Gift for chemistry department aids top-tier pursuit.
By Melissa Ludwig | San Antonio Express
Friday, October 7, 2011
The University of Texas at San Antonio has landed a $1.5 million gift from the Houston-based Welch Foundation to fund an endowed chair in chemistry.
The university will match the gift to create a $3 million endowment for the Robert A. Welch Chair in Chemistry, and plans to recruit an internationally recognized scholar who can contribute to the university's drive to reach top-tier research status.
Texas has three Tier One research universities, the University of Texas at Austin, Texas A&M University and Rice University in Houston. Each has at least three Welch Chairs.
“Having a Welch Chair has become a symbol of achieving a high level of excellence in scholarly chemistry research. The foundation's directors recognize UTSA's progress and promise,” said George Perry, dean of the UTSA College of Sciences.
The Welch Foundation has given $4.2 million to UTSA's chemistry department since 1993 and is supporting the research projects of five professors, said Waldemar Gorski, chair of the chemistry department.
Gorski said he will be looking for a researcher focused on the interaction between chemistry and biology, the department's area of specialty.
For instance, one researcher is studying how to make small molecules interact with stem cells, prodding them to form heart tissue. Another is trying to synthesize large molecules that are hard to find in nature, but are good for use in medical applications.
The field of inquiry crosses scientific disciplines, and UTSA works in collaboration with the UT Health Science Center and the Southwest Research Institute.
To help with recruiting, the department has invited professors who hold the Welch chair at other Texas universities to speak at its weekly graduate seminars. Richard Schrock, the 2005 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, is also scheduled to attend.
“We will be trying to get help from them in the form of nominations,” Gorski said.
UTSA's chemistry department offers bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees and has an enrollment of 350 students.
The Welch Foundation is one of the nation's largest and oldest private funding sources for basic chemistry research, and primarily supports researchers at Texas institutions of higher education. It was created in honor of Robert Alonzo Welch, who came to Houston as a youth and made a fortune in oil and minerals.
Read more: http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/education/article/UTSA-gets-1-5-million-for-chemistry-2205654.php#ixzz1aJu7wBKn
Showing posts with label Perry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Perry. Show all posts
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Tuesday, September 06, 2011
In Texas' Schools, Perry Shuns Federal Influence
by Morgan Smith
9/4/2011
In May, during the waning days of the 82nd Legislature, Gov. Rick Perry made a rare trip to the Senate chamber to broker a deal.
Negotiators from the House and the Senate were struggling to cobble together a school finance plan that would slash state financing, integral to closing a multibillion-dollar shortfall in the state’s 2012-13 budget. After about 90 minutes, Perry emerged from the closed-door meeting to tell reporters he felt “very optimistic” that lawmakers would reach an agreement.
Shortly, they did, agreeing to a change in the way the state allocates money to its schools that, in practical terms, meant a historic reduction of $4 billion in financing and an additional $1.4 billion cut in discretionary grants for public education.
How the budget will affect the state’s public schools will be a cornerstone of Perry’s legacy and could influence his fate as a presidential candidate. But he is likely to be remembered most for a far more public battle: staving off the federal government’s influence — and sometimes its dollars — from invading Texas classrooms.
When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan jabbed Perry on public schools in mid-August, it was only the latest skirmish between the governor and the Obama administration since late 2009, when Perry announced that the state would not sign on to common core-curriculum standards. Those criteria, though endorsed by the Obama administration, were developed by a consortium of 48 states and the National Governors Association.
The announcement was quickly followed by news that Texas would not participate in the administration’s signature education program, a competition among states for $4.35 billion in grants, because of its emphasis on the adoption of the common curriculum. Texas public schools were eligible for $700 million through the grants.
“I am not prepared to sell control of our state’s education system for any price,” Perry said in January 2010. The common curriculum, he said, could lead to the “dumbing down” of the state’s standards.
Perry’s disdain for the federal government’s role in public education, along with legal challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency and the federal heath care overhaul, fit neatly into his anti-Washington primary campaign against U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who challenged him for the 2010 Republican nomination for governor. It can now also be seen as a preamble to his presidential run.
But unlike his positions on health care and environmental regulations, widely shared among conservatives, Perry’s early opposition to the administration’s education policies — whose bipartisan backers include former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida — make him something of an ideological outlier among Republicans.
Of his fellow presidential contenders, Perry “probably has the most fully formed vision of what he would like the federal role to be” in education, said Rick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization.
If Perry wins the nomination, Hess said, it could make public education more important in the general election. Proposals like the common core standards could suddenly become politically charged.
“What’s going to happen is that prominent Republicans broadly supportive of Obama in education may be forced to choose a side,” he said. “Rather than remaining as reforms that both Republicans and Democrats can embrace, these things could be poisoned by association.”
Though federal issues have lately dominated Perry’s discourse on education, in earlier years he actively backed education proposals popular among conservatives, like incentive pay for teachers and private school vouchers, with mixed success.
Vouchers failed several times to make it through the Legislature — proving politically lethal for Kent Grusendorf, chairman of the House Public Education Committee, who strongly supported them — and eventually lost momentum. The “last grasp” at passing a voucher program, said Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, a San Antonio Democrat who opposed it, was in the 2007 legislative session.
When incentive pay also struggled for passage in the Legislature, Perry set up the state’s first statewide program with an executive order in 2005. It earmarked $10 million in federal money for teachers who had shown progress with students in economically disadvantaged school districts over three years. Lawmakers expanded it in 2006 only to discontinue it 2009 after a three-year study commissioned by the Texas Education Agency found it had little effect on student achievement.
The problem, said Lori Taylor, a researcher at Texas A&M University, who was a co-author of the studies, was not with the concept of incentive pay but in the way the program implemented it, with every school choosing its own design. That meant that districts could, if they wanted, use the money to give every teacher an across-the-board raise regardless of student achievement — and that is what many of them did.
