Tag Archive: president


Obama proposes money for math, science education (Reuters)

Filed Under: News, Tech by Thomas Botelho — Comments Off
February 7, 2012

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – President Barack Obama will seek $80 million in new funding for a program to boost science and math education in U.S. schools, the White House said on Tuesday.

Obama, who is running for re-election in November at a time when the economy is voters' top concern, has sought to emphasize math and science education as one of the keys to a robust economic recovery.

Many U.S. business leaders have complained that a shortage of workers with strong math and science skills has forced them to look abroad.

Obama, who is hosting a science fair at the White House, plans to announce the new initiative at the event.

The aim is to train 100,000 teachers who would be able to share their expertise in science, technology, engineering and math with 1 million additional students over the next decade.

Obama will formally unveil the request in his proposed budget for fiscal year 2013 that he will present on February 13.

The request requires approval from Congress.

In addition to the $80 million in government funds Obama is proposing, philanthropic organizations and private companies have committed to providing $22 million, the White House said.

Organizations involved in the effort include the Carnegie Corporation of New York, Google, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Freeport-McMoRan and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation.

(Reporting By Caren Bohan; Editing by Sandra Maler)

Obama proposes money for math, science education
(Reuters)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,
Permalink

Brown U. student uncovers lost Malcolm X speech (AP)

Filed Under: News by Thomas Botelho — Comments Off
February 5, 2012

PROVIDENCE, R.I. – The recording was forgotten, and so, too, was the odd twist of history that brought together Malcolm X and a bespectacled Ivy Leaguer fated to become one of America’s top diplomats.

The audiotape of Malcolm X’s 1961 address in Providence might never have surfaced at all if 22-year-old Brown University student Malcolm Burnley hadn’t stumbled across a reference to it in an old student newspaper. He found the recording of the little-remembered visit gathering dust in the university archives.

“No one had listened to this in 50 years,” Burnley told The Associated Press. “There aren’t many recordings of him before 1962. And this is a unique speech — it’s not like others he had given before.”

In the May 11, 1961 speech delivered to a mostly white audience of students and some residents, Malcolm X combines blistering humor and reason to argue that blacks should not look to integrate into white society but instead must forge their own identities and culture.

At the time, Malcolm X, 35, was a loyal supporter of the black separatist movement Nation of Islam. He would be assassinated four years later after leaving the group and crafting his own more global, spiritual ideology.

The legacy of slavery and racism, he told the crowd of 800, “has made the 20 million black people in this country a dead people. Dead economically, dead mentally, dead spiritually. Dead morally and otherwise. Integration will not bring a man back from the grave.”

The rediscovery of the speech could be the whole story. But Burnley found the young students in the crowd that night proved to be just as fascinating.

Malcolm X was prompted to come to Brown by an article about the growing Black Muslim movement published in the Brown Daily Herald. The article by Katharine Pierce, a young student at Pembroke College, then the women’s college at Brown, was first written for a religious studies class. It caught the eye of the student paper’s editor, Richard Holbrooke.

Holbrooke would become a leading American diplomat, serving as U.S. Ambassador to Germany soon after that nation’s reunification, ambassador to the United Nations and President Obama’s special adviser on Pakistan and Afghanistan before his death in 2010 at age 69.

But in 1961 Holbrooke was 20, and eager to use the student newspaper to examine race relations — an unusual interest on an Ivy League campus with only a handful of black students.

Pierce’s article ran in the newspaper’s magazine and made her the first woman whose name was featured on the newspaper’s masthead.

Somehow, the article made its way to Malcolm X. His staff and Holbrooke worked out details of the visit weeks in advance. Campus officials were wary: Malcolm X had been banned from the University of California-Berkeley and Queens College in New York.

Tickets — 50 cents — for the Brown speech sold quickly. About 800 people filled the venue, the 19th-century, Romanesque Sayles Hall, meant to hold about 500.

Pierce introduced Malcolm X and recalls him vividly.

“He came surrounded by a security detail,” she recalls. “You got the sense — this is an important person. He was handsome, absolutely charismatic. I was just bewildered that my class paper could have led to something like this.”

In his speech, Malcolm X outlined Black Muslims’ beliefs and argued that black Americans cannot wait for white Americans to offer them equality.

“No, we are not anti-white,” he said. “But we don’t have time for the white man. The white man is on top already, the white man is the boss already… He has first-class citizenship already. So you are wasting your time talking to the white man. We are working on our own people.”

Richard Nurse, one of three black students in his Brown University class in 1961, came to the speech with his mind made up against Malcolm X.

“I very strongly believed in integration,” Nurse said in a telephone interview from his New Jersey home. “These were ideas I had accepted, adopted. Here I was at this Ivy League university. But he confounded me a little bit. I had never heard a black man in public speak as forcefully as Malcolm X did that night. It was cataclysmic.”

Nurse, now 72 and retired from teaching at Rutgers University, said the speech didn’t cause him to change his views. But he said he understood Malcolm X’s message better years later when, in the U.S. Army, he was barred from all-white USO clubs and movie theaters in the South.

“Now things have changed to the point where that kind of notion (separatism) is no longer even considered,” he said.

Pierce said the speech exposed her and other students in the audience to a different side of America. She gives Holbrooke credit for bringing Malcolm X to campus.

