n+1: Bad Education

Malcolm Harris lays out the student loan debt crisis that we're in. It mirrors the pre-crisis housing market:

"The loans and costs are caught in the kind of dangerous loop that occurs when lending becomes both profitable and seemingly risk-free: high and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it."

The way that the working class is getting denied "debt opportunities," if you will, that are available to the middle class that has had greater opportunity in securing four-year college degrees, is through the for-profits like the University of Phoenix or Kaplan. Check out these statistics and this narrative that suggest very real scamming that is taking place currently:

"While the debt numbers for four-year programs look risky, for-profit two-year schools have apocalyptic figures: 96 percent of their students take on debt and within fifteen years 40 percent are in default. A Government Accountability Office sting operation in which agents posed as applicants found all fifteen approached institutions engaged in deceptive practices and four in straight-up fraud. For-profits were found to have paid their admissions officers on commission, falsely claimed accreditation, underrepresented costs, and encouraged applicants to lie on federal financial aid forms. Far from the bargain they portray themselves to be on daytime television, for-profit degree programs were found to be more expensive than the nonprofit alternatives nearly every time. "

Despite this, corporate interests that include The Washington Post Co. University of CA Regent Richard Blum (husband to Senator Dianne Feinstein) means that this for-profit sector is among the fastest growing one in higher education.

The growing debt amount is staggering foreshadowing the possibility of massive default. However, Federal policy via Student Loan Asset-Backed Security (or SLABS)has insulated investors to date. As long as the status quo prevails, universities can keep simply raising tuition costs. However from the consumer side, a $200,000.00 education-related debt should very well provide something to show for it at the end of the day. And it should minimally command a labor market advantage that will actually allow them to get out of debt. A more despairing, if growing scenario, is highly indebted class of college graduates that must go into greater debt to pay off student loans. And student debt is particularly punishing:

"Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits. When a borrower defaults and the guaranty agency collects from the federal government, the agency gets a cut of whatever it’s able to recover from then on (even though they have already been compensated for the losses), giving agencies a financial incentive to dog former students to the grave."

Another trend is the hiring of top-level, very highly paid administrators with concomitant dips in instruction and student services:

"If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it’s unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years."

All very sobering and concerning.

-Angela


n+1: Bad Education

The Project On Student Debt estimates that the average college senior in 2009 graduated with $24,000 in outstanding loans. Last August, student loans surpassed credit cards as the nation’s single largest source of debt, edging ever closer to $1 trillion. Yet for all the moralizing about American consumer debt by both parties, no one dares call higher education a bad investment. The nearly axiomatic good of a university degree in American society has allowed a higher education bubble to expand to the point of bursting.

Since 1978, the price of tuition at US colleges has increased over 900 percent, 650 points above inflation. To put that number in perspective, housing prices, the bubble that nearly burst the US economy, then the global one, increased only fifty points above the Consumer Price Index during those years. But while college applicants’ faith in the value of higher education has only increased, employers’ has declined. According to Richard Rothstein at The Economic Policy Institute, wages for college-educated workers outside of the inflated finance industry have stagnated or diminished. Unemployment has hit recent graduates especially hard, nearly doubling in the post-2007 recession. The result is that the most indebted generation in history is without the dependable jobs it needs to escape debt.

What kind of incentives motivate lenders to continue awarding six-figure sums to teenagers facing both the worst youth unemployment rate in decades and an increasingly competitive global workforce?

During the expansion of the housing bubble, lenders felt protected because they could repackage risky loans as mortgage-backed securities, which sold briskly to a pious market that believed housing prices could only increase. By combining slices of regionally diverse loans and theoretically spreading the risk of default, lenders were able to convince independent rating agencies that the resulting financial products were safe bets. They weren’t. But since this wouldn’t be America if you couldn’t monetize your children’s futures, the education sector still has its equivalent: the Student Loan Asset-Backed Security (or, as they’re known in the industry, SLABS).

SLABS were invented by then-semi-public Sallie Mae in the early ’90s, and their trading grew as part of the larger asset-backed security wave that peaked in 2007. In 1990, there were $75.6 million of these securities in circulation; at their apex, the total stood at $2.67 trillion. The number of SLABS traded on the market grew from $200,000 in 1991 to near $250 billion by the fourth quarter of 2010. But while trading in securities backed by credit cards, auto loans, and home equity is down 50 percent or more across the board, SLABS have not suffered the same sort of drop. SLABS are still considered safe investments—the kind financial advisors market to pension funds and the elderly.

With the secondary market in such good shape, primary lenders have been eager to help students with out-of-control costs. In addition to the knowledge that they can move these loans off their balance sheets quickly, they have had another reason not to worry: federal guarantees. Under the just-ended Federal Family Education Loan Program (FFELP), the US Treasury backed private loans to college students. This meant that even if the secondary market collapsed and there were an anomalous wave of defaults, the federal government had already built a lender bailout into the law. And if that weren’t enough, in May 2008 President Bush signed the Ensuring Continued Access to Student Loans Act, which authorized the Department of Education to purchase FFELP loans outright if secondary demand dipped. In 2010, as a cost-offset attached to health reform legislation, President Obama ended the FFELP, but not before it had grown to a $60 billion-a-year operation.

Even with the Treasury no longer acting as co-signer on private loans, the flow of SLABS won’t end any time soon. What analysts at Barclays Capital wrote of the securities in 2006 still rings true: “For this sector, we expect sustainable growth in new issuance volume as the growth in education costs continues to outpace increases in family incomes, grants, and federal loans.” The loans and costs are caught in the kind of dangerous loop that occurs when lending becomes both profitable and seemingly risk-free: high and increasing college costs mean students need to take out more loans, more loans mean more securities lenders can package and sell, more selling means lenders can offer more loans with the capital they raise, which means colleges can continue to raise costs. The result is over $800 billion in outstanding student debt, over 30 percent of it securitized, and the federal government directly or indirectly on the hook for almost all of it.

If this sounds familiar, it probably should, and the parallels with the pre-crisis housing market don’t end there. The most predatory and cynical subprime lending has its analogue in for-profit colleges. Inequalities in US primary and secondary education previously meant that a large slice of the working class never got a chance to take on the large debts associated with four-year degree programs. For-profits like The University of Phoenix or Kaplan are the market’s answer to this opportunity.

