The Education Optimists

Title Your Study with Care

2012-01-30T12:27:00.002-06:00

Today's New York Times features an article on a new study on residential segregation by Edward Glaeser of Harvard, and Jacob Vigdor of Duke University. I'd like to draw your attention to what the study actually finds, and how it's being pitched to the national audience.

The study is produced by the Manhattan Institute's Center for State and Local Leadership. The Institute is widely recognized as a conservative research organization.

The title of the report, as written by its authors, reads: "The End of the Segregated Century."

The NYT's headline reads: "Segregation Curtailed in U.S. Cities, Study Finds."

The NYT's tweet reads: "Nation's Cities Almost Free of Segregation"

So it seems, the study must tell us that segregation has ended, or is about to-- right?

Nope. What it tells us, points out Doug Massey of Princeton University, a nationally recognized expert on the topic, is that segregation has declined substantially in metropolitan areas with few black residents. I wish I could say more, but this study-- despite being covered in the New York Times-- does not currently seem to appear anywhere on the Web!

So why not title the study "Shifting Patterns of Segregation"and the headline "Segregation Declines in Some U.S. Cities, Study Finds?"

Hmmm. Think it'd get as much attention? Fuel as much conservative fire? Yeah, that's what I thought.

PS. Want a more nuanced take on the changing face of segregation? I recommend this study.

You Got Rejected from Your First Choice College. So What?

2012-01-30T08:26:00.000-06:00

The following is a guest post from Robert Kelchen, doctoral candidate in Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The Washington Post’s Campus Overload blog recently featured a guest post, “Getting Rejected from Your Dream School(s) isn’t a Bad Thing” by Eric Harris, a junior who attended the University of Maryland after being deferred by his first choice (Duke) and rejected by six of the other eight colleges to which he applied. (He was also accepted by Emory.) Eric’s story is hardly unique, as numerous blogs and websites feature stories of students who were rejected by their first choice college. Most of the popular media accounts of students rejected by their first choice college are from students like Eric—those who applied to a large number of highly selective (and very expensive) colleges and universities and still attended a prestigious institution.

The kinds of students who are typically featured in the media are very likely to enjoy college and graduate in a timely manner, no matter where they end up attending. But the students who should be prominently featured instead are those whose first choice colleges are very different than their other options (much less selective four-year colleges, community colleges, or no college at all). Just-released data from the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at UCLA shows that only 58 percent of students attending four-year universities were attending their first choice college in fall 2011; nearly one-fourth of students were rejected by their first choice. This suggests that a fair number of students fall into this category, but little is known about their college outcomes.

As a part of my dissertation, I am using data from the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study to examine the college experiences of students who attended their first choice college to those who attended another college—either because they were rejected by their first choice or because they were accepted by their first choice but did not attend. WSLS students all come from modest financial backgrounds and were Pell Grant recipients during their first year of college, so it is likely that the cost of college played a much larger role in their college choice process than for students like Eric.

It is important to note that students end up at their first choice college as the result of three decisions: applying to their first choice (not explored in my study), getting accepted, and then attending after being accepted. I model the acceptance and attendance decisions using available information on the students’ demographics and academic preparation, their high school of attendance, and their first choice college. This is an important step in establishing a causal relationship because WSLS students who attended their first choice college tend to come from different backgrounds (especially from more rural areas) than those who did not.

I use interview and survey data to explore whether students’ academic and social integration levels differed between students who attended their first choice and those who did not for either of the above reasons. The interviews suggest that most students reported being happy with their college of attendance, regardless of whether that was their first choice college. (Whether this is actually true or whether this is an example of self-affirmation bias, in which people try to portray a disappointing event in the best possible light, cannot be determined.) There are also few differences between students who attended their first choice and those who did not on survey measures of academic and social integration.

I also use academic outcomes from the University of Wisconsin System and the National Student Clearinghouse to estimate the effects of attending one’s first choice college. After modeling the selection process, I find no statistically significant differences on academic outcomes between students who attended their first choice and either group who did not. (This dissertation chapter is nearly complete, so stay tuned for the full results.)

It appears that being rejected from one’s first choice college is not the end of the world for most students. The psychic costs appear quite high in much of the popular media, but we don’t need to feel too sorry for students who are forced to attend a highly selective college that may have been their seventh choice instead of their first. I spent three years in college working in the admissions office at Truman State University, and I talked with plenty of students for whom Truman was not their first choice. After being rejected by elite, expensive universities, they came to Truman and turned out just fine. So don’t worry too much about getting rejected by your first choice college—especially if paying for college was never one of your concerns. Everything will be okay.

Thoughts on the Obama Blueprint for Higher Education

2012-01-27T13:44:00.003-06:00

Today President Obama unveiled his latest blueprint for the reform of higher education at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, a public institution with relatively high tuition and relatively advantaged students, and a place in the midst of a dispute over graduate student labor practices. It's just miles from Henry Ford Community College in Dearborn, where on July 14, 2009, Obama released his American Graduation Initiative, a blueprint for transforming the nation's community colleges, which was essentially destroyed as it was caught up in political debates over the health care legislation.

The blueprint responds to the groundswell of concern about the high and ever-expanding cost of college attendance, and the corresponding growth in the costs of financial aid. It resonates with efforts by the Occupy movement, and especially with the agendas of the Lumina and Gates foundation. It's also consonant with the work of many labor economists.

On the one hand, there are many things to like here-- for example, it's about time the Administration shined a light on the fact that tuition is rising primarily because states are cutting their support to higher education. Despite some recent unfortunate remarks by Vice-President Biden, faculty salaries don't account for much of the increase in tuition. While it is the case that the salaries of SOME professors are too high, such discussions serve only to distract from the real problems-- and have the political effect of pitting educators against students. That may be convenient for administrators, or conservatives who simply want to put the predominantly liberal faculty out of work, but it isn't solving the problem of rising tuition. We shouldn't expend effort making policy based on anecdote or a few bad apples, especially when a wealth of data is staring us in the face, pointing the way.

But in many ways, what President Obama does in this blueprint is deeply problematic. First, it demonstrates his clear adherence to market-based logics of educational reform. He seems to actually believe that Race to the Top is working so well that it ought to be replicated by creating another competition in higher education. Where's the evidence to support that? Too much faith in Arne Duncan, if you ask me.

Second, the approach of tying Perkins and SEOG dollars to these new requirements has a consequence--perhaps unintended--of restricting the abilities of financial aid administrators to exercise their professional judgment in directing aid to students. These are some of the most flexible dollars at their disposal-- and some institutions have very, very few. I'm concerned that we don't yet know whether the choices aid administrators make maximize the effects of these dollars in ways that will now be minimized-- and also that these frontline workers would seem to have little control over the institutional and state actions needed to ensure the dollars keep coming in. In other words, aid officers may have fewer flexible dollars to work with now, but no additional control over how their universities set tuition.

I'm happy to see some money to promote the adoption of practices that can increase productivity in higher education, but as Doug Harris and I have pointed out, the evidence-base on which to make judgements about cost-effectiveness of programs is very, very thin. So I'm very disappointed that this program didn't begin by first endowing the Institute for Education Sciences with the resources needed to establish multiple higher education research centers, and task them (in part) with evaluating effects of this effort.

Also, given that some of these approaches to enhanced productivity have negative effects for faculty worklife, it would have been good for Obama to at minimum urge policymakers to avoid pitting students against their educators-- as they have in criticizing teachers' unions-- and instead be cognizant that students and professors have many common interests, and those should be emphasized. I predict that next up we'll be told that faculty aren't really interested in student success, and thus can and should be replaced. Of course, no one will produce hard evidence to back that up-- and yet we'll be demonized.

When it comes to specific aid programs, it is absurd for Obama to double the American Opportunity Tax Credit without any explanation, while barely mentioning the Pell Grant. As Sandy Baum and Mike McPherson recently wrote, when "will we also debate whether government expenditures targeting low-income college students deserve much stricter scrutiny in this age of attempted austerity than government expenditures through the tax code targeting more-affluent students?"

Overall, my reaction to this proposal is a simple "Meh." (HT to Sue Dynarski) Lately Obama has come out fighting, talking about the rich and poor, and about not backing the same old policies which got us into this economic crisis in the first place. What I see in this proposal is a lot of his approach to k-12 education and it's neither radical or progressive. Sure, it resonates with the desire of moderates and conservatives (as well as so-called reformers) to hold the academy's feet to the fire, and it does talk about state responsibility. But a progressive blueprint would've referred to higher education much more strongly as a right and a public good, focused on policies that could most benefit the struggling public institutions (think community colleges and state u's-- not flagships) and left all privates out of eligibility, stressed the importance of both faculty success and student success to the definition of "quality", and instead of framing change as a "race to the top" he should have called for a "war on educational inequality."

PS. After reading my take, please consider Clare Potter's. She is spot-on, and I only wish I'd made the case as well as she did!

Guest Post: UCR Students Promote a Bad Tuition Plan as Police Beat Protesters

2012-01-20T21:44:00.001-06:00

The following is a guest post by Bob Samuels, President of the University Council - AFT and a lecturer at UCLA. It is cross-posted from his blog, where you should go to find all of the original hyperlinks. I highly recommend also reading his November entry in the Huffington Post on why public higher education should be free.

The UC Regents meeting had a little of everything this week: UCR students came up with a new way to fund the university, a long list of new salary increases was released, UCSF asked to quit the system, a retired professor was fired, protesters disrupted the meeting, Regents met behind closed doors, and police attacked protesters who were using books as shields.

What does it all mean? Perhaps, it all adds up to the demise of the modern Western social contract. Without being too dramatic, we are seeing an attempt to resist the destruction of the central institutions of modernity: the university, the public commons, and the welfare state. Although it was once taken for granted that everyone should sacrifice for the common public good, this social contract has been broken, and now some are fighting to maintain it, while others are pushing us forward to a more premodern mode of social organization.

A case in point is the UCR “Student Investment Proposal,” which argues that students should pay no tuition while they are in school, but once they graduate, they should pay 5% of their income for 20 years. At first, this appears to be an elegant solution, but it really represents the final privatization of the public university. Instead of relying on state and federal funds and a common tax base, the new system would rely on private citizens to fund their own education through the use of a non-progressive flat tax. Just as UCSF wants to break its ties with the state and the rest of the UC system, this new funding model would allow students to “pay for their own education,” and would get rid of messy things like financial aid and family contributions.

Under this neoliberal payment program, the students working at Starbucks would be paying the same percent of their income to the UC as the students working for hedge funds. Of course, the university would have a strong incentive to only accept wealthy students, since these students have the highest chance of earning a big paycheck in the future. Likewise, there would be no reason to support programs in the humanities and social sciences if the big earners will all go to law school, medical school, and business school. In short, the student proposal is a private solution to a public problem, and yet we are told that the Office of the President will take it seriously.

It is indeed telling that a student group has come up with such a regressive funding model. We can read this as a sign of the way the backlash against the public good has been so successful that even good-intentioned people present anti-social ideas as if they were progressive. While the program does insist that the state should spend 2% of its budget on the UC each year, it does not say how the UC should use this money. Instead, we are told that students will pay for their own education out of their own future earnings. Of course, this model assumes that these students will have a future income in a world where we no longer have any sense of the common good

Baking Bread Without The Yeast

2012-01-19T08:54:00.002-06:00

Among my son's favorite books are the ones in Richard Scarry's Busytown series. In What Do People Do All Day?, Able Baker Charlie puts too much yeast in the dough, resulting in a gigantic, explosive loaf of bread that the bakers (and Lowly Worm) need to eat their way out of.

The opposite problem -- a lack of yeast -- is present in Michelle Rhee's recent op-ed in Education Week. In it, she limits her call to "rethink" teaching policy to "how we assign, retain, evaluate, and pay educators" and to "teacher-layoff and teacher-tenure policies." (And she casts the issue of retention purely as one about so-called "last-in, first-out" employment policies rather than about school leadership, collaboration or working conditions.)

The utter absence of any focus or mention of teacher development either in this op-ed or in her organization's (StudentsFirst) expansive policy agenda leaves me wondering if Rhee believes that teachers are capable of learning and improving. If Rhee indeed does believe that new teacher induction and career-long professional development have value, then why does she consistently ignore it in her public statements and in her organization's strategic priorities? The alternative, of course, is a view that teachers are static beings, incapable of improvement. They are either born effective or ineffective. "Mr. Anderson's value-added score is an 18, thus he is an ineffective teacher and should be fired because his inability to teach cannot be ameliorated." We, of course, know this not to be the case. This alternative view also involves a strategy of simply trying to hire and fire our way to success. From research and international exemplars, I think most of us understand such a narrow approach to be ineffectual, albeit politically attractive in some quarters, especially among the Republican governors that Rhee is assisting exclusively.

High-quality development opportunities for teachers are like the yeast that helps the bread to rise. Comprehensive teacher induction has been shown to accelerate new teacher effectiveness and increase their students' learning. Likewise, personalized and purposeful professional development also can strengthen teaching skills and classroom impact.

It seems to me that a stated policy goal should be to ensure that as many as teachers as possible successfully pass educator evaluations being developed across the nation. Too many advocates such as Rhee appear to be eager to fire more teachers rather than make investments and restructure schools to maximize their effectiveness. A critical role for policy then would be to re-define teacher development in a way that raises the quality bar and invests public dollars in programs and approaches shown to have the desired impact on teaching and learning. Isn't that something we all can agree with?

Teachers are tremendously influential -- and we should do everything we can to unleash their full power. On teacher effectiveness, I'm unwilling to settle for half a loaf.

Skipping Evidence in Favor of Conclusions

2012-01-10T22:27:00.002-06:00

Tonight's Chronicle of Higher Education features a story of great policy relevance. Under the headline "Study Disputes Claims That Preferentially Admitted Students Catch Up," author Peter Schmidt describes the results of an unpublished paper by Duke researchers as calling "into question other studies that play down the academic difficulties initially experienced by the beneficiaries of race-conscious admissions." The paper, Schmidt says, has been marshaled by critics of affirmative action as they seek a Supreme Court ruling knocking the policy down.

My own reading of the paper is that drawing such conclusions from this work, and highlighting them with such an inflammatory headline ("preferentially admitted students"?) is grossly inappropriate. While the authors document (1) racial/ethnic variation in the relationship between initial academic preparation and later major-switching and (2) that major-switching accounts for the diminishing racial/ethnic gap in GPA during college, there is absolutely no evidence presented that the use of race in college admissions is the driving factor behind such switches.

But I can see where the reporter got such ideas. The authors frame the paper from page 1 in terms of the debate over racial preferences. There were other options, including framing it in terms of unpacking the significant fluctuation in students' choices of college majors over time (e.g. as documented by Jerry Jacobs in Revolving Doors), and the implications of that fluctuation for labor market outcomes. Or they could have thought in terms of the debates over student learning, and how this may help us understand racial differences in rates of learning, such as those laid out in Academically Adrift. Instead, the authors open with a discussion of how affirmative action is "promoting access" to the "less prepared,"suggesting that such admits would need to "catch up" over time. This is the language of affirmative action critics, not researchers who recognize that the literature on testing and admissions hardly indicates that students who are admitted through the use of some form of preference may not be less prepared at all, and thus have no reason to catch up.

The first finding presented in the paper is that even though they start "behind" white students at Duke (behind as proxied by their first semester GPA, which is hardly solely a function of intelligence or preparation), black and Hispanic students make steady gains in GPA over time. One could look at this and think many things-- for example, perhaps over time minority students learn the "system" and figure out how to reap its rewards. (For the record, even white students do this, and have for decades--read about the "grade point average perspective" in Howard Becker's classic Making the Grade.) Or maybe black students benefit disproportionately from mentoring and other attention on campus. There are many possible explanations, but the authors turn to two in particular--variance and course selection. And in the end, they hang their hats on major migration--black students catch up on their GPA by switching to easier majors, and this is because they are disproportionately weaker students. Controlling for switching explains almost all of the black/white convergence in grades, say the authors. And so, they write, "Attempts to increase representation [of minorities] at elite universities through the use of affirmative action may come at a cost of perpetuating under-representation of blacks in the natural sciences and engineering." There you have it: we oppose affirmative action because it hurts black people.

Ok, let's say it together: COME ON. There are no alternative explanations proffered by these very fine academics (one of whom trained at UW-Madison)? And seriously, issuing such a policy proclamation based on a study of one single, highly unusual private university?

It is easy to come up with many, and next to impossible for the authors to rule them out. So black students have lower first year GPAs than white students, and this explains why they'd be more likely to switch majors over time. This can be true even WITHOUT affirmative action. Only if we hold a very high bar that says "we will only admit students above this bar so that they will not change majors" would this be stopped. Moreover, have the authors considered the potential that Duke's affirmative action program is the problem-- not affirmative action itself? As Doug Massey and his colleagues have pointed out, programs of all kinds that admit students but fail to adequately support their success are bad programs-- period. That does not mean the admissions practice itself is bad-- it means the university is hypocritical. It wants the glory of claiming diversity without devoting sufficient resources and effort required to ensure that all who are admitted fully succeed.

These are but a few conjectures- and deciding on which is right is not my job. My point is straightforward: this paper begins and ends with a political agenda, and it's being used as such. There is no more reason to think the patterns observed are attributed to the use of race in Duke's admissions decisions than to discriminatory practices in the allocation of university resources to its students, or to inadequate teacher quality on the part of its professors in some majors. Who knows the reason? Certainly not these researchers.

Is Higher Tuition What the Public Wants? And Who Cares?

2012-01-10T12:40:00.003-06:00

In a blog over at the Washington Post today, Daniel de Vise raises an interesting question: Does the public want lower (or higher) tuition? He engages with this issue mainly in the context of private institutions, discussing anecdotal evidence from a recent meeting with college presidents.

In a nutshell, here are the highlights of his findings:

1. There is some evidence that the public wants a deep discount on a more expensive product. In other words, families are happier when they get a lot of merit-based financial aid at a high-priced college. Some colleges have found that when they cut tuition, applications drop too, and families complain they aren't getting much aid.

2. There is also some evidence that the public embraces -- even demands-- lower tuition, even thought it means getting less aid. At Sewanee, The University of South, which de Vise highlights, cut its (very high) tuition by 10% and focused efforts on need-based aid, resulting in an increase in applications. de Vise also notes that Sewanee took a key step, first done by George Washington University, freezing tuition for returning students. This prevents surprising hikes in cost from year to year, something that my own research (forthcoming) suggests can alarm students and even induce some to drop out of college.

So what's going on here? How can college presidents say that they must raise tuition because that's what the public wants, while others work to lower tuition, because it's what the public wants?

The answer is quite simple, actually. The "public" doesn't exist. It's an averaged American, comprised of heterogeneous individuals.

Some people equate the price of college with quality. Those are likely the same people who will buy a Lexus, thinking they're getting a better car, even though Lexus and Toyota use the same components. They're thrilled with a discounted Lexus, and have the cultural capital to know that if they go to a dealer and haggle, they might get one.

Other people have negative connotations associated with high prices. They see expensive things as "elitist", "snobby" and most importantly out-of-reach. They don't want to haggle for an affordable price, since they know that when people like them (who don't wear Banana Republic, look white, or speak formal English) walk into a dealership or admissions office, they aren't likely to get a deal. They want the price low, period. Discounting doesn't work for them.

Both types-- and there are nuanced versions of each-- are now part of higher education. But the pricing model, advocated by so many college presidents and backed by evidence produced by economists, is built for the first group-- the We Like Deep Discounts on Expensive Things group. Why? Because it suits the needs of institutions, who want to have more cash on hand, it seems "realistic" given budget cuts from governments and declining endowments, and it's said to be more efficient.

Ok. Let's say that's true (and I worry about the evidence, since much of it is based on studies of students from the 70's and 80s, before tuition went through the roof and disadvantaged students became a large part of enrollments). It doesn't necessarily make it effective policy. The relative effectiveness of the two strategies depends on who's in higher education (who dominates enrollment), what goals are sought, and whose outcomes are more affected by the pricing strategy. If first-generation students are in the I Want It Cheap camp, and they begin to comprise a sizable fraction of enrollment, if the primary outcomes measured are college graduation rates of at-risk students, and if first-generation students are most price-sensitive, then I'm sorry but hiking prices and discounting simply isn't effective.

Thus, the question we ought to be asking is not the one de Vise posed -- Is higher tuition what the public wants?-- but rather, Is higher tuition going to achieve the goals America has set for higher education? If we want to make progress, that's the one we have to get focused on answering.

Remaking Academia: Disclose Your Funders

2012-01-10T10:53:00.000-06:00

In my first post on remaking academia, I recommended that authors disclose the funders of their research--as well as the costs of the work. The recommendation had twin aims: to expose any potential influences (positive or negative) on the research, and to allow others to make more accurate cost-benefit calculations when planning how to conduct their own research. Unless you know what good research really costs, it's hard to realistically plan for it-- and to fundraise to support it. If you know it'll be expensive, you have to seek outside support, and that will lead directly to the decisions you'll make that will eventually require that you name your funders.

This week, the national association of economists adopted similar standards. Given the extent to which economics is alpha dog in social science research, capturing headlines and exerting disproportionate influence on public thinking, this is the right move-- just long overdue. Said one economist in the Chronicle of Higher Education, "Economics is in the harm business but we don't wrestle with the ethical implications."

Admittedly, sometimes naming funders is easier said than done. For example, I have been supported by a foundation that stipulates in a contract that it is not to be named in publications. I have difficulty with this, and pondered the reasons for it, but ultimately abided by the request. I do this only because I feel certain that receiving funding from that source has had no other influence on my actual research other than making data collection (which I designed and conducted) possible. The foundation is extremely low-touch, especially compared to others which I do name-- those that provide professional development and other supports which could shape the direction of my thinking and research.

It can also be unclear when a funder must be named. Academics often have multiple sources of support from our time, and our time is blurry-- summers can be funded from 3-4 sources and who knows who's paying for the time you spend on a given Fridsy writing an article. In those cases, I recommend acknowledging them all.

Finally, we have to check our propensities to overreact to the naming of funders-- and not too quickly presume untoward influence, while maintaining a healthy skepticism. It's very common, for example, to see the Gates Foundation listed as a funder of education research-- but the role the Foundation plays in each piece varies tremendously, according to both authors and program officers. Sometimes the idea started with the Foundation, and other times it was the last funder in-- hardly influential.

The main goal should be honesty and transparency. Don't wring your hands over it-- just do it.

Remaking Academia: Improve the Hiring Process

2012-01-07T11:52:00.000-06:00

The latest entry in a continuing series here at The Education Optimists

Have you ever sought a job as a professor? Depending on your field and where you’ve applied, it goes something like this:

(1) You send in a letter of interest, a CV, and some publications. Maybe some letters of reference too, or perhaps just contact information for those people. If it’s a teaching institution or a school of education, maybe you’ll also send in a statement of teaching philosophy and some student evaluations.

(2) If the search committee likes what they see in the file, they get in touch. This typically means you’ve published a fair bit, demonstrated that you have some interesting ideas, come from a good graduate program, have very solid letters that say you’re among the very best, can attract grant funding, etc.

(3) Then you either meet with the committee via phone or Skype, or at a conference, or more commonly go to campus. (Sometimes it’s a two-step or three-step sequence, sometimes you just go right to campus.) During the visits, you’ll do a talk about your research (to show how you approach questions, theory and evidence), talk with lots of academics who will ask you about your future research plans and what you like to read and discuss (mainly to see if they think you’re smart and they like you), meet with an administrator or two, talk to students, and maybe give a demonstration of your teaching (e.g. a pedagogical talk).

(4) At the end of the evaluation period, a search committee, or even the entire department, together with the dean, has a set of information about you. It includes a written record of what you’ve done, thoughts about what they’ve heard, some student evaluations on a set of metrics, etc. Then they make their decisions.

Often this results in the offer of a job at a pretty good salary with decent benefits, with a three-year contract, and the possibility of tenure. Or, if you’re lucky, it’s a tenured position—in which case they’ve committed (after a tenure committee does their own review) to hire you “for life.”

This process has long puzzled me for what it omits. And as I listen to heated discussions of ineffective professors and teachers, and watch the advent of a strong debate from k -20 over using metrics to decide who to fire, I have to wonder: why can’t we start instead by using data and standard human resources practices to improve our effectiveness at hiring?

Before I list some suggestions for improvement, let me admit that I have held one academic job for my entire career (which admittedly is just 8 years long). And this area—hiring and evaluation—isn’t the topic of my own research. So I don’t know about every practice used in every college or school, and it’s quite possible some of what I think should be done IS being done—in which case we should get a good census of practices and start evaluating their effectiveness. This is a blog I really hope to get constructive feedback on (yes, more so than usual).

(1) Rethink who does the hiring. Right now prospective colleagues primarily do it. This is good, since they are whom you’ll end up working with and spending time with. They should and must have a role. But those peers were hired because they are talented researchers and teachers, not because they know how to evaluate large numbers of prospective applicants and make terrific judgment calls. Professionalization of this hiring practice is needed, and it must include very experienced people who’ve done hiring in academia for decades. Ideally, they’d be systematically trained in identifying expertise in the competencies academics need to do their jobs very well (see next point).