The state’s current incentive pay program fared better in its evaluation, but because the gains were so small among schools, it wasn’t “wholly persuasive,” said Taylor. It’s unlikely there will be a follow-up, Taylor said, because very little financing for the program survived the Legislative session.
Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Perry, said in an email that while the teacher incentive program was affected by the budget, it “remains a priority.”
“The governor understands that we faced considerable budget challenges this last session,” Frazier said. “No agency was spared from reductions in spending, but ultimately he is proud of lawmakers’ tough decisions to keep Texas living within its means without raising taxes.”
The governor has exerted influence through his appointments to the Texas Education Agency and the State Board of Education, where he has consistently picked from the board’s faction of evangelical conservatives.
Perry has also not been afraid to use — or let lawmakers know he was inclined to use, should they push him — his veto pen. In 2009, he killed bipartisan legislation that would have required limits on class size and offered full-day programs in state kindergarten. In his veto statement, he said the money was better used to serve more children under the state’s current half-day program than to create an additional program.
During the last legislative session, the governor opposed a bill that would have changed how end-of-course exams were factored into graduation requirements under the state’s new accountability system. His office made it clear that if the measure passed, it would be subject to a veto, said Andrew C. Erben, of the Texas Institute for Education Reform, a business-oriented education advocacy group.
“While he and his staff weren’t out front saying it’s a horrible bill, they let it be known they did not support it,” Erben said.
Perry was more publicly adamant in his promise that he would not sign a budget that used the state’s Rainy Day Fund, a tactic that many called for to help ease deep cuts to public education. Lawmakers took him seriously, as was apparent during discussion between two House Republicans on an amendment that became one of the last efforts to use the money to help public schools.
“Is it possible,” Rep. Van Taylor of Plano said, “if the amendment stayed in that the governor might veto the bill?”
Rep. Phil King of Weatherford replied, “Well, my impression of Governor Perry is that he usually does what he says that he’s going to do.”
9/4/2011
In May, during the waning days of the 82nd Legislature, Gov. Rick Perry made a rare trip to the Senate chamber to broker a deal.
Negotiators from the House and the Senate were struggling to cobble together a school finance plan that would slash state financing, integral to closing a multibillion-dollar shortfall in the state’s 2012-13 budget. After about 90 minutes, Perry emerged from the closed-door meeting to tell reporters he felt “very optimistic” that lawmakers would reach an agreement.
Shortly, they did, agreeing to a change in the way the state allocates money to its schools that, in practical terms, meant a historic reduction of $4 billion in financing and an additional $1.4 billion cut in discretionary grants for public education.
How the budget will affect the state’s public schools will be a cornerstone of Perry’s legacy and could influence his fate as a presidential candidate. But he is likely to be remembered most for a far more public battle: staving off the federal government’s influence — and sometimes its dollars — from invading Texas classrooms.
When Secretary of Education Arne Duncan jabbed Perry on public schools in mid-August, it was only the latest skirmish between the governor and the Obama administration since late 2009, when Perry announced that the state would not sign on to common core-curriculum standards. Those criteria, though endorsed by the Obama administration, were developed by a consortium of 48 states and the National Governors Association.
The announcement was quickly followed by news that Texas would not participate in the administration’s signature education program, a competition among states for $4.35 billion in grants, because of its emphasis on the adoption of the common curriculum. Texas public schools were eligible for $700 million through the grants.
“I am not prepared to sell control of our state’s education system for any price,” Perry said in January 2010. The common curriculum, he said, could lead to the “dumbing down” of the state’s standards.
Perry’s disdain for the federal government’s role in public education, along with legal challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency and the federal heath care overhaul, fit neatly into his anti-Washington primary campaign against U.S. Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, who challenged him for the 2010 Republican nomination for governor. It can now also be seen as a preamble to his presidential run.
But unlike his positions on health care and environmental regulations, widely shared among conservatives, Perry’s early opposition to the administration’s education policies — whose bipartisan backers include former Gov. Jeb Bush of Florida — make him something of an ideological outlier among Republicans.
Of his fellow presidential contenders, Perry “probably has the most fully formed vision of what he would like the federal role to be” in education, said Rick Hess, the director of education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative research organization.
If Perry wins the nomination, Hess said, it could make public education more important in the general election. Proposals like the common core standards could suddenly become politically charged.
“What’s going to happen is that prominent Republicans broadly supportive of Obama in education may be forced to choose a side,” he said. “Rather than remaining as reforms that both Republicans and Democrats can embrace, these things could be poisoned by association.”
Though federal issues have lately dominated Perry’s discourse on education, in earlier years he actively backed education proposals popular among conservatives, like incentive pay for teachers and private school vouchers, with mixed success.
Vouchers failed several times to make it through the Legislature — proving politically lethal for Kent Grusendorf, chairman of the House Public Education Committee, who strongly supported them — and eventually lost momentum. The “last grasp” at passing a voucher program, said Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, a San Antonio Democrat who opposed it, was in the 2007 legislative session.
When incentive pay also struggled for passage in the Legislature, Perry set up the state’s first statewide program with an executive order in 2005. It earmarked $10 million in federal money for teachers who had shown progress with students in economically disadvantaged school districts over three years. Lawmakers expanded it in 2006 only to discontinue it 2009 after a three-year study commissioned by the Texas Education Agency found it had little effect on student achievement.
The problem, said Lori Taylor, a researcher at Texas A&M University, who was a co-author of the studies, was not with the concept of incentive pay but in the way the program implemented it, with every school choosing its own design. That meant that districts could, if they wanted, use the money to give every teacher an across-the-board raise regardless of student achievement — and that is what many of them did.
