Also check out the clip from Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye's documentary that revisits Nixon’s speech from Nov. 3, 1969 from an earlier post to this blog titled: "The Silent Majority: Consisting of rare footage filmed by President Richard M. Nixon’s aides, this experimental documentary revisits Nixon’s campaign to win an elusive majority"
-Patricia
By MATTHEW D. LASSITER
Published: November 2, 2011
AMERICAN politics might appear polarized along a red-blue divide, but the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements are claiming to do the same thing: defend the real majority against the powerful elites and vocal interest groups that control the political system. Conservatives in the Tea Party attack big government and rally behind the slogan “Silent Majority No More!” Progressives in Occupy Wall Street denounce big business and embrace the manifesto “We Are the 99 Percent.”
On both the right and the left, strategists want to mobilize the elusive group of voters that Richard M. Nixon first labeled the “great silent majority” during a speech about the Vietnam War on Nov. 3, 1969. With one rhetorical stroke, Nixon identified a new populist category that redefined how political groups strive for influence.
At the time, polls revealed that two-thirds of Americans hoped the conflict would end quickly but simultaneously opposed antiwar demonstrations. Nixon called for unity on the home front and asked patriotic Americans to speak out against efforts by a “vocal minority” to defeat the United States. Tens of thousands of letters from self-identified members of the silent majority poured into the White House.
Nixon’s conservative populism attempted to obscure the differences between working-class and affluent voters by portraying the silent majority as both heroes and victims of this tumultuous period. In the 1968 campaign, Nixon praised the “forgotten Americans, the nonshouters, the nondemonstrators” — hard-working, tax-paying Americans whose values were under siege by antiwar protesters, urban rioters, criminals and antipoverty liberals.
In 1970, Nixon’s chief of staff, H. R. Haldeman, asked the president’s political team to develop “a plan to mobilize the Silent Majority.” The White House operative Charles Colson incorporated “Silent Majority Inc.” in all 50 states and organized rallies through fake grass-roots organizations like Americans for Winning the Peace and the Honor America Committee. The administration worked on an internal “blue-collar strategy” to finesse the economic liberalism and cultural conservatism of white working-class Democrats viewed as potential Republican voters. The White House even orchestrated the formation of a National Black Silent Majority Committee to represent African-Americans being “shouted down by a handful of militants.”
Nixon was always careful to say that black Americans were part of the silent majority, but his populist agenda targeted white voters who believed that the civil rights and antiwar movements had gone too far. “Enough Is Enough,” a manifesto circulated by conservative groups in the late 1960s, spoke for the Americans who “pay taxes to provide schools for sit-ins, books for burning, rallying points for off-campus riots and study courses in anarchism.” During the 1972 campaign, Nixon invited “those millions who have been driven out of their home in the Democratic party ... to join us as members of a new American majority.”
Nixon’s landslide reelection obscured the class and ideological divisions within his fabled silent majority. Faced with a weakening economy, Nixon portrayed Democrats as the party of racial quotas, busing, urban welfare and weakness on foreign policy. After the election, internal memos circulated by Nixon’s political team acknowledged that he had won by mobilizing a “nonpartisan” majority against liberalism rather than by creating a cohesive Republican coalition. The point person for the blue-collar strategy even warned of a fierce reaction if the administration betrayed middle-income voters by returning to “big-business-dominated Republicanism.”
The legacies of Nixon’s pursuit of the silent majority can be found across the political spectrum. In 1972, the community organizer Saul Alinsky portrayed the silent majority as “up for grabs” and promised to “show the middle class their real enemies: the corporate power elite that runs and ruins the country.” In 1980, the Religious Right televangelist Jerry Falwell proclaimed that “God is calling millions of Americans in the so-often silent majority to join in the moral-majority crusade to turn America around.” In his 1981 inaugural, Ronald Reagan updated Nixon’s formula by informing the “heroes” of America — an allegedly classless majority made up of factory workers and entrepreneurs — that “government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem.”
The Democrats regained the White House only by combining Nixon’s populist outreach to the silent majority with assurances that government intervention could address economic malaise. Bill Clinton promised to listen to the “quiet, troubled voice of the forgotten middle class,” while Barack Obama said that they had “a right to be frustrated because they’ve been ignored.”
Mr. Obama’s challenge in 2012 is not the ideological fervor of Tea Party conservatives, but rather the recognition by many working-class and middle-class voters that both parties favor Wall Street over Main Street. While activist groups on the right and left compete to portray big government or big business as the enemy, the silent majority is still out there in the volatile political center, up for grabs.
Matthew D. Lassiter, an associate professor of history at the University of Michigan, is the author of “The Silent Majority: Suburban Politics in the Sunbelt South.”
Monday, November 07, 2011
The Silent Majority: Consisting of rare footage filmed by President Richard M. Nixon’s aides, this experimental documentary revisits Nixon’s campaign to win an elusive majority.
The Silent Majority: Consisting of rare footage filmed by President Richard M. Nixon’s aides, this experimental documentary revisits Nixon’s campaign to win an elusive majority.
By PENNY LANE and BRIAN L. FRYE
Published: November 2, 2011
THIS film, “The Silent Majority,” was born out of a larger project. We are making a feature-length documentary using the Super 8 home movies of some of Richard M. Nixon’s aides. As we combed through the home movies, we fell in love with these long shots of crowds out to meet the president. Filming over Nixon’s shoulder, the cameramen lingered on the faces of these ordinary, anonymous Americans. We began referring to this footage in edit-room shorthand as the “Silent Majority” footage.
This short documentary suggests a direct connection between two of Nixon’s greatest triumphs as president: his landmark 1969 “Silent Majority” speech (in which he argued that street protesters did not represent the views of most Americans, despite their increasing visibility) and his historic landslide re-election in 1972 (in which George S. McGovern won only one state and the District of Columbia, losing even his home state of South Dakota).
Given our current moment, with next year’s presidential election approaching and with the “Occupy Wall Street” movement repopularizing street protests throughout the nation, we think that spending a few minutes considering parallels between 1972 and 2012 is interesting. But we do not draw conclusions in this video as to what the significance of the notion of a “Silent Majority” is to today’s political reality. That, dear viewer, we leave up to you.
Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye are the directors of the upcoming film “Our Nixon.” Ms. Lane, a visiting professor at Bard College, has been awarded grants from Cinereach, the New York State Council on the Arts, Independent Filmmaker Project, the Experimental Television Center, LEF Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. Mr. Frye, a visiting assistant professor of law at Hofstra, has had work shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New York Film Festival.
By PENNY LANE and BRIAN L. FRYE
Published: November 2, 2011
THIS film, “The Silent Majority,” was born out of a larger project. We are making a feature-length documentary using the Super 8 home movies of some of Richard M. Nixon’s aides. As we combed through the home movies, we fell in love with these long shots of crowds out to meet the president. Filming over Nixon’s shoulder, the cameramen lingered on the faces of these ordinary, anonymous Americans. We began referring to this footage in edit-room shorthand as the “Silent Majority” footage.
This short documentary suggests a direct connection between two of Nixon’s greatest triumphs as president: his landmark 1969 “Silent Majority” speech (in which he argued that street protesters did not represent the views of most Americans, despite their increasing visibility) and his historic landslide re-election in 1972 (in which George S. McGovern won only one state and the District of Columbia, losing even his home state of South Dakota).
Given our current moment, with next year’s presidential election approaching and with the “Occupy Wall Street” movement repopularizing street protests throughout the nation, we think that spending a few minutes considering parallels between 1972 and 2012 is interesting. But we do not draw conclusions in this video as to what the significance of the notion of a “Silent Majority” is to today’s political reality. That, dear viewer, we leave up to you.
Penny Lane and Brian L. Frye are the directors of the upcoming film “Our Nixon.” Ms. Lane, a visiting professor at Bard College, has been awarded grants from Cinereach, the New York State Council on the Arts, Independent Filmmaker Project, the Experimental Television Center, LEF Foundation and the Puffin Foundation. Mr. Frye, a visiting assistant professor of law at Hofstra, has had work shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art and the New York Film Festival.
Sunday, November 06, 2011
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
An amazing read, folks.
Angela
WORLD FOOD ISSUES:PAST AND PRESENT
Jared Diamond on Agriculture
Opinion
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
By Jared Diamond University of California at Los Angeles Medical School
Discover Magazine, May 1987 Pages 64-66
Illustrations by Elliott Danfield
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of
1
progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We’re better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?
For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It’s a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it’s nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.
From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre
2
than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?
The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B- minor Mass.
While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it’s hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"
While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen’s average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It’s almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the
3
1840s.
So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren’t nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world’s worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don’t tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.
How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.
In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.
Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner’s sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers
4
toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9" for men, 5’ 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3" for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.
Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced bya bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don’t think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it’s become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."
There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied
5
diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (today just three high-carbohydrate plants–wheat, rice, and corn–provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn’t take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities.
Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter- gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the élite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a
6
fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an élite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter- gatherer counterparts–with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.
Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden.
In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.
As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post- agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
7
Thus with the advent of agriculture and élite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.
One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it’s because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it’s old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don’t have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.
As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It’s not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn’t want.
At this point it’s instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can
8
solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering façade, and that have so far eluded us?
9
Angela
WORLD FOOD ISSUES:PAST AND PRESENT
Jared Diamond on Agriculture
Opinion
The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race
By Jared Diamond University of California at Los Angeles Medical School
Discover Magazine, May 1987 Pages 64-66
Illustrations by Elliott Danfield
To science we owe dramatic changes in our smug self-image. Astronomy taught us that our earth isn’t the center of the universe but merely one of billions of heavenly bodies. From biology we learned that we weren’t specially created by God but evolved along with millions of other species. Now archaeology is demolishing another sacred belief: that human history over the past million years has been a long tale of
1
progress. In particular, recent discoveries suggest that the adoption of agriculture, supposedly our most decisive step toward a better life, was in many ways a catastrophe from which we have never recovered. With agriculture came the gross social and sexual inequality, the disease and despotism, that curse our existence.
At first, the evidence against this revisionist interpretation will strike twentieth century Americans as irrefutable. We’re better off in almost every respect than people of the Middle Ages, who in turn had it easier than cavemen, who in turn were better off than apes. Just count our advantages. We enjoy the most abundant and varied foods, the best tools and material goods, some of the longest and healthiest lives, in history. Most of us are safe from starvation and predators. We get our energy from oil and machines, not from our sweat. What neo-Luddite among us would trade his life for that of a medieval peasant, a caveman, or an ape?
For most of our history we supported ourselves by hunting and gathering: we hunted wild animals and foraged for wild plants. It’s a life that philosophers have traditionally regarded as nasty, brutish, and short. Since no food is grown and little is stored, there is (in this view) no respite from the struggle that starts anew each day to find wild foods and avoid starving. Our escape from this misery was facilitated only 10,000 years ago, when in different parts of the world people began to domesticate plants and animals. The agricultural revolution spread until today it’s nearly universal and few tribes of hunter-gatherers survive.
From the progressivist perspective on which I was brought up, to ask "Why did almost all our hunter-gatherer ancestors adopt agriculture?" is silly. Of course they adopted it because agriculture is an efficient way to get more food for less work. Planted crops yield far more tons per acre
2
than roots and berries. Just imagine a band of savages, exhausted from searching for nuts or chasing wild animals, suddenly grazing for the first time at a fruit-laden orchard or a pasture full of sheep. How many milliseconds do you think it would take them to appreciate the advantages of agriculture?
The progressivist party line sometimes even goes so far as to credit agriculture with the remarkable flowering of art that has taken place over the past few thousand years. Since crops can be stored, and since it takes less time to pick food from a garden than to find it in the wild, agriculture gave us free time that hunter-gatherers never had. Thus it was agriculture that enabled us to build the Parthenon and compose the B- minor Mass.
While the case for the progressivist view seems overwhelming, it’s hard to prove. How do you show that the lives of people 10,000 years ago got better when they abandoned hunting and gathering for farming? Until recently, archaeologists had to resort to indirect tests, whose results (surprisingly) failed to support the progressivist view. Here’s one example of an indirect test: Are twentieth century hunter-gatherers really worse off than farmers? Scattered throughout the world, several dozen groups of so-called primitive people, like the Kalahari bushmen, continue to support themselves that way. It turns out that these people have plenty of leisure time, sleep a good deal, and work less hard than their farming neighbors. For instance, the average time devoted each week to obtaining food is only 12 to 19 hours for one group of Bushmen, 14 hours or less for the Hadza nomads of Tanzania. One Bushman, when asked why he hadn’t emulated neighboring tribes by adopting agriculture, replied, "Why should we, when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?"
While farmers concentrate on high-carbohydrate crops like rice and potatoes, the mix of wild plants and animals in the diets of surviving hunter-gatherers provides more protein and a bettter balance of other nutrients. In one study, the Bushmen’s average daily food intake (during a month when food was plentiful) was 2,140 calories and 93 grams of protein, considerably greater than the recommended daily allowance for people of their size. It’s almost inconceivable that Bushmen, who eat 75 or so wild plants, could die of starvation the way hundreds of thousands of Irish farmers and their families did during the potato famine of the
3
1840s.
So the lives of at least the surviving hunter-gatherers aren’t nasty and brutish, even though farmes have pushed them into some of the world’s worst real estate. But modern hunter-gatherer societies that have rubbed shoulders with farming societies for thousands of years don’t tell us about conditions before the agricultural revolution. The progressivist view is really making a claim about the distant past: that the lives of primitive people improved when they switched from gathering to farming. Archaeologists can date that switch by distinguishing remains of wild plants and animals from those of domesticated ones in prehistoric garbage dumps.
How can one deduce the health of the prehistoric garbage makers, and thereby directly test the progressivist view? That question has become answerable only in recent years, in part through the newly emerging techniques of paleopathology, the study of signs of disease in the remains of ancient peoples.
In some lucky situations, the paleopathologist has almost as much material to study as a pathologist today. For example, archaeologists in the Chilean deserts found well preserved mummies whose medical conditions at time of death could be determined by autopsy (Discover, October). And feces of long-dead Indians who lived in dry caves in Nevada remain sufficiently well preserved to be examined for hookworm and other parasites.
Usually the only human remains available for study are skeletons, but they permit a surprising number of deductions. To begin with, a skeleton reveals its owner’s sex, weight, and approximate age. In the few cases where there are many skeletons, one can construct mortality tables like the ones life insurance companies use to calculate expected life span and risk of death at any given age. Paleopathologists can also calculate growth rates by measuring bones of people of different ages, examine teeth for enamel defects (signs of childhood malnutrition), and recognize scars left on bones by anemia, tuberculosis, leprosy, and other diseases.
One straight forward example of what paleopathologists have learned from skeletons concerns historical changes in height. Skeletons from Greece and Turkey show that the average height of hunger-gatherers
4
toward the end of the ice ages was a generous 5’ 9" for men, 5’ 5" for women. With the adoption of agriculture, height crashed, and by 3000 B. C. had reached a low of only 5’ 3" for men, 5’ for women. By classical times heights were very slowly on the rise again, but modern Greeks and Turks have still not regained the average height of their distant ancestors.
Another example of paleopathology at work is the study of Indian skeletons from burial mounds in the Illinois and Ohio river valleys. At Dickson Mounds, located near the confluence of the Spoon and Illinois rivers, archaeologists have excavated some 800 skeletons that paint a picture of the health changes that occurred when a hunter-gatherer culture gave way to intensive maize farming around A. D. 1150. Studies by George Armelagos and his colleagues then at the University of Massachusetts show these early farmers paid a price for their new-found livelihood. Compared to the hunter-gatherers who preceded them, the farmers had a nearly 50 per cent increase in enamel defects indicative of malnutrition, a fourfold increase in iron-deficiency anemia (evidenced bya bone condition called porotic hyperostosis), a theefold rise in bone lesions reflecting infectious disease in general, and an increase in degenerative conditions of the spine, probably reflecting a lot of hard physical labor. "Life expectancy at birth in the pre-agricultural community was bout twenty-six years," says Armelagos, "but in the post-agricultural community it was nineteen years. So these episodes of nutritional stress and infectious disease were seriously affecting their ability to survive."