(2) Bring some additional competencies into the mix. Being a good professor or teacher requires strong time management skills, grit, resilience, ability to respond under pressure, communication skills, drive, ability to implement feedback, performance orientation, inquisitiveness, and cultural competencies as well. Where/how are these being assessed now? Primarily in terms of how much you’ve managed to publish in X time (which doesn’t necessarily tell you how well time was managed since other activities are often sacrificed). There are instruments for measuring such things, and we’re often ignoring them. That’s not good enough. What other competencies predict success in academia? We need to know, and we need to integrate them into hiring.

(3) Lengthen the process. My colleagues will hate me for saying this, but spending only a total of maybe 2-5 days evaluating whether a person should be allowed to teach large numbers of students, enjoy limited campus resources, etc, is far too quick. You need more data and more time to analyze it.

(4) Systematize the evaluation process. We use very superficial forms and often don’t consider the data that result in any sophisticated way. The process of reference and background checks is too personal, political, and idiosyncratic, mainly because people who were never trained to do these checks are in charge!

There’s got to be even more we can do. Sure it has to be a flexible process that can be adapted to public flagships or private liberal arts colleges, as well as community colleges, etc. It also can’t be so expensive as to prevent scaling. And it will need revision and improvement. When’s the last time your department changed how it recruited and evaluated applicants?

The current process skips key steps and fails to assess competencies that when not present, lead to failure and turnover in academia (and k12 teaching). Instead of researching who we should fire, why not focus our attention on improving the hiring process? It seems far more efficient, not to mention equitable and ethical.

What Happens When You Remake Academia? Rick Hess Looks Your Way

2012-01-04T08:40:00.001-06:00

Rick Hess is an amusing guy-- witty banter, fun to have drinks with-- and always pushing buttons. I dig that, even though we rarely agree on policy issues.

What I like most about him is that he takes seriously the idea that academics should bring their research to the public, and in an effort to prod that along, last year he began ranking us. He uses a set of metrics that even he admits are pretty darned flawed, but are at least an ATTEMPT in the right direction. I like it not because I'm ranked (ok, I like that too) but rather because Hess is a prominent guy doing whatever he can to provide incentives to professors to do more than what tenure requires of them. He wants us to use all 5 tools in our work--"disciplinary scholarship, policy analysis and popular writing, convening and quarterbacking collaborations, providing incisive media commentary, and speaking in the public square." And that I can appreciate.

So here are the rankings this year. And here's the methodology.

Remaking Academia: 12 Ideas for 2012

2012-01-02T10:56:00.001-06:00

What follows is a summary of a Twitter thread I started a few days ago. Feedback suggested it might be useful to compile it here.

Here are 12 rough, off-the-cuff ideas about how we might collectively remake academia. Just to get the party started. Please throw yours in too!

1. Hey professor: Ask yourself "What new knowledge does this article contribute to the world? Does the method actually address the research question?" If the answer is no or it does not, for pete's sake please don't be so self-serving as to submit it for publication.

2. Publish for the sake of knowledge dissemination, not in the pursuit of tenure. There should be penalties for publishing bad work!

3. At least 1 out of every 5 publications should contribute a lesson for policy or practice at some level.

4. For every three articles placed in academic journals, write at least one executive summary for public dissemination. For those of you at UW, consider this part of the Wisconsin Idea. You could ask your department to host a site where you post these summaries collectively with your colleagues-- no need for a special outlet. Or, consider this bit of info from Julia Savoy- "you might consider depositing your work or summaries of pubs in Minds@UW, an institutional repository that offers a number of benefits, such as long-term archiving and permanent URLs. The outlet is already set up and indexed by Google and other search engines.

5. Blogging and writing op-eds and letters to editor, based on evidence not anecdote, should count for tenure.

6. The full costs of research, and all funders, should be disclosed in a standard statement at the end of articles.

7. It isn't "mixed methods" if you simply add anecdotes in the discussion section to "explain" your statistical findings.

8. Write about what you actually did not what you wished you'd done. Be honest, share tradeoffs and lessons learned.

9. The discussion section of a paper should be INTERESTING and worth reading, not a throwaway.

10. People with controversial opinions should be prized for bravery, not shunned for rocking the boat. Academic freedom & all.

11. Syllabi should include readings from competing perspectives, and varied political ones too.

12. There needs two be a "professor 101" course for all new faculty, helping socialize them to whatever "standards" are expected.

2012: A Year for Big Ideas

2012-01-02T09:56:00.000-06:00

2011 was a terrific year in some ways, and a horrible one in others. Watching many national leaders attack the rights of working families was devastating, but watching those families fight back was awe-inspiring. What Time magazine called the year of the protestor, I'd call the year of the working class reawakening.

Personally, 2011 was a critical turning point, as I finally earned tenure and thus the distinct privilege of having the freedom to speak my mind and keep my job. Wow. I can't tell you how GOOD that feels. Watch out world.

My hope is that in 2012 we'll see many people bring fresh ideas to old problems, with a willingness to float trial balloons on thoughts they typically might've withheld for fear of reprisal. I've been endeavoring to do this a bit on Twitter, and at Liam's suggestion I'm next reposting my latest stream-- on Rethinking Academia.

We are welcoming guest bloggers in 2012, following the remarkable success of Robin Rogers, and encourage you to write to us if you'd like to speak out on an issue facing k-20 education. Don't get me wrong--we don't post anything that's simply advertising your product or work, and we will stick at least initially to bloggers we have some sense of. We want to keep the discourse on this blog stimulating, thought-provoking, and at least modestly snarky. Send us good stuff!

All the best for a fabulous 2012!

Whose Race to the Top?

2011-12-28T13:01:00.001-06:00

A new investigation into the charter schools run by Joe Biden's brother Frank, a self-proclaimed "PT Barnum" of charters, raises interesting implications for the Obama Administration's educational policy known as Race to the Top.

As many, including the U.S. Department of Education which oversees RTTT, have pointed out, states that embrace charter schools are winning the race. As DOE materials put it, "President Obama has called upon states to encourage the expansion of charter schools. A network of innovative and high-achieving charter schools can be an important part of a state's school reform effort. However, charter schools are facing significant obstacles to expansion in too many states."

Is this an entirely disinterested reform effort? Many others have raised concerns about the neoliberalism inherent in RTTT, which shapes the dominance of private business interests over common public goods. For example, in a recent article two researchers from Occidental College document the actions taken by Arne Duncan in Chicago, where Renaissance 2000 threatened participatory democracy by excluding parents from key decisions including the closing of schools, an action that the Consortium for Chicago School Research did not find to be beneficial for student outcomes.

The "unintended" consequences of capitalizing school markets are numerous, but one also has to wonder about the intended consequences as well. As it turns out, Vice President Biden, a guy I have generally liked, has family interests in the charter school movement. This most recent investigation, which in full disclosure I will say was conducted by my sister Lisa Rab, makes me further wonder whether the Race to the Top is really about the 99% of America's students-- or truly about advancing the advantages of the 1%. As usual.

PS. Valerie Strauss of the Washington Post also covered this story, on December 10, several weeks after Lisa began writing about it.

Billionaire Education Policy: Part 2 (Guest Post)

2011-12-12T06:29:00.005-06:00

The following is the second post in a two-part series by Robin Rogers, associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). For more about Robin and her first post, click here.

Before I jump into policy experiments, I want to reflect on the enthusiastic response that I received from last week’s Part One of Billionaire Education Policy. If I could summarize the response with one word, it would be relief.

A lot of people who work in education, philanthropy, and government are wary of the rise in billionaire policymaking, but are reticent in voicing their concerns. Perhaps this is fear of retaliation -- what Edward Skloot calls the “Brass-Knuckles philanthropy”of the Gates Foundation. But I see another, more heartening piece to this puzzle. People in the philanthropic and advocacy communities don’t want to harm the mission of philanthropy. We fear that revealing the pitfalls of billionaire philanthropy might have some unforeseen effect on the good work that these foundations support.

Billionaire policymaking is the elephant in the room, but nobody seems sure how to approach it. I say that we should name the elephant, but we don’t have to shoot him. There is a middle road.

We’ve named the elephant – it is philanthro-policymaking. It is here to stay. A small, well-networked group of the super-rich will make and fund social policy globally. We don’t have to shoot the elephant, but we need to understand its nature and learn to live happily with it. Like any powerful institution, billionaire philanthropy needs checks and balances. Our task is to develop them.

Now, to education policy. If you’re not a policy wonk, wonkette, or even a wink, as my more politically savvy friends called me in college, stay with me. Once you get past the odd language of experimentation and evaluation, it’s all politics and human folly.

Testing new policy ideas is appealing. Why have a political battle over education reform, when you can experiment with a bunch on a small scale, and then pick the one that works best? In my last post, I mentioned the recent New York Times article “Policy-Making Billionaires” by Nicholas Confessore. In his coverage of Mark Zuckerberg’s controversial 100 million dollar donation to the Newark, NJ school system, Confessore wrote that NJ officials now plan use the money to “experiment” with education policy and find “what works” and then replicate the best programs with public money: “Whatever proves most effective [in the experiments] can then be rolled out on a larger scale.”

This approach to policy reform is not new. It was a central part of welfare reform in the 1990s. Testing and measuring are particlulary attractive to super-wealthy business oriented philanthropists – philanthrocapitalists. Philanthrocapitalist apply business models to philanthropy. They want to measure everything like money.

Social good is harder to measure than money. The official U.S. poverty line was changed this year after years of debate and controversy. We are struggling to even measure poverty. How do we measure student performance? Teacher quality? Our measurements are imprecise at best and meaningless and misleading at worst. Most educators, advocates, researchers, philanthropists, and policymakers are well aware of the problem of measuring complex outcomes. That awareness disappears when we talk about policy experiments. We act as if testing these programs will lead to some empirical, objective truth about what work bests.

Sociologists talk about manifest and latent functions – for all of you Sociologists, I am not suggesting a functionalist approach to education policy, the concept is illustrative. A manifest function is what something is supposed to do. For example, the manifest function of prisons is to incarcerate people. Things also have latent functions – effects that they have in addition to the stated objective. Prisons provide jobs, for example. That is a latent function.

Policy experiments are supposed to tell us empirically how good a program or approach is. They don’t do this very well. Randomized experiments are expensive, difficult, and rare. Most policy “experiments” aren’t really experiments. They are a trial run of a program with data collection. Even then, the data is often collected haphazardly or to highlight program success and minimize failures. Politics and research also operate in different time frames – solid evaluations often take years. In short, well-funded policy evaluations take too long to actually affect policy, and ad hoc evaluations don’t produce reliable findings. If you want to read more about these issues, I recommend Education Research on Trial.

If policy experiments don’t succeed in their manifest function, why are they still around? Because they are brilliant at their latent functions.

1) Building networks of people who support a particular reform and placing many of them in administrative positions.
2) Funding the intellectual development of a new policy.
3) Political advantage. If a program is in place, opponents can’t say the program is radical, impossible or to predict catastrophe -- few social programs have immediate and obvious consequences.
4) Taking the debate out of the political realm -- what should we do -- where citizens play a role and putting them in the technical, “expert” realm -- what works.

“Experiments” is not the correct word for this process. The scientific language of experimentation trips us up. Seeding is a more accurate description.

I’m not much of a gardener, but I know that I planted the plants that grow in my backyard, and I know that their success depends on what was planted there before, the quality of the soil, and the weather. Not everything that I plant grows. Some grow for a bit and then wither. Some flowers are hearty but ugly. But none are there because they’re empirically the best possible plants to be growing in my garden.

We need to think of experimental programs as planted seeds rather than clinical experiments. We learn which of the programs that we plant thrive and which fail. We can uproot the plants that are thriving but are poisonous to the plants around them. Rather than talking about outcomes and “yields” in some Sisyphean effort to find the thing that “works best,” we should talk about program results. We should talk about the actual plants, instead of pretending that our “experiments” will one day yield a perfect plant. We should talk about whether a specific goal was met. We should talk about how the goals relate to our values. And we should keep trying to get better measures for the outcomes we care about.

Talking about “policy experiments” as what they really are – seed programs for social policy – would help us see more clearly that billionaire philanthropists have become policy makers. The power of the economic elite currently hides behind the language of science, which seems to legitimize their actions and prevents us from asking questions. If Bill Gates is funding “research” and gathering “evidence” in “experiments” that he is funding, this seems normal. If he’s funding a seed program that will help the government set education policy, the privatization of policy becomes more obvious. We must not allow the language of science to obscure the power of the economic elite. Policy seeding is an effective political strategy

Billionaire Education Policy (Guest Post)

2011-12-05T06:40:00.000-06:00

The following is a guest posting by my colleague and friend Robin Rogers, associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). She is the author of “Why Philanthro-policymaking Matters” in The Politics of Philanthrocapitalism, Society 2011, The Welfare Experiments: Politics and Policy Evaluation (Stanford University Press, 2004) and numerous articles on politics and social policy. Rogers served as a Congressional Fellow on Women and Public Policy during welfare reform, as a Robert Wood Johnson Health Policy Scholar at Yale University, was a visiting fellow at Princeton University. She is writing a book on philanthro-policymaking, Billionaire Philanthropy. This is the first of two posts in a mini-series on the Education Optimists.

The word “policy” makes us think of politicians and bureaucrats. But what happens when powerful policy-makers aren’t elected or appointed? Today, billionaires are shaping education policy in the United States. Buying political influence—-even legally—-feels dirty, so let me try again:

Philanthropists are saving our schools!

See what happened when I replaced “political influence” with “philanthropy”?

The super wealthy—I’m talking about the .01, not the measly 1%—have more influence in American politics than the 99% because they can donate huge sums of money to political campaigns and fund Congressional lobbyists. But their power extends beyond these well-publicized campaign contributions. With the economic crisis, the government is broken and broke, leaving a vacuum for the very rich to become more directly involved with the formation and implementation of social policy.

For years, the connection between philanthropy and policy-making has flown under the radar, but last week, the New York Times published “Policy-Making Billionaires” by political reporter Nicholas Confessore. I’m surprised it took so long for an article on billionaire policymaking to hit the newsstands. The Occupy Movement focused public attention on inequality and the concentration of wealth and power, yet we rarely talk about elite, strategic philanthropy, which Mathew Bishop calls philanthro-capitalism and Chrystia Freeland calls plutocracy. Michael Edwards has argued that philanthro-capitalism erodes civil society. I have written about the rise of philanthro-policymaking. But still, the rise of co-ordinated and strategic philanthropy by the very wealthy hasn’t been covered by the media.

Very, very wealthy men—-Diane Ravitch calls them the Billionaires Boys Club-- are setting policy. Ravitch’s “Boys Club” moniker has a literal counterpart in the form of the mysterious "The Good Club," a small group of billionaires led by Warren Buffett and Bill Gates that meets with the specific intention of setting the global social agenda. To be fair, it is not only a boys club; reportedly, Oprah is a member, so it’s The Billionaire Boys Club and Oprah.

Education policy is where mega-philanthropists are making the most significant inroads in the United States. In New York, billionaire Mayor Michael Bloomberg and billionaire philanthropist George Soros put up $30 million each for the Young Men’s Initiative, and then the City of New York matched these contributions. The goal of the Young Men’s Initiative is to improve the health, education, and employment of young black and Latino men in New York so they don’t end up in prison. No argument here: that’s a great goal. But $60 million in matching funds? Is this just extra cash the city had on hand? No. It came at the exclusion of other policy priorities. Is the Young Men’s Initiative a better use of taxpayer dollars than other programs would have been? Maybe. Did the philanthropic agenda of Bloomberg and Soros set social policy in New York? Absolutely.

There is no sign of this trend slowing down. In Screw Business as Usual, Virgin Atlantic founder Richard Branson argues for more elite policy-making power – you guessed it, in the form of “doing good.”

Yesterday, Twitter was buzzing with the news that the Gates Foundation had given a grant to ALEC to, essentially, influence state budget making -- where the rubber hits the road in education policy. I heard some debate over whether this constituted a Republican takeover of the state budget process, a Gates Foundation takeover of ALEC or both. No one suggested it was a victory for democracy. Kristen McQueary recently wrote about the scandal erupting over Stand for Children’s founder Jonah Edelman’s rant last summer in Aspen. Edelman was pretty explicit about the group’s power in the legislative process. Shhhh, Jonah! To paraphrase the movie Fight Club, the first rule of philanthropolicymaking is never speak of philanthropolicymaking.

One troubling example hits at the heart of public education. Last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared on Oprah to give the city of Newark, NJ 100 million dollars. Governor Chris Christie and Mayor Cory Booker were there, too. Big photo op – and nice photo. Then it got messy. Zuckerberg formed a foundation, Startup: Education, intended to parcel out grants to schools that matched funds with the grant and fit the foundation’s priorities. Months after the Oprah announcement, the ACLU filed a lawsuit against the city of Newark for denying access to communications between Booker and Zuckerberg. Booker claimed that communications between him and Zuckerberg regarding the grant were personal; that he wasn’t acting as Mayor, and thus the information was private. Zuckerberg later said the money was actually for developing leaders, like Booker. Now, according to New Jersey officials, the plan is to use the money to “experiment” with education policy and find “what works” and then replicate the best programs with public money.

The idea of using policy experiments to learn what works sounds great, but the reality is more complicated. In The Welfare Experiments: Politics and Policy Evaluation, I showed that policy experiments led to the 1996 welfare reform by changing institutional structures, building networks of people in support of reform, and making the idea of time limited welfare publicly acceptable. It had nothing to do with the research findings on the programs. The role of experimental programs in education reform is complicated – and the focus of Billionaire Education Policy, Part 2 (the next installment of this post, coming next Monday on the Education Optimists). For now, I’ll say that I am skeptical of claims, such as the one Confessore suggests, that “Whatever proves most effective [in the experiments] can then be rolled out on a larger scale…” Policy experiments don’t work that way.

All over the country, variations of the New York and New Jersey story are playing out: Philanthropists give money to resource-starved school systems, and in return, they reserve the right to effectively set education policy. Consultants and for profit programs present a potential conflict of interest by creating cash cows. Booker‘s claim that he was acting as a private citizen—and the fact that Zuckerberg’s money was just a pledge, not a guarantee of funding—raises questions. What is private and what is public? Is anyone accountable for what happens to this money? Do we need more transparency for private donations?

I feel crass in suggesting that we probe philanthropic giving with the same critical eye we cast on political money and business profits. And yet, the very nature of philanthropic giving has significantly changed in recent years. A handful of wealthy individuals and families control a large amount of this country’s wealth, and their “philanthropy” is beginning to feel more like governance.

ROBIN ROGERS can be reached via email at robinrogers99@gmail.com
Follow her on Twitter: @Robin_Rogers

Gates Foundation Makes Grant to ALEC

2011-12-04T11:31:00.000-06:00

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.

Things That Make Me Go Hmm....(Part 2)

2011-12-03T11:25:00.000-06:00

Hot off the presses, recent news that has me scratching my head, or otherwise up in arms...

(1) Raising tuition in expensive cities in the midst of an economic crisis. Yep, that's what CUNY thinks is the right thing to do. Hat tip to Tom Hilliard, who pointed me to this incredible inane comment from a CUNY administrator: "What's really driving some of the issues here is the concern about debt and debt upon graduation, and our students as a whole take out little debt, for obvious reasons. The tuition's affordable for those who can pay." Um, yeah.

(2) The White House wades into the quagmire of university admissions, promoting creative thinking on how to achieve diversity. In one sense, just in time, since it sure looks like the Supreme Court is going to end the use of race in admissions by June. On the other hand, I wish the Administration would issue some cautions about how criteria like first-generation status and high school attended are hardly clean proxies for race. Plenty of folks want to do something less controversial, which socioeconomic diversity proxies will accomplish, but they can't and shouldn't pretend the outcomes achieved will be the same.

(3) Jerry Sandusky is innocent? So he says. "I didn't do those things. I'm not the monster I've been made out to be. I didn't engage in sexual activities with those kids." Others told me similar things during a recent trip to Penn State. I don't know, call me naive but I'm inclined to believe the testimony of the 8 or more adults who say they were raped, over the guy who likes to call anal sex "horseplay." I don't care what his "motives" were-- I care what his ACTIONS were. And by the way, does he sound drugged or drunk to anyone else?

Making College More Student Friendly (Part 1: Seg Fees)

2011-12-01T08:16:00.002-06:00

Another new Education Optimists series-- this one is focused on how to reform our colleges and universities to become more student-friendly. First up, seg fees.

Last night as I observed my Twitter feed, I noticed a tweet from a student journalist about a particular aspect of UW System policy on segregated fees. According to System financial rule F50, in order for an organization to receive seg fees, it must "require that all leadership positions in the organization be held by students enrolled on a fee-paying basis for at least half-time; as used in this policy, "half-time" status means enrollment for a minimum of six credits as an undergraduate student, and enrollment for a minimum of four credits as a graduate student, except that for UW-Colleges students "half-time" status means enrollment for a minimum of three credits."

This strikes me as a good example of a well-intentioned policy with unintended consequences.

The purpose of the policy may be to ensure that only students hold leadership positions, preventing others in the community from accessing student resources and/or controlling agendas. That makes sense. Maybe it is also intended to ensure that students who hold leadership positions have "skin in the game"--e.g. paid their seg fees. That makes less sense, since many students didn't themselves pay their seg fees: their parents or financial aid did.

But this half-time requirement systematically disenfranchises the more than 23,000 undergraduate students in the UW System who, for whatever reason, are attending college part-time. Statistics show that part-time enrollment is a temporary situation for some students, and a strategy for college attendance for others. For example, a student may be full-time throughout college, but due to family obligations or a short-fall of financial resources, or difficulty with some hard courses, may drop to part-time for a given term. Or, the student's approach to financing college may be to work 3/4 time, and take a half-time load. Such students are disproportionately first-generation, racial/ethnic minorities, and/or from low-income families. They are often somewhat older, and more likely to be women.

Participation and leadership in student organizations is important. It's not only a credit to one's resume, and a great way to build social networks, but it is also a predictor of college persistence. Thus, it is probably especially important for students who are otherwise disconnected from campus to have the opportunity--if they so choose, can fit it in, and are chosen--to take the role as a leader. Saying that they can't (or if they do, their organization can't access seg fees) is passing judgement on their abilities, rights, and opportunities based on a single atribute of their college attendance pattern: how many credits they take. This serves to preserve and maintain the advantage of students who can afford and manage to schedule full-time attendance, and perpetuates the interests of full-time students over part-time ones.

This rule could be modified in ways that maintain the intent--to ensure leaders are students--while removing the unintended consequences. For example, why not require of leaders (item 2c in F50) exactly what's required of members (item 2b): "Students enrolled for a minimum of one semester hour of credit at the UW institution for which the organization is seeking official recognition?" Or, require that the person has taken at least 6 credit hours on campus in the last 2 years? If a modification is sought, consider this: Is it really the case that there is a systematic problem of non-students taking leadership roles in student organizations, such that a blanket rule that disenfranchises 15% of UW System undergraduates is truly needed?

Lest you think this is a minor issue that hardly ever comes up, take a look at today's Badger Herald. At last night's ASM meeting, student Nneka Akubeze was nominated to fill the position of vice-chair, and "Student Services Finance Committee Chair Sarah Neibart said because Akubeze, a special student, is enrolled in four credits, she is not eligible for a leadership position in ASM." A debate ensued. I do not know Akubeze, but it seems to me that debate was long overdue.

What We're Reading: New Thinking on Financial Aid

2011-11-29T22:03:00.000-06:00

Welcome to another new miniseries of the Education Optimists. Once in awhile we get a chance to sit and read-- it's rare, but when it happens it's crazy fun. Here's a taste of what we've liked lately.

For those pondering the reform of financial aid programs, I want to draw your attention to two papers--one very new, and one a year old.

In Postmortem for the Current Era: Change in American Higher Education, 1980-2010, Penn State historian Roger Geiger cogently tackles the many dismal trends of the last several decades. Among my most favorite of his observations is the following:

"The four vectors of the current era—-the financial aid revolution, selectivity sweepstakes, vocationalism, and research intensification—all bear an underlying signature by invoking private, as opposed to public or social, interests. They do not necessarily contradict public interests. On the contrary, to significant degrees, financial aid has allowed students with limited means to pursue postsecondary education; the selectivity sweepstakes has sorted students by academic ability so that the most able benefit from the most ample educational resources; vocationalism has prepared students for productive employment; and academic research has helped to revive and sustain the competitiveness of U.S. industry. Rather, these worthy social purposes have operated through incentives to private advantage. Thus, although public policies are involved to a greater or lesser extent, these vectors have derived their force from the market preferences of individual actors. But market relations can bring unplanned and sometimes unwelcome consequences."

