The Learning Revolution Blog: highlighting disruptive and challenging ideas about teaching and learning.
U.S. institutions of higher education and U.S. local governments are under extraordinary pressure to cut costs and eliminate from institutional or governmental ledgers any expenses whose absence would cause little or no...
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A few years back, I got my knuckles rapped by a government minister. In public. It was 2010: David Cameron had just come to power, and he was about to thrust university students into a new regime of higher tuition fees and debt.
Against that backdrop, I’d written a column criticising the way in which both Labour and Conservative governments marketed degrees as being some kind of social-mobility jetpack, zooming their wearers to more money and high-powered jobs. It was no such guarantee, I said, citing among other things Whitehall’s own plunging estimates of how much more graduates earn over a lifetime. Graduates, I said, would “probably end up doing similar work to their school-leaver parents – only with a debilitatingly large debt around their necks”.
Continue reading...Parents are squeezing the role of play out of their children’s lives in favour of the three ‘R’s as they try to prepare their offspring for a competitive world, according to the head of Lego’s education charity arm.
A lack of understanding of the value of play is prompting parents and schools alike to reduce it as a priority, says Hanne Rasmussen, head of the Lego Foundation. If parents and governments push children towards numeracy and literacy earlier and earlier, it means they miss out on the early play-based learning that helps to develop creativity, problem-solving and empathy, she says.
Continue reading...
When pondering the best way to transform and improve America’s K-12 public schools, do the ideas that first come to mind include: ditching locally elected school boards? Placing grade-school kids in overcrowded computer labs for hours at a time with unproven software and inexperienced teachers? Telling children from poor homes that test scores are the only results that matter? Or putting high-tech entrepreneurs who have financial stakes in the digital tools being road-tested on students on the private boards running those schools?
These are all cornerstones of the charter school movement that has grown out of Silicon Valley, supported by Microsoft’s Bill Gates, who has spent more than $400 million to promote technology-driven charter schools. And they’re being championed by Netflix founder-CEO Reed Hastings, who just launched a $100 million foundation where he is likely to become one of America’s highest-profile figures pushing this anti-democratic, tech-centric, corporate-inspired vision to recast America’s public schools.
“The underlying mentality that Hastings shares with Gates is that computers revolutionized commerce, revolutionized business, revolutionized manufacturing, so now why can’t computers revolutionize education,” said Anthony Cody, a retired high school teacher from Oakland, Calif. and critic of billionaire-led charter schools and their high-tech takeover of the learning process. “In their minds, it is inevitable that it will. The only question is what will be the delivery method.”
The charter school movement emerged in the 1990s as a way to innovate in individual public schools. But over the last decade the movement has evolved into a franchise-dominated industry, where a tight circle of interrelated for-profit and non-profit players are doing everything they can to privatize public education. Across the country, super wealthy foundations—including the Walmart-backed Walton Family Foundation and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation—have put more than $1 billion into creating 6,700 charter schools. Besides Gates, there may be no figure more widely identified with the computers-will-fix-everything mindset than Northern California’s Hastings.
Hastings, 55, has been pushing charters for two decades. Last winter, he made national news when he gave the keynote address to the California Charter Schools Association’s (CCSA) convention and said locally elected school boards were hurting schools and should be replaced by privately run boards, like those at charters. Hastings, an ex-president of the California State Board of Education appointed by a Democratic governor, noted that the public might not buy this anti-democratic conclusion, but encouraged his movement players to look beyond the fact that “school boards have been an iconic part of America for 200 years.”
“The most important thing is that they [charters] constantly get better every year… because they have stable governance—they don’t have an elected school board,” said Hastings—even though that narrative of stability and steady improvement has not proven itself out at charters he’s helped found. Nevertheless, Hastings hammered home a note that’s echoed across both his business career and his life as a charter advocate: that rapid growth is the solution. “What we have to do is to work with school districts to grow steadily,” Hastings said. “The work ahead is really hard because we’re at 8 percent of students in California, whereas in New Orleans they’re at 90 percent, so we have a lot of catchup to do… We have to continue to grow and grow.”