While the debt numbers for four-year programs look risky, for-profit two-year schools have apocalyptic figures: 96 percent of their students take on debt and within fifteen years 40 percent are in default. A Government Accountability Office sting operation in which agents posed as applicants found all fifteen approached institutions engaged in deceptive practices and four in straight-up fraud. For-profits were found to have paid their admissions officers on commission, falsely claimed accreditation, underrepresented costs, and encouraged applicants to lie on federal financial aid forms. Far from the bargain they portray themselves to be on daytime television, for-profit degree programs were found to be more expensive than the nonprofit alternatives nearly every time. These degrees are a tough sell, but for-profits sell tough. They spend an unseemly amount of money on advertising, a fact that probably hasn’t escaped the reader’s notice.

But despite the attention the for-profit sector has attracted (including congressional hearings), as in the housing crisis it’s hard to see where the bad apples stop and the barrel begins. For-profits have quickly tied themselves to traditional powers in education, politics, and media. Just a few examples: Richard C. Blum, University of California regent (and husband of California Sen. Dianne Feinstein), is also through his investment firm the majority stakeholder in two of the largest for-profit colleges. The Washington Post Co. owns Kaplan Higher Education, forcing the company’s flagship paper to print a steady stream of embarrassing parenthetical disclosures in articles on the subject of for-profits. Industry leader University of Phoenix has even developed an extensive partnership with GOOD magazine, sponsoring an education editor. Thanks to these connections, billions more in advertising, and nearly $9 million in combined lobbying and campaign contributions in 2010 alone, for-profits have become the fastest growing sector in American higher education.

If the comparative model is valid, then the lessons of the housing crash nag: What happens when the kids can’t pay? The federal government only uses data on students who default within the first two years of repayment, but its numbers have the default rate increasing every year since 2005. Analyst accounts have only 40 percent of the total outstanding debt in active repayment, the majority being either in deferment or default. Next year, the Department of Education will calculate default rates based on numbers three years after the beginning of repayment rather than two. The projected results are staggering: recorded defaults for the class of 2008 will nearly double, from 7 to 13.8 percent. With fewer and fewer students having the income necessary to pay back loans (except by taking on more consumer debt), a massive default looks closer to inevitable.

Unlike during the housing crisis, the government’s response to a national wave of defaults that could pop the higher-ed bubble is already written into law. In the event of foreclosure on a government-backed loan, the holder submits a request to what’s called a state guaranty agency, which then submits a claim to the feds. The federal disbursement rate is tied to the guaranty agency’s fiscal year default rate: for loans issued after October 1998, if the rate exceeds 5 percent, the disbursement drops to 85 percent of principal and interest accrued; if the rate exceeds 9 percent, the disbursement falls to 75 percent. But the guaranty agency rates are computed in such a way that they do not reflect the rate of default as students experience it; of all the guaranty agencies applying for federal reimbursement last year, none hit the 5 percent trigger rate.

With all of these protections in place, SLABS are a better investment than most housing-backed securities ever were. The advantage of a preemptive bailout is that it can make itself unnecessary: if investors know they’re insulated from risk, there’s less reason for them to get skittish if the securities dip, and a much lower chance of a speculative collapse. The worst-case scenario seems to involve the federal government paying for students to go to college, and aside from the enrichment of the parasitic private lenders and speculators, this might not look too bad if you believe in big government, free education, or even Keynesian fiscal stimulus. But until now, we have only examined one side of the exchange. When students agree to take out a loan, the fairness of the deal is premised on the value for the student of their borrowed dollars. If an 18-year-old takes out $200,000 in loans, he or she better be not only getting the full value, but investing it well too.

Higher education seems an unlikely site for this kind of speculative bubble. While housing prices are based on what competing buyers are willing to pay, postsecondary education’s price is supposedly linked to its costs (with the exception of the for-profits). But the rapid growth in tuition is mystifying in value terms; no one could argue convincingly the quality of instruction or the market value of a degree has increased ten-fold in the past four decades (though this hasn’t stopped some from trying). So why would universities raise tuition so high so quickly? “Because they can” answers this question for home-sellers out to get the biggest return on their investments, or for-profits out to grab as much Pell Grant money as possible, but it seems an awfully cynical answer when it comes to nonprofit education.

First, where the money hasn’t gone: instruction. As Marc Bousquet, a leading researcher into the changing structures of higher education, wrote in How The University Works (2008):

If you’re enrolled in four college classes right now, you have a pretty good chance that one of the four will be taught by someone who has earned a doctorate and whose teaching, scholarship, and service to the profession has undergone the intensive peer scrutiny associated with the tenure system. In your other three classes, however, you are likely to be taught by someone who has started a degree but not finished it; was hired by a manager, not professional peers; may never publish in the field she is teaching; got into the pool of persons being considered for the job because she was willing to work for wages around the official poverty line (often under the delusion that she could ‘work her way into’ a tenurable position); and does not plan to be working at your institution three years from now.

This is not an improvement; fewer than forty years ago, when the explosive growth in tuition began, these proportions were reversed. Highly represented among the new precarious teachers are graduate students; with so much available debt, universities can force graduate student workers to scrape by on sub-minimum-wage, making them a great source of cheap instructional labor. Fewer tenure-track jobs mean that recent PhDs, overwhelmed with debt, have no choice but to accept insecure adjunct positions with wages kept down by the new crop of graduate student-workers. Rather than producing a better-trained, more professional teaching corps, increased tuition and debt have enabled the opposite.

If overfed teachers aren’t the causes or beneficiaries of increased tuition (as they’ve been depicted of late), then perhaps it’s worth looking up the food chain. As faculty jobs have become increasingly contingent and precarious, administration has become anything but. Formerly, administrators were more or less teachers with added responsibilities; nowadays, they function more like standard corporate managers—and they’re paid like them too. Once a few entrepreneurial schools made this switch, market pressures compelled the rest to follow the high-revenue model, which leads directly to high salaries for in-demand administrators. Even at nonprofit schools, top-level administrators and financial managers pull down six- and seven-figure salaries, more on par with their industry counterparts than with their fellow faculty members. And while the proportion of tenure-track teaching faculty has dwindled, the number of managers has skyrocketed in both relative and absolute terms. If current trends continue, the Department of Education estimates that by 2014 there will be more administrators than instructors at American four-year nonprofit colleges. A bigger administration also consumes a larger portion of available funds, so it’s unsurprising that budget shares for instruction and student services have dipped over the past fifteen years.