The state’s current incentive pay program fared better in its evaluation, but because the gains were so small among schools, it wasn’t “wholly persuasive,” said Taylor. It’s unlikely there will be a follow-up, Taylor said, because very little financing for the program survived the Legislative session.
Catherine Frazier, a spokeswoman for Perry, said in an email that while the teacher incentive program was affected by the budget, it “remains a priority.”
“The governor understands that we faced considerable budget challenges this last session,” Frazier said. “No agency was spared from reductions in spending, but ultimately he is proud of lawmakers’ tough decisions to keep Texas living within its means without raising taxes.”
The governor has exerted influence through his appointments to the Texas Education Agency and the State Board of Education, where he has consistently picked from the board’s faction of evangelical conservatives.
Perry has also not been afraid to use — or let lawmakers know he was inclined to use, should they push him — his veto pen. In 2009, he killed bipartisan legislation that would have required limits on class size and offered full-day programs in state kindergarten. In his veto statement, he said the money was better used to serve more children under the state’s current half-day program than to create an additional program.
During the last legislative session, the governor opposed a bill that would have changed how end-of-course exams were factored into graduation requirements under the state’s new accountability system. His office made it clear that if the measure passed, it would be subject to a veto, said Andrew C. Erben, of the Texas Institute for Education Reform, a business-oriented education advocacy group.
“While he and his staff weren’t out front saying it’s a horrible bill, they let it be known they did not support it,” Erben said.
Perry was more publicly adamant in his promise that he would not sign a budget that used the state’s Rainy Day Fund, a tactic that many called for to help ease deep cuts to public education. Lawmakers took him seriously, as was apparent during discussion between two House Republicans on an amendment that became one of the last efforts to use the money to help public schools.
“Is it possible,” Rep. Van Taylor of Plano said, “if the amendment stayed in that the governor might veto the bill?”
Rep. Phil King of Weatherford replied, “Well, my impression of Governor Perry is that he usually does what he says that he’s going to do.”
Friday, August 26, 2011
Texas-Size Compromise
Kevin Kiley | Inside Higher Education
August 26, 2011
Texas Governor Rick Perry is surging in polls for the Republican nomination for president, but Francisco Cigarroa might be the Texan with the biggest political victory this week.
At a meeting of the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents on Thursday, Cigarroa, the system’s chancellor, presented a framework, which the board adopted unanimously, designed to improve accountability, outcomes, and efficiency at the system’s nine academic institutions and six health centers.
Cigarroa's plan, much like the efforts being pushed by Perry and conservative think tanks in the state, involves much more public reporting about faculty performance and focuses on using technology as a way to drive down college costs. But unlike those plans, it gives considerable leeway to campuses to determine how they will evaluate faculty members. It also avoids some of the controversial assumptions made by other reform efforts -- such as the view that there is a clear relationship between grants obtained and the value of research, or that student evaluations are the best way to measure a faculty member's teaching -- to which faculty members have objected.
The new plan is ambitious in its scope -- encompassing everything from a public database to evaluate faculty productivity to a new resource to develop online courses -- but its biggest success might be the fact that, so far, it has the support of groups on multiple sides of what has been a contentious debate about the future of higher education in Texas. The framework provides a rough outline for the system, and campuses will be left to figure out the details of exactly how they will meet the chancellor's goals, which could create tension down the road. But the fact that Cigarroa is being praised by conservative think tanks, faculty members, and even Perry is a notable departure from the rhetoric that has dominated higher-education talk in Texas.
“Chancellor Cigarroa’s action plan is the first step of many that will be needed for Texas public universities to achieve the important goals of greater transparency and accountability, improved use of resources, more world-class research and high-quality graduates, and reduced cost of higher education to students and taxpayers,” said David Guenthner, senior communications director for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank whose reform proposals have been at the center of many of the debates. “Today’s positive presentation is the beginning of the reform process, not the end – but it is a very good start.”
At the same time, the plan received approval from the Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, a group formed in opposition to the reforms being pushed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Chancellor Cigarroa’s plan is in direct contrast to the simplistic, ill-conceived, and untested so-called ‘solutions’ being promoted by outside interest groups,” the coalition said in a statement. Democratic and Republican lawmakers also weighed in, supporting the chancellor's efforts.
Tim Allen, a professor at the U.T. Health Science Center in Tyler and chair of the University of Texas System Faculty Advisory Council, said in a presentation following Cigarroa that faculty approved of the plan.
During the past few years, system administrators, university faculty members, alumni groups, politicians, and think tanks have been embroiled in discussions about college costs, accountability, faculty productivity, and the value of research. The Texas Public Policy Foundation has pushed a series of contentious reforms called the "seven solutions" that include separating research and teaching budgets, placing more emphasis on student evaluations, and creating a separate accrediting body. The group has numerous ties to the governor (who has great influence on the direction of the state's public universities, having appointed every member of the state's six boards of regents), who has partially endorsed its reforms.
Officials stressed that such issues have come up in other states as well, and that the issues of college costs and accountability are not unique to Texas, just more high-profile. “Texas finds itself at the epicenter of the national debate on the future of higher education,” Cigarroa said on Thursday.
Efforts to impose parts of those reforms have not sat well with some faculty and alumni groups, who see them as overly simplistic and detrimental to the system in the long run, and particularly to the research mission. But several people involved in the system say the broad support for Cigarroa's plan, and the comprehensive nature of the plan itself, will likely help quell the disputes.
"I think we're mostly past all that now," said Charles Miller, former chairman of the Board of Regents, of the heated rhetoric. He said that in the beginning of the debates about faculty productivity and college costs, some regents and staff quickly moved ahead to solve problems before there was agreement about what the problems were, creating a lot of tension. "In the beginning, the process wasn't well done. But these are smart, capable people on these boards, and when they're being told they're doing something wrong, they dig in and work harder."