The evidence suggests that the Indians at Dickson Mounds, like many other primitive peoples, took up farming not by choice but from necessity in order to feed their constantly growing numbers. "I don’t think most hunger-gatherers farmed until they had to, and when they switched to farming they traded quality for quantity," says Mark Cohen of the State University of New York at Plattsburgh, co-editor with Armelagos, of one of the seminal books in the field, Paleopathology at the Origins of Agriculture. "When I first started making that argument ten years ago, not many people agreed with me. Now it’s become a respectable, albeit controversial, side of the debate."
There are at least three sets of reasons to explain the findings that agriculture was bad for health. First, hunter-gatherers enjoyed a varied
5
diet, while early farmers obtained most of their food from one or a few starchy crops. The farmers gained cheap calories at the cost of poor nutrition. (today just three high-carbohydrate plants–wheat, rice, and corn–provide the bulk of the calories consumed by the human species, yet each one is deficient in certain vitamins or amino acids essential to life.) Second, because of dependence on a limited number of crops, farmers ran the risk of starvation if one crop failed. Finally, the mere fact that agriculture encouraged people to clump together in crowded societies, many of which then carried on trade with other crowded societies, led to the spread of parasites and infectious disease. (Some archaeologists think it was the crowding, rather than agriculture, that promoted disease, but this is a chicken-and-egg argument, because crowding encourages agriculture and vice versa.) Epidemics couldn’t take hold when populations were scattered in small bands that constantly shifted camp. Tuberculosis and diarrheal disease had to await the rise of farming, measles and bubonic plague the appearnce of large cities.
Besides malnutrition, starvation, and epidemic diseases, farming helped bring another curse upon humanity: deep class divisions. Hunter- gatherers have little or no stored food, and no concentrated food sources, like an orchard or a herd of cows: they live off the wild plants and animals they obtain each day. Therefore, there can be no kings, no class of social parasites who grow fat on food seized from others. Only in a farming population could a healthy, non-producing élite set itself above the disease-ridden masses. Skeletons from Greek tombs at Mycenae c. 1500 B. C. suggest that royals enjoyed a better diet than commoners, since the royal skeletons were two or three inches taller and had better teeth (on the average, one instead of six cavities or missing teeth). Among Chilean mummies from c. A. D. 1000, the élite were distinguished not only by ornaments and gold hair clips but also by a
6
fourfold lower rate of bone lesions caused by disease.
Similar contrasts in nutrition and health persist on a global scale today. To people in rich countries like the U. S., it sounds ridiculous to extol the virtues of hunting and gathering. But Americans are an élite, dependent on oil and minerals that must often be imported from countries with poorer health and nutrition. If one could choose between being a peasant farmer in Ethiopia or a bushman gatherer in the Kalahari, which do you think would be the better choice?
Farming may have encouraged inequality between the sexes, as well. Freed from the need to transport their babies during a nomadic existence, and under pressure to produce more hands to till the fields, farming women tended to have more frequent pregnancies than their hunter- gatherer counterparts–with consequent drains on their health. Among the Chilean mummies for example, more women than men had bone lesions from infectious disease.
Women in agricultural societies were sometimes made beasts of burden.
In New Guinea farming communities today I often see women staggering under loads of vegetables and firewood while the men walk empty-handed. Once while on a field trip there studying birds, I offered to pay some villagers to carry supplies from an airstrip to my mountain camp. The heaviest item was a 110-pound bag of rice, which I lashed to a pole and assigned to a team of four men to shoulder together. When I eventually caught up with the villagers, the men were carrying light loads, while one small woman weighing less than the bag of rice was bent under it, supporting its weight by a cord across her temples.
As for the claim that agriculture encouraged the flowering of art by providing us with leisure time, modern hunter-gatherers have at least as much free time as do farmers. The whole emphasis on leisure time as a critical factor seems to me misguided. Gorillas have had ample free time to build their own Parthenon, had they wanted to. While post- agricultural technological advances did make new art forms possible and preservation of art easier, great paintings and sculptures were already being produced by hunter-gatherers 15,000 years ago, and were still being produced as recently as the last century by such hunter-gatherers as some Eskimos and the Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
7
Thus with the advent of agriculture and élite became better off, but most people became worse off. Instead of swallowing the progressivist party line that we chose agriculture because it was good for us, we must ask how we got trapped by it despite its pitfalls.
One answer boils down to the adage "Might makes right." Farming could support many more people than hunting, albeit with a poorer quality of life. (Population densities of hunter-gatherers are rarely over on person per ten square miles, while farmers average 100 times that.) Partly, this is because a field planted entirely in edible crops lets one feed far more mouths than a forest with scattered edible plants. Partly, too, it’s because nomadic hunter-gatherers have to keep their children spaced at four-year intervals by infanticide and other means, since a mother must carry her toddler until it’s old enough to keep up with the adults. Because farm women don’t have that burden, they can and often do bear a child every two years.
As population densities of hunter-gatherers slowly rose at the end of the ice ages, bands had to choose between feeding more mouths by taking the first steps toward agriculture, or else finding ways to limit growth. Some bands chose the former solution, unable to anticipate the evils of farming, and seduced by the transient abundance they enjoyed until population growth caught up with increased food production. Such bands outbred and then drove off or killed the bands that chose to remain hunter-gatherers, because a hundred malnourished farmers can still outfight one healthy hunter. It’s not that hunter-gatherers abandoned their life style, but that those sensible enough not to abandon it were forced out of all areas except the ones farmers didn’t want.
At this point it’s instructive to recall the common complaint that archaeology is a luxury, concerned with the remote past, and offering no lessons for the present. Archaeologists studying the rise of farming have reconstructed a crucial stage at which we made the worst mistake in human history. Forced to choose between limiting population or trying to increase food production, we chose the latter and ended up with starvation, warfare, and tyranny.
Hunter-gatherers practiced the most successful and longest-lasting life style in human history. In contrast, we’re still struggling with the mess into which agriculture has tumbled us, and it’s unclear whether we can
8
solve it. Suppose that an archaeologist who had visited from outer space were trying to explain human history to his fellow spacelings. He might illustrate the results of his digs by a 24-hour clock on which one hour represents 100,000 years of real past time. If the history of the human race began at midnight, then we would now be almost at the end of our first day. We lived as hunter-gatherers for nearly the whole of that day, from midnight through dawn, noon, and sunset. Finally, at 11:54 p. m. we adopted agriculture. As our second midnight approaches, will the plight of famine-stricken peasants gradually spread to engulf us all? Or will we somehow achieve those seductive blessings that we imagine behind agriculture’s glittering façade, and that have so far eluded us?
9
Thursday, November 03, 2011
UT agreement lets MyEdu see students' education records
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz and Eric Dexheimer | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Thursday, Nov. 3, 2011
An agreement between the University of Texas System and MyEdu Corp. designates the Austin-based company as "a UT System official" with permission to see students' education records.
The agreement also lets the company display trademarks and logos of the system's 15 campuses on its website, which offers a free service that students can use to plan courses, track their progress toward a degree and rate professors.
Administrators at the Austin flagship and other campuses say implementing these and other details of the agreement is a work in progress.
The members of the UT System Board of Regents voted unanimously Aug. 25 to invest $10 million in privately held MyEdu and to sign on with it for customized website functions for each of the system's nine academic and six health campuses. The American-Statesman has reported on several unusual aspects of the partnership this week.
The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act allows colleges to release publicly so-called directory information about students, such as name, phone number and address. But individual student grades and schedules are considered private under the law.
Although he said he could not speak to the arrangement between the UT System and MyEdu specifically, Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education, said the law permitted schools to designate contractors to view and gather otherwise private student information.
"As 'school officials,' these outside parties may inspect and review students' education records and are under the same obligations to protect the information as internal school officials," Bradshaw said.
Steven McDonald, general counsel for the Rhode Island School of Design and an expert of the privacy act, said contractors given access to otherwise private student information must meet a series of legal tests, including being under the direct control of the school.
The contractors also must use the information only for matters pertaining to student education, he said.
UT System officials said student information will be protected with security safeguards, system oversight and campus-by-campus authority to decide what will be shared with MyEdu.
But officials at the system's campuses, who were not consulted in depth before the MyEdu deal was struck, said it was not yet clear exactly how all this will work.
"If we can make MyEdu a useful advising tool for faculty advisers, that could potentially be helpful to us," David Daniel , president of UT-Dallas, said Thursday. "However, we have to do that in a way that is FERPA-compliant. We do not yet know precisely how that will work."
A spokesman for the Austin flagship said no other contract or partnership is precisely comparable to the one involving MyEdu.
But, Gary Susswein said, "We believe the framework exists in this agreement for us to protect student privacy and safeguard our brand in a way that is consistent with our operations."
MyEdu did not respond to a request for clarification.
Barry Burgdorf, the UT System's vice chancellor and general counsel, said individual education records wouldn't be shared with MyEdu without a student's permission. Patti Ohlendorf, UT-Austin's vice president for legal affairs, said that was her understanding, as well.
"The application will not even access a particular student's information unless he or she signs up for the service," she said. "If a student wants to use the advising application and UT-Austin has decided to offer it, the student can sign on for the application and only then can it access that particular student's record."
S tudents around the country use tools on the company's website, myedu.com, to help them plan their schedules and then log on to official university sites to confirm class and scheduling information. Students and faculty members have occasionally complained that information on myedu.com has been inaccurate.
Regents and UT System officials said the partnership with MyEdu would ensure greater accuracy, and they predicted that the website could become a kind of one-stop shop for degree planning. But if campuses decide not to share some educational records with MyEdu, students might still have to check with their schools to ensure that their educational plans are on track.
Carisa Neitsche , president of UT-Austin's Senate of College Councils, the voice of students on academic affairs, said past surveys show students are concerned with protecting their privacy. Regarding the MyEdu deal, she said: "There are so many question marks at this point. None of us knows what this will look like."
John Davis Rutkauskas , the UT System's nonvoting student regent, said students at many of the campuses want expanded and enhanced advising services. "As an undergraduate student at UT-Austin and a user of MyEdu, I can personally attest that the service works and has enhanced my student experience," he said.
The system's partnership with MyEdu came together in an unusual fashion. Investments from the multibillion-dollar Permanent University Fund are normally made by money management firms chosen by an arm of the UT board, the University of Texas Investment Management Co.
The regents made a direct investment in this case, without competitive bidding, because they saw MyEdu as a unique and innovative tool to help students plan their educations and thereby improve graduation rates, system officials said.
The regents and other system officials did not disclose the fact — nor were they apparently aware in some cases — that William Cunningham, the system's chancellor from 1992 to 2000, is an investor in MyEdu and that his son is the company's senior vice president of information architecture and a co-founder. No law or rule required such disclosure.
System officials said this week that the son of Regent Wallace Hall held an unpaid internship at MyEdu from Aug. 1-12 and was invited to return this fall, also for no pay. That does not constitute a conflict requiring any action, Burgdorf said.
UT-Austin President William Powers Jr. said this week that the decision to partner with MyEdu "was a decision of the board not a decision of the campus."
He added that he would have had different priorities for the $10 million.
The system later issued a statement defending the investment: "This purchase was a literal 'gift' from the Board of Regents directly to the 211,000 students matriculating in the system's institutions. In time the board is hopeful that administrators, faculty and staff at our institutions will find the MyEdu software that is customized for their use to be very helpful and useful in improving advising and improving help to their students."
rhaurwitz@statesman.com; 445-3604
edexheimer@statesman.com; 445-1774
Thursday, Nov. 3, 2011
An agreement between the University of Texas System and MyEdu Corp. designates the Austin-based company as "a UT System official" with permission to see students' education records.
The agreement also lets the company display trademarks and logos of the system's 15 campuses on its website, which offers a free service that students can use to plan courses, track their progress toward a degree and rate professors.
Administrators at the Austin flagship and other campuses say implementing these and other details of the agreement is a work in progress.
The members of the UT System Board of Regents voted unanimously Aug. 25 to invest $10 million in privately held MyEdu and to sign on with it for customized website functions for each of the system's nine academic and six health campuses. The American-Statesman has reported on several unusual aspects of the partnership this week.
The federal Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act allows colleges to release publicly so-called directory information about students, such as name, phone number and address. But individual student grades and schedules are considered private under the law.
Although he said he could not speak to the arrangement between the UT System and MyEdu specifically, Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Education, said the law permitted schools to designate contractors to view and gather otherwise private student information.
"As 'school officials,' these outside parties may inspect and review students' education records and are under the same obligations to protect the information as internal school officials," Bradshaw said.
Steven McDonald, general counsel for the Rhode Island School of Design and an expert of the privacy act, said contractors given access to otherwise private student information must meet a series of legal tests, including being under the direct control of the school.
The contractors also must use the information only for matters pertaining to student education, he said.
UT System officials said student information will be protected with security safeguards, system oversight and campus-by-campus authority to decide what will be shared with MyEdu.
But officials at the system's campuses, who were not consulted in depth before the MyEdu deal was struck, said it was not yet clear exactly how all this will work.
"If we can make MyEdu a useful advising tool for faculty advisers, that could potentially be helpful to us," David Daniel , president of UT-Dallas, said Thursday. "However, we have to do that in a way that is FERPA-compliant. We do not yet know precisely how that will work."
A spokesman for the Austin flagship said no other contract or partnership is precisely comparable to the one involving MyEdu.
But, Gary Susswein said, "We believe the framework exists in this agreement for us to protect student privacy and safeguard our brand in a way that is consistent with our operations."
MyEdu did not respond to a request for clarification.
Barry Burgdorf, the UT System's vice chancellor and general counsel, said individual education records wouldn't be shared with MyEdu without a student's permission. Patti Ohlendorf, UT-Austin's vice president for legal affairs, said that was her understanding, as well.
"The application will not even access a particular student's information unless he or she signs up for the service," she said. "If a student wants to use the advising application and UT-Austin has decided to offer it, the student can sign on for the application and only then can it access that particular student's record."
S tudents around the country use tools on the company's website, myedu.com, to help them plan their schedules and then log on to official university sites to confirm class and scheduling information. Students and faculty members have occasionally complained that information on myedu.com has been inaccurate.
Regents and UT System officials said the partnership with MyEdu would ensure greater accuracy, and they predicted that the website could become a kind of one-stop shop for degree planning. But if campuses decide not to share some educational records with MyEdu, students might still have to check with their schools to ensure that their educational plans are on track.
Carisa Neitsche , president of UT-Austin's Senate of College Councils, the voice of students on academic affairs, said past surveys show students are concerned with protecting their privacy. Regarding the MyEdu deal, she said: "There are so many question marks at this point. None of us knows what this will look like."
John Davis Rutkauskas , the UT System's nonvoting student regent, said students at many of the campuses want expanded and enhanced advising services. "As an undergraduate student at UT-Austin and a user of MyEdu, I can personally attest that the service works and has enhanced my student experience," he said.
The system's partnership with MyEdu came together in an unusual fashion. Investments from the multibillion-dollar Permanent University Fund are normally made by money management firms chosen by an arm of the UT board, the University of Texas Investment Management Co.
The regents made a direct investment in this case, without competitive bidding, because they saw MyEdu as a unique and innovative tool to help students plan their educations and thereby improve graduation rates, system officials said.