Hastings’ remarks were hardly the first salvo between charter proponents and elected school boards. But coming from one of Silicon Valley’s best-known entrepreneurs, they quickly drew negative reactions, especially because Hastings has aligned himself with one of the most hubris-filled sectors of the charter movement: technology executives who believe the only thing stopping Silicon Valley from saving America’s public schools are clunky school boards, needless government regulation and skeptical lifelong educators.
Hastings’ comments were cynically greeted by the Washington Post’seducation blog, where he was labeled part of the billionaire boy’s club of “Bill Gates, Eli Broad, Mark Zuckerberg, various Waltons… some of the prodigiously wealthy who have decided that they know how public education can be ‘fixed’ and have plowed big money into it,” as the Post's Valerie Strauss wrote. Yet “after billions of their dollars have been spent for pet projects, the real problems facing public schools remain.”
Strauss’ last point is crucial. Hastings’ slap at elected boards, while offensive, wasn’t unique. Gates said the same thing when he extolled “mayoral control” of urban schools. “Instead of having a committee of people, you have that one person,” Gates said, “where we’ve seen the willingness to take on some of the older practices and try new things.” The problem, as Strauss noted, is that many of these “pet projects” have yet to deliver on their hype as a pathway out of poverty for poor kids. The darker reality is that these schools are in fact doubling as product development centers for the fabulously rich and their well-connected associates.
High-Tech Experiments Flounder
Hastings’ track record is a prime example of this pattern in action. He helped launch Rocketship Education, a chain of computer-learning centered schools whose grandiose business plan envisioned educating 1 million students in 50 cities, as many as are educated in New York City, the nation’s largest school district. But as EdWeek.org and the San Jose Mercury News have extensively reported, Rocketship’s ambitious plans badly failed to keep the network's foremost promise: to continue raising student test scores.
The notion that higher test scores are the best way to track student accomplishment is controversial in itself. Many educators argue that there’s far more to learning. Nonetheless, Rocketship believes the best way to educate poor kids is to put 150 young students in front of computers for hours at a time, in large lab classes where there are more technicians than experienced teachers. The curriculum’s emphasis is on correctly answering questions, which, as Education Weekly and the Mercury News reported, created so much pressure on students that many became sick. As Cody notes, this approach minimizes what traditional teachers believe is necessary—the transmission of developmentally appropriate interpretation, communication and social skills, as well as paying personal attention to students whose home lives may be filled with factors complicating their ability to learn.
Yet Rocketship and the software firms plying this “blended learning” experiment has been one of Hastings' priorites. Last winter, he donated $2 million to start a $17 million fundraising drive for the chain. Reality, however, took hold last spring as the chain's student test scores “plummeted,” as the Mercury News put it. There was also teacher burn-out, fear among non-unionized faculty of criticizing the curriculum, and raised eyebrows after the chain’s founder left to create a software firm that sold its wares back to Rocketship—an organization supported by taxpayers and philanthropy. Rocketship postponed expansion plans in Texas, and even Hastings spoke about taking a pause to figure out what was wrong and how to keep growing.
“Rocketship sort of assumed they could work with existing hardware and software,” Cody explained, referring to the learning tools and answer-oriented agenda put before students. “At Rocketship, kids are three hours a day in a computer lab with 150 students in a room, two to three lab techs, and one 'teacher' that supervises the whole thing… They describe what they do as personalizing the learning experience.”
It’s not surprising that the founder of Netflix would find putting kids in front of digital devices that track what they are doing and relying on software formulas to tell them what they need to do next, an attractive educational strategy. It many respects, device-centered tracking and user analysis is what Silicon Valley has developed to trace consumer-buying patterns. In the public school world, tracking test scores—Bill Gates’ emphasis—has become the coin of the realm, largely because it is faster and can be done more easily on a large scale than assessing other indices of learning that are not metric-centered, but track other ways children gain intellectual and life skills.
Rocketship is not the only example of a Hastings project that exposes the problematic nature of tech-centric learning. Many studies—including a trio released last fall and funded by the pro-charter Walton Family Foundation—have found that most of the kids in cyber-centered learning environments fall drastically behind their brick-and-mortar peers. Khan Academy, which has been backed by Hastings, produces online videos on math problems. Even though it has been a viral sensation, experienced teachers have called it sloppy and imprecise.