*********************

Second, a new paper from a young economist just entering the job market, who tackles a critical question: how much Pell are students REALLY getting? In other words, to what degree are Pell dollars being supplanted and/or supplemented by institutions through a kind of crowding out? Leslie Turner tackles these questions, and more, in The Incidence of Student Financial Aid: Evidence from the Pell Grant Program

On average, Turner finds that colleges and universities reap the benefits of about 17% of Pell grants--but that the institutional variation is wide, and some schools are actually supplementing Pell with additional dollars, seemingly to attract more low-income students.

Both papers are worth a read in full. Enjoy!

Students Occupy Colleges

2011-11-22T08:31:00.005-06:00

In a sense, this movement was inevitable.

Higher education has been transformed over the last 50 years, reshaped in many ways that bring into question what it's for, how it works, who should lead it, and most importantly who it is serving. It is the failure of colleges and universities to sufficiently grapple with and address those key questions that led students to Occupy Colleges, and faculty to stand with them, and set up college administrators to be largely inept in response.

The experience of postsecondary education today is highly polarized. Among those attending college are the kinds of students who have always attended college--those who parents and grandparents have degrees, who expected them to go, and ensured they were financially, academically, and otherwise prepared. These are the students who dominate enrollment at the private colleges, take advantage of liberal arts institutions, and who not only earn bachelor's degrees in large numbers but also graduate and professional degrees. But in addition, there is a wide swath of students for whom college was not entirely planned-- it may have felt expected of them, and they did work hard to get ready, but they were unaware of how unprepared college would be to meet their needs. Little did they know that most colleges and universities act as if it's the students' job to get "college-ready," rather than the colleges' job to be prepared to meet the needs of all who enter.

These are the students stunned by the high and rising costs of attendance, and the lack of grant aid available to them. These are the students willing to work long hours to make ends meet, but continually surprised that the faculty and administrators don't respond in turn to accomodate their needs with flexible scheduling, remote advising, and timetables for timely degree completion that don't require full-time enrollment. These are the students who attend the vast majority of our public colleges and universities, and our community colleges, and these are the students at the heart of Occupy Colleges.

Higher education is not sure about these students. Sure, the initial shots were fired long ago, during the Free Speech Movement. But that was about far more than how higher education would work; it was about how society would work. And since that time, colleges and universities have become less--not more-- hospitable to what they like to call "nontraditional" students. Those that some have labeled "tenants" rather than "landowners," decried as "academically adrift," and said to care far less about the hard work of studying. Serving these students has evolved as a speciality, rather than the primary function it ought to be when they comprise at least half of the undergraduate population.

The evidence is everywhere. The growth of the student services industry has segregated the job of meeting students' needs to administrators, letting faculty off the hook. The shift to part-time, contingent labor has lessened the ability of professors to spend the kind of time required to really get to know and address their students' needs--thus creating a stronger rationale for relying on administrators. It would be far better for people to serve dual roles, as teacher and administrator, rather than to continue to pretend the two can be effectively performed in isolation from one another. States have disinvested in public higher education at the same time that the children of the nation's leaders are more likely than ever to opt for private higher education. Public colleges and universities point to those declines in state support and rationalize that since they must have money, they should move to a more "efficient" model of high tuition/high aid, a model that works only in theory. In practical, political life, real world families take sticker prices as real, and mistrust discounting. Politicians and university administrators rarely have the appetite to tie their own hands and fully commit to increasing aid whenever tuition rises. And almost none consider the sharp hypocrisy in their support for free public k-12 education, juxtaposed against their refusal to demand free higher education.

Many, but not all, students are catching on. And therein lies the rub. The move to Occupy Colleges is not a unified front: for every student supporter, there is a student who thinks it's stupid. The students I observe decrying the effort are those who have been well-treated by the current system. Same goes for faculty: those who interact all the time with the so-called nontraditional student and know intimately how we are failing them much more often support this movement. The others, especially those who put research first, often do not.

It's clear who has long been most successful. After all, there is now a move to slash a federal financial aid program (Pell) whose costs have risen (a) because it is doing its job in serving the needs of many students from low-income families and (b) because powerful interests have ensured that government considers to subsidize private and for-profit higher education. If Occupy Colleges could end (b) then the costs of the Pell program would fall dramatically. It won't happen--because higher education refuses to even consider being more about the economically disadvantaged student.

Students are laying these issues at the feet of college administrators and they are stumbling and mumbling in response. Their power-hungry allies, including their overly-compensated athletic directors and boosters and police forces, are doing everything they can to stop it.

It should not be stopped. Students should Occupy Colleges. Let's try that again. Students should occupy colleges. Not administrators. Students, and their educators, should occupy colleges.

NOTE: This post was amended on November 23 in response to a very cogent comment submitted to the blog.

RECALL WALKER!

2011-11-19T20:21:00.000-06:00

It is a proud day for Wisconsin. Nearly 30,000 people turned out at the state's Capital for the kickoff Recall Walker rally. I had the distinct honor of being invited to speak twice today--first at the rally in front of Wisconsin Manufacturer's and Commerce, and then at the BIG rally, on behalf of Jobs Not Cuts. It was honestly one of the most awe-inspiring experiences--what a motivated, impassioned crowd. Below, I have pasted both of my speeches.

RECALL WALKER!!!!

Speech at Jobs Not Cuts Rally

It's my great honor to be a professor of higher education policy at UW-Madison. I’ve worked and made my home here in Wisconsin for the last 8 years, raising two small children, paying my taxes, and educating your children.

I am a hard-working teacher, and a researcher who has created more than 2 dozen jobs for the people of Wisconsin over the last 4 years. And this year Scott Walker decided I deserved a pay cut. In September, as I earned my tenure, instead of getting a raise, his policies cut my family’s income. He cut the budget of my employer substantially, and even as we went about teaching the state’s undergraduates this fall, he cut us again.

Apparently, for Scott Walker, a college education is something to fear.

We are here today to send a strong message to the 1% of Wisconsin and the nation that intends to block educational opportunities for our kids by laying off our teachers, demoralizing our schools, privatizing every public institution in sight, and systematically ensuring that all we have access to is narrow job-training that will make us into the company yes-men that don’t think or act when they are repeatedly crapped on.

Scott Walker doesn’t believe in college—he just believes in training. Training people in the skills he and his business friends need so that they don’t have to do any dirty, hard work; training us to accept minimum wage and horrible working conditions and worse yet be GRATEFUL for it. Training us that protest and response is unacceptable, and that we should bow down to the almighty dollar.

The WMC has a clear plan: starve the public colleges and universities so that they will beg for help. In return the business community will offer them a prescribed curriculum, and pay them to train automatons. No more critical thinking skills, they want you to do what you are told—nothing more, nothing less. And they want to enlist us teachers in their service, as cheap labor.

Look I’m not saying everyone should go to college. But there is NO WAY it is good economic policy for the state of Wisconsin to ensure that the opportunity is blocked. A new report shows that within a few years, 63% of American jobs will be totally unavailable to people who don’t have college degrees. If you only have a high school education, just ONE-THIRD of the jobs you will be able to get will pay a living wage. And the vast majority of those will continue to be open mainly to men, not to women.

So by slashing and burning down our colleges and universities with $250 million budget cuts $66 million “lapses” in judgment Scott Walker is taking away job opportunities and chances for economic stability from us and from our kids.

Enough is enough. We need JOBS not CUTS. We need higher education not ‘corporate training.” We need career prospects not minimum wage.

It’s time, now more than ever, to INVEST in our people, grow our skills, and create jobs. Say Yes to Education, and NO NO NO to Scott Walker and his friends-the WMC.

*************************************************

Speech at Recall Walker rally

Thank you for coming out today to MAKE HISTORY! I'm Sara Goldrick-Rab from Jobs Not Cuts, a coalition that called for a national week of action in which we tell the Congressional "Super Committee" that enough is enough, no more cuts!

Earlier today we gathered at Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce to raise our voices alongside similar protests in Boston, Seattle, New York and many other cities around the country.

We all know what the face of austerity looks like here in Wisconsin. In March, Scott Walker destroyed collective bargaining rights for Wisconsin's public workers –including our children’s teachers-- and drained millions from their paychecks when he slashed their pensions and health care benefits.

But there is an even bigger axe coming down from Washington in just a few short days. At a time of record unemployment and poverty, the politicians in Washington D.C. are threatening historic cuts to the country's social safety net. Soon that so-called “Super Committee” will decide the fate of trillions in funding for federal programs that seniors, the sick, the poor, students, workers, middle-class people, women, and others depend on. Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, education funding, and other social services are all on the chopping block. Make no mistake people-- they are rolling back the New Deal.

The politicians tell us that we need to "tighten our belts" and learn to live with "the new normal." They tell us that the government of the richest country in the world is broke. But for decades, these same politicians have bailed out banks, slashed taxes for corporations and millionaires, and wasted trillions on wars carried out to protect profits of Exxon and BP. Those are the same policies that led to massive government debts. Now they want to gut our programs to pay for an economic crisis that Wall Street created.

The wealth harbored by the top 1% could pay off all student loan debt, all credit card debt, buy every home foreclosed upon in 2007 and 2008, finance every current mortgage for two years, triple the number of teachers, pay the annual salary of 19 million families and then some! The financial sector is sitting on $2 trillion of idle cash that could be creating jobs. Keep that in mind the next time a politician tells you that our state, or our country, is broke and that ordinary working people have to pay the price.

That is why today, all across the country, activists are taking to the streets to demand jobs, not cuts.

We're telling Washington hands off Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid! We won't tolerate any cuts to education or social services!

We need jobs, not cuts! Congress should fund a federal public works program to create millions of jobs for the unemployed. We need it now!

We want Wall St to pay for the crisis they created, not working people.

We know where Scott Walker and his cronies in the Capitol stand on the question of who has to pay for the crisis. But this fight is much bigger than Walker, much bigger than just Wisconsin. Earlier this year Wisconsin showed the country that we won't stand for these cuts, and now the rest of the country is waking up. We are rising up to say "we won't pay for your crisis!"

It's time to...

Recall Walker! Recall Walker! Recall Walker!

Get Smart About Student Loans

2011-11-18T13:44:00.000-06:00

First, apologies for the long silence. My workload has increased tremendously post-tenure (sorry to disillusion anyone) and I'm having trouble keeping up with the blog. (This is why this post, so deserving of embedded links to sources, lacks them.)

Second, let me go on record as a supporter of the Occupy movement. Protest is powerful, period. The denigration of protest and attempts to make it look irresponsible, violent, and evil is a power tactic leveraged by elites. Ignore them.

Third, this post is a few thoughts for the OccupyCollege movement in particular. The battle cry against student loans is worthwhile but needs a more informed perspective. Yes, there is now more student loan debt than credit card debt. Yes, tuition and fees are high, and it's one reason for the growth in debt. And some schools leave students with more debt than others. Yes, Obama's recent plans will help, but only a little. Yes, this is problem that needs to be addressed.

But too little knowledge is dangerous. Protesters need to know and address the following in formulating their counter-proposals:

(1) Rising tuition is outstripped by a massive expansion of costs of room and board and student fees-- they are now the bulk of "cost of attendance." These costs are growing because colleges and universities think students are demanding them. They say you want climbing gyms, organic foods, and dorms at 2-year colleges. Do you--or don't you? Are you willing to get less in order to pay less?

(2) The growing reliance on loans is reflective of a turn away from grants, and it's not only a fiscal decision but a philosophical one. There has been push back against aid you don't have to repay, supported by a new claim that students benefit by having "skin in the game." There are accusations about the misuse of aid dollars, and discussion that states aren't getting much for their money since many students-- even middle-class ones--aren't completing college degrees. So why, they ask, shouldn't students foot the bill themselves?

(3) Colleges and universities and policymakers are loathe to rethink what being a student means, and adapt college requirements and scheduling accordingly. Large fractions of students now work, and must fit that work into their schedules. Work comes with benefits, sometimes-- which aid does not. So many students are going to work, no matter what. The fact that college doesn't accomodate work means that working students take even longer to finish college and that increases overall debt.

(4) Rising time to degree is likely a good part of the story about the ballooning debt. So those who oppose debt should join forces with those who seek to get more students to a degree in a timely fashion.

(5) Student debt, in and of itself, is not evil. When you borrow to buy a car, having that car does nothing to help you pay back the loan. But when you buy college, having the degree does help you pay off the debt. Moreover, unless you forsee some massive lottery winnings for the nation in the near future, we are never going to have enough money to meet the full financial need of everyone attending college-- and evidence suggests that grant dollars are most important and effective for students from lower-income families. So loans are likely to continue to be part of how students finance college -- the question is what fraction of the strategy should they be? By no means should students borrow to meet their entire costs of attendance, and by no means should they borrow to finance an overly expensive institution with low graduation rates. But a no-loans platform will not succeed.

(6) Yes some colleges have graduates with less debt than others. But be careful of conflating correlation with causation. Colleges enrolling wealthier students, those with larger endowments, and more investment from the state tends to graduate students with less debt. It's not like they are BETTER colleges because of that. And it doesn't mean that if you have less money and attend that school that you are guaranteed to graduate with less debt than you otherwise would-- you can't use averages to make decisions for individuals.

The biggest underlying problem facing our nation's college students is that many showed up to college totally unprepared for how to pay for it. They had next to no plan. They had no 'game' and neither did their parents. They went to college because they thought they were supposed to, and the colleges assumed they knew what they were getting into. That was wrong. There are dozens of different ways to pay for college and it requires research and education to make it work out for your own family. The goal should be to help all kids and parents get informed, and to help ensure that all colleges and universities do their due diligence in making that happen.

Under Assault? Fight Back

2011-10-26T20:50:00.000-05:00

There has been so much bad news in Wisconsin (and the nation) this week, I haven't had two seconds to catch my breath. Each time I get a moment to think about what is happening here, and how powerless we seem to be in response, something else happens and my temperature rises.

Governor Scott Walker seems determined to tear apart the foundation of middle-class life here in Wisconsin, starving the University of Wisconsin System to death. I really don't care whether or not the right to "lapses" (in judgement) was contained in his godawful budget, the fact is that we have already taken a terrible $250 million cut, and now we face another $113.8 million shortfall on top of that. The effects will undoubtedly be detrimental to Wisconsin's middle class, as workers across the state are laid off, and students who can't afford to take 5 years to earn a bachelor's degree will drop out ( declining resources often lead to larger classes and waits for key courses at less-selective universities like the various UWs).

I am hard-pressed to see how destroying Wisconsin's pride and joy is a solid approach to job creation. The fact is, this isn't an economic strategy at all. It's a political one: Walker intends to reduce UW System to a shriveled raisin and then propose that we "solve" the higher education problem in the state by open the door to more private and for-profit institutions. "Businesses", he'll say. Moreover, by keeping the population from a postsecondary education, he'll help increase the likelihood they'll vote for him. (Seriously: I have NO PROBLEM with college dropouts, and don't bother sending me an email accusing me of such. My problem is with people who dropout and recommend that others do it too!)

Each week it's something new. Walker no doubt praised the heck out of Steve Nass for tormenting UW-Madison with his silly legislative hearing on affirmative action, and he's undoubtedly chuckling over what will happen when DOA gets UW System's plan for coping with the cuts. There's another Nass hearing in early November, and who knows what else around the corner.

If you can't stand this anymore, and you have the guts to say so, now's the time to get loud. Folks are organizing and together, united, we have to take action. I wish the UW-Madison football players would simply halt in the middle of their next game and tell the national television audience just what a schmo Walker really is. SCOTT WALKER IS KILLING BUCKY! We can't afford to take small steps here.

This is the Walker some of us knew was coming. This is the Walker we said you cannot trust, when others argued we could hand it to Scottie to come up with a new governance model for UW-Madison. This is the Walker who we must recall. Now. Get on it. Get to work.

Passing the Buck

2011-10-19T20:55:00.000-05:00

This week we witnessed Steve Nass's Wisconsin Legislature hearing on the Center for Equal Opportunity's report on UW-Madison admissions, and the Walker administration's announcement that-- SURPRISE!--the state is cutting UW System's funding by an additional $65.7 million.

A common theme runs through the discourse and beliefs underlying both events: society's problems originate with and should be borne by individuals. Not policies or practices, politics or economies-- but your average, ordinary Joe and Josephine.

According to Roger Clegg of the CEO, the United States provides every child with an equal opportunity to succeed, a high-quality k-12 system, a testing system that is grounded in multicultural competencies and is thus unbiased, and equal access to the resources required to obtain college knowledge, file applications, and secure the necessary financing. Any difficulties in getting admitted, therefore, are the problems of individuals-- and society shouldn't bother addressing them.

According to Scott Walker and his administrators, the economic challenges the state faces stem at least partly from over-spending on individuals' college educations, and thus now is the time to pass the burden of payment onto individuals. Some UW alumni even appear to agree. After learning of Walker's cut, one such alum tweeted this:

UnitedCouncilUnited Council

More cuts to UW System and Education! http://t.co/EOcTuVMM

Oct 19Favorite RetweetReply

in reply to @UnitedCouncil↑

@uwbadger74
frank rojas @UnitedCouncil Time for the UW students to step up and offset these cuts. Just a $250 surcharge would offset the majority of the cuts.
Oct 19 via webFavorite RetweetReply

This same person argued during discussion of the New Badger Partnership that UW-Madison students could, should, and would pay more for their college educations-- even as our economy tanked, parents were laid off, and unemployment rose (yes, even among college grads).

So here we are, faced with substantial rigorous, empirical evidence that inequalities in opportunities of all sorts are widespread, including in education, and yet still people are making arguments that these public issues are fundamentally private troubles.

What should you do when you are passed the buck? Told that your difficulty getting access to the American dream is nothing more than your own fault? Told that you are alone in holding responsibility for the opportunities offered to you? Told you just need to try a little harder, pay a little more, struggle a little longer?

First, recognize and empathize with the folks passing off the problems. They can't analyze data without filters that exclude any potential for systematic causes. Remember the words of C. Wright Mills: "When, in a city of 100,000, only one man is unemployed, that is his personal trouble, and for its relief we properly look to the character of the man, his skills, and his immediate opportunities. But when in a nation of 50 million employees, 15 million men are unemployed, that is an issue, and we may not hope to find its solution within the range of opportunities open to any one individual."

Second, note the real underlying problem-- the massive economic inequality which makes them pathologize others, and even makes them feel good while doing it. They are the real "little people," as Mills wrote, "estranged from community and society in a context of distrust and manipulation [and] alienated from work." You can't help but worry for them.

Third, keep focused and fighting to reform systems and organizations. Their efforts to demonize and individualize every single person will take far, far longer than our concerted efforts to change the spaces and places in which people live. (See, there's the Education Optimist!)

Finally, do not get frustrated and begin to believe them. Then you are truly alone in the world, and all hope really is lost.

What the Nass Hearing is Really About

2011-10-16T21:15:00.000-05:00

Tomorrow's hearing on equal opportunity practices at UW-Madison is but one such action being taken by organizations and individuals around the country seeking to erode access to higher education.

Writes Adam Liptak in today's New York Times, "diversity is the last man standing, the sole remaining legal justification for racial preferences in deciding who can study at public universities." And diversity is under attack. According to Liptak, a case involving the University of Texas is likely to reach the Supreme Court sometime next year. That case will challenge the right of universities to focus any part of their admissions efforts on ensuring a racially diverse campus.

Why? Because some people, even well-educated ones, even Yale law professors whose work I regularly cite, fail to see its value. Says one, "The idea of racial and ethnic diversity altering the kind of conversation that goes on in the classroom is so overrated. Any experienced, conscientious teacher, regardless of race, could and would get on the table any of the arguments that ought to be there, including ideas normally associated with racism or other analogous experiences not personally experienced by the teacher."

Really? And how widespread is that sort of highly culturally competent teaching among today's professoriate?

Folks, Steve Nass may be an outsider in the Wisconsin Legislature, but he is far from alone in his opinions. Tomorrow's hearing has national implications. Please watch it with our students at the Memorial Union. Please discuss it with your friends. The educational opportunities of millions of children across this nation are at stake.

Tomorrow: A Day of Student Action in Madison

2011-10-16T09:46:00.001-05:00

This was posted on WisPolitics on Friday. The students are clearly being thoughtful about what this hearing on Monday aims to accomplish, and the degree to which it is a diversion from the real issues facing students. And they are not blind to the fact that the CEO and Nass want this to turn into a three ring circus, with students portrayed as "thuggish" animals. Here's to hoping that Monday is as peaceful and productive as it can be.

United Council: Invitation to concerned members of the Madison community
10/14/2011

Contact: David Vines, Matt Guidry (608)263-3422 ext. 12

Holistic admissions is an important issue to many of us and we experience the benefits of a diverse student body in the classroom, in the lab, and on our campus every day.

We do not understand the interest in this politically motivated, misguided report and we would like to take the opportunity to share with you the real challenges facing students of all backgrounds in higher education today.

We will not be attending Monday’s hearing. Instead, we invite students, allies, and other interested persons to join us:

October 17th at 1:00pm Room 411S of the Wisconsin State Capitol

We will hold a press conference focused on the issues the legislature has a direct impact on and what we would like to see our representatives in government focus on, including: reining in the skyrocketing cost of college, reducing debilitating student loan debt, the ability to get a decent job upon graduation, and the increased discrimination that students will soon face at the polls.

Following the press conference we will lead a march down State Street to the UW Memorial Union where those who are interested will have the opportunity to view the hearing on Wisconsin Eye in a neutral setting and participate in a debrief on issues affecting students.

Asian American Student Union (AASU)
Associated Students of Madison Diversity Committee
Hood Dispora
La Pec
Multicultural Student Coalition (MCSC)
Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlan (MEChA)
Queer People of Color (QPOC)
Teaching Assistants Association (TAA)
United Council of UW Students

ESEA Come, ESEA Go

2011-10-13T08:50:00.003-05:00

The chatter among the education cognescenti this week is about what is and what isn't in the bipartisan ESEA draft released by Senate education chair Tom Harkin (D-IA) and ranking member Mike Enzi (R-WY).

Let me repeat my prior contention that, politically, ESEA reauthorization is an issue for 2013 -- not 2011 or 2012. The Republican-led U.S. House is not going to give President Obama any kind of a political victory, despite the solid compromise put forth by the Senate HELP Committee. For that reason, the work currently underway is in part about laying the groundwork for a future compromise, in part a genuine attempt to get something done (despite the House), and in part political cover.

The bill itself represents a sensible step back from a pie-in-the-sky accountability goal of 100% proficiency in favor of annual state data transparency, continued data disaggregation among subgroups, and greater state flexibility over educational accountability. Personally, I am not an accountability hawk and am unswayed by spotty evidence and advocates such as former Florida Governor Jeb Bush who contends that it was Florida's accountability system (rather than its major investment in literacy and other interventions) that fueled student test-score gains. Chairman Harkin nails it by saying that the bill "focuses on teaching and learning, not testing and sanctioning." Amen to that.

Seeing as I have a day job that doesn't allow me to analyze the entirety of 800-page bills, here is my quick take on a few elements in the draft bill:

Positives

Accountability: Eliminates AYP. Requires states to identify 5% lowest-performing schools and 5% of schools with the largest achievement gaps.
CSR: Tightens up the use of Title II, Part A for class-size reduction to ensure that those dollars are directed at research-based implementation of smaller class sizes. [UPDATE: This could potentially free up some Title II, Part A dollars for teacher professional development and new teacher support.]
Teacher & Principal Training & Recruiting Fund: This Fund would support state & local activities that further high-quality PD, rigorous evaluation and support systems, and improve the equitable distribution of teachers. The bill's language significantly strengthens existing federal policy language regarding the elements of comprehensive, high-quality educator induction and mentoring.

Concerns

Equitable teacher distribution: The bill would require states to ensure that high-poverty and high-minority schools receive an equitable distribution of the most effective educators as measured by new teacher evaluation systems that must include four performance tiers. Sounds good and fair. But given that teacher working conditions significantly impact an individual educator's ability to be effective in the classroom (and garner a "highly effective" rating [see DC]), wouldn't this just create a massive game of musical chairs and major disruptions in the teaching pool unless a determined effort were mounted to improve the often poor teaching and learning conditions present in high-poverty schools?

Good Coverage & Analysis

Alyson Klein - Politics K-12 - Education Week
Joy Resmovits - Huffington Post
Stephen Sawchuk - Teacher Beat - Education Week
The Quick and the Ed (Education Sector)

Speak Your Mind

2011-10-12T22:47:00.003-05:00

The publication of a set of papers critiquing a widely-utilized national survey of college students, and the subsequent cancellation of an academic conference session aimed at discussing those papers, has caused quite a stir in the higher education research community.

Many of the details can be found in newspaper coverage here and here, so these are just the highlights:

There's a famous survey known as the NSSE (pronounced Nessie) the National Survey of Student Engagement. It is used by many colleges and universities to assess how their students experience college. The resulting data are also used by researchers who study topics such as how engagement relates to institutional resources, college graduation rates, etc. There aren't many such sources of data on the college experience, so the NSSE is a big fish in a tiny pond. For example, as states turn their attention to developing accountability metrics, some are considering NSSE metrics for that purpose.