The regents and other system officials did not disclose the fact — nor were they apparently aware in some cases — that William Cunningham, the system's chancellor from 1992 to 2000, is an investor in MyEdu and that his son is the company's senior vice president of information architecture and a co-founder. No law or rule required such disclosure.
System officials said this week that the son of Regent Wallace Hall held an unpaid internship at MyEdu from Aug. 1-12 and was invited to return this fall, also for no pay. That does not constitute a conflict requiring any action, Burgdorf said.
UT-Austin President William Powers Jr. said this week that the decision to partner with MyEdu "was a decision of the board not a decision of the campus."
He added that he would have had different priorities for the $10 million.
The system later issued a statement defending the investment: "This purchase was a literal 'gift' from the Board of Regents directly to the 211,000 students matriculating in the system's institutions. In time the board is hopeful that administrators, faculty and staff at our institutions will find the MyEdu software that is customized for their use to be very helpful and useful in improving advising and improving help to their students."
rhaurwitz@statesman.com; 445-3604
edexheimer@statesman.com; 445-1774
Wednesday, November 02, 2011
Community Action Councils present their vision of local schools
Nice writeup on the efforts that the Puerto Rican Cultural Center (PRCC) and others to help make Chicago schools better.
-Patricia
By: Sarah Karp / October 17, 2011
Tags: community involvement neighborhood schools school closings
Imagine this: A community that is viewed as an expansive campus, home to elementary schools that specialize in all sorts of things from Montessori to math and science to language. Parents don't have to apply and pray to win the lottery, but are guaranteed a seat for their child if they live in the neighborhood.
The high school would build on the specialties taught in the elementary schools, to draw in students from the community rather than having them travel far and wide.
This is the vision of the Community Action Council of Humboldt Park, one of four groups that have met for a year to come up with a comprehensive plan for what schools in their neighborhood should look like. Another council, in Bronzeville, has a similar vision. The four councils wrapped up presentations to CPS senior staff members last week.
When they came together last year, during the tenure of former CEO Ron Huberman, the councils were a novel idea. After years of experiencing school closings, consolidations, turnovers and takeovers handed down from above by CPS, a council would come together and create a vision for local schools.
In addition to parents and community advocates, aldermen and other elected officials would serve on the councils to give them some political leverage.
The plans are as different as the communities. Humboldt Park outlined a strategy to meld neighborhood schools and school choice. Englewood focused on creating more structures in schools to beef up parent involvement.
Yet all the groups want more high-quality preschools, and for schools to build on what students are learning as they transition from early childhood programs to elementary school to high school.
No mention of closing, consolidations
None of the plans, however, specify which schools the councils believe should be closed or consolidated, even though the communities--Englewood, Grand Boulevard, Humboldt Park and Austin--have many under-utilized schools.
The fact that the plans don’t include any recommendations for such action underscores how painful and controversial such decisions are, even when schools are virtually empty and low-achieving.
CEO Jean-Claude Brizard has said he will close and consolidate some schools this year; he’s also told the groups he will let them know what he’s thinking.
“I am proud to say that Brizard promised not to make any decisions without talking to us first,” says Chris Harris, pastor of the Bright Star Church of God and the chairman of the Bronzeville council. But Harris notes that hearing what the community has to say is not the same as listening to it.
Puerto Rican Cultural Center Executive Director Jose Lopez says the Humboldt Park council understands that some schools have to be closed, but that, rather than letting those schools sit vacant, they would like them to be used constructively for programs like job training or parent institutes.
He emphasized that the Humboldt Park council was more interested in talking about stopping the brain drain from their communities than about closing schools.
While some CPS officials might have liked for the councils to make specific recommendations about closings and other actions, council members say they wanted to offer up something more visionary.
“We didn’t want something piecemeal,” Harris says.
Serving students in their community
Because it comes out of the community, Lopez says, it incorporates ideas that outsiders often miss. “How do we harness the social capital of our community and bring it to bear on our schools?” he says. “This is the most comprehensive rethinking of schools that has happened.”
Lopez says the Humboldt Park council wants the schools in the community to be able to serve students seamlessly, from preschool through college. Julio Urrutia, deputy director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, says that the council wants Clemente to be the anchor of the community and to offer dual-credit programs with colleges, such as Northeastern University.
Making the neighborhood schools, such as Clemente High, more attractive is the critical factor in stemming enrollment loss. Clemente is down more than 1,000 students since 2006.
"We talked about why are we losing kids at that level?" Urrutia said."Where are we failing?"
The plans don’t ask for, or speak against, charter schools, though CPS leaders who are supportive of charters might have been hoping the groups would get behind the idea.
Harris says the Bronzeville council supports any school that educates children well, but wants resources poured into neighborhood schools. He notes that there’s little evidence that charter schools are, on the whole, better than neighborhood schools, yet he understands why some parents choose them.
He points to Woodson South, where he is on the local school council. On one side of the building is a University of Chicago charter school, with smart-boards and new books and parents who can bring their children to school in a Mercedes-Benz, he says.
Charter schools and selective enrollment schools, such as King High School, can frustrate parents because students are chosen for them, creating a situation where students are forced to walk past good schools to go to worse ones.
“At the end of the day, do not put a school in my community and tell me my kid can’t go,” Harris says.
Potential impact
It’s anyone’s guess what the district’s leadership will do with these plans. Since the groups began meeting, Huberman left, Interim CEO Terry Mazany came and went, and new CEO Brizard has taken over. Robert Runcie, the former chief administrative officer who spearheaded the process, has also left CPS.
Brizard’s administration is still digesting the plans and is not ready to comment on them, according to a spokesperson.
But there are signs that the process could have at least some impact.
While Brizard is not beholden to the councils, he and his senior staff did take time to meet with them and listen to their presentations. And amid hundreds of layoffs in central office, the former principal who has overseen the council process, Bill Gerstein, remains on board.
Other communities, such as Roseland, are starting to meet to come up with plans as well.
Public pressure, too, could put pressure on the district to listen. In Humboldt Park, the plan was unveiled and approved at a community summit meeting attended by 300 people.
Harris says the Bronzeville council also worked with the chief of schools, Sean Stalling, who oversees area high schools, and Shawn Smith, who oversees area elementary schools.
The Humboldt Park council also included ideas about how to lengthen the school day, which is at the top of Brizard's agenda. Rather than add many more minutes to subjects such as math and reading, the Humboldt Park council would like to see community groups and neighborhood institutions such as the fire department work with teachers to integrate some real-life, hands on lessons.
“Why would we do the same things, and students are [already] bored to death?” Lopez said.
-Patricia
By: Sarah Karp / October 17, 2011
Tags: community involvement neighborhood schools school closings
Imagine this: A community that is viewed as an expansive campus, home to elementary schools that specialize in all sorts of things from Montessori to math and science to language. Parents don't have to apply and pray to win the lottery, but are guaranteed a seat for their child if they live in the neighborhood.
The high school would build on the specialties taught in the elementary schools, to draw in students from the community rather than having them travel far and wide.
This is the vision of the Community Action Council of Humboldt Park, one of four groups that have met for a year to come up with a comprehensive plan for what schools in their neighborhood should look like. Another council, in Bronzeville, has a similar vision. The four councils wrapped up presentations to CPS senior staff members last week.
When they came together last year, during the tenure of former CEO Ron Huberman, the councils were a novel idea. After years of experiencing school closings, consolidations, turnovers and takeovers handed down from above by CPS, a council would come together and create a vision for local schools.
In addition to parents and community advocates, aldermen and other elected officials would serve on the councils to give them some political leverage.
The plans are as different as the communities. Humboldt Park outlined a strategy to meld neighborhood schools and school choice. Englewood focused on creating more structures in schools to beef up parent involvement.
Yet all the groups want more high-quality preschools, and for schools to build on what students are learning as they transition from early childhood programs to elementary school to high school.
No mention of closing, consolidations
None of the plans, however, specify which schools the councils believe should be closed or consolidated, even though the communities--Englewood, Grand Boulevard, Humboldt Park and Austin--have many under-utilized schools.
The fact that the plans don’t include any recommendations for such action underscores how painful and controversial such decisions are, even when schools are virtually empty and low-achieving.
CEO Jean-Claude Brizard has said he will close and consolidate some schools this year; he’s also told the groups he will let them know what he’s thinking.
“I am proud to say that Brizard promised not to make any decisions without talking to us first,” says Chris Harris, pastor of the Bright Star Church of God and the chairman of the Bronzeville council. But Harris notes that hearing what the community has to say is not the same as listening to it.
Puerto Rican Cultural Center Executive Director Jose Lopez says the Humboldt Park council understands that some schools have to be closed, but that, rather than letting those schools sit vacant, they would like them to be used constructively for programs like job training or parent institutes.
He emphasized that the Humboldt Park council was more interested in talking about stopping the brain drain from their communities than about closing schools.
While some CPS officials might have liked for the councils to make specific recommendations about closings and other actions, council members say they wanted to offer up something more visionary.
“We didn’t want something piecemeal,” Harris says.
Serving students in their community
Because it comes out of the community, Lopez says, it incorporates ideas that outsiders often miss. “How do we harness the social capital of our community and bring it to bear on our schools?” he says. “This is the most comprehensive rethinking of schools that has happened.”
Lopez says the Humboldt Park council wants the schools in the community to be able to serve students seamlessly, from preschool through college. Julio Urrutia, deputy director of the Puerto Rican Cultural Center, says that the council wants Clemente to be the anchor of the community and to offer dual-credit programs with colleges, such as Northeastern University.
Making the neighborhood schools, such as Clemente High, more attractive is the critical factor in stemming enrollment loss. Clemente is down more than 1,000 students since 2006.
"We talked about why are we losing kids at that level?" Urrutia said."Where are we failing?"
The plans don’t ask for, or speak against, charter schools, though CPS leaders who are supportive of charters might have been hoping the groups would get behind the idea.
Harris says the Bronzeville council supports any school that educates children well, but wants resources poured into neighborhood schools. He notes that there’s little evidence that charter schools are, on the whole, better than neighborhood schools, yet he understands why some parents choose them.
He points to Woodson South, where he is on the local school council. On one side of the building is a University of Chicago charter school, with smart-boards and new books and parents who can bring their children to school in a Mercedes-Benz, he says.
Charter schools and selective enrollment schools, such as King High School, can frustrate parents because students are chosen for them, creating a situation where students are forced to walk past good schools to go to worse ones.
“At the end of the day, do not put a school in my community and tell me my kid can’t go,” Harris says.
Potential impact
It’s anyone’s guess what the district’s leadership will do with these plans. Since the groups began meeting, Huberman left, Interim CEO Terry Mazany came and went, and new CEO Brizard has taken over. Robert Runcie, the former chief administrative officer who spearheaded the process, has also left CPS.
Brizard’s administration is still digesting the plans and is not ready to comment on them, according to a spokesperson.
But there are signs that the process could have at least some impact.
While Brizard is not beholden to the councils, he and his senior staff did take time to meet with them and listen to their presentations. And amid hundreds of layoffs in central office, the former principal who has overseen the council process, Bill Gerstein, remains on board.
Other communities, such as Roseland, are starting to meet to come up with plans as well.
Public pressure, too, could put pressure on the district to listen. In Humboldt Park, the plan was unveiled and approved at a community summit meeting attended by 300 people.
Harris says the Bronzeville council also worked with the chief of schools, Sean Stalling, who oversees area high schools, and Shawn Smith, who oversees area elementary schools.
The Humboldt Park council also included ideas about how to lengthen the school day, which is at the top of Brizard's agenda. Rather than add many more minutes to subjects such as math and reading, the Humboldt Park council would like to see community groups and neighborhood institutions such as the fire department work with teachers to integrate some real-life, hands on lessons.
“Why would we do the same things, and students are [already] bored to death?” Lopez said.
Keller high school's mistake forces students to change courses mid-semester
By Sandra Engelland | Star Telegram
Monday, Oct. 24, 2011
FORT WORTH -- Because of an error by the counseling department, close to 100 of the almost 600 seniors at Keller Central High School found out last week that they have to transfer into a physics class mid-semester to fulfill graduation requirements for the state's recommended high school program.
To help the students catch up, teachers will review the material they covered in the first eight weeks as they continue with the curriculum, district officials said.
"I've told our staff to understand kids being upset and to please be supportive and help keep them on track," Principal David Hinson said.
The class of 2012 is the first to have no exceptions to the state's "four-by-four" plan, the measure that added math and science credits to the courses needed to graduate.
"All of these students are still on track to graduate," Hinson said.
The mistake came in a counselor's misinterpretation of the transition to the four-by-four requirements, Hinson said. This is the first year that students must take physics to receive the recommended diploma required by Texas four-year universities. The state has also been phasing out allowing students to take integrated physics and chemistry for the recommended and distinguished diplomas.
Hinson said the error should have been caught in July when the counseling department reviewed schedules, but school officials discovered the problem just last week. Counselors met with all affected students individually and called parents during the meetings. All the seniors were in other science classes, most of them in environmental science.
Some who are not planning to go to a four-year university next fall opted to graduate on the state's minimum plan, he said.
For students who wanted to remain on the recommended plan, school officials changed an environmental science class into a physics course because the teacher had taught physics last year, he said. Students in that class who did not need physics transferred to other environmental science classes.
Students transferring into physics would not need to make up missed assignments and would start with whatever grade they had in their previous science class, Hinson said.
Affected students and parents could not be reached for comment.
This was not the first reported counseling mistake that has affected students in the Keller district this year.
Tais Navarro said her son, a senior, had to take an additional science class this year after learning that integrated physics and chemistry, which he took as a freshman, would not count on his graduation plan. He was already taking physics, but now is in biology as well.
Monday, Oct. 24, 2011
FORT WORTH -- Because of an error by the counseling department, close to 100 of the almost 600 seniors at Keller Central High School found out last week that they have to transfer into a physics class mid-semester to fulfill graduation requirements for the state's recommended high school program.
To help the students catch up, teachers will review the material they covered in the first eight weeks as they continue with the curriculum, district officials said.
"I've told our staff to understand kids being upset and to please be supportive and help keep them on track," Principal David Hinson said.
The class of 2012 is the first to have no exceptions to the state's "four-by-four" plan, the measure that added math and science credits to the courses needed to graduate.
"All of these students are still on track to graduate," Hinson said.
The mistake came in a counselor's misinterpretation of the transition to the four-by-four requirements, Hinson said. This is the first year that students must take physics to receive the recommended diploma required by Texas four-year universities. The state has also been phasing out allowing students to take integrated physics and chemistry for the recommended and distinguished diplomas.
Hinson said the error should have been caught in July when the counseling department reviewed schedules, but school officials discovered the problem just last week. Counselors met with all affected students individually and called parents during the meetings. All the seniors were in other science classes, most of them in environmental science.
Some who are not planning to go to a four-year university next fall opted to graduate on the state's minimum plan, he said.
For students who wanted to remain on the recommended plan, school officials changed an environmental science class into a physics course because the teacher had taught physics last year, he said. Students in that class who did not need physics transferred to other environmental science classes.
Students transferring into physics would not need to make up missed assignments and would start with whatever grade they had in their previous science class, Hinson said.
Affected students and parents could not be reached for comment.
This was not the first reported counseling mistake that has affected students in the Keller district this year.
Tais Navarro said her son, a senior, had to take an additional science class this year after learning that integrated physics and chemistry, which he took as a freshman, would not count on his graduation plan. He was already taking physics, but now is in biology as well.
Fair Funding Now School Finance Campaign
Communities and schools must work together to strengthen their capacity so that schools work for all children. Courageous Connections highlights events, resources, initiatives and projects that show how communities and schools are able to spark and sustain changes.
In the spring of 2011, the Texas legislature cut education funding the first time in over four decades. And given the chance to end funding disparities, they walked away – pushing millions of Texas children aside.