Senator Judith Zaffirini, a Democrat from Laredo who chairs the Senate's Higher Education Committee, said she hopes the plan serves as a "unifying force that looks beyond yesterday’s controversies and toward a brighter future."
The plan Cigarroa laid out Thursday is designed to make sure that taxpayers and students are getting their money's worth out of the system -- particularly at a time of diminished state revenue and rising student costs -- which has been a major goal of the reform efforts. "Our primary goal here is enhancing the University of Texas for students and their parents, maintaining high quality, while at the same time, figuring out how to reduce overall costs and cost per student," said Gene Powell, chairman of the Board of Regents, in an interview.
The reforms incorporate suggestions developed by two regents' committees created at the beginning of the year: one on productivity and efficiency, and another on blended and online learning. Faculty members and administrators, feeling like the board was trying to micromanage campus operations, objected to those committees. The board then vested more authority in Cigarroa to create the plan.
In presenting the framework Thursday, Cigarroa stressed that he didn't want to take a "one size fits all" approach. Instead he laid out broad goals while letting each campus determine the actual benchmarks it would use. "Innovation happens at the campus level," he said in an interview. "We're not going to be prescriptive, but we are going to hold them accountable on developing strategies."
In terms of undergraduate students, the framework calls on campuses to improve four-year graduation rates, increase the number of degrees granted, and reduce the financial impact of tuition on families. For each of these, the plan outlines smaller action items, such as tuition policies that encourage four-year graduation, and identifies individuals responsible for carrying them out on each campus.
One of the major pushes in the framework, growing out of the regents' committee, is a call to increase blended and online learning to drive down costs. The board authorized an investment of up to $50 million to create a new Institute for Transformational Learning. The institute will work with campuses to develop online learning resources.
The announcement comes slightly more than a year after the system shuttered the UT TeleCampus, a centralized office for distance-education programs. Administrators said that unlike TeleCampus, the new institute will be a bottom-up approach, with programs originating on campuses, which they hope will spur greater innovation.
It will be left to the individual campuses to hammer out the details for many of the reforms advanced for improving faculty accountability and productivity, including strengthening annual evaluations and post-tenure review and implementing incentive-based compensation.
The system is already working on developing a publicly available dashboard that will present detailed information about department and individual professor productivity that administrators can use to make decisions. Cigarroa stressed that the exact information included in the dashboard has yet to be determined and that each campus will be able to determine its own set of metrics.
The selection of metrics will likely be a contentious issue down the road. Recent efforts to hold professors more accountable, such as lists of professors based on how many students they teach compared to their salaries, have not been greeted warmly by faculty members, who said they felt like they were under attack.
Other reforms include finding new ways to fund and collaborate on research projects, promote shorter completion times for Ph.D.s, and develop health and educational opportunities in South Texas -- including investment in UT-Brownsville, which used to operate jointly with a community college, to make the university a stand-alone four-year institution.
Actual implementation of the plans will take place over the next few years, as campus presidents and administrators determine actual metrics on which to measure performance and productivity.
Miller, who said he has been pushing for similar reforms for years and has been critical of both sides of the debate, said the board and Cigarroa deserve praise for tackling a politically dangerous issue. "There are quite a few people who should take responsibility for not having this discussion sooner," he said."This kind of thing takes leadership at the state policy level, at all levels, and the board should be commended for what they've done.
August 26, 2011
Texas Governor Rick Perry is surging in polls for the Republican nomination for president, but Francisco Cigarroa might be the Texan with the biggest political victory this week.
At a meeting of the University of Texas System’s Board of Regents on Thursday, Cigarroa, the system’s chancellor, presented a framework, which the board adopted unanimously, designed to improve accountability, outcomes, and efficiency at the system’s nine academic institutions and six health centers.
Cigarroa's plan, much like the efforts being pushed by Perry and conservative think tanks in the state, involves much more public reporting about faculty performance and focuses on using technology as a way to drive down college costs. But unlike those plans, it gives considerable leeway to campuses to determine how they will evaluate faculty members. It also avoids some of the controversial assumptions made by other reform efforts -- such as the view that there is a clear relationship between grants obtained and the value of research, or that student evaluations are the best way to measure a faculty member's teaching -- to which faculty members have objected.
The new plan is ambitious in its scope -- encompassing everything from a public database to evaluate faculty productivity to a new resource to develop online courses -- but its biggest success might be the fact that, so far, it has the support of groups on multiple sides of what has been a contentious debate about the future of higher education in Texas. The framework provides a rough outline for the system, and campuses will be left to figure out the details of exactly how they will meet the chancellor's goals, which could create tension down the road. But the fact that Cigarroa is being praised by conservative think tanks, faculty members, and even Perry is a notable departure from the rhetoric that has dominated higher-education talk in Texas.
“Chancellor Cigarroa’s action plan is the first step of many that will be needed for Texas public universities to achieve the important goals of greater transparency and accountability, improved use of resources, more world-class research and high-quality graduates, and reduced cost of higher education to students and taxpayers,” said David Guenthner, senior communications director for the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank whose reform proposals have been at the center of many of the debates. “Today’s positive presentation is the beginning of the reform process, not the end – but it is a very good start.”
At the same time, the plan received approval from the Texas Coalition for Excellence in Higher Education, a group formed in opposition to the reforms being pushed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation. “Chancellor Cigarroa’s plan is in direct contrast to the simplistic, ill-conceived, and untested so-called ‘solutions’ being promoted by outside interest groups,” the coalition said in a statement. Democratic and Republican lawmakers also weighed in, supporting the chancellor's efforts.
Tim Allen, a professor at the U.T. Health Science Center in Tyler and chair of the University of Texas System Faculty Advisory Council, said in a presentation following Cigarroa that faculty approved of the plan.