The stature of NSSE has drawn the attention of researchers, in particular to how well NSSE does in terms of actually measuring student engagement. There are many potential flaws, most common to all data collection instruments, relating to the sort of things researchers enjoy obsessing over, stuff like sampling, question wording, constructs, etc. This is the nitty-gritty of our work as it comprises the methodology we used to answer our research questions. You know the old expression "crap in, crap out?" Well, it's why we care so much about these things and want to spend time thinking about them.

It seems that a lot of researchers care about the NSSE and its methods--so many that the Association for Higher Education's journal, Review of Higher Education, received a load of papers all about the NSSE, and decided to put them all together in a single special issue, published this fall. And that's where the trouble began. In one sense, it's understandable that a collected set of critiques can feel like an attack. The folks at NSSE were given a chance to respond in the next issue of the journal. Maybe it should have been in the same issue as the critiques, maybe not-- it happens both ways in social science and education journals. In this case, they are responding in the next issue. And researchers who authored the articles sought and were granted a presidential session at the upcoming ASHE conference to share their studies with others. This was an opportunity for open and frank discussion and debate, the kind of thing most academics thrive on.

Sadly, that conference session was canceled.

Last week, President Linda Serra Hagedorn emailed her members, saying it was up to her to schedule the session, and up to her to cancel it. She defended her choice with two rationales: (1) She's heard concerns with the content of the journal issue -- in particular she said that one of the authors may have violated the association's code of ethics, and (2) She felt that the journal issue had become too controversial. So she changed her mind, and decided the session about the set of journal articles would not be held. "It's my academic freedom to go in a different route," she said. "I don't understand what the hullabaloo is all about."

That was a mistake.

First, there has been no determination that the articles' authors violated ASHE policy—and the policy itself may violate academic freedom and need to be revised. We need more discussion and debate not less. If the tone of the issue or a particular critique was offensive, a session at the meetings might help to serve as a corrective.

Second, Hagedorn's decision to schedule the presidential session was hers to make. It does not matter if the papers were already published, if the conference program committee had rejected the session, or if all paper presenters planned to dress in purple-- no matter what this session was to look like, it was Hagedorn's to invite and plan. She did it-- and this constitutes a verbal contract, a promise to those scholars. She opened the door for them to share their ideas, and then she shut it, saying "too loud!"

Third, the assessment that a topic is too controversial is one that inherently limits academic discussion. Hagedorn's was a pre-emptive action that violates the rights of others— especially those brave enough to offer strong critique. She has limited their dissemination opportunities and academic discourse by backing out. It may be her right to decide, but the fact is that many people decide things that violate the rights of others.

I was a member of ASHE for most of the last 10 years, publishing in RHE and serving on the conference program committee, but this spring after I got tenure, I let my membership expire. The reason was simple: I usually find the discussions in the journal and the conferences dull, especially in comparison to the fierce and insightful debates I encounter at other meetings. There is a preponderance of group-think in the organization, which seems inclined to teach its members to be "team players" that do not contradict each another. This is not the way to make progress in a field desperately in need of new insights.

It is ironic that the first issue of RHE that I missed was this one on NSSE: it's the best one I've seen. And that now-canceled conference session would have been worth attending, no doubt. But it's not happening, and that's a darn shame. Critique is enriching and healthy-- it isn’t something to be avoided or frightened of.

I firmly disagree with Hagedorn's decision to cancel this session, and urge her to reconsider. The researchers and NSSE leaders should come to the same table and talk. The NSSE is a valuable resource, it is led by smart people, and they should be thrilled to engage in an academic discussion in such a prominent venue about this work. The big surveys dominate the field. In a sense, they are collective resources and thus subject to collective processes of improvement. Let's make that happen.

Finally, I hope the ASHE Board will think about the message that Hagedorn's actions has sent to scholars of higher education who seek to sift and winnow their way through difficult issues, and address any detrimental effects. Since I was until very recently an untenured professor, I can say that these sorts of actions make us very, very nervous. What if we write a paper that attracts too much attention-- will we be shut out of our association's conference? Not published? Shunned? Higher education needs researchers willing and able to speak their minds. The field deserves nothing less.

Wisconsin's Economy Needs Affirmative Action

2011-10-06T10:07:00.002-05:00

On this, Republicans and Democrats throughout Wisconsin can agree: the state's economy is in the tank. We need to find ways to create more jobs and grow our paychecks, and fast.

An overwhelming body of evidence shows that state and local economies are greatly enhanced by educating their workforces. Employers build and expand businesses where they can find educated talent and thriving communities where their employees can live. An under-educated population in a landscape with significant pockets of poverty does not make for a hospitable place to do business.

A college education pays off. Sure, more people are going to college, and that makes some people worry that the returns will diminish. But just look around: the unemployment rate of college graduates may be up slightly, but it's still half that of workers without college degrees. You have to like those odds. The chances that you will end up mired in poverty, dependent on government benefits, unable to send your own kids to college--these are greatly reduced if you complete at least a year of college.

This is common sense, and people know it. What they may not realize is that a college education pays off MORE for the people who are least likely to get it. Those kids who we might consider "long shots" when it comes to earning a college degree face the worst labor market prospects if they don't attend college-- so going to college gives them a huge boost. And they benefit even more if they not only attend college, but attend where with the resources and advantages improve their odds of finishing -- places like UW-Madison.

Data proves this: the best way for the people of Wisconsin to maximize the contribution of a college education to their economy is to ensure that the kids who are the "long shots" get to attend its most selective universities. Yes, those individual kids will benefit-- but even more importantly, we all will. The returns to helping them avoid poverty and become gainfully employed taxpayers accrue to the whole state.

This is why affirmative action works for Wisconsin. It helps extend educational opportunities to those who will reap the biggest benefits, which spill over to us all. Without some attention paid to a student's ability to benefit from college, selective colleges would admit only the "sure things"--students who will actually benefit the least. Sure not all of the "long shots" will succeed--but large numbers of them will, far more than those who would if they only attended non-selective colleges. And as for the rest of us, working hard and raising "sure thing" kids, we are not harmed by that extra attention to the "long shots" (the idea that we are being "penalized" is a statistical fallacy), and because benefits to a college education acrrue to communities, we are actually helped.

Affirmative action is in Wisconsin's best interest, and it's within our rights. It's time to stand up for a policy that efficiently uses a college education to grow our economy.

Task Force Named to Rethink UW System

2011-10-03T10:46:00.000-05:00

The following folks will be rethinking UW System, courtesy of the Fitzgerald Brothers who got to choose 12 of the 17 task force members.

Their choices include:
Sen. Sheila Harsdorf, R-River Falls
Rep. Steve Nass, R-Whitewater
Rep. Pat Strachota, R-West Bend
UW-Platteville Chancellor Dennis Shields
Wis. Technical College Board President Mark Tyler
Former UW Alumni Association Chair Renee Ramirez
Carroll University Board of Directors member Joanne Brandes
Business Owner Tim Higgins
Former UW Regent Fred Mohs
UW Colleges and Extension Chancellor Ray Cross
UW-Oshkosh Chancellor Richard Wells
Former UW Student Regent Joe Alexander

Last spring, some of these folks were strongly opposed to the New Badger Partnership--UW-Madison's effort to break from UW System.

For example, who can forget Ray Cross's astute remarks, delivered just a short time after his arrival in Wisconsin. He noted that comparisons to U. Michigan were inappropriate, and stressed the importance of keeping UW System together especially during a "contentious and partisan" period. His goals including reducing competition and duplication, helping campuses fulfill their designated missions, and yes, obtaining more flexibility.

Chancellor Richard Wells had a crisis regarding academic freedom on his hands this spring after a March 7 incident in which an Oshkosh professor encouraged his students to sign a recall petition. He used the event as a teachable moment, holding a community discussion on political activities. We can expect that disagreements over the importance of academic freedom and how to best protect it will be implicit in the task force's discussions, even if they are not explicitly on the agenda.

As for Tim Higgins, well, we Optimists featured him on the blog several months back. He, along with Renee Ramirez, endorsed the NBP.

But that was then, and this is now. What do we know about the positions of these folks on the future of UW System? Inquiring minds want to know-- so please, do write in and share.

Innovating our Educating

2011-09-27T12:56:00.000-05:00

Last spring I blogged several times about the importance of rethinking how we deliver education at the postsecondary level. At the time, I was focused on the question of how to deliver a high-quality education in a more cost-effective manner. At this moment, I think that focus remains important, but I am also especially cognizant of whether we are teaching in a manner that truly fulfills our mission. At UW-Madison that mission is embodied in the Wisconsin Idea-- our goal of bringing the teaching and learning from this university to people all over the state.

Accomplishing that goal in the face of an increasingly heterogeneous student body and under severe financial constraints will require us to think hard about what we do and how we do it. An article from today's Inside Higher Ed provides some provocative suggestions.

1. We must consider what style(s) of thinking our faculty and students value. Do we aim to educate change agents, or those who will help maintain the status quo? We must be honest about this, since it implies different approaches to teaching. It's easy to say we "value it all" but far harder to develop metrics for performance, for example, that reward it all.

2. We should think about what drives the way we teach. Do we teach in ways that are comfortable and convenient for faculty, or ways that reflect the styles in which students prefer to learn? In other words, are we "teaching to ourselves" rather than to our students? How does this affect our willingness to try new technologies, or consider teaching online?

3. We also need to talk about what we grade or reward. We are very focused on a normative program of study, 4 year-long bachelor's degree, credits accruing to time spent in the classroom, grades based on whatever the professor decides is important. Do we favor approaches that reflect the way we've always done things, or even more importantly, reward behaviors most like our own?

Throughout these discussions I think it's essential that we avoid adopting an overly relativistic position that claims to value and reward everything, says all styles are fine and good, and essentially avoids hard discussions. In the end, with an approach like that nothing will change and this may even perpetuate a downward spiral, since the way we currently educate is expensive and not necessarily sufficiently effective to help move us through the 21st century. This is a discussion that must originate with professors and students, and that I urge administrators to encourage but not lead. Change will take hold only those who teach and those who learn tackle this together.

Conservatives Claim Liberals Are Meanies

2011-09-27T12:16:00.000-05:00

Race Matters

2011-09-23T13:34:00.002-05:00

There is a robust debate on campus over whether last Tuesday's event at the Doubletree constituted a "protest" (which most seem to agree is appropriate) or a "disruption" of a press conference (which most seem to agree is inappropriate). Even those who disagree with the depiction of students as "thugs" who were part of a "mob" still appear to be concerned that a disruption may have occurred.

What is noticeably absent from the responses is a candid admission that that race matters in how we understand and interpret the events. Let's be frank: a large group of mostly brown folks came into contact with a much smaller group of mostly white folks and it freaked out some of those the white folks.

I was there. First, I was in Clegg's press conference, waiting to be called on while he prioritized questions from the media. I initially observed the protest outside with my ears (it was possible to hear them) and via Twitter. Next, I was in the hallway outside the press conference, in the lobby, where I was being interviewed by media at the moment the young men race through the lobby to open the hotel doors to the protesters. I saw them go by, and I heard a loud sound, then the sound of singing as students streamed into the lobby. Literally, whatever "it" was happened right in front of me. I then watched as students sang and clapped, spoke and cried, and then finally moved into the room where the press conference was wrapping up (having gone on for 45 minutes). I watched as a white man leaving the room (Lee Hansen) put up his hands to press against a black woman as he tried to exit, and as she in turn pushed back. I heard most loudly cries of "peace" and "let them pass" and watched as no one was injured. I remained in the hotel lobby until the student press conference wrapped up, and people departed.

So unlike so many others, I am not relying on second-hand information. That sort of information is filtered and distorted not only by memory and a bad game of telephone but also by racial insecurities.

I admit it: there was a fraction of a second in that lobby, when I saw the people run by and I heard the loud sound, that I experienced fear. At first, I thought it was surprise. Then I realized that I had caught myself anticipating violence and momentarily panicking as I saw men of color move fast and loud. I recognized it, I checked it, and I questioned it. I was angry with myself--for so much has clearly changed internally since I moved from a predominantly black community (West Philadelphia) to a nearly entirely white one. This is what happens to a person when the community in which they live is overly homogenous. And it took me no more than 30 seconds to chastise myself for it, get over it, and then experience the protest as it really was: peaceful, bold, and uplifting.

I had experienced another moment of fear not 30 minutes earlier, when I watched Clegg address a young African-American woman, responding to her question about his report with a smug, paternalistic smile that to me conveyed absolutely no understanding of the powerful hand he had in intimidating her. I reacted to him, in that moment, as a white man with no sense of his own privilege. It was the whiteness of his skin combined with the Southern in his voice and his hyper-masculine demeanor that made my hands shake. I was afraid of his evidently barely-repressed disdain for this woman. The Jewish ancestry in me felt it to my toes. I'm not proud of that either.

I challenge all of us to ask ourselves if I am utterly alone in feeling this way. If we cannot all begin to admit that we are race conscious every day, we are sunk. Entire op-eds and letters to the editors about "events" that were as diverse as any that ever occur at UW-Madison but neglect the fact of RACE are untruthful. It's time for us all to come clean. What distinguishes us from the racists is our honesty, candor, and willingness to learn. Race matters. And that's why the Doubletree event was no "disruption" but rather a necessary protest against an antagonistic deliberate transgression of outsiders on a community.

Postscript: It seems some did not understand that in my original post I was critical of BOTH of my responses. I have added a single comment to the end of the next-to-last paragraph to clarify.

What Do Comparisons of Test Scores Tell Us About Fairness in Admissions Practices?

2011-09-22T13:05:00.001-05:00

Heard this before?

"The average test scores of minority students admitted to UW-Madison are lower than those of nonminority students admitted to UW-Madison. This is simply not fair, and is evidence of discrimination."

In other words, if minorities and nonminorities were treated equally in the admissions process, there would be no test score differences.

This claim is common and demonstrably incorrect.

Test scores in the general population are lower for minority students than for nonminority students. This means that even if UW-Madison were to rely solely on test scores for purposes of determining admission, and had the exact same cutoff point for admission (regardless of race), the average scores of minority students would be lower than those of nonminority students. In case that's unclear, try this. Say instead of a test requirement we imposed a weight requirement: you must be at least 200 pounds to be admitted. The proportion of football players admitted to UW-Madison would undoubtedly exceed the proportion of non-football players admitted. Same exact criteria, totally different chances of getting in, and totally different average weights of those admitted.

Among all of the factors you could use to assess whether two applicants are being treated equally, test scores are among the very worst, since they are more unevenly distributed than many others (e.g. minority/non-minority differences in average strength of letters of recommendation are likely much smaller than differences in average test scores).

It is for this reason that experts agree: "evidence of differences in [test] scores does not prove and almost certainly overstates the role of preferential treatment in admissions."

As we can all see, it is incredibly common to mis-interpret the significance of test score differences. Heck, the experts at the Center for Equal Opportunity do it all the time. But that doesn't make it right.

*******

Please, read more about this-- stop the spread of incorrect information.

Where are the WAA and Badger Advocates Now?

2011-09-20T14:09:00.000-05:00

When someone lies about your alma mater this way, will you simply stand by? Or will you use your substantial resources to act?

Guest Post: 10 Myths About Affirmative Action

2011-09-20T09:22:00.000-05:00

The following is a guest post by Elizabeth Wrigley-Field, doctoral candidate in Sociology at UW-Madison and member of the Teaching Assistants' Association. The post originally appeared in the Socialist Worker and is reprinted here at my request. Please refer to the original post for sources for all works cited. --Sara

Students of color in the incoming freshman class at the University of Wisconsin in Madison must have had a disorienting second week of the semester. On September 13, they were greeted by a small group of old suited white men at podiums, telling them they don't belong here--and over 850 angry students telling those men they're wrong.

The press conference held by the misnamed Center for Equal Opportunity (CEO) and the debate with their uninspiring spokesperson Roger Clegg later that same day left me less than impressed with the argument that the university's affirmative action policies discriminate against white people.

But what did impress me mightily was the students who again and again stood up to share their stories, their anger that men like Clegg don't think they matter, and their determination to assert that they do. Inspired by those students, here is my defense of race-based affirmative action. Put aside that the richest country in world history treats education like a scarce commodity to be fought over. Race-based affirmative action is simply a matter of justice.

Here are ten myths that people like Clegg spin about affirmative action--and the facts that dispel those myths.

Myth Number 1: Students of color admitted under affirmative action aren't admitted on merit.

If there was one phrase Roger Clegg kept using at his debate that made the entire audience hiss, it was "lowered expectations." That's what Clegg says affirmative action means for minority students. But what he calls lowered expectations, I call recognition of a higher achievement.

According to the Black Commentator, "Wisconsin, and in particular the Milwaukee area, justly merit the invidious distinction of the Worst Place in the Nation to be Black." One reason? The staggering extent to which the criminal justice system in this state is directed at young Black men and their communities.

Sociologist Pamela Oliver has shown that Wisconsin's racial disparity in sentencing people convicted of new drug offenses dramatically dwarfs the disparity in every other state--including New York under its infamous Rockefeller Drug Laws.

In short, succeeding in high school under these conditions is a real achievement--one that frankly dwarfs managing to study SAT vocabulary in a well-funded suburban high school where students are expected to go to college.

And speaking of the SAT and other standardized tests, it's worth understanding some of the reasons for the racial discrepancies in test scores. As Adam Sanchez explained for SocialistWorker.org, since standardized tests are created to sort students, they only serve their function if some students consistently perform better than others.

This has two implications. First, test designers need questions that lots of students will get wrong, and the easiest way to do this is to use questions that draw less on classroom experiences that all children share than on home experiences that only some did. (The need for variation in scores is also why the exams are timed, even though this makes them much more artificial.)

Second, test designers need questions to agree on who the high-scoring students are--otherwise, everyone would score somewhere near the middle. This means that before new questions are added, they are vetted to make sure that they pick out the same students who already are scoring well on the tests. (In testing parlance, such questions are "reliable"--which doesn't mean they are "valid" at capturing real intellectual merit.)

These reasons help to explain why the best predictors of standardized test scores are parents' wealth and education.

Myth Number 2: White students are admitted to college solely on merit.

Underlying all the attacks on affirmative action is the idea that without it, college admissions are race-neutral and meritocratic. But as my fellow UW student Paul Pryse wrote after the last attack on affirmative action at UW:

As many as 15 percent of freshmen at America's top schools are white students who failed to meet their university's minimum standards for admission, according to Peter Schmidt, deputy editor of the Chronicle of Higher Education. These kids are "people with a long-standing relationship with the university," or in other words, the children of faculty, wealthy alumni and politicians.

According to Schmidt, these unqualified but privileged kids are nearly twice as common on top campuses as Black and Latino students who had benefited from affirmative action.

There's no such thing as a race-neutral college admissions policy in America. "Colorblind" just means the advantages and disadvantages are rendered invisible.

Myth Number 3: Affirmative action hurts students of color by putting them in environments for which they aren't prepared.

This might have been Clegg's single nastiest argument of the night--that because UW-Madison employs affirmative action, it admits students who are, in Clegg's words, "guaranteed to fail."

Students of color do have a harder road at college than most white students, but it isn't because they're unqualified--it's because discrimination and hostility don't stop at campus gates. Campus cultures have been improved by the victories of antiracist student movements over the past 50 years, but they are still alienating at best and vicious at worst for some students.

Only this past summer at UW, a fraternity hung a life-size black-clad Spiderman doll by its neck from the balcony of its house on fraternity row. If Black students find inhospitable a campus that mere months ago saw the echoes of lynching, only a racist would think that the answer is to keep them off that campus--for their own good.

Myth Number 4: Maybe affirmative action was important once, but those days are long past.

It's hard to imagine anyone making this argument seriously, but then again, Clegg--who, under student questioning, said he wasn't sure whether Black students on average attend less well-funded schools than white kids--didn't seem to be joking. Here are just a few relevant facts:

The median Black family has just 5 percent of the wealth of the median white family (with Hispanics much closer to Blacks than whites)--this is one of the most important ways that advantages and disadvantages are passed down over generations.

Another is segregated schools. A majority of Black students in Illinois, Michigan, New Jersey, and New York attend schools that are over 90 percent Black and Latino, and most white students attend schools that are overwhelmingly white. Here in Wisconsin, the Milwaukee school district, with 77 percent Black and Hispanic students, spends $3,081 less per student than the nearby Maple Dale-Indian Hill district, where 80 percent of students are white. The average Black or Latino K-12 student in the country attends a school in which most students are poor.

Meanwhile, one of the most-ballyhooed areas of progress--the narrowing gap in high school graduation rates between Black and white students--has been shown by sociologists Stephanie Ewert and Becky Pettitt to be a statistical lie: once you include prisoners, the progress disappears. The biggest change is that now the Black students who don't graduate high school are locked up.

Myth Number 5: Affirmative action policies in colleges distract attention from disparities earlier in the pipeline.

This one--which Clegg also threw out at the debate in Madison--is just bizarre. Have you ever heard any proponent of affirmative action say, "Well, I would support equal access to quality K-12 schools, but I'm too busy defending affirmative action at colleges?"

Affirmative action at every level helps future generations at every level. Many students of all races are being taught by teachers who may have benefited from affirmative action programs--and who had their sense of education's power and importance shaped by the struggle for affirmative action and civil rights at their colleges.

On the other hand, we might ask those making this argument about their commitment to reforming "the pipeline." I was next in line to question Clegg when the debate unceremoniously ended, with a long line of students still waiting to speak. My question was simple: Since he and his organization apparently want schooling to be colorblind, what have they done to combat residential segregation, by far the biggest contributor to different schooling for different races?

Myth Number 6: Eliminating affirmative action would be fairer to Asian students.

This might be the CEO's most important left cover for their position--the idea that UW-Madison is discriminating not only against white students, but Asian students as well.

As Chinese-American student government leader and Student Labor Action Coalition member Beth Huang pointed out at a pro-affirmative action rally on campus here in Madison, this argument lumps together very diverse populations into the category "Asian." In particular, Wisconsin has a large Hmong population--settled in the Midwest as refugees after the CIA had recruited them into its "Secret War" in Laos--who are largely segregated and impoverished, and should be beneficiaries of affirmative action.

However, it's also true that some "holistic admissions policies" used at universities--such as privileging certain kinds of extracurricular experiences--can function to limit the number of Chinese and Chinese-American students on campus. The main beneficiaries are not other students of color, who remain underrepresented on campuses, but wealthy white students.

Proponents of affirmative action should fight efforts to divide populations that historically have faced discrimination in the United States.

Myth Number 7: White students are only harmed by affirmative action policies.

As it happens, the biggest beneficiaries of affirmative action programs in general--by far--have been white women. But this article is about race-based affirmative action, and my case is that these race-based programs are essential for white students--for the sake of their own education.

As we waited in line to question Clegg last week, the student in front of me told me that she had multiple white students in her classes tell her they'd never met a Black person before. Can it really be in these students' interest to have African American students kept out of college, so the country's Black population remains an abstraction to them?

As left-wing education expert Jonathan Kozol points out, research shows that "the strongest opposition to integrated schooling among white people is among those who have never experienced it." Kozol cites studies showing that "60 percent of young people of all races feel not only that they will receive a better education in an integrated setting, but that the federal government should make sure that it happens."

Myth Number 8: Anything that smacks of "quotas" is rigid and suspect.

Quotas became a dirty word in the 1990s, when Democratic President Bill Clinton led the effort to get rid of them--in the name of "mending, not ending" affirmative action. A series of Supreme Court decisions then sharply limited the ways that colleges are allowed to use race in admissions.

But what a quota really means is that there is accountability to stated diversity goals. Here at UW-Madison, the university's 10-year diversity initiative, Plan 2008, fell far short of its goals--which the college's Academic Planning Analysis division attributed to a lack of increased financial aid. Today, the university is less than 4 percent Hispanic, less than 3 percent Black, less than 2 percent Southeast Asian and less than 1 percent Native American. And a third of these students never graduate.

In the same 10 years, the university recruited faculty of color, but failed to increase its rates of granting tenure to them. Faculty of color often face a dilemma in which they are expected to mentor many students of color and serve on every diversity committee, but are not really rewarded for this work in the tenure system.

A system that enforced more accountability to its stated diversity aims would force departments and the university administration to address this kind of discrepancy. Without this accountability, it is far too easy to never question the basic operating and funding structures of the university, while bemoaning the lack of progress on diversity.

Myth Number 9: If we had class-based affirmative action, we wouldn't need race-based affirmative action.

Racial and economic disadvantages in education are deeply intertwined, but that doesn't mean the racial disadvantages can be reduced to class.

Because of residential segregation, even when a Black and a white family have the same household income, it's very likely that the Black family's children go to far worse schools. The "war on drugs" has led to an all-out assault on Black communities in particular. And in the current era--to quote sociologist Matt Desmond, commenting on his study of evictions in Milwaukee--"eviction is for Black women what incarceration is for Black men." It should be obvious that these processes have a tremendous effect on children.