Holbrooke joined the foreign service after graduation and was posted to Vietnam in 1962. He visited Pierce in Hong Kong, where she worked as a teacher. She went on to work on international refugee projects and at Yale University and now creates computer training programs.

She said she wasn’t surprised when Holbrooke became the diplomat presidents dispatched to hotspots like Bosnia and Afghanistan.

“He was a very good friend,” she said of Holbrooke. “I was saddened to hear of his death, sad for myself and sad for the world.”

The recording of the address is in pristine condition. Pierce obtained the tape after the event — she isn’t sure who made the recording — and it sat in a box of mementos for years before she mailed it to the university archives.

Burnley has had the tape digitized and plans to air excerpts next week at an event hosted by the Rhode Island Black Heritage Association.

Lehigh University professor Saladin Ambar, who is working on a book about Malcolm X’s 1964 visit to Oxford University, said any new recording of him is reason to celebrate.

“Malcolm’s best speeches, they’re just gone,” he said. “He’s not nearly as well-documented as he should be, when you consider his power as an orator.”

Brown U. student uncovers lost Malcolm X speech
(AP)

Tags: , , , , , , , ,
Permalink

Analysis: Some colleges cut tuition, hasten graduation (Reuters)

Filed Under: News by Thomas Botelho — Comments Off
February 3, 2012

(Reuters) – Even before President Barack Obama announced plans last month to push colleges to improve affordability, a number of schools beat him to the punch by lowering tuition and helping students graduate in fewer semesters.

These schools — typically small private colleges like University of Charleston, Cabrini College and Midland University that lack the cachet of top-tier colleges and compete with less expensive state schools — are bucking the widespread trend of increasing costs. In the last year, a few have cut tuition by as much as 20 percent. Others promise that students will earn their degree in four years or the college will pick up the cost of additional coursework.

While there's no hard data, dozens of schools already have cut costs or implemented graduation guarantees. More such initiatives are expected to be announced this spring.

Such programs have clearly intrigued students and parents, but skeptics fear they may have a negative impact on the quality of education.

Promising a cheaper, quicker education will “invite institutions to take shortcuts,” says Richard Arum, a sociology and education professor at New York University. The temptation, he said, would be to make courses less rigorous, hire fewer top-notch faculty and pack more students into each class. “If you don't also focus on quality, you risk contributing to this downward spiral in the quality of undergraduate education,” Arum says.

Arum adds that the most elite private schools are not rolling back tuition, for fear of cheapening their brands. Even in this rough economy, plenty of students are willing to pay for the cachet of prestigious degrees. “The Harvard, the Yale, the New York University brands … they don't need to do that, and they're not doing that,” Arum says.

But colleges that have taken these measures say they're not cutting corners — just costs, especially for middle-class, middle-of-the-pack students who may not be eligible for either need-based or merit-based financial aid.

Before the financial crisis, many families tapped home equity and borrowed heavily to pay escalating tuition costs, but that became far more difficult in 2008 when credit markets tightened. With the job market miserable, students also became much more concerned about carrying student-loan debt.

“We knew we were pricing ourselves out of the market,” says Lee Ann Afton-Backlund, dean of admission and financial aid at The University of the South, a small liberal arts school in Sewanee, Tennessee.

The university, widely known as Sewanee, cut tuition by 10 percent last year, from $46,112 to $41,518, and has pledged to freeze the rate next year for current students.

The University of Charleston in West Virginia recently announced an even bigger cut: It will lower tuition by 22 percent next year, to $19,500 from $25,000.

“We decided, let's have an advertised price that's closer to the real price,” says Edward H. Welch, president of university, which serves nearly 1,400 undergraduates.

Welch says his board decided to lower costs after 42 students left their deposits on the table for the 2011-2012 school year and instead decided in August to attend less expensive schools.

Nationwide, 13 percent of college freshmen say they ended up at their current school in large measure because they couldn't afford their first choice, according to a new study by University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). More than 40 percent say tuition costs were a “very important” factor as they weighed their college options.

Obama highlighted the issue in his State of the Union speech on January 24, and a few days later detailed his plans to use federal aid as a lever to prod colleges to become more affordable.

A COMPETITIVE MARKET SWAYING STUDENTS

At Sewanee, which lowered its tuition last fall, the reaction was immediate. Campus visits shot up 60 percent, applications climbed 20 percent this year to 3,200 (as of February 1). Many alumni and families were pleased with the lower tuition, and contributions to the annual fund hit $3.487 million — the second-highest in Sewanee history.

The price drop made a difference to Jimmy Szewczyk, 19, a freshman from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, who attends Sewanee. It also impressed his parents, he says. “It made them feel much more comfortable with the school,” he says. “I was going to a school that cares about how much we had to pay.”

High-school senior Abby Forren, 17, of Oak Hill, West Virginia, says the price cut at the University of Charleston prompted her to apply, though she had originally planned to target only public schools with lower prices. “I was so excited to be able to afford such a good college,” she says. “It made a big difference. I didn't have to opt for plan B.”

There is, to be sure, a price to be paid for lower tuition: some schools are increasing class size and eliminating academic departments with low enrollments. William Peace University in Raleigh, North Carolina, cut tuition by 7.7 percent for 2012-13 and is freezing room and board, but dropped less popular programs like classical music performance.