But communities across the state are taking action to make sure that schools are equipped to guarantee that all children graduate ready for college and career.
Fair Funding Now! is an initiative of IDRA. We are holding a series of roundtables this fall in collaboration with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Mexican American School Board Members Association (MASBA) and Texas Center for Educational Policy (TCEP).
On this website, we will share resources and stories stemming from the initiative.
Interactive Online and Social Media Tools
Share your story: How are funding cuts affecting your school?
A collaborative, crowdsourced mapping project – Your stories (reports) and comments can be posted to the map in several ways:
Web - on the web, visit: http://schoolfunding.crowdmap.com/
Email - By sending an email to fairfundingnow@gmail.com
Twitter - By sending a tweet with the hashtag #TXequity Phone App - By phone app: download Ushahidi Maps “app” on your smartphone, then look for Texas School Funding Map and post your story.
Visit IDRA’s OurSchool portal to see funding information and compare school districts.
In the spring of 2011, the Texas legislature cut education funding the first time in over four decades. And given the chance to end funding disparities, they walked away – pushing millions of Texas children aside.
But communities across the state are taking action to make sure that schools are equipped to guarantee that all children graduate ready for college and career.
Fair Funding Now! is an initiative of IDRA. We are holding a series of roundtables this fall in collaboration with the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Mexican American School Board Members Association (MASBA) and Texas Center for Educational Policy (TCEP).
On this website, we will share resources and stories stemming from the initiative.
Interactive Online and Social Media Tools
Share your story: How are funding cuts affecting your school?
A collaborative, crowdsourced mapping project – Your stories (reports) and comments can be posted to the map in several ways:
Web - on the web, visit: http://schoolfunding.crowdmap.com/
Email - By sending an email to fairfundingnow@gmail.com
Twitter - By sending a tweet with the hashtag #TXequity Phone App - By phone app: download Ushahidi Maps “app” on your smartphone, then look for Texas School Funding Map and post your story.
Visit IDRA’s OurSchool portal to see funding information and compare school districts.
Tuesday, November 01, 2011
IDRA Visits Valley to Explain School Finance Litigation
Great piece on the Fair Funding Now Campaign Roundtables. Dr. Albert Cortez has been a leader in school finance since the early 1980s.
Please check out the website for more information on this effort as well as the amazing tools that allow you to weigh in on how the budget cuts are impacting your district and public schools.
-Patricia
Albert Cortez, of the Intercultural Development Research Association, speaks at a roundtable in Alamo on Saturday. (Photo: RGG/Steve Taylor)
By Steve Taylor | Rio Grande Guardian
ALAMO, Oct. 29 - The Intercultural Development Research Association held a roundtable on school funding equity in Texas at La Quinta Inn in Alamo on Saturday.
Among those in attendance were representatives from La Unión del Pueblo Entero, Project ARISE, Proyecto Azteca, Equal Voice for America’s Families, LULAC, the University of Texas-Pan American, and Pharr-San Juan-Alamo ISD.
Albert Cortez, director of policy for IDRA, explained how litigation was proceeding to improve equity in public school finance. This litigation is necessary, Cortez said, because some school districts are getting $1,000 less per pupil. “About half the school districts in the state are going to be suing the State over the funding system,” Cortez explained, during a power point presentation.
There are roughly 1,100 school districts in Texas. About 500 different districts are being represented in the litigation by four different groups. The two groups providing most assistance to Rio Grande Valley school districts, Cortez said, are the Equity Center and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Both of these are concerned about equity, with the Equity Center, for the purposes of the litigation, setting up a group known as the Texas Taxpayer and Student Fairness Coalition. This coalition has about 300 districts signed up, including PSJA ISD and Rio Hondo ISD. PSJA Superintendent Danny King was present at the roundtable.
Cortez said MALDEF is a key player because of its history in fighting for school finance equity. He pointed out the group took the lead in the famous Edgewood case of 1973, known as Rodriguez v. San Antonio ISD. Cortez said MALDEF would be looking for a smaller subset of school districts, parents and students to help its cause when the case goes to court. He said he expects MALDEF’s petition to be filed early next month.
In addition to the Equity Center and MALDEF, there will be two other groups involved in the litigation with different interests, Cortez said. The rich school districts will be trying to get authority from the Texas Supreme Court to expand the funding gap between rich and poor districts. Meanwhile, the large, urban, districts will be fighting over adequacy, not equity, Cortez said, by making the point that the State of Texas does not provide enough funding.
Cortez said the litigation approach of Equity Center and MALDEF is compatible. “We think the data is on our side,” he explained. “In Edgewood I the state said if a district makes the same tax effort as another district, they should get the same amount of money. The Supreme Court upheld that principle. Under the current system there is no connection between the tax effort PSJA makes and how much money it gets. It can make the same tax effort as a rich district, or greater, and get $1,000 less per pupil.”
Cortez pointed out that after the last round of litigation against the State of Texas, known as the Orange Grove case of 2006, school districts had to be allowed some ability to raise extra funding to supplement local programs. Back then, about 100 districts were “maxed out” at the $1.17 per $100 property valuation. Now the number is more than 200, Cortez said. “Even if they want to raise more money they are locked in. They cannot do any better than they are doing,” he said. So, in effect, an unconstitutional statewide property tax was now in place, Cortez said.
Cortez said he expects the school finance trial to take place late summer or early fall, 2012. A ruling may not come until the following spring, right in the middle of the 2013 legislative session. He concluded his remarks by saying that once the school funding system is ruled unconstitutional, the voices of Rio Grande Valley communities will need to be raised in order to get state lawmakers to fix the equity gap and provide adequate resources for school districts.
In an interview with the Guardian after his presentation Cortez said the impact of some school districts getting $1,000 per student less was enormous. “We have done the math and you are talking about over half a million dollars in a campus of 20 classrooms,” Cortez said. “That creates tremendous differences in what school districts can provide to their children. We have never believed the quality of a child’s education should depend on what neighborhood they live in. We have a situation where there is a subgroup of districts that have a tremendous advantage.”
Cortez said that during the last legislative session, IDRA was trying to get school funding distributed a little fairer, so the students who were getting significantly less would get the programs and support they needed. “There was a great reluctance to share the wealth,” he said.
Asked how much the Valley lost because of school funding cuts last session, Cortez said it was in the region of $134 to $150 million. He said the Valley has about half a million students in public education, which is about ten percent of the total in Texas. “The half a million in the Valley has a tremendous impact for the State. If we talk about economic development for the Valley, how can you have your dreams of economic development when you are not providing those communities with the resources they need to produce the workforce?” he said.
Cortez said that in a way the Valley represents the canary in the mine. “So the Valley goes, so goes Texas. The Valley looks like what the rest of Texas will look like. State leaders need to realize that this is a vital part of Texas. You are one of the lynchpins. If we do not do well by the Valley we do not do well by Texas. The leadership does not make the connection we are all inter-connected. If we do not educate our children in the south of Texas, the whole state changes, because of mobility,” Cortez said.
Aurelio Montemayor, senior education associate for IDRA, said he hoped his group’s extensive research would be used by school districts in the Valley to help mobilize support for a more equitable school finance system. “Use the hell out of all these materials. Have the superintendents come together and say, look how you got hit,” he said.
Please check out the website for more information on this effort as well as the amazing tools that allow you to weigh in on how the budget cuts are impacting your district and public schools.
-Patricia
Albert Cortez, of the Intercultural Development Research Association, speaks at a roundtable in Alamo on Saturday. (Photo: RGG/Steve Taylor)
By Steve Taylor | Rio Grande Guardian
ALAMO, Oct. 29 - The Intercultural Development Research Association held a roundtable on school funding equity in Texas at La Quinta Inn in Alamo on Saturday.
Among those in attendance were representatives from La Unión del Pueblo Entero, Project ARISE, Proyecto Azteca, Equal Voice for America’s Families, LULAC, the University of Texas-Pan American, and Pharr-San Juan-Alamo ISD.
Albert Cortez, director of policy for IDRA, explained how litigation was proceeding to improve equity in public school finance. This litigation is necessary, Cortez said, because some school districts are getting $1,000 less per pupil. “About half the school districts in the state are going to be suing the State over the funding system,” Cortez explained, during a power point presentation.
There are roughly 1,100 school districts in Texas. About 500 different districts are being represented in the litigation by four different groups. The two groups providing most assistance to Rio Grande Valley school districts, Cortez said, are the Equity Center and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. Both of these are concerned about equity, with the Equity Center, for the purposes of the litigation, setting up a group known as the Texas Taxpayer and Student Fairness Coalition. This coalition has about 300 districts signed up, including PSJA ISD and Rio Hondo ISD. PSJA Superintendent Danny King was present at the roundtable.
Cortez said MALDEF is a key player because of its history in fighting for school finance equity. He pointed out the group took the lead in the famous Edgewood case of 1973, known as Rodriguez v. San Antonio ISD. Cortez said MALDEF would be looking for a smaller subset of school districts, parents and students to help its cause when the case goes to court. He said he expects MALDEF’s petition to be filed early next month.
In addition to the Equity Center and MALDEF, there will be two other groups involved in the litigation with different interests, Cortez said. The rich school districts will be trying to get authority from the Texas Supreme Court to expand the funding gap between rich and poor districts. Meanwhile, the large, urban, districts will be fighting over adequacy, not equity, Cortez said, by making the point that the State of Texas does not provide enough funding.
Cortez said the litigation approach of Equity Center and MALDEF is compatible. “We think the data is on our side,” he explained. “In Edgewood I the state said if a district makes the same tax effort as another district, they should get the same amount of money. The Supreme Court upheld that principle. Under the current system there is no connection between the tax effort PSJA makes and how much money it gets. It can make the same tax effort as a rich district, or greater, and get $1,000 less per pupil.”
Cortez pointed out that after the last round of litigation against the State of Texas, known as the Orange Grove case of 2006, school districts had to be allowed some ability to raise extra funding to supplement local programs. Back then, about 100 districts were “maxed out” at the $1.17 per $100 property valuation. Now the number is more than 200, Cortez said. “Even if they want to raise more money they are locked in. They cannot do any better than they are doing,” he said. So, in effect, an unconstitutional statewide property tax was now in place, Cortez said.
Cortez said he expects the school finance trial to take place late summer or early fall, 2012. A ruling may not come until the following spring, right in the middle of the 2013 legislative session. He concluded his remarks by saying that once the school funding system is ruled unconstitutional, the voices of Rio Grande Valley communities will need to be raised in order to get state lawmakers to fix the equity gap and provide adequate resources for school districts.
In an interview with the Guardian after his presentation Cortez said the impact of some school districts getting $1,000 per student less was enormous. “We have done the math and you are talking about over half a million dollars in a campus of 20 classrooms,” Cortez said. “That creates tremendous differences in what school districts can provide to their children. We have never believed the quality of a child’s education should depend on what neighborhood they live in. We have a situation where there is a subgroup of districts that have a tremendous advantage.”
Cortez said that during the last legislative session, IDRA was trying to get school funding distributed a little fairer, so the students who were getting significantly less would get the programs and support they needed. “There was a great reluctance to share the wealth,” he said.
Asked how much the Valley lost because of school funding cuts last session, Cortez said it was in the region of $134 to $150 million. He said the Valley has about half a million students in public education, which is about ten percent of the total in Texas. “The half a million in the Valley has a tremendous impact for the State. If we talk about economic development for the Valley, how can you have your dreams of economic development when you are not providing those communities with the resources they need to produce the workforce?” he said.
Cortez said that in a way the Valley represents the canary in the mine. “So the Valley goes, so goes Texas. The Valley looks like what the rest of Texas will look like. State leaders need to realize that this is a vital part of Texas. You are one of the lynchpins. If we do not do well by the Valley we do not do well by Texas. The leadership does not make the connection we are all inter-connected. If we do not educate our children in the south of Texas, the whole state changes, because of mobility,” Cortez said.
Aurelio Montemayor, senior education associate for IDRA, said he hoped his group’s extensive research would be used by school districts in the Valley to help mobilize support for a more equitable school finance system. “Use the hell out of all these materials. Have the superintendents come together and say, look how you got hit,” he said.
Texas Board Requires the Phasing Out of 64 Degree Programs With Low Enrollments
Harold W. Hahn (left) and Fred W. Heldenfels IV were among the members of the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board who determined which "underperforming" degree programs to cut. They are shown at Thursday's hearing, where college officials sought reprieves for some programs.
By Katherine Mangan | Chronicle of Higher Education
Austin, Tex.
The Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board voted Thursday to phase out 64 degree programs that failed to attract enough majors under stricter enrollment guidelines the board enacted last year.
Another 145 programs the board deemed underperforming are also being voluntarily cut.
The board's decisions came program by program over four hours in which a parade of higher-education leaders pleaded with the board to spare their programs.
Board members say the cuts will allow the state to use its resources more efficiently, while critics counter that the board's actions will disproportionately hurt predominantly minority colleges and programs in mathematics and science.
Thirteen of the state's 25 undergraduate physics degree programs, for instance, were judged "underperforming." The board voted to phase out or consolidate six of them.
In all, the board identified 545 programs statewide that were underenrolled according to its new, more-stringent standards. For a bachelor's or associate degree, a program is defined as being underenrolled if it produced fewer than five majors per year, averaged over five years. The threshold for a master's degree is three per year, and for a doctorate, it's two per year.
Eliminating low-producing majors won't prevent a college from offering courses in that subject, board officials said.
"We're not losing anything. We're telling institutions, Either make all of your programs robust and successful, or concentrate on the things you do well," the state's higher-education commissioner, Raymund A. Paredes, told reporters during a conference call before the meeting. He was asked whether the move was related to calls from some regents and allies of Gov. Rick Perry, a Republican, for greater productivity in higher education.
"This process of accountability is something we're going to see more of," Mr. Paredes said. "We want to be able to report to Texas taxpayers how their money is being used."
Appeals for 'Core' Programs
Texas Southern University, a historically black institution, appealed the proposed elimination of five majors, in chemistry, math, physics, English, and art. (During Thursday's board meeting, the physics and math appeals were denied, and English and chemistry were given a two-year reprieve.)
Another historically black institution, Prairie View A&M University, appealed cuts in physics and chemistry. (The physics appeal was denied and chemistry was given a two-year extension). "The courses offered in the programs targeted for deletion are core components for engineering, nursing, and biology," the university's provost, E. Joahanne Thomas-Smith said in an e-mail to The Chronicle.
After being notified that they had programs that were underenrolled, Texas colleges agreed to cut 145 of those majors. The coordinating board, after an initial appeals process, then decided that colleges should be forced to phase out 95 more programs. For the rest of the programs that were deemed underenrolled, colleges were allowed to consolidate them with other departments or were given temporary reprieves while they try to increase their enrollments. Of the 95 programs that the board has recommended be forced to close, colleges made appeals to the full board to keep 44 programs.
The coordinating board has had the authority to cut low-performing majors since 1971, but this is the first time it has looked at every major at every state college and university and recommended widespread cuts.
Mr. Paredes denied criticisms that the cuts will undermine the STEM fields—science, technology, engineering, and math. Between the 2006 and 2010 fiscal years, the programs slated for closure graduated 1.7 percent of the state's physics majors and 0.7 percent of its STEM graduates, the coordinating board reports.
Recent research also shows, Mr. Paredes said, that paring down the number of majors students can choose from can help them focus and graduate faster. "Students have so many choices and majors they can get confused," he said.
Analysts with the Texas board said their thresholds for identifying "low-producing" degrees are more lenient than those of several other states that have been analyzing enrollment and completion numbers, including Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina.
In April, the State of Louisiana Board of Regents voted to eliminate 109 degree programs that had low rates of completion; for bachelor's degrees, that meant that fewer than eight people completed the program per year. The Louisiana board had deemed more than 400 degree programs to be "underperforming," many of which ended up being consolidated into other departments.