Moreover, the most important dimensions of class--wealth, not income--are the hardest to account for in college admissions, especially when it comes to ensuring racial justice.

One reason wealth is harder to measure is that many government programs are designed to make sure the poor--as opposed to the rich--don't get benefits they don't qualify for. One result is that it is generally easy to verify whether someone is officially living in poverty, but not always whether another family has been living paycheck to paycheck, while still another with the same income has valuable assets.

Myth Number 10: We have to choose between class-based and race-based affirmative action.

Have you ever noticed that the only time Republicans seem to care about how poor kids will get to college is when they can use this concern as their battering ram against racial justice?

There is every reason to support affirmative action based on both race and class. And although I began by setting aside the way education is being made a scarce commodity, there's every reason to fight that, too.

Beneath the attack on affirmative action is the idea that not everyone is entitled to a good education. But the money is there for quality, integrated schools--in the military budget; in the bailouts going to the banks; in the taxes never paid by corporations and the extremely wealthy. Any social organization that requires children to spend their childhoods competing to see whether they'll be among the lucky few to attend the right schools isn't rational.

So at the same time that we fight for justice in college admissions--and justice means affirmative action--we should fight for more educational opportunity for all students. The rallying chant of this defense of education should be: "Black, Latino, Arab, Asian and white, rich or poor--education is a right!"

Or maybe it will be the cry that we came back to last week, over and over again: "Power to the people!"

Securing Wisconsin's Future

2011-09-17T15:06:00.002-05:00

When my son was a baby, we used to visit storytime at the public library together. He loved it, crawling around the floor, mouthing the toys, nibbling on books. And I enjoyed it as well, particularly because of the social time I spent with other moms.

While this was a period in which I was on unpaid maternity leave from UW-Madison, and thus not actively teaching, when moms asked what I “did” I’d hesitantly reveal I was a professor. I got a lot of “oh wows” and “what’s that like?” and then after they learned about my field of expertise (higher education) I’d field many questions about how they were supposed to ever manage to get their kids into college. Their babies weren’t even yet one year old, but I was happy to answer. At the same time, I often felt an odd kind of guilt-—I was acutely aware that this wasn’t something I really had to worry about. My son was college-bound from the time he was conceived. Some of those other kids and their moms were going to have to really work at it.

Maternal education is one of the strongest predictors of children’s outcomes. If your mom finished a bachelor’s degree rather than only a high school diploma you are more than twice as likely to earn one yourself. This is partly but not entirely because moms with college degrees are much more likely to have good jobs and enjoy full employment, and thus are more able to afford college. But there are other reasons as well. College-educated parents (and this includes dads, who are incredibly important but less-often the primary caregiver) engage with their differently from the beginning. They obtain higher-quality prenatal care, are more likely able to spend time with their newborns given their more flexible and higher-paid employment, and they are fortunate enough to have the time to invest much more of their energy in endowing their kids with large vocabularies and enrichment activities that result in measurable advantages in test scores, even as early as kindergarten.

Most if not all children have kind and loving parents who take care of them, keep them safe, play with them, etc. But the kinds of things highly educated parents can buy and do with their children seem to provide a boost that’s very hard to match. (Schools, so far, don't seem up to the herculean task.)

Since colleges and universities have raised tuition far more often than governments have increased financial aid, a college education remains a difficult, expensive thing to procure in this country. Attendance is increasingly predicated on the level of education and wealth in your family—yes, that relationship is stronger now than ever. In this country, in statistical terms, people from racial and ethnic minority backgrounds have less of everything required for college—less wealth with which to buy homes near the best schools or purchase for test prep and tuition, less educational background to utilize when sifting through potential colleges, completing applications, and filling out FAFSAs, less job security on which to rely when it comes to taking time off for college visits. The list goes on. Those facts alone mean that the chances of obtaining a bachelor’s degree are far, far less for Black, Latino, Native, and Southeast Asian children than for other children, especially if their parents don’t have college degrees—and very often, they don’t. The chance that a black student will attend college increases from 46% if his parents only attended high school to 84% if his parents graduated from college. But only 10.7% of blacks in Wisconsin hold bachelor’s degrees. Thus the cycle is long and vicious.

Many opponents of affirmative action want to ignore these facts. They want to pretend that it’s possible to compare black and white student with similar test scores, and test for “fairness” based on who is admitted. Sure, admitting a black student with a test score that is lower than that of a “comparable” white student seems unfair, but only if you insist on pretending that life begins when students file admissions applications. It is clearly eminently fair when you realize the incredible odds that most minority students had to beat in order to arrive at that same point of application, compared to the odds that most white students faced. The odds a person beat can provide important context that captures the unmeasured attributes of individuals. Admissions officers seek to admit the students most likely to benefit from and succeed in their universities. Perseverance, stamina, a family’s investment in a student’s success—all of these things are difficult to document and demonstrate in admissions files, but they enhance a student’s chances of success. Picking “winners” requires trying to include those unmeasurable factors when making decisions. Race is a proxy, and for now, the best one we’ve got.

Of course not all minority students would agree that they faced down long odds to get to the point of applying to college. Some are the children of doctors and lawyers who own their own homes and always expected their kids to get a college degree. Some blacks, like some whites, were born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple. But overwhelmingly, this is not the case. In contrast, it is far, far more common for white students to have not faced down long odds to get to the same point. This is because, as Mitchell Stevens has written, “the organizational systems that deliver students to the point of selective college entrance remain structured in ways that systematically favor white and Asian American applicants over black and Latino ones.” And that matters. Stevens reports, “as copious scholarship makes clear, black and Latino students remain considerably less likely to become candidates for admission at the nation’s most prestigious schools than their presence in the general population would have us expect.”

The goal of affirmation action is to create an opportunity for deserving kids who haven’t had the opportunities they deserve. If we refused to use a proxy like race for “deserving but often denied opportunities” we would have to collect extensive personal information that nearly everyone would object to providing. Applications would quadruple in length, and admit rates would drop because there would be even more incomplete applications. If we instead decided not to bother using either a proxy or such intense data collection to facilitate the provision of such opportunities, the average value of the college degree would likely decline, a larger fraction of Wisconsin's population would remain mired in poverty, and there would be no hope of ever not needing programs like affirmative action.

So yes, it is tempting to think that starting college is the beginning point of life—-the point at which all can be fairly determined by a single test score. But college applicants are not born; they are raised. As Stevens says they are “delivered to the point of application by social systems that send children from different groups to this particular destination at different rates.” Pretending that the road to college is race-neutral is to close one’s eyes to the realities of daily existence in the United States. Acknowledging the role that race plays in structuring opportunity, and attempting to reduce the influence of race on those opportunities is not racism—and no, it is not reverse discrimination. Racism is assuming and acting like the color of one’s skin is inherently inferior, rather than acknowledge the problem lies in the way society treats the color of one’s skin. Those who seek to level the playing field do so by explicitly acknowledging that the trouble isn’t that someone is brown, it’s that brown people are treated terribly in this country. It’s far harder to admit that and seek to do something about it, than to deny reality and cry racism.

Those seeking to end affirmative action at UW-Madison need to remember these facts. There is an enormous payoff to a state’s investment in educating its minority students at its finest schools. Research demonstrates that admitting black students to more selective schools improves their chances of finishing college—not the opposite—and furthermore, these students generate bigger individual and social returns from their college degrees than do students whose college attendance is far more expected and much easier to obtain.

Furthermore, supporting affirmative action does not equate with supporting the denial of opportunities for white students. Far from it. This is a case where the benefits for minorities are large, and the costs for individual white students are very, very small. College opportunities abound for majority students, who attend college at very high rates and appear to succeed in completing degrees almost no matter where they attend. Denial from one college nearly always results in admission at another. Data from Wisconsin show that not attending one’s top choice college and instead attending another appears to have little to no impact on whether a student enjoys in and excels at college. In contrast, the great threat to ending affirmative action is that minority students will attain far fewer college degrees. And that would undoubtedly threaten the economic security of our state. None of our families can afford that risk.

New Course Offering: Spring 2012

2011-09-16T20:39:00.000-05:00

In response to recent student demand, I have decided to offer my higher education policy course this spring. Here's some info.

EPS 518: Introduction to Debates in Higher Education Policy
Spring 2012
Tuesdays, 225-5:25 pm

Open to Undergraduates and Graduate Students

In this course students will learn to think critically about debates in contemporary higher education policy. Our discussions will explore the tensions between key policy goals including diversity, quality, and efficiency, and the results (including unintended consequences) of those tensions. We’ll also examine the research brought to bear on policy debates, and how it is used-- or not-- to shape policy agendas.

This semester we will focus on three big debates dominating contemporary higher education policy:

(1) Who should attend higher education?
(2) Who should pay for higher education?
(3) How can federal, state, and institutional policies most effectively support students who wish to attend college and earn degrees?

We will discuss many contemporary issues, including the debates over tuition and financial aid, as well as affirmative action.

ENROLLMENT MAY NOT EXCEED 50 STUDENTS-- SO SIGN UP EARLY DURING REGISTRATION.

UW-Madison Deans Take the Lead

2011-09-16T11:45:00.000-05:00

In the last 24 hours we heard from at least two UW Madison deans, weighing in on the COE debacle. I share their words with you here.

Thursday, 8:59 pm.
CALS students,

I am writing to you in my role as interim dean of CALS to respond to attacks on members of our community by Mr. Roger Clegg of the Center for Educational Opportunity. The center released a report that charges that UW-Madison discriminates against applicants on the basis of race. This conclusion is misleading and unfounded. UW-Madison uses a system based on a holistic, selective, competitive process that includes many factors to determine who is admitted. Most importantly, UW-Madison only admits students who have demonstrated the ability to succeed at Madison. On Tuesday evening, along with over 800 other members of our community, I had the opportunity to witness a debate between Mr. Clegg and Professor Church of our law school. I was deeply offended that Mr. Clegg chose to make his argument with comments that were demeaning and derogatory to members of our student body. Every one of you who has been admitted to UW-Madison has worked hard to get here and you all deserve to be here.

As scholars, I urge you to be on guard for the misuse of statistics for political gain. As Badgers I know you will continue to respect and support all the members of our community.

On Wisconsin!

William F. Tracy
Interim Dean and Director, College of Agricultural and Life Sciences
Friday Chair of Vegetable Research
University of Wisconsin-Madison

Friday, 11:32 am

Dear Colleagues,

The School of Education is proud of its long commitment to a diverse faculty, staff, and student body. Moreover, School faculty and staff have been major contributors to the scholarship on issues of educational access and equality. Our research and experience confirm that a diverse academic community enhances teaching and learning, enriches research, promotes vibrant intellectual discourse, and serves the professions and communities for which we prepare our students.

We affirm our conviction that all School of Education students represent the best of our campus—smart, committed, and active individuals who make a difference now and, as alumni, will shape our future. Our students compete vigorously for admission both to the campus and to our professional programs. Our School’s minimum academic requirements are among the highest on campus. For these reasons we reject the recent claims by the Center for Equal Opportunity regarding the quality of our undergraduates.

I call on the School to support and encourage every student; to take this opportunity to engage in critical discussion and analysis about access and equity in education; and to redouble our efforts to create a School that reflects the diversity of our nation and the world.

Julie Underwood, Dean
UW-Madison School of Education

How to Lie with Statistics

2011-09-16T09:44:00.006-05:00

Interpret statistical results in misleading ways.

Change the denominator. Pretend students didn't apply who actually did.

Let's Get Our Facts Straight

2011-09-15T10:40:00.001-05:00

There is an outrageous article by Chris Rickert in today's WSJ (shocking, I know) claiming that I am promoting (he says "publicly touting") the decrease in admissions rates for targeted minority students. Since this would literally stun anyone who knew me, let's get the facts straight.

I was asked what I thought about the statistics presented by the CEO. What I said was that they don't line up with UW-Madison statistics. If anything, they dramatically overstate the admissions rates of black students, which have been declining over time while the admissions rates of white students are rising (in recent years). This is something we at Madison are concerned about and are actively discussing. Which is why I knew CEO was out of line.

Saying two data sources don't accord is NOT AT ALL the same as saying "hey, look at us, we are proudly turning away more black students." Why in the world would I say that???? Yea that's right--I wouldn't.

I guess we know who stands with the CEO, an organization that hears what it wants to hear. He goes so far as to claim that affirmative action punishes white people. For shame. As one friend put it, this Rickert "simply writes to incite." The sad, sad, state of journalism....

In Case You Doubted What This CEO Business is Really About...

2011-09-14T22:50:00.000-05:00

This should remove all doubt from your mind. Here who is promoting CEO's attack on UW-Madison

(1) White Reference--a website "designed for the dissemination of news of interest to the White Nationalist community as well as others interested in such information. This includes reports of crime and oppression against White people worldwide, as well as accounts of White resistance."

(2) American Renaissance, a group advocating for a "race realism" approach, and "racial-realist" thought.

(3) TMB, who writes that "minorities going crazy in Wisconsin."

(4) The American Civil Rights Institute, "a nationally recognized civil rights organization created to educate the public about racial and gender preferences." The blog is maintained by La Shawn Barber and created by Ward Connerly. Barber is known for her writings such as "Black Pride, White Paternalism."

The list goes on.. and this has been in the works for a long time. Here is Clegg attacking us back in 2007.

Boycott the Madison Doubletree Hotel

2011-09-14T14:43:00.002-05:00

Yesterday's student activism in response to the Center for Equal Opportunity's "study" on affirmative action practices at UW-Madison was awe-inspiring. Students were articulate, passionate, and poised. They made their voices heard in powerful ways. They brought me to tears.

On the other hand, some observers of their actions were downright racist. Most notable among them was the Doubletree Hotel, site of the morning's press conference. By evening, Madison newspapers were reporting that a Doubletree press release called the students a "mob." Yes, a group of UW-Madison students, mostly students of color, was labeled by hotel management with a word meaning "disorderly and intent on causing trouble or violence."

Nothing could be further from the truth. I was standing in the hotel lobby when the action began. The students were organized-not disorderly--and most definitely not intent on causing trouble or violence. They came to speak with Roger Clegg, who organized a public press conference, and let him hear the faces and voices students whom he claimed were admitted to Madison without proper qualifications.

There was no "mob" at the Doubletree Hotel yesterday. This local hotel, so often patronized by those associated with UW-Madison, should be ashamed of its employees who used such slander in describing Madison students. They witnessed vocal, spirited students of color and were afraid. That is appalling.

UW-Madison can choose to whom it gives University business. Until this issue is resolved to the satisfaction of the campus community, in my opinion it should boycott the Doubletree.

This is What Hypocrisy Looks Like

2011-09-13T06:48:00.000-05:00

The Center for Equal Opportunity and its president and general counsel, Roger Clegg, claim to advance educational opportunity by punishing colleges and universities for attempting to level a highly unequal playing field.

The CEO's name is laughable. It is the exact opposite of what the organization does. The misnomer is a deliberate deception. It is a lie so blatant that it would be considered a joke in very poor taste were it not so outrageously fallacious.

The record of CEO's lawsuits has never been in support of equality--it has always been to preserve and protect educational opportunity for those most fortunate social classes and racial/ethnic groups. There is no no record of this organization filing a lawsuit on behalf of newly emerging and underrepresented populations in higher education--it always and only files lawsuits on behalf of the already-advantaged.

One of the biggest problems with this breed of advocacy is that it is never, ever accompanied with support for government programs that address the inequities the CEO sues to deny. That is what makes the organization hypocritical, and reveals a naked agenda to preserve privilege for those who inherit it. That is not to say those born into fortunate circumstances do not work hard for what they achieve. But they are certainly blessed by luck and circumstances at birth that others do not receive at birth. That is why government programs exist--to assist those who need it. CEO does not accept this. The organization is not only dead wrong, it is unashamedly racist.

The Challenge UW-Madison Faces

2011-09-13T01:45:00.001-05:00

There is something terribly disingenuous about talking about educational practices without first describing the context in which they operate.

UW-Madison, the Center for Equal Opportunity "reveals," seeks to enroll students from many different backgrounds. It employs preferences of all kinds to do so--favoring talented musicians, athletes, people from Wyoming, and yes, people who weren't born White.

Is this unjust? That's the question you have to ask, since it certainly isn't illegal.

When weighing your response, consider this:

(1) The Wisconsin population is comprised of about 14% non-white minorities-- that's about 744,000 of the 5.4 million people.
(2) Among the population who ever graduated from high school (not necessarily on time) the proportion is about the same.
(3) Among high school graduates who were in the top half of their class and took the ACT, just about 8% are minorities. That's about 2,700 people-- the total number of minority students in Wisconsin that UW-Madison can recruit directly from public high schools.
(4) According to the CEO (and that is a HUGE caveat-- their data do not match UW's, posted on the apa.wisc.edu website), in 2007, 19,345 students applied to Madison. Just 1103 were Black or Hispanic. That includes plenty from out-of-state, from private schools, etc. We admitted 71% of the Black students and 90% of the Hispanic students. In total, that gave us just 892 students meeting those criteria.

The higher rate of admissions among Black and Hispanic students might seem unfair if you simply compared it to the rate for White students (62%) but consider the context. Look at what these students have to survive in order to get admitted-- they are the cream of their crops, regardless of their test scores. In fact, their ability to survive and thrive a sorting process that is clearly setting them up to fail at every stage is hard-core evidence of their ability to succeed at UW-Madison. It's a far better proxy than an ACT score.

Moreover, the moment they actually apply to college they are fiercely fought over by colleges and universities nationwide. Diversity is a marker of "success" now, and wooing talented non-white student is big business. If you like diversity for no other reason, you should be excited about it because it improves our U.S. News rankings. (not that I value those at all, nor should you.)

Ask your professors: Would you rather teach the student who always knew he'd go to college, always did well on tests, and doesn't have to study much to pass your class? Or would you rather teach the student who lived with lifelong uncertainty, whose mom and pop never set foot on a college campus, who always felt isolated in school, and yet still graduated from high school, having taken good coursework and finishing well, did take the ACT and simply didn't get as high test scores? That guy is working his butt off to succeed every day. And boy, if you ask me-- I want both of those students in my classroom, together, every day, to learn from each other. No, I don't think that only minority students fall in the latter category. Plenty of white students do too, and class-based affirmative action coupled with race-based affirmative action would undoubtedly make for a stronger UW-Madison, one that confers even greater benefits on all of its graduates, helping them produce rich social networks that will lead them to good jobs and happy lives.

How will we make all that happen if test scores and a false sense of "fairness" determine who we let in? The answer is clear: we won't.

Dissecting the So-Called "Research" Report: Preliminary Thoughts

2011-09-13T00:10:00.000-05:00

Here's some stuff you gotta know.

In Wisconsin 2.5% of Blacks are in prison. That rate is 8 times higher than it is for Whites.

Just 65% of Blacks earn a high school diploma on time in Wisconsin, compared to 95% of Whites.

But for some reason, it outrages the Center for Equal Opportunity that in 2007-2008, Blacks made up 2.6% of the student body admitted to UW-Madison-- while 85.5% of those incoming classes were white.

??????

It is common to use distort facts with percentages. So if the 72% admissions rate for Blacks at UW-Madison compared to 59% admissions rate for Whites really upsets you, consider this. The applicant pools in those years included 33,337 White students, just 923 Black students and just 1,212 Hispanics. The admissions pool included 20,249 White students, and just 1,723 Blacks and Hispanics put together. Seriously, who is at a disadvantage in this race to the top?

Have you EVER walked around UW-Madison's campus and thought "Something must be wrong. There's just wayyy too many Brown people are here." Yeah, that's what I thought.

Knowledge is Power: Get the Facts on So-Called "Reverse Discrimination"

2011-09-12T23:05:00.003-05:00

During the coming days, the UW-Madison community is going to get an earful about the Center for Equal Opportunity's commitment to "disadvantaged minorities." In an effort to ensure they get full access to the American Dream, these "thinkers" want to ensure they compete on a "level playing field," gaining admission to higher education "like everyone else." After all, we wouldn't want to put those poor folk at a further disadvantage by putting them in over their heads, surrounded by students with higher test scores we can assume they will sink.

You will hear this from white folks, mostly. But you will hear it from some brown folks too. Perhaps unexpectedly, even those in leadership positions on our own campus. Positions like these--heck all political positions--can be adopted by anyone. They just have to "believe."

Right now you need to get the facts. Researchers and legal scholars have been tackling these hot policy questions for a long time now, and here's what we know.

(1) Access to the American Dream requires access to at least some postsecondary education. If we keep people from college by providing them with inadequate academic preparation, sticking them in poor neighborhoods where violence predominates, we are not giving them a fair shot. That's not a meritocracy.

(2) Students who graduate from high school are on a highly uneven playing field when it comes to college admissions. Those born with moms and dads who attended college themselves, especially elite universities, have more financial, social, and cultural capital that makes college both expected and extremely likely. They also have higher test scores, in no small part because of the well-resourced environment in which they were raised. Other graduates have major barriers to overcome. Their high schools didn't offer AP classes, their teachers moved on every year, they suffered from inadequate nutrition and poor health care, and so much more. Or, maybe they had a pretty darned good life--except for the constant structural barriers constraining their family's ability to accumulate wealth and therefore move them to a great neighborhood and pay for private school. The playing field is rife with potholes.

(3) There is no one way to gain admission to college. People take all sorts of routes in--legacies, athletics, musical talents, etc. Universities exercise preferences based on where students grew up, what high school they attended, how many times they visit campus when looking, how much mom and dad plan to donate, etc.

(4) Once admitted, test scores play very little role in determining your chances of success. Being surrounded by an elite environment and peers with higher test scores does next to nothing--if anything at all-- to harm your chances of graduating. What can hurt you is when the university under-invests in your financial aid, has a climate that devalues folks like you, and doesn't focus its efforts for all students on degree completion. Oh, and when the state systematically disinvests in your education. Yeah, that's bad.

These are the facts. I will annotate this with references as soon as I'm able. Believe me, as a professor of sociology and higher education policy and chair of the university committee on this topic, we've got our facts straight. All the CEO has is myths and fear-mongering. Knock it down.

References for #4:
Methods matter a lot in these studies--those that fail to distinguish student characteristics from admissions practices in assessing effects produce highly biased results. The relevant studies are about the effects of mismatching students & colleges based on test scores- since the claim is that affirmative action promotes mismatch, these test for whether mismatch has negative effects

Jesse Rothstein, 2006, no evidence of mismatch effects in law school

Alon & Tienda (2005). No support for the mismatch hypothesis using national data

Grove & Hussey (2011). Little evidence supporting mismatch hypothesis using data on MBA programs

Ho (2005). Yale Law Review paper find no evidence affirmative action hurts law students.

*** A Must Read

Peter Hinrichs of Georgetown. "Affirmative action bans lead to fewer underrepresented minorities becoming graduates of selective colleges."

Right Wing Think Tank Targets UW-Madison

2011-09-12T20:23:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow the so-called Center for Equal Opportunity, a right-wing think tank headed by Linda Chavez and based in Sterling, Virginia will begin an assault on UW-Madison. The Center charges that the university seeks to advance racial equality by exercising preferences in admissions practices.

As you consider the "case" the Center will lay out-- the "study" will be released tomorrow and then we will all see the "facts"-- please note the following:

This "CEO" (I refuse to call them the CEO in all seriousness..) has a long and sordid track record. UW-Madison is one in a long line-- a line at least 60 colleges and universities long-- targeted by this group. It supports what it describes as "colorblind public policies," including the elimination or curtailment of existing racial preference and affirmative action programs, the replacement of bilingual and ESL programs with English immersion, and the adoption of policies that both welcome increased immigration while calling for the assimilation of new immigrants to the United States.

The facts are not in CEO's favor. Forget the evidence on whether preferences are being exercised--they are beside the point. At issue is how we help all students succeed. Despite claims that helping students with more modest test scores gain access to elite institutions puts them at a disadvantage--the so-called mismatch hypothesis--numerous rigorous empirical studies find exactly the opposite. I will cover them on this blog soon.

Moreover, despite claims of being post-racial, this think tank is advancing an agenda that is decidedly racial. Pushing for assimilation of new immigrants? Seriously, what century are you from?

UW Madison is replete with scholars of education and inequality who can shed light on these important concerns. I hope the community, and the media, will go searching for real, hard facts, rather than listening to ideologues.

I will write more about this soon.

Reform UW System, But Don't Render it Toothless

2011-09-11T20:18:00.000-05:00

A busy first week of classes caused me to miss last week's UW System Board of Regents meeting, an event now known for its dramatic highlights and active Twitter feed. I was especially disappointed to miss it because it was the initial unveiling of the work UW System has done over the summer to re-orient itself given the recent legislative changes granting its member institutions more fiscal autonomy.

The main thrust of the documents shared at the meeting appears to be a desire to accomodate the wishes of (some of?) the UW chancellors for more decision-making authority and less oversight from the System office. There will be a downsizing of that office, and a corresponding restructuring.