Some schools that lower tuition are also decreasing the amount of merit aid they offer, though such aid is a key to attracting top-flight students and bolstering a college's ranking on lists like the one published by U.S. News & World Report.

THE NEW FOUR-YEAR PUSH

Colleges also are aiming to help families cut costs by getting students in and out more quickly. Only about half the students at private non-profit colleges graduate within four years.

Administrators at Medaille College in Buffalo, New York, rolled out a four-year graduation guarantee — which will take effect next fall — as a way to distinguish the small private college from more than a dozen rivals in the area.

“Competition is fierce,” said Greg Florczak, a vice president at Medaille, which serves 1,700 undergraduates.

Prospective students typically ask two questions when visiting campus, Florczak said: Will I actually graduate in four years? And can you promise I'll land a job?

“It's very difficult to answer the second question,” Florczak says. “But we wanted to ensure an answer to the first. To be able to say to students and parents, 'We guarantee it' gives them peace of mind.”

As with most graduation guarantees, Medaille's plan requires students to declare a major before sophomore year, enroll in all required classes, take a full course load and maintain passing grades. If they do all that and still can't finish their degree in four years, Medaille will cover tuition – about $10,800 per semester – until they do graduate.

About half of Medaille's 1,700 undergraduates typically earn their degree in four years. Even among those who successfully complete their freshman and sophomore years, just 70 percent graduate on time. To boost that number, administrators plan a whole lot of hand-holding.

The college just opened a $3.5 million “Student Success Center” connected to faculty offices so that a professor concerned about a student's progress can literally walk him down the hall to consult with a guidance counselor, academic tutor, or career mentor. Counting on students to make such appointments on their own doesn't work, Florczak says.

While they praise the goal, skeptics argue that guaranteeing a degree in four years “creates an incentive to pass everybody, and that damages academic quality,” says Jane Shaw, president of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, North Carolina. “It's a little scary.”

College administrators say that is not a risk because the guarantees are structured so that they only apply to students who pass all their classes. If a student fails a course, the college is not on the hook to cover additional tuition.

At Midland University in Fremont, Nebraska, President Ben Sasse believes he can boost graduation rates with some common-sense tinkering.

Sasse says Midland's 930 undergraduates often had a tough time fitting in required courses because so many professors scheduled their lectures in the same mid-morning time slots. So he worked with faculty to spread out their classes. “There's no reason that problem had to exist,” Sasse says.

(Editing by Lauren Young, Linda Stern and Andrea Evans)

Analysis: Some colleges cut tuition, hasten graduation
(Reuters)

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Permalink

College presidents wary of Obama cost-control plan (AP)

Filed Under: News by Thomas Botelho — Comments Off
January 28, 2012

WASHINGTON – Public university presidents facing ever-increasing state budget cuts are raising concerns about President Barack Obama’s plan to force colleges and universities to contain tuition prices or face losing federal dollars.

Illinois State University President Al Bowman says the reality is that deficits in many public schools can’t be easily overcome with simple modifications. Bowman says he’s happy to hear Obama call for state-level support of public universities but adds that, given the decreases in state aid, tying federal support to tuition is a product of “fuzzy math.”

Obama spelled out his proposal Friday at the University of Michigan.

College presidents wary of Obama cost-control plan
(AP)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Permalink

Obama to target rising college tuition costs (AP)

Filed Under: News, Tech by Thomas Botelho — Comments Off
January 27, 2012

ROMULUS, Mich. – President Barack Obama wants to shift some federal dollars away from colleges and universities that aren’t controlling tuition costs to those that are. He’s also proposing competitions among higher education institutions to encourage them to run more efficiently.

Obama will spell out his plans Friday during a speech at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor focused on college affordability.

On Tuesday during his State of the Union address, Obama put colleges and universities on notice to control soaring tuition costs or face losing federal dollars.

The money Obama is targeting is what’s known as “campus based” aid given to colleges to distribute in areas such as Perkins loans or in work study programs. Of the $142 billion in federal grants and loans distributed in the last school year, about $3 billion went to these programs.

THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS UPDATE. Check back soon for further information. AP’s earlier story is below.

President Barack Obama has put colleges and universities on notice to control tuition costs or face losing federal dollars. Now, schools are waiting to hear how big a stick he plans to wield to enforce his message.

Obama was expected to spell out his plan in a speech Friday at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor focused on college affordability. His plan could set a new precedent in the federal government’s role in controlling the rising costs of college — a move making people in higher education nervous. Obama’s speech will cap a three-day post-State of the Union trip by the president to promote different components of his economic agenda in politically important states.

The president hinted at what’s ahead in education during his State of the Union address Tuesday night, which coincided with the release of a White House “blueprint” that said he wants to shift federal aid away from colleges that don’t keep net tuition down and provide a good value. But it’s unclear exactly what pot of federal dollars Obama plans to target and how his plan would work.

The Obama administration already has taken a series of steps to expand the availability of grants and loans and to make loans easier to pay back, and Obama spelled out Tuesday other proposals to make college more affordable such as extending tuition tax breaks and asking Congress to keep loan interest rates from doubling on July. His administration has also targeted career college programs — primarily at for-profit institutions — with high loan default rates among graduates over multiple years by taking away their ability to participate in such programs.

