The New Orleans turnaround shows the power of giving more freedom to teachers and principals — and then holding them accountable for their performance
Twelve years later, Nigel Palmer still remembers the embarrassment of his first days as a fourth grader in Monroe, La. He was a Hurricane Katrina evacuee from New Orleans, living with his family in a La Quinta Inn, 250 miles from home. As soon as the school year began, he could tell that the kids in his new school seemed different from him.
They could divide numbers. He really couldn’t. They knew the 50 states. He didn’t. “I wasn’t up to par,” he quietly told me. It’s a miserable feeling.
Until the storm, Palmer had been attending New Orleans public schools, which were among the country’s worst. The high-school graduation rate was 54 percent, and some students who did graduate had shockingly weak academic skills.
After Katrina’s devastation, New Orleans embarked on the most ambitious education overhaul in modern America. The state of Louisiana took over the system in 2005, abolished the old bureaucracy and closed nearly every school. Rather than running schools itself, the state became an overseer, hiring independent operators of public schools — that is, charter schools — and tracking their performance.
Dominique Newton was the 2016 valedictorian of G.W. Carver High School. But she initially struggled in college, at Xavier, while also helping care for her father, who is on dialysis. She now is doing better, and majoring in political science.CreditWilliam Widmer for The New York Times
This month, the New Orleans overhaul entered a new stage. On July 1, the state returned control of all schools to the city. The charter schools remain. But a locally elected school board, accountable to the city’s residents, is now in charge. It’s a time when people in New Orleans are reflecting on what the overhaul has, and has not, accomplished.
So I decided to visit and talk with students, teachers, principals, community leaders and researchers. And I was struck by how clear of a picture emerged. It’s still a nuanced picture, with both positives and negatives. But there are big lessons.
New Orleans is a great case study partly because it avoids many of the ambiguities of other education reform efforts. The charters here educate almost all public-school students, so they can’t cherry pick. And the students are overwhelmingly black and low-income — even lower-income than before Katrina — so gentrification isn’t a factor.
Performance on every kind of standardized test has surged. Before the storm, New Orleans students scored far below the Louisiana average on reading, math, science and social studies. Today, they hover near the state average, despite living amid much more poverty. Nationally, the average New Orleans student has moved to the 37th percentile of math and reading scores, from the 22nd percentile pre-Katrina.
This week, Douglas Harris — a Tulane economist who leads a rigorous research project on the schools — is releasing a new study, with Matthew Larsen, another economist. It shows that the test-score gains are translating into real changes in students’ lives. High-school graduation, college attendance and college graduation have all risen.
Jewel Dauphin, a 2017 Carver graduate, now attends Opportunities Academy, a program that teaches life skills. He also does work as an advocate pushing the city to improve transportation options for people with disabilities. CreditWilliam Widmer for The New York Times
One example: In most of Louisiana, the share of 12th graders going directly to college has fallen in recent years, probably because of budget cuts to higher education. In New Orleans, Harris and Larsen report, the share has jumped to 32.8 percent, from 22.5 percent before Katrina.
People here point to two main forces driving the progress: Autonomy and accountability.
In other school districts, teachers and principals are subject to a thicket of rules, imposed by a central bureaucracy. In New Orleans, schools have far more control. They decide which extracurriculars to offer and what food to serve. Principals choose their teachers — and can let go of weak ones. Teachers, working together, often choose thei
r curriculum.
“It puts decisions really close to the school site and the students,” Towana Pierre-Floyd, the principal of KIPP Renaissance High School, told me. Victor Jones, an English teacher at G.W. Carver High School, says, “We don’t have to wait to make changes when we know changes need to be made.”
Jones and his colleagues recently decided that their ninth graders needed more writing practice than they were getting from their literature-heavy curriculum. But the teachers still wanted to expose the students to great books. So they combined two curriculum plans to get the right mix, cutting down on novels without eliminating them. The students now read “Lord of the Flies,” “Romeo and Juliet,” “Parable of the Sower,” Ray Bradbury short stories and journalism about terrorism, among other things, and also do more writing than they used to.