I have heard a few folks suggesting that these moves look like the New Badger Partnership policy advanced by former chancellor Biddy Martin last spring. Reportedly, they think that those of us who felt the NBP was ill-advised, given its obvious leaning towards privatization, should also be upset about the System changes. Both of these arguments seem to hold little water. First and foremost because the System changes are the result of a transparent process during which time many discussions with relevant partners were held. That in no way resembles what transpired with the NBP. With regard to the System changes there is no evidence that any individuals seek to gain personally or politically from these reforms, or that they make any institution within System more vulnerable to the influence of private interests. These appear to be modifications to bureaucratic processes, rather than large-scale changes to governance structures. There is nothing here resembling the Board of Trustees proposed by Martin and her team, which would have installed a Governor Walker-dominated set of leaders overseeing UW-Madison instantaneously.

That doesn't mean, however, that I am free of concern. On the contrary, I worry that the moves at System belie an approach of appeasing institutional leaders whose natural tendencies are to have as much control as possible over their own campuses. The preservation of statewide interests in Wisconsin public higher education requires close coordination of the work on each campus, and that kind of work isn't fun. It isn't the kind of thing people volunteer to do. And so it must be led by a System whose employees are experienced and paid to do it.

I am also especially concerned with System President Kevin Reilly's statements about the future of national initiatives in System's work. While we can all point to national initiatives that have failed, there are also those that have succeeded--in getting institutional leaders to consider what their data have to say about their policies, at convening faculty and staff from across campuses and states to learn across new practices that could help Wisconsin, etc. Two of the most important aspects provided by national initiatives are vision and cover. Making common cause with colleges and universities across the state and country renews our sense of energy and purpose. And that common work can make it possible to collectively undertake efforts that individually are politically hard to do. It can be difficult, for example, for a chancellor to convince his campus they must talk about racial gaps in their college completion rates--it is often easier if instead campus leaders are invited to become part of a larger group engaged together in these conversations. Decades of organizational research indicates that the best ideas don't come from conversations occurring in silos but rather than those where we can learn from those who've tried and succeeded, and those who've tried and failed. So I hope that Reilly will continue to make System's participation in these national initiatives a priority, and keep the talented teams in place who currently lead them.

Those of us working diligently to preserve Wisconsin public higher education need to support System's right to influence the work of its campuses. Van Hise should not be diminished into a central party-planning office, or one whose workers can do little more than rubber-stamp the offerings of campus leaders. Certainly there should be more give-and-take with talented local leaders like UW Colleges Ray Cross, and Reilly should embark on a statewide tour to interact with faculty, staff, and students at all colleges and universities so as to get in touch with their needs. They all need to get a better sense of him and System writ large, lest during the next go-around they continue to believe the fallacious tales they are told. The position of System president must remain one of power and influence. A significantly weakened System makes all of Wisconsin public higher education vulnerable to further loss of legislative support. That's the last thing Wisconsin's economy and its working families need.

Are you Ready for Some "Football"?

2011-09-05T20:26:00.000-05:00

If there's one thing Wisconsin seems to agree on, it's the Badgers. Even if you never attended or even cared to attend UW-Madison, you're most likely a fan. Why? Honestly, I won't pretend to know--college football's never been my thing. But I do think it's cool that people throughout the state seem to feel they have a little bit of Madison they're connected to. Football-- Bucky-- makes that happen. As my late colleague and friend Doug Toma wrote in Football U, "football humanizes seemingly impersonal large universities for external audiences."

But a few recent incidents regarding UW football seem to have affected UW Madison's activities and image in ways that deserve some scrutiny.

First, last Thursday afternoon (on the eve of the first day of classes), Madison faculty and staff were urged to abandon their offices early and clear out of campus so that the crowds could take over for the season opener against UNLV. Many campus administrative offices shut down at 1 pm. People who paid sizable fees for annual parking (e.g. $1000 per year) were told they needed to leave so their spots could be sold to others for the night. Basically, we threw all real business (class prep?) aside for a beer and circus show. For more, check out this spot-on post over at Sifting and Winnowing.

The message was clear: Football comes first. Get out of the way.

Second, 6 weeks after her much-discussed departure from campus, we've come to learn that Biddy Martin has left some goodbye presents. One is the apparent revelation that she unilaterally decided that UW-Madison would vote against AAU membership for Nebraska. Reports the Lincoln newspaper: "After endorsing the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's entrance into the Big Ten Conference -- in part because of its academic strength -- leaders at the universities of Wisconsin and Michigan apparently helped oust UNL from an elite academic group."

UW Madison is famous for its shared governance of all issues, big and small. According to actions and rhetoric around campus (including last Thursday's events) football is a BIG darn deal. So why does it seem that Biddy went it alone on making such an important decision?

Honestly, I don't know. But I'd really like to hear some campus discussion of it. I'm concerned that it serves to perpetuate our elitist image, an appearance Biddy did much to reinforce. Football may have been yet another tool in her arsenal of weapons intended to barricade Madison from the public--using it in this way manages to undo its powerful ability to bring Madison to the people. I'm especially concerned that efforts by journalists to understand what's happened here have been rebuffed-- the Journal Star says that its open records requests were declined by UW. And most of all, I hope that those of us who benefit from shared governance act now to find out why we--the faculty, staff, and students--were bypassed on this one. Who knew what, and when? This institution isn't supposed to act on issues that seemingly matter most of all ... like FOOTBALL... without us.

Things That Make Me Go Hmm....(Part 1)

2011-09-04T21:28:00.004-05:00

Sincerest apologies for the silence on our blog. The summer has wound down, school is starting, federal grant deadlines are approaching--and most importantly, our son just started 4-year-old kindergarten! All in all, it's a very busy time of year. So with that, I'm beginning a new series, intended to highlight and raise a few questions about news that intrigues me. Perhaps Liam will pick up on this too, and we'll make a series of it.

(1) Why am I so cranky/ out of shape/ exhausted / or otherwise morose? Sometimes I wonder. And the day I read the New York Times Magazine's brilliant piece on the perils of too-much decision-making I felt a tad bit better--and then a whole lot worse. Because it seems that people who are asked all day long to pick or choose, often on high-stakes tasks, tend to put decisions about themselves last. So when the question is: what will I eat tonight? the answer is often "who cares? just feed me." Where's the solution, New York Times? I really don't see one.

(2) As I send our kid off to the phenomenal Madison Waldorf School each day, I feel a pending twinge of hypocrisy. What will we do next year, when there are public school options? Will we continue to invest in private school, even though we--the Education Optimists--are deep believers in public education? Then I read an article like today's New York Times cover story on the uninhibited spending on technology in classrooms that is eating up money we could otherwise spend supporting teachers-- and without a shred of evidence to support it. I hear tales that here in Stoughton, Wisconsin my kid's kindergarten will have a Smartboard and plenty of laptops, for his focused "reading time"...and I want to run screaming in the other direction. The last thing I want to raise is a glazed-eye kid who stares at screens all day (like I do), who develops back and posture problems from the classic "slump" and who would rather listen to someone say something cool than say it himself. I suppose this makes me a Luddite. My iPhone, iPad, and Mac might say otherwise. But what I want most is for schools to invest in what we know pays off-- and that's child-human contact. Give my kid teachers who feel appreciated and well-supported, please. Forget the laptops.

(3) On a somewhat related note, that "esteemed" publication Newsweek/Daily Beast just named UW-Madison the third least rigorous university in the nation among those serving students with average test scores of 1250 or higher (SAT). While I've written about my concerns regarding the institutional focus on teaching and whether we deliver everything we're capable of, let me be the first to say: THESE RANKINGS SUCK. Look at their "methodology"--Are you kidding me? Using "College Prowler" and "rate my professor" to develop metrics? Did the writers have NOTHING better to do with their time than to craft this worthless drivel? Puhleeese.

(4) Can Scott Walker read? Survey says: No. In a recent press release, Walker claimed that the new Wisconsin-Minnesota tuition reciprocity deal, which ended some of the subsidy provided to Wisconsin students who chose to attend college out-of-state, "make college more affordable." Um...no... this kinda reminds me of someone else's recent claim that privatizing the university and jacking up tuition would make UW more affordable. Listen, I served on the legislative committee that developed this reciprocity change last summer, and the purpose was to save Wisconsin some money, and perhaps provide a little disincentive for Wisconsin students to leave the state for college. Nothing to do with affordability. My question is this--how much are you paying those staffers of yours, Governor?

That's it for today. Stay tuned for a busy year, as UW-Madison searches for a new chancellor and Wisconsin works to recall Scott Walker...and of course now that I'm tenured, I'll tell ya what I REALLY think!

Measuring Up? The Trouble with Debt to Degree

2011-08-10T22:07:00.000-05:00

The following is a guest blog post by Robert Kelchen, graduate student in Educational Policy Studies at UW-Madison, and a frequent co-author of mine. --Sara

I was pleased to see the release of Education Sector’s report, “Debt to Degree: A New Way of Measuring College Success,” by Kevin Carey and Erin Dillon. They created a new measure, a “borrowing to credential ratio,” which divides the total amount of borrowing by the number of degrees or credentials awarded. Their focus on institutional productivity and dedication to methodological transparency (their data are made easily accessible on the Education Sector’s website) are certainly commendable.

That said, I have several concerns with their report. I will focus on two key points, both of which pertain to how this approach would affect the measurement of performance for 2-year and 4-year not-for-profit (public and private) colleges and universities. My comments are based on an analysis in which I merged IPEDS data with the Education Sector data to analyze additional measures; my final sample consists of 2,654 institutions.

Point 1: Use of the suggested "borrowing to credential" ratio has the potential to reduce college access for low-income students.

The authors rightly mention that flagship public and elite private institutions appear successful on this metric because they have a lower percentage of financially needy students and more institutional resources (thus reducing the incidence of borrowing). The high-performing institutions also enroll students who are easier to graduate (e.g. those with higher entering test scores, better academic preparation, etc) which increases the denominator in the borrowing to credential ratio.

Specifically, the correlations between the percentage of Pell Grant recipients (average of 2007-08 and 2008-09 academic years from IPEDS) and the borrowing to credential ratio is 0.455 for public 4-year and 0.479 for private 4-year institutions, compared to 0.158 for 2-year institutions. This means that the more Pell recipients an institution enrolls, the worse it performs on this ratio.

While even though Carey and Dillon focus on comparing similar institutions in their report (for example, Iowa State and Florida State), it is very likely that in real life (e.g. the policy world) the data will be used to compare dissimilar institutions. The expected unintended consequence is “cream skimming,” in which institutions have incentives to enroll either high-income students or low-income students with a very high likelihood of graduation. (Sara and I have previously raised concerns about “cream skimming” with Pell Grant recipients in other work.)

The graphs below further illustrate the relationship between the percentage of Pell recipients and the borrowing to credential ratio for each of the three sectors.

There is also a fairly strong relationship between a university’s endowment (per full-time equivalent student) and the average borrowing to credential ratio. Among public 4-year universities, the correlation between per-student endowment and the borrowing to credential ratio is -.134, suggesting that institutions with higher endowments tend to have lower borrowing to credential ratios. The relationship at private four-year universities is even stronger, with a correlation of -.346. For example, Princeton, Cooper Union, Caltech, Ponoma, and Harvard are all in the top 15 for lowest borrowing to credential ratios.

The relationship between borrowing to credential ratios and standardized test scores is even stronger. The correlations for four-year public and private universities are -.488 and -.589, respectively. This suggests that low borrowing to credential ratios are in part a function of student inputs, not just factors within an institution’s control. In other words, the metric does not solely measure college performance.

It is critical to note that the average borrowing to credential ratio should be lower at institutions with more financial resources and who enroll more students who can afford to attend college without borrowing. However, institutions who enroll a large percentage of Pell recipients should not be let off the hook for their borrowing to credential ratios. These two examples highlight the importance of input-adjusted comparisons, in which statistical adjustments are used so institutions can be compared based more than their value-added than their initial level of resources. The authors should be vigilant to make sure their work gets used in input-adjusted comparisons rather than unadjusted comparisons. Otherwise, institutions with fewer resources will be much more likely to be punished for their actions even if they are successfully graduating students with relatively low levels of debt.

Point 2: The IPEDS classification of two-year versus four-year institutions does not necessarily reflect a college’s primary mission.

IPEDS classifies a college as a 4-year institution if it offers at least one bachelor’s degree program, even if the vast majority of students are enrolled in 2-year programs. Think of Miami Dade College, where more than 97% of students are in 2-year programs but the institution is classified as a 4-year institution.

For the purposes of calculating a borrowing to credential ratio, the Carnegie basic classification system is more appropriate. Under that system an institution is classified as an associate’s college if bachelor’s degrees make up less than ten percent of all undergraduate credentials. The Education Sector report classifies 60 institutions as four-year colleges that are Carnegie associate’s institutions.

This classification decision has important ramifications for the borrowing to credential comparisons. The average borrowing to credential ratio by sector is as follows:

Two-year colleges, Carnegie associate’s: $6,579 (n=942)
Four-year colleges, Carnegie associate’s: $13,563 (n=60)
Four-year colleges, Carnegie bachelor’s or above: $23,166 (n=1,421)

Ten of the twelve and 20 of the top 40 four-year colleges with the lowest borrowing to credential ratios are classified as Carnegie associate’s institutions. For example, Madison Area Technical College is 54th on the Education Sector’s list of four-year colleges, but is 564th of 1,002 associate’s-granting institutions. These two-year institutions with a small number of bachelor’s degree offerings should either be placed with the other two-year institutions or in a separate category. Otherwise, anyone who wishes to rank institutions based on their classification would be comparing apples to oranges.

In conclusion: the effort in this report to measure institutional performance is a laudable one. But the development and use of metrics is challenging precisely because of their potential for misuse and unintended consequences. Refining the proposed metrics as described above may make them more useful.

It Rhymes With 'Tool'

2011-08-09T06:45:00.004-05:00

UPDATED, 8/11/2011, 1:10 pm

Thursday morning in Washington DC -- the only city that could host such a vacuous, inane event -- the Thomas B. Fordham Institute is hosting (the hopefully one-off) "Education Reform Idol." The event has nothing to do with recognizing states that get the best results for children or those that have achieved demonstrated results from education policies over time -- but simply those that have passed pet reforms over the past year.

It purports to determine which state is the "reformiest" (I kid you not) with the only contenders being Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin and the only judges being: (1) a representative of the pro-privatization Walton (WalMart) Family Foundation; (2) the Walton-funded, public education hater Jeanne Allen; and (3) the "Fox News honorary Juan Williams chair" provided to the out-voted Richard Lee Colvin from Education Sector.

With the deck stacked like that, Illinois is out of the running immediately because its reforms were passed in partnership with teachers' unions. Plus it has a Democratic governor. Tssk, tssk. That's too bad, because Illinois represents the most balanced approach to education and teaching policy of the five states over the past year. And the absence of a state like Massachusetts from the running is insane. It has the best NAEP scores of any state and has a long track record of education results from raising standards and expectations, not by attacking teachers or privatizing our schools. But that's not the point here, of course. This is ALL politics. [UPDATE 8/11/2011: Yes, all politics. Mike Petrilli of Fordham says that "the lesson of Education Reform Idol" is --- ba-ba-ba-baaah ... ELECT REPUBLICANS. "When Republicans take power, reforms take flight."]

So I digress.... The coup de grace of ridiculousness for me is the inclusion of Wisconsin among the list of "contenders." What exactly has Scott Walker and his league of zombies actually accomplished for education over the last seven-and-a-half months OTHER THAN eliminating collective bargaining rights, a historic slashing of state school aids, and a purely political expansion of the inefficacious school voucher program?

What's even worse than the inclusion of Wisconsin among the nominees is the case made by Scott Walker's office for the 'reformiest' award. As a policy advisor to the former Wisconsin governor, I am amazed by the brazenness and spin from Walker's office. I would expect nothing less from a political campaign. But someone's gotta tell these folks that while they theoretically represent the public trust, the content of their arguments suggests we can't trust them as far as we can throw them. And here in cheese curd land, that ain't very far.

A quick look at Walker's argument reveals an upfront invocation of Tommy Thompson (Wisconsin's version of Ronald Reagan) to pluck at Badgers' heart strings and make them long for the good old days of the 1990s (when the rich paid their fair share in taxes). It is soon followed by the refuted and refuted claims that Walker's deep education cuts "protect students in the short term" and give districts "tools" to manage the fiscal slaughter. Just read the well-respected Milwaukee school superintendent's opinion of such "tools." Then there's this gem: "Districts immediately began to set aside more time for teacher collaboration as well as money for merit pay." I'd LOVE to see the data behind this claim because as I am aware there is no state survey that measures collaborative time for teachers for starters. Walker's staff probably lifted it from a single school district's claims detailed in this Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel story -- claims trumpeted by dozens upon dozens of right-wing bloggers such as Wisconsin's own Ann Althouse -- claims which since have been exposed as "literally unbelievable".

The irony is that this event is taking place in DC just two days after the recall elections of six seemingly vulnerable, incumbent Republican state senators. The repudiation of Walker's slash-and-burn policies will be testament enough to the destructiveness of his leadership both for public education and for the Badger State as a whole. In Wisconsin, recall would appear to be a far more effective 'tool' than the tools tentatively running the show under the Golden Dome in Madison.

[UPDATE 8/11/2011: For anyone who cares ... Indiana apparently is the "reformiest" state. By reformers' preferred metrics, I believe this means that Indiana will have the top NAEP scores in the nation next time 'round. Right?]

Image courtesy of Democurmudgeon

A View from the Right in a Left-Leaning Tower

2011-07-26T08:00:00.013-05:00

What follows is a GUEST POST by University of Wisconsin-Madison graduate student Robert Kelchen. I have had the privilege of working with Robert since 2008; we have co-authored two articles, including this one on the effects of financial aid. Upon reading John Tierney's take on the dominance of liberals in academe, I asked Robert for his thoughts-- and here they are. SGR

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My name is Robert Kelchen, but many students and faculty who know me at the University of Wisconsin-Madison often introduce me as "the conservative guy" or "my Republican friend." I am used to this sort of introduction after being in Madison for four years; after all, I can count the number of conservative or libertarian doctoral students who I know on two hands. I have been told several times in the past by fellow students that I am the first right-leaning person with whom they have ever interacted on a regular basis. Prior to the passage of Act 10 (the law that restricted collective bargaining), I was one of the few students at the university to request a refund of the portion of the Teaching Assistants' Association dues that went toward political or ideological activities. This also meant that I had to give up my right to vote on issues germane to collective bargaining (the primary purpose of the union), but it was a sacrifice that I was willing to make. During the protests at the Capitol throughout the spring semester, I did my best to stay out of the fray and keep very quiet about my personal opinions.

Sara asked me for my thoughts on the recent New York Times article about why there are so few conservative students in graduate school. I had to consider the offer for a while, as making this post would make my political leanings more publicly known and could potentially affect my chances of getting a job in two years. However, I just could not pass up the opportunity to comment on this article in the newspaper of record for American liberals--and the same paper that ran a front-page article about Sara being one of a new generation of less politically-oriented professors.

My initial reaction to the article was to try to think of a conservative or libertarian professor in the School of Education at UW-Madison. To the best of my knowledge, there are no professors in the entire school, let alone my home department (Educational Policy Studies) who publicly identify as being right of center. However, this does not mean that there are no conservative faculty. A likely explanation is that faculty (and students) who do not identify with the liberal majority stay quiet about their political beliefs. The reaction of the majority of the faculty and graduate students during recent political events makes speaking out as a conservative a lonely proposition. It also means that there must exist other "elite" institutions that have a higher proportion of conservative faculty.

I do not put any stock in the Gross et al experiment mentioned in the article, which sent out letters asking for information about top graduate schools and included whether a fictional student worked for the Obama or McCain campaigns. Working on a presidential campaign does tell something about a student's political beliefs, but a student's GRE score and college performance (in addition to ability to pay) matter much more than that information. Additionally, the study only used male "prospective" applicants, a potentially serious limitation. (Not to mention that John McCain is a fairly liberal Republican who partnered with ex-Senator--and Madison hero--Russ Feingold on campaign finance reform. He is much more palatable to the left than someone like Michelle Bachmann.)

This leaves several possible explanations for why conservative students are less likely to go to graduate school and stay in academia later in life than liberals. A potential explanation mentioned in the article (and is echoed by several of the comments on the article) is that conservatives do not have the mental abilities to go to graduate school. That is entirely bogus, as noted in the article. I do not put much stock into the hypothesis that conservatives are less likely to be in academia due to discrimination on the acceptance (graduate students) or hiring (faculty) side, although this very well may be true in isolated institutions and departments.

The argument of self-selection, in which conservatives choose not to pursue a career in higher education, is the likely culprit for why I know only one other conservative graduate student in the entire School of Education. Much self-selection occurs because of how attending graduate school delays one's ability to make a reasonable salary. In "red" states, adults are more likely to get married at a younger age than those in "blue" states; the need to support a family can detract both women and men from spending an additional six or more years in school. The claim made by Peter Wood from the conservative National Association of Scholars, that conservatives choose not to pursue a graduate degree because of the perception of liberal bias, is likely responsible for part of the attendance gap. I would say that, holding all other factors constant, it is easier to be a majority liberal than a minority conservative. However, the common perception that conservatives know all other Republicans in the area or that we're always expected to engage in political discussions at the drop of a hat (or that we agree with everything that Sarah Palin says) probably do not cause many students to shun away from graduate school. The perception of liberal bias likely drives away many more students than the actual amount of liberal bias.

In closing, I would like to thank Sara again for the opportunity to post my thoughts. Next time you talk with a conservative, please realize that we are not bad people because we have different political viewpoints. Most of us, regardless of ideology or partisan affiliation, believe in the importance of public education even though we disagree on the best ways to improve the current system.

Robert

Caring for the Me Generation

2011-07-24T13:59:00.001-05:00

During the past semester, a time where I constantly felt split between my academic life and my civic life, I became acutely aware of an attitude among undergraduates that perplexed me. I tried writing about it , describing what readers pointed out (in a far more articulate manner than I'd managed) was a notable lack of empathy among some students.

Since I've spent the last 10 years trying to make convince higher education institutions to prioritize their students' needs and desires, these realizations about who some of the students seemed to be and especially what they seemed to believe, made me pretty depressed. Don't get me wrong: it's not that I expect students to speak and act in one voice--far from it, given how much I value the democratic process. I don't want them to share my opinions or perspectives, but rather simply want them to formulate opinions and perspectives after asking good questions and gathering and evaluating information. But what I hope for, most of all, is their recognition that they are part of a worldwide community of students, and their strength lies in that community. I hope that such a larger sense of the world will guide them to think of more than themselves, and to act for the greater good.

Of course, what I learned from social media engagement this spring is what the Me Generation is really all about. "Me."

As it turns out, this is not at all a Wisconsin phenomenon. There's rigorous research from the University of Michigan demonstrating a sharp decline in empathy among undergraduates, based on data from 14,000 students over 30 years. Compared to students who attended college 20-30 years ago, undergraduates in the first decade of the new millenium scored 40% lower in empathy. Said one of the study's authors, this group is among the "most self-centered, narcissistic, competitive, confident and individualistic in recent history."

The authors speculate as to the root causes, citing among other things the influence of media and social media in particular. But those are worldwide phenomena, and this is a U.S. study (I strongly suspect such trends aren't felt in many other countries). Instead, I'm betting that we have Ronald Reagan to thank. The undergraduates of the 1970s and 1980s were raised by parents who came of age under the New Deal, during times when social justice and civil rights for all were demanded and (to some degree) received. They were more often raised to appreciate the luck and good fortune that gave opportunities to them, and worked to share those opportunities with others. Not so for the undergraduates of the 2000s, whose parents came into adulthood under the Gipper, a period in which inequality blossomed, and consumption was conspicuous. They've never known a time when college wasn't insanely expensive, always assumed that the American Dream was only about individual effort, and they were listening as even the Democrats placed all of the blame for poverty at the feet of the poor (yes, I'm looking at you Bill Clinton).

Reversing this trend is absolutely necessary for ensuring the well-being of people everywhere. As the Michigan researchers noted, what accompanies an exclusive emphasis on oneself is a "corresponding devaluation of others." Such a condition tears at the web of our social life and creates conditions of anomie that increase the spread of poverty and perpetuate hatred and fear like that evidenced in recent events in Norway.

So, start now. Take this quiz created by the Michigan researchers and see how YOU compare to those undergrads they surveyed. Then decide what to do with your results.

ps. In case you are curious, I scored a 59/70, meaning more empathetic than 80% of the study's participants. Thanks Poppa.

Anger Management

2011-07-20T16:43:00.001-05:00

I am appalled by this malicious attack on teachers and teachers' unions by Jay Greene. He claims that teachers are engaging in mob-like behavior, are seething anger and are intimidating politicians. The irony is that I've met few teachers who are nearly as angry as Jay himself comes across.

But when the public face of the teacher unions is the Army of Angry Teachers, they no longer seem like Mary Poppins and begin to look a lot more like longshoremen beating their opponents with metal pipes.

Giant mobs of yelling protesters and blogs filled with tirades may increase the intimidation politicians feel, but it seriously undermines the image of teachers as an extension of our family.