But until now, it has done little to turn its attention to the rising cost of tuition at traditional colleges and universities. The average in-state tuition and fees at four-year public colleges last fall rose 8.3 percent and with room and board now exceed $17,000 a year, according to the College Board. Rising tuition costs have been blamed on a variety of factors, including a decline in state dollars, an over-reliance on federal student loan dollars and competition for the best facilities and professors.

During Tuesday’s speech, the president said he’d met with university presidents who described to him ways some universities through technology and redesigning courses were able to help students finish more quickly — efforts that helped curtail costs.

“The point is, it’s possible. So let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down. Higher education can’t be a luxury_ it’s an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford,” Obama said.

Barry Toiv, spokesman for the Association of American Universities, said some of its members participated in the meeting Obama referred to and agree that there are good examples of things that can be done to make colleges more efficient. But he said universities are concerned that any proposal by the president “doesn’t hurt students” because anything that does is “obviously counterproductive.”

Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a former education secretary, said the autonomy of U.S. higher education is what makes it the best of the world, and he questioned whether Obama could enforce any such plan without hurting students. Potentially, billions of dollars are at stake. In the 2010-2011 school year, the federal government awarded $142 billion in federal student aid — most of it directly to students in the form of grants and loans, according to the Education Department.

“It’s hard to do without hurting students and it’s not appropriate to do,” Alexander said. “The federal government has no business doing this.”

Some public institutions worry about being unfairly blamed for state cuts that led to an increase in tuition prices. Neal McCluskey, an education analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute, said it’s difficult for the federal government to dictate what is a reasonable increase because some colleges and universities might have legitimate reasons to raise tuition some years, such as the need to replace buildings in disrepair.

Obama’s plan reflects that in the race between subsidizing tuition with student aid and rising tuition, student aid is going to lose, said Andrew P. Kelly, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. Instead of redesigning their business model or using more online programs to save money, many colleges and universities have made small changes hoping to wait out the nation’s fiscal crisis that don’t solve the problem long term, Kelly said.

“This signals I think a sense of how acute that problem is and the fact that it can’t just be about pouring money into federal student aid programs and hoping that affordability is maintained, that there has to be some kind of way, or at least a signal sent, to the institutions that benefit, and the states, frankly … that they just can’t continue to ratchet up prices and use federal aid to fill in the gaps,” Kelly said.

Even though it’s not politically popular, McCluskey said a good way to control rising tuition costs would be to cut federal aid to students, which would force colleges and universities to keep tuition low.

This isn’t the first time a politician has sought to control tuition costs. In 2003, Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon, R-Calif., proposed a plan to hold back aid to colleges and universities that raised tuition much faster than inflation. It met resistance from higher education and wasn’t passed.

Come Friday, “we’ll be watching and listening carefully,” said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education.

___

Hefling reported from Washington.

___

Online:

White House: http://www.whitehouse.gov/

Education Department: http://www.ed.gov/

Obama to target rising college tuition costs
(AP)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Permalink

Broken schools breed South Africa’s "lost generation" (Reuters)

Filed Under: News by Thomas Botelho — Comments Off
January 27, 2012

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – The first blow to Martha Netshiozwe's future came when her parents died of AIDS. The second came when she ran out of money and had to drop out of a South African high school.

Netshiozwe, 23, is a product of the first post-apartheid generation who entered a new and aspiring education system which aimed to heal the economic divisions created by the white-minority government. But like many, she left without the skills to qualify for anything other than manual labor.

Despite pouring billions of dollars into education, the ruling African National Congress (ANC) has little to show for its money except for public primary schools regarded as among the worst in the world and millions of students destined for a life in the underclass.

“If you don't have an education, you don't have a chance in life,” said Netshiozwe, who is unemployed with little prospect of finding regular work. She and her HIV-infected aunt live together and scrape by on about $100 a month in welfare benefits.

Nearly half of South Africa's 18 to 24 year olds — the first generation educated after apartheid ended in 1994 — are not in the education system and do not have a job, according to government data.

Academics have called this group the “lost generation” and worry it will grow larger unless the government fixes a system riddled with failing schools, unskilled educators and corruption that stops funding from reaching its intended destinations.

“This is an appalling waste of human potential and a potential source of serious social instability,” the Ministry of Higher Education said this month when it unveiled sweeping plans

for boosting university enrollment and improving vocational colleges.

The lost generation poses long term risks for Africa's largest economy, which is trying to grow its tax base as it funds increased social spending.

There are about three people receiving social welfare payments for each taxpayer. While the recipients of state funds are set to increase substantially under anti-poverty programs, the number of taxpayers is not, which should cause already yawning budget deficits to widen.

Major ratings agencies are also worried.

Fitch, this month, and Moody's a few months ago, downgraded the outlook for South Africa, saying the government has not done enough to tackle structural problems including chronic unemployment, growing state debt and a broken education system.

CRIPPLED BY CORRUPTION

South Africa does not suffer a lack of plans or finances for education, the largest sector of state spending and accounting for more than 20 percent of the budget.

The problems are with implementation.

Corruption eats away at money. Teachers are poorly trained and challenged by a constantly shifting curriculum. Schools are often shut by teachers' strikes.

There have been numerous changes for the better in the ANC-run education system with more of the country's blacks, excluded from most high-quality education under apartheid, entering high-performing schools.