During the past few years, system administrators, university faculty members, alumni groups, politicians, and think tanks have been embroiled in discussions about college costs, accountability, faculty productivity, and the value of research. The Texas Public Policy Foundation has pushed a series of contentious reforms called the "seven solutions" that include separating research and teaching budgets, placing more emphasis on student evaluations, and creating a separate accrediting body. The group has numerous ties to the governor (who has great influence on the direction of the state's public universities, having appointed every member of the state's six boards of regents), who has partially endorsed its reforms.
Officials stressed that such issues have come up in other states as well, and that the issues of college costs and accountability are not unique to Texas, just more high-profile. “Texas finds itself at the epicenter of the national debate on the future of higher education,” Cigarroa said on Thursday.
Efforts to impose parts of those reforms have not sat well with some faculty and alumni groups, who see them as overly simplistic and detrimental to the system in the long run, and particularly to the research mission. But several people involved in the system say the broad support for Cigarroa's plan, and the comprehensive nature of the plan itself, will likely help quell the disputes.
"I think we're mostly past all that now," said Charles Miller, former chairman of the Board of Regents, of the heated rhetoric. He said that in the beginning of the debates about faculty productivity and college costs, some regents and staff quickly moved ahead to solve problems before there was agreement about what the problems were, creating a lot of tension. "In the beginning, the process wasn't well done. But these are smart, capable people on these boards, and when they're being told they're doing something wrong, they dig in and work harder."
Senator Judith Zaffirini, a Democrat from Laredo who chairs the Senate's Higher Education Committee, said she hopes the plan serves as a "unifying force that looks beyond yesterday’s controversies and toward a brighter future."
The plan Cigarroa laid out Thursday is designed to make sure that taxpayers and students are getting their money's worth out of the system -- particularly at a time of diminished state revenue and rising student costs -- which has been a major goal of the reform efforts. "Our primary goal here is enhancing the University of Texas for students and their parents, maintaining high quality, while at the same time, figuring out how to reduce overall costs and cost per student," said Gene Powell, chairman of the Board of Regents, in an interview.
The reforms incorporate suggestions developed by two regents' committees created at the beginning of the year: one on productivity and efficiency, and another on blended and online learning. Faculty members and administrators, feeling like the board was trying to micromanage campus operations, objected to those committees. The board then vested more authority in Cigarroa to create the plan.
In presenting the framework Thursday, Cigarroa stressed that he didn't want to take a "one size fits all" approach. Instead he laid out broad goals while letting each campus determine the actual benchmarks it would use. "Innovation happens at the campus level," he said in an interview. "We're not going to be prescriptive, but we are going to hold them accountable on developing strategies."
In terms of undergraduate students, the framework calls on campuses to improve four-year graduation rates, increase the number of degrees granted, and reduce the financial impact of tuition on families. For each of these, the plan outlines smaller action items, such as tuition policies that encourage four-year graduation, and identifies individuals responsible for carrying them out on each campus.
One of the major pushes in the framework, growing out of the regents' committee, is a call to increase blended and online learning to drive down costs. The board authorized an investment of up to $50 million to create a new Institute for Transformational Learning. The institute will work with campuses to develop online learning resources.
The announcement comes slightly more than a year after the system shuttered the UT TeleCampus, a centralized office for distance-education programs. Administrators said that unlike TeleCampus, the new institute will be a bottom-up approach, with programs originating on campuses, which they hope will spur greater innovation.
It will be left to the individual campuses to hammer out the details for many of the reforms advanced for improving faculty accountability and productivity, including strengthening annual evaluations and post-tenure review and implementing incentive-based compensation.
The system is already working on developing a publicly available dashboard that will present detailed information about department and individual professor productivity that administrators can use to make decisions. Cigarroa stressed that the exact information included in the dashboard has yet to be determined and that each campus will be able to determine its own set of metrics.
The selection of metrics will likely be a contentious issue down the road. Recent efforts to hold professors more accountable, such as lists of professors based on how many students they teach compared to their salaries, have not been greeted warmly by faculty members, who said they felt like they were under attack.
Other reforms include finding new ways to fund and collaborate on research projects, promote shorter completion times for Ph.D.s, and develop health and educational opportunities in South Texas -- including investment in UT-Brownsville, which used to operate jointly with a community college, to make the university a stand-alone four-year institution.
Actual implementation of the plans will take place over the next few years, as campus presidents and administrators determine actual metrics on which to measure performance and productivity.
Miller, who said he has been pushing for similar reforms for years and has been critical of both sides of the debate, said the board and Cigarroa deserve praise for tackling a politically dangerous issue. "There are quite a few people who should take responsibility for not having this discussion sooner," he said."This kind of thing takes leadership at the state policy level, at all levels, and the board should be commended for what they've done.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Rick Perry's Education Policies Bring Mixed Results In Texas
Texas Gov. Rick Perry's k-12 education record has become the Obama administration's newest piñata -- but the administration's attacks mostly paint Perry's education policies in half-true generalizations and miss some real contradictions.
The criticism began Thursday, when U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan unloaded on the newest GOP presidential contender, telling Bloomberg Television that he felt "very, very badly" for Texas school children. "Texas may have the lowest high school graduation rate in the country," Duncan asserted.
Over the weekend, Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary and current outside administration advisor, piled on: "I think when it comes to someone like Rick Perry, they're [voters] going to wonder why a place like Texas has one of the worst education systems," Gibbs said on Sunday's "Meet the Press."
But Texas's educational achievement record is more complex than Gibbs and Duncan make it sound, and their claims depend on carefully-chosen data.
On one hand, math scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress test have increased, and Texas students have performed relatively well under Perry's watch -- though progress has stalled recently. On the other hand, NAEP reading scores are relatively low, and Texas leads the country in the number of adults without high school diplomas. And while Texans scored slightly below the national average on the 2011 ACT, few of those students are college-ready.
