This is a major shift with definite implications for policy, politics, and practice in and with our schools.

-Angela

August 18, 2014

Dept. of Ed. projects public schools will be ‘majority-minority’ this fall

By Jens Manuel Krogstad and Richard Fry9 comments

Teacher Haiti Johnson helps her first grade students with learning about the rhomboid shape during class. Credit: Getty Images

A milestone is expected to be reached this fall when minorities outnumber whites among the nation’s public school students for the first time, U.S. Department of Education projections show. This is due largely to fast growth in the number of Hispanic and Asian school-age children born in the U.S., according to a Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data.
A steady demographic change over the years has resulted in a decline in the number of whites in classrooms even as the total number of public school students has increased. In 1997, the U.S. had 46.1 million public school students, of which 63.4% were white. While whites will still outnumber any single racial or ethnic group this fall, their overall share of the nation’s 50 million public school students is projected to drop to 49.7%. Since 1997, the number of white students has declined by 15%, falling from 29.2 million to 24.9 million in 2014.

While the number of white students has declined, there have been large enrollment increases of Hispanics and Asians, two groups that have seen overall population growth. Since 1997, the number of Hispanic students nearly doubled to 12.9 million, and the number of Asians jumped 46% to 2.6 million. The number of black students expected in schools this fall, 7.7 million, has been relatively steady during this time.
Most of the growth is driven by U.S.-born Hispanic and Asian children rather than immigrant children. The number of Hispanic and Asian school-age children born in the U.S. has boomed, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data. The difference in growth between U.S.-born and immigrant children is most dramatic among Hispanics. From 1997 to 2013, the number of Hispanic children ages 5 to 17 born in the U.S. jumped 98%, while the group’s immigrant population of the same age declined by 26%. Among Asians of this age, the number of U.S.-born Asians increased 50% during this time, and the immigrant population increased a more modest 9%.
Young children are on the leading edge of the demographic shift. Minorities this fall are expected to make up 51% of public school students in grades pre-K through 8th grade and 48% of those in grades 9 through 12. Young Latinos alone accounted for at least 20% of public school kindergartners in 17 states, up from just eight states in 2000.
The composition of the private school student population is markedly different. In 2009, about seven-in-ten (73%) of the estimated 4.7 million children enrolled in kindergarten through grade 12 in private schools were white.
While those born in the U.S. are driving growth, immigrants are still having an impact in the classroom. Across the country, school districts have had to boost English language instruction for students who are not native speakers. This is because seven-in-ten school-age children who are immigrants or have immigrant parents speak another language other than English at home and will likely be provided English language instruction upon entering school.
It’s not certain that minorities will become the majority this fall in the nation’s classrooms because government enrollment data — as opposed to enrollment projections — won’t be available for a few years. Altered projections can throw off landmark demographic moments. This summer, for example, the Census Bureau reversed an estimate from 2012 that declared minority births had exceeded white births in the United States. Due to a sharp decline in U.S. births after the Great Recession, white births today still slightly exceed minority births.

Topics: Education, Race and Ethnicity

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1. Jens Manuel Krogstad is a Writer/Editor at the Pew Research Center's Hispanic Trends Project.
   

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   Richard Fry is a Senior Research Associate at the Pew Research Center’s Hispanic Trends Project.
   

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'Crisis' label deflects responsibility for migrant children by Nestor Rodriguez & Cecilia Menjívar

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I really respect the opinion of these two scholars on the matter of migration and unaccompanied minors.  Both have dedicated their entire careers to the topic of hemispheric migration.  We would do well to heed their cautionary words and analysis on how this so-called "crisis" is actually, unfortunately, nothing new but is rather an artifact of the media and political spin that nevertheless has consequences for policies that still may not get at the root of this long-term social problem.

-Angela

'Crisis' label deflects responsibility for migrant children

By Nestor Rodriguez and Cecilia Menjívar

The conventional characterization of the day regarding the situation with Central America migrant children heading to the United States is one that simply is not based on reality. There is no crisis.

The media, public officials and politicians have all contributed to create an image of this migration flow as a crisis, but Central American children have migrated unaccompanied to the United States by the thousands for decades. Granted, the numbers increased recently, but the conditions that have been cited in the media to explain this migration have remained constant during the past decade, so they cannot explain the "surge" we saw recently.

This popular construction of a "crisis" in the media, however, has had a significant consequence - not just for what the coverage has related but for what has been left out. It has focused our attention on the violence in the "origin" countries that contributes to the migration north but not to the root causes of this violence and how closely tied it is to U.S. actions.

This image of a crisis supposedly rooted in current violence in Central America misdirects our sense of responsibility for this region, which has suffered for decades from U.S. military interventions, U.S.-supported dictatorial regimes and ruthless neoliberal policies. Perhaps no other region was as thoroughly transformed and brutalized to serve U.S. interests during the Cold War as was Central America. Yet, when the legacy of decades of military intervention and School of the Americas' training of these countries' torturers emerges in the form of the highest murder rates in the world, the United States quickly finds distance from those conditions as if this violence sprang up independently of U.S. actions.

This historical erasure and the depiction of this migration as being the result of a crisis located solely in Central America confuse the American public. They cannot understand why the United States should assume responsibility for the children who are fleeing the conditions of violence that their government in large measure contributed to create.

