Since the 1970s, a “doom loop” has pervaded higher education, writes Christopher Newfield in his new bookThe Great Mistake: How We Wrecked Public Universities and How We Can Fix Them. Newfield, a professor of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, calls this loop “privatization” – the hidden and overt ways that “business practices restructure teaching and research.”
It’s a cycle in which colleges spend more and more money chasing research projects, building luxury dorms and academic centers to attract wealthy students, and engaging in activities that compel them to compete against each other, rather than focus on their own students. Newfield says he saw this first-hand while serving on the University of California’s planning and budget committee.
One consequence, according to Newfield: After decades of public universities raising tuition, legislatures have learned to rely even more on tuition increases to enable them to cut funding for public higher education.
Families suffer, of course, but the long-term impact transcends that. “The converting of public funding into higher tuition focuses the student on assuring her future income to cover higher costs and debt,” he writes. At stake, he believes, is a citizenry that sees college not as a place for in-depth learning and inquiry, but as a means to economic security, forcing colleges to conduct themselves more like a business, and less like a public good that all students can afford.
The Hechinger Report spoke with Newfield to learn more.
Society – culturally, economically and socially – gets the majority of the benefits. Here I’m using the work of some economists, particularly Walter McMahon, who has actually tried to count up all of the non-market benefits that universities generate.
My parents are first-generation college people, and they probably wouldn’t have gone if it hadn’t been free for them. The benefit of that was that society got two more productive, also politically more thoughtful, more complex people that had better health, people that were able to make contributions to their community, because they had incomes that allowed them to work only one job.
What’s happened since is, it’s just kind of an arrangement of convenience for state governments, for taxpayers, for business taxpayers, who’ve gotten a cheaper deal. But, it’s economically and socially less efficient to save money this way [by reducing state funding and relying on tuition plus businesslike revenue from research]. It’s also philosophically and economically incorrect.
Q: What’s one example of the way colleges have been behaving like businesses at the expense of students?
A: They had to look for multiple revenue streams really starting in the 1980s, and some of those were very high-value and glamorous … like technology-transfer revenues through patenting, increasing contracts and grants revenues, and increasing fundraising.
The national statistic is that universities have to put in 19 cents of institutional funds to make up, to get to a full dollar of their research expenditures. [And] this number is higher at public universities than it is at private universities. The last numbers that I saw are about 25 cents on the dollar of overall research expenditures at publics, and something like half that at privates. So there’s a public subsidy that’s going on at these institutions, through ongoing general fund contributions, that means that they’re just paying more of their own money … and not paying for what the public thinks it’s paying for, which is instruction, and some other kinds of core things.
There’s actually one article that was published on this in the general press that said on $3.5 billion in gross contract and grant revenues [at the University of California], they lose $720 million [in one year].
Q: Why were states increasing tuition – your book notes public colleges raised tuition by about 50 percent in the 1980s and 38 percent in the 1990s – even though, as you point out, state funding was growing slightly?
Because they were adding prestigious activities. And after U.S. News came in with [college] rankings in the late 1980s, it just really took off. Because they were having to compete for revenue, for overall amount of R&D expenditures, for selectivity rates, which were tied to the prestige of the faculty. … Bayh-Dole [legislation], in 1980, which is the door opening [for universities] to keep patenting revenues, was a driver that we haven’t talked about enough.
But I think some of it is just that it was more important to have a kind of a national profile than it was to do really good regional service. Shifting from regional service to national profile created competitive costs; you just tend to duplicate a lot of things that other people have. Then later, in the 1990s and 2000s, when you’re starting to compete for blue chip out-of-state students, the arms race in facilities accelerates, and just re-accelerates after 2008.
Q: What’s the most glaring example of privatization at work that you saw on the UC planning and budget committee?
A .We just started prioritizing private revenue streams, and energy and brains and additional positions were created in order to go after that other stuff. The Regents were pitched fundraising statistics and contracts and grants, gross statistics – always with the gross numbers, never with net. Undergraduates and academic graduates students became more of an afterthought at the senior management level. They were kind of the revenue source, in terms of tuition and general funds per capita, but then, after that, they were not at the center of policy. We really lost our focus.
Q:Let’s say there’s a reformer who’s sympathetic to the arguments in this book. Does she sit down with President-elect Trump? Or with her state’s governor? And what will that elevator pitch sound like?
She would say to Trump, you ran on making America great again. And to make America great again, you have to make the economy great again. And to make the economy great again, you have to bring all the non-college workers of the country into it. And to do that, to include the non-college, you have to rebuild open-access, high-quality, public universities. There is no other way. It can’t be job training. It can’t be political rhetoric. It can’t be browbeating a few companies to not off-shore their workers.
This has to be liberal arts and sciences. Rebuild high-end cognitive skills, so that these folks don’t just go down the street to the machinist shop that’s still open if they lost their factory job. They can be eligible for a whole range of jobs, or build jobs and businesses on their own with these skills.
This interview was conducted by telephone and lightly edited for length and clarity.
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about higher education.
Kindergarten classes at Ernest R. Geddes Elementary School in Baldwin Park, Calif., are taught primarily in Spanish as part of the school’s bilingual program. Photo: Sarah Garland)
As the election results were rolling in across the country signaling that Donald Trump would become the 45th president of the United States, nearly three-quarters of Californians had voted to restore bilingual education in California.
The Trump campaign had been overtly anti-immigrant, while the restoration of bilingual education was an affirmation of the valuing of the children of immigrants. How could California and the nation be at such great odds?
In 1976, California was one of the first states in the nation to pass legislation making it a requirement for schools to provide bilingual education to its English learners (ELs). The rationale for these programs was that such instruction would combat discrimination against immigrant children and support development of a stronger self- concept, in addition to providing instruction in a language the children could understand, thereby avoiding school failure.
While there wasn’t a large body of research on any of this, it made intuitive as well as logical sense. This remained the policy in California until the passage of a voter initiative in 1998 entitled Proposition 227, or “English for the Children,” effectively prohibited bilingual instruction in most cases.