These initiatives are emblematic of the corner of the charter school world that Hastings inhabits. Like Gates’ support of test-centered curriculum, there are Silicon Valley biases and imperatives driving them. One is that digital data can replace the judgments and knowledge of experienced teachers. The other is that reducing the ratio of teachers to students, which cuts personnel costs (and feeds the mindset that there’s big money to be made in privatizing public education), is of no consequence to student learning. It’s hardly news that entrepreneurs see profits in developing online tools, even if it may be years before their effectiveness can be assessed—such as by seeing how cyber-schooled kids fare once they enroll in colleges and universities.
Outsider, Entrepreneur, Democrat
Hastings didn’t begin his career as an education reformer by trashing school boards and pushing tech-centric solutions that can scale. But tracing his involvement in California’s education reform movement for the past two decades reveals what brought him there.
People who know him describe him as a quasi-liberal, an ex-Peace Corp volunteer who taught in Africa and then came back and made several fortunes as a math whiz, computer programmer and tech entrepreneur. They see him as an idealist who has given millions to bankroll state ballot measures and candidates who share his vision—particularly with charter schools. But his business experience and successes have shaped him over the years and led to a growing hubris that’s all too common among high-tech executives—the belief the world be a better place if only it could be more like them.
Hastings, who lives in the counterculture-embracing coastal town of Santa Cruz, has always played by his own rules. Today, he comes across as a mild-mannered, graying, goateed man in his mid-50s who prides himself on trusting his intuition and following up with hard work. Decades ago, Fortune magazine said “he was as hard-headed as they come. So much so that he earned the nickname ‘animal.’”
He grew up in suburban Boston, went to liberal arts college in Maine where he majored in math and ran the outdoors club, and after a bad experience in a Marine Corps officer-training program, joined the Peace Corps and was sent to Swaziland to teach math. He then went to Stanford University, where he earned a computer science degree. Afterward, he created a company that made software tools for Unix developers called Pure, which was bought for $750 million in 1997—his first fortune. He soon left and enrolled in another masters program at Stanford, in education, and got involved in California politics.
In 1998, he teamed up with education experts he met at Stanford to write a state ballot measure to repeal a cap on the number of charter schools that could open across California in one year. The state’s charter law, passed in 1992, allowed 100 schools to open annually and not more than 10 per school district. After paid circulators got the signatures needed to get the measure on the ballot, the legislature stepped in and passed a bill lifting the cap. The same year, Hastings became the CEO of TechNet, a new Silicon Valley lobbying group whose members were all CEOs who also backed federal candidates from both parties. Here, he again saw how money, power and influence converge and could bring about political results.
In 2000, Hastings took aim at another statewide reform—lowering the vote needed, from two-thirds to 55 percent, to pass school bonds. Hastings gave $1 million to Proposition 39, which passed, delighting the state’s teachers unions. That year, Democratic Gov. Gray Davis appointed Hastings to the state Board of Education, where he became president in 2001. Among their issues was how to test students’ progress. In 2004, he was nominated for another term by then-Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. Democrats blocked him in response to his support for teaching 2.5 hours a day of English in bilingual kindergartens (previously 90 percent of the instruction was in Spanish). “I lacked political deftness,” he told a pro-charter website last year.
Hastings shifted his focus to a new business, Netflix, the idea for which came after being charged a late fee at a video store. But he was a steady and reliable donor to state and federal candidates, usually Democrats, and to education-based campaigns in California. Many of his candidates did not win, reporters tracking the state’s biggest donors found. By 2005, Hastings was not just a dedicated supporter of charters, but was saying that public education’s future depended on schools being run like private corporations.
“If public schools don’t adopt the same principles of competition and accountability as exist in the private and nonprofit sectors, they will continue to deteriorate,” he said in 2005, explaining his philosophy on the New School Venture Fund website, a Silicon Valley grant-making hub he helped to create that has invested in charters and education software. “More and more parents with means will send their children to private schools, and the institution will become like Medicare, an alternative for only the most disadvantaged.” (Medicare is the federal government’s popular health plan for people 65 and older; in early 2016 it had 49.5 million recipients.)
Hastings also complained that even though his world was “littered” with business people who wanted to help the situation, he saw no overarching plan to improve K-12 schools, apart from supporting new charters. “One way to permanently impact the system would be to have 10 to 20 percent of California schoolchildren enrolled in charter schools,” he said in 2005, foreshadowing his own advocacy. “That would be critical mass, and enough of a force to induce a competitive dynamic in the system.”