The depiction of this migratory flow as a crisis also deflects attention from immigration policies in the United States since the 1990s. In our research, we have listened to hundreds of deeply worried Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan parents in the U.S. who toil in multiple jobs to support their children from whom they have been separated for years, if not decades. These Central American parents are unable to travel to visit their children because, given the militarized southern U.S. border and their uncertain status, they would be unable to make it back.

Separation from children for Central American immigrants is quite common, longer and more uncertain than it is among other immigrants - for instance, Mexicans. Under these circumstances, and with their kids facing everyday violence at home, the parents feel pressured to send for the kids. In the absence of a new immigration law to regularize their immigration status, sending for them, even if it is a dangerous enterprise, appears to be the only chance these parents have at family reunification. As long as millions of immigrants continue to live in the United States separated from their children back home for lack of an immigration policy to address their irregular status, the ebb and flow of child migration from Central America to the United States will continue.

There are no quick fixes to the problem of child migration, but one way Congress can start reducing this migration is to pass an immigration policy to lessen family separation, as various congressional measures did from 1965 to the early 1990s. Also, rather than using federal funds to put a bandage on a "problem" that has roots in Cold War policies, the Obama administration can use this money to improve schools, generate opportunities for dignified employment, create safety nets and strengthen public safety in Central America. These measures would go a long way in redressing the damage inflicted on Central Americans during the decades of Cold War expansionism (for which President Bill Clinton apologized to Guatemala in 1999).

These improvements would address the needs of many of those who feel pressured to migrate and those who are compelled to join gangs. Mislabeling social processes like migratory flows as "crises" leads to misplaced responsibility and misdirected and uninformed solutions that create even bigger unintended consequences in the future.

Rodriguez is a professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of "Black/Brown Relations and Stereotypes" and "Guatemala-U.S. Migration: Transforming Regions." Menjívar is a professor of sociology at Arizona State University and author of "Fragmented Ties: Salvadoran Immigrant Networks in America" and "Enduring Violence: Ladina Women's Lives in Guatemala."

A back-to-school conversation with teachers and school leaders

Leadership

A back-to-school conversation with teachers and school leaders

By Arne Duncan on August 21st, 2014 | Comments (0)

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As teachers gear up for a new school year, I want to offer two thoughts. One is a message of celebration and thanks. The other is a response to a concern that has come up often in many conversations with teachers and families, and which deserves an answer.
First, the thanks. America’s students have posted some unprecedented achievements in the last year — the highest high-school graduation rate in the nation’s history, and sharp cuts in dropout rates and increases in college enrollment, especially for groups that in the past have lagged significantly. For these achievements, we should celebrate America’s teachers, principals and students and their families. These achievements are also indications of deeper, more successful relationships with our students. All of us who’ve worked with young people know how much they yearn for adults to care about them and know them as individuals.
These achievements come at a time of nearly unprecedented change in American education — which entails enormously hard work by educators. Nearly every state has adopted new standards, new assessments, new approaches to incorporating data on student learning, and new efforts to support teachers.
This transition represents the biggest, fastest change in schools nationwide in our lifetime. And these efforts are essential to prepare kids to succeed in an age when the ability to think critically and creatively, communicate skillfully, and manipulate ideas fluently is vital. I have heard from many teachers that they have not received all the support they’d want during this transition. Yet America’s teachers are making this change work — and I want to recognize and thank them for that and encourage their leadership in this time of change.
That’s the easy part of this message. The harder part has to do with concerns that many teachers have brought to my door.
My team and I hold regular conversations with teachers, principals and other educators, often led by Teacher and Principal Ambassador Fellows, who take a year away from their schools to advise my agency. Increasingly, in those conversations, I hear concerns about standardized testing.
Assessment of student progress has a fundamental place in teaching and learning — few question that teachers, schools and parents need to know what progress students are making. And few question the particular importance of knowing how our most vulnerable students are progressing. Indeed, there’s wide recognition that annual assessments — those required by federal law — have done much to shine a light on the places and groups of students most in need of help. Yet in too many places, it’s clear that the yardstick has become the focus.
There are three main issues I’ve heard about repeatedly from educators:

1. It doesn’t make sense to hold them accountable during this transition year for results on the new assessments — a test many of them have not seen before — and as many are coming up to speed with new standards.
2. The standardized tests they have today focus too much on basic skills, not enough on critical thinking and deeper learning.
3. Testing — and test preparation — takes up too much time.