The seemingly slow acquisition of English and the low achievement of EL kids were blamed on bilingual education, even though no more than 30 percent of ELs were ever provided bilingual instruction, mostly because of a lack of credentialed bilingual teachers.
The solution was to immerse the students in a cold bath of English, eschewing instruction in a language they could actually understand.
The snake-oil salesman who convinced the voters in 1998 that with English-only instruction ELs would become proficient in English in one year and raise their academic performance at the same time was not unlike Donald Trump. Even at the time, there was sufficient research to suggest that the first of these promises was unlikely, and the second simply impossible.
Ron Unz manufactured statistics that could never be verified: “The majority of English learners are in bilingual programs,” “hundreds of thousands of these students languish in classes where only Spanish is taught, not English.”
These remarks aren’t dissimilar to the claims of Donald Trump that Mexican immigrants are “rapists and criminals,” that he will build a wall to shut out our neighbors to the south, or that he will rescind the program that allows young “Dreamers” (young people brought to the U.S. as children) to go to college or work without fear of deportation — no verifiable facts, no specificity about how the proposals would actually work.
The ban on bilingual instruction passed with more than 60 percent of the vote – mostly by voters who had never seen a bilingual program (as was the case with Unz) or even understood how they worked. After five years, the state’s commissioned evaluation of the impact of Proposition 227 found no significant difference in outcomes for English learners as a result of the new law, but it did “conclude that Proposition 227 focused on the wrong issue.”
Bilingual education was not the problem. Nonetheless, California, home of more children of immigrants than any other state, continued to live with the virtual ban on bilingual instruction until this year.
Proposition 58, “The Multilingual Education Initiative,” lifted the ban and expands access to bilingual (usually targeted to English learners) and dual-language programs (that incorporate both English learners and English speakers wanting to learn a second language).
During the last 18 years, research has been conducted that shows significant benefits to multilingual instruction. Canadians have long been researching the cognitive benefits and concluding that learning in more than one language effectively made students “smarter” – they demonstrated a greater capacity for focused attention and avoidance of distractions. However, this research never had a major impact on policy in the U.S., perhaps because we have always considered our situation to be very different from Canada’s.
In recent years, longitudinal research – following the same children over their entire school career, from kindergarten to high school — comparing those in bilingual and dual-language programs to those in English-only classrooms, has concluded that while the bilinguals start slower, they end with superior outcomes in English, and Latino students perform better in both English and math when enrolled in bilingual programs.
Other research has shown that the children of immigrants who attain literacy in their home language actually earn more once in the workforce, and, again, in the case of Latinos go on to four-year universities at higher rates than those who lose that language ability.
Over the last two decades, too many children have been denied an education that could have conferred real benefits, and too many have been left behind. But perhaps equally important, California’s classrooms have been emptied of bilingual teachers. Although the demand for these programs continues to grow, less than one-third as many young people prepare to become bilingual teachers today as did in 1998. Why prepare for a job that doesn’t exist?
The dearth of prepared teachers will be a significant impediment to mounting these highly desired programs even as they have become once again legal.
Meantime, we have to hope that false promises and unverifiable claims made by presidential candidates do not tear at the fabric of this nation, a nation of immigrants.
Patricia Gándara is Research Professor and Co-Director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA. She is also Chair of the Working Group on Education for the University of California-Mexico Initiative.
School climate and school culture directly impact student success. As a result, it is particularly important for the school culture (and the classroom culture) to reflect, acknowledge, and celebrate diversity. Taking these feel-good ideals and making them a reality can be tough for educators, especially with so many other initiatives on their ever-tighter schedules.
But I think that this is so important that as an educator, you must take the time to do it. How to celebrate diversity in the classroom is another article, but for now, I want you to begin your journey with knowing exactly why it’s important.
1. Because the idea of “diversity” is not even that straightforward. Not only must schools recognize diversity evident among broad racial and ethnic groups (e.g., Asian or Hispanic), but the diversity within these groups must be recognized as well. For example Chinese and Japanese students may share common cultural characteristics as a result of being Asian, but will also have distinctly Chinese and Japanese cultural characteristics that differ from each other. The same is true of Caucasian students who come from vastly different family backgrounds, even from the same neighborhoods. In the interest of treating students equally, giving them equal chances for success, and equal access to the curriculum, teachers and administrators must recognize the uniqueness and individuality of their students.
2. Teachers have a particular responsibility to recognize and structure their lessons to reflect student differences. This encourages students to recognize themselves and others as individuals. It also encourages the appreciation of a diverse school population, and brings a sense of connection between disparate cultural heritages within a single school’s culture. It is certainly in the best interest of students and teachers to focus on the richness of our diversity. Recognizing and acknowledging our differences is part of treating students fairly and equally.
3. So that you can facilitate the process of learning overall. One reason for seeking out and acknowledging cultural differences among students is the idea that learning involves transfer of information from prior knowledge and experiences. To assist in this transfer process, it is important to acknowledge the students’ background, and to validate and incorporate their previous knowledge into the process of acquiring new information. All students begin school with a framework of skills and information based on their home cultures. This may include a rudimentary understanding of the alphabet, numbers, computer functions, some basic knowledge of a second language, or the ability to spell and write their names. It also includes a set of habits, etiquette and social expectations derived from the home.
4. So that you can help students assimilate what they learn with what they already know. If a student cannot relate new information to his own experiences, or connect the new material to a familiar concept, he may perceive the new information as frustrating, difficult or dismiss it completely, believing it to be in conflict with his already tenuous understanding of the world. Teachers have the responsibility to seek out cultural building blocks students already possess, in order to help build a framework for understanding. Some educational pedagogy refers to this process as “scaffolding.” Recognition of a student’s cultural differences provides a positive basis for effective learning, and a “safe” classroom environment. Every group of students will respond differently to curriculum and teachers must constantly adjust to be sure their methods are diverse, both in theory and in practice.
What are some easy ways you’ve found to promote diversity in your classroom? Leave a comment below.
Also, if you’re interested in learning more about how you can celebrate diversity in class, here are some tips I have for you.