When you hire corporate managers, you get managed like a corporation, and the race for tuition dollars and grants from government and private partnerships has become the driving objective of the contemporary university administration. The goal for large state universities and elite private colleges alike has ceased to be (if it ever was) building well-educated citizens; now they hardly even bother to prepare students to assume their places among the ruling class. Instead we have, in Bousquet’s words, “the entrepreneurial urges, vanity, and hobbyhorses of administrators: Digitize the curriculum! Build the best pool/golf course/stadium in the state! Bring more souls to God! Win the all-conference championship!” These expensive projects are all part of another cycle: corporate universities must be competitive in recruiting students who may become rich alumni, so they have to spend on attractive extras, which means they need more revenue, so they need more students paying higher tuition. For-profits aren’t the only ones consumed with selling product. And if a humanities program can’t demonstrate its economic utility to its institution (which can’t afford to haul “dead weight”) and students (who understand the need for marketable degrees), then it faces cuts, the neoliberal management technique par excellence. Students apparently have received the message loud and clear, as business has quickly become the nation’s most popular major.

When President Obama spoke in the State of the Union of the need to send more Americans to college, it was in the context of economic competition with China, phrased as if we ought to produce graduates like steel. As the near-ubiquitous unpaid internship for credit (in which students pay tuition in order to work for free) replaces class time, the bourgeois trade school supplants the academy. Parents understandably worried about their children make sure they never forget about the importance of an attractive résumé. It was easier for students to believe a college education was priceless when it wasn’t bought and sold from every angle.

If tuition has increased astronomically and the portion of money spent on instruction and student services has fallen, if the (at very least comparative) market value of a degree has dipped and most students can no longer afford to enjoy college as a period of intellectual adventure, then at least one more thing is clear: higher education, for-profit or not, has increasingly become a scam.

We know the consequences of default for lenders, investors, and their backers at the Treasury, but what of the defaulters? Homeowners who found themselves with negative equity (owing more on their houses than the houses were worth) could always walk away. Students aren’t as lucky: graduates can’t ditch their degrees, even if they borrowed more money than their accredited labor power can command on the market. Americans overwhelmed with normal consumer debt (like credit card debt) have the option of bankruptcy, and although it’s an arduous and credit-score-killing process, not having ready access to thousands in pre-approved cash is not always such a bad thing. But students don’t have that option either. Before 2005, students could use bankruptcy to escape education loans that weren’t provided directly by the federal government, but the facetiously named “Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act” extended non-dischargeability to all education loans, even credit cards used to pay school bills.

Today, student debt is an exceptionally punishing kind to have. Not only is it inescapable through bankruptcy, but student loans have no expiration date and collectors can garnish wages, social security payments, and even unemployment benefits. When a borrower defaults and the guaranty agency collects from the federal government, the agency gets a cut of whatever it’s able to recover from then on (even though they have already been compensated for the losses), giving agencies a financial incentive to dog former students to the grave.

When the housing bubble collapsed, the results (relatively good for most investors, bad for the government, worse for homeowners) were predictable but not foreordained. With the student-loan bubble, the resolution is much the same, and it’s decided in advance.

In addition to the billions colleges have spent on advertising, sports programs, campus aesthetics, and marketable luxuries, they’ve benefited from a public discourse that depicts higher education as an unmitigated social good. Since the Baby Boomers gave birth, the college degree has seemed a panacea for social ills, a metaphor for a special kind of deserved success. We still tell fairy tales about escapes from the ghetto to the classroom or the short path from graduation to lifelong satisfaction, not to mention America’s collective college success story: The G.I. Bill. But these narratives are not inspiring true-life models, they’re advertising copy, and they come complete with loan forms.

Image: Plans for a new athletic center at Ithaca College. From msidesign.com.

The 'Thing' Economy and the 'Care' Economy | | AlterNet

Economics and caring are rarely seen together though it's completely sensible that they should be. In this 2003 piece, Fred Block maintains that "What we need are new policies that can reintegrate these two warring economies into one unified structure that is efficient in producing quality things and quality care. This requires abandoning the foolish notion that whatever is good for General Motors or General Dynamics is good for the whole society." This undercuts the neoliberal assumption that Americans can use the free-market to arrive at solutions for social problems (i.e., the problem of inadequate care) since the thing economy is what has significantly contributed to the crisis of care. This piece gives us language for challenging our business-like, high-stakes accountability systems from a perspective of care. -Angela

AlterNet
The 'Thing' Economy and the 'Care' Economy
By Fred Block, AlterNet
Posted on November 10, 2003, Printed on November 21, 2011

http://www.alternet.org/story/17146/the_%27thing%27_economy_and_the_%27care%27_economy

The newest conventional wisdom insists that voters are angry because the economy is bad. However, through the last 30 years of ups and downs in the unemployment rate, there really haven't been any periods of great economic satisfaction. Sure, a few years ago, we had the great internet bubble when both computer geeks and financial types got rich quickly, but most families still struggled with too little money, too little time and too much debt. Of course, rising unemployment and cutbacks in government spending make everything worse, but it has been a long time since people were optimistic that their children would enjoy greater financial security than they had.

The problem with current efforts to recycle the Clinton-era slogan, "It's the economy, stupid," is that we really have two different economies. The first is the one that economists always talk about; we can call it the "thing economy" that produces computers, petroleum, autos and missiles. The thing economy is the envy of the world since we have successfully harnessed science and technology to make marvelous machines with greater and greater efficiency.

The second economy is the "care economy" in which people take care of each other and of the natural environment. The care economy includes child raising, childcare, care for elderly relatives, education, health, pensions for the elderly, the criminal justice system, religion and the arts, and all of our expenditures to protect the environment.

