the canon wars, federal fiscal policies, the fall of the Soviet Union. On that day in 1967, Reagan crystalized what has since become conventional wisdom about college. In the early 1970s, nearly three-quarters of freshmen said it was essential to them to develop a meaningful philosophy of life. About a third felt the same about being very well off financially. Now those fractions have flipped.”
Now students and policymakers alike see higher education as career training, a way to get a better job. Lost is the idea of learning for learning’s sake. That is an intellectual luxury we can no longer afford or even remember.
Bloomberg News reports that early admissions favors the affluent, and many of the most desirable colleges are filling up a large proportion of their freshman class early.
Janet Lorin writes:
Top colleges are filling more of their classes in early-admissions programs that favor affluent families, placing another barrier before poorer students hoping to better themselves through higher education.
Families that need financial aid often wait for the regular round, which starts this month, so they can compare aid offers. Because early-decision programs require a binding commitment to one school in November and boost admissions chances, many slots are taken before lower-income students even apply.
At Northwestern and Duke, about half the spots for this fall’s freshman class are already spoken for. Ten years ago, the universities each took about a quarter through early admissions. Vanderbilt expects its class to be as much as 44 percent full by next month, compared with a third a decade ago.
“The scale is definitely tipped to the kids who have more behind them financially,” said Bruce Poch, former dean of admissions at Pomona College in Claremont, California. The trend of colleges filling up early “has gotten more extreme in recent years.”
In this excerpt from her recent book, The Tyranny of the Meritocracy, Lani Guinier describes the tight linkage between standardized testing and family income. To the extent, then, that colleges rely on the SAT (or ACT) as a filter for college admission, they disproportionately screen out students who have not had the multiple advantages of living in affluence.
She cites data demonstrating that the SAT is of little value in predicting college performance, yet it effectively excludes students of color and students who are from low-income families.
She writes:
Close to eight hundred colleges have decreased or eliminated reliance on high-stakes tests as the way to rank and sort students. In the current environment, however, moving away from merit by the numbers takes guts. The testing and ranking diehards, intent on maintaining their gate-keeping role, hold back and even penalize administrators who take such measures. The presidents of both Reed College and Sarah Lawrence College report experiencing forms of retribution for refusing to cooperate with the “ranking roulette.”
At the center of this conflict is the wildly popular US News & World Report’s annual college-rankings issue—the bible of university prestige. In the book Crazy U, Andrew Ferguson describes meeting Bob Morse, the director of data research for US News and the lead figure behind the publication’s college rankings. Morse, a small man who works in an unassuming office, is described by Ferguson as “the most powerful man in America.” And for good reason: students and parents often rely upon the rankings—reportedly produced only by Morse and a handful of other writers and editors—as a proxy for university quality. These rankings rely heavily on SAT scores for their calculations. Without such data available from, for example, Sarah Lawrence, which stopped using SAT scores in its admissions process in 2005, Morse calculated Sarah Lawrence’s ranking by assuming an average SAT score roughly 200 points below the average score of its peer group. How does US News justify simply making up a number? Michele Tolela Myers, the president of Sarah Lawrence at the time the school stopped using the SAT, reported that the reasoning behind the lowered ranking was explained to her this way: “[Director Morse] made it clear to me that he believes that schools that do not use SAT scores in their admission process are admitting less capable students and therefore should lose points on their selectivity index.”
This is the testocracy in action, an aristocracy determined by testing that wants to maintain its position even if it has to resort to fabrication. What is it they are so desperate to protect? The answer initially seems to be that the SAT can predict how well students will do in college and thus how well-prepared they are to enter a particular school. There is a relationship between a student’s SAT score and his first-year college grades. The problem is it’s a very modest relationship. It is a positive relationship, meaning it is more than zero. But it is not what most people would assume when they hear the term correlation.
In 2004, economist Jesse Rothstein published an independent study that found only a meager 2.7 percent of grade variance in the first year of college can be effectively predicted by the SAT. The LSAT has a similarly weak correlation to actual achievement in law school. Jane Balin, Michelle Fine, and I did a study at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where we looked at the first-year law school grades of 981 students over several years and then looked at their LSAT scores. It turned out that there was a modest relationship between their test scores and their grades. The LSAT predicted 14 percent of the variance between the first-year grades. And it did a little better the second year: 15 percent. Which means that 85 percent of the time it was wrong. I remember being at a meeting with a person who at the time worked for the Law School Admission Council, which constructs the LSAT. When I brought these numbers up to her she actually seemed surprised they were that high. “Well,” she said, “nationwide the test is nine percent better than random.” Nine percent better than random. That’s what we’re talking about….