I share these concerns. And I want our department to be part of the solution.
To those who are reading the last sentence with surprise, let me be clear: assessment is a vital part of teaching and learning, but it should be one part (and only one part) of how adults hold themselves responsible for students’ progress. Schools, teachers and families need and deserve clear, useful information about how their students are progressing. As a parent of two children in public school, I know I want that. And in fact, most teachers and principals I talk with want to be held responsible for students’ progress — through a sensible, smart combination of factors that reflect their work with students — not the level students came in at, or factors outside of their control.
But assessment needs to be done wisely. No school or teacher should look bad because they took on kids with greater challenges. Growth is what matters. No teacher or school should be judged on any one test, or tests alone — always on a mix of measures — which could range from classroom observations to family engagement indicators. In Nevada, educators include a teacher’s contribution to the school community in their measures; in Hawaii, schools consider student feedback surveys and professional growth, such as leading workshops or taking university coursework). Educators in Delaware look at measures of planning and preparation such as lesson plans and descriptions of instructional strategies to be used for students with diverse needs. Federal policy rightly stays out of picking those individual measures, but ensures that in evaluating teachers, states and districts include student growth, and consider multiple measures.
But the larger issue is, testing should never be the main focus of our schools. Educators work all day to inspire, to intrigue, to know their students — not just in a few subjects, and not just in “academic” areas. There’s a whole world of skills that tests can never touch that are vital to students’ success. No test will ever measure what a student is, or can be. It’s simply one measure of one kind of progress. Yet in too many places, testing itself has become a distraction from the work it is meant to support.
I believe testing issues today are sucking the oxygen out of the room in a lot of schools — oxygen that is needed for a healthy transition to higher standards, improved systems for data, better aligned assessments, teacher professional development, evaluation and support and more. This is one of the biggest changes education in this country has ever seen, and teachers who’ve worked through it have told me it’s allowed them to become the best teachers they’ve ever been. That change needs educators’ full attention.
That’s why we will be taking action in the coming weeks that give states more flexibility in key areas that teachers have said are causing worry.
States will have the opportunity to request a delay in when test results matter for teacher evaluation during this transition. As we always have, we’ll work with them in a spirit of flexibility to develop a plan that works, but typically I’d expect this to mean that states that request this delay will push back by one year (to 2015-16) the time when student growth measures based on new state assessments become part of their evaluation systems — and we will work with states seeking other areas of flexibility as well.
We want to make sure that they are still sharing growth data with their teachers, and still moving forward on the other critical pieces of evaluation systems that provide useful feedback to educators. We will be working in concert with other educators and leaders to get this right. These changes are incredibly important, and educators should not have to make them in an atmosphere of worry. Some states will choose to take advantage of that flexibility; others, especially those that are well along in this transition, will not need a delay.
The bottom line is that educators deserve strong support as our schools make vital, and urgently needed, changes. As many educators have pointed out, getting this right rests also on high-quality assessments. Many educators, and parents, have made clear that they’re supportive of assessment that measures what matters — but that a lot of tests today don’t do that — they focus too much on basic skills rather than problem solving and critical thinking. That’s why we’ve committed a third of a billion dollars to two consortia of states working to create new assessments that get beyond the bubble test, and do a better job of measuring critical thinking and writing.
I’m concerned, too, when I see places where adults are gaming tests, rather than using them to help students.
And we also need to recognize that in many places, the sheer quantity of testing — and test prep — has become an issue. In some schools and districts, over time tests have simply been layered on top of one another, without a clear sense of strategy or direction. Where tests are redundant, or not sufficiently helpful for instruction, they cost precious time that teachers and kids can’t afford. Too much testing can rob school buildings of joy, and cause unnecessary stress. This issue is a priority for us, and we’ll continue to work throughout the fall on efforts to cut back on over-testing.
There’s plenty of responsibility to share on these challenges, and a fair chunk of that sits with me and my department. We encouraged states to move a whole lot of changes simultaneously, because of the enormous urgency to raise standards and improve systems of teacher support — not for another generation of students, but for today’s students.
But in how this change happens, we need to listen carefully to the teachers, principals and other educators who are living it on a daily basis — and we need to be true to our promise to be tight on outcomes, but loose on how we get there.
From my first day on this job, the objective has been to work in a spirit of flexibility to help states and communities improve outcomes for kids. We need to make changes, but we are also making progress. I’m determined that, working in partnership, we’ll continue to do both – be flexible and make progress for our kids.
Change is hard, and changes of significance rarely work exactly as planned. But in partnership, making course alterations as necessary, we will get there.
Arne Duncan is U.S. Secretary of Education

Delivering a Keynote Address next week on Sept. 3, 2014 at Rice University's 50th anniversary of the Teacher Education Program

--> Friends,I am extremely honored to have been asked to deliver a keynote address next week in Houston at Rice University as part of the 50th anniversary commemoration of its Teacher Education Program on September 3rd in the Anderson-Clarke Center’s Hudspeth Auditorium on the Rice University campus (an RSVP is required) as you can see in this announcement of the event.
Among other things, I will  be talking critically about our high-stakes testing system and how we as Texas can and should move in a different direction, beginning this next legislative session with a sharing of clear ideas on how to move forward—together with a fresh sense of what teacher's work could and should be under this system. Texas is ground zero for all this high-stakes testing nonsense and so it only makes sense that we lead the change.
I will also share our Tejano/Mexican American Studies curriculum development initiative that consists of a partnership with the Austin Independent School District (AISD) the City of Austin, and Nuestro Grupo, a grassroots organization, to establish a Cultural Arts and Literacy Saturday Academy for fourth-grade, AIDS children.  This curriculum will get taught in Spanish, beginning with an inaugural ceremony this fall at the Emma S. Barrientos Mexican American Culture Center. 

Under the auspices of the National Latino/a Education Research and Policy Project, I also head a national grow-your-own (GYO) Latina/o teacher initiative in 5 cities in 5 states that will suggest future directions for teacher preparation in the U.S.