When asked for clarification on what Duncan meant by saying Texas "may have" the nation's lowest graduation rate, a spokeswoman said she could not comment further. Texas's technical graduation rate may indeed be the nation's lowest, but that figure includes students of all ages who have not completed high school. The state's freshman completion rate is average, and Texas ranked seventh out of the 26 states that reported their four-year on-time graduation rates for 2009.
"Texas is mid-pack on graduation rates, and that's no great shakes," said Andy Rotherham, a former Clinton policy aide who now works as a partner at the think tank Bellwether Education Partners. "The bigger story is that Perry hasn't done anything on education."
WHAT POLICY?
Under Perry's watch, Texas's curriculum wars made national headlines with stories about the state's conservative school board arguing over textbook content. Perry himself received attention late last week for saying intelligent design is taught alongside evolution in Texas public schools. That statement flew in the face of a 1987 state Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the practice. Still, Perry's gaffe was more a statement on values than an education policy pronouncement.
While Perry has condemned the federal government's role in public schools, he does not seem to have a highly-articulated education policy of his own. His campaign website does not list education as an issue. Members of his staff did not return requests for comment.
Perry's gubernatorial website points to several small initiatives: teacher incentive pay, school supply reimbursement, teacher mentoring and increasing standards. But Texas education leaders say they wish Perry had articulated broader education positions.
"I couldn't point out a signature education policy but I give [Perry] credit for letting things play out over time and letting them get better," said Michael Marder, a professor at the University of Texas who runs a teacher preparation program that receives state funds. A lack of coherent education policy is inconsequential, he says, as long as the numbers are relatively good.
Ed Fuller, a long-time Texas education researcher, is less charitable. "If [Perry]'s going to run around claiming that he's done something good, the numbers don't show it," Fuller said. "Fourth grade math flattened out; we're not making improvements -- it's taking a while to translate into the eighth grade."
"He's done nothing," said Linda Bridges, who heads Texas's arm of the American Federation of Teachers.
JUMPING OFF THE FUNDING CLIFF
Budget cuts may end up the education legacy of Perry's governorship; Texas education observers predict that the school system is about to fall off the edge of a funding cliff.
During a special session to reform school funding in 2005, Perry said, "I cannot let $2 billion sit in some bank account when it can go directly to the classroom," according to his website. But the governor had no problem underfunding Texas's schools by $5.5 billion this legislative session, despite access to a $9.4 billion rainy-day fund. That move, some education advocates say, threatens to foil the subtle gains Texas students have made in recent years.
And while Perry touts job creation on the campaign trail, thousands of Texas education employees stand ready to lose their jobs because of the cuts.
The worst is yet to come, says Eva DeLuna Castro, a senior budget analyst at Texas's Center for Public Policy Priorities. Her think tank predicts a loss of 49,000 education jobs over the next two years.
"Federal stimulus money softened the blow this year," she said. "Next August will be worse. There will be cuts to dropout prevention, teacher pay, incentive pay, math and science labs and grants for pre-K. A lot of education initiatives done in earlier years will be gone now."
Texas now ranks 47th nationally in what it pays for each student's education. "[Perry's] goal is to make Texas the 99-cent store of states," said Scott Hochberg, a Democratic state representative. "You're going for cheap."
It's about to get cheaper. The state swapped its heavy reliance on property taxes for a new business tax in 2006, despite the Republican comptroller's warning that the flip would lead to a budget shortfall. Since then, Texas school funding -- and the state budget in general -- has been unsteady.
This budget session, the legislature responded to pressure from Perry and did not fund enrollment growth in schools, despite an increase of 80,000 students. According to Democratic state Sen. Kirk Watson, "[Perry] did this almost single-handedly, blocking the disuse of the rainy day fund with veto threats."
According to Bloomberg News, "Perry cut $15 billion from spending [over time] and shortchanged [students] by about $4 billion from previously mandated levels rather than raise taxes."
To Cody Wheeler, a music teacher at a Louis Elementary School in Houston, Perry's education policies will be apparent for the incoming class. Last year he had 26 students, but budget cuts have forced his district to lay off some teachers. "This year, I'm going to have a class of 35 kindergartners every day," Wheeler said. "That'll be pretty challenging."
FAVORING FEDERALISM
Perry has been called the anti-Obama of education policy more than once. But he's also the anti-George W. Bush in some ways.
Bush, Perry's predecessor in Texas, made education a major issue while leading both the state and, later, the country.
"Governor Bush was making public education a priority," said Hochberg. "Perry's education initiatives in k-12 have been limited to things like announcing that he was going to provide some teachers help to buy school supplies to their classrooms and then never funding it."
With Bush as president, Congress passed No Child Left Behind, the sweeping federal education law that requires accountability and test reporting among school districts and ties federal education funding to set performance standards.
Perry attacked NCLB in his book, "Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington," in a chapter titled "Federal Intervention in Education":
[J]ust like the spending hook used to induce compliance for seat-belt and drinking-age laws, the federal government reaches into our pockets, takes out wads of dollars, and then says that we can have them back only if we comply with federal instructions.
Perry also showed his states' rights principles in his resistance to participating in
Obama's Race to the Top, a grant program that had states compete for federal education funding in exchange for agreeing to implement adminstration-sanctioned reforms. "Texas knows how to best educate our students," Perry said.
He echoed that that point in "Fed Up," writing, "The academic standards of Texas are not for sale. We will retain our sovereign authority to decide how to educate our children."
But critics say Perry's funding decisions undermine any boasts of enhancing student learning. Instead, Texas kids are coming of age in an under-resourced school system that might be unable to prepare them to enter the workforce.
"If students are in underfunded schools, they'll never get ahead," DeLuna Castro said. "When they grow up, they'll be unable to pay taxes, too. It's a cycle. You've got to prepare them for that."