Crucially, all of this autonomy comes with accountability: Schools must show their approach is working. They are evaluated based on test scores, including ACT and Advanced Placement, and graduation rate — with an emphasis on the trend lines. Schools that fail to make progress can lose their contract.
Over the past decade, the district has replaced the operators of more than 40 schools in response to poor performance. “You have to meet these minimum standards to continue to have the privilege of educating kids,” Patrick Dobard, the superintendent until last year, told me. Harris’s research has found that much of the city’s progress has stemmed from closing the worst charter schools and letting successful charters expand.
Think about how different this is from the norm in American education. In most districts, a single entity — a board of education — is responsible for both running schools and evaluating them. That combination is not a recipe for rigorous evaluation and consequences. It’s akin to letting students grade themselves.
Obviously, very few districts elsewhere are going to replicate the New Orleans model and start from scratch. But most would benefit from introducing both more freedom and more accountability. Together, the two spark human ingenuity.
For all of the improvement here, the schools still have their troubles. The academic results still trail those in less impoverished districts, and progress has slowed lately. “We’re not where we want to be,” Rhonda Dale, the principal of Abramson Sci Academy, said. Some residents told me they hoped that the new local control could accelerate academic progress – while also making the school system feel like more a local institution and less like one imposed on the city. My column next week will focus on these challenges.
Yet even with the caveats, it would be a terrible mistake to let the imperfections obscure the progress here. The city’s residents certainly recognize that progress. In a recent poll by Tulane’s Cowen Institute, 70 percent of public-school parents said the charter schools had improved education.
And what ended up happening to Nigel Palmer? In seventh grade, he moved back to New Orleans, a stronger student than when he left. Fortunately, the city’s schools had improved too. His high school, KIPP Renaissance, was “a fun, competitive environment — people wanted a high G.P.A.,” he said. “School was cool.”
This spring, he graduated from Xavier University, a historically black Catholic college here, and he recently started his first job — as a middle-school social studies teacher in New Orleans.
Source of the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/15/opinion/columnists/new-orleans-charter-schools-education-reform.html
The minutes and hours of the school day are critical to build knowledge, foster student motivation, and drive student outcomes. To make the most of precious instructional time, teachers must first develop engaging lessons that meet the various needs of students. This requires teachers to collaborate, plan, and reflect outside of instructional time. Effective school schedules maximize the time teachers spend with their students but also recognize teachers’ additional responsibilities beyond instructional time. Unfortunately, not enough schools successfully balance these priorities.
Teachers in the United States spend far more time engaged in active instruction than teachers in other high-performing countries.1 Based on self-reported data, teachers in the United States spend 27 hours teaching out of 45 hours of work per week.2 Compare this with teachers in Singapore, who teach for only 17 hours per week, or teachers in Finland, who teach for a total of 21 hours per week.3 Schools in these countries prioritize time for planning and collaboration, recognizing that developing and executing lessons take time and preparation.4 According to a recent analysis of more than 140 school districts, the average length of a U.S. teacher’s workday is 7.5 hours.5 In another analysis of more than 120 school districts, the most common length of time allotted for planning was 45 minutes per day.6 In this short time, teachers must grade student work, plan for future lessons, engage with families, and complete necessary paperwork. As a result, teachers have little time to plan or collaborate with peers.7
The squeeze for time to plan lessons and complete other administrative tasks shapes a school’s professional environment and, ultimately, affects the quality of instruction. In a recent survey from the American Federation of Teachers, one of teachers’ two most cited “everyday stressors” was time pressure.8 As teachers are largely separate from other educators during instruction, lack of time for collaboration can be very isolating. More than half of lower secondary school teachers in the United States report that they do not teach jointly or observe other teachers.9 Such practices can improve teaching quality by granting teachers opportunities to receive feedback on their lesson execution and infuse new best practices into their repertoire.