To be sure, these two economies are interdependent and interconnected. Without people who are educated, healthy, and sane, we couldn't produce all those marvelous things. And if the thing economy were not efficient, we wouldn't be able to feed and clothe all of the people who are working in the care economy. And, of course, our official economic accounts treat these two economies as though they are one; they do not even attempt to measure their relative size.

If they did, the results would be surprising. The care economy is huge. It is well known that our statistics on Gross Domestic Product completely exclude the unpaid labor that both men and women do in the home-meals, laundry, care for children, and home and yard maintenance. Estimates suggest that the value of this activity could add close to another 50 percent to total GDP, especially if one also includes all the hours spent in volunteer activity and community endeavors. If one adds to this the 13 percent of GDP that we spend each year on medical care, the 6-7 percent of GDP that we spend on every form of education and training, the 7-8 percent that we spend on pensions for the elderly, as well as the billions that we spend on the criminal justice system, funding the arts and religious institutions, and protecting the environment, it seems clear that both in dollar value and in cumulative hours, the care economy is at least as large as the thing economy.

But here is the problem. The strategies that we have been following to increase efficiency in the thing economy often do not work to make the care economy work better. Even worse, there are several ways in which the growth and development of the thing economy actually undermine the care economy. And undermining the care economy means that we end up getting lower quality education and health care for each dollar we spend. It also means a growing "care deficit": Millions of people are not getting either the care they need or are getting caught in a fierce time bind as they juggle to balance work responsibilities and care responsibilities. It is quite possible that this systematic undermining of the care economy is what is making people irritable and angry -- both in "good" economic times and in "bad."

The obvious way in which the development of the thing economy undercuts the care economy is through the misorganization of time. Several generations ago, we had a simple way of coordinating the two economies. Men worked in the thing economy and women worked -- usually for no or little compensation -- in the care economy. This system "worked" to produce high quality care, but at an enormous cost -- women's opportunities were severely restricted. Hence, this system fell apart as women pressed for equality and the thing economy pulled millions of women into both part-time and full-time jobs. Now, we have the social ideal that all adults should be in the paid labor force until retirement age. Average annual hours of paid work by women have risen dramatically, while those for men have barely changed. The consequence is that millions of families are incredibly harried and are constantly forced to shortchange their care responsibilities.

These intense time pressures have huge costs. The continuing stress of balancing work and family takes a huge toll on our mental and physical health and is linked to rising rates of substance abuse. Moreover, the strains on family life make it harder to keep relationships together. And then, rising divorce rates and ever smaller household units lead to even further time pressures as the vicious cycle intensifies.

All this produces the second undercutting dynamic -- unproductive cost cutting. We have all become more dependent on paid workers to produce some of the care that we need for ourselves and other family members. But when the principles of efficiency from the thing economy are applied to this part of the care economy, the results are often disastrous. In the thing economy, we can keep labor costs down and press workers for more output without sacrificing quality by using increasingly sophisticated technologies. When we do this in the care economy, we get diminishing quality of care. For example, badly paid and badly trained childcare workers or nursing home workers usually produce poor quality care because technology is largely irrelevant. And the resulting institutional failures generate other kinds of costs, from toddlers who do not get the kind of stimulus they need, to the elderly who suffer medical complications because of abuse and neglect. And, of course, worrying about the poor quality of institutional care becomes another huge source of stress.

The last undercutting dynamic can be called "unproductive spillovers." It is most obvious in our system for providing health care (and also evident in many of our environmental problems). While our scientists and physicians have made some extraordinary advances, it is apparent that transferring the for-profit model of the thing economy into the health sector has produced a variety of negative consequences. We have more than 40 million people who lack health insurance and many others whose access to health care is highly uncertain. We also know that the multiple levels of administration and bureaucracy add enormous inefficiencies and drain resources that could be used to provide more and better patient care. Finally, the uncoordinated and often chaotic system for delivering health care both undermines the quality of care and has become another huge time drain for families. Hundreds of thousands of patients are forced to become experts on their own diseases and on the health care system just to find their way to quality care.

The only way these serious problems of the care economy currently enter our political debates is through the issue of whether private or public provision of services is preferable. But privatization is not the solution; in health care and nursing homes, it is part of the problem. Yet it is also obvious that public provision is not a panacea; there are plenty of examples of poor quality public care.

The real problem is that we have imagined that if we get the thing economy organized properly, then the care economy will take "care" of itself. But this is an illusion; the logics of the thing economy are systematically undermining the effectiveness of the care economy.

What we need are new policies that can reintegrate these two warring economies into one unified structure that is efficient in producing quality things and quality care. This requires abandoning the foolish notion that whatever is good for General Motors or General Dynamics is good for the whole society. The string of recent corporate scandals should be a sufficient reminder that when markets are left on their own, small groups of insiders can become enormously rich at everyone else's expense. Who benefits, for example, from the extraordinary success of one giant retail chain that is famous for its low wages and miserly employee health care plan? Certainly not the communities that are forced to subsidize this corporation by providing health care to the firm's large number of uninsured employees. Certainly not the competitors who are being forced into bankruptcy because they are more decent towards their employees. It is both inefficient and immoral for society to give corporations free reign to engage in these destructive forms of cost shifting.

And, in fact, we have abundant evidence that firms can be highly profitable while providing their employees with decent wages and access to quality care. Many of our most dynamic and innovative firms have, in fact, created caring communities for their employees -- attending to the difficulties of balancing work and family, supporting the ongoing development of employee skills, and facilitating improvements in employee health behavior. These policies could and should be pursued more generally since a unified economy would benefit from the enhanced productivity of well-cared-for employees.

But skeptics will immediately note that we live in an era of tight budgets -- can we really afford to create this unified economy? Yes, and in fact, it is actually both realistic and urgent because effective care foregone in the short term means higher costs in the long term. When we fail at early detection with physical and mental illnesses, we obligate ourselves to pay much larger costs down the road. When our schools fail large numbers of young people, we end up paying down the road to expand our prison system. Economizing on these types of care is the purest instance of false economy; it is penny wise, pound foolish.