The signature issue for Betsy DeVos, nominated to be the next U.S. Secretary of Education, is giving parents freedom of choice, either to choose charter schools or to use vouchers to buy an education at any school they like, public or private. The logical extension of such policies – permitting students to take individual courses wherever they wish, by using online options – has already begun to take root in about a dozen states.
It’s called “Course Access” or “Course Choice.” Under such plans, the funding for a course taken by an individual student goes to the school or online company offering the course, often away from the student’s local district. In Nevada, in fact, parents can spend state education dollars any way they please — on private, public, online, part-time and full-time schools, on tutoring and extra books — through education savings accounts, which an advocate for them calls “the purest form of educational freedom.”
As they have emerged in some states, these programs have been assisted by conservative groups such as Jeb Bush’s Chiefs for Change and the Koch Industries-backed American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC). It remains to be seen whether a Trump Administration will boost them further, using federal policy.
The growth of “Course Choice” initiatives in various states was chronicled in depth by The Hechinger Report last year, in this story from our archives.
— The editors
Thanks to a relatively new state policy, all spring Clarke went to the school library during second period for an online sociology class.
“It was very cool,” said Clarke, noting it lived up to his psychology teacher’s description: “It was a very interesting topic with some things that will tie back to psychology.”
This initiative, often called “Course Choice” or “Course Access,” is, as one proponent described it, like “school choice on steroids.”
Proponents count at least 10 states that have adopted a collection of policies they began promoting as Course Access — policies that allow students to take classes part-time online (and sometimes in other off-campus classrooms) by choosing from a variety of providers, including charter schools and other districts, instead of being limited to their local course offerings or to one state virtual school. And the Course Access movement is gaining momentum as it expands across the country, with eight states adopting or considering such laws in just the last four years, according to a comprehensive report on Course Access sponsored by the conservative group the Foundation for Excellence in Education and the lobbying firm EducationCounsel.
For Clarke and other students, online schools mean options, but for school district officials, they can mean less revenue, as education dollars flow toward charter schools or other districts that offer the online courses.
And, not unlike what often happens with charter schools and vouchers, the Course Access policies can set up a competition for limited education dollars.
States generally allocate money per student to districts, but in states with Course Access, districts have to share that funding based on the number of courses a student takes elsewhere. Much of the money can end up in the hands of for-profit companies that supply the curriculum, directly provide the classes or run the online schools in which students enroll part time.
“What is possible is the exploding wiring — if you will — of money across district lines or even state lines,” said Patricia Burch, associate professor of education and policy at the University of Southern California. “That can have a very immediate funding implication for a district.”
“It is a significant cost,” said Randy Paulson, Chatfield High’s principal. His school, with 400 students, can manage it partly because no more than 40 students a year are taking an online class. In Chatfield’s case, nearly all the classes are provided by the Minnesota Virtual Academy, run by the Houston Public School District about 40 miles away, with help from the for-profit company K12 Inc.
“What we want to do is serve our own students the best we can,” said Paulson, noting that adding an online class or two sometimes helps keep students in school. “We don’t want to lose students. If we lose students, we’re not able to provide students those opportunities.”
Similar to efforts to open charter schools or offer vouchers for private schools, Course Access aims to allow students (usually in high school) and their families to make choices — in this case, about where to go for individual classes. Advocates believe that the programs have the potential to appeal to all students, even those who would never consider leaving their local schools or don’t have the option of a charter school.
“We think the market is infinite,” said Mary Gifford, senior vice president of education policy and academic affairs at K12 Inc., the nation’s largest virtual school operator, which provides the curriculum and some management for the school where Clarke and his classmates enrolled. She said that although no more than 1 or 2 percent of U.S. students will ever enroll in virtual schools full-time, the company is now working closely with districts to help them start online programs as part of Course Access policies.
So far, only a tiny fraction of eligible students have enrolled for online classes. For example, in Minnesota, which began allowing part-time online enrollment in 2006, roughly 1 percent (5,520) of the state’s secondary school students enrolled during the 2013-14 school year, according to the Minnesota Department of Education.
But the policy has powerful backers, including at least three Republican presidential candidates — former Florida Governor Jeb Bush, Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal and Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker — along with conservative groups such as the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC, the Koch Industries-backed association of state legislators and businesses), not to mention allies in the for-profit education business.
“If you rewind and go back to the last election cycle, you had at least two governors campaigning on Course Access,” said John Bailey, vice president of policy at the Jeb Bush-founded Foundation for Excellence in Education, referring to governors Bruce Rauner of Illinois and Greg Abbott of Texas.
And the reform-minded group Chiefs for Change, also founded by Jeb Bush, is pushing to include a provision in the update to the federal No Child Left Behind Act to set aside 5 percent of Title I dollars to be used, among other things, for Course Access. (The House version of the bill already sets aside 3 percent, or roughly $410 million, mostly for outside tutoring services; changes could be made when the House and Senate versions are reconciled in conference committee.)
Many of these backers prefer the term Course Access to Course Choice, to distinguish it from school choice and the controversies surrounding it, and also as a way of indicating its focus on addressing many schools’ lack of course offerings.
As states around the country try to prepare more students for college and careers, they are working to provide more students with access to advanced classes, particularly in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). The widespread lack of access to some key courses — only half of all high schools nationwide offer calculus and just 63 percent have physics — has become a rallying cry for Course Access supporters.
“Having a high-quality education must no longer depend on location,” wrote Jeb Bush in the introduction to last year’s Course Access policy brief. “For the next generation of students, the international stakes are too high to restrict access to great courses based on ZIP code.”
Yet at least so far, the program may not be living up to its promise of creating greater access for the very kids who might need it most. The students using the program in Texas are wealthier and whiter overall than the public school population as a whole, suggesting that gaps in access persist online. Data on the Florida Virtual School show a similar trend; in Utah, a stunningly low 6.15 percent of students participating in the state’s Course Access program are officially listed as poor enough to qualify for a fee waiver, though officials said course providers might not be filling out the information correctly.
Utah — the model legislation and its aftermath
When Utah passed the law creating a Course Access program in 2011, school districts panicked over what it would do to their budgets.