In addition, providing teachers with more time to plan and attend to other responsibilities throughout the school day creates systematic opportunities to support new teachers and stretch more seasoned teachers—increasing the likelihood of teacher retention. During this structured planning time, new teachers should receive the coaching and personalized training they need to maximize their effectiveness and meet their professional goals. Meanwhile, experienced teachers can pursue leadership roles or coach new teachers.
Fortunately, schools can look to several promising models to change their typical schedules. The Center for American Progress compiled five of these innovative school schedules. Some of these schedules have already been implemented in schools across the country to improve instruction and ensure that teachers have ample time to teach, prepare, and develop their craft. CAP has also included teachers’ ideas for alternatives to the traditional school day model.
While each example schedule varies, there were similarities in how school leaders and teachers at each school reimagined the use of time. These innovative schedules all included:
Additional time for planning and collaboration
Flexible instructional blocks to differentiate content to student need
Opportunities for small group instruction or student-directed learning
Innovative school schedules: Example schedules from schools across the country
Guilmette Elementary School in Lawrence, Massachusetts, added more than 260 hours of instructional time to the school year and built in common planning time by extending the school day and strategically aligning grade team schedules. The schedule also allows for targeted intervention and enrichment opportunities for all students. (see Table 1) Students follow a similar schedule on Mondays through Thursdays. On Fridays, students participate in high-quality enrichment programming from noon to 2:30 p.m., which is led by community partners. These enrichment activities include art, music, yoga, and cooking. Teachers participate in professional development and planning at that time.10
Operations and cost
The extra instructional hours are a significant cost. The district’s teacher contract provides teachers with a stipend of $2,500 per year for added hours that is distributed evenly across their paychecks. Moreover, the quality of the enrichment programs offered on Friday is dependent on the community partners that teach the programs. Guilmette has worked to find high-quality, affordable partners.11
Outcomes
In the four years since Guilmette has implemented the new schedule, its English language arts and math proficiency scores have steadily improved; since 2013, Guilmette outperformed other elementary schools in the district. More information is available on the school’s report card.12
Objectives
Add 260 or more instructional hours each school year
Provide collaborative planning time for teachers
Create added opportunities for enrichment and targeted intervention that focuses on acceleration
Achievement First Greenfield middle school schedule, New Haven, Connecticut
What’s different about this schedule?
Greenfield schools, which are a part of the Achievement First network, designed a schedule that leverages four modalities of learning: self-directed learning; small group learning; large group instruction, and immersive expeditions.13 Students engage in daily self-directed learning to build responsibility and differentiate the pace of their learning. During this time, students use independent work or technology to review new concepts and move through mastery of content at their own pace. Students also participate in small group learning in sections of 14 to 16 students to dig into specific topics and receive individual feedback. Larger group instruction is reserved for seminars, debates, and experiments.
Every eight weeks, students engage in immersive expeditions for one to two weeks that explore a specific issue and apply skills to the real world. Expeditions such as creating a play, television show, or movie allow them to use writing, improvisation, and teamwork skills to bring stories to life. For example, in the expedition “Make your story come to life,” students write and produce scenes or short plays to be performed by other actors. They engage with a professional theater company for storytelling workshops and go on behind-the-scenes tours.14
Interactive digital learning is a key element of the Greenfield model. A cloud-based Personalized Learning Platform, or PLP, takes the place of traditional textbooks. Students use a laptop to access their online self-directed content, track progress toward their goals, and take assessments to demonstrate mastery of concepts. This system minimizes teachers’ work and increases transparency of student progress. Teachers or students do not need to input results to track progress; the platform does it automatically. Teachers, students, and families can log in to access student progress anywhere with an internet connection. It also helps the school communicate with parents and families.15
Every teacher is responsible for leading one instructional area—either humanities, math, science, writing, or social studies. This specialization allows teachers to focus on achieving ambitious results in their content area. A yearly pacing calendar identifies where students must perform at every point in the year in order to be on track with these ambitious outcomes. Teachers use pacing reports each day to determine where students are performing relative to the bar and to adjust their instruction in ways that will maximize the number of students who are on and ahead of pace.16
In addition, Greenfield differentiates teachers’ roles and schedules to allow for specialization, planning, and life balance.17 This includes collaborative planning time for all teachers, differentiated coaching, and professional development, as well as growth opportunities based on teachers’ skills and experience. Greenfield also offers a staggered teaching schedule for more experienced teachers.