 I promise to be suggestive and informative. Please scroll down to see how you can rsvp.
 -Angela

Rice’s Teacher Education program will celebrate 50th anniversary with special events Sept. 3-4

Jeff Falk
– August 20, 2014Posted in: News Releases
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713-348-6327
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Jeff Falk
713-348-6775
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Rice’s Teacher Education program will celebrate 50th anniversary with special events Sept. 3-4

HOUSTON – (Aug. 20, 2014) – Rice University’s pioneering Teacher Education program, part of Rice’s Susanne M. Glasscock School of Continuing Studies, will celebrate its 50th anniversary Sept. 3-4 with two special events highlighting educational equity in Texas schools. The events coincide with the beginning of the state’s K-12 school year.
Sept. 3, Angela Valenzuela, a professor in the Educational Policy and Planning Program at the University of Texas at Austin, will give a public keynote address on “Educational Equity, Politics and Policy in Texas.” She also serves as director of the University of Texas Center for Education Policy and is the new director of the National Latino Education Research Agenda Project that aims to create a national teacher education pipeline for Latino youth. Valenzuela’s talk will be at 7 p.m. in Anderson-Clarke Center’s Hudspeth Auditorium, 6100 Main St. Public registration for this event is free; however, an RSVP is required at teach.rice.edu/50years.
On Sept. 4, a panel will explore the topic “Educating for Equity in Texas Schools.” This discussion is open only to the media and invited guests and will be from 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. in Rice Memorial Center’s Grand Hall, 6100 Main St. Panelists will include Alex Byrd, associate professor of history at Rice; Grace Magnani, 2014 Rookie of the Year teacher in Fort Bend Independent School District; Linda McNeil, director of Rice’s Center for Education; Juliet Stipeche, president of the Houston Independent School District Board of Education and associate director of Rice’s Center for Excellence and Equity; Judy Radigan, director of Rice’s Teacher Education program; and Valenzuela.
Founded in 1964, Rice’s Teacher Education program was established on the tenets of creating content experts who are adept at writing and delivering innovative curriculum. Today, Teacher Education at Rice University provides professional education courses that include extensive study of critical issues in education and effective teaching for diverse learners.
For more information about the Rice University Teacher Education program, go to http://teach.rice.edu.
Members of the news media who want to attend should RSVP to Jeff Falk, associate director of national media relations at Rice, at jfalk@rice.edu or 713-348-6775.
For a map of Rice University’s campus with parking information, go to www.rice.edu/maps.

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Follow the Glasscock School via Twitter @GlasscockSchool.
Follow Rice News and Media Relations via Twitter @RiceUNews.
Located on a 300-acre forested campus in Houston, Rice University is consistently ranked among the nation’s top 20 universities by U.S. News & World Report. Rice has highly respected schools of Architecture, Business, Continuing Studies, Engineering, Humanities, Music, Natural Sciences and Social Sciences and is home to the Baker Institute for Public Policy. With 3,920 undergraduates and 2,567 graduate students, Rice’s undergraduate student-to-faculty ratio is just over 6-to-1. Its residential college system builds close-knit communities and lifelong friendships, just one reason why Rice is highly ranked for best quality of life by the Princeton Review and for best value among private universities by Kiplinger’s Personal Finance. To read “What they’re saying about Rice,” go here.
- See more at: http://news.rice.edu/2014/08/20/rices-teacher-education-program-will-celebrate-50th-anniversary-with-special-events-sept-3-4/#sthash.RjeKuqPj.dpuf

New Information Might Help Send Rick Perry Straight to Prison

New Information Might Help Send Rick Perry Straight to Prison

Experts: K-12 Population Shift Toward Students of Color Will Shed Light on Resource Inequalities

August 17, 2014 | Category: Facts & Figures,Latino Issues,News,Subfeature | :

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by Ronald Roach

Deborah Santiago is chief operating officer and vice president for policy at the Washington-based Excelencia in Education advocacy organization.

For the first time ever, non-Hispanic Whites are projected to make up less than 50 percent of the U.S. K-12 public school population. The National Center for Education Statistics has estimated that minorities will comprise 50.2 percent of students in public school classrooms in the 2014-15 academic year.

The shift comes as the nation’s public schools have enrolled surging numbers of non-White Hispanic children in recent years. Non-White Hispanic children will account for 25.8 percent of American public K-12 students this school year and 28.5 percent in the 2019-20 academic year. In 2009-10, 22.8 percent of American students were Latino, according to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES).

Non-Hispanic Whites are projected to make up 49.8 percent this year and 46.9 percent in 2019-20 of American public school students. African-American enrollment in public schools will be 15.4 percent this year and 15 percent in 2019-20. Among American public school students, Asians will make up 5.2 percent this year and 5.3 percent in 2019-20; Native Americans will be 1.1 percent in 2014-15 and 1 percent in 2019-20.

The population shift is bringing forth challenges, such as higher poverty rates among students and the need for more English-language instruction for children of immigrant families. Low-income students of color, in particular, attend schools that are highly likely to be segregated by race, reflecting U.S. housing patterns, and the schools tend to have fewer high-quality teachers than those in affluent areas, experts say.

“Certainly we know that there is still a great deal of segregation for Latinos, African-Americans and other groups. And they tend to be in school districts that don’t have the high-quality teachers or resources available,” says Deborah Santiago, the chief operating officer and vice president for policy at the Washington-based Excelencia in Education advocacy organization.

In thinking about and discussing the issues emerging with the changing school population, Santiago prefers “to say this is an amazing opportunity rather than challenge to make the kind of investments in education that we fundamentally need” in the U.S.

“This framing of students of color as the majority is an opportunity to do the real systemic change that we’ve only been doing around the edges,” she says. “There are opportunities to make sure that we have high expectations and that we have quality teachers. … We need to make sure that we are as diligent as we have been in the past to make sure this cohort of students is college ready.”