The Million-Dollar Check Writer
It wasn’t unusual for Hastings to write quarter-million dollar checks, or more, to campaigns and causes. In 2014, he gave $247,000 to a successful state ballot measure that rolled back sentences for non-violent crimes. In 2012, he gave $1 million to support a successful ballot measure drafted by Gov. Jerry Brown to raise taxes on the wealthiest Californians. That year he also gave $250,000 to a failed measure to end the state’s death penalty. But his top priority has primarily been charter schools and computer-centered learning.
In 2014, Hastings gave $1.5 million to the California Charter Schools Association Advocates, which, as the Los Angeles Times wrote, “transferred much of the money to an affiliated political action committee that supported candidates in the 2015 Los Angeles Board of Education elections,” where there was a big fight brewing over how quickly charter schools could expand in L.A., the nation’s second largest school district. Another billionaire, Eli Broad, had floated a plan to turn half of the city’s schools into charters in eight years; just last month, the L.A. school board soundly rejected that proposal.
More recently, Hastings has increased his support for educational software developers. As the pro-charter EducationNext.org explained in a profile last winter, “Netflix CEO Reed Hastings has given millions of dollars to start charter schools. He’s put millions more into developing education software to personalize learning.... And he is not a fan of school boards.” The article continues, showing the small and entwined world of charter operators and elite high-tech businesses:
“Hastings provided start-up funding for the Aspire Public Schools charter network and helped start and fund EdVoice, a lobbying group, and the NewSchools Venture Fund, which supports education entrepreneurs. He’s given money to Sal Khan of Khan Academy to develop teaching videos—and a dashboard to track student progress—used in the U.S. and around the world. Hastings also supports Rocketship Education, which blends adaptive learning on computers with teacher-led instruction. He’s on the board of the California Charter Schools Association; the KIPP Foundation; DreamBox Learning, an education technology company; and the Pahara Institute, which provides fellowships to education leaders.”
Hastings' announcement in January that he was creating a $100 million foundation to focus on education suggests he will not only keep doing what he has been doing—as exemplified by his support of Rocketship and software firms putting largely untested ideas in charter schools—but also step up the pace. Last winter, he told a pro-charter website that one takeaway from the Rocketship turmoil of falling test scores was that software was best for teaching “subjects with correct answers,” but “it will take 5 to 10 years of hard work to figure out” how to use it to teach an interpretive subject like history or literature.
It’s worth pondering that comment. Rocketship has plans to keep on expanding into new states and opening more schools in low-income communities. Hastings’ $100 million donation undoubtedly will allow this and related experiments to continue and grow, whether or not device-centered classrooms in charter schools will prove to help or hurt students. Last fall, Hastings affirmed his long game philosophy: because he’s a billionaire, he can impose pet projects on public schools.
“The key in management is you have to have your long-term, stable, successful picture. And motivate people—employees, suppliers, investors toward that picture,” Hastings told CNBC. “There will be uneven amounts of execution toward it, potentially doubts at times if it’s achievable. But you can’t get concerned.”
As wealth becomes concentrated in fewer and fewer hands, the billionaire class is increasingly turning to foundations and non-profits to enact the change they would like to see in the world. Amid the rise of philanthrocapitalism, growing numbers of critics are raising serious questions about whether this outsized influence is doing more harm than good.
In the January issue of the New York Review of Books, veteran journalist Michael Massing noted that, in the past 15 years alone, “the number of foundations with a billion dollars or more in assets has doubled, to more than eighty.” The philanthropic sector in the United States is far more significant than in Europe, fueled in part by generous tax write-offs, which the U.S. public subsidizes to the tune of $40 billion a year.
As Massing observes, billionaires are not just handing over their money, they have ideas about how it should be used, and their vision often aligns with their own economic interests. For this reason, the philanthropy industry deserves rigorous scrutiny, not a free pass because it is in the service of good.