Within each grade, students are organized into goal teams of 10 to 12 students and assigned a goal coach. These teams meet daily in order to set and reflect on academic, life habit, or enrichment goals; deepen relationships with the goal coach and other goal team members; and build habits of success. Within goal teams, students are paired off with another student, called a running partner. These pairs provide mutual support and accountability to one another as they strive for ambitious short- and long-term goals. Goal teams are led by a goal coach who is a staff member in the school. The goal coach works closely with one goal team to build community and to be a primary support for each student and running partner pair.18
Operations and cost
The ongoing operation of this schedule is not more costly than other schedules that Achievement First operates in its network. Core to Achievement First’s mission is to operate with the same public dollars as traditional district schools in the geographies where it operates.19
Outcomes
The Greenfield schools piloted the model in kindergarten and middle school grades, all of which saw proficiency exceed or equal the scores of other Achievement First schools in Connecticut after just one year. Kindergartners exceeded 90 percent proficient rates in reading, and 60 percent of students demonstrated at least 75 percentile growth in math. For middle school grades, average scores on English language arts weekly quizzes ranked first or second in the overall Achievement First Connecticut network. Fifth grade math scores exceeded the network average, but sixth grade scores were below the average.20For more information on socioemotional growth, review the Achievement First’s Greenfield Schools Year 1 Pilot.21
Objectives
Allow for accelerated, differentiated academics through four modalities of learning: self-directed learning time; small group learning; large group learning; and immersive expeditions
Build in time for enrichment
Foster habits of success in all kids, including curiosity, personal growth, empathy, gratitude, drive, and teamwork
Emphasize the importance of student, family, and staff motivation
Differentiate teacher roles based on experience and create more time for planning for all instructional staff
Reduce turnover by finding ways to accommodate senior teachers who need more flexible schedules
Generation Schools secondary schedule, Brooklyn, New York
What’s different about this schedule?
Generation Schools Network’s secondary school model creates up to 30 percent more learning time than traditional public schools in New York City and provides opportunities for differentiated instruction. It also reduces student-to-teacher ratios and overall teacher workloads to facilitate the development of supportive teacher-student relationships.22
Furthermore, teachers have more time for collaboration and professional development. All teachers, as part of their approximately 180-day work year, participate in a one- to two-week Summer Institute dedicated to collaborative planning in preparation for the school year.23 In addition, grade teams have two weeks of professional collaborative time staggered throughout the year when their students are in intensives. This is in addition to the collaborative time that teachers have every day.24
To reduce teacher workload and increase instructional time, the Generation Schools Network differentiates instructional roles—foundation, studio, and intensive teachers. This allows the school to build on a wider range of teachers’ strengths and to design roles and responsibilities that help teachers be effective and reduce turnover. In addition, it reduces teachers’ student load. Teachers have 75 or fewer students daily compared with their peers in New York City traditional public high schools, who often teach 150 students daily.25 The model organizes teachers into grade level teams and a college and career intensives team. The college and career intensives team rotates from grade to grade over the course of the year, spending a month with students exploring college and career pathways. Teachers on that designated grade team are not responsible for students that month and can use that time for collaboration and breaks. By staggering teacher breaks, Generation Schools Network expands the instructional year for students without increasing the number of working days for teachers.26
Every student also has a differentiated schedule that fits their needs. Students participate in extended foundation courses—including interdisciplinary courses on humanities or science, technology, engineering, and math, or STEM—which teach required subjects for all students as well as have various studio courses based on their interests. Studio courses include art history, physical education, art, foreign languages, or advanced sciences.27
Operations and cost
Generation Schools’ model reconfigures the same number of staff members who are employed in a conventional school model so that each school can offer much more planning time to teachers and instructional time to students without increasing staff costs, which are a majority of a school’s budget. Depending on how districts budget, this type of schedule may require additional costs for maintenance or transportation.28
Outcomes
Generation Schools Network has improved student achievement and graduation rates. Brooklyn Generation School, or BGS, has improved attendance, course completion, and graduation rates. At 69 percent, the four-year graduation rate at BGS has matched that for the city overall—70 percent—and outperformed schools with a similar demographic of students. These achievements are especially remarkable, as 85 percent of BGS’ students enter high school behind or significantly behind. In addition, 100 percent of the 2016 graduating class was accepted into college—many receiving multiple admissions and significant financial aid to make the opportunity real.29
Objectives
Increase instructional time for all students and opportunities to differentiate instruction
Reduce student-to-teacher ratios and overall teacher workloads to facilitate the development of supportive teacher-student relationships
Integrate collaborative planning time for teacher teams
Model school schedules designed by teachers
Model elementary school schedule
Created by Lexie Woo, fourth and fifth grade teacher in Queens, New York
What’s different about this schedule?