“We were fearful because those who were pushing it were pretty intense,” said Ken Grover, now the principal of Innovations Early College High School in Salt Lake City, describing billboards that advertised free online courses.
The program — officially called the Statewide Online Education Program — has been phased in over time. High school students this fall will be able to take up to five classes online during the school year while remaining enrolled in their local high school. This past school year, when students could take four classes online, it cost districts up to $366 per student per semester, according to the Utah State Office of Education.
In the fall of 2016, students will be able to take up to six online classes (usually considered a full load of coursework) while remaining enrolled.
Utah’s Course Access legislation also allows kids in private schools and home-schooled kids to participate through a separate funding stream.
The Utah policy was the model for what conservative backers of the program had imagined. In fact, Utah’s legislation is one of two officially approved by the Koch-backed ALEC. (The other, which contains two possible funding options, is based on a law passed in Louisiana, though later overturned by its state court, and on the law passed in Texas.)
The disaster that public school districts in Utah anticipated never materialized — partly because, within a few months, many districts in the state had established online schools to compete for dollars with the online charter schools.
Canyons School District, for example, went from having no online students in 2011 to 1,900 this past year. They are all enrolled part time, and all but 400 come from within the district, said Darren Draper, who runs what he’s been told is the largest of the district’s part-time schools, the Canyons Virtual High School.
“That’s huge,” said Draper. “If we didn’t build CVHS, we would have many students going elsewhere, without question.”
In fact, just 1,367 students in the entire state took an online class outside their district in 2014-15, according to preliminary state figures, meaning district budgets were largely spared.
In the end, advocates of the change and public school officials who balked at the measure can both claim victory in Utah — at least so far.
Course Access backers, however, claim credit for creating the competition that spurred the public schools to change.
“We changed the landscape in the state entirely,” said Robyn Bagley, board chair for Parents for Choice in Education, a Utah group that advocated for the law locally. “The amount of options skyrocketed in some form or another.”
Bagley maintains that the program has already grown dramatically in its first four years and will expand further.
But Grover said he doesn’t expect to see a spike in numbers. “Most parents want their kids to go to school,” he said. “They want them at school learning. It’s their identity.”
(In perhaps a reflection of where online learning is headed, both Bagley and Grover now run blended-learning schools that they say offer the best of both worlds — the personalization of an online school with the in-person interactions of a traditional school.)
Although rural Texas districts depend on Course Access, statewide its enrollments have dropped
Rural school districts across the state of Texas are using its version of Course Access to offer courses to fulfill basic high school requirements and even to save money.
In the tiny Dell City Independent School District, with fewer than 100 children enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade, every single middle and high school student was enrolled in an online social studies class after the district’s teacher left mid-year. Algebra II and Spanish classes were also offered virtually, said Veronica Gomez, a physical education teacher who doubles as the liaison to the Texas Virtual Academy Network, as the statewide program is officially called.
“We live in a rural area; it’s out in the middle of nowhere,” she said. “We don’t have the staff. Because we don’t have the staff, we have to go online.” The district hadn’t found a good candidate to teach Spanish, she said, but added that the online program has other advantages: “It’s cheaper for us. We don’t have to pay benefits or anything like that.”
Most Texas districts, however, appear to be taking a different route — they are opting to spend money on their own schools and teachers instead of paying for online classes.
When the state originally started up the Texas Virtual School Network Course Catalog, in 2009, students could take courses online without the districts having to cover the costs; the state had allocated a separate pool of money for the program.
But after the state stopped covering the cost, the number of spots filled in the semester-long online classes dropped precipitously, from 22,899 in 2010-11 to 5,757 in 2013-14. The wording of the state law may have been a major factor.
The law says that districts can turn down a student’s request for a state-vetted online class only if their school offers a “substantially similar” class. Backers of Course Access said they think many districts are using a generous interpretation of that concept (they tried unsuccessfully this spring to get the legislature to close that loophole).
Louisiana’s new source of funding for college and career classes
In a striking innovation, Louisiana adopted a program, officially called Course Choice, that includes not just online courses but off-campus classes as well. As the law was originally written in Louisiana, for-profit companies and other outside groups could compete to directly provide the online or in-person classes, with parents and students choosing among them and funding going to the winners.
The political opposition to the program was initially fierce, and the law was challenged successfully. The state Supreme Court ruled that the funding approach was unconstitutional because it didn’t provide local school boards a say. Lawmakers revamped the program, removing the competition for resources, allowing schools to control what classes their students enrolled in and adding additional money — in essence, guaranteeing extra funding for the extra classes.
The revised program has expanded rapidly, according to the Louisiana Department of Education, with 19,068 semester-long Course Choice enrollments in 2014-15, just its second year. While the state has been championed as the model for Course Access policies, state superintendent John White said the program hasn’t lived up to his original vision.
The program was originally conceived as a way to bring new and inspiring classes to high school students preparing for life after graduation, White said, with “things that would not have existed without Course Choice.”
Although a welding program, an elite private college’s associates degree program and an ACT-preparation program have successfully flourished as prime examples of innovation under the revised program, schools across the state are most commonly using the program to prepare high school students for life after graduation, specifically allowing students to earn college credit through the state’s four-year universities, technical and community colleges. More than two-thirds (13,000) of the course enrollments have been in these so-called dual-enrollment classes.
“That’s an important thing,” White said, but added, “much of that would exist — not all of it, but much of it would exist without Course Choice.” (Significant numbers of students already took dual-enrollment classes before Course Choice ever started.) He had also hoped, with the initial bill, to put decision-making control in the hands of parents instead of school boards, and argues that the program now has less innovation as a result.
White, who heads the Chiefs for Change group, said federal funding of Course Access, if changes are made to the No Child Left Behind Act, could drive further innovation, with outside groups essentially guaranteed a chance at significant funds. “You’re going to attract a lot of actors that you wouldn’t otherwise attract — creative actors,” he said.
Despite the wide consensus that the program is now working, critics still aren’t happy about how it was originally conceived in Louisiana. “I think it was an ALEC-driven, an American Legislative Exchange-driven, initiative that Superintendent White felt would work in Louisiana,” said the Louisiana School Boards Association executive director, Scott Richard, who helped launch a lawsuit against the state program as it was initially conceived.
