0 The Higher Education Lobby Comes to UW-Madison

This morning, the UW System Board of Regents heard from a prominent speaker: Molly Corbett Broad, President of the American Council of Education.  Then, around noon, she joined a group on the UW-Madison campus to share a similar talk, but this time with an audience of faculty, staff, and students. Both talks focused on the theme of "higher education at a crossroads."

I had the honor of introducing President Broad to the second audience, in my role as Senior Scholar at the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education.  I also moderated the discussion portion of the conversation.

As I'm grateful to Broad for joining us, I feel it's among the most respectful acts to fully engage with her comments and offer my thoughts and questions here.  Simply receiving information from a talk without vigorously considering and debating the ideas is inconsistent with the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea.  So, with that in mind, here are my thoughts.

First, let's begin with 10 key points Broad made in her talk:

1. Today's undergraduates are quite different from yesterday's. In particular, they are often older, have fewer resources, and are especially interested in getting a return on their college investment.
2. Students' reactions to loan burdens are often inappropriate, given the sizable return to college degrees.  Broad noted that it's better to have a college education than to own a home. She also clearly stated that students who take on too many loans are greatly in need of financial education.
3. Many  colleges and universities are struggling financially to stay afloat.  Broad posited that this was an inevitable trend, unlikely to change.  She showed a slide indicating that 50% of universities are reporting lower enrollment growth.
4. The federal government, said Broad, is a minor player in higher education and it's best that it remain that way.  A growing role of the federal government, she said, would be unwelcome.  She told the audience to remember the old adage that those with the gold do the ruling (or something similar, implying that the federal government will try to control whatever it funds).
5. It is therefore problematic, noted Broad, that a growing number of undergraduates are "dependent" on the federal Pell Grant. 
6. There is a lot of variation among institutions, Broad pointed out. To illustrate this, she showed data indicating that the selective private universities admit just 13% of applicants and spend $75,000 on each student, while less selective privates admit 67% of applicants and spend $21,000 per student.
7. It is important, said Broad, that we provide better counseling to explain to students (especially those without family resources) that "not every student can afford to attend every institution."  
8. We have done a great job expanding access to college, say Broad. 
9. The classic iron triangle of higher education (which I've dissected many times, including in a blog for the Board of Regents) is now outdated, according to Broad, and must be rethought with a focus on innovation.
10. The key innovation lies in online courses and services.  Broad said "isn't it time for us to take lessons from private business?" and pointed to MOOCs.  Udacity, Coursera, and EdX "will help higher education meet the forces of change," she reported. Of course, Broad noted the usual concerns about academic quality, and then said that we could be confident that ACE was helping ensure quality control. Specifically, she said that ACE had been "retained" by the MOOCs to assess quality.

Before providing my own comments, here is a taste of what the audience at WISCAPE had to say in response. First, a graduate student asked about the implications for academic labor, noting his concern that graduate student training opportunities would be diminished if MOOCs were the main mechanism for course delivery.  Broad responded that graduate student experiences with regard to teaching were already subpar.  A staff member asked how we might alter tenure incentives to focus more on innovative teaching, and Broad said she didn't know.  A faculty member asked about how MOOCs generate money for their schools-- and Broad said that remained to be seen.  And finally, the Chief Information Officer of UW-Madison noted that broadband access, critical to online education, is woefully insufficient in some parts of the country, and asked Broad to do the lobbying to help shore it up. In response, Broad suggested that he contact the Obama Administration and let her know what they said.

Ok.  I was struggling to stay silent throughout all of this for one major reason:  There is a abundant gulf between the (mainly accurate) trends among undergraduates and institutions that Broad described and the solution she offered.  So I asked her: "If on the one hand we know that the number of economically disadvantaged students in higher education is growing, and many colleges and universities have fewer resources with which to serve them, how can we expect a solution (MOOCS) which provide less student contact (particular the hands-on kind important to success of first generation students) and no additional revenue to help?"  

Her response was that our current model is broken, and that she would not want to be the person to "underestimate the potential of disadvantaged students to benefit from MOOCs" as much as any other student.

Hmm.  Well.  

First, this must be the new version of the "soft bigotry of low expectations" for higher education.  Now it's the skeptic of MOOCs who doubts the potential of poor students, rather than the potential of the proposed educational plan? This was especially remarkable since the comment was directed at a researcher who spends inordinate amounts of time with the same Pell recipients she was discussing-- who, by the way, would take offense at being termed "Pell dependent."  (Recall when welfare receipt became welfare dependence, folks?)  What I know, from spending time on the campuses of community colleges and less-selective institutions, is that their students prize their time with people-- they are happy to have technology be a part of instruction, but it cannot replace personal interaction.  If anything, perhaps MOOCs are best suited to the sorts of students increasingly in the minority/nontraditional category of higher education-- like the artificial intelligence students with whom Sebastian Thrum discovered his love for teaching online.