Once almost exclusively white, universities now reflect the racial composition of the country with more people from groups disenfranchised by apartheid climbing the ladder with a degree or diploma.

But at the same time, the number of people living in poverty has changed little since apartheid ended, with no remedy in sight given the structural problems in education.

“As things stand, the ANC is wreaking untold damage on our children and, consequently, on the country's future, just as apartheid education did in the past,” said Barney Mthombothi, editor of the influential weekly Financial Mail.

Hundreds of schools do not have electricity or running water and absenteeism has become such a concern that President Jacob Zuma has begged teachers to show up for classes.

A study by graft watchdog Transparency International last year pointed to massive local level corruption resulting in millions of students not having desks, chairs or books.

The central government has been trying to take over two provincial education systems that are effectively bankrupt.

In Limpopo province, students started the school year in January without textbooks even though millions of dollars had been allocated for purchases, with media reports saying a politically connected figure may have pocketed the funds.

This month, the central government said Limpopo, which has recorded some of the country's worst results in standardized testing, had unauthorized expenditure of 2.2 billion rand ($275 million). The province had more than 2,400 teachers on the payroll, including 200 “ghost teachers” who were not in classrooms but were still paid.

TICKET OUT OF POVERTY

A university education is seen as the best ticket out of poverty. Competition is fierce and at some of the top schools, there are about 10 applicants for each place.

The desperate demand for higher education led to a stampede at the University of Johannesburg this month when thousands of applicants lined up for a few hundred available places on the final day to submit paperwork.

“The lofty status of universities is an indicator of a lack of status for any other alternative for post-school education,” said Frances Faller, an education expert at the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg.

About eight in 10 unemployed have not completed secondary education or just made it through high school. Only six percent of South Africa's jobless have a university degree, a study from the South African Institute for Race Relations said.

The odds are also stacked against those who hope to find entry-level employment. Economists say labor laws make it difficult for employers who want to take on new workers and train them for jobs.

A cozy relationship between the ANC and organized labor, formed in their partnership against apartheid, has hampered apprenticeship programs.

The ANC, which relies on the 2 million members of top labor federation COSATU as a source of votes, has put off plans denounced by unions but backed by economists to reduce youth unemployment by allowing firms to hire youths at cut-rate wages and train them up.

“We will never let them get away with making these laws even more 'flexible' to allow even higher levels of exploitation,” COSATU said in a statement.

ANC governments have spent billions of dollars on job training programs only to see large sums lost to corruption, while producing few graduates with skills required by employers.

“I know what will happen to me if I don't get into school,” said university applicant Eddie Ncube, 18.

“Look at what I am exposed to. I am from the ghetto. Without school, I will get into drugs and I'll never find a job.”

($1 = 8.0169 South African rand)

(Additional reporting by Ndundu Sithole; Editing by Rosalind Russell)

Broken schools breed South Africa’s "lost generation"
(Reuters)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Permalink

State of the Union: What can Obama do about college tuition? (The Christian Science Monitor)

Filed Under: News by Thomas Botelho — Comments Off
January 25, 2012

President Obama hit hard on issues of college affordability in his State of the Union address Tuesday night, and continued to emphasize the importance of excellent teaching in K-12 education.

He called on states to raise the compulsory age of education to 18; called on Congress to extend the tuition tax credit, to stop the interest on student loans from doubling in July, and to pass the DREAM Act; and issued a threat to higher education institutions who fail to keep costs in check and keep tuition down.

“Let me put colleges and universities on notice: If you can’t stop tuition from going up, the funding you get from taxpayers will go down,” Obama said. “Higher education can’t be a luxury – it is an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford.”

RECOMMENDED: How much do you know about the State of the Union speeches? A quiz.

It was unclear, however, from Obama’s speech – and in the blueprint that his administration sent out afterward – exactly how he plans to carry out this threat.

“Unlike K-12 where lots of money pours into programs, there’s much less [Federal] money pouring into higher-education programs,” says Rita Kirshstein, director of the Delta Project on Postsecondary Education Costs, Productivity, and Accountability. Most of the money that does go to schools is in the form of research funds, she says, along with Pell Grants and subsidized loans for students.

While Ms. Kirshstein says withholding student grant and loan money could be disastrous for some students, she believes withholding research dollars might cause faculty to put pressure on administrators to look hard at their costs. Kirshstein hopes the plan would be placed in a broader context, looking at how much various states have cut back their higher-ed funding, for instance.

“The devil is in the details if it’s going to be done effectively,” she says.

As for Obama’s other proposals, Kirshstein says she was glad to see him sound the dual themes of states making higher ed a higher priority in their budgets, and colleges and universities doing more with less.

These aren’t new themes for the administration, which has worked to improve student aid by increasing the maximum Pell Grant size last year and moving to a system of direct government loans, and which hosted a summit on higher education productivity and cost in December. But the ideas seem to be getting increased attention now.

“Those of us in higher education are always happy when higher ed issues are recognized because so much of the attention typically goes to K-12,” says Kirshstein. Obama, she believes, “is indeed serious about this issue.”

Not that he neglected K-12 topics in his speech.

Some themes that he has hit before, like calling on Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (sometimes better known in its current incarnation as No Child Left Behind), were notably absent – perhaps a reflection of the impossibility of getting such a bill passed in an election year.