Massing’s argument followed a study released in January by the watchdog organization Global Policy Forum, which found that philanthropic foundations are so powerful they are allowing wealthy individuals to bypass governments and international bodies like the United Nations in pursuit of their own agendas. What’s more, this outsized influence is concentrated in the United States, where 19 out of the top 27 largest foundations are based. These 27 foundations together possess $360 billion, write authors Jens Martens and Karolin Seitz.
Such dramatic wealth accumulation has disturbing implications. "What is the impact of framing the problems and defining development solutions by applying the business logic of profit-making institutions to philanthropic activities, for instance by results-based management or the focus on technological quick-win solutions in the sectors of health and agriculture?" the report asks.
These questions are not new, as social movements have long raised the alarm about the global impact of the ever-expanding philanthropy sector. In 2010, the international peasant movement La Via Campesina blasted the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s acquisition of Monsanto shares as proof that its role in privatizing the global food supply and exporting big agribusiness, from Africa to North America, should be viewed through a commercial rather than humanitarian lens.
“It is really shocking for the peasant organizations and social movements in Haiti to learn about the decision of the [Gates] Foundation to buy Monsanto shares while it is giving money for agricultural projects in Haiti that promote the company’s seed and agrochemicals,” said Chavannes Jean-Baptiste of the Haitian Peasant Movement of Papaye and Caribbean coordinator of La Via Campesina at the time. “The peasant organizations in Haiti want to denounce this policy which is against the interests of 80 percent of the Haitian population, and is against peasant agriculture—the base of Haiti’s food production.”
The Gates Foundation more recently fell under scrutiny from the advocacy organization Global Justice Now, which released a report in January raising concerns about the institution’s track record on education, food and health care policies.
“The Gates Foundation has rapidly become the most influential actor in the world of global health and agricultural policies, but there’s no oversight or accountability in how that influence is managed,” said Polly Jones of Global Justice Now. “This concentration of power and influence is even more problematic when you consider that the philanthropic vision of the Gates Foundation seems to be largely based on the values of corporate America. The foundation is relentlessly promoting big business-based initiatives such as industrial agriculture, private health care and education. But these are all potentially exacerbating the problems of poverty and lack of access to basic resources that the foundation is supposed to be alleviating.”
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan, raised eyebrows in December when they announced they would give away 99 percent of their wealth. As it turned out, this was not a giveaway at all, but a shifting of funds into their own limited liability company (LLC). Just weeks later, Zuckerberg lashed out at Indian media justice advocates who raised concerns about his company’s efforts to undermine net neutrality protections in their country.
Like many others, Massing is calling for greater transparency, not only for foundations but for think tanks, Hollywood, Silicon Valley and universities. Pointing to the website Inside Philanthropy, whose stated purpose is to “pull back the curtain on one of the most powerful and dynamic forces shaping society,” Massing argues that far greater and better-resourced scrutiny is needed. “There remains the question of how to pay for all this,” writes Massing, posing: “Is there perhaps a consortium of donors out there willing to fund an operation that would part the curtains on its own world?”
But some argue that we already have all the information we need to be concerned. In December, Vandana Shiva, an ecofeminist and activist, wrote in response to Zuckerberg’s move in India that a “collective corporate assault is underway globally. Having lined up all their ducks, veterans of corporate America such as Bill Gates are being joined by the next wave of philanthro-corporate Imperialists, including Mark Zuckerberg.”
“It is an enclosure of the commons,” she continued, “which are ‘commons’ because they guarantee access to the commoner, whether it be seed, water, information or internet.”
Here's why.
The post Dragged Across the Classroom Floor: It’s Time to Admit That Schools Are Prisons appeared first on The Anti-Media.
Sometimes events happen that seem to be disconnected, but after a few days or weeks, the pattern emerges. Consider this: On October 2, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan announced that he was resigning and planned to return to Chicago. Former New York Commissioner of Education John King, who is a clone of Duncan in terms of his belief in testing and charter schools, was designated to take Duncan’s place. On October 23, the Obama administration held a surprise news conference to declare that testing was out of control and should be reduced to not more than 2 percent of classroom time. Actually, that wasn’t a true reduction, because 2 percent translates into between 18-24 hours of testing, which is a staggering amount of annual testing for children in grades 3-8 and not different from the status quo in most states.
Disconnected events?