We already spend so much on the care economy that we cannot afford to keep making the same mistakes. Think, for example, of the health care dollars that we spend each year to respond to work-related stress. Wouldn't it make more sense to try to save a large portion of those outlays by taking steps to reduce the amount of job-related stress? Or think of the not-so-hidden epidemic of addiction to prescription drugs; wouldn't it be better to create a more caring and less stressful society where fewer people were tempted to "solve" their problems through the magic of chemistry?

What is involved in creating this unified economy? A full road map is not possible here, but we can identify three basic principles that should guide the process of unification. All of these principles depend, in turn, on the recognition that the regulation of market activity is absolutely indispensable if we are to create a humane and effective economy. This fundamental truth has been obscured by thirty years of celebratory rhetoric about the magic of free markets and the extraordinary gains that come from the individual pursuit of self-interest. But the lesson of our most recent series of corporate scandals is that the pursuit of self-interest quickly degenerates into criminality in the absence of effective systems of regulation. If we are to remain a civilized society, we have to abandon the fashionable rhetoric of "deregulation" and recognize that government regulators -- whether they are meat inspectors, bank auditors, enforcers of labor standards, or even tax collectors -- are actually quiet heroes defending our society from the insidious threat of runaway greed.

Hence, the first principle emphasizes the importance of regulations that protect and strengthen the care economy. We have constructed such regulations on occasion -- most recently when Congress passed the Family and Medical Leave Act -- but each effort encounters fierce resistance from those who claim that it is both unfair and economically irrational to impose any new costs on private businesses. But it is also wrong that businesses be allowed to impose costs on their employees that undermine the care economy as, for example, when employees are unable to honor their commitments to children and aging parents. As with any regulations, the task is to find the proper balance of these conflicting interests, but to do this, we have to abandon the fantasy that the care economy can survive without being nurtured and supported. For example, we desperately need rules that would keep large firms from expanding their market share by pushing labor costs and benefits to the lowest levels possible.

The second principle centers on the urgent need to reorganize our society's way of managing time. Both the thing economy and the care economy depend on human beings who are constrained by the scarcity of time. Whatever startling gains have been made in productivity, we haven't extended the 24-hour-day by a single second. And new technologies like the cell phone and e-mail are increasingly eliminating the divide between work time and private time. It is hardly controversial that the resulting time squeeze has become a pervasive source of misery and stress in our society. But despite many creative ideas for reconstructing our time economy, we have made very little progress because of a continuing reluctance to impose any new costs on employers. And yet this is extremely shortsighted since employees who were less stressed by problems of time management would certainly be more productive.

Finally, we have to change our way of thinking about the true requirements for quality care. The fashion for some time has been to think that health and education, for example, are just businesses and that tough systems of cost accounting and the use of performance indicators such as the number of patients treated or student test scores will get us the results we want. But the triumph of this bean-counting approach has resulted instead in rushed medical appointments where patients are allowed to discuss only one concern per visit and classrooms where teachers have no time to cultivate curiosity and love of learning because they must teach to the next round of standardized tests. The techniques of the thing economy simply don't work for producing quality health care and education. We have to return to the individual -- the patient or the student -- and figure out ways that each client, working in close cooperation with trained professionals, other clients, and volunteers, can become healthier and wiser.

Much more work has to be done to translate these principles into concrete policy proposals that could be debated in the political arena. And even more effort will be required to overcome the resistance to meaningful reform. But there is great leverage that comes from recognizing the problem of the divided economy and creating a positive vision of a unified economy in which the creation of quality care and the making of things are no longer in conflict. The result would be a moral economy that could reconcile our desire to prosper with our deepest moral and spiritual impulses.

Fred Block teaches economic sociology at the University of California at Davis. He is also a senior fellow with the Rockridge Institute.

© 2011 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.alternet.org/story/17146/
[w2]

Study challenges IDEA charters' success claims

To get a complete picture of the picture that is getting portrayed here, check out Ed Fuller's commentary on his blog: http://fullerlook.wordpress.com/2011/11/15/are-idea-charter-schools-a-good-idea-for-austin/

Important comment that he makes:

Regardless, it does not matter what the intentions of IDEA are. The fact remains that IDEA systematically enrolls students who are more advantaged than students remaining in the local public schools. This directly CONTRADICTS the claim by IDEA that they educate “underserved” students. In fact, IDEA has STILL NOT communicated how they define “underserved” students.

Critics need to consider that he uses the state's own data [2010 Academic Excellence Indicator System (AEIS)] to draw comparisons on the extent to which IDEA students are as "socioeconomically disadvantaged" as proponents say that they are.

Finally, in my view, there are serious questions and issues of governance. It is simply problematic to move toward any system that eliminates those structures about which parents have a vote. In fact, it is anti-democratic.

-Angela



Study challenges IDEA charters' success claims
By Melissa B. Taboada and Laura Heinauer

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Updated: 10:47 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011

Published: 10:32 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 15, 2011

IDEA Public Schools, which has basked in accolades for its highly ranked schools and has set its sights on revamping and running some of the Austin school district's most academically troubled campuses, might have an overrated reputation for teaching challenging populations, new research has found.

A study by a Pennsylvania State University researcher shows that the charter operator, which has 10 campuses in Texas, enrolls fewer English language learners and few students who are economically disadvantaged and need special education services. In contrast to IDEA's claims that all of its graduates enroll in college, the study found that 35 percent of IDEA ninth-graders withdraw by 11th grade.

Tom Torkelson, founder of IDEA, said the report has not been peer-reviewed and said the author — former University of Texas professor Ed Fuller — has a history of opposing charter schools. Torkelson said state data show 91.8 percent of IDEA's class of 2009 completed high school in four years.

Austin district Superintendent Meria Carstarphen, who has argued that the proposed partnership would boost academic offerings in East Austin, said Tuesday that Fuller's study isn't what she'd expect from professional scientific research. "He made no pretense about his purpose, and it wasn't to be objective," she said.

Fuller's study, "Is IDEA a good idea for Austin ISD?", was given exclusively to the American-Statesman on Tuesday by education labor groups that question the planned partnership with the charter group, which would use its own staff to teach and manage two or three East Austin campuses.