Dr. Patricia Gandara, the co-director of the Civil Rights Project at UCLA and a member of the White House Advisory Commission on Educational Excellence for Hispanics, told the Associated Press that public schools will have to confront poverty as an issue in order to help their students reach their potential.

About one-fourth of Hispanics and African-Americans live below the poverty line and many poor Hispanic children live with the instability of their families not having legal status, she said. The focus on teacher preparation and stronger curriculum is “not going to get us anywhere unless we pay attention to the really basic needs of these children, things like nutrition and health and safety, and the instability of the homes,” Gandara noted.

Deborah Veney Robinson, the vice president of Government Affairs and Communications at The Education Trust organization, agrees that the most significant challenges ahead for public school will be “making sure vulnerable students have highly effective teachers in every classroom … and that the spread of effective teachers is equitable so that we’re seeing students getting their fair share of high-performance teaching.”

Robinson adds that the higher education sector will have to significantly improve its capacity in retaining and helping students earn degrees. “I think [higher education’s] primary levers are going to be not just access for a more diverse population of students, but also looking at what it can do to make sure students are being successful, meaning that schools are affordable and that students actually graduate,” she says.

Semantic Tags: Government Research � K12

Thoughtful piece on accountability in higher education. -Angela

Matthew Lynch, Ed.D. Become a fan Author of The Call to Teach and editor of The Edvocate, www.theedadvocate.org

Diverse Conversations: What's Next for Higher Education?

Posted: 08/16/2014 9:05 pm EDT Updated: 4 hours ago

 

 

Recognizing the trends of higher education is important for those of us who are involved in it on a professional level. But what are the trends?

Today, I'm speaking with Ryan Evely Gildersleeve who is Associate Professor of Higher Education at Morgridge College of Education at University of Denver.

Q: First off, let's talk about some of the general trends. How would you describe the trends of higher education now?

A: Money, money, money. Colleges and universities are now commodities and trades. As such, questions need to change and any or all trends must be understood not only in how they might fit within and reinforce this conception of higher education but also how they challenge it. It's a strange relationship, certainly. To marketize knowledge and commodify education are in many ways at odds with how we've understood the role of the university over time, but it's here. And with it, new forms of accountability, new demands on performance, and new measures of quality. These three trends form a trifecta of imperatives in public and political interest in higher education today. But it also presents new opportunities - and refocuses attentions on some opportunities that have always been there, but were perhaps neglected. In refashioning institutions, we have the chance to determine new purposes and modes of operations. These are values decisions. Our colleges and universities reflect and produce our values as a society. With big data, rapid technology shifts, and globalized capitalism, it's radical change now. It's subjecting the university to the market, wholesale - not piecemeal.

It would be a mistake, however, to equate higher education with business. Colleges and universities are not businesses. They are social institutions that perform a social good, as well as bestow private goods onto individuals. The marketization and commodification trend seeks to make money for various people through these social and private goods. But the thing that makes a college or university the powerful and inspiring institution that it is - that's knowledge. And while capitalist society can find a way to capitalize pretty much anything, that doesn't necessarily mean the generative activities of knowledge production and dissemination need to be organized as a business. To do so would more than likely truncate knowledge - it would minimize its impact and standardize its form. Part of what makes knowledge such an attractive commodity is its expansiveness, its diversity, its plurality and all the possibilities that follow suit. Rather, the activities of knowledge production and dissemination probably need something less linear, more dynamic, and dare I say, more democratic than business.

Q: Of these trends, which, do you think, is the most important? The one that people should principally pay attention to?

A: Accountability captures most of the sub-trends through which everyday people in academe have the most opportunity to shape their futures - and the future of higher education. Accountability as an imperative is already here, but what it looks like and how it gets operationalized is still up for grabs. Various states have some tentative plans that are starting to make in-roads, although these accountability regimes tend to be short-term and tied to specific temporal goals of enrollment or attainment. For example, Colorado's master plan sets forward a college completion goal of having 66% of Coloradans with a degree or certificate by 2025. This is in-line with some of the federal government's ideas around accountability, such as President Obama's 2020 goal for being the most credentialed country in the world.

Still, no one is really sure what performance measures are best or most appropriate for higher education. That probably has something to do with the moment of higher education's history we are crafting right now. It took a long time, but then all of a sudden it was made dramatically clear - higher education is the number one way to populate the workforce with knowledge-focused jobs and fuel the economy with consumers. It's easy to abscond or at least obscure the knowledge imperative of higher education when we think about it only in relation to the knowledge economy. Today, most universities operationalize the knowledge imperative into research, teaching, and service - three distinct yet overlapping modes of scholarship. The knowledge imperative requires resources too easily hidden from the strict production of degrees. And yet, degrees are the most obvious commodity that colleges and universities can sell.

It's tricky, because degrees are different than most commodities. They are symbolic of student and faculty labor that hopefully generated a broad (in the case of the liberal arts) or specific (in the case of professional programs) expertise. That labor constitutes knowledge. And knowledge isn't fixed. It's malleable. But the market seeks to make it static and standardized. Moreover, knowledge has as much to do with process as it does with content - knowledge involves synthesis, analysis, and creativity, regardless of the field of study.

Put plainly, a degree is not like a baseball bat. Sports stores can sell a baseball bat to anyone. A college degree must be earned through the generative activity of a higher education. Whereas, sports stores would never say you must obtain a 300 batting average before they'd sell you a baseball bat, colleges require students to perform above average over a period of about four years before they will bestow a degree.