“I think it’s all part of the national reform, so-called reform, from the national think tanks,” he added, arguing that the new form of Course Choice had provided districts with resources to make important changes.
White said his inspiration was the online experience in Louisiana and with charter schools and school choice generally, but acknowledged that, because schools are happier with the revised version of the program, principals and teachers are collaborating with the state on everything from scheduling problems to reaching students who hadn’t had access to courses in the past.
Some proponents of Course Access now say that a program that doesn’t start off as competitive for funding may be best.
“I don’t see one system as better than the other; they’re just very different,” White said.
Other options besides Course Access
Of course, for many advocates of Course Access, the program represents just one possibility for changing the public education system — their goal is to put more power in the hands of students and parents to decide where state education dollars are spent.
Nevada passed a law in June that allows parents to spend state education dollars any way they please — on private, public, online, part-time and full-time schools, on tutoring and extra books — through education savings accounts, or “vouchers on steroids,” as they were called in one news story about the legislation. (Four other states have similar laws, but they limit the savings accounts significantly — to students with special needs, in foster care and/or from high-poverty households.)
“I think Course Choice is sort of evolving, just as a policy area, into what you may know as an educational savings account,” said Lindsay Russell, the director of the ALEC Task Force on Education and Workforce Development. “We’re evolving as a country, and I think students continue to need to be competitive, not only within the United States, but globally as we continue to slip. I think educational savings accounts are the purest form of educational freedom.”
Course Access in its current form, while seemingly less radical than Nevada’s approach, appeals to some of its more conservative backers because it can be set up to pay schools and other course providers only when students complete a course (or potentially pass an outside exam).
Proponents call this a step toward accountability and paying for the right thing — results, instead of student attendance, especially given the dismal completion rates for online classes. (In Louisiana and Utah, providers of courses receive half on enrollment and half when the course is completed, for example.)
“Nevada is the poster child for seeing a different way to approach this,” said Michael Horn, co-founder and executive director of the Clayton Christensen Institute. “We need to step back and start learning what policy environments work in terms of incentivizing the right behavior. Course Access is this intriguing place to play with a lot of policies that move away from seat time toward competency-based learning and measuring individual student growth and things like that.”
This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, independent news organization focused on inequality and innovation in education. Read more about blended learning.
The spring legislative season is well underway, and, as has been the case for the last several years, a number ofstates are again considering and passing amendments to their anti-bullying laws.
This year, Florida and Kentucky, for example, saw amendments to their anti-bullying laws introduced in their general assemblies. Florida’s bill, which has been signed into law by Governor Rick Scott, requires schools to review and revise their anti-bullying policies at least every three years. And Kentucky’s bill has come up with a clear definition of bullying so schools better recognize bullying when it occurs.
These changes to anti-bullying laws are good first steps, but recognizing the problem is not sufficient. Schools also need to know what to do about it as well. States’ anti-bullying laws can and should guide and require schools to implement interventions that truly address the causes and effects of bullying.
My research on bullying has focused on anti-bullying laws – what they do, what they don’t do. The truth is these laws can both help and hurt students.
Yet very few of the states’ anti-bullying laws effectively address the problem.
Indeed, the vast majority of these laws call for nothing more in response to bullying than punishment of the bully. Often, this means the bully will face suspension or expulsion from school.
For example, when Montana became the last state to pass its anti-bullying law last year, it simply prohibited bullying.
Montana’s law states,
Bullying of a student enrolled in a public K-12 school by another student or an employee is prohibited.
Idaho’s anti-bullying law goes further in its efforts to be punitive. The anti-bullying law is part of its criminal code. So the punishment for bullying in school means facing criminal penalties.
As a result of the lack of guidance or mandates that schools do more than simply punish the bullies, it is likely that schools are treating bullying in the same way as they treat most other serious student disciplinary problems – by suspending and expelling students.
Across the country, the number of suspensions has more than doubled in recent decades. In 2009-10, the most recent year for which statistics are available, more than 3.3 million students were suspended and over 100,000 were expelled from school. While statistics do not disaggregate on the basis of bullying, they are indicative of schools’ overall response to serious student disciplinary problems, of which bullying is one.
Why doesn’t punishment work?
Punishing bullies may seem like the obvious, natural response to the problem. But it does not truly address it.
Social scientists who study bullying have found that “there is limited evidence that mandatory suspensions are effective at curbing aggressive or bullying behavior.”
Simply punishing students does not improve their behavior. Working Word, CC BY-ND
While sending students home from school does communicate that the bullying behavior is unacceptable, it does little to teach them how to improve their behavior. When students are suspended or expelled from school, they typically sit home with nothing to do. This is unlikely to stop bullying.
Moreover, such studies also suggest that students who bully may have behavioral or emotional problems that require intervention in order to address the root cause of bullying.
If schools were to focus on effective early intervention for bullies instead of waiting to punish bullying behavior after the fact, it is likely they would see a decrease in bullying and suspensions and expulsions. In addition, it could prevent some tragic consequences of bullying.
One such program, known as Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports (PBIS), endorsed by the U.S. Department of Education, has been found to be effective. Its effectiveness stems in part from its basic model, which allows for the use of multiple intervention models, ranging from school-wide training to individualized interventions, that can be integrated in the school setting.
States’ anti-bullying laws can draw on such social science research to call for schools to use interventions that do work, but very few of them actually provide support for such strategies. As a result, most schools are left to incorporate them only as far as their notoriously strapped budgets and resources allow.
There are, however, some notable exceptions.
For example, Florida’s new law mandates schools to address student bullying behavior at the same time as continuously reviewing and revising their policies with an eye toward improving responses as needed.
Nevada’s example
Nevada has gone a step further.
In 2015, Nevada revised its anti-bullying law to call for, among other things, hiring social workers to provide services to address the bullying problem and its effects. Even better, it funded the law.
Stopping bullying will involve a comprehensive program. Ken Whytock, CC BY-NC
It allocated nearly US$16 million to support the hiring of the social workers devoted to working on bullying problems. These social workers work on building social skills and empathy development programs in schools.