This schedule allows educators the opportunity to improve their instruction through strategic collaboration with colleagues, additional planning time, and ongoing feedback from administrators.
The timing of instructional blocks rotates to diffuse the negative impact of time-sensitive factors, such as tardiness, early dismissals, fatigue, medication use, and attention span. In addition, each subject has a double instructional block once per week, providing time for innovative educational practices, including multidisciplinary learning; project-based learning; and science, technology, engineering, art and design, and math, or STEAM, and STEM. This allows students to engage in a more self-directed and autonomous educational experience, growing as independent thinkers and doers.
With this dynamic schedule, teachers can select preferred preparation times, allowing teachers to shape their day to fit their working style. In other words, teachers can deliver instruction at the height of their energy.30
Objectives
Create more teacher planning time and develop more opportunities for teachers to receive feedback on their instruction
Allow teachers to self-select preparation periods to ensure that the timing works for their teaching and working styles
Offer double instructional blocks for each subject throughout the week
Rotate the timing of instructional blocks
Model high school schedule
Created by Crischelle Navalta, high school teacher in Donna, Texas; Jillian Harkins, high school teacher in New Haven, Connecticut; Mary Kreuz, high school teacher in Toledo, Ohio; Megan Williams, eighth grade teacher in Washington, D.C.; and Amanda Zullo, high school teacher in Saranac Lake, New York
What’s different about this schedule?
This schedule strategically minimizes teachers’ workloads to ensure that they have time to build their content expertise. In addition, teachers have additional time apart from active instruction to collaborate with their content team, plan independently, or assume a leadership position.31
Objectives
Reduce instructional load by ensuring that teachers teach no more than two different course subjects, and limit teaching time to only 60 percent of a teacher’s day
Build in approximately 40 percent of the day for conference time, leadership roles beyond the classroom, common planning time with content or grade team, and professional development
Conclusion
Tasked to deliver differentiated, high-quality instruction that prepares students for the social and academic challenges in college and beyond, schools must push their thinking on how they allocate time throughout the school day. Innovative school schedules should meet diverse student needs and ensure that all teachers are primed to deliver engaging, rigorous content. As this issue brief demonstrates, various models already exist to accomplish these goals. As schools across the country reimagine their school day schedules, they will be most successful if they customize the use of time to meet content needs rather than adapting content to fit a fixed schedule.
Meg Benner is a Senior Consultant at the Center for American Progress. Lisette Partelow is the Director of K-12 Strategic Initiatives at the Center.