Affirmative-Action Critics See Texas Case as a Vehicle for a Supreme Court Victory
By Peter Schmidt | Chronicle of Higher Education
Washington
October 31, 2011
Leading critics of affirmative action say they are optimistic that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up a lawsuit challenging the race-conscious admissions policies of the University of Texas at Austin and hand down a ruling that curtails, or even ends, the use of such admissions preferences by colleges around the nation.
In briefs urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, the lawyers for two white students rejected by the university have been joined by several conservative advocacy groups and other foes of affirmative-action preferences in arguing that colleges have strayed far beyond the limits on such policies set forth by the Supreme Court when it weighed in on them in 2003, in two decisions involving the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
All of the briefs filed on behalf of the two students ask for the Supreme Court to overturn an appellate-court ruling that upheld the University of Texas's race-conscious admissions policies, and several argue that the case presents the high court with an opportunity to revisit its 2003 rulings and further restrict, or even eliminate, the use of affirmative-action preferences by colleges.
The University of Texas has remained silent, so far, on the question of whether the Supreme Court should take up the case, and no one has yet submitted any other briefs on its behalf to urge the justices to leave alone the lower court's ruling in its case.
The university's deadline for submitting a brief on its own was October 19, but the Supreme Court cannot decide to hear the case, Fisher v. the University of Texas at Austin, without offering the university an opportunity to argue against its doing so. If the Supreme Court asks the university to submit such a brief, those who support the university's policies will have another opportunity to submit friend-of-the-court briefs on its behalf.
Officials of the University of Texas and the state attorney general's office, which is helping to represent it in the case, declined last week to comment on their reason for not having already filed a brief urging the court not to take up matter.
Although several lawyers with expertise on the Supreme Court said the university's failure to volunteer such a brief on its own, without an invitation by justices, will not matter, Michael A. Carvin, a lawyer for Jones Day who has argued several cases before the high court, characterized the move as a "mind-boggling" strategic mistake.
"The only times you don't file a response are if they are low-visibility cases where there is no chance" the Supreme Court will decide to hear them, Mr. Carvin said. "Texas' decision not to file," he said, "is inexcusable and insulting to the court."
Among the lawyers for groups likely to file friend-of-the-court briefs on the university's behalf, Ada Meloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education, said her organization has been "waiting to see how this would play out."
Damon Todd Hewitt, who oversees litigation related to education for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said his organization is prepared to argue that the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions policies is "settled precedent" and there is "no need for further review by the Supreme Court."
Source of Division
If the Supreme Court does take up the case, a key question before it will be whether the University of Texas needs to have race-conscious admissions policies to achieve sufficiently diverse enrollments, or had taken in adequate numbers of students from various minority populations under a state law guaranteeing admission to any public university to students graduating from a Texas high school in the top 10th of their class.
Texas lawmakers adopted the admissions guarantee, widely known as the "top 10 percent plan," in 1997, in response to a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in a legal challenge to the use of race-conscious admissions by the University of Texas' law school.
The Fifth Circuit's decision in that case, Hopwood v. Texas, was interpreted as barring the state's colleges from considering applicants' race or ethnicity, but the law guaranteeing admission based on a high-school class rank helped black and Hispanic enrollments at the University of Texas rebound, reaching levels above what they had been before the Hopwood decision.
Federal appeals courts in other circuits around the nation upheld the consideration of race in admissions, however, and the legal landscape surrounding them changed significantly when the Supreme Court ruled on their constitutionality in two landmark 2003 decisions involving the University of Michigan, in the cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger.
In the Gratz case the Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 to strike down the admissions policy of the university's main undergraduate college, with the majority opinion holding that the university put too much emphasis on race in using a point-based admission system that automatically gave substantial bonuses to members of certain minority groups. In the Grutter case, however, the court voted 5 to 4 to uphold the race-conscious admission policy of the university's law school.
The Grutter majority's opinion strongly endorsed the idea that the law school had a compelling interest in using affirmative action to enroll "critical masses" of black, Hispanic, and American Indian students because of the educational benefits such diversity was said to provide.
It also concluded that the law school's policy was "narrowly tailored" to achieving such a goal because race and ethnicity were considered among several factors in the course of the law school's holistic evaluation of applicants. The Grutter majority's opinion cautioned, however, that colleges, before adopting such policies, should give "serious, good-faith consideration" to race-neutral alternatives.
Based on the Grutter ruling, the University of Texas returned to considering applicants' race and ethnicity in 2005. Lawyers for the Project on Fair Representation, an organization opposed to affirmative-action preferences, responded by mounting a legal challenge to the move on behalf of Abigail Fisher, a white applicant for undergraduate admission that the university had rejected.
A U.S. District Court judge tossed out the lawsuit in 2009, arguing that the university's policy was constitutional because it was narrowly tailored. Although a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit unanimously upheld that decision in January, one of the three judges, Emilio M. Garza, heavily criticized the Grutter opinion that had served as the basis of the panel's decision as a digression from Supreme Court precedents and as having little basis on concrete evidence of the educational benefits of such policies.
In voting 9 to 7 in June to deny a rehearing of the case by all of its members, the full Fifth Circuit was even more bitterly divided. Its chief judge, Edith H. Jones, was joined by four others in issuing a dissent that said the three-judge panel had actually strayed from the requirements of Grutter by showing too much deference to the views of college administrators, failing to consider the success of the state's "top 10 percent plan" as a race-neutral alternative, and accepting the university's argument that it needed race-conscious admissions to bring about diversity at a classroom—and not just institutional—level.
Judging Ripeness
Speaking strictly in terms of numbers, the odds of the U.S. Supreme Court hearing a case are tiny—it typically grants fewer than 1 out of 100 requests for it to take up legal disputes. But, in interviews last week, several legal scholars said the Supreme Court was much likelier to take up the University of Texas case than most.
Among the reasons they cited was that the composition of the court has changed significantly since the Grutter decision, with the justice who wrote for the Grutter majority, Sandra Day O'Connor, retiring and being replaced by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who appears to take a much dimmer view of affirmative-action preferences.
"Given how much the justices care about this issue, and given the perception of the conservative justices that they can at least cut back on Grutter if not overrule it with their new majority, I suspect they'll take it," says Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California at Irvine.
Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at New York University who helped represent the University of Texas in Hopwood, said the high profile of the latest case, along with the Fifth Circuit judges' deep division over it, "certainly increases the likelihood" the Supreme Court will take it up.
But Michael A. Olivas, a professor of law at the University of Houston who examines Supreme Court cases dealing with higher education in his forthcoming book Suing Alma Mater: Higher Education and the Courts, last week predicted that the Supreme Court will turn down the case as "not ripe," especially since federal circuit courts do not seem to be in disagreement over how to interpret the Grutter ruling.
"It does not present any fresh issue," he said. "My guess is that the court is tired of this."
If the Supreme Court does take up the case, Justice Elena Kagan may need to recuse herself if, in her former capacity as solicitor general, she played a role in the Obama administration's submission to the Fifth Circuit of a brief siding with the University of Texas. Although Justice Kagan is a member of the court's liberal wing, which is unlikely to have a majority with or without her, as a former dean of Harvard's law school, she could be a powerful voice arguing the perspective of such institutions.
Dire Warnings
In their brief asking the Supreme Court to take up the case, the lawyers for the white students who were rejected said the Fifth Circuit panel erred in relying too heavily on the university's "good faith" in accepting its assertions it had tailored its policies to be constitutional.
They also argue that the Fifth Circuit judges were mistaken in accepting the university's arguments that its admission policies needed to take into account the state's demographics and that it needed to have racial and ethnic diversity at the classroom level. Achieving classroom diversity, it argues, would require the university to make major changes in the curriculum, steer students into certain schools and majors, or make race such a dominant consideration in admissions that "a flood of minority students would solve the problem."
Six friend-of-the-court briefs urging the justices to take up the case have been filed on the plaintiffs' behalf.
Among them is a brief submitted by Richard H. Sander, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles who has published studies questioning whether race-conscious admission policies achieve their goals, and Stuart Taylor Jr., a lawyer and journalist.
It argues that "a growing volume" of research suggests that racial preferences in higher education undermine minority achievement. Such students are often ill-prepared for the demands placed on them and respond by segregating themselves into easier majors, they say, which calls into question the argument that affirmative-action preferences can produce classroom diversity.
They also argue that elite colleges' failure to do more to bring about socioeconomic diversity—which would help increase racial and ethnic diversity as a side effect—calls into question the institutions' assertions that their race-conscious admission policies are narrowly tailored.
Among the other friend-of-the-court briefs submitted, one from several organizations that have played a prominent role in fighting race-conscious admission policies, including the American Civil Rights Institute and the Center for Equal Opportunity, says the court should take up the case "because universities nationwide have used Grutter as a blueprint for employing racial criteria in university admission policies, instead of treating it as a warning to scale back reliance on race."
A brief from the Asian American Legal Foundation, which is at odds with other Asian civil-rights groups in its opposition to race-conscious admission policies, accuses the University of Texas of discriminating against Asian-American applicants to meet its diversity goals and argues that allowing the Fifth Circuit's decision to stand will leave not just colleges but public schools feeling free to exhibit bias against Asian students.
Washington
October 31, 2011
Leading critics of affirmative action say they are optimistic that the U.S. Supreme Court will take up a lawsuit challenging the race-conscious admissions policies of the University of Texas at Austin and hand down a ruling that curtails, or even ends, the use of such admissions preferences by colleges around the nation.
In briefs urging the Supreme Court to hear the case, the lawyers for two white students rejected by the university have been joined by several conservative advocacy groups and other foes of affirmative-action preferences in arguing that colleges have strayed far beyond the limits on such policies set forth by the Supreme Court when it weighed in on them in 2003, in two decisions involving the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.
All of the briefs filed on behalf of the two students ask for the Supreme Court to overturn an appellate-court ruling that upheld the University of Texas's race-conscious admissions policies, and several argue that the case presents the high court with an opportunity to revisit its 2003 rulings and further restrict, or even eliminate, the use of affirmative-action preferences by colleges.
The University of Texas has remained silent, so far, on the question of whether the Supreme Court should take up the case, and no one has yet submitted any other briefs on its behalf to urge the justices to leave alone the lower court's ruling in its case.
The university's deadline for submitting a brief on its own was October 19, but the Supreme Court cannot decide to hear the case, Fisher v. the University of Texas at Austin, without offering the university an opportunity to argue against its doing so. If the Supreme Court asks the university to submit such a brief, those who support the university's policies will have another opportunity to submit friend-of-the-court briefs on its behalf.
Officials of the University of Texas and the state attorney general's office, which is helping to represent it in the case, declined last week to comment on their reason for not having already filed a brief urging the court not to take up matter.
Although several lawyers with expertise on the Supreme Court said the university's failure to volunteer such a brief on its own, without an invitation by justices, will not matter, Michael A. Carvin, a lawyer for Jones Day who has argued several cases before the high court, characterized the move as a "mind-boggling" strategic mistake.
"The only times you don't file a response are if they are low-visibility cases where there is no chance" the Supreme Court will decide to hear them, Mr. Carvin said. "Texas' decision not to file," he said, "is inexcusable and insulting to the court."
Among the lawyers for groups likely to file friend-of-the-court briefs on the university's behalf, Ada Meloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education, said her organization has been "waiting to see how this would play out."
Damon Todd Hewitt, who oversees litigation related to education for the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said his organization is prepared to argue that the constitutionality of race-conscious admissions policies is "settled precedent" and there is "no need for further review by the Supreme Court."
Source of Division
If the Supreme Court does take up the case, a key question before it will be whether the University of Texas needs to have race-conscious admissions policies to achieve sufficiently diverse enrollments, or had taken in adequate numbers of students from various minority populations under a state law guaranteeing admission to any public university to students graduating from a Texas high school in the top 10th of their class.
Texas lawmakers adopted the admissions guarantee, widely known as the "top 10 percent plan," in 1997, in response to a ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, in a legal challenge to the use of race-conscious admissions by the University of Texas' law school.
The Fifth Circuit's decision in that case, Hopwood v. Texas, was interpreted as barring the state's colleges from considering applicants' race or ethnicity, but the law guaranteeing admission based on a high-school class rank helped black and Hispanic enrollments at the University of Texas rebound, reaching levels above what they had been before the Hopwood decision.
Federal appeals courts in other circuits around the nation upheld the consideration of race in admissions, however, and the legal landscape surrounding them changed significantly when the Supreme Court ruled on their constitutionality in two landmark 2003 decisions involving the University of Michigan, in the cases Gratz v. Bollinger and Grutter v. Bollinger.
In the Gratz case the Supreme Court voted 6 to 3 to strike down the admissions policy of the university's main undergraduate college, with the majority opinion holding that the university put too much emphasis on race in using a point-based admission system that automatically gave substantial bonuses to members of certain minority groups. In the Grutter case, however, the court voted 5 to 4 to uphold the race-conscious admission policy of the university's law school.
The Grutter majority's opinion strongly endorsed the idea that the law school had a compelling interest in using affirmative action to enroll "critical masses" of black, Hispanic, and American Indian students because of the educational benefits such diversity was said to provide.
It also concluded that the law school's policy was "narrowly tailored" to achieving such a goal because race and ethnicity were considered among several factors in the course of the law school's holistic evaluation of applicants. The Grutter majority's opinion cautioned, however, that colleges, before adopting such policies, should give "serious, good-faith consideration" to race-neutral alternatives.
Based on the Grutter ruling, the University of Texas returned to considering applicants' race and ethnicity in 2005. Lawyers for the Project on Fair Representation, an organization opposed to affirmative-action preferences, responded by mounting a legal challenge to the move on behalf of Abigail Fisher, a white applicant for undergraduate admission that the university had rejected.
A U.S. District Court judge tossed out the lawsuit in 2009, arguing that the university's policy was constitutional because it was narrowly tailored. Although a three-judge panel of the Fifth Circuit unanimously upheld that decision in January, one of the three judges, Emilio M. Garza, heavily criticized the Grutter opinion that had served as the basis of the panel's decision as a digression from Supreme Court precedents and as having little basis on concrete evidence of the educational benefits of such policies.
In voting 9 to 7 in June to deny a rehearing of the case by all of its members, the full Fifth Circuit was even more bitterly divided. Its chief judge, Edith H. Jones, was joined by four others in issuing a dissent that said the three-judge panel had actually strayed from the requirements of Grutter by showing too much deference to the views of college administrators, failing to consider the success of the state's "top 10 percent plan" as a race-neutral alternative, and accepting the university's argument that it needed race-conscious admissions to bring about diversity at a classroom—and not just institutional—level.
Judging Ripeness
Speaking strictly in terms of numbers, the odds of the U.S. Supreme Court hearing a case are tiny—it typically grants fewer than 1 out of 100 requests for it to take up legal disputes. But, in interviews last week, several legal scholars said the Supreme Court was much likelier to take up the University of Texas case than most.
Among the reasons they cited was that the composition of the court has changed significantly since the Grutter decision, with the justice who wrote for the Grutter majority, Sandra Day O'Connor, retiring and being replaced by Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who appears to take a much dimmer view of affirmative-action preferences.
"Given how much the justices care about this issue, and given the perception of the conservative justices that they can at least cut back on Grutter if not overrule it with their new majority, I suspect they'll take it," says Erwin Chemerinsky, dean of the law school at the University of California at Irvine.
Samuel Issacharoff, a professor of constitutional law at New York University who helped represent the University of Texas in Hopwood, said the high profile of the latest case, along with the Fifth Circuit judges' deep division over it, "certainly increases the likelihood" the Supreme Court will take it up.