But in his speech Obama continued to preach the importance of teaching and accountability. His education agenda so far has defied typical partisan lines: Some of its most frequent critics are loyal Democrats, including the teachers’ unions, while some Republicans have praised it.

In fact, in Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels’s response to the State of the Union Tuesday night, he praised just two aspects of Obama’s tenure as president: killing Osama bin Laden and “bravely backing long overdue changes in public education.”

Obama was particularly diplomatic in how he handled his remarks on teachers, who have, in many cases, sharply rebelled against his administration’s agenda of increased accountability, more data, and evaluations linked to student achievement.

“Teachers matter,” Obama said. “So instead of bashing them, or defending the status quo, let’s offer schools a deal. Give them the resources to keep good teachers on the job, and reward the best ones.”

In return, he said, he wants to “grant schools flexibility:  to teach with creativity and passion, to stop teaching to the test, and to replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.”

Teachers’ unions seized on the message, in particular the line about “teaching to the test.” A common complaint about the direction of education reform – including Obama’s Race to the Top initiative – is that it encourages instruction driven only by standardized tests.

Obama “made clear tonight what America’s teachers have long understood,” said Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, in a statement. “We can’t test our way to a middle class; we must educate our way to a middle class. The overemphasis on testing has led to narrowing of the curriculum, rather than creating a path to critical thinking and problem solving.”

But nothing in Obama’s comments, or the blueprint his administration released, indicated he was backing off from his controversial education reform goals.

While he didn’t mention Race to the Top by name, he lauded what it has accomplished, in terms of pushing states to enact tough reforms. “For less than 1 percent of what our nation spends on education each year, we’ve convinced nearly every state in the country to raise their standards for teaching and learning,” he said.

And he continues to tout teacher quality, both recognizing the best and replacing ineffective teachers. “We know a good teacher can increase the lifetime income of a classroom by over $250,000,” he said.

In his blueprint, Obama particularly emphasized the need to reform the teaching profession, including pushing to make teacher education schools more effective and selective, to improve professional development, and to reshape tenure and evaluation systems.

Obama didn't clarify the means by which he wants to achieve these goals, though an existing federal program, the Teacher Incentive Fund, is already being used to improve teacher effectiveness and reform the teacher pay system, among other goals.

“It’s notable that the president will continue to aggressively promote this new federal priority in education,” including teacher effectiveness, data systems, teacher evaluations, and school turnarounds, says David DeSchryver, vice president of education policy for Whiteboard Advisors, an education consulting group.

While he offered conciliatory rhetoric to teachers’ unions, Mr. DeSchryver notes, Obama still holds that teacher evaluations should be used for both hiring and firing teachers.

“And given that we’re heading into an election season, it’s notable that he’s willing to stand behind that,” DeSchryver says. 

RECOMMENDED: How much do you know about the State of the Union speeches? A quiz.

Get daily or weekly updates from CSMonitor.com delivered to your inbox. Sign up today.

State of the Union: What can Obama do about college tuition?
(The Christian Science Monitor)

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Permalink

School lunches to have more veggies, whole grains (AP)

Filed Under: News by Thomas Botelho — Comments Off
January 25, 2012

WASHINGTON – Schoolchildren’s favorite lunch — the ubiquitous frozen pizza — is about to get healthier.

First lady Michelle Obama and Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack are expected to announce Wednesday that most school meals, including pizza, will have less sodium, more whole grains and more fruits and vegetables as sides. The popular pizzas will still be on school lunch lines but made with healthier ingredients.

Mrs. Obama and Vilsack were making the announcement at an elementary school in Alexandria, Va., with celebrity chef Rachael Ray.

The new rules, the first major nutritional overhaul of school meals in 15 years, won’t be as aggressive as the Obama administration had hoped. Congress last year blocked the Agriculture Department from making some of the changes the department had sought, including limiting french fries and pizzas.

A bill passed in November would require USDA to allow tomato paste on pizzas to be counted as a vegetable, as it is now. The initial draft of the department’s guidelines, released a year ago, would have prevented that. Congress also blocked USDA from limiting servings of potatoes to two servings a week. The final rule to be announced Wednesday will have to incorporate those directions from Congress.

The congressional changes had been requested by potato growers and food companies that produce frozen pizzas for schools, among others in the food industry. Conservatives in Congress called the guidelines an overreach, saying the government shouldn’t be telling children what to eat. School districts had also objected to some of the requirements, saying they go too far and would cost too much.

The new guidelines would apply to lunches subsidized by the federal government, and a child nutrition bill signed by President Barack Obama in 2010 would help school districts pay for some of the increased costs. Some of the changes could take place as soon as the next school year, while others would be phased in over time.

The guidelines are also expected to limit the total number of calories in an individual meal and require that milk be low in fat. Flavored milks would have to be nonfat.

While many schools are improving meals already, others are still serving children meals high in fat, salt and calories. The guidelines are designed to combat growing childhood obesity and are based on 2009 recommendations by the Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences.

The subsidized meals that would fall under the guidelines are served as free and low-cost meals to low-income children and long have been subject to government nutrition standards. The 2010 law for the first time will extend nutrition standards to other foods sold in schools that aren’t subsidized by the federal government, including “a la carte” foods on the lunch line and snacks in vending machines.