Beyond this simple accounting of how a college degree is a tough thing to commodify and measure/assess productively (i.e., without absconding the knowledge imperative), it's important to recognize our systems of higher education in the U.S. are so diverse that a single nationalized version of accountability won't make much sense. It would be like having one regulating body for the minor leagues of baseball, the apprentice programs in dance, and keeping track of the number of moons orbiting Jupiter. How does one group take responsibility for holding each activity accountable? It can't. But a small collection of dynamic accountability efforts might provide a whole new venue for talking about and documenting the significance of our systems of higher education in society. It might look more like various portfolios of assessment rather than a scorecard or ranking system.

Any accountability systems we might adopt should incorporate group, organizational, and social metrics, in addition to more traditional individual measurements (e.g., graduation rates). The problem with individual measurements alone is that a college education, being based on knowledge, is not solely an individual endeavor. Knowledge, requires learning, which requires collaboration. Doing so could potentially help revive focus on the knowledge imperative of higher education - moving beyond the linear interpretation of what colleges and universities "produce."

Cue the faculty and administration.

Q: Why is it important for higher education professionals to pay attention to these trends? What benefits do we derive from being attentive?

A: If faculty and administrators don't take seats at the table where these decisions are being made and the problems are being figured out, then we really are claiming space as cogs in a machine - and that's not what most faculty came to the profession desiring. Most of us, I believe, want to take the knowledge imperative of our profession seriously. To do so, we need to configure systems of accountability that help illustrate the importance of our work.

Q: How can we use these trends, then? What strategies do you recommend for not only staying up to date with trends but making sure that they work for you, that you are prepared for them?
A: Faculty can demand seats at the accountability table (as should the public!). This can be difficult, because the commodification of education means we should all be spending most of our time on revenue generating activities - enrollments, external funding for research, etc. But I think engaging in active governance is something we can't resign to managers and external voices alone. And right now - in this historical moment for higher education - shared governance still has some political cache. Faculty can still bring an institution to a stand still, without fear of losing their livelihoods. Shared governance also means staying up to date on what's happening within and across our fields - fields of study, fields of education, fields of public investment. We need to think deeply about the ways that our labor - the labor of the knowledge imperative - is unique compared to other labor.

Q: Finally, what do you think is likely to happen in higher education in the future? Do you think the current trends are likely to sustain themselves?

A: I see no end to the commodification of education or the marketization of knowledge. Too many and too powerful economies now rely on it. The relationship between higher education and the economy has changed fundamentally, and with that change comes new questions that the public are expecting higher education to be able to answer. Accountability regimes are expanding in scope and scale. Now is the time to seize the opportunity to use these trends in order to configure the kind of social institution we want our colleges and universities to constitute.

Academics and higher education professionals don't need to agree with the new economic imperatives of higher education or with the maturation of accountability regimes. But we certainly need to accept the responsibility of sustaining the knowledge imperative that undergirds our generative activity. And we need to recognize the weight of that responsibility as we choose how to engage with the design, adoption, execution, and critique of the accountability systems that will help define what the institution stands for and what it can produce as values of a democratic society.
We would like to thank Ryan for taking the time to sit down and talk with us.
This interview originally appeared on www.diverseeducation.com

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"Every year, undocumented immigrants have collectively paid as much as $13 billion into the system while only receiving $1 billion in benefits in return."

Equality

Doris Murch, 85, sits at her kitchen table in Lafayette, New Jersey, on March 12, 2014.

John Moore/Getty

Undocumented workers are keeping a key benefit program afloat

08/12/14 07:00 AM—Updated 08/12/14 08:17 AM

By Amanda Sakuma

Social Security, which provides retirement income to millions of elderly Americans, is largely stable – at least for now – thanks in part to the more than 3.1 million people who are working and paying taxes in the U.S. using fake or expired social security numbers. Every year, undocumented immigrants have collectively paid as much as $13 billion into the system while only receiving $1 billion in benefits in return.
The contributions are starting to add up. In total, undocumented workers have contributed more than $100 billion over the last decade while living in the shadows, says Stephen Goss, chief actuary of the Social Security Administration (SSA).
“You could say legitimately that had we not received the contributions that we have had in the past from undocumented immigrants … that would of course diminish our ability to be paying benefits for as long as we now can,” Goss told msnbc.
In 2010, the agency estimated that as many as 2.7 million undocumented immigrants have social security numbers on the books – and are earning credit to their names for potential benefits in the future if ever granted legal status – either because they have temporary authorization to work, have overstayed their visa or obtained work by using fraudulent documents. Another 3.9 million other immigrants are estimated to be working in the U.S. but in the underground economy.
Since the 9/11 terror atacks, Goss says the SSA has cracked down on fake IDs, which were often obtained in the mid-1980s through fraudulent birth certificates. But there remains a significant amount of money contributed to the Social Security system by undocumented workers that continues to go unclaimed.
Those contributions are crucial as more and more of America’s baby boom generation reaches retirement age. The Social Security Trust Fund released its annual report last month finding that there are major causes for concern for the program down the road. Unless Congress reforms the system, the retirement trust funds will be depleted by 2033 and the revenue coming in will only be able to cover 77% of benefits.
One of the solutions proposed to offset the diminishing funds has been comprehensive immigration reform. In a study commissioned by Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, a Republican member of the Senate’s Gang of Eight architects for immigration reform, found that the legislation would have boosted GDP by 1.63% and created more than 3 million jobs.
Adriana Kugler, a former chief economist of the U.S. Department of Labor under the Obama administration and a professor at Georgetown University, said lifting undocumented immigrants into the legitimate workforce would have a significant impact on Social Security’s long-term future.
“The net contribution over the next 30 to 40 years will be very crucial in alleviating the pressure on the system,” said Kugler. “That’s really key because it’s a time when a lot of people will be retiring.”
Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren has made the same argument, saying that comprehensive immigration reform is vital to preserving the program.
“One of the ways we can save Social Security is to pass comprehensive immigration reform,” Warren said speaking before the National Council for La Raza (NCLR) conference last month. “Bring more workers and bring more people out of the shadow economy and into the fully paid economy where everything is above the table.”
While hopes of immigration reform languish in Congress, President Obama is expected to take executive action by the end of the summer that could protect 5-8 million people from deportation. The actions under consideration could temporarily grant work permits to some undocumented immigrants, allowing them to get jobs and pay taxes.
In 2012, Obama instituted the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, known as DACA. Under DACA, more than 580,000 so-called DREAMers – young immigrants brought into the U.S. as children – are protected from deportation under a two-year, renewable program eligible for DREAMers who have lived in the U.S. continuously since 2007.
The immediate economic impact has been a boon for the young immigrants and their communities, according to a study released earlier this summer by American Immigration Council. More than 60% of DACA recipients were able to find a job after receiving their benefits, and those jobs translate into more taxable revenue for the state.
Goss said the impacts of the president’s pending executive action would be relatively modest in terms of additional revenue for the Social Security Trust Fund, but still a net positive.
“We estimated that a good number of those people would remain in the country and would remain in the above ground economy,” Goss said.