Second, it is uncommon for academics like Broad to uncritically accept and repeat claims that a system is simply "broken," without questioning how and why it broke and for whose benefit it is broken. To her credit, Broad alluded to politics when questioning the right of the federal government to be involved in the work of colleges and universities.  But she did not address the broader trends resulting in the defunding of education and research, the push towards "innovation" generated in the private sector, or the increasing focus on the deficits of students rather than the institutions serving them.  When declaring the push for access a "success," she failed to note that the chances of attaining a bachelor's degree for students born in the bottom income quintile is less than one in ten.  Moreover, instead of pointing to states for diminishing appropriations for higher education and driving up tuition, and institutions for catering to the rich students rather than keeping college affordable, she blamed students for their poor choices with regard to loans.

In the end, the picture Broad painted today was not so much of higher education at a "crossroads," but rather a disturbing vision of colleges and universities frantically trying to pull up the drawbridge and create a new moat for their protection. To keep out those unwashed masses of unkempt nontraditional students, and prevent federal "intrusion" colleges and universities can no longer simply raise tuition-- the public will not stand for it. Instead, they must shift to protecting the elite survivors (the A institutions, I think she called them) by generating MOOC courses that can be launched into the cloud to create a virtual wall -- satisfying those new degree-seekers whom colleges and universities will never adapt to serve in person the way their administrators and professors will serve their own kids.  Such efforts will only thrive at the most elite places, since as Broad noted, MOOCs require course release time to develop-- and the reality, despite her statement to the contrary, is that such time is incredibly rare these days. 

Will "quality" postsecondary education survive?  Does is now exist?  Color me unimpressed by the fact that ACE has been "retained" by the MOOCs.  A look at ACE's website and reports suggests close ties between the two, and tight relations with the Gates Foundation-- not what you want to see when looking for independent assessment.  And more importantly, it seems that the persistence of elite status among those powerful institutions fueling ACE's fire depends on the success of the MOOCs.  For without these educational alternatives, a real revolution might erupt-- with the masses actually demanding the same types of rich college experiences that American undergraduates are famous for enjoying. 

0 Guest Blog: Billionaire Philanthropy and the Chicago Teachers' Strike

The following is a guest posting by Robin Rogers, associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Robin's last post was the popular "Billionaire Education Policy." She can be reached via email at robinrogers99@gmail.com
Follow her on Twitter: @Robin_Rogers

 
Earlier this week I was a guest panelist for Al Jazeera English’s news program Inside Story. The half-hour feature – provocatively entitled “Should U.S. schools be run like businesses?” – focused on the Chicago teachers’ strike that had begun that morning. The two other guests were Joanne Barkan, who writes on economic, labor and education issues, and her clear foil Matthew Chingos, a fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. – and, I should note, currently in a heated debate with Sara Goldrick-Rab.

Barkan and Chingos are formidable thinkers and articulate advocates for their positions on the Chicago strike, Barkan siding with the Chicago Teachers Union and Chingos making a case against it. And then there was me. I’d be delighted to say I was brought onto this panel as the rational moderate—or as I prefer to think of it, immoderately rational. But rather, I was brought on as “an expert on the role of billionaire philanthropy in shaping public policy.” Taking a step back, it’s important to ask why a panel on the teachers’ strike needs an expert on billionaire philanthropy. My very presence at the table is telling. The truth is, you can’t understand what’s happening in Chicago without factoring billionaire philanthropists like Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Michael Dell, and Michael Bloomberg into the equation.

To be clear, billionaire-financed education reform is not the only reason for this strike. The city of Chicago is facing debt in the billions. The schools are under-performing and among the most segregated in the country. Mayor Rahm Emanuel and his education reformers have genuine problems to solve and good points to make. On the other hand, Chicago teachers are facing a serious and well-financed effort to cut their pay and benefits while the school system is reorganized to permit their wholesale firing. They have some good points, too.

The strike, however, is about much more than these bread and butter issues. The strike is about the heart and soul of American public education. I don’t buy the claims being tossed around by both sides that this is all about the kids. (It is never all about the kids: they don’t vote.) This particular strike, in many ways, has become a referendum on how “public” public schools should be. Increasingly, public officials like Rahm Emanuel are teaming up with private education reformers and private foundations. The question of who controls public education – an institution that is at the core of democracy – has become open-ended.

One of the biggest issues in the Chicago strike is teacher evaluation. For many observers, this issue makes teachers seem unsympathetic, as if they’re afraid of being evaluated. But evaluation in and of itself isn’t the real issue—even many unions support strong evaluation and reform. In today’s debate, teacher evaluation has become something of a code word or a Trojan horse for a package of other reforms, many of which lead toward the privatization and de-professionalization of teaching. On the surface, it might seem trite or suspicious for teachers to be striking over their evaluations, or their pensions and healthcare. In truth, for both sides the strike is about much more than that.