Those standards, while expected to be similar, will be written separately and have not yet been proposed by USDA.

School lunches to have more veggies, whole grains
(AP)

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Permalink

Education law’s promise falls short after 10 years (AP)

Filed Under: News by Thomas Botelho — Comments Off
January 7, 2012

WASHINGTON – The No Child Left Behind education law was cast as a symbol of possibility, offering the promise of improved schools for the nation’s poor and minority children and better prepared students in a competitive world.

Yet after a decade on the books, President George W. Bush’s most hyped domestic accomplishment has become a symbol to many of federal overreach and Congress’ inability to fix something that’s clearly flawed.

The law forced schools to confront the uncomfortable reality that many kids simply weren’t learning, but it’s primarily known for its emphasis on standardized tests and the labeling of thousands of schools as “failures.”

Sunday marks the 10-year anniversary of the day Bush signed it into law in Hamilton, Ohio. By his side were the leaders of the education committees in Congress, Rep. John Boehner, R-Ohio, and Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-Mass. The bipartisanship that made the achievement possible in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks is long gone.

The same Senate committee approved a revamped education bill last year, but deep-rooted partisanship stalled the measure in the full Congress. In this election year, there appears little political will for compromise despite widespread agreement that changes are needed.

Critics say the law carries rigid and unrealistic expectations that put too much of an emphasis on tests for reading and math at the expense of a more well-rounded education.

Frustrated by the congressional inaction, President Barack Obama told states last fall they could seek a waiver around unpopular proficiency requirements in exchange for actions his administration favors. A vast majority of states have said they will go that route, seen as a temporary fix until lawmakers do act.

Like Obama, Republican presidential candidates have criticized the law. One, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, even saying he regrets voting for it.

“If you called a rally to keep No Child Left Behind as it is, not a single person would show up,” said Democratic Sen. Michael Bennet of Colorado, Denver’s former school superintendent.

The view was drastically different 10 years ago, when Bush took what was an uncommon stance for a conservative in seeking an aggressive federal role in forcing states and districts to tackle abysmal achievement gaps in schools.

He was able to get fellow Republicans such as Boehner, the current House speaker, and Democratic leaders on education such as Kennedy, who died in 2009, and Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., to join him. The mandate was that all students read and perform math on grade level by 2014.

“No longer is it acceptable to hide poor performance. No longer is it acceptable to keep results from parents,” Bush said when he signed the legislation. “We’re never going to give up on a school that’s performing poorly; that when we find poor performance, a school will be given time and incentives and resources to correct their problems.”

The law requires annual testing. Districts must keep and publish data showing how subgroups of students perform. Schools that don’t meet requirements for two years or longer face increasingly tough consequences, from busing children to higher performing schools to offering tutoring and replacing staff.

The test results were eye-opening, recalled Miller, the top Democrat on the House Education and the Workforce Committee.

“People were stunned because they were always led to believe that things were going fine in this particular school. And the fact of the matter was, for huge numbers of students that was not the case,” Miller said. “That led to a lot of anger, disappointment. That led to embarrassment. In many instances, the schools were being held out as exceeding in their mission, when it fact they were failing many, many of the children in those schools.”

Under the law, watching movies and assigning irrelevant or no homework was no longer acceptable because suddenly someone was paying attention, said Charles Barone, a former aide to Miller who is director of federal policy with Democrats for Education Reform.

In low-performing urban schools, where teachers and principals once might have thrown up their hands and not known what to do, there was a new attitude along the lines of “we might not know what to do, but we’ve got to do something,” said Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow in education at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University.

Both spoke at a recent forum on the law at the Thomas B. Fordham Institute.

But m

any teachers and principals started to believe they were being judged on factors out of their control and in ways that were unfair.

Jennifer Ochoa, an eighth-grade literacy teacher in New York who works with low-performing students, said the law has hurt morale among educators as well as students, who feel they have to do well on a standardized test or are failures, no matter how much progress they make.

“Afterward, it didn’t matter how far you came if you didn’t make this outside goal,” Ochoa said. “We started talking about kids in very different ways. We started talking about kids in statistical ways instead of human being terms.”

How successful the law has been academically remains under debate.

Scores on a national assessment show significant gains in math among the fourth- and eighth-graders, with Hispanic and African-American fourth-graders performing approximately two grade levels higher today than when the law was passed, said Mark Schneider, the former U.S. commissioner of education statistics who now serves as vice president at the American Institutes for Research.

“You cannot dismiss these gains, and I think … people just aren’t willing to credit NCLB or accountability in general because of ideological and political preferences,” Schneider said.

As the years went by, however, the growth has largely plateaued, Schneider said. Similar large gains were not shown in reading, and some experts say more progress was made in reading before the law was passed. There are still huge differences in the performance of African-American and Hispanic students compared with white students.

As the 2014 deadline draws closer, more schools are failing to meet federal standards, with nearly half not doing so last year, according to the Center on Education Policy. Center officials said that’s because some states today have harder tests or have high numbers of immigrant and low-income children, but it’s also because the law requires states to raise the bar each year for how many children must pass the test.

Some states had long put off the largest increases to avoid penalties.

In Washington, much of the political debate over the law centers on how much federal control the government should have. Some Republicans want to go so far as to close the Education Department and end federally-imposed annual testing.