Not at all. Here comes the pattern-maker: the federal tests called the National Assessment of Educational Progress released its every-other-year report card in reading and math, and the results were dismal. There would be many excuses offered, many rationales, but the bottom line: the NAEP scores are an embarrassment to the Obama administration (and the George W. Bush administration that preceded it).
For nearly 15 years, Presidents Bush and Obama and the Congress have bet billions of dollars—both federal and state– on a strategy of testing, accountability, and choice. They believed that if every student was tested in reading and mathematics every year from grades 3 to 8, test scores would go up and up. In those schools where test scores did not go up, the principals and teachers would be fired and replaced. Where scores didn’t go up for five years in a row, the schools would be closed. Thousands of educators were fired, and thousands of public schools were closed, based on the theory that sticks and carrots, rewards and punishments, would improve education.
But the 2015 NAEP scores released today by the National Assessment Governing Board (a federal agency) showed that Arne Duncan’s $4.35 billion Race to the Top program had flopped. It also showed that George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind was as phony as the “Texas education miracle” of 2000, which Bush touted as proof of his education credentials.
NAEP is an audit test. It is given every other year to samples of students in every state and in about 20 urban districts. No one can prepare for it, and no one gets a grade. NAEP measures the rise or fall of average scores for states in fourth grade and eighth grade in reading and math and reports them by race, gender, disability status, English language ability, economic status, and a variety of other measures.
The 2015 NAEP scores showed no gains nationally in either grade in either subject. In mathematics, scores declined in both grades, compared to 2013. In reading, scores were flat in grade 4 and lower in grade 8. Usually the Secretary of Education presides at a press conference where he points with pride to increases in certain grades or in certain states. Two years ago, Arne Duncan boasted about the gains made in Tennessee, which had won $500 million in Duncan’s Race to the Top competition. This year, Duncan had nothing to boast about.
In his Race to the Top program, Duncan made testing the primary purpose of education. Scores had to go up every year, because the entire nation was “racing to the top.” Only 12 states won a share of the $4.35 billion that Duncan was given by Congress: Tennessee and Delaware were first to win, in 2010. The next round, the following states won multi-millions of federal dollars to double down on testing: Maryland, Massachusetts, the District of Columbia, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, and Rhode Island.
Tennessee, Duncan’s showcase state in 2013, made no gains in reading or mathematics, neither in fourth grade or eighth grade. The black-white test score gap was as large in 2015 as it had been in 1998, before either NCLB or the Race to the Top.
The results in mathematics were bleak across the nation, in both grades 4 and 8. The declines nationally were only 1 or 2 points, but they were significant in a national assessment on the scale of NAEP.
In fourth-grade mathematics, the only jurisdictions to report gains were the District of Columbia, Mississippi, and the Department of Defense schools. Sixteen states had significant declines in their math scores, and thirty-three were flat in relation to 2013 scores. The scores in Tennessee (the $500 million winner) were flat.
In eighth grade, the lack of progress in mathematics was universal. Twenty-two states had significantly lower scores than in 2013, while 30 states or jurisdictions had flat scores. Pennsylvania, Kansas, and Florida (a Race to the Top winner), were the biggest losers, by dropping six points. Among the states that declined by four points were Race to the Top winners Ohio, North Carolina, and Massachusetts. Maryland, Hawaii, New York, and the District of Columbia lost two points. The scores in Tennessee were flat.
The District of Columbia made gains in fourth grade reading and mathematics, but not in eighth grade. It continues to have the largest score gap—56 points–between white and black students of any urban district in the nation. That is more than double the average of the other 20 urban districts. The state with the biggest achievement gap between black and white students is Wisconsin; it is also the state where black students have the lowest scores, lower even than their peers in states like Mississippi and South Carolina. Wisconsin has invested heavily in vouchers and charter schools, which Governor Scott Walker intends to increase.
The best single word to describe NAEP 2015 is stagnation. Contrary to President George W. Bush’s law, many children have been left behind by the strategy of test-and-punish. Contrary to the Obama administration’s Race to the Top program, the mindless reliance on standardized testing has not brought us closer to some mythical “Top.”