When anti-union reform advocates talk about teacher evaluations, they’re also talking about a new type of education system—the type supported by billionaire philanthropists— that rewrites the rules of seniority, tenure and credentialing, while shifting funding priorities into public charter schools and other new models. Pro-union opponents, on the other hand, support some types of evaluation and reform, but they also want to strengthen and preserve what we currently understand to be the public education system.

The aspect of this debate that’s very frustrating to me as a social scientist is the idea that we can look to scientific studies for “objective” answers as to “what works” in education. Today’s education reformists often believe that they have found the “solution” to public education. Based on what is presented as clear-cut research, reformists will shut down longstanding neighborhood schools and open charter schools that reflect the latest, trendiest “solution.”

Meanwhile, most education researchers will tell you that we wish we could handpick the perfect teacher based on the perfect parameters or evaluation schema, but we can’t. Teacher evaluation models have turned out to be very iffy predictors of how well a teacher performs – and, of course, there is not an endless supply of brilliant teachers. This doesn’t mean there aren’t solutions or strategies for hiring good teachers, but rather that public education is more complicated than many number-crunching reformers realize.

There is mounting evidence that charter schools don’t perform particularly better or worse than regular public schools, despite the money invested in charters. Of course there are examples of outstanding charter schools just as there are examples of outstanding public schools. I went to Stuyvesant High School in New York City, an outstanding public school, and yet I don’t think it’s reasonable to suggest that Stuyvesant could be duplicated all over the country – “scaled up” to use the language of philanthrocapitalist education reformers.

There are three important points that I want to make away from the heated rhetoric on both sides of the strike – point that I think many involved would agree with but that are being lost in the fray. First, we are at a turning point in American education that will impact our ability to sustain our democratic system as well as our economic competitiveness. Second, education research is being mangled and abused as people – again on both sides – try to turn questions that are fundamentally about our values and priorities into technical questions that can be solved with a spreadsheet or regression analysis. Third, billionaire philanthropists have an outsized role in public education policy that is financed by tax dollars as well as private contributions. If we can focus on these three issues and use education research in good faith, then perhaps we can build a public education system worthy of our county’s children – even if they don’t vote.

0 Wishy-Washy Thoughts on Gates

I'm no Diane Ravitch.  If I were, I'd use this blog to bravely state my concerns about the direction the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is heading with educational policy. I'd follow her lead and ask hard, pointed questions about the role that people with money play in driving major decisions in a democracy.

But I won't.  Because while I'm tenured, I am still fearful.  I have receiving more than $1 million in support from the Gates Foundation for my research on financial aid, and I am grateful for it-- and in need of much more.  That's the honest truth.  It's harder and harder to find funding for research these days, and while my salary doesn't depend on it, getting the work done does.

So I won't say all that Diane just did.  Yet I have to say something, and as I wrote recently, I always attempt to do so.

Her questions deserve answers.  And they should be asked of the higher education agenda as well.  Why the huge investment in Complete College America, an outfit that is pushing an end to college remediation unsupported by the work of top scholars like Tom Bailey?  Why the growing resistance to funding basic research in key areas where massive federal and state investments persist absent evidence of effectiveness? Why sink $20 million into performance-based scholarships, based on a single tiny randomized trial in one site?

I'm sure there are good answers out there.  It's not the first time I've asked these questions.  And perhaps unlike Diane, the time I've spent with the Foundation has imbued me with some confidence that there are very smart, well-meaning people inside the place-- people I like quite a bit.  There's also a lot of turnover, and the outfit is a bit gangly in some areas, kinda like a teenager.

Actually, that's exactly it. The Foundation is one heck of a powerful adolescent.  And maybe that's ok, as long as it recognizes its stage in life, and continues to seek expert advice and wisdom.  Adolescents are good at asking questions and not so great at listening. That's something to work on. Places like the William T. Grant Foundation are full-fledged adult foundations who make smart and highly effective investments daily.  I'd love for Gates's ed portfolio to seek advice and hear from them.  It'd make a world of difference.

Have I just torpedoed my own chances for future support?  Well, I guess only time will tell....

0 Gates Foundation Makes Grant to ALEC

Liam and I were out enjoying an evening of dinner and a movie, when some astonishing news came over Twitter: the Gates Foundation just made a grant to ALEC. Yes, more than $375,000 to the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization my husband has called a self-proclaimed "free market, limited government" non-profit, which is really just a spout of Republican policy ideas. They push an agenda "focused on pet approaches to privatizing education, firing teachers and enabling home schooling that likely have little bearing on student outcomes and that have little basis in research."

As a fellow Gates grantee, colored me disconcerted.

As a professor in public higher education in Wisconsin, where ALEC has worked to intimidate the scholarship of faculty like Bill Cronon, color me outraged.

Tomorrow, watch this blog for what my colleague Robin Rogers of Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York has to say about the educational policy activities of billionaires. It'll be the first in a two part series. Clearly, it's something we all need to start discussing.