Meaningful participation in a democratic society depends upon citizens who are willing to develop and utilize these three skills: collaborative problem solving, independent thinking, and creative leadership. But these skills bear no relationship to success in the testocracy. Aptitude tests do not predict leadership, emotional intelligence, or the capacity to work with others to contribute to society. All that a test like the SAT promises is a (very, very slight) correlation with first-year college grades.
But once you’re past the first year or two of higher education, success isn’t about being the best test taker in the room any longer. It’s about being able to work with other people who have different strengths than you and who are also prepared to back you up when you make a mistake or when you feel vulnerable. Our colleges and universities have to take pride not in compiling an individualistic group of very-high-scoring students but in nurturing a diverse group of thinkers and facilitating how they solve complex problems creatively—because complex problems seem to be all the world has in store for us these days.
Michael Hilzik of the Los Angeles Times reminds readers that public higher education in California used to be tuition free. It was also tuition free for qualified students at the City University of Néw York.
“President Obama’s proposal unveiled Thursday to provide free community college education to all “responsible” students is garnering immense attention. That’s as it should be, although the details still need to be fleshed out and individual states will have to agree to shoulder a share of the costs.
“But the proposal fails to address one glaring flaw in the nation’s overall system of public higher education: It should all be free. That’s the way it is in Germany, for instance, where there is a long tradition of low-cost university study. In 2014 the last German state holding out against free university education threw in the towel; now anyone, including foreign students, can study at a German university at public expense.
“Free higher education to qualified students was also the rule in California, where the University of California had no tuition for state residents until Gov. Ronald Reagan demanded it in the early 1970s. Once the door was cracked open for tuition charges, it swung wide; a Berkeley or UCLA education was pegged at $12,192 for state residents in 2014-15, plus myriad other fees….
“Free tuition has since come to be viewed as an anachronism, charming to contemplate in the abstract but simply incompatible with modern life. But the numbers don’t support that conclusion. The real obstacle to reinstating it is that it represents a path to social mobility for the working class and the poor–that’s the aspect that’s anachronistic in our grasping modern world.
“Consider this: When the corporate plutocrat Meg Whitman was running for California governor in 2010, she had no trouble proposing the elimination of the state’s capital gains tax, which brought in more than $10 billion in a decent year. Eliminating all in-state tuition, according to a UC report issued around the same time, would have cost only $3 billion.
“Which option would be an investment yielding a greater, broader return to the state? Unmistakably the latter. The roll of distinguished Californians educated for free at UC before the 1970s is a long one. It includes former Governor and U.S. Chief Justice Earl Warren; Ralph Bunche (the first black Nobel Peace Prize laureate); author Maxine Hong Kingston; the discoverer of plutonium (and later Berkeley chancellor) Glenn Seaborg; and Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley.”
Earlier today I posted approvingly about President Obama’s proposal to make two years of community college free for all who work for it, meaning, “Students must attend community college at least half-time, maintain a 2.5 GPA, and make steady progress toward completing their program.” In the announcement, the White House said that his proposal is similar to one enacted in Tennessee by Republican Governor Haslam.
Dissenting readers feared this plan would be a means of imposing NCLB, Race to the Top, and VAM on higher education.
Here is an email I received with other concerns from a professor of mathematics at the University of Memphis:
Dear Professor,
Perhaps you are aware that President Obama is visiting Knoxville, TN, today to talk about his free community college program
I think there are many people who (should) have a less than enthusiastic take on this proposal, since it is just a manifestation of the national movement to privatize public education.
In my opinion, the idea behind this free community college proposal is to weaken high quality education (public universities), and then easily implement privatization in the form of outsourcing university/college functions (teaching, research) to private companies. Part of this future will be the wide spread use low quality forms of education, such as online courses.
Concrete example for transferring funds from high quality education to lower quality
Here is a concrete example from my university, The University of Memphis (UofM), that should give a pause to the celebration of free higher education. Last year, shortly after the announcement of a $20 million cut to UofM’s budget, came the announcement of Tennessee Promise that offers free education to all TN residents at public community colleges. In my opinion, TN Promise is a perfect example for taking money away from high quality education (UofM, in this case), and use the extra funds to invest in low quality education (community colleges). Then this lower quality education is offered to the masses as a solution to their educational needs.