Even among Democrats there’s been some dissension. The Obama administration, for example, opposed the Senate bill passed in committee under the leadership of Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, because it said the measure didn’t go far enough on accountability; Harkin said it wasn’t a perfect bill, but compromise was necessary.

Many educators

are now looking to other factors such as online learning, an increased trend toward teacher evaluations tied to student performance, the federal Race to the Top competition that states have competed in, and the common core standards adopted in the vast majority of states as factors that could provide the next boost in education.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a former education secretary, said he’s hopeful Congress will do what’s right and update No Child Left Behind, which became due for renewal in 2007.

“One of the things we ought to be able to do is fix No Child Left Behind,” said Alexander, R-Tenn. “What we ought to do is set new realistic goals for it so that schools and schools can have those kinds of goals, and most importantly we need to move out of Washington and back to states and local communities decisions about whether schools and teachers are succeeding or failing.”

___

Associated Press writer Dorie Turner in Atlanta contributed to this report.

___

Kimberly Hefling can be followed at http://twitter.com/khefling

___

Online:

Background on the law: http://www2.ed.gov/nclb/landing.jhtml

Education law’s promise falls short after 10 years
(AP)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , ,
Permalink

Ed Dept. chides Hawaii for use of grant dollars (AP)

Filed Under: News by Thomas Botelho — Comments Off
December 22, 2011

WASHINGTON – An Education Department official on Wednesday admonished Hawaii for its “unsatisfactory” performance under a $75 million federal grant the state won last year in a high profile competition and said it was placing it under “high risk” status. That means the state is in danger of losing the money if it doesn’t make improvements.

This is the first time the department has placed under such a status a state that won dollars distributed in the competition known as “Race to the Top.” The contest is a signature education initiative under the Obama administration, which has used it to encourage states to enact changes it supports.

Hawaii was one of 11 states and the District of Columbia to win more than $4 billion in Race to the Top grants last year. The Hawaii Department of Education is the nation’s 10th largest school system and the only statewide district in the country.

The education community has been watching closely to see how aggressively the department will enforce the terms of the competition.

Hawaii still has about $72 million of its four-year, $75 million grant left to spend. The state has been well over a year behind in implementing many aspects of its plan to improve low-performing schools, and has struggled to roll out a teacher evaluation system tied to teacher performance that it promised.

“The department is concerned about the state’s ability to fulfill its commitments within the grant period,” Hawaii Gov. Neil Abercrombie was told in a letter dated Wednesday and signed by Education Department official Ann Whalen.

Because the state is now a high-risk grantee, it will be required to get pre-approval before funds are spent and will be subjected to a thorough on-site review, the letter said.

“Please note that failure to comply with the high-risk conditions may constitute a material failure to comply with the requirements of the grant,” the letter said.

Abercrombie said he found the implications of the letter “disturbing.”

“I am willing to do everything that’s necessary to proceed with Race to the Top and am calling on the responsible parties to immediately address the areas that need resolution,” he said in an emailed statement late Wednesday.

“It’s really apparent from the letter that everyone involved in education in Hawaii is going to have to step up,” Superintendent Kathryn Matayoshi said in a separate statement. “We acknowledge there’s work to be done.”

Stephen Schatz, Hawaii’s assistant superintendent for strategic reform who is overseeing the Race to the Top effort, last week told The Associated Press that the state was making progress on reforms it promised, although he said there have been roadblocks.

Schatz said the state’s ability to move forward has been slowed down by complications with the Hawaii State Teachers Association, the union representing public school teachers across the islands.

The two sides had reached a conceptual agreement before Hawaii was announced as a winner to tie half of a teacher’s evaluation to education gains made by students. But the union currently is embroiled in a prohibited practice complaint it lodged with the state labor relations board against the state. The union claims the state violated members’ rights by implementing its “last, best and final” contract offer over the summer.

“We’re still wholeheartedly committed to the reforms in the race. Whatever impediments that we may face we intend to get through them,” Schatz said. “We’re making progress on every project in our scope of work.”

Abercrombie said he would ask the labor relations board to expedite its process. He also plans to appeal to the Legislature for support and ask the superintendent, Board of Education and those working on Race to the Top to address the changes noted by the Education Department.

“It is clear on what actions need to take place and it is time to get this done now,” he said.

Union President Wil Okabe said Wednesday he’s not surprised Hawaii has been placed on high risk status, but that state officials should have recognized the risk to the grant when imposing the contract offer on teachers.

“Once they implemented this thing, it had ramifications on everything,” he said, adding that it’s unfair to blame the union for the position the state is in.

The letter to Abercrombie comes as President Barack Obama attempts to leave for Hawaii for his family’s annual Christmas vacation. The president’s wife and daughters are already in Hawaii, but his travel plans are up in the air because Congress has been unable to reach agreement over extending payroll tax cuts and unemployment benefits due to expire at the end of the year.

___

Kimberly Hefling can be followed at http://twitter.com/khefling

___

Kelleher reported from Honolulu.

_____

Online:

Education Department: http://www.ed.gov/

Hawaii Public Schools: http://doe.k12.hi.us/

Ed Dept. chides Hawaii for use of grant dollars
(AP)

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Permalink
Powered by WordPress