Nevada passed the law due in no small part to the advocacy of Jason Lamberth, father of Hailee Lamberth, who was a student in the Nevada public schools. Hailee committed suicide in December 2013 as the result of bullying in school.
In her suicide note, Hailee asked that her school be informed of the reasons she committed suicide so that the school would prevent bullying from harming other students in the future.
Nevada had an anti-bullying law in place at the time of Hailee’s suicide that, much like the vast majority of states’ anti-bullying laws, called for schools to investigate and impose discipline for bullying. That law obviously did not help prevent Hailee’s bullying or her resulting death.
Jason Lamberth’s advocacy led Nevada to pass a law that holds the promise to do what Hailee asked schools to do: prevent and address the underlying causes of bullying.
Using punishment of the bullying as the primary or sole intervention for addressing bullying cannot address the complicated causes and effects of the problem.
As other states look to amend their laws, they should look at Nevada’s example and make their laws meaningful and not just well-intentioned. And they should not wait for another tragedy to make those changes.
More students than ever before have the opportunity for higher education but their choices are being undermined by a confusing admissions system in much need of reform.
This is the conclusion of a report to Education Minister Simon Birmingham, which points to “a paradoxical situation”.
“Entry into universities has become more equitable. Yet there is evidence that families with less experience of higher education, which are economically disadvantaged or live in regional Australia, are less able to understand how admissions processes operate.”
The report, “Improving the Transparency of Higher Education Admissions” is from the Higher Education Standards Panel, chaired by Peter Shergold, a one-time head of the Prime Minister’s department, and will be released by Birmingham on Wednesday.
It says the increasing diversity of admissions criteria for higher education is not well enough understood. Media focus is on the Australian Tertiary Admission Rank (ATAR) but in 2014 more than half the students admitted to higher education courses were admitted on other criteria. These included previous study and mature age provisions.
“Diversity is good. Varied entry standards and pathways are giving greater numbers of students the opportunity to benefit from higher education than ever before.
“More students from disadvantaged families, who in previous times would not have been able to gain entry to higher education, are now able to do so.
“However, choice is being undermined by information about the system’s operation that is confusing, ambiguous, misunderstood and unevenly distributed.”
Problems include: no common language to describe entry requirements; the ATAR calculation differing in each jurisdiction; information not being provided in a readily accessible way that facilitates comparisons; the ATAR focus leading many prospective students to assume that is the only path; and the danger that some higher education providers might make exaggerated claims about ATAR requirements, in an effort to boost their prestige.
There is consensus that the autonomy of higher education providers to set their own admission criteria should be upheld, but the panel says the emphasis should be on a student-centred approach.
The panel has produced a detailed set of recommendations to:
achieve more transparency by using common language and publishing consistent information about admissions processes;
widen the accessibility of information to prospective students;
improve the comparability of information from providers about admission processes and entry requirements;
make providers more accountable for the information they give;
ensure providers are subject to common reporting requirements, and
give students, parents, teachers and career advisers the knowledge and capacity they need to navigate admissions policies and processes.
Releasing the report at a higher education summit in Melbourne, Birmingham will support the recommendations’ intent and promise an official response within weeks. The government will get input from the sector and states and territories.
“Admission policies should not only empower students to make wise, well-informed choices but should also create levels of transparency and accountability that, coupled with optimal financial incentives, help to ensure that higher education providers make enrolment decisions that are genuinely in the best interests of students and the nation,” Birmingham will say.
“That shift towards greater transparency is why the Turnbull government has been such a strong advocate of the QILT [Quality Indicators for Learning and Teaching] website – giving students better information about institutions and course quality, as well as graduate employment outcomes.”
The site has received about 490,000 visits. Enhancements to QILT would be part of the government’s response to the report and broad higher education reform, including better information for postgraduate students and greater use of universal data sources, Birmingham will say.
“We also require better understanding of whether students are moving between sectors or institutions within sectors or moving in to work or from a bachelor course of study to a diploma or advanced diploma in the same or another institution. Those students are currently being counted as non-completions.”
Globally, the U.S. is at risk of declining economic competitiveness due to its continuing lower levels of educational attainment in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).
The U.S. currently ranks 44th according to the quality of its mathematics and science education.
A “leaky STEM pipeline” – in which factors such as lower expectations, discrimination, and a lack of interest make it less likely that racial or ethnic minorities, women or those from low-income families will pursue STEM careers – makes many adults less likely to be employed in these types of positions.
Yet STEM positions are often high-paying and provide greater economic well-being and employment stability, especially as the U.S. transitions to a knowledge-based economy.
Efforts that increase schoolchildren’s science achievement – particularly those from diverse, traditionally marginalized populations – could help provide children with greater future employment opportunities while ensuring that the U.S. remains economically competitive.
The question is, when should these efforts begin? That is, how early do leaks in the STEM pipeline begin to occur?
Science achievement gaps
My research seeks to understand why some groups of children are more likely to struggle academically in U.S. schools. To date, I have been reporting on factors that increase children’s risk for lower achievement in reading and mathematics.
Researchers have found that large science achievement gaps occur within the U.S. These gaps are very large by middle school, and they are disproportionately experienced by children who are racial or ethnic minorities, English Language Learners (ELLs), and those from lower-income families.
For example, 63 percent of U.S. eighth graders who are black display “below basic” (that is, less than partial mastery of knowledge and skills necessary for grade level work) levels of science achievement. The contrasting percentage for white children is 20 percent. While 52 percent of low-income children display below basic levels of science achievement, only 20 percent of higher-income children do so.
Yet why these science achievement gaps are occurring has been unclear.
Very few studies have examined children’s science achievement across time. Most studies have used samples of middle or high school students. As a result, when science achievement gaps begin to occur has not been well understood.
Here’s what our study shows
To better understand these science achievement gaps, we analyzed a nationally representative sample of U.S. schoolchildren as they entered kindergarten and then continued through elementary and middle school.
The data were collected by the U.S. Department of Education, and designed to be representative of the population of children who entered U.S. kindergarten classrooms in 1998-1999.