But Michael A. Olivas, a professor of law at the University of Houston who examines Supreme Court cases dealing with higher education in his forthcoming book Suing Alma Mater: Higher Education and the Courts, last week predicted that the Supreme Court will turn down the case as "not ripe," especially since federal circuit courts do not seem to be in disagreement over how to interpret the Grutter ruling.
"It does not present any fresh issue," he said. "My guess is that the court is tired of this."
If the Supreme Court does take up the case, Justice Elena Kagan may need to recuse herself if, in her former capacity as solicitor general, she played a role in the Obama administration's submission to the Fifth Circuit of a brief siding with the University of Texas. Although Justice Kagan is a member of the court's liberal wing, which is unlikely to have a majority with or without her, as a former dean of Harvard's law school, she could be a powerful voice arguing the perspective of such institutions.
Dire Warnings
In their brief asking the Supreme Court to take up the case, the lawyers for the white students who were rejected said the Fifth Circuit panel erred in relying too heavily on the university's "good faith" in accepting its assertions it had tailored its policies to be constitutional.
They also argue that the Fifth Circuit judges were mistaken in accepting the university's arguments that its admission policies needed to take into account the state's demographics and that it needed to have racial and ethnic diversity at the classroom level. Achieving classroom diversity, it argues, would require the university to make major changes in the curriculum, steer students into certain schools and majors, or make race such a dominant consideration in admissions that "a flood of minority students would solve the problem."
Six friend-of-the-court briefs urging the justices to take up the case have been filed on the plaintiffs' behalf.
Among them is a brief submitted by Richard H. Sander, a professor of law at the University of California at Los Angeles who has published studies questioning whether race-conscious admission policies achieve their goals, and Stuart Taylor Jr., a lawyer and journalist.
It argues that "a growing volume" of research suggests that racial preferences in higher education undermine minority achievement. Such students are often ill-prepared for the demands placed on them and respond by segregating themselves into easier majors, they say, which calls into question the argument that affirmative-action preferences can produce classroom diversity.
They also argue that elite colleges' failure to do more to bring about socioeconomic diversity—which would help increase racial and ethnic diversity as a side effect—calls into question the institutions' assertions that their race-conscious admission policies are narrowly tailored.
Among the other friend-of-the-court briefs submitted, one from several organizations that have played a prominent role in fighting race-conscious admission policies, including the American Civil Rights Institute and the Center for Equal Opportunity, says the court should take up the case "because universities nationwide have used Grutter as a blueprint for employing racial criteria in university admission policies, instead of treating it as a warning to scale back reliance on race."
A brief from the Asian American Legal Foundation, which is at odds with other Asian civil-rights groups in its opposition to race-conscious admission policies, accuses the University of Texas of discriminating against Asian-American applicants to meet its diversity goals and argues that allowing the Fifth Circuit's decision to stand will leave not just colleges but public schools feeling free to exhibit bias against Asian students.
Community Alert: Shortening Instructional Days Limits Access to Quality Learning
October 31, 2011
Dear Community Partner:
Families In Schools and several statewide partners, joined the Education Trust-West in the release of "Turning Back the Clock: The Inequitable Impact of Shortening California's School Year."
This policy brief highlights research findings that indicate the importance of increasing classroom time to improve student achievement and lifelong success, particularly for low-income students throughout California. As the brief explains, over the past several years, California's policymakers have reduced the amount of instructional time that our school districts are required to provide. Furthermore, the brief identifies a number of schools in California that have extended the school year or school day and have seen improved student learning. For more context on the brief, please read this letter from Arun Ramanathan, Executive Director of Ed Trust--West.
Families In Schools is an advocate for high quality learning environments and believes instructional quality should be preserved, despite increasing budget shortfalls. Shortening the school year potentially limits parents' ability to access a quality education for their children. Instructional time is essential, particularly in underserved communities that have limited access to additional academic support throughout the year and summer months. Families need more opportunities for their students to learn, not less.
We encourage you to read and share this critical brief to learn more about how shortening instructional time impacts our highest needs families.
To read the full brief in English, click HERE. To read the full brief in Spanish, click HERE.
Sincerely,
Kaci Patterson
Director of Community Engagement & Advocacy
Dear Community Partner:
Families In Schools and several statewide partners, joined the Education Trust-West in the release of "Turning Back the Clock: The Inequitable Impact of Shortening California's School Year."
This policy brief highlights research findings that indicate the importance of increasing classroom time to improve student achievement and lifelong success, particularly for low-income students throughout California. As the brief explains, over the past several years, California's policymakers have reduced the amount of instructional time that our school districts are required to provide. Furthermore, the brief identifies a number of schools in California that have extended the school year or school day and have seen improved student learning. For more context on the brief, please read this letter from Arun Ramanathan, Executive Director of Ed Trust--West.
Families In Schools is an advocate for high quality learning environments and believes instructional quality should be preserved, despite increasing budget shortfalls. Shortening the school year potentially limits parents' ability to access a quality education for their children. Instructional time is essential, particularly in underserved communities that have limited access to additional academic support throughout the year and summer months. Families need more opportunities for their students to learn, not less.
We encourage you to read and share this critical brief to learn more about how shortening instructional time impacts our highest needs families.
To read the full brief in English, click HERE. To read the full brief in Spanish, click HERE.
Sincerely,
Kaci Patterson
Director of Community Engagement & Advocacy
Prop 6 Would Change Texas Constitution on School Funds
Texas lawmakers passed a budget this year that cut $4 billion dollars from K-12 public education. As negotiations on those cuts came to a boil during the legislative session, there were also efforts to figure out how to squeeze additional money out of other funds to help cushion the budget blow. That's where state Rep. Rob Orr, R-Burleson, and a few other lawmakers came in with what became Proposition 6.
Orr said it was needed because the state's school land trust fund, which includes oil and gas revenues, had ballooned while payments to public schools had not.
"That fund had grown to over two and a half billion dollars in cash. But very little of it was getting directly to education," Orr said, "so this was a way for the General Land Office to make a direct deposit to the available school fund."
If passed, the constitutional amendment would allow the land commissioner to send no more than $300 million each year to spend in the state's public education budget. The measure passed the House and Senate unanimously, but some have worried it would allow the land commissioner to transfer more than the fund generated. That could weaken the fund and limit its ability to keep up with inflation.
But Orr said that shouldn't happen. "Income coming in over the last 15 years, when you look at it on an annual basis, it's been generating about $500 million a year," Orr said, "and there's a cap of $300 million. And so the fund will keep growing even if the General Land Office sends up to the $300 million."
There's nothing keeping a land commissioner from continuing to transfer $300 million even if the fund generates less. But Orr said that if that happened, the commissioner would have to answer to voters for those actions.
Early voting ends Friday. Election Day is Nov. 8.
Orr said it was needed because the state's school land trust fund, which includes oil and gas revenues, had ballooned while payments to public schools had not.
"That fund had grown to over two and a half billion dollars in cash. But very little of it was getting directly to education," Orr said, "so this was a way for the General Land Office to make a direct deposit to the available school fund."
If passed, the constitutional amendment would allow the land commissioner to send no more than $300 million each year to spend in the state's public education budget. The measure passed the House and Senate unanimously, but some have worried it would allow the land commissioner to transfer more than the fund generated. That could weaken the fund and limit its ability to keep up with inflation.
But Orr said that shouldn't happen. "Income coming in over the last 15 years, when you look at it on an annual basis, it's been generating about $500 million a year," Orr said, "and there's a cap of $300 million. And so the fund will keep growing even if the General Land Office sends up to the $300 million."
There's nothing keeping a land commissioner from continuing to transfer $300 million even if the fund generates less. But Orr said that if that happened, the commissioner would have to answer to voters for those actions.
Early voting ends Friday. Election Day is Nov. 8.
Straus criticizes tone of higher ed debate, questions value of state's job funds
"One of the real disappointments of the session to me was the assault on higher education and I’m hoping that that tone of wanting to tear down some of our very fine institutions of the state is over,"
Amen.
-Patricia
Aman Batheja | Star Telegram PoliText Blog
November 1, 2011
In a wide-ranging interview with the Star-Telegram's editorial board Tuesday, Texas House Speaker Joe Straus touched on several hot-button political topics including the state's jobs record, higher education reform and the state's program of offering in-state tuition rates for illegal immigrants.
Straus criticized the tone of a recent debate revolving around reforming the state's universities as "negative" and "almost demeaning" in tone.
"One of the real disappointments of the session to me was the assault on higher education and I’m hoping that that tone of wanting to tear down some of our very fine institutions of the state is over," the San Antonio Republican said.
An intense debate on the future of public higher education in Texas erupted earlier this year when Gov. Rick Perry appointed a new chairman to the UT System Board of Regents with a record of being dismissive of much academic research.
Straus said he agreed with many of the goals touted by critics in the debate such as promoting greater efficiency at the schools but was concerned about how its tenor impacted the state’s image.
"I think that our state’s image to the rest of the country and the world really is important and nowhere can we make a stronger statement about what’s good about Texas then having strong higher education institutions," Straus said.
When asked if he felt Perry deserved some of the blame for encouraging the debate, Straus said, "I'm not really blaming anyone. I'm just disappointed that it occurred but moving forward. I want to see us more productive in our discussions when it involves higher education."
Straus expressed optimism that a new joint committee devoted to higher education reform issues launched earlier this year will address the issues brought up in the debate while still attracting the best minds to Texas.
Straus' title, if not his name, has come up on the national stage in recent weeks as Perry has pointed to the oversight the Texas House Speaker and Lieutenant Governor provide to the state's Enterprise Fund and Emerging Technology Fund. On the campaign trail, Perry has touted the two programs as key job boosters but has faced questions that some grants went to campaign donors.
Straus said he has no concerns about how the programs have been governed but questioned their effectiveness.
"I’m not sure that the Enterprise Fund is what it needs to be to be competitive going forward," Straus said. "I'd like to see what other states are doing to encourage job growth...If there’s a better way to attract business here and create jobs, we ought to try and do that."
Added Straus: “I think not having a state income tax has been a lot more powerful incentive than the Enterprise Fund."
Straus has been outspoken of late about the need to tackle the state’s structural deficit. He said he and other House leaders were upfront about the state’s financial issues at the start of this year’s legislative session.
"I’m not going to name names but others were out there talking about how rosy the economy was," Straus said. "While it’s better than other states, we were under no illusion that our budget was going to be a simple task to balance."
Along with the deficit, Straus said lawmakers are also likely to see efforts to repeal in-state college tuition rates for illegal immigrants next session. Perry has defended the program in recent weeks in the face of conservative criticism.
Straus would not say whether he supports repealing the program, a position recently voiced by some local Republican candidates for the state senate.
"My understanding is most of the children of illegal immigrants who are eligible for the in-state tuition are going to community colleges, helping them be trained for the work force...for the most part," Straus said. "I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
"We just have to take a look at what the facts are and how it’s working."
-Aman Batheja
Read more: http://blogs.star-telegram.com/politex/2011/11/straus-criticizes-tone-of-higher-ed-debate-questions-states-job-funds-.html#ixzz1cW2iV7OL
Amen.
-Patricia
Aman Batheja | Star Telegram PoliText Blog
November 1, 2011
In a wide-ranging interview with the Star-Telegram's editorial board Tuesday, Texas House Speaker Joe Straus touched on several hot-button political topics including the state's jobs record, higher education reform and the state's program of offering in-state tuition rates for illegal immigrants.
Straus criticized the tone of a recent debate revolving around reforming the state's universities as "negative" and "almost demeaning" in tone.
"One of the real disappointments of the session to me was the assault on higher education and I’m hoping that that tone of wanting to tear down some of our very fine institutions of the state is over," the San Antonio Republican said.
An intense debate on the future of public higher education in Texas erupted earlier this year when Gov. Rick Perry appointed a new chairman to the UT System Board of Regents with a record of being dismissive of much academic research.
Straus said he agreed with many of the goals touted by critics in the debate such as promoting greater efficiency at the schools but was concerned about how its tenor impacted the state’s image.
"I think that our state’s image to the rest of the country and the world really is important and nowhere can we make a stronger statement about what’s good about Texas then having strong higher education institutions," Straus said.
When asked if he felt Perry deserved some of the blame for encouraging the debate, Straus said, "I'm not really blaming anyone. I'm just disappointed that it occurred but moving forward. I want to see us more productive in our discussions when it involves higher education."
Straus expressed optimism that a new joint committee devoted to higher education reform issues launched earlier this year will address the issues brought up in the debate while still attracting the best minds to Texas.
Straus' title, if not his name, has come up on the national stage in recent weeks as Perry has pointed to the oversight the Texas House Speaker and Lieutenant Governor provide to the state's Enterprise Fund and Emerging Technology Fund. On the campaign trail, Perry has touted the two programs as key job boosters but has faced questions that some grants went to campaign donors.
Straus said he has no concerns about how the programs have been governed but questioned their effectiveness.
"I’m not sure that the Enterprise Fund is what it needs to be to be competitive going forward," Straus said. "I'd like to see what other states are doing to encourage job growth...If there’s a better way to attract business here and create jobs, we ought to try and do that."
Added Straus: “I think not having a state income tax has been a lot more powerful incentive than the Enterprise Fund."
Straus has been outspoken of late about the need to tackle the state’s structural deficit. He said he and other House leaders were upfront about the state’s financial issues at the start of this year’s legislative session.
"I’m not going to name names but others were out there talking about how rosy the economy was," Straus said. "While it’s better than other states, we were under no illusion that our budget was going to be a simple task to balance."
Along with the deficit, Straus said lawmakers are also likely to see efforts to repeal in-state college tuition rates for illegal immigrants next session. Perry has defended the program in recent weeks in the face of conservative criticism.
Straus would not say whether he supports repealing the program, a position recently voiced by some local Republican candidates for the state senate.
"My understanding is most of the children of illegal immigrants who are eligible for the in-state tuition are going to community colleges, helping them be trained for the work force...for the most part," Straus said. "I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
"We just have to take a look at what the facts are and how it’s working."
-Aman Batheja
Read more: http://blogs.star-telegram.com/politex/2011/11/straus-criticizes-tone-of-higher-ed-debate-questions-states-job-funds-.html#ixzz1cW2iV7OL
Dunn and Torkelson: Austin would benefit from charter schools
David Dunn and Tom Torkelson, Special Contributors | Austin American-Statesman
Monday, Oct. 31, 2011
Contrary to the American-Statesman editorial board's Oct. 26 editorial, we believe the Austin Independent School District's plan to collaborate with public charter schools in our community is right, bold and promising for Austin ("Proposals for schools need thoughtful study").
News to incorporate charters into overall facility plans for the 2012-13 school year will benefit our community. The collaboration between the Austin school district and charters comes at a remarkable time in the charter school movement here in Texas — both student demand and public support for charter schools are now at their highest statewide levels since the Texas Legislature created them in 1995.
A recent poll shows good news across the state regarding public support for charter schools. The survey, done by WPA Opinion Research on behalf of the Texas Charter Schools Association, shows strong support for creating more public charter schools and ensuring that they receive the same funding as other traditional neighborhood schools.
Overall, the favorability ratings for charters grew by 12 percent over the past year. This is impressive, given charter schools educate nearly 120,000 students in Texas, which is less than 3 percent of the total student population. The poll of 500 randomly sampled likely voters was conducted in Central Texas, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and the Rio Grande Valley.
The Statesman editorial says, "As charters go, IDEA has an impressive track record, being ranked an exemplary district this year by the Texas Education Agency. But trustees pointed out that IDEA has no experience running an in-district charter."
Parents and school trustees should have no concerns about IDEA Public Schools. IDEA takes all students with disabilities and special needs. Ninety-four percent of IDEA students are Hispanic and 81 percent are from low-income homes, and there are currently 16,000 students on a waiting list to get into IDEA schools. All IDEA graduates have matriculated into college or university, and more than 90 percent are persisting or have graduated with a bachelor's degree.