Poll: Who’s to blame for inaction on immigration reform?

 This is a more flagrant tale of cheating, but there are tons of gray areas in this regard.

The answer to the first question is: No one really knows. But, a Government Office Accountability report last year found confirmed reports of cheating on at least one standardized test in 33 states in the school years 2010-11 and 2011-12. Thirty-two of the 33 states, the report said, "canceled, invalidated, or nullified" test scores as a result of suspected cheating.

 -Angela

Why The Atlanta Testing Scandal Matters

by Anya Kamenetz

August 17, 2014 8:03 AM ET

One study found that teachers under high-stakes testing spent more time teaching "bubble kids" who were close to passing, at the expense of students elsewhere on the bell curve.

LA Johnson/NPR 

 

Once, in a sauna at a Korean spa in Queens, I overheard what sounded like two teachers discussing the cheating practices of a third. "You know how she does it," one said. "She'll lean over a student about to put a wrong answer and whisper, 'Check your work.' " "Yes, and her finger will just happen to be on the right answer," said the other one.

I thought of that exchange when I read that jury selection is for an unusual trial. The defendants are 12 former employees of Atlanta Public Schools. They are accused under the state's racketeering laws of conspiring to falsify their students' results on state standardized tests. Dozens more school employees have faced in a case that has rocked the city of Atlanta for the past few years.

The trial is unusual. It's likely that millions of dedicated teachers around the country spend their entire careers without engaging in the kind of behavior that happened in Atlanta, or that I heard about in that spa.

But high-stakes state standardized tests of this kind are not unusual. They are mandated in nearly every public school by No Child Left Behind, the 2001 federal education law. These tests are high-stakes because they trigger serious consequences for students (like grade promotion and graduation); for schools (like extra resources, reorganization, or closure); for districts (the loss of federal funds); and for school employees (bonuses, demotion, poor evaluations, or firing.)
And so the Atlanta trial should bring two questions: How common is cheating on these tests? And short of cheating, what else might be happening in schools as a result of these tests?

The answer to the first question is: No one really knows. But, a Government Office Accountability report last year found confirmed reports of cheating on at least one standardized test in 33 states in the school years 2010-11 and 2011-12. Thirty-two of the 33 states, the report said, "canceled, invalidated, or nullified" test scores as a result of suspected cheating.

A 2003 paper by the economists Brian Jacob of the University of Michigan and Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago analyzed test answers from the Chicago Public Schools. They found evidence of serious cheating in 3 to 5 percent of elementary school classrooms. That doesn't sound so bad.
But, the experimenters cautioned, their methods captured only the most egregious kinds of cheating: those that came from teachers or administrators actually altering test papers. It's this type of outlandish behavior that's alleged to have occurred in Atlanta, where some schools allegedly held "erasing parties" to change answer sheets behind closed doors.

Jacob and Levitt note that there are other, more subtle ways teachers can cheat, such as giving students more time, or prepping students beforehand with answers to actual test questions.

And that brings us to a broader point. Research shows high-stakes testing can also produce unintended consequences that fall short of outright cheating. Daniel Koretz, the Henry Lee Shattuck Professor of Education at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and an expert in educational testing, writes in Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us, that there are seven potential teacher responses to high-stakes tests:

1. Working more effectively (Example: finding better methods of teaching)

2. Teaching more (Example: spending more time overall)

3. Working harder (Example: giving more homework or harder assignments)

4. Reallocation (Example: shifting resources, including time, to emphasize the subjects and types of questions on the test)

5. Alignment (Example: matching the curriculum more closely to the material covered on the test)

6. Coaching students (Example: prepping students using old tests or even the current test)

7. Cheating.

Strategies 1 through 3 pretty much describe what high-stakes testing is supposed to do: raise standards, ignite harder effort from teachers and students, and produce more learning.