The data included children’s reading and mathematics achievement, their classroom behavior, and many characteristics of their families and schools. Such characteristics included the quality of the children’s parenting, their family’s income, and the racial segregation of their schools. From third grade to eighth grade, the surveys included a measure of children’s science achievement.
During kindergarten and first grade, the surveys assessed children’s general knowledge about their natural (e.g., the seasons, the lunar phases, erosion) and social worlds (e.g., what a fireman does, what planes and trains have in common).
Our analyses of these data yielded three surprising findings.
First, we found that very large gaps in general knowledge were already evident among children entering kindergarten classrooms in the U.S. For example, about 60 percent of black children scored in the bottom 25 percent on the general knowledge measure. The contrasting percentage for white children was 15 percent.
About 65 percent of low-income children entered kindergarten with low levels of general knowledge. Only 10 percent of high-income children did so. The general knowledge and science achievement gaps in kindergarten were even larger than the reading or mathematics achievement gaps.
In other words, leaks in the STEM pipeline were originating “close to the tap.”
The second surprising finding was that general knowledge gaps by kindergarten strongly predicted science achievement gaps by third grade. For example, of those whose general knowledge was in the lowest 25 percent during kindergarten, 62 percent, 60 percent and 54 percent had levels of science achievement in the lowest 25 percent at the end of third, fifth or eighth grade, respectively.
This suggests that children who are already struggling with low levels of general knowledge in kindergarten are likely to still be struggling in science throughout elementary and middle school.
Children’s general knowledge was a stronger predictor of third grade science achievement than race/ethnicity, reading or mathematics achievement, classroom behavior or family income.
Both the general knowledge and science achievement gaps were very stable over time.
Children who are racial or ethnic minorities, English Language Learners or from low-income households displayed lower levels of science achievement by third grade and typically continued to lag behind throughout elementary and middle school. Girls displayed relatively lower science achievement than boys in third grade.
Closing these gaps
Our third finding was more encouraging. We found that we could explain most of these general knowledge and science achievement gaps. And this could help inform efforts by parents, practitioners, and policymakers to close these gaps.
For example, we were able to explain 75 percent of the third grade science achievement gap between black and white children as well as 97 percent of the gap between low- and high-income children.
Factors that helped explain science achievement gaps included children’s reading and mathematics achievement, their behavior and, most importantly, their general knowledge.
Helping young children to be more knowledgeable about their physical and social surroundings, as well as to be better at reading and mathematics, may increase their science achievement as they grow older.
Asking children questions about their surroundings while encouraging and extending their initial explorations could help them improve their general knowledge and science achievement.
Encouraging policies that lead to high-quality childcare for children most at risk could reduce these gaps. Policies that counter the racial segregation of U.S. schools might also be helpful.
It is never too late to help children grow to be successful. But if we are really serious about their as well as our nation’s future opportunities, we will do more to help all children begin kindergarten already knowledgeable about their natural and social worlds.
Collective, coordinated, and sustained efforts by parents, practitioners, and policymakers during children’s early school careers could make all the difference.
After spending a decade and a half in the field of education, and much to my chagrin, not much has changed. K-12 schools are still underperforming, losing the global war for intellectual supremacy year after year. The power to counteract this is within our grasp, but we are too busy fighting political battles over state and parental rights. Our kids deserve better.
The bottom line is that most valuable commodity that we have is our children, and the future of the United States is inextricably tied to them. Unless we provide our children with a world-class education now, we will suffer later, when they are unable to lead or compete in the global economy.
Let’s stop fighting these petty turf wars. Who cares if Common Core is tied to President Obama or not? Flawed as it may be, it has the potential to ensure that all children graduate with the skills that they need to become productive citizens. It could be a game changer, but many of us reject it because it feels too much like a nationalized curriculum, or because we simply don’t understand the potential benefits. I brought up Common Core because it’s a divisive issue, driven more by politics than practicality.
It’s funny how we say that it is all about the kids, but at the end of the day, education policy makers create laws based on what is best for stakeholders. They don’t want to upset educators, teachers unions, parents, business, etc. Who cares about what upsets kids?
Take ten minutes out of your day and talk to a high school dropout. Ask them why they dropped out? The answers that you get will give you valuable insight into what is wrong with U.S. Education system. Instead of listening to the feedback from students, we would rather do a deep dive into the data, or pay a consultant six figures.
Our kids deserve better. They deserve access a quality education regardless of where they live in this country. The only thing standing in our way is us. If we could learn to focus on what matters most, our children, then and only then will we be able to reform the U.S. education system and secure our children’s future.
Editor’s note: This is an updated version of an article first published on April 27, 2015
Texas college professors may soon face a dilemma between upholding professional ethics and protecting their lives.
On Thursday, December 10, a task force at the University of Texas at Austin recommended restricting guns in residence halls, at sporting events and in certain laboratories, but allowed them in classrooms.
The 19-member task force was set up following a “Campus Carry” law passed by the state in Spring 2015. The law, which will come into effect on August 1, 2016, will allow people with handgun licenses to carry concealed firearms on college campuses.
With the recommendation to allow firearms in classrooms, a question coming up for many academics is whether they would be forced to give As to undeserving students, just so they can avoid being shot.
This is not as far fetched as it sounds. In my five years as a college professor, I have had experience with a number of emotionally distressed students who resort to intimidation when they receive a lesser grade than what they feel they deserve.
Threats on campus
Here is an example of one such threatening experience: one evening in a graduate course, after I handed back students’ papers, a young woman stood up and pointed at me. “This is unacceptable!” she screamed as her body shook in rage.
She moved toward the front of the class waving her paper in my face and screamed again, “unacceptable!” After a heated exchange, she left the room, and stood outside the door sobbing.
All this was over receiving a B on a completely low-stakes assignment.
What followed was even more startling. The following week, the student brought along a muscle-bound man to class. He watched me through the doorway window for the entire three hours of the class, with his arms folded across his chest.
And if this wasn’t enough, the young woman’s classmates avoided me on campus because, they said, they were afraid of getting caught in the crossfire should she decide to shoot me.