Setting high expectations for all children has produced transformative results for children and families throughout the Rio Grande Valley. A partnership with the Austin Independent School District will produce similarly transformative results for Austin families.
The debate over charter schools is really about school choice, about parents and students being empowered to make the move to a school that's a better fit.
Austin Superintendent Meria Carstarphen's idea to incorporate charters in a collaborative way in Austin helps meet the growing demand for this type of education. We do not think the idea is half-baked or rushed. In fact, we think the community should feel urgency around the issue of continually failing schools.
The proposal makes sense. The district wins by choosing highly effective charters to provide specific educational solutions and deliver exceptional results to Austin school district students. The charter schools win by accessing available facilities in the communities they are looking to serve. Taxpayers win by revitalizing underused facilities that they have already paid to build and maintain. Most importantly, students and families win by having a richer portfolio of school options.
The conversation about charters is changing. It's time to stop pitting public charters against other public schools and start celebrating our strengths. Charters and regular public schools both have a central role to play, and parents and students want and need them both.
More districts and charters are working together to empower Texas students — and in doing so, they are absolutely transforming our communities for years to come.
Dunn is executive director of the Texas Charter Schools Association. Torkelson is founder and chief executive officer of IDEA Public Schools.
Monday, Oct. 31, 2011
Contrary to the American-Statesman editorial board's Oct. 26 editorial, we believe the Austin Independent School District's plan to collaborate with public charter schools in our community is right, bold and promising for Austin ("Proposals for schools need thoughtful study").
News to incorporate charters into overall facility plans for the 2012-13 school year will benefit our community. The collaboration between the Austin school district and charters comes at a remarkable time in the charter school movement here in Texas — both student demand and public support for charter schools are now at their highest statewide levels since the Texas Legislature created them in 1995.
A recent poll shows good news across the state regarding public support for charter schools. The survey, done by WPA Opinion Research on behalf of the Texas Charter Schools Association, shows strong support for creating more public charter schools and ensuring that they receive the same funding as other traditional neighborhood schools.
Overall, the favorability ratings for charters grew by 12 percent over the past year. This is impressive, given charter schools educate nearly 120,000 students in Texas, which is less than 3 percent of the total student population. The poll of 500 randomly sampled likely voters was conducted in Central Texas, Dallas, Fort Worth, Houston and the Rio Grande Valley.
The Statesman editorial says, "As charters go, IDEA has an impressive track record, being ranked an exemplary district this year by the Texas Education Agency. But trustees pointed out that IDEA has no experience running an in-district charter."
Parents and school trustees should have no concerns about IDEA Public Schools. IDEA takes all students with disabilities and special needs. Ninety-four percent of IDEA students are Hispanic and 81 percent are from low-income homes, and there are currently 16,000 students on a waiting list to get into IDEA schools. All IDEA graduates have matriculated into college or university, and more than 90 percent are persisting or have graduated with a bachelor's degree.
Setting high expectations for all children has produced transformative results for children and families throughout the Rio Grande Valley. A partnership with the Austin Independent School District will produce similarly transformative results for Austin families.
The debate over charter schools is really about school choice, about parents and students being empowered to make the move to a school that's a better fit.
Austin Superintendent Meria Carstarphen's idea to incorporate charters in a collaborative way in Austin helps meet the growing demand for this type of education. We do not think the idea is half-baked or rushed. In fact, we think the community should feel urgency around the issue of continually failing schools.
The proposal makes sense. The district wins by choosing highly effective charters to provide specific educational solutions and deliver exceptional results to Austin school district students. The charter schools win by accessing available facilities in the communities they are looking to serve. Taxpayers win by revitalizing underused facilities that they have already paid to build and maintain. Most importantly, students and families win by having a richer portfolio of school options.
The conversation about charters is changing. It's time to stop pitting public charters against other public schools and start celebrating our strengths. Charters and regular public schools both have a central role to play, and parents and students want and need them both.
More districts and charters are working together to empower Texas students — and in doing so, they are absolutely transforming our communities for years to come.
Dunn is executive director of the Texas Charter Schools Association. Torkelson is founder and chief executive officer of IDEA Public Schools.
Statesman Investigates: UT regents invest $10 million in startup with ties to ex-chancellor, governor
Follow-up to an earlier article titled, "UT president: School didn't seek MyEdu deal" also posted to this blog.
-Patricia
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz and Eric Dexheimer | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 10:36 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011
The governing board of the University of Texas System invested $10 million in a privately held company with close ties to the system's former chancellor, the chancellor's son and associates of Gov. Rick Perry.
The allocation of proceeds from the Permanent University Fund, a public endowment, was extremely unusual, if not unprecedented, in that it was made directly by the Board of Regents rather than by money management firms chosen by the board's investment arm.
The regents voted unanimously at a public meeting Aug. 25 to invest in Austin-based MyEdu Corp. after a brief discussion with no debate and no public input.
The regents and senior UT System staff members did not disclose publicly — nor did some of those officials apparently know — that former Chancellor William Cunningham is an investor in MyEdu and that his son, John, is the company's senior vice president of information architecture and one of its founders.
The company's chairman and CEO, Michael Crosno, served on the governor's statewide re-election finance committee last year.
MyEdu adviser Bob Pearson, who holds a stake in the company, donated to the governor's re-election campaign and is a former Perry-appointed chairman of an advisory panel that recommends proposals for state funding through the Emerging Technology Fund.
Margaret Spellings, who was secretary of education under President George W. Bush, is also an adviser to MyEdu.
The company operates a website, myedu.com, where college students can plan course schedules, track credits, rate professors, calculate costs and exchange comments with professors and fellow students.
Along with its 22.5 percent stake in the company, the UT System will get customized website functions for each of its nine academic and six health campuses under an agreement with the company concerning such "private-label services."
Crosno said that neither Cunningham nor Pearson had any involvement in negotiating the deal with UT System officials and that neither knew anything about the arrangement until it was completed — an account echoed separately by both men.
Gene Powell, chairman of the regents, and Francisco Cigarroa, the system's chancellor, said they were unaware of the investment by the former chancellor but that, in any event, they were under no obligation to disclose it.
Powell, who co-chaired Perry's re-election finance committee, said he didn't know of Crosno's and Pearson's ties to the governor.
"I have no knowledge of that, either. Nor was it pertinent to this agreement. We felt comfortable with exactly how this agreement went forward," Cigarroa said, adding that it was thoroughly vetted by the system's general counsel.
Josh Havens, a spokesman for Perry, said the governor's office was not involved with the matter.
In 2000, Texas A&M University graduate John Cunningham started the online service with a partner as Pick-A-Prof, a site where students could rate and exchange information about their teachers.
Crosno said he started MyEdu in 2009 by purchasing Pick-A-Prof.
A veteran of several successful Internet startups, he said he saw huge potential in a one-stop online destination where students and their parents could lower college costs through better planning. Studies show that students are taking longer to earn degrees, causing families to waste thousands of dollars.
The solution, Crosno said, is treating students as informed consumers so they can more efficiently navigate their time in college.
"There's one way to save money in college," he said. "Take the right, exact number of courses to get a college degree, and do it in the least amount of time."
MyEdu doesn't offer users any information not already publicly available; the company collects details about individual schools and teachers through open records requests and by scraping schools' websites.
Many universities, including Texas, offer their own schedule- and career-planning tools and post summaries of student evaluations of faculty members.
But Crosno said MyEdu arranges and presents the information better, and in a single location. "We deliver the technology in a form that students accept," he said.
Cigarroa said MyEdu, with its customized approach for each campus in the system, would help advance his plan to improve graduation rates.
"Simply put, MyEdu is, as they advertise, the best way to manage college," Cigarroa said. "For many students, it is their virtual college adviser and a specialized forum for communicating with each other and giving input about all aspects of student life."
Powell agreed. "This is a product we are going to make available for free to students on 15 campuses," he said. "We don't believe there's any other product out there that comes close to doing this. We wanted to do it as quickly as possible" because improving graduation rates is an urgent priority.
"It was not an issue we felt was controversial or required public input," Powell said.
Steven Leslie, UT-Austin's executive vice president and provost, said the school looks forward to embracing MyEdu's features but anticipates some challenges in integrating the company's systems with those in the registrar's office.
Not everyone has been impressed.
Though students like the visual course scheduling feature that allows them to plan their semesters, MyEdu's "tools are not always the most accurate," said senior Carisa Nietsche, president of UT-Austin's Senate of College Councils, which represents students in academic affairs. "The university also already has a lot of the tools available on MyEdu."
Kim Krieg, assistant dean for advising at UT-Austin's College of Liberal Arts, said a committee of university advisers and administrators convened by the registrar's office last spring examined MyEdu, as well as schedule-planning sites at other universities, in an effort to see what improvements UT could make.
"It's fine, but it wasn't anything that blew anybody away," Krieg recalled.
The site also has been criticized for pandering to students interested primarily in using it to identify faculty members who reliably give high grades. A UT-Austin student survey conducted last year confirmed most students used the site to check professors' grade distributions.
"As an educator, I'm not sure that's what we want students to focus on," Krieg said.
Still, Crosno said, the company, which earns money from advertisers, such as textbook publishers and computer companies interested in tapping the student market, has grown quickly, thanks in part to recent cash infusions from a handful of private investors.
He said MyEdu boasts 500,000 members who actively use the site's tools to plan their college education and an additional 3 million members who log in occasionally. Part of the company's growth has come through informal deals with student associations, some of which the company has donated money to in exchange for each new registered user.
It has forged partnerships with a handful of organizations and schools directly as well.
This past summer, the California Virtual Campus, a state-funded portal for nonresident college students, announced it was working with MyEdu to help students plan their schedules, although no money was exchanged, said Tim Calhoon, director of technology for the system.
'Shocking' invitation
Crosno said he wasn't actively looking to partner with any schools in a more formal way when MyEdu received an email in February from Art Martinez, the UT regents' director of board services, asking the company to come to UT and "present what we do."
At a meeting attended by a roomful of UT System officials, including a handful of regents, Crosno said, he made a "very challenging" presentation.
"I said the technology you offer students wasn't very well-used," he recalled. "I was shocked to hear everyone in the room say: 'This is cool. Let's have another meeting.'\u2009"
Following more gatherings over the next four months, Crosno said, the university in June asked if MyEdu would be interested in forming a partnership with the UT System.
"They said, 'We're willing to make an investment in you,' " he recalled.
Crosno said he resisted at first. "I said, 'We've got plenty of cash; I don't need your money.' " But, he added, "Cigarroa convinced me."
The result: The UT System's $10 million "unrestricted, unconditional" investment, which Crosno said will be used to build new platforms for MyEdu's tools, such as apps for tablets and cellphones.
Crosno said that he handled most of the negotiations with system officials himself, keeping only his four-member board of directors informed.
Cunningham, the former chancellor, who is also a former president of UT-Austin, said he is not a major shareholder in MyEdu and knew nothing about UT's investment until it was publicly announced.
Pearson, who said he advises the company on its social media strategy, said that's when he first learned of the partnership as well.
Barry Burgdorf, the UT System's vice chancellor and general counsel, said no law or regulation required public disclosure of the financial interest of Cunningham or his son. Nor did any general sense of ethics require such disclosure, he said.
Steve Hicks, a vice chairman of the regents who helped negotiate the MyEdu deal, said he wasn't informed of the Cunninghams' interest.
But "I do not feel it is a material matter," Hicks said. "It would not have influenced my vote."
Specialists in higher education governance, however, say transparency is always better than opacity.
"These things are often undertaken with positive purposes and good people, but when they're not fully disclosed, it really hurts them," said Aims McGuinness Jr., a senior associate with the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, a nonprofit policy center in Boulder, Colo. "It's much better to be transparent about it, and then you don't run into conflict."
Transparency has been a running theme for the UT System and its governing board in recent years. For example, the system has posted voluminous data on each of its campuses on graduation rates and other measures of student success.
But the MyEdu deal was struck almost completely behind the scenes. Indeed, the first public clue came when the regents posted a one-sentence agenda item about a forthcoming recommendation for "a business arrangement" with MyEdu regarding online academic data.
A regent's initiative
The idea to partner with MyEdu came from Regent Alex Cranberg, who learned about the company through informal conversations with UT-Austin students, Cigarroa said.
Regent Brenda Pejovich credited Cranberg for bringing the idea to a task force on excellence and productivity of which she was chairwoman and he was a member. Task force meetings, including a July presentation by MyEdu officials, were closed to the public.
Impressed by the company and its website, Cigarroa approached Powell, who agreed that a partnership could benefit the system's more than 215,000 students.
"So everybody will know, we had another unofficial committee," Powell, the regents' chairman, said at the August meeting. "Regent (Wallace) Hall, Regent Cranberg and Vice Chairman Hicks formed an unofficial committee for the chairman several weeks ago and have met continuously with MyEdu and have done a very good job of helping Barry Burgdorf bring this to fruition."
Before the board's vote on MyEdu, Powell described the company as "one of the most transformational things that we saw as a board, and the board is, I think, unanimous."
Burgdorf said officials settled on a $10 million stake to ensure that projects benefiting UT System campuses would be a first priority. "We didn't want a controlling interest because it's not our business to run MyEdu," he said.
The regents' investment arm, the University of Texas Investment Management Co., conducted a "due diligence" review to ensure that MyEdu's "people were good and financials were as represented," Hicks said.
UTIMCO CEO Bruce Zimmerman said he met with MyEdu officials, examined the company's financial statements and found no evidence of fraud or "smoke and mirrors."
Zimmerman said he advised regents and system staff members that direct investments, particularly in Internet startups, are risky, with a reasonable probability that all of the money would be lost and a small chance that huge gains would be made.
Zimmerman said he knew about the Cunninghams' involvement in the company but couldn't recall whether he mentioned that in the course of his review, which did not result in any formal report.
The former chancellor, who teaches corporate governance at UT-Austin and sits on several corporate boards, said he has made three investments totaling $175,000 in MyEdu.
Asked whether his stake should have been disclosed publicly by the regents, Cunningham replied: "I don't think so. I'm not a major shareholder in the company. I have no administrative input. I don't think that's relevant, and obviously they didn't think it was relevant."
About this story
Ralph K.M. Haurwitz, who has covered higher education since 2004, and Eric Dexheimer, a Statesman investigative reporter since 2006, examined the University of Texas System's partnership with MyEdu Corp. as part of the newspaper's ongoing focus on transparency in dealings between taxpayer-funded entities and private businesses.
-Patricia
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz and Eric Dexheimer | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 10:36 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29, 2011
The governing board of the University of Texas System invested $10 million in a privately held company with close ties to the system's former chancellor, the chancellor's son and associates of Gov. Rick Perry.
The allocation of proceeds from the Permanent University Fund, a public endowment, was extremely unusual, if not unprecedented, in that it was made directly by the Board of Regents rather than by money management firms chosen by the board's investment arm.
The regents voted unanimously at a public meeting Aug. 25 to invest in Austin-based MyEdu Corp. after a brief discussion with no debate and no public input.
The regents and senior UT System staff members did not disclose publicly — nor did some of those officials apparently know — that former Chancellor William Cunningham is an investor in MyEdu and that his son, John, is the company's senior vice president of information architecture and one of its founders.
The company's chairman and CEO, Michael Crosno, served on the governor's statewide re-election finance committee last year.
MyEdu adviser Bob Pearson, who holds a stake in the company, donated to the governor's re-election campaign and is a former Perry-appointed chairman of an advisory panel that recommends proposals for state funding through the Emerging Technology Fund.
Margaret Spellings, who was secretary of education under President George W. Bush, is also an adviser to MyEdu.