National Council on Teacher Quality, “The NCTQ Teacher Trendline: A snapshot of district-level teacher policies from NCTQ’s Teacher Contract Database” (2015), available at http://www.nctq.org/commentary/article.do?id=186. ↩
Personal communication from Jonathan Spear, co-founder and former chief learning officer, and Wendy Loloff Piersee, chief executive officer, Generation Schools Network, July to August 2016. ↩
Personal communication from Lexie Woo, fourth and fifth grade teacher, Queens, New York, July 2016. ↩
Personal communication from Crischelle Navalta, high school teacher, Donna, Texas; Jillian Harkins, high school teacher, New Haven, Connecticut; Mary Kreuz, high school teacher, Toledo, Ohio; Megan Williams, eighth grade teacher, Washington, D.C.; and Amanda Zullo, high school teacher, Saranac Lake, New York, July 2016. ↩
Source of the article: https://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education-k-12/reports/2017/02/23/426723/reimagining-the-school-day/
North America/United States/03.07.18/Source: www.theguardian.com.
In Pennsylvania, organizers go door-to-door to make a personal case for educators as a court decision threatens union funding
Gunshots ring out from the nearby hunting range across the railroad tracks in Westmoreland City, Pennsylvania, but Jason Davis is not easily deterred.
“You never know what’s going to happen when you knock on someone’s door,” says Davis as we get out of his car to start walking the hills of this blue-collar, Trump-supporting community in the foothills of the mountains of south-western Pennsylvania.
Davis is going door-to-door to rally support for a teacher’s union after a historic supreme court decision – Janus vs AFSCME – that threatens its funding and that of all other US public sector unions.
Following last Wednesday’s ruling, non-union members will no longer have to pay “fair share” fees to be represented by unions in collective bargaining negotiations. The move could cost unions millions and lead some union members to make the decision to stop paying their dues.
For Davis, this is vital work. Over the past 15 years, the Republican-leaning school district where Davis teaches has seen the number of teachers reduced through attrition and layoffs from 320 to 270 today. He sees unions as the best way to fight back against those cuts.
While anti-union organizations have launched a broad effort to get public sector union members to stop paying dues, unions like Davis’s are going into high gear to not only retain their members, but to build on public support for teachers felt in the wake of this year’s teachers’ strikes.
As we trudge up a large hill, Davis and I meet Tim McKinney, a 24-year-old factory worker at the local General Carbide plant, who is living with his parents while working part-time. Davis starts off by introducing himself as a local teacher in the Penn Trafford school district; his kids attend McKinney’s alma mater, Norwin high school. Davis asks McKinney how he feels about education funding and they immediately start talking about the underfunding of the local high school band.
McKinney had played in the band, which is nationally ranked. But after he graduated in 2012, the then governor, Republican Tom Corbett, cut more than $1bn from the state’s education funds, and the school started instituting fees for kids who wanted to play. Now, Norwin high school parents like Davis pay $620 a year for each of their kids to play in the band.
“The band was so important to me. It taught me discipline,” says McKinney as we stand on the front porch of his parent’s house.
Davis and McKinney begin to discuss how statewide funding cuts have devastated education and how the current Democratic governor, Tom Wolf, is fighting the narrowly Republican-controlled Pennsylvania state legislature to increase funding. Davis quickly wins over McKinney as a convert to the teachers’ union cause.
“Funding education is important. We gotta support our teachers,” says McKinney as we leave his doorstep.
Davis, who canvasses the area regularly, says that conversations force people who never think about education funding to consider why unionized teachers like himself are seeking more funding.
“I just reminded him of the greatest moments of his life,” says Davis. “Now, he is going to have a conversation with his parents about what we talked about and they are probably going to talk to two or three people, which means that I helped facilitate not one conversation, but multiple conversations about education.”
A few doors down, we encounter a woman wearing a shirt depicting Joe Paterno, the controversial hero and legendary Penn State football coach. She appears a little nervous to talk to Davis. She starts to complain about how local property taxes are too high and at the same time, the school seems to be letting staff go and the quality of teaching is going down.
Davis explains to her that local property taxes have gone up as state funding of education has gone down. Davis talks for a few brief minutes, but as the reception seems less warm than at the previous home, he doesn’t stick around.
Even though the conversation isn’t quite what Davis expected, he still sees it as a victory in the fight to humanize teachers’ unions.