Fuller, now an associate professor and executive director of the Center for Education Evaluation and Policy Analysis at Penn State, has researched the Austin district in the past. The study is part of a broader body of research on high-performing charter schools in Texas and was funded by the Texas Business and Education Coalition and the Texas American Federation of Teachers, of which Education Austin is an affiliate.

The analysis given to the Statesman on Tuesday focuses on the South Texas charter school from the 2007-08 to the 2010-11 school year. Fuller's study concludes that IDEA's success should be questioned because the charter:

• Starts with a student body that includes lower percentages of students who are economically disadvantaged, are enrolled in bilingual education or have other special needs than the enrollment of surrounding school districts.

• Sends only 65 percent of its students to college. (His report had no comparable figure for other districts.) Although all of IDEA graduates go on to college, more than a third of students who are enrolled in ninth grade leave the charter school by 11th grade. Fuller considered students who left for any reason, arguing that state completion rates cited by Torkelson don't consider students who leave for reasons such as a change to home schooling or private school.

• Outperforms area high schools because the charter sheds lower-performing students , increasing "scores at the school and district levels even if the remaining students made no increase in achievement," the report said.

"No matter how you measure it, they actually have fewer underserved students than the schools that are in the same market that they serve," Fuller said Tuesday.

Fuller also found that fifth-grade students are less likely to enroll in IDEA if they are poor. "If they're going to enroll in East Austin, that's who you need to serve is the poor kids," he said. Fuller said his concern is that the charter is "just going to segregate by ability and further concentrate kids in doomed schools."

Torkelson said IDEA analyses show that students admitted to IDEA schools didn't pass the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills at higher rates than students attending other area public schools. About 19 percent of students enrolling at IDEA in sixth through 10th grades previously failed reading and math exams in 2011; the average for the region was closer to 15 percent, Torkelson said.

Torkelson said he agrees with one point in Fuller's report: "that IDEA is higher performing and that our students achieve amazing results."

"We believe that our results are a product of hard work and great teaching," Torkelson said. "The report implies, without sufficient evidence, that the only explanation for our results is factors outside the control of the school."

Torkelson said Fuller's claims that the charter skims the best kids from area districts is unfounded. Torkelson said representatives go door to door in low-income neighborhoods to inform students about the school, then hold an admission lottery.

Finally, fewer IDEA students are in special education because of successful early intervention by IDEA educators, Torkelson said.

Josie Duckett, a spokeswoman with the Texas Charter Schools Association, criticized Fuller's work, saying he leaves out individual academic growth measures that "would go a long way toward telling the true story about how well these schools are preparing kids."

"If attrition is something we need to look at, then we will — and in fact we already do plan to take a deeper dive in terms of our own data," Duckett said. "Ultimately, presenting data like this in a biased fashion isn't helpful," she said.

Trustee Sam Guzman, who represents neighborhoods IDEA would focus on, said he thinks Fuller's study unfairly attacks the charter operator. "I don't have a problem with people raising questions about IDEA or anything other option or program that we explore, but I would hope that people would be fair and open-minded in doing so," Guzman said.

Officials with Education Austin, which represents about 4,000 district workers, said they want to be sure any partnership focuses on better education for children.

"The (district's) motivation is the ability to appear innovative," said Ken Zarifis, the group's co-president.

Education Austin, which asked its parent labor group to share Fuller's findings, also has been putting together a proposal to run a charter school within the district.

mtaboada@statesman.com; 445-3620

lheinauer@statesman.com; 445-3694

Find this article at:

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Parents hear Austin school district proposal for all-girls, all-boys middle schools

By Ciara O'Rourke | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, Nov. 19, 2011

Parents weighed in Saturday morning on an Austin school district proposal to open two single-gender schools in their attendance zones, a move administrators believe could help improve some students' academic performance.

The district's $11.1 million proposal calls for putting the children at Pearce and Garcia middle schools in East Austin.

Boys would attend one school, and girls would attend the other, though the preliminary plans have not specified which campus would hold which school. The schools would serve 650 boys and 650 girls in grades six through eight. The proposal is part of a larger effort to improve the district's facilities.

Debra Clarke, an art teacher at Sims Elementary School who attended Saturday's community forum, said she supports the proposal in part because it helps girls become stronger and more independent without boys to distract them.

"It gives you that confidence," said Clarke, who attended Texas Woman's University.

Paula Rogers, who has two students at Sims Elementary School, urged administrators to ensure that children would not just have teachers of the same gender, but who also shared the same racial background. Rogers said she isn't necessarily in favor of single-gender schools, but she said she's willing to try it because she thinks the district has failed in teaching black children.

Trustees plan to vote on the proposals in December, though Superintendent Meria Carstarphen said it could be as late as 2013-14 before the single-gender schools open if they approve the plan.

"It depends on how ready we feel," she said.

Trustee Cheryl Bradley, who represents the area that includes the schools, said, "We're more concerned with doing it right than how fast we do it."

Other details, such as whether and when students from other attendance zones would be able to attend the schools, are also unknown.

Carstarphen said the district would start with students in the attendance area and then could expand to other zones, potentially using a lottery system to admit students.

The district's current single-gender school — the Ann Richards School for Young Women Leaders — opened in 2007 and takes applications from students from across the district.

In June, the Galveston-based Moody Foundation announced that it is giving the Austin district $4.6 million for the creation of a boys school that could open in 2013-14.

The Ann Richards school has earned the state's highest academic rating, but a University of Texas researcher challenged the school's success in a paper published in the journal Science in September.

In "The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Schooling," co-author Rebecca Bigler, a University of Texas psychology and women's and gender studies professor, argued that single-sex schools don't improve student performance any more than coeducational schools. Bigler said that high test scores were the result of the selective admissions policy and that single-sex education was not a wise investment of taxes.

District officials have countered that there also is a significant body of research that supports single-sex education. Carstarphen said that not all single-gender designs work. The district has pulled together best practices from a number of schools, she said, including Ann Richards.

Bradley, who initially presented the idea of introducing single-gender schools in the area to Carstarphen, called the proposal an "opportunity to help with the distractions that can plague some schools."

Visiting a South Austin middle school last summer where some summer school classes were divided by gender, Bradley said she saw a calmer, more attentive classroom than the classes that were coed.

