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

http://wate.com/2015/01/08/pres-obama-to-propose-free-community-college-program/. Please see the short video in the bottom of the even shorter announcement.

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.

Best,

Mate Wierdl

The first post this morning was about Daniel McGraw’s astonishing discovery that the pass rates on the GED literally crashed after Pearson aligned the GED with the Common Core. He wrote:

The numbers are shocking: In the United States, according to the GED Testing Service, 401,388 people earned a GED in 2012, and about 540,000 in 2013. This year, according to the latest numbers obtained by Scene, only about 55,000 have passed nationally. That is a 90-percent drop off from last year.

Daniel McGraw posted a comment later.

He wrote:

One thing I left out of this story, but wish I had put in. Many of the high academic folks I interviewed about the process in changing the GED all said the changes were made because the old test “wasn’t fair” to HS graduates. They explained saying that if a HS senior had to know a certain amt. to graduate, it wasn’t fair to them if someone passing a slightly lower standard GED got into college as well. I then said for something not “to be fair” to a party, you must prove that that party had been harmed in some way. They couldn’t pinpoint any real harm, and were sort of disgusted by that line of questioning. But their thinking was very real in that every one of them had the same talking point: that somehow a 2013 HS grad college freshman and their parents would experience some harm if they went to college and their kid was sitting next to a GED grad. The problem here is that we do not make education/economic policy based on whether some group “thinks” that policy is fair or not. We look at the bigger picture. And in this case, the college presidents and administrators overseeing this change were thinking more along the lines of fairness to their perceived constituency rather than a policy for the greater good of the country. BTW, thanks for all the comments.

Jonathan Lovell, who has contributed several posts to this blog, has written to Secretary of Education Arne Duncan about his intention to grade colleges of education by the test scores of the students of their graduates. The deadline for submitting comments is January 2. Send comments to: https://www.federalregister.gov/articles/2014/12/03/2014-28218/teacher-preparation-issues

Lovell writes:

Dear Mr Duncan,
As a teacher educator for the past 35 years in the field of English Education–having spent the past 27 of those years in my present institution of San Jose State University–and as someone who has observed upwards of over 2500 middle and high school English classes over the course of my career, I can say without qualification that the proposed new regulations for assessing the quality of teacher preparation programs would be an unmitigated disaster.
Others on this site have spoken eloquently about the extremely serious effects, especially to public institutions like ours, of the costs of implementing these regulations, as well as the wrong-headedness of linking the assessment of teacher preparation programs to a VAM-like measure of student performance in the classes of recent graduates.
I’d like to address a related issue, but one that has been strangely left out of the public discussion to date. It’s the effect of these new regulations on what might be called the “climate” in which teaching as a profession is perceived.
As I’m sure you are aware, there has already been a 50% decline over the past five years in the number of applicants to teacher education programs in the state of California. While we’ve countered this trend in the English Education program here at San Jose State, we’ve only been able to do so by focusing relentlessly of what helps beginning teachers improve not only their instructional practices, but their sense of personal agency in their chosen profession. The major player in this effort has been the San Jose Area Writing Project, which routinely selects exemplary K-12 teachers for an intensive four and one half week summer institute, then positions these teachers in significant roles in the preparation of new teachers.
Your proposed new regulations will be perceived as yet another iteration of all-too-familiar Bush-Obama refrain that “the whipping will continue until morale improves.” I believe it’s high time to turn from this thoroughly discredited approach to the improvement of teaching and teacher training, and to start looking more sensibly and honestly at practices that work.
The practices of the National Writing Project would be an excellent place to start.

 
Yours truly,

 
Jonathan Lovell
Professor of English and Director of the San Jose Area Writing Project
San Jose State University