“For too long, we have been vilified and the only way to stop that is to put a human face on it,” says Davis. “If we want to exist, we have to sell ourselves as unions about why are we valuable. This is intensive, but it does make a difference and it will help.”
Davis and his colleagues have their work cut out for them. The Janus case was backed by some of the richest rightwing activists in the US, including the Koch brothers. As the Guardian revealed earlier this year, those groups have been planning an all-out assault on public sector unions following the Janus decision. They too will be going door-to-door and buying ads to encourage union members to rip up their membership cards and drop out now that they no longer have to pay “fair share” fees.
“In the wake of Janus, that one-on-one direct form of communication is extremely important,” says Annie Briscoe, a union organizer with the Pennsylvania State Education Association. “The ability to connect with one another is something that unions have unfortunately struggled with in recent decades. So, from an organizing standpoint, it’s very much back to basics with the canvassing effort to talk to members of the community about the nuts and bolts of public schools and why education funding works.”
Source of the notice: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2018/jul/01/teachers-unions-supreme-court-janus-ruling
American higher-education policy has two overarching problems. We don’t spend enough money on college education for middle-class and poor students. And we don’t demand enough accountability from colleges.
The two problems feed off each other, leading to miserably low graduation rates — often below 50 percent — at many colleges. The colleges that have figured out how to do better aren’t rewarded with more resources. The colleges with weak results face few consequences. All the while, lower-income students suffer.
Fortunately, the problem of college performance is starting to get more attention — from colleges themselves, state officials and others. But there is still a huge missing piece: the federal government. Washington has the potential to influence higher education, via both money and oversight, more powerfully than any state or college consortium.
I don’t see much reason to hope that the Trump administration will play this role. Betsy DeVos, the education secretary, seems more focused on using federal dollars to lift the profits of private education companies, regardless of how well or ill they serve students.
Outside the administration, though, some policy experts are starting to have intriguing conversations about the future of federal higher-education policy. The latest example comes from the Center for American Progress, the liberal research and advocacy group, which on Wednesday is set to release a new higher-education proposal. It focuses on those two big problems: lack of resources and lack of accountability.
The proposal calls for roughly doubling federal financial aid, an increase of $60 billion a year. (That’s less than one-fourth of the annual cost of the Trump tax cut, as Ben Miller, a former Education Department official who helped write the proposal, told me.) The bulk of that money would increase financial aid by up to $10,000 a year for a low- or middle-income student.
This money would effectively help cover student living costs, which often run close to $15,000 a year. Those costs — mostly room and board — are a major burden even for students who receive enough financial aid to cover much of their tuition bill. In fact some higher-education experts believe the recent attention on “free college” has been problematic, because it has obscured the fact that tuition isn’t the main issue for many lower-income families.
The second part of the new proposal would require colleges to meet performance benchmarks in exchange for the infusion of new federal spending. These benchmarks would include graduation rates and post-college employment and would vary based on “degree of difficulty.” A college that enrolled mostly low-income students wouldn’t be expected to have the same results as an elite college. Over the long term, colleges that failed to meet the benchmarks could lose funding, as is already the case in some states, including Florida and Indiana.
I don’t agree with every part of the proposal. I think it focuses too much on equity among demographic groups within colleges, for example — whether white and non-white students, or high- and low-income students at a given college fare similarly. These gaps exist, but they are usually modest. The much bigger problem is that students from different groups tend to attend different colleges. But I also think the plan is an excellent way to start the discussion.
A college degree remains the most reliable path to a good job and a healthy, satisfying life. That path should be open to a much larger segment of Americans than it is now.
On the news. President Trump’s use of the word “infest” yesterday continues his ugly pattern of describing illegal immigrants as subhuman. And “infest” is particularly stark, because it suggests that immigrants are akin to insects or rats — an analogy that Nazis frequently used to describe Jews, as Aviya Kushner notes in The Forward.
dehumanizing language “will only get worse as November approaches.” Bouie adds: “To energize its voters, the White House plans a campaign of vicious demagoguery.”