To make the high-to-low quality education transformation explicit, I remark that we at UofM are now pressured to start accepting lower level courses to our major requirements to “ease the transition of students from community colleges to our university”.
This transformation to low quality education is, of course, quite similar to what’s happening in K-12 education. In Tennessee, the Achievement School District takes over schools, fires the teachers, then the teachers get replaced by young underpaid, undertrained teachers. This scheme is presented as a solution to the educational needs of the poor.
In other words, both in higher and K-12 education, low quality alternatives are offered to the poor with obvious social (and often racial) implications.
Weaken the opposition: eliminate the tenure system
The first step in the privatization movement is the weakening of the opposition. Community colleges have a much greater number of adjunct faculty than 4 year colleges. Adjuncts are much easier to control than tenured faculty. This is one of the reasons Gates is supporting community colleges instead of 4 year colleges. It’s “educational” to listen to him as he answers a question about why he focuses his efforts to community colleges and especially why he prefers adjunct professors over tenured ones; just watch this for, say, 3 minutes
At UofM, the total salary increase of all employees between 2009-2014 was $10 million. Most of this increase went to increase administration and temporary faculty. The total salary of tenured faculty during these 5 years not only didn’t increase but got reduced.
So again, the strategy of the privatizers seems clear: strengthen community colleges at the expense of 4 year colleges. Weaken the power of opposing tenured professors so that then the privatization of public higher education can be accomplished much easier with the easily controlled adjunct faculty. To be sure, the privatization has been happening. In an earlier email, I reported to you the concerete example of a $5 million/ year teacher training program to be run by Relay and TNTP on the UofM campus, but there are other examples for outsourcing university functions to private companies.
Publicize the privatization scheme and the associated statistics
In my opinion, it would be important to publicize the general scheme of the privatizers so that people would recognize them. In some cases, like TN Promise, it’s not so easy to recognize the underlying motivation.
Also, it would be important to be able to support claims by numbers. It would be great to encourage people to find out, publicize and regularly update the following numbers for their school district (they are not easy to obtain, though they are supposed to be public records)
1) The names and number of schools that are taken over by charterizers (like the Achievement School District in TN).
2) The number of teachers fired during the take over.
3) The average salary of the fired teachers.
4) The average salary of the newly hired teachers.
In (4 year) public colleges, it would be important to publicize and maintain
5) The total salary increase for the last 5 and 10 years.
6) The total salary increase of the permanent (tenured) faculty for the last 5 and 10 years.
7) The total budget allocated to private companies in each of the last 5 years.
The stats in 5) and 6) above are not difficult to do, and can be done using publicly available salary databases. I’d be happy to show anybody what and how I did at UofM.
President Obama has proposed making two years of community college tuition-free for all. That’s an excellent plan. Too many young people are priced out of any higher educAtion, and this removes affordability as an obstacle. Community colleges were originally underwritten by state and local governments to expand access, so this plan restores the original purpose of the community college. My hope would be that this plan would not only open the doors of higher education to many students, but would undercut predatory for-profit online “universities.”
COMMUNITY COLLEGE FOR EVERYONE: President Barack Obama is headed to Pellissippi State Community College in Tennessee today, where he’ll propose making two years of community college free “for everybody who’s willing to work for it.” But he’ll need the approval of Congress to make it happen. So far, the plan doesn’t have a price tag – at least not officially; all White House officials will say is it’s “significant.” If all 50 states participate, the proposal could benefit 9 million students each year and save them an average of $3,800 in tuition. (David Leonhardt of The New York Times estimated the cost could reach $15 billion annually: http://nyti.ms/1Kr23Ey) But administration officials insist it’s “a proposal with bipartisan appeal.” The plan is inspired by – but not identical to – the Tennessee Promise, the brainchild of Republican Gov. Bill Haslam. More from Allie Grasgreen: http://politi.co/1FwnNPd Watch Obama speak in Knoxville at 1:20 p.m. ET: http://1.usa.gov/IKgGYn
– Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) was quick to state his support Thursday night, framing community colleges as “a more affordable, higher quality alternative to for-profit colleges.”
– But there are potential drawbacks, said Don Heller, dean of Michigan State University’s College of Education. Take California, he said, where many students enroll at community colleges because they aren’t admitted to the University of California. “Should we really be giving those kids free tuition when their families can pay?” Heller asked. Further, he said, why not just offer two years’ worth of tuition at any institution? “By focusing this on just community college students, are we going to lose out on some students that could benefit by going and starting at a four-year university?”
Diane Ravitch's blog 