No wonder Arne Duncan is leaving Washington. There is nothing to boast about, and the next set of NAEP results won’t be published until 2017. The program that he claimed would transform American education has not raised test scores, but has demoralized educators and created teacher shortages. Disgusted with the testing regime, experienced teachers leave and enrollments in teacher education programs fall. One can only dream about what the Obama administration might have accomplished had it spent that $5 billion in discretionary dollars to encourage states and districts to develop and implement realistic plans for desegregation their schools, or had they invested the same amount of money in the arts.
The past dozen or so years have been a time when “reformers” like Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein, and Bill Gates proudly claimed that they were disrupting school systems and destroying the status quo. Now the “reformers” have become the status quo, and we have learned that disruption is not good for children or education.
Time is running out for this administration, and it is not likely that there will be any meaningful change of course in education policy. One can only hope that the next administration learns important lessons from the squandered resources and failure of NCLB and Race to the Top.
A new report released Thursday provides a detailed look at the graduation rates of low-income college students. At many colleges, low-income students graduate at much lower rates than their high-income peers.
At the University of Missouri-Kansas City, only 35 percent of Pell Grant recipients graduate college, a rate that is more than 20 percentage points lower than that of their wealthier peers. And at St. Andrews, a liberal arts college in Laurinburg, North Carolina, only 13 percent of Pell Grant recipients graduate, more than 50 percentage points less than students who don’t receive the grants.
The study found 51 percent of Pell students graduate nationwide, compared to 65 percent of non-Pell students. The average gap between wealthy and poor students at the same schools is much smaller: an average of 5.7 percentage points. That’s because many Pell students attend schools with low graduation rates. (You can now look up whether poor students are graduating at the same rate as their classmates in our newly updated interactive database, Debt by Degrees.)
Ben Miller, the senior director for postsecondary education at the Center for American Progress, said that schools with large graduation gaps deserve greater scrutiny.
“Colleges have responsibility to ensure that the students they enroll are well served,” said Miller. “If you’re going to enroll someone, you should do the absolute best you can to graduate them, or else don’t take their money.”
The new report comes on the heels of recently released federal education data that has brought new focus on how low-income students fare at college, including how much federal debt they take on and how much they earn after graduation. The graduation rates of low-income students were not included in that data.
The group behind the new report, the Education Trust, collected the graduation rates of Pell Grant recipients — typically students whose families make less than $30,000 a year — for a selection of more than 1,000 colleges across the country.
A spokesman for University of Missouri-Kansas City said many of their students are low-income and that the school is working to do better. “We are not satisfied with that gap,” said John Martellaro. “We are investing more resources in our student success programs in an effort to narrow that gap.” (Read their full statement.)
St. Andrews did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
At more than a third of the colleges studied, schools were able to serve their Pell students almost as well as non-Pell students, with a gap of less than 3 percentage points.
Other schools have managed to graduate Pell students at an even higher rate than their non-Pell peers. According to the new data, nearly 90 percent of Pell recipients are able to graduate Smith College, compared with an 85 percent graduation rate of non-Pell students. And at Western Oregon University, Pell recipients have a graduation rate of 50 percent — nearly 10 percentage points better than their peers.
Both schools worked hard to ensure high graduation rates, including improving admissions policies and bolstering financial aid, as well as increasing advising and support services for students at school, says the new report.
The Pell Grant program is the nation’s largest need-based student grant program, giving out billions of dollars annually. Yet for years, the data on Pell recipient graduation rates was mostly hidden from the public eye.
Although colleges are required to give the government graduation-rate data that's broken down by gender and race, the data is not required to be reported by income or Pell Grant status. Since 2008, schools are required to disclose Pell graduation rate data if it’s requested by prospective students.
“It’s kind of astounding when you think about how much money is spent on the Pell Grant program,” said Andrew Kelly, the director of the Center on Higher Education Reform at the American Enterprise Institute. “We don’t have any idea about how much of that money goes to producing degrees. We don’t know what happens to Pell recipients after they enroll.”
In order to collect Pell graduation rates, the Education Trust filed requests for data through state higher education systems as well as with the schools themselves. Some of the data was purchased from U.S. News and World Report. However, only around 1,150 schools were included in the report, out of the more than 7,000 institutions in the country. The survey also did not include data from for-profit colleges, where many Pell-recipients attend school.
Sisi Wei contributed to this report.
The College Board released a new version of its Advanced Placement U.S. History (APUSH) framework in late July.