I’m not suggesting that Donald Trump is a Nazi. He is not. Yet it would be wishfully naïve to explain away his racism and his hate at this point. In both word and deed, he has shown himself to be quite comfortable with many of the ideas of white supremacy.
Source of the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/opinion/college-middle-class-poor-students.html?rref=collection%2Ftimestopic%2FEducation
Fraternity members at Louisiana State University adhere to age-old rituals, shrouded in secrecy, that dictate how they gather, greet each other and initiate their young pledges.
But when they return to campus in the fall, one ritual will be drastically different: They will face much more severe consequences for dangerous hazing incidents.
In May, eight months after the death of Maxwell Gruver, a freshman pledge at the university’s now banished Phi Delta Theta fraternity chapter, Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana signed into law an anti-hazing bill that would make it a felony for those involved in hazing that resulted in death, serious bodily harm, or life-threatening levels of alcohol. And students found guilty could land in a Louisiana jail for up to five years.
The new law represents an important departure for Louisiana, which once had some of the most lenient anti-hazing laws in the nation. But it also reflects renewed efforts around the country — in state legislatures, inside courthouses and on campuses — to prevent the hazing injuries and deaths that have plagued college campuses for decades.
“Realistically, the answer is regulation and reform,” John Hechinger, the author of “True Gentlemen: The Broken Pledge of America’s Fraternities,” said during a panel on Greek life last week at The New York Times Higher Ed Leaders Forum. “That is really the only possibility.”
There has been at least one school-related hazing death each year in the United States since 1961, according to Hank Nuwer, a Franklin College journalism professor and the author of multiple books on hazing. Most, but not all, have occurred during fraternity initiation events.
But in 2017, four students, including Mr. Gruver at L.S.U., Tim Piazza, a 19-year-old at Pennsylvania State University and Andrew Coffey, a 20-year-old at Florida State University, lost their lives in hazing-relating incidents. Mr. Coffey died on a fraternity house couch after drinking an entire bottle of bourbon during Big Brother Night. In each case, multiple students were charged.
This fall, Penn State President Eric J. Barron, who appeared on the panel with Mr. Hechinger, said that the incident on his campus had been a “horrible tragedy,” but one that had spurred new interest in reform.
This past year, Dr. Barron banned 13 organizations from his campus and instituted 15 reforms, including switching disciplinary oversight of the institutions from a Greek governing council to university administrators, requiring newcomers to take a pledge about their actions inside their organizations and deferring the initiation process for freshmen until later on in the school year, so they can develop new friends and interests before being faced with hazing.
This winter, officials at Florida State University started a hazing education initiative and increased staff members charged with monitoring Greek life. And at Louisiana State, President F. King Alexander proposed 28 reforms, including a requirement that chapters hire house managers.
College administrators are also beginning to look at the problem collectively. At a meeting in Chicago this spring, representatives from 31 colleges and universities explored ways to garner more cooperation from national Greek organizations, which can resist university oversight.
Dr. Barron is pushing an online safety database that will record incidents at chapters around the country, indicate which institutions are doing exemplary work in their communities and which are experiencing alarming trends.
Penn State and many other universities already have, or are instituting, their own report cards.
The high profile nature of the cases is also impacting state capitals. Pennsylvania, like Louisiana, is expected to soon pass an anti-hazing law that would make death by hazing a felony.
New Mexico has also been exploring the idea.
In Tennessee, state representative John DeBerry Jr. floated a bill that would ban fraternities altogether in the state.
Mr. Hechinger says fighting to make fraternities safer is probably a better use of critics’ energy, as it is unlikely that fraternities will be banned on public campuses where they are powerful.
“If we were going to create a higher education system from scratch, would we have organizations that year after year kill a student? Probably not,” he said at the conference. “But they are very ensconced in higher education, and if you try to do some kind of ban, which is often what people are asking, you run the risk of underground behavior.”
Source of the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/05/education/learning/colleges-fraternities-laws.html
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