The criticism began Thursday, when U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan unloaded on the newest GOP presidential contender, telling Bloomberg Television that he felt "very, very badly" for Texas school children. "Texas may have the lowest high school graduation rate in the country," Duncan asserted.
Over the weekend, Robert Gibbs, a former White House press secretary and current outside administration advisor, piled on: "I think when it comes to someone like Rick Perry, they're [voters] going to wonder why a place like Texas has one of the worst education systems," Gibbs said on Sunday's "Meet the Press."
But Texas's educational achievement record is more complex than Gibbs and Duncan make it sound, and their claims depend on carefully-chosen data.
On one hand, math scores on the National Assessment of Education Progress test have increased, and Texas students have performed relatively well under Perry's watch -- though progress has stalled recently. On the other hand, NAEP reading scores are relatively low, and Texas leads the country in the number of adults without high school diplomas. And while Texans scored slightly below the national average on the 2011 ACT, few of those students are college-ready.
When asked for clarification on what Duncan meant by saying Texas "may have" the nation's lowest graduation rate, a spokeswoman said she could not comment further. Texas's technical graduation rate may indeed be the nation's lowest, but that figure includes students of all ages who have not completed high school. The state's freshman completion rate is average, and Texas ranked seventh out of the 26 states that reported their four-year on-time graduation rates for 2009.
"Texas is mid-pack on graduation rates, and that's no great shakes," said Andy Rotherham, a former Clinton policy aide who now works as a partner at the think tank Bellwether Education Partners. "The bigger story is that Perry hasn't done anything on education."
WHAT POLICY?
Under Perry's watch, Texas's curriculum wars made national headlines with stories about the state's conservative school board arguing over textbook content. Perry himself received attention late last week for saying intelligent design is taught alongside evolution in Texas public schools. That statement flew in the face of a 1987 state Supreme Court ruling prohibiting the practice. Still, Perry's gaffe was more a statement on values than an education policy pronouncement.
While Perry has condemned the federal government's role in public schools, he does not seem to have a highly-articulated education policy of his own. His campaign website does not list education as an issue. Members of his staff did not return requests for comment.
Perry's gubernatorial website points to several small initiatives: teacher incentive pay, school supply reimbursement, teacher mentoring and increasing standards. But Texas education leaders say they wish Perry had articulated broader education positions.
"I couldn't point out a signature education policy but I give [Perry] credit for letting things play out over time and letting them get better," said Michael Marder, a professor at the University of Texas who runs a teacher preparation program that receives state funds. A lack of coherent education policy is inconsequential, he says, as long as the numbers are relatively good.
Ed Fuller, a long-time Texas education researcher, is less charitable. "If [Perry]'s going to run around claiming that he's done something good, the numbers don't show it," Fuller said. "Fourth grade math flattened out; we're not making improvements -- it's taking a while to translate into the eighth grade."
"He's done nothing," said Linda Bridges, who heads Texas's arm of the American Federation of Teachers.
JUMPING OFF THE FUNDING CLIFF
Budget cuts may end up the education legacy of Perry's governorship; Texas education observers predict that the school system is about to fall off the edge of a funding cliff.
During a special session to reform school funding in 2005, Perry said, "I cannot let $2 billion sit in some bank account when it can go directly to the classroom," according to his website. But the governor had no problem underfunding Texas's schools by $5.5 billion this legislative session, despite access to a $9.4 billion rainy-day fund. That move, some education advocates say, threatens to foil the subtle gains Texas students have made in recent years.
And while Perry touts job creation on the campaign trail, thousands of Texas education employees stand ready to lose their jobs because of the cuts.
The worst is yet to come, says Eva DeLuna Castro, a senior budget analyst at Texas's Center for Public Policy Priorities. Her think tank predicts a loss of 49,000 education jobs over the next two years.
"Federal stimulus money softened the blow this year," she said. "Next August will be worse. There will be cuts to dropout prevention, teacher pay, incentive pay, math and science labs and grants for pre-K. A lot of education initiatives done in earlier years will be gone now."
Texas now ranks 47th nationally in what it pays for each student's education. "[Perry's] goal is to make Texas the 99-cent store of states," said Scott Hochberg, a Democratic state representative. "You're going for cheap."
It's about to get cheaper. The state swapped its heavy reliance on property taxes for a new business tax in 2006, despite the Republican comptroller's warning that the flip would lead to a budget shortfall. Since then, Texas school funding -- and the state budget in general -- has been unsteady.
This budget session, the legislature responded to pressure from Perry and did not fund enrollment growth in schools, despite an increase of 80,000 students. According to Democratic state Sen. Kirk Watson, "[Perry] did this almost single-handedly, blocking the disuse of the rainy day fund with veto threats."
According to Bloomberg News, "Perry cut $15 billion from spending [over time] and shortchanged [students] by about $4 billion from previously mandated levels rather than raise taxes."
To Cody Wheeler, a music teacher at a Louis Elementary School in Houston, Perry's education policies will be apparent for the incoming class. Last year he had 26 students, but budget cuts have forced his district to lay off some teachers. "This year, I'm going to have a class of 35 kindergartners every day," Wheeler said. "That'll be pretty challenging."
FAVORING FEDERALISM
Perry has been called the anti-Obama of education policy more than once. But he's also the anti-George W. Bush in some ways.
Bush, Perry's predecessor in Texas, made education a major issue while leading both the state and, later, the country.
"Governor Bush was making public education a priority," said Hochberg. "Perry's education initiatives in k-12 have been limited to things like announcing that he was going to provide some teachers help to buy school supplies to their classrooms and then never funding it."
With Bush as president, Congress passed No Child Left Behind, the sweeping federal education law that requires accountability and test reporting among school districts and ties federal education funding to set performance standards.