Jay's "mob" is my "democratic gathering". Here in Wisconsin (the featured photo on Jay's blog post) there was an organic outpouring of disgust and determination as a result of Governor Scott Walker's attacks on collective bargaining and public employee and teachers unions -- and his decisions to balance the state budget on the backs of public workers and by gutting public education while steering tax breaks to corporations and providing massive funding increases to voucher schools.

Jay is mad that teachers are mad, but they have every right to be, especially in a state like Wisconsin. Have you visited Wisconsin in the past six months, Mr. Greene? Have you actually talked to teachers here? Have you seen and heard the thousands and thousands of protesters that have no vested or financial interest that nonetheless turned out en masse to speak out on behalf of others? (Clearly, these are rhetorical questions.)

This *is* what democracy looks like. The allowance of such an outpouring of opposition is why our nation was founded. Apparently, Jay's preferred answer to the Palin-esque question of "How's that redress of grievances thing workin' out for ya?" would be "It should not be allowed."

Wisconsin teachers have not and should not lie down and take the beating they've received here. Their right to bargain has been stripped. They've seen massive cuts to their pay and benefits. They're now working in public school systems that have had resources sucked out of them. They're standing up for their rights and for a far different state of Wisconsin than has emerged under the leadership of Governor Walker and his legislative Rubber Stamps.

Have teachers and their unions always advocated for and prioritized the best educational policies? Sure they haven't. Has any one education group or interest? (Greene's free market approach to education certainly doesn't represent sound policy.) Reforms can only succeed when teachers are full partners in their creation and implementation. And I will fight for the right of their voices to be heard in policy debates, in schools, and, yes, at the bargaining table.

It seems that Mr. Greene would prefer that teachers simply shut up.

The New Normal

2011-07-19T17:47:00.001-05:00

Too many Americans appear willing to accept the hand they're dealt. Most shockingly, many of our political, educational and civic leaders seem to have fallen into the same trap. "The New Normal," they call it. Like Death and Taxes. Etched in stone. Undefined, yet not re-definable. Inevitable.

Fortunately, there are those among us willing to demand a new deck of cards -- and a new dealer!

We've seen the rise of the Forces For Fairness in states like Wisconsin where there is no disguising the unsubtle, in-your-face, anti-democratic, vitriolic, bought-and-paid-for policies of Governor Scott Walker, the Brothers Fitzgerald, ALEC, the Koch Brothers and their yes men and women (even the few remaining Republican moderates - if they still can be called such - who should know better). In the Badger State, tens of thousands took to the streets of Madison and are now actively participating in recall efforts to change the equation and prevent Wisconsin from being turned into a place totally unrecognizable.

Nationally, I see a rising consciousness and an emerging consensus that congressional Republicans have one-upped their Gingrichian colleagues from the 1990s in overreaching on fiscal matters. Voters do not like the draconian cuts being pushed through by House Republicans, the intransigence and obstructionism practiced as a religion by Senate Republicans, the GOP's willingness to hold America's bond rating and our economic recovery hostage by refusing to raise the debt ceiling, and an adherence to a baseless and extremist anti-tax philosophy. In a recent CBS News poll, 71 percent of Americans are opposed to the way the Republicans are approaching the debt limit debate. As well they should be.

Americans are NOT opposed to raising taxes on the wealthy to address our national debt. A recent Reuters poll found that 52 percent of Americans believed that "a combination of spending cuts and tax increases was the best strategy to reduce deficits." Republicans are so constrained by anti-tax pledges that they even believe a repeal of ANY tax cut or the closing of ANY tax loophole (even those for corporate jet owners!) would result in Grover Norquist gagging them with a mouthful of tea bags and ordering them to a permanent political purgatory.

If more Democrats had shown the courage to stand up sooner and establish the terms of the debate, this emerging consensus could have been precipitated. The likes of Vermont's Bernie Sanders have had it right for some time in the call for "shared sacrifice." Others, including President Obama, appear to be catching up to the reality that was evident to Sanders and other Progressives: Congressional Republicans are economic extremists willing to drive the American economy into the ground in order to assuage the Anti-Tax God (don't let it go to your head, Mr. Norquist).

"The Rock and the Hard Place on the Deficit", an op-ed in last Sunday's New York Times, written by Christina Romer, is one of the best articles I've read that puts the substance of this issue into context. For the benefit of you non-Times subscribers, here are some key highlights:

The economic evidence doesn’t support the anti-tax view. Both tax increases and spending cuts will tend to slow the recovery in the near term, but spending cuts will likely slow it more. Over the longer term, sensible tax increases will probably do less damage to economic growth and productivity than cuts in government investment.
...
There is a basic reason why government spending changes probably have a larger short-term impact than tax changes. When a household’s tax bill rises by, say, $100, that household typically pays for part of that increase by reducing its savings. Its spending tends to fall by less than $100. But when the government cuts spending by $100, overall demand goes down by that full amount.
Wealthier households typically pay for more of a tax increase out of savings, and so they reduce their spending less than ordinary households. This implies that tax increases on wealthy households probably have less effect on the economy than those on the poor or the middle class.
All of this argues against any form of fiscal austerity just now. Even some deficit hawks warn that immediate tax increases or spending cuts could push the economy back into recession. Far better to pass a plan that phases in spending cuts or tax increases over time.
But if federal policy makers do decide to reduce the deficit immediately, reducing spending alone would probably be the most damaging to the recovery. Raising taxes for the wealthy would be least likely to reduce overall demand and raise unemployment.

The politics behind this issue is another matter. But it has huge implications for issues like education. Too many educational advocates, policy types, and yes, even elected leaders seem all too willing to accept "The New Normal" -- and even pontificate about it -- as opposed to fight for a new deal and attempt to redefine the debate. President Obama too often appears to allow congressional Republicans to define the terms of the conversation, such as tying long-term deficit reduction to the debt ceiling, as Robert Reich noted over Twitter yesterday.

There's a time and a place for acknowledging political realities and accepting half a loaf. The problem is we've entered the second coming of the Robber Barons where the rich are hoarding their loaves of bread and too many Americans aren't getting a chance to get their hands in the dough at all. Until we address the historic economic inequality in this country and put spending power back in the pockets of working families, there is a tremendous likelihood that the economy will never fully recover. Never. That requires us -- and our elected leaders -- to speak out and act.

The time is now. Reality is what we make it. More of us have got to be willing to step up and say, "Enough!" I've witnessed Democrats and independents get energized in Wisconsin. We need a similar dynamic to take hold nationally. My guess is that it will build in time. But will it be enough to change the equation?

The forces of fiscal lunacy had better listen to the American people now or my guess is that they'll be hearing from the silent majority of sensible Americans at the ballot boxes in 2012 -- and even sooner in states like Wisconsin. If the "Republican Revolution" in the 1990s is any signal, past is prologue.

Affordability and Attainment in Wisconsin Public Higher Education

2011-07-14T13:47:00.000-05:00

As I noted in a prior post, last week the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study (which I co-direct) hosted a statewide conference on the issues of affordability and attainment in Wisconsin Public Higher Education.

The research released became part of this morning's UW Regents discussion (start around 1:03).

In case you missed the event, which was attended by more than 150 leaders from all over Wisconsin, you can watch most of it on Wisconsin Eye. The main presentation of findings is here (see part1).

We will also be posting conference materials on the WSLS website soon.

Playing Politics with Financial Aid

2011-07-12T19:03:00.002-05:00

She just won't quit. With only a few days left in her tenure as chancellor of UW Madison, Biddy Martin issued a press release this afternoon "asking" that the UW System Board of Regents allow Madison to spend $2.3 million of its new tuition hike on need-based financial aid.

She's a "champion" of need-based aid says the press release, and this must be music to the ears of all of us concerned about affordability--right?

Wrong. Sadly, Martin is playing politics yet again and thinking of what's best for her, rather than what's best for all students from Wisconsin's low-income families.

(1) Biddy Martin lobbied hard for new "flexibilities" for Madison this year and she got them. The money from the state arrives in a block grant, which means Madison now makes its own decisions about use of the differential tuition. She doesn't need to "ask" UW System for this-- and she knows it. (And boy, if she doesn't know that ....)

(2) So why didn't she simply just say "this is what the tuition should be used for," instead of issuing a press release directly to the Board of Regents and System President Kevin Reilly? Because then her actions would be exposed for what they are: a demand on the incoming interim chancellor David Ward. Yes, while she runs off into the distance from the mess she's created, Martin has already begun to boss Ward around. I suppose we can't be surprised.

(3) This is her chance to reiterate her claim that she's all about affordability. As noted in an earlier post, Martin says this is her big thing, reflects her values, etc-- and it's why she wants to go to Amherst. Except for this-- Amherst serves about as many students from low-income families as Madison could cram into a single lecture hall. Puhleese.

(4) This proposal-- hike tuition but give away a bunch of it to financial aid--raises eyebrows among thoughtful people about whether we "needed" the hike in the first place. Why not avoid hiking tuition and instead hold tuition flat for everyone? Martin draws on the arguments of some economists here who argue it's most efficient and equitable to charge everyone what they can afford, redistributing funds from wealthier families to needier ones. Again, sounds good in theory. Unfortunately it's just a mess in practice. In the real world, it pits students against students. It also sends an unintended message to state governments that institutions can take care of themselves. Just look at Martin-- has she said even one word about the importance of the Wisconsin Higher Education Grant? Did she provide input to UW System as to how those limited resources could best be spent? I served on the Legislature's Special Committee on the Reform of Financial Aid Programs last summer and the answer is "nope." We heard not one word from Madison's chancellor about her support for the need-based financial aid program that serves ALL students in Wisconsin public higher education. All we hear about is aid for Madison students. Doesn't smell like team spirit to me.

(5) Finally, there's an irony here. Last week economist Doug Harris and I issued a new study on the effectiveness of financial aid in Wisconsin. It demonstrates the need to target funds in order to make sure they are effective. Martin didn't attend the conference (on Madison's campus) where the paper was discussed, she didn't send a note of support for the event, and she hasn't asked to see the paper that was issued and that has been widely covered in the media. Funny decisions, for someone supposedly so supportive of need-based aid.

No, this is pure politics. Worse yet it's playing politics with the hearts and minds of students from low-income families. And those who truly strive to serve them-- all of them.

What I Do With My Time

2011-07-12T10:00:00.001-05:00

The Chronicle of Higher Education is running a story about faculty productivity, questioning the idea that professors aren't earning their salaries by contributing substantially to their students' education. It's accompanied by the schedules of a few faculty at UTexas. I've looked over those schedules, and was struck: none of them even begin to resemble mine. Most don't start til 8 am, and often end by 4 or 5. Most are on two or three committees at most. And most have few grants and few research assistants.

So I figured, why not lay it all out there? Here are my statistics-- you go right ahead and calculate my "value-added."

What the university's numbers show ('10-11 academic year):

Total course sections taught: 2 (the other 2 were 'bought out' with a William T Grant Scholars award)

Total class enrollment: 12 graduate students

Research grants: $1.6 million

Annual salary: $72,000 (9 months)

What the numbers don't show:

(1) Independent studies -- During this past year I did independent studies with 6 graduate students. These don't show up as formal teaching.

(2) Teaching -- I used grant money to facilitate additional resources for my class, including paying for guest speakers from other universities and the cost of licensing software they needed

(3) Advising -- I chaired 4 doctoral committees and 4 master's committees, and served on 4 other committees. I also served as a McNair mentor for an undergraduate student.

(4) Committee work -- I chaired a university-wide committee, served on the steering committee of PROFS, and served on 2 school-wide and 1 department committee.

(5) Research -- I ran a project that funded two full-time staff and 3 postdoctoral fellows and involved at least 10 graduate students and 5 undergraduates at any one time. I met frequently with most of them and monthly with all. In addition, during this past year I published 3 peer-reviewed articles, 2 book chapters, and 2 reports, and initiated 9 new working papers (nearly all co-authored with graduate students).

(6) State service-- During my "summer vacation" in 2010 I served on the Wisconsin Legislature's Special Committee on the Reform of Higher Education Programs and at year's end I hosted a statewide conference for 150 participants on "Affordability and Attainment in Wisconsin Public Higher Education."

(7) National service- I gave more than a dozen talks around the country (ranging from LA to Seattle to NY), served on two standing panels for the U.S. Department of Education and on 3 editorial boards of journals as well as a granting board of a foundation, and participated in higher education policy working groups at several DC think tanks. Thus far in 2011 alone, I have logged 48,000 miles on Delta.

(8) Public engagement -- In addition to this blog, I maintain an active Twitter presence where I comment regularly on issues related to higher education policy at the campus, state, and national levels.

Here's what my schedule looks like:

Monday-Friday: Up by 7 am, checking email for 15-20 minutes before starting commute at 745 am. Usually on a call or two en route to work. In the office in non-stop meetings and teaching from 830 am til 430 pm, rarely taking a break for lunch (ask my students- I hardly ever get to eat). Commute home, spend time with kids and have dinner. Back to work by 8 pm, working until 11 pm.

Saturday/Sunday: An hour of email each morning, 3-5 hours each afternoon, plus 2-3 hours each evening.

In the last year I estimate I worked 67-80 hours/week, and this represented a decline of about 5 hours/week from the prior year. I took no more than a total of a week's vacation.

Did I mention my wonderful husband and children (ages 1 and 4)? Wouldn't be possible without them.

Yes, I earned tenure this spring. And no, I don't expect my workload to decline much if at all.

So, whatever you think of me personally or politically-- am I productive?

Executive Compensation at UW Madison

2011-07-11T22:51:00.001-05:00

Last week UW Madison employees got the details on their pending benefits cuts, which will take a substantial hack at their earnings during the coming years.

At the same time, we also got word that at least two folks at UW Madison wouldn't be feeling the pain--quite the contrary actually. Barry Alvarez has a new deal amounting to $1 million in total compensation (a 20% raise), and Francois Ortalo-Magne was named dean of the biz school with a salary of $410,000. While former dean Mike Knetter's salary was completely paid for by the Albert O. Nicholas endowment, apparently some of the new dean's salary (how much? we aren't told) is covered by UW Madison central administration. This apparently amounts to a 109% increase in 43-year-old Ortalo-Magne's salary. Outgoing chancellor Biddy Martin approved both deals as she left UW Madison.

According to the posted agenda for the upcoming UW System Regents meeting, these two aren't alone...
"Move into closed session to consider personal histories related to the naming of a facility at UW-Madison, as permitted by s. 19.85(1)(f), Wis. Stats.; to consider a compensation adjustment for the UW-Madison athletic director, as permitted by s. 19.85(1)(c), Wis. Stats.; to consider a compensation adjustment for the UW-Madison men’s basketball head coach, as permitted by s. 19.85(1)(c), Wis. Stats.; to consider a compensation adjustment for the UW-Madison women’s hockey head coach, as permitted by s. 19.85(1)(c), Wis. Stats.; to consider salary approval for an interim chancellor for UW-Madison, as permitted by s. 19.85(1)(c), Wis. Stats; to confer with legal counsel regarding pending or potential litigation, as permitted by s. 19.85(1)(g), Wis. Stats.; and to consider annual personnel evaluations, as permitted by Wis. Stats. §19.85(1)(c)."

Raises for not one but three athletics folks, eh? Don't forget, Bret Bielema's salary was increased 47% and Paul Chryst's was jacked 33% back in February while most of us were freezing our butts off protesting at the Capital. And of course tuition is going up yet again-- passing the costs for these luxuries onto all students and their families (hey, do they get a vote?). You can claim "private donors funded this" but (a) it's not entirely true (some comes from Administration) and (b) if donors didn't have to pay for this stuff, don't you think they might CONSIDER funding our educational mission? In other words, a dollar is a dollar-- and a dollar spent here is a dollar that could've been spent there.

I guess the UW Madison administration isn't acquainted with the phrase "shared sacrifice."

NEW EXPERIMENTAL STUDY SUGGESTS FINANCIAL AID ENHANCES COLLEGE SUCCESS AMONG THE MOST UNLIKELY GRADUATES

2011-07-07T08:39:00.002-05:00

The following is a press release issued by UW-Madison this morning

Results from an ongoing random assignment study of a private grant program in Wisconsin indicate that low-income students who receive Pell Grants and are unlikely to finish college get a sizeable boost in college persistence from additional financial aid. The findings suggest that directing aid to serve the neediest students may be the most equitable and cost-effective approach.

Researchers with the Wisconsin Scholars Longitudinal Study (WSLS) at the University of Wisconsin–Madison have been examining the impact of the Fund for Wisconsin Scholars (FFWS) need-based grant program on the educational attainment of its recipients since 2008. FFWS provides $3,500 per year to full-time, federal Pell Grant recipients enrolled at University of Wisconsin System institutions. WSLS researchers have collected survey and interview data on 1,500 students, including 600 grant recipients and a random sample of 900 eligible non-recipients who serve as a control group.

“Our findings suggest that making college more affordable for students who were initially unlikely to succeed in college increased their college persistence rates over the first three years of college by about 17 percentage points,” says Sara Goldrick-Rab, WSLS co-director and associate professor of educational policy studies and sociology.

However, since financial aid programs usually do not explicitly target this particular group of students, prior research has found that the average effects of need-based grants are often modest. “It’s common to focus only on the average effects of financial aid programs, but it’s clear that often policies work better for some people than others,” says Goldrick-Rab. “In this case, the Wisconsin grant really helped some students, didn’t help others, and may even have had adverse consequences for another group.”

While policy discussions about targeting financial aid often focus on financial need, the WSLS researchers also considered challenges faced by first-generation students and those with inadequate academic preparation. According to the study, students without college-educated parents and those with lower test scores were initially much less likely to persist in college, while students with high test scores and whose parents held bachelor’s degrees began with a high probability of finishing. The effects of the additional financial aid provided by the Wisconsin grant were very different for those two groups.

Initial findings indicate the program has a moderate positive impact, on average, on the educational attainment of grant recipients. “Enrollment rates didn’t improve much over three years. But the good news is that some students who were awarded the grant were 28 percent more likely to finish 60 credits over two years, increasing the chances that they will earn a bachelor’s degree on time,” says Doug Harris, WSLS co-director and associate professor of educational policy studies and public affairs.

Given the WSLS is the first random assignment study of a program with a similar structure to the federal Pell Grant, it may have important implications for that program, one of the nation’s largest in the education sector. According to Michael McPherson, President of the Spencer Foundation and noted scholar of higher education policy, “This study is the result of an extraordinary opportunity to bring high-quality experimental research to a vitally important question: the effect of changes in need-based grant aid on outcomes for students already enrolled in college."

Goldrick-Rab, Harris, and co-authors James Benson and Robert Kelchen present and discuss additional findings in a working paper issued by the Institute for Research on Poverty entitled “Conditional Cash Transfers and College Persistence: Evidence from a Randomized Need-Based Grant Program.” It can be downloaded, along with an executive summary, here.

The authors will discuss their results at 8 a.m. on Friday, July 8 in room 159 of the Education Building of the University of Wisconsin-Madison as part of a WSLS-sponsored conference entitled “Affordability and College Attainment in Wisconsin Public Higher Education.” More information is available here.

The WSLS is a collaborative effort among the University of Wisconsin System, the Wisconsin Technical College System, and the Wisconsin Higher Educational Aids Board. The study is also supported by UW-Madison's Wisconsin Center for Educational Research, Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education, and Institute for Research on Poverty. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, the William T. Grant Foundation, and the Spencer Foundation provided funding for the research.

**
For more on this story please see coverage in Inside Higher Ed and the Chronicle of Higher Education, as well as the Wisconsin State Journal

This You Gotta See

2011-07-05T15:14:00.000-05:00

Outgoing UW Madison Chancellor Biddy Martin appeared on Here and Now last night. This is a must-watch. (Boy, she doesn't look happy, eh?)

Watch the full episode. See more Here and Now.

Listening to Chancellor Martin left me with several questions. Among them:

(1) Why is it that she feels she cannot answer hypothetical questions? They are a widely accepted rhetorical strategy for ascertaining one's values-- something many are still struggling to do with Biddy Martin.

(2) What exactly did she mean when she said she wished for a more “flexible, differentiated” discussion of the NBP? In fact, the discussion was quite differentiated, given that it occurred among different groups of people given widely disparate access to data and relevant information.

(3) She suggests that the public authority model made the provision of flexibilities seem like a compromise position. Is she trying to insinuate that public authority was offered as a distraction-- as a way to get the job done?

(4) She speaks of Amherst as being more aligned with her "values" and notes that that college serves a higher percentage of Pell-eligible students than does UW Madison. Is she also aware that the total number of low-income students she will be serving at Amherst is less than 400 (given undergraduate enrollment of about 1,700) compared to just under 7,000 at UW-Madison?

(5) She said she added 80 new faculty lines after 10 years of cuts in the number of faculty members in response to student needs. How are we to juxtapose this with the evidence that the number of faculty at UW-Madison was basically steady from the mid-90s through the first decade of the new century? The decline occurred in the early 1990s and was the reversal of a spike in faculty hiring in the late 1980s. There's little evidence that the most cost-effective solution to the problem of undergraduate course access was to hire more professors.

(6) She says that the research infrastructure has begun to be re-organized, that is "not complete, but we got it started." Does she recall the faculty uprising over the Grad School restructuring, and does she think it still ought to move forward as planned?

(7) The need for boards to oversee individual campuses in the UW System, she says, is "to help them generate revenue.” What, I wonder, is the reason why people (alumni) are only willing to support their institutions if they have leadership positions on boards? What is it they feel they need to control?

Yes, I too wish I could have a week without thinking about Biddy Martin and the issues she's raising. Unfortunately, she may be on her way out, but we are stuck with Scott Walker and "his" big ideas.

What the Future Holds

2011-07-04T19:34:00.001-05:00

Sociologists of education love longitudinal studies since they allow us to get a sense of how people's lives unfold over time as they engage with schools and society. But man, they take forever to produce data! We have to wait, and wait, and wait for kids to age, then for data to be assembled, made available, etc.

So I get kinda psyched when NCES issues a newsflash with the latest report from one of its longitudinal studies. The most recent is not even longitudinal--yet. It's about fall 2009 9th graders, who form the basis for the High School Longitudinal Study of 2009. The results are based on a nationally representative sample of 20,000 9th graders attending 944 high schools.

In a sense, this is decent way to examine what's coming down the pike towards the nation's colleges and universities. Prior research clearly demonstrates that the road to college entrance requires a surefooted start in 9th grade. So how do things look now?

No doubt about it, these 9th graders are ambitious. Fully 73% expect to attain more than a high school degree (another 22% aren't sure what they will do). This isn't surprising, as John Reynolds, Barbara Schneider and others have been describing an upward trajectory in college ambitions for quite some time. Consistent with national trends, girls expect to go further than boys -- 44% of 9th grade girls said they would earn a graduate degree, compared to 35% of 9th grade boys. Sadly, 27% of students in the bottom fifth of the socioeconomic distribution didn't expect to attend any college, compared to just 3% of those in the top 5th. A similar proportion of those in the bottom 5th planned to attend graduate school, compared to 56% of those in the top 5th.

Some kids are also pretty realistic. NCES administered a test of algebra achievement, and 39% of those scoring in the bottom quintile don't expect to go beyond high school. Nearly one in four said they "don't know" what their educational expectations are. In comparison, just 14% of students in the top quintile on that test weren't sure of what would happen after high school, and 95% expected to go on to college. But oddly enough, almost 25% of students who expect to finish college and/or go to graduate school hadn't even made it as far as Algebra I by 9th grade, and 29% weren't taking any science.

And this time NCES asked a pretty cool question about the probability that students will be able to finish college: "Whatever your plans, do you think you have the ability to complete a Bachelor’s degree?" What amazes me is that the percent of students who responded that they would "definitely" complete college didn't exceed 75% for any of the subgroups analyzed-- at best, 75% of 9th graders who expected to complete graduate school were definitely certain of their ability to complete college. That may indicate that they've internalized a fair bit of the world's uncertainty. Especially the boys--heck, 34% of these 9th grade boys couldn't identify what occupation they'd like to be working in at age 30.

These kids have a long road ahead of them- I only hope that when they reach higher education, our colleges are ready to meet their needs.

**The next HLS wave is 2012-- when most of the students will be 11th graders. We'll see what happens!

Shining (a little) Light on Net Price

2011-06-30T20:39:00.001-05:00

I must admit, I got a little excited when I (virtually) opened the Chronicle this morning and saw that the Department of Education had published its own personal scarlet letter list of the colleges and universities charging the highest net price. Finally, the government did what government can do best-- draw our attention to important national trends that make our local (personal) problems into national (public) ones.

I was also psyched about the list because it's another step towards helping change the deeply entrenched public perception that the sticker price listed by colleges is the actual price people pay. It's not-- since almost everyone get some kind of discount-- but that fact is so little known that some of us are pretty convinced that sticker shock exerts effects on the decisions made by families with little information.