Some parents at the forum asked why teachers don't already have the higher expectations that Carstarphen said she'd like to create at the proposed single-gender schools. Keisha Jones, who has two students in the district, said that if students had the right support from teachers and administrators, they could be successful regardless of the gender of the student body.

"Fixing the system takes a lot longer than helping this vertical team," Carstarphen said, referring to the elementary, middle and high schools in the LBJ and Reagan high school zones. "In the meantime, we can do a much better job at Garcia and Pearce."

corourke@statesman.com;

512-392-8750

Texas Teachers Say Classes Growing, Layoffs Widespread

Check out the findings from Texas AFT's study on "Destructive Budget Cuts Hitting Students and Teachers Hard"

-Patricia

by Morgan Smith | Texas Tribune
November 17, 2011

Since the Legislature's intention to cut $5.4 billion from public education became a reality, one question has dominated the conversation: just how bad will it be?

Not everyone comes up with the same answer. But the Texas American Federation of Teachers, the state branch of the nationwide teachers' association, has released the results of a web survey that reports extensive teacher layoffs, increasing class sizes and deteriorating work environments.

Here's a quick run through their results, which included 3,549 respondents, about 82 percent of whom identified as educators. (And remember, this is a web survey, not a scientific poll.)

· 92 percent said their district had eliminated positions — most reported between 10 to 50.

· 85 percent said the positions eliminated included teachers.
· 79 percent reported cuts to student programs including pre-K, special education, electives, and athletics.

· Tutoring was the program respondents most frequently reported as cut

· 87 percent said that class sizes had increased at both the elementary and secondary level.

The survey also asked respondents about their schools' climate for students, teachers, and staff — and how that compared to the year before. 81 percent said it was "worse" or "much worse," and 72 percent described it as "stressful and taxing."

The survey confirms the impact that the budget is having an impact on classroom instruction, Texas AFT president Linda Bridges said, adding that its results show that Gov. Rick Perry has been "spinning a tale" about balancing the budget without harming public education. She said that her organization planned a follow up survey in the spring, and noted that because of the way school districts have structured their budgets, most of the worst cuts are still to come.

As the new school year progresses, expect many more attempts at quantifying the effects of the budget cuts in public education.

Two DREAMers ponder their futures

Loren Campos and Juana Garcia were brought to the U.S. by their parents. They have educations, but they can't work in the U.S.


By Dave Harmon | AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF
Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011

Loren Campos graduated from the University of Texas in May with a degree in civil engineering. He said he waited until the last minute to buy his cap and gown and class ring.

"Graduation was the last thing that I wanted to think about," he said. "That was a difficult thing to go through."

It's a familiar sentiment among undocumented students. Graduation means confronting the fact that they have earned college degrees that they can't use in the United States.

For now, the 22-year-old Campos is sharing an apartment in Northeast Austin with two friends and selling cosmetics from out of his apartment. He's also active in the University Leadership Initiative, a group for undocumented students.

"I cannot work with my degree," he said. "I cannot get a driver's license."

He says he's watched other undocumented friends graduate from college, "and a lot of them go back to working low-wage jobs. ... It's just a waste of talent. It doesn't make sense to be investing in the education of students without having some sort of return on that investment."

The Texas Dream Act requires students to file paperwork to become legal residents. Campos did that in 2003, when he was 14. His sister, a U.S. citizen, is sponsoring him, and he figures he'll have to wait another seven years before his case is reviewed. That's because the number of people trying to legally immigrate with help from family members who are U.S. citizens dwarfs the limited number of visas issued each year.

And the waiting time depends on a complicated formula based on the immigrant's country of origin and their relationship to the person sponsoring them. According to the U.S. State Department website, Mexican citizens who are being sponsored by siblings and applied for visas in 1996 are just now eligible to get visas.

Campos said his mother brought him to Texas when he was 11 and his sister was 16. They entered the country with tourist visas and overstayed them. He said he begged his mother to take him back to Mexico within a few weeks of arriving in Houston. His mother refused.

He remembers being teased for carrying around a Bible-size Spanish-English dictionary in school while he was in English as a second language classes. By eighth grade, his English was good enough that he was put in regular classes. He applied to the engineering magnet program at Booker T. Washington High School — "just trying to take advantage of the opportunities that were given to me," he said — and quickly jumped into extracurricular activities like the robotics club, the math club and the soccer team.

To earn money, he worked as a baggage handler for a charter bus company that catered to Mexicans, and he worked at restaurants as a waiter, busboy and dishwasher.

He's the only member of his immediate family who is still undocumented — his two sisters married U.S. citizens and became permanent residents, followed by his mother, who was sponsored by one of his sisters. He said his mother is studying for the test to become a U.S. citizen.

He'd like to stay in the United States and design buildings that can withstand earthquakes. He's heard stories of the 1985 Mexico City earthquake from family and friends, and the earthquake in Haiti "inspired me to do something about it and contribute somehow."

"I grew up with the idea that America was the land of opportunity," he said. "I've basically grown up in this country; I don't know another country."

Juana Garcia was born in a village called Juan Aldama, in the state of Zacatecas in Central Mexico — a place she can't find on a map.

"I don't know the geography of Mexico, actually," she said.

She was a year old when her parents brought her to the United States. Now 21, she has no memories of Mexico.

Her father started coming to the United States when he was a teenager, working in Dallas restaurants. When she was born, her father didn't want to be separated from his first child and persuaded her mother to join him in the U.S.

They settled in Chicago, where all of her mother's family had migrated, then moved to Arlington when Garcia was 12. At each stop, her parents found work — her father operated forklifts in a warehouse and cooked in a hotel restaurant, while her mother cleaned hotels and malls and now works at a dry cleaner.

Garcia, who qualified for free and reduced school lunches, did well in school, taking Advanced Placement courses and singing in the choir. Growing up, she hid the fact that she was undocumented from friends, classmates and teachers — until her junior year of high school, when she was forced to confide in someone.

The choir had received a coveted invitation to sing at the American Choral Directors Association conference in Miami, all expenses paid. Excitement about the trip built all year, she said, as the choir rehearsed for the performance. Then her parents said no. She didn't have a driver's license, and they were afraid she'd be detained at the airport.