Perry attacked NCLB in his book, "Fed Up! Our Fight to Save America from Washington," in a chapter titled "Federal Intervention in Education":
[J]ust like the spending hook used to induce compliance for seat-belt and drinking-age laws, the federal government reaches into our pockets, takes out wads of dollars, and then says that we can have them back only if we comply with federal instructions.
Perry also showed his states' rights principles in his resistance to participating in
Obama's Race to the Top, a grant program that had states compete for federal education funding in exchange for agreeing to implement adminstration-sanctioned reforms. "Texas knows how to best educate our students," Perry said.
He echoed that that point in "Fed Up," writing, "The academic standards of Texas are not for sale. We will retain our sovereign authority to decide how to educate our children."
But critics say Perry's funding decisions undermine any boasts of enhancing student learning. Instead, Texas kids are coming of age in an under-resourced school system that might be unable to prepare them to enter the workforce.
"If students are in underfunded schools, they'll never get ahead," DeLuna Castro said. "When they grow up, they'll be unable to pay taxes, too. It's a cycle. You've got to prepare them for that."
Thursday, August 18, 2011
Obama’s Education Secretary Says Perry’s Schools Left Behind
By Margaret Talev |
Aug 18, 2011
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Texas’s school system “has really struggled” under Governor Rick Perry, a Republican candidate for president, and the state’s substandard schools do a disservice to children.
“Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college,” Duncan said on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” airing Aug. 19- 20. “I feel very, very badly for the children there.”
“You have seen massive increases in class size,” Duncan said of the Texas public school system during Perry’s terms as governor since December 2000. “You’ve seen cutbacks in funding. It doesn’t serve the children well. It doesn’t serve the state well. It doesn’t serve the state’s economy well. And ultimately it hurts the country.”
Perry has been an outspoken critic of President Barack Obama’s education policies. Perry declined to participate in Obama’s Race to the Top initiative that awards federal grants in exchange for adopting national standards, saying the program “smacks of a federal takeover of public schools.”
Perry said participating “could very well lead to the ‘dumbing down’ of the rigorous standards we’ve worked so hard to enact.” He has called Duncan a “true bureaucrat.”
Perry in June signed a $172.3 billion state budget that included $4 billion in cuts to public schools and cut financial aid to 43,000 college students, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Texas Rankings
The estimated public high school graduation rate in Texas ranks 43rd of the 50 states, at 61.3 percent, according to the Legislative Budget Board’s 2010 Texas Fact Book.
Among 4.75 million students in Texas public schools in 2008-09, the most recent year for statistics compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics, 48.8 percent were eligible for free or reduced lunches and 15.1 percent were in limited-English proficiency programs.
Duncan’s critique of Texas comes days after Perry’s formal entrance into the 2012 presidential race on Aug. 13 and his Aug. 15 comment that it would be “almost treacherous -- or treasonous” if Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke increased stimulus spending before the election.
Mark Miner, a spokesman for the Perry campaign, responded to Duncan’s comments in an e-mail.
“The president’s secretary of education may want to do a little more homework before commenting on education in Texas,” he said. “Under Governor Perry, Texas has been a national leader in adopting college and career-ready curriculum standards that will ensure Texas students graduate prepared to succeed in college and the workplace.”
Miner cited Education Week, in September 2009, as recognizing Texas as a national leader in adopting college and career ready standards. “Texas continues to lead the country in job creation because companies know they can find educated and highly skilled workers here,” he said.
Aug 18, 2011
U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Texas’s school system “has really struggled” under Governor Rick Perry, a Republican candidate for president, and the state’s substandard schools do a disservice to children.
“Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college,” Duncan said on Bloomberg Television’s “Political Capital With Al Hunt” airing Aug. 19- 20. “I feel very, very badly for the children there.”
“You have seen massive increases in class size,” Duncan said of the Texas public school system during Perry’s terms as governor since December 2000. “You’ve seen cutbacks in funding. It doesn’t serve the children well. It doesn’t serve the state well. It doesn’t serve the state’s economy well. And ultimately it hurts the country.”
Perry has been an outspoken critic of President Barack Obama’s education policies. Perry declined to participate in Obama’s Race to the Top initiative that awards federal grants in exchange for adopting national standards, saying the program “smacks of a federal takeover of public schools.”
Perry said participating “could very well lead to the ‘dumbing down’ of the rigorous standards we’ve worked so hard to enact.” He has called Duncan a “true bureaucrat.”
Perry in June signed a $172.3 billion state budget that included $4 billion in cuts to public schools and cut financial aid to 43,000 college students, according to the Dallas Morning News.
Texas Rankings
The estimated public high school graduation rate in Texas ranks 43rd of the 50 states, at 61.3 percent, according to the Legislative Budget Board’s 2010 Texas Fact Book.
Among 4.75 million students in Texas public schools in 2008-09, the most recent year for statistics compiled by the National Center for Education Statistics, 48.8 percent were eligible for free or reduced lunches and 15.1 percent were in limited-English proficiency programs.
Duncan’s critique of Texas comes days after Perry’s formal entrance into the 2012 presidential race on Aug. 13 and his Aug. 15 comment that it would be “almost treacherous -- or treasonous” if Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke increased stimulus spending before the election.
Mark Miner, a spokesman for the Perry campaign, responded to Duncan’s comments in an e-mail.
“The president’s secretary of education may want to do a little more homework before commenting on education in Texas,” he said. “Under Governor Perry, Texas has been a national leader in adopting college and career-ready curriculum standards that will ensure Texas students graduate prepared to succeed in college and the workplace.”
Miner cited Education Week, in September 2009, as recognizing Texas as a national leader in adopting college and career ready standards. “Texas continues to lead the country in job creation because companies know they can find educated and highly skilled workers here,” he said.
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