Strategies 6 and 7 clearly undermine the effectiveness of tests as a metric of learning, and hurt students in the process. Perhaps 95 percent of educators will never go there.

Strategy 4 (reallocation) and 5 (alignment) are ambiguous. If the test is high quality — if it captures all the most important subjects students need to know — then changing school to prioritize those subjects is, again, exactly what we want to see. In other words, if the test is excellent, then "teaching to the test" can be a very good thing.

On the other hand, if the test captures only a few of the subjects students need to know, or emphasizes, say, memorization over comprehension, then reallocation and alignment can cause students to miss out on other important parts of learning.

There's another kind of reallocation that may go on as well: the reallocation of teaching itself.
Jennifer Booher-Jennings, a sociologist at New York University, describes this as educational "rationing" or "triage." In a pair of in 2005 she draws on field research undertaken at a Texas elementary school after the passage of No Child Left Behind.

She documented teachers diverting resources and time to the group of students who looked like they were closest to passing the test. These kids, who might make the minimum passing score if given intensive help, were described as being "on the bubble."

Correspondingly, the teachers gave less attention to a lower-scoring group that they were ," as well as the kids who would pass the test no matter what. The upshot was that a relatively small number of students received a disproportionately high amount of the teaching and resources available.

We teach our children not to cheat. The tiny minority of teachers who cheat cross an ethical bright line that harms the entire enterprise of education. But the Atlanta trial should be an opportunity to consider what might be happening in the gray areas as well.

Fascinting! -Angela
 

AlterNet / By Clancy Sigal

What the Media Isn't Telling You About Lauren Bacall and Bogart

Lauren Bacall was a true-blue, New York, left-of-center, liberal Democrat her whole life.

Photo Credit: AFP

August 14, 2014  |  

The Lauren Bacall obits I’ve seen take only a fleeting glance at her politics. She had the guts and stamina of a classic New York-born Jewish left-liberal. She was not only Bogie’s sultry siren in To Have and Have Not and The Big Sleep, but a kickass fighter, the only child of a divorced, dirt-poor, single immigrant mother. During the 1950s blacklist purges, aimed more at Jews and liberals than at “reds,” when so many in Hollywood ran for cover, Betty Joan Perske Weinstein-Bacal pushed her new husband Humphrey Bogart into establishing the Committee for the First Amendment to damn the blacklist and protect its victims. CFA was a cross-section of the plucky, upstanding Hollywood left: Danny Kaye, John Huston, Bette Davis, Frank Sinatra, Katharine Hepburn, etc.

Bacall, a mere ingénue just starting out, risked her virgin career to stick her neck out, as did Bogart who wanted to vote Republican until his new Jewish wife corralled him otherwise. Anyone who has seen Bacall in her non-sultry roles, as the rich, destructive lesbian in Young Man With A Horn or the disabled young dowager in Harper or the demanding psychiatrist in Shock Treatment can understand just how fiercely imperious Bacall could be on screen, and in real life, too, if my all-too-brief meeting with her is any evidence.

I was one of her husband Bogie’s agents during the worst of the Hollywood blacklist. The pressure on him and Bacall to recant and retreat was overwhelming, from the government, Warner Brothers studio, his agents and an atmosphere of compromise and informing. (“What’s the point. It’ll blow over.”) You never knew when your best friend might turn and rat on you. Or your union brother—Bogart and Bacall’s Screen Actors Guild president Ronald Reagan was FBI informant “T-10.”

The just-married Bogart, tied hand and foot to a studio bossed by a fanatic blacklister Jack Warner (trying to live down his few “liberal” movies), wasn’t a youngster anymore. He was nearly 50 when he took his brave stand in Washington D.C. In the end, faced by waves of spy mania and a cowardly Truman White House bent on out-witch-hunting the hunters, most of the CFA members resigned. The Hollywood 10's off-putting harangues to HUAC gave the weaker spirits a perfect excuse.

But except for a single article in a national magazine denying he was a Communist (all the big stars like Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield had to write the same “I was a dupe” piece to get J. Edgar Hoover off their backs), Bogart never betrayed his blacklisted or “tainted” friends. In real life, aside from hard drinking, tough-guy Bogie was a rather gentle soul, so I suspect his New York Jewish liberal wife had a lot to do with his political backbone.

The Gestapo wasn’t putting a gun to our heads. (I’d been blacklisted by Columbia Pictures.) But Hollywood is such a small village that bad news travels fast, and it didn’t take more than a word here or there, an unsourced rumor, a hesitation to make the mandatory box-office-dud anti-communist film, before your phone stopped ringing. Many otherwise good people couldn’t stand the idea of being exiled from what they felt to be the only game in town, if not the universe. Not to work in Hollywood was to be condemned to a lonely lower circle of hell. 

Facebook and Twitter didn’t exist then, but electrified gossip could kill you. The chief targets were communists (that is, you signed a petition years ago), interracial romances (Sammy Davis Jr. and Kim Novak, shock horror) and homosexuality. It’s no accident that the Rupurt Murdoch of his day, the spreader of career-killing gossip in the magazine Confidential, had been a pornographer and his chief editor a former reporter for the communist Daily Worker. What a crew!

 
All her life Lauren Bacall stayed a true-blue, New York, left-of-center, liberal Democrat lobbying for Adlai Stevenson and Bobby Kennedy.  Or as she proudly boasted in a late interview, “I’m anti-Republican. A liberal. The L-word!”