But as I read about this list, I deflated. First of all, it's clearly obtuse. It's got 54 lists made up of 6 variables and 9 sectors. 54 lists. Come on...most of this country still thinks USA Today is a good, thorough read. And the thing is, some of the smarter government guys know it's too much-- but hey, Congress said so, so here we are (look at the quote by professor and NCES chief honcho Jack Buckley, who is far too polite when he says "this definition of net price is far from perfect." If only I were so diplomatic...).

There we are--getting it done, but not getting it done right.

Moreover, in talking about the power of the list, some officials clearly want to take this too far, suggesting the list tells us something about institutional "performance." Um, no-- not at all. Net price tells us nothing about the impact the institution has on students--only about the price it charges.

All that to say-- this is a decent step in the right direction but we can and must do more. This is prime time for higher education, we've got a growing cadre of smart folks paying attention to the national problems of affordability and degree completion and we need to develop metrics that deliver the kind of information parents and students can use (sorry, I refuse to call people "consumers") in a manner in which those who need it most can find it accessible. How about tweeting the highlights of the list for starters? Arne? David? Jack? You up for it?

Postscript: More coverage of this story, including a quote from me, here on Marketplace on NPR.

Fit to Lead

2011-06-29T15:30:00.000-05:00

UW-Madison has a new interim chancellor and it's a person of great integrity, intellect, and experience. David Ward has led Madison before, and is exactly the right kind of person to lead us through the current high waters.

My opinion of David is based on many things, including:

-- His decision to found the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education with gifts he received when completing his term as chancellor. This was an effort to let more flowers bloom in higher education research and policy, and it led to the creation of several faculty lines including one I occupy.

-- His leadership on the Board of the Fund for Wisconsin Scholars, the state's largest private need-based financial aid program. Again, in full disclosure, it's the program I have spent the last three years studying. I've watched David interact on this board, asking tough questions of us researchers, and offer sage advice. He's fully capable of making thoughtful decisions informed by rigorous evidence.

-- His prior term as Chancellor of UW-Madison, during which time he showed great respect for shared governance and solid choices in selecting staff.

-- His work as president of the American Council on Education.

This, ladies and gents, is the power of a System. President Kevin Reilly has installed just the kind of leader we need at this moment, someone who has not been embroiled in rancorous campus politics, and can come and steer us onto calmer seas.

Trust me, given their druthers, it's not whom "Bascom" would've appointed.

Rock on.

Wake Up and Smell Scott Walker's Plans for UW-Madison

2011-06-28T22:24:00.000-05:00

Biddy Martin is moving on to Amherst. Sadly, UW Madison is stuck with the Martin/Walker, Walker/Martin plan for public authority-- and Scott Walker still seems hell-bent on pushing for it.

Make no mistake about it, this fight ain't over. Rest up this summer, and while you're recuperating, please do some reading on what Walker and his ALEC cronies think is "best" for public higher education. That is, privatize the heck out of it.

That's the plan folks, mark my words. If you thought this was Biddy's bright idea, think again. In her effort to save us from financial disaster, she walked us right into the lion's den. That's the "hand we were dealt" of course, a "reality" handknit for us by the corporate elites determined to ensure that big business rules, no matter what the cost to the working people of Wisconsin.

Get ready. We have work to do. RECALL WALKER. Save Wisconsin public higher education.

Making Our Investments Count

2011-06-23T13:30:00.000-05:00

In a few weeks my research team will release findings from our ongoing study of need-based financial aid, as we host a conference on Affordability and Attainment in Wisconsin Public Higher Education. Preparing for this event has given me the chance to think more about the things colleges and universities might do to maximize the substantial investments federal and state governments--and taxpayers--make in college students.

In particular, I propose that institutions begin to leverage their existing resources-- namely, their faculty-- to support the neediest students, those who enter with a low probability of success. While some might argue those students simply shouldn't be admitted, I take a different stance: given the labor market returns to college degrees and the widespread ambitions for college, it's incumbent upon higher education institutions to get "student-ready" -- rather than simply demanding that students get "college-ready."

I hope to begin writing about this concept of "student-ready" colleges from time to time over the coming months, but let's start with two ideas for how it could work.

(1) The Chronicle of Higher Education today highlights a program that assigned retired faculty to mentor first-generation students. Love this-- it's a win-win for all involved. Students without college-educated parents gain the benefits of having a college-educated "grandparent" of sorts who has not only attended but succeeded in college and worked at one!

(2) Here's an idea of my own. Policymakers should experiment with a new program to provide colleges and universities with incentives to place Pell Grant recipients in contact with faculty. Student-faculty interactions have been shown to enhance retention rates, and they are less common among low-income, first-generation students. A work-study type program could be a starting approach, but typical work-study jobs are located in cafeterias and libraries where students cannot form new connections with their educators. This approach should enhance the effectiveness of financial aid by supplementing it with increased faculty interaction. The federal government could begin with a trial effort using funds from the Trade Adjustment Assistance Act. The effort should be rigorously evaluated and used to inform future revisions of financial aid programs.

For sure, many faculty are overworked as it is. These kinds of things won't work everywhere and under all conditions. But let's say we tried them at four-year universities first. I'm willing to bet that even with uneven quality of mentoring, the effects on some students would be large enough as to raise persistence rates. The mentors will also benefit, and perhaps become advocates for these students and the programs that serve them. Student contact reminds us why we got into this biz in the first place, energizes us, and grounds us. We should be urged and rewarded for focusing that contact where it's most needed.

Things That Make You Go Hmmmm...

2011-06-16T16:11:00.000-05:00

Twitter is such an amazing resource. For those following Chancellor Biddy Martin's departure from the University, I thought you might enjoy some of these recent tweets about her statements at Amherst today.

Marx: "Welcome to Amherst, @Biddy_Martin." Another standing ovation.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyAmherstCollege
AmherstCollege

Martin: "I just feel the urge to get here and find out who all of you are."less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyAmherstCollege
AmherstCollege

Martin: "I think people exaggerate the difference between private and public institutions, and even small and large institutions."less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyAmherstCollege
AmherstCollege

Martin: "I need first to learn from the faculty ... staff ... students" about college's challenges and aspirations.less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyAmherstCollege
AmherstCollege

Martin: "Every part of the community is critical to the success of the community."less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyAmherstCollege
AmherstCollege

Martin: "Things can always be made better, no matter how great they are. ... But we'll want to do that together."less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyAmherstCollege
AmherstCollege

Martin: "You can count on me always to want to discuss things."less than a minute ago via web Favorite Retweet ReplyAmherstCollege
AmherstCollege

Turn, Turn, Turn

2011-06-15T16:15:00.006-05:00

I've been asked by some readers for my thoughts on the resignation of Chancellor Biddy Martin, and her pending move to Amherst College.

My general sense is this: Martin's making the move that is right for her. There is a place and time for everything, and she must've had a sense that her time here might not last much longer when she entered the search at Amherst last fall. She had more knowledge of the full dynamics at play in these Wisconsin debates than anyone, since she was allowed into more conversations with more players. She was looking ahead.

The job at Amherst is an enviable one. The past-president, Tony Marx, is one of the most thoughtful leaders of higher education in the nation. His efforts at value-driven decision-making have challenged traditions--traditions that favor institutional interests over student and state interests. I am especially impressed by his efforts to promote socioeconomic diversity by not only offering enormous amounts of financial aid but also practicing class-based affirmative action. Many institutions do only the former but not the latter since it's the latter that makes the distribution of aid much more expensive. He used the advantages that come with being at an elite private institution to challenge the privileges the elites try to keep for themselves. Those are big shoes to fill.

Looking to the future I fervently hope that the search for a new UW-Madison chancellor will identify someone who thinks about both the institutional and student interests (and by students I mean all potential students not only those currently or previously enrolled) as well as the state's interests, and how those often conflict. I hope we will be led by someone who understands and is fully committed to the unique values, qualities, and challenges facing public higher education-- and who embraces its difficulties as opportunities, rather than resenting them. Public institutions should be recognized for the uncommon goods that they are, rather than treated like a dying breed that cannot be saved.

On Wisconsin!

Guest Blog: The Trouble with Transfer Articulation Policies

2011-06-11T07:00:00.002-05:00

Today's blog is authored by Josipa Roksa, assistant professor at the University of Virginia

Once again, transfer articulation policies are in the news, being touted as a viable solution to the problem of low transfer rates between 2-year and 4-year colleges.

Articulation policies sound like a good idea, but there are a few pieces of empirical evidence that should give us pause. Consider the following questions:

(1) Do states with articulation policies (and particularly those with more comprehensive articulation policies) have higher transfer rates?

According to at least three recent studies, the answer is no.

For example, see:
Gregory M. Anderson, Jeffrey C. Sun, and Mariana Alfonso Anderson, “Effectiveness of Statewide Articulation Agreements on the Probability of Transfer: A Preliminary Policy Analysis” The Review of Higher Education, 29 no 3 (2006).

Betheny Gross and Dan Goldhaber, “Community College Transfer and Articulation Policies: Looking Beneath the Surface.” Working paper # 2009_1R. University of Washington Bothell: Center on Reinventing Public Education (April 2009)

Josipa Roksa, “Building Bridges for Student Success: Are Higher Education Articulation Policies Effective?,” Teachers College Record 111 (2009).

(2) Do states with articulation policies have higher bachelor’s degree completion rates, shorter time-to-degree, and/or less “wasted” credits among their transfer students?

The answer, again, is no.

See:
Josipa Roksa, and Bruce Keith,“Credits, Time, and Attainment: Articulation Policies and Success after Transfer,” Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis 30 (2008).

(3) How many credits do four-year entrants earn on their path toward a bachelor’s degree?

Community college transfers are not the only ones earning 140 credits. A recent report noted that students who transferred from community colleges to the California State University (CSU) system graduated with an average of 141 credits. And how many credits did students who began in the CSU system graduate with? 142!! The situation is only slightly better in Florida: Associate of Arts (AA) transfers completed 137 credits before graduation while native four-year students averaged approximately 133 credits. Similar patterns are observed in national data: students starting in four-year institutions (and even those who attend only one four-year institution) earn more (and often many more) than 120 credits.

In conclusion: yes, low transfer rates are a problem, but there is no empirical evidence to suggest that articulation policies are the solution. This does not mean that we should not work on streamlining credit accumulation, or that the transfer process should not be more transparent and consistent. But it does mean that relying on articulation policies to increase bachelor’s degree attainment or improve efficiency in higher education is more hopeful than realistic.

A Few Thoughts on Faculty Productivity

2011-06-10T08:52:00.001-05:00

Richard Vedder isn't an easy guy to get along with, but he's good at one thing: pushing the agenda, sometimes in students' best interests.

I totally disagree with the guy when it comes to financial aid-- there's no way it's making students lazy on average, or causing them to party. On the other hand, he asks some good questions about our college-for-all movement that offers no alternatives for students who don't want to go to college right away, and he also raises good questions about institutional resistance to change.

In his latest piece, he takes on faculty. Boo-hiss, I know... The guy has the nerve to suggest that on average we don't teach enough. His analysis comes from Texas A&M (so popular these days, eh?) and finds a “sharp disparity in the teaching loads for individual faculty members” at UT. Strikingly, they find that the top 20 percent of “faculty with respect to teaching loads teaches 57% of all student credit hours” while the bottom 20 percent teach “only 2% of all student credit hours.”

His point, while overly aggressive (heck, I know something about that), is mainly that we established a way of putting students and teachers together a long, long time ago-- and since then colleges and universities have tried to save money on that approach by shifting to a part-time contingent workforce (reducing average teaching load), allowing more and more professors to buy out of teaching with grant money, and keeping class sizes about the same even while enrollments expanded dramatically and technology made other solutions possible.

When Richard says it, people freak out. A rebuttal from a Texas A&M political science professor tries to bat down the accusations. But he seems to miss the point of Vedder's approach, which is to say that every decision about staffing matters-- so we should lump together faculty in different categories given that theoretically the distributions could be changed. Case in point: "First, much of the skew in teaching duties observed by the CCAP report authors is simply a function of the fact that UT employs a large number of part-time faculty." Well, yes, but that's part of the point-- and a big problem. Universities do that NOT to serve students better but to save money on benefits. PT faculty are perfectly good at teaching but are overworked and underpaid so don't have time for out-of-classroom interaction. His second point, that there's a potential consequence for education quality is right, in theory, yet he cites not a single study showing that large class sizes are associated with diminish instructional quality in higher education. And that's because he can't-- such studies don't exist. Doug Harris and I covered this at length in our La Follette working paper released last year. I do agree that there should be adjustments by field, but this needs to be carefully done because decisions about offering fields with lower enrollments are also strategic decisions and institutions have to be accountable for them. I'm not saying don't offer them, but you can probably only do it if you high-demand fields are very productive. Finally, I see nothing about the use of our resistance to technology, especially blended learning, about faculty in the professor's rebuttal. Technology breaks the iron triangle between access, quality, and costs -- it makes it more possible to offer a high-quality lower cost accessible education. I'm on-board with that and it may be one thing that sets me apart from most other professors.

All that said, Vedder's analysis is far from perfect. It doesn't introduce the issue of impacts on students in any rigorous way. It doesn't take on strongly enough the political and economic reasons why part-time labor is being exploited across higher education. It doesn't question a business-style approach to measuring higher education "outputs." And it doesn't take seriously the need for faculty to LEAD this discussion so that reforms stand a chance of really being implemented.

I've long wondered why I teach today in approximately the same way my colleagues did a half-century ago. Why stand in front of classrooms of 30-50 undergraduates several times a week, rather than meeting with 300 of them twice a month and the rest of the time online? Some will inevitably say that will produce lower-quality instruction but they have nothing to point to-- studies of blended learning are strongly suggestive of positive impacts. Forget online-only, I'm not talking about online only and neither are most proponents of bringing technological advances into university teaching.

And let's get real: right now there are hundreds of professors who have to cancel classes in order to attend conferences, meetings, and such. They resent the requirement to be in-person all the time to teach, when nothing else in their lives requires that anymore. Some of them never reschedule, others hold makeup classes, and some use Skype to teach. The latter is a very low-tech approach and it's used because we're not given other options. What if we were? What if faculty could teach more students, more flexibly, and even with better pedagogy (for example by getting more regular feedback on student performance, rapidly, to use in our teaching) -- and this, together, helped preserve public investment in higher education because it demonstrated productivity gains? Why not?

I suspect part of the reason "why not" is because when you hear "online" you think "for-profit" or "business." When you hear "big classes" you think "community college." When you hear "improved pedagogy" you think "someone's going to tell me how to teach?" And when you hear "productivity" you think "neoliberalism, market-driven education." I know, I sometimes do too.

This is a problem-- professors are thoughtful, careful people and it's essential we not have knee-jerk reactions to ideas that aren't yet being shoved down our throats in propaganda-spun-out policy proposals. This is one we can help shape and get in front of, and make it our own. Or, we can wait until the Republicans bring it to us, and tell us what to do.

PS. One more thing. Richard's claims that faculty can do more because he's done more--juggling research and teaching--that's just plain silly. There's been a major change in the faculty workforce--it's feminized. Something I know for sure-- Richard never juggled teaching, research, breastfeeding, and taking care of small kids. We can and should do more, but there's no reason to base the model on Richard Vedder's style.

Community Colleges and Press

2011-06-09T13:45:00.002-05:00

To the editor of Education Week:

In the June 9 article by Caralee Adams titled "Popularity Offers Challenges for Community Colleges." I am quoted in a manner that implies significant disrespect for the work of community colleges. While Ms. Adams used my words verbatim, they were taken out of context and this --unintentionally--altered their meaning.

I shared in the effort to craft and pass the American Graduation Initiative intended to support the efforts of community colleges to serve students from all walks of life. When the AGI failed to become law, it meant that community colleges had been drawn into the public eye but not given the financial resources they needed to improve their outcomes. Their current outcomes became highly visible, and left some with the false impression they were attributable to a lack of will on the part of the colleges, rather than a lack of resources.

I explained this to Caralee, and in particular I said the colleges had both the "will and commitment" to succeed. I also noted that I felt partially responsible for not delivering more support to them. Those pieces were paraphrased due to space constraints, but they were essential.

My long track record of analyzing and explaining the challenges facing community colleges stands on its own. They have motivation--what they need now is money and technical assistance. I fully support efforts to deliver on the promise of the AGI.

Sara Goldrick-Rab

Biddy Martin's Next Bold Vision

2011-06-05T22:34:00.000-05:00

Chancellor Biddy Martin of the University of Wisconsin-Madison enjoys making bold moves. Here are some thoughts on what those next moves could be.

Since his election, Scott Walker has successfully divided the constituencies supporting public education across Wisconsin. Advocates for poor children who see charter schools as the best option are attacking public school teachers who struggle to feed their families while being painted as living lifestyles of the welfare "queens." Proponents of publicly-supported research universities are attempting to preserve the rights of UW-Madison by denigrating the work of other UW institutions. By distracting supporters of public higher education with a divisive "public authority" model for UW-Madison, Walker convinced most administrators, faculty, staff, and students at that school to fight against their brethren, rather than against his $250 million cut.

Regardless of her intentions, Chancellor Martin participated in Walker's charade. Great ugliness has resulted, and I think she's well-aware of that. For example, last week, even as the media declared the death of public authority, the Badger Advocates issued a press release that castigated UW System President Kevin Reilly and humiliated everyone not at UW-Madison. While the Badger Advocates consistently claim to represent the Chancellor--above and beyond the institution-- even she couldn't take it anymore, attempting to distance herself from their work.

That was a good start. Much more is needed. The past several months have illuminated some extremely elitist, ugly attitudes among Madison's employees, students, and alumni. To be clear, I am not attacking students here-- indeed, I feel we are collectively responsible for their actions. I am extremely concerned, however, by Martin's expressions of uniform support for alumni involvement in Madison when alumni express opinions like this one, written by Frank Rojas (UW, '74) in the comments of a national higher education online newspaper:

"Madison gets more outside research funding in one day than than Oshkosh gets in a year. It raises more donations in a day than Oshkosh does in a year. Madison would be happy to see the other schools grow and improve as it would take away some of the heat it now gets over admissions/rejections of instate kids. But to date none has shown much ability or vision in that area. There is no College of New Jersey or William and Mary equivalent in Wisconsin. Madison endorses similar freedoms from state regs for the other campuses. But it does not want to be held back by the limits of the lowest common denominator thinking either."

Frank has written to me and about me since this debate began, accusing me of "hateful" behavior towards UW-Madison. Nothing could be further from the truth. I have worked tirelessly to preserve the best of UW-Madison -- its unselfish leadership and opportunities it provides all of Wisconsin. I have worked to defend UW-Madison from global forces that aim to corrupt it-- a market-driven vision that is antithetical to its populist roots, a neoliberal approach that prioritizes pragmatism over values, a narrow definition of excellence that excludes others' accomplishments. I honor UW-Madison, the institution. That is why I fight efforts to distance it from the rest of UW System -- a move that would transform it from something unique and wonderful, to something common and truly mediocre.

Biddy's bold step should be to ensure that all of UW-Madison understands her lesson learned from the past six months: divided we fall. She should work to instill a sense of collective efficacy, and teach her employees and staff to empathize with the struggles facing all of Wisconsin. She should endeavor to educate UW alumni about the institution's values, lest they be away far too long and simply forget.

I know Biddy can do this. I recently watched a wonderful video of her during days at Cornell, where she spoke of rejecting the corrupting influence of college rankings that create a "winner-take-all" society, and focused on "questions of value" for the future of higher education. She talked of the "threats to meritocracy" that stem from "public resistance to paying the taxes it would require to keep pace with the costs of higher education and research." That is the Biddy Martin we needed to fight Scott Walker's cuts.

That Biddy Martin also talked about something crucial when she said, "I think that there is a kind of lack of attention to interiority generally, by which I mean the relationship we have to ourselves, and I believe that education is letting us all down when it comes to that. I am not talking about interiority in the form of naval-gazing or individualism in the sense of some sort of asocial obsession, but I am talking about the value of awareness and individuality, the development of individuality and the development of the ability to integrate, what we take in and what we establish as our own. I think we owe it to our students to model those things. They require engaging with the world and with other people, but they also require that each of us engage with the person that we are in the process of becoming, and that we give our students the tools to engage with themselves as the people that they are becoming to. It is a combination then of wired connectivity and super-fast pace on the one hand, which our students require of us and we require of ourselves, but also the ability to take space and time in the midst of the gold rush for contemplation and reflection."

The Biddy Martin of that video is capable of repairing the immense damage inflicted by the push for public authority. She is capable of standing up to alumni who wish to promote a UW-Madison that views the UW-Oshkoshes of the world as part of the "lowest common denominator." She is capable of reaching the hearts and minds of students who mistakenly believe they are at UW-Madison because they deserve it more than other people in the state.

That's the Biddy Martin I look forward to meeting this fall.

The Saddest Tweet of Them All

2011-05-30T21:17:00.004-05:00

Updated May 30, 2011--and again June 1

I've been watching as UW Madison moves into the post-NBP phase of life (wait, there is life after NBP?). In particularly, I'm finding the (re)framing of recent events by NBP proponents both fascinating, and disturbing.

Spin is, to some degree, expected. We can't blame Chancellor Martin for trying to save face, or Governor Walker for that matter.

What I didn't expect, and what upsets me most, is the self-righteousness evident in those who proclaim "we accomplished something here." Something, they claim, UW System did not. Could not. Would not.

Sad and short-sighted, perhaps, but not surprising. On the other hand, a recent tweet from a Madison student stopped me in my tracks. On Saturday he wrote, "No #UWNBP. Disappointing. Looks like we have to be tied to the poor decisions #UWSystem makes." Surprised at his statement, I responded, "Ever been to System? Ever met anyone there? Why do you follow blindly what u r told? #UWNBP #UWSystem." To which he replied "It's fun to make assumptions."

Well, that's sorta what I figured-- the majority of people claiming failure on the part of UW System and lauding the achievements of Chancellor Martin have never interacted with System. It's not that System is perfect -- far from it. But by degrading the capabilities of the governing body of our sister institutions, one casts dispersions on the quality of education received by other students. It's incredibly unproductive. It's also unfair. Of course, maybe people just don't care. I worried about that, so I wrote: "Fun, but destructive to students at other universities."

A moment later, I got a reply: "It isn't my job to be concerned with students at other universities." And a few minutes after that, he added: "It was my job to maximize my education and the value of this university, if that benefits other universities too, great!"

It was like a punch in the gut, as I suddenly realized that the whole UWNBP situation is but a microcosm of the broader threat to public education.

Too many of our fellow Americans are downright compassionless.

As David Berliner wrote in The Manufactured Crisis, "true improvements in public education will not come about unless they are based on compassion...If we structure our public school system so that large groups of students are not provided equitable education, we create a host of problems....In Lincoln's words, it has always been clear that effective reform of education must begin 'with charity for all.'"

None other than David Brooks makes a similar statement in today's New York Times, where he loudly admonishes college graduates "It's not about you." The big mistake society has made is giving undergraduates the impression the goal in life is to find themselves. Not hardly. The goal is to "lose yourself", Brooks explain, by "look[ing] outside and find[ing] a problem, which summons [your] life."

I guess we can't really blame the students. After all, they are simply following the example set by people like the alumni backing The Badger Advocates. Given that I've already publicly called them "goons" I suppose it's worth the risk to go one step further and say straight up that their latest press release reveals them as plain ol' liars. Yes, I said that. They are lying. Take a look. According to their revised version of reality, Chancellor Martin spent the last year attempting to "educate" the state about the need for the New Badger Partnership (if by educate you mean tell people the version of the facts you prefer, alrighty then), working "closely and diligently" with the Legislature while UW System "fought the proposal," worked "hastily," opposed "real reform," and basically did whatever was possible to undermine the thoughtful, hard work of Martin. "And although Martin worked tirelessly on the NBP, at the end of the year-long tour, she is respectful and considerate of the Joint Finance Committee and the Legislature’s desire to draft their own plan for UW-Madison and the system." There are no words for the extent to which this is a lie, other than COME ON! (I'm not alone in saying this.) The only truth in the whole darned thing is that Martin was on a "year-long tour."

We have been sold a bill of goods-- one that paints UW Madison into a corner as an elitist, know-it-all flagship that bears no resemblance to the rest of the state. We at UW Madison should be furious that anyone--anyone--is spending money "on our behalf" to support the kinds of work The Badger Advocates are doing. That they are doing it at the behest of our leader is even more appalling. At this point, they are more than undermining our credibility with the Legislature, in fact they threaten to further smear the good name of Madison in the hearts and minds of the rest of Wisconsin. Not only have they -- and she-- not given up on Public Authority, they are pushing harder.

This state faces massive inequities in the provision of both k-12 and higher education. If we at UW-Madison cannot teach our undergraduates compassion for their fellow undergraduates-- at all public institutions throughout the state-- then we are doomed to a competitive race to the bottom. If the only route they can see to helping others is by helping themselves, we have not done our jobs.

That was the lesson I got from Twitter that day. We have failed to educate. We must do more.