After that, every time she turned in a paper I cringed and prayed that it was good so that I wouldn’t have to give her anything less than an A.
Learning from this experience, now I give papers back only at the end of the class or just “forget” to bring them with me.
I was lucky that the student didn’t have a gun in my classroom. Other professors have not been so lucky.
In 2014 a student at Purdue shot his instructor in front of a classroom of students. In another incident in 2009, a student at Northern Virginia Community College tried to shoot his math professor on campus. And, in 2000, a graduate student at the University of Arkansas shot his English professor.
In each of these states, carrying handguns on campus was illegal at the time of the shooting, although a bill was introduced in Arkansas earlier this year to allow students to carry guns.
Grade inflation
Despite these and other shootings, a new trend has emerged across the US that supports guns on college campuses.
We know that some students will carry guns whether it is legal or not. One study found that close to five percent of undergraduates had a gun on campus and that almost two percent had been threatened with a firearm while at school.
Allowing students to carry weapons to class strips off a layer of safety. Students are often emotional and can be volatile when it comes to their GPAs.
Who would want to give a student a low grade and then get shot for it?
Many majors are highly competitive and require certain GPAs for admission. Students on scholarships and other forms of financial aid must maintain high grades to keep their funding. It’s no surprise that some might students resort to any means necessary to keep up their GPAs.
An international student once cried in my office and begged me to change his F to an A, as without it, his country would no longer pay for him to be in the US. I didn’t. He harassed me by posting threatening messages on Facebook.
So, the question is, will we soon see a new sort of grade inflation, with students earning a 4.0 GPA with their firepower rather than brain power? And if so, what sort of future citizenry will we be building on our campuses?
The growth of community colleges in the U.S. has improved access to higher education tremendously, especially for students from low-income families. However, completion rates at these schools are less than 30 percent.
Could the mental health of community college students play a role in their degree completion?
We recently partnered with researchers, nonprofits and community colleges across the country to study the mental health conditions of community college students.
Mental health on college campus
The first signs of most mental health conditions often appear during or before the typical college age range – 18 to 24 years. Symptoms can include lack of energy, loss of concentration, lack of sleep or even substance abuse, which can affect school performance. Depressed or anxious students can also feel pessimistic and lose their motivation.
In previous research, we and other research groups have extensively documented the high prevalence of mental health disorders in four-year institutions. Recent studies also indicate that mental health disorders could be increasing among the youth.
What about mental health issues of community college students specifically?
Community college students are more vulnerable to mental health problems. trizoultro, CC BY-ND
So in winter 2015, we conducted an online survey of a random sample of over 4,300 students at 10 community colleges across the nation, and used standard brief assessments to measure symptoms of mental health conditions such as depression and anxiety.
To compare with four-year school populations, we examined these same measures from Healthy Minds Study, a national survey from the academic year 2014-2015, which included nearly 16,000 respondents from 16 institutions.
Here are the community college data
The results from our study “Too Distressed to Learn” leave little doubt that mental health is, in fact, a major concern for community college students.
Nearly half (49 percent) of community college students show symptoms related to one or more mental health condition, such as depression, anxiety, suicidal ideas, nonsuicidal self-injury or eating disorders.
In other words, approximately six million students, of the approximately 12 million students in community colleges nationwide, have symptoms of mental disorders. We found depression and anxiety to be among the most common conditions. About 36 percent students showed symptoms of depression and 29 percent had disorders related to anxiety.
For younger students ages 18-24 in community colleges, these numbers are even higher: 40 percent for depression and 33 percent for anxiety.
Furthermore, mental health conditions appear to be considerably higher at community colleges, as compared to four-year schools. Among students ages 18-24, 23 percent of community college students are experiencing the most severe frequency and number of depressive symptoms, as compared to 11 percent of four-year students.
Are students getting help?
This troubling situation is compounded by the fact that most students with mental health conditions are not receiving adequate support.
Among community college students with a mental health condition, we found only 41 percent were receiving any mental health care (counseling and/or medication) in the previous year. This number is even lower – 35 percent – among community college students in the age group 18-24. Although still not adequate, by comparison, 45 percent of students in the age group 18-24 find support at four-year schools.
There is a similar disparity in the counseling or support that students receive from non-clinical sources, such as friends and family: 60 percent among community college students, compared to 79 percent among four-year students.
The lower use of mental health services among community college students is driven in part by the fact that more of these students lack health insurance: 14 percent, compared to just 3 percent in our four-year sample.
Additionally, community colleges offer significantly fewer campus services.
Fewer community college students have access to mental health services. Joe Houghton, CC BY
For example, many community colleges do not have any mental health counselors, and among those that do, the ratio of counselors to students is 1 to 3,000, compared to 1 to 1,600 at four-year institutions.
Here’s what can be done
The reality is that improving this situation will likely require an influx of additional resources, particularly more robust campus health services and programs. So, how can institutions and other stakeholders build support for funding these resources?
For many years, four-year schools have been using data extensively to make the case for increased support of mental health services. Data from our study, which is one of the first large-scale assessments of mental health among community colleges throughout the nation, could serve as a starting point.
We know there is a relationship between depression and student retention. In fact, four-year schools have used this argument persuasively for finding more resources.
In addition, there are a number of partnership opportunities, and successful experiences at other institutions nationwide, from which institutions and students can benefit. For example, many students today are engaging in peer-led initiatives.
An example of such an initiative is Active Minds, a national organization supporting student advocates for mental health. It has chapters at over 400 campuses (including some community colleges). Campus administrators can partner with the Campus Program of Jed Foundation, which helps institutions help develop and implement a campus-specific plan to improve their support for student mental health.
Single Stop is another national nonprofit that has been assisting community college students with accessing public benefits and services; such an organization can also help students access mental health services in their respective communities.
It would be easy to view our new findings as another reason to be discouraged about the state of higher education, particularly community colleges. But we believe these findings highlight a whole new set of opportunities to improve the prospects for millions of students.
An ever-growing wealth of services and programs can treat or prevent mental health conditions. The challenge, and opportunity, is to make more and better investments in this area.