The company operates a website, myedu.com, where college students can plan course schedules, track credits, rate professors, calculate costs and exchange comments with professors and fellow students.
Along with its 22.5 percent stake in the company, the UT System will get customized website functions for each of its nine academic and six health campuses under an agreement with the company concerning such "private-label services."
Crosno said that neither Cunningham nor Pearson had any involvement in negotiating the deal with UT System officials and that neither knew anything about the arrangement until it was completed — an account echoed separately by both men.
Gene Powell, chairman of the regents, and Francisco Cigarroa, the system's chancellor, said they were unaware of the investment by the former chancellor but that, in any event, they were under no obligation to disclose it.
Powell, who co-chaired Perry's re-election finance committee, said he didn't know of Crosno's and Pearson's ties to the governor.
"I have no knowledge of that, either. Nor was it pertinent to this agreement. We felt comfortable with exactly how this agreement went forward," Cigarroa said, adding that it was thoroughly vetted by the system's general counsel.
Josh Havens, a spokesman for Perry, said the governor's office was not involved with the matter.
In 2000, Texas A&M University graduate John Cunningham started the online service with a partner as Pick-A-Prof, a site where students could rate and exchange information about their teachers.
Crosno said he started MyEdu in 2009 by purchasing Pick-A-Prof.
A veteran of several successful Internet startups, he said he saw huge potential in a one-stop online destination where students and their parents could lower college costs through better planning. Studies show that students are taking longer to earn degrees, causing families to waste thousands of dollars.
The solution, Crosno said, is treating students as informed consumers so they can more efficiently navigate their time in college.
"There's one way to save money in college," he said. "Take the right, exact number of courses to get a college degree, and do it in the least amount of time."
MyEdu doesn't offer users any information not already publicly available; the company collects details about individual schools and teachers through open records requests and by scraping schools' websites.
Many universities, including Texas, offer their own schedule- and career-planning tools and post summaries of student evaluations of faculty members.
But Crosno said MyEdu arranges and presents the information better, and in a single location. "We deliver the technology in a form that students accept," he said.
Cigarroa said MyEdu, with its customized approach for each campus in the system, would help advance his plan to improve graduation rates.
"Simply put, MyEdu is, as they advertise, the best way to manage college," Cigarroa said. "For many students, it is their virtual college adviser and a specialized forum for communicating with each other and giving input about all aspects of student life."
Powell agreed. "This is a product we are going to make available for free to students on 15 campuses," he said. "We don't believe there's any other product out there that comes close to doing this. We wanted to do it as quickly as possible" because improving graduation rates is an urgent priority.
"It was not an issue we felt was controversial or required public input," Powell said.
Steven Leslie, UT-Austin's executive vice president and provost, said the school looks forward to embracing MyEdu's features but anticipates some challenges in integrating the company's systems with those in the registrar's office.
Not everyone has been impressed.
Though students like the visual course scheduling feature that allows them to plan their semesters, MyEdu's "tools are not always the most accurate," said senior Carisa Nietsche, president of UT-Austin's Senate of College Councils, which represents students in academic affairs. "The university also already has a lot of the tools available on MyEdu."
Kim Krieg, assistant dean for advising at UT-Austin's College of Liberal Arts, said a committee of university advisers and administrators convened by the registrar's office last spring examined MyEdu, as well as schedule-planning sites at other universities, in an effort to see what improvements UT could make.
"It's fine, but it wasn't anything that blew anybody away," Krieg recalled.
The site also has been criticized for pandering to students interested primarily in using it to identify faculty members who reliably give high grades. A UT-Austin student survey conducted last year confirmed most students used the site to check professors' grade distributions.
"As an educator, I'm not sure that's what we want students to focus on," Krieg said.
Still, Crosno said, the company, which earns money from advertisers, such as textbook publishers and computer companies interested in tapping the student market, has grown quickly, thanks in part to recent cash infusions from a handful of private investors.
He said MyEdu boasts 500,000 members who actively use the site's tools to plan their college education and an additional 3 million members who log in occasionally. Part of the company's growth has come through informal deals with student associations, some of which the company has donated money to in exchange for each new registered user.
It has forged partnerships with a handful of organizations and schools directly as well.
This past summer, the California Virtual Campus, a state-funded portal for nonresident college students, announced it was working with MyEdu to help students plan their schedules, although no money was exchanged, said Tim Calhoon, director of technology for the system.
'Shocking' invitation
Crosno said he wasn't actively looking to partner with any schools in a more formal way when MyEdu received an email in February from Art Martinez, the UT regents' director of board services, asking the company to come to UT and "present what we do."
At a meeting attended by a roomful of UT System officials, including a handful of regents, Crosno said, he made a "very challenging" presentation.
"I said the technology you offer students wasn't very well-used," he recalled. "I was shocked to hear everyone in the room say: 'This is cool. Let's have another meeting.'\u2009"
Following more gatherings over the next four months, Crosno said, the university in June asked if MyEdu would be interested in forming a partnership with the UT System.
"They said, 'We're willing to make an investment in you,' " he recalled.
Crosno said he resisted at first. "I said, 'We've got plenty of cash; I don't need your money.' " But, he added, "Cigarroa convinced me."
The result: The UT System's $10 million "unrestricted, unconditional" investment, which Crosno said will be used to build new platforms for MyEdu's tools, such as apps for tablets and cellphones.
Crosno said that he handled most of the negotiations with system officials himself, keeping only his four-member board of directors informed.
Cunningham, the former chancellor, who is also a former president of UT-Austin, said he is not a major shareholder in MyEdu and knew nothing about UT's investment until it was publicly announced.
Pearson, who said he advises the company on its social media strategy, said that's when he first learned of the partnership as well.
Barry Burgdorf, the UT System's vice chancellor and general counsel, said no law or regulation required public disclosure of the financial interest of Cunningham or his son. Nor did any general sense of ethics require such disclosure, he said.
Steve Hicks, a vice chairman of the regents who helped negotiate the MyEdu deal, said he wasn't informed of the Cunninghams' interest.
But "I do not feel it is a material matter," Hicks said. "It would not have influenced my vote."
Specialists in higher education governance, however, say transparency is always better than opacity.
"These things are often undertaken with positive purposes and good people, but when they're not fully disclosed, it really hurts them," said Aims McGuinness Jr., a senior associate with the National Center for Higher Education Management Systems, a nonprofit policy center in Boulder, Colo. "It's much better to be transparent about it, and then you don't run into conflict."
Transparency has been a running theme for the UT System and its governing board in recent years. For example, the system has posted voluminous data on each of its campuses on graduation rates and other measures of student success.
But the MyEdu deal was struck almost completely behind the scenes. Indeed, the first public clue came when the regents posted a one-sentence agenda item about a forthcoming recommendation for "a business arrangement" with MyEdu regarding online academic data.
A regent's initiative
The idea to partner with MyEdu came from Regent Alex Cranberg, who learned about the company through informal conversations with UT-Austin students, Cigarroa said.
Regent Brenda Pejovich credited Cranberg for bringing the idea to a task force on excellence and productivity of which she was chairwoman and he was a member. Task force meetings, including a July presentation by MyEdu officials, were closed to the public.
Impressed by the company and its website, Cigarroa approached Powell, who agreed that a partnership could benefit the system's more than 215,000 students.
"So everybody will know, we had another unofficial committee," Powell, the regents' chairman, said at the August meeting. "Regent (Wallace) Hall, Regent Cranberg and Vice Chairman Hicks formed an unofficial committee for the chairman several weeks ago and have met continuously with MyEdu and have done a very good job of helping Barry Burgdorf bring this to fruition."
Before the board's vote on MyEdu, Powell described the company as "one of the most transformational things that we saw as a board, and the board is, I think, unanimous."
Burgdorf said officials settled on a $10 million stake to ensure that projects benefiting UT System campuses would be a first priority. "We didn't want a controlling interest because it's not our business to run MyEdu," he said.
The regents' investment arm, the University of Texas Investment Management Co., conducted a "due diligence" review to ensure that MyEdu's "people were good and financials were as represented," Hicks said.
UTIMCO CEO Bruce Zimmerman said he met with MyEdu officials, examined the company's financial statements and found no evidence of fraud or "smoke and mirrors."
Zimmerman said he advised regents and system staff members that direct investments, particularly in Internet startups, are risky, with a reasonable probability that all of the money would be lost and a small chance that huge gains would be made.
Zimmerman said he knew about the Cunninghams' involvement in the company but couldn't recall whether he mentioned that in the course of his review, which did not result in any formal report.
The former chancellor, who teaches corporate governance at UT-Austin and sits on several corporate boards, said he has made three investments totaling $175,000 in MyEdu.
Asked whether his stake should have been disclosed publicly by the regents, Cunningham replied: "I don't think so. I'm not a major shareholder in the company. I have no administrative input. I don't think that's relevant, and obviously they didn't think it was relevant."
About this story
Ralph K.M. Haurwitz, who has covered higher education since 2004, and Eric Dexheimer, a Statesman investigative reporter since 2006, examined the University of Texas System's partnership with MyEdu Corp. as part of the newspaper's ongoing focus on transparency in dealings between taxpayer-funded entities and private businesses.
UT president: School didn't seek MyEdu deal
By Ralph K.M. Haurwitz | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Updated: 5:58 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2011
The president of the University of Texas said Monday that the university didn't seek an unusual partnership with MyEdu Corp., an Austin-based company that operates a website on which students can plan classes, rate professors and exchange comments.
"Would I have had different priorities for that $10 million?" UT President William Powers Jr. said at a meeting of the Faculty Council, referring to the investment of endowment funds by the UT System Board of Regents in MyEdu. "Yes."
He did not say what his priorities would have been. But Powers made it clear that it wasn't his decision to partner with MyEdu.
"That was a decision of the board. That was not a decision of the campus," Powers said. "We didn't choose to bring this to the campus. It was brought to us."
UT System regents voted unanimously Aug. 25 to invest in the privately held company and to sign on with it for customized website functions for each of the system's nine academic and six health campuses.
The American-Statesman reported in Sunday's editions that a former UT System chancellor, William Cunningham, is an investor in MyEdu and that his son, John, is a co-founder and a senior official of the company.
UT System officials and regents did not disclose the Cunninghams' involvement with the company and in some cases were unaware of it.
The elder Cunningham, who teaches corporate governance at the Austin campus, was chancellor from 1992 to 2000 and president of the campus from 1985 to 1992.
System officials said no law, rule or sense of ethics required disclosure of the Cunninghams' involvement. William Cunningham, as well as UT System and MyEdu officials, said he had no role in negotiating the partnership or even any knowledge of it until it was a done deal.
It is rare, if not unprecedented, for the Board of Regents to invest endowment funds directly in a company. Investments from the multibillion-dollar Permanent University Fund are generally made by money management firms chosen by an arm of the governing board, the University of Texas Investment Management Co.
Powers said the tools on myedu.com were demonstrated for him last week, and he observed that they can be optimized by users in various ways — for example, to offer a student the easiest courses.
"The first question I asked was, 'Can you turn some of these things off?'\u2009" he said, adding that he was assured it could be done. He said other tools on the website "seem OK to me" and could be valuable to students.
Alan Cline, a professor of computer science, asked Powers about Cunningham, the former president and chancellor.
"I don't see any influence" from Cunningham in the partnership, Powers said.
"I've known President Cunningham for a long time, and he's given great service to this university," Powers said.
Updated: 5:58 a.m. Tuesday, Nov. 1, 2011
The president of the University of Texas said Monday that the university didn't seek an unusual partnership with MyEdu Corp., an Austin-based company that operates a website on which students can plan classes, rate professors and exchange comments.
"Would I have had different priorities for that $10 million?" UT President William Powers Jr. said at a meeting of the Faculty Council, referring to the investment of endowment funds by the UT System Board of Regents in MyEdu. "Yes."
He did not say what his priorities would have been. But Powers made it clear that it wasn't his decision to partner with MyEdu.
"That was a decision of the board. That was not a decision of the campus," Powers said. "We didn't choose to bring this to the campus. It was brought to us."
UT System regents voted unanimously Aug. 25 to invest in the privately held company and to sign on with it for customized website functions for each of the system's nine academic and six health campuses.
The American-Statesman reported in Sunday's editions that a former UT System chancellor, William Cunningham, is an investor in MyEdu and that his son, John, is a co-founder and a senior official of the company.
UT System officials and regents did not disclose the Cunninghams' involvement with the company and in some cases were unaware of it.
The elder Cunningham, who teaches corporate governance at the Austin campus, was chancellor from 1992 to 2000 and president of the campus from 1985 to 1992.
System officials said no law, rule or sense of ethics required disclosure of the Cunninghams' involvement. William Cunningham, as well as UT System and MyEdu officials, said he had no role in negotiating the partnership or even any knowledge of it until it was a done deal.
It is rare, if not unprecedented, for the Board of Regents to invest endowment funds directly in a company. Investments from the multibillion-dollar Permanent University Fund are generally made by money management firms chosen by an arm of the governing board, the University of Texas Investment Management Co.
Powers said the tools on myedu.com were demonstrated for him last week, and he observed that they can be optimized by users in various ways — for example, to offer a student the easiest courses.
"The first question I asked was, 'Can you turn some of these things off?'\u2009" he said, adding that he was assured it could be done. He said other tools on the website "seem OK to me" and could be valuable to students.
Alan Cline, a professor of computer science, asked Powers about Cunningham, the former president and chancellor.
"I don't see any influence" from Cunningham in the partnership, Powers said.
"I've known President Cunningham for a long time, and he's given great service to this university," Powers said.
Survey: More cuts to school jobs expected next year
By Kate Alexander | Austin American-Statesman
Tuesday, November 1, 2011, 11:51 AM
More than 60 percent of Texas school districts expect further staffing reductions next year as they grapple with state budget reductions, according to a survey by school finance consultant Moak, Casey & Associates.
Almost 9,600 school district jobs — one-third of which were classroom teachers — were eliminated this year by the survey respondents, which serve 39 percent of the state’s students. If those job cuts were applied across the state, there would be 32,000 fewer school employees in Texas, including 12,000 fewer teachers.
That number is much, much smaller than the 100,000 school jobs that consultant Lynn Moak estimated would be lost when the 2012-13 budget was first released in January. At that point, lawmakers proposed reducing per-student funding by $10 billion and eliminating almost $2 billion in education grants.
In the end, the Legislature underfunded schools by $4 billion in basic aid and cut $1.3 billion from grant programs that paid for full-day prekindergarten, assisted students struggling to pass state standardized tests and more.
But more jobs are expected to be lost next because schools are relying on some one-time federal money to prop up their budgets this year and some districts will lose additional state aid next year, the school districts report.
Tuesday, November 1, 2011, 11:51 AM
More than 60 percent of Texas school districts expect further staffing reductions next year as they grapple with state budget reductions, according to a survey by school finance consultant Moak, Casey & Associates.
Almost 9,600 school district jobs — one-third of which were classroom teachers — were eliminated this year by the survey respondents, which serve 39 percent of the state’s students. If those job cuts were applied across the state, there would be 32,000 fewer school employees in Texas, including 12,000 fewer teachers.
That number is much, much smaller than the 100,000 school jobs that consultant Lynn Moak estimated would be lost when the 2012-13 budget was first released in January. At that point, lawmakers proposed reducing per-student funding by $10 billion and eliminating almost $2 billion in education grants.
In the end, the Legislature underfunded schools by $4 billion in basic aid and cut $1.3 billion from grant programs that paid for full-day prekindergarten, assisted students struggling to pass state standardized tests and more.
But more jobs are expected to be lost next because schools are relying on some one-time federal money to prop up their budgets this year and some districts will lose additional state aid next year, the school districts report.
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