She had to tell her choir teacher that she couldn't go — and she had to tell her why. "It was so hard for me, because I had never told anyone face to face," Garcia said. "I remember I cried a lot over it." She said her teacher was supportive, which gave her confidence to speak up when she got to college.

Garcia finished in the top 10 percent of her class, went to community college for two years, then transferred to UT last year. She joined University Leadership Initiative and now serves as its social committee chairwoman. She was part of a group that traveled by bus to Washington to tell their story to U.S. senators, urging them to pass a federal DREAM Act. She said "coming out" in such a public way was liberating.

"Being around so many people that have done it already gives you a sense of comfort," she said. "You feel better not having to hide something. You shouldn't have to hide, because it's not your fault."

At times, she said, she's resented her parents' decision to bring her to the United States. When her younger brother and cousins — who are U.S. citizens by birth — would go to Mexico to visit relatives every summer, she stayed home. When her high school friends were learning to drive, she was reminded that she can't get a driver's license. When her college friends began getting summer internships and doing semesters abroad, she swallowed her jealousy.

"I've had my moments," she said, sipping a drink in a West Campus Starbucks, "but I'm glad I'm here."

And now, with a year to go before she gets her degree in elementary education, she knows she won't become an elementary school teacher unless Congress passes the DREAM Act.

"It's a very depressing idea because it's getting really close," she said.

UT Faculty Productivity Gets High Marks in New Report

Check out Musick's full report, "An analysis of faculty instructional and grant-based productivity at the University of Texas at Austin"

-Patricia

by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
November 13, 2011

Despite the arguments of critics in recent months, Marc Musick, the University of Texas at Austin’s College of Liberal Arts associate dean of student affairs, makes the case in a new faculty productivity report that his institution provides “an incredible return on investment for the state.”

Using data from the 2009-10 academic year made public by the University of Texas System this summer, Musick found that UT professors generated revenue of more than twice their compensation of $257 million in state funds for salary and benefits. By combining the amount of money paid by the state via a student enrollment-based formula and external funding for academic research, Musick concluded that the UT faculty generated about $558 million in total revenue for the university.

Musick’s report is the latest in a series of similar productivity studies that have been released over the course of a year marked by questions about the effectiveness of the state’s higher education system. The studies have come from a variety of sources using differing methodologies and reaching a wide range of conclusions, some of them strikingly negative. The latest release comes at a time when many of the key players in the state’s ongoing debate over higher education are poised to take the discussion on how to measure faculty productivity to a national level.

The topic became a hot-button issue in the spring, due in large part to a set of seven controversial proposals for higher education written by Austin businessman Jeff Sandefer in 2008 and promoted by Gov. Rick Perry and the Texas Public Policy Foundation, a conservative think tank of which Sandefer is a board member.

On Friday, Sandefer and others tied to the TPPF are participating in a higher education conference in Washington, D.C., put on by the Cato Institute, a prominent national conservative organization. According to information the institute posted online about the event, “One key question the conference will take on is how to assess the productivity of faculty members, including examining the groundbreaking — and highly controversial — efforts recently undertaken in the state of Texas."

An early December closed-door gathering in Indianapolis organized by UT President Bill Powers for the presidents and provosts of public universities in the Association of American Universities, an elite organization of research institutions, will also tackle the subject. “In particular, I would like to explore how we might foster richer deliberations about higher education productivity than we have seen recently in Texas and other states,” Powers wrote in his invitation.

While Musick’s new study demonstrates a high level of faculty productivity at the university, he acknowledged that it omits key elements of professors’ workload. “All it’s doing is measuring two things that the faculty do,” he said. “It’s measuring grants and its measuring teaching. But faculty do lots of different things. The data we have are extremely limited in what they can tell us.”

Still, Musick saw in the data opportunities to encourage more productivity. He recommends enhancing offerings for faculty mentorship, since the strongest-performing faculty tend to be more experienced. He said the number of students in some mid-size classes could be increased without sacrificing quality, freeing up resources for more of the smaller classes that students prefer. He also recommended that the university provide greater incentives for professors to pursue grants and more assistance with their submissions so that less of their time is spent on paperwork.

Most importantly, Musick said, faculty need to be evaluated based on accurate, comprehensive data that conveys their productivity over time as opposed to a single year.

“I completely agree with the idea of going out and getting data and analyzing it,” said Musick, who also released a report on university efficiency in September, “but it’s got to be helpful, it’s got to be thoughtful, its got to be done in the right way to make sure we are finding the truth and not just doing what’s easy to find quick answers.”

Undocumented students grateful to Perry for defending in-state tuition law

I do believe in giving credit where credit is due, Governor Rick Perry. The most credit though goes to the students themselves. This is the group that has inherited the social justice agenda, passion, and acumen of the Mexican American Civil Rights struggle. I have said this for a long time. Even if painful, as this struggle frequently is, this is the most hopeful, exciting, and truly promising movimiento in our community. Many of these are my students and they are exceptional. United We Dream!

Angela


Undocumented students grateful to Perry for defending in-state tuition law
'DREAMers' at UT have formed a group that fights to keep Texas law intact and pushes for federal Dream Act
By Dave Harmon

AMERICAN-STATESMAN STAFF

Updated: 1:34 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 13, 2011

Published: 9:29 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 12, 2011

In a nondescript room on the University of Texas campus, about 20 students chattered and laughed before Daniel Olvera called the meeting to order.

One by one, they introduced themselves: the mechanical engineering major who's building a computer program that analyzes MRI images of the heart; the music major who has played his viola in Carnegie Hall; the student who got his engineering degree, then decided to follow his heart and enroll in the School of Social Work.

They are the children of hotel housekeepers, restaurant cooks and construction workers. Some of them already have bachelor's or master's degrees from UT. But they can't legally drive to a job interview, and they couldn't legally accept a job if it were offered.

They are the undocumented students who have become central figures in this year's Republican presidential debates. Brought into the United States as children, they have gone through Texas public schools (a 1982 U.S. Supreme Court ruling allows them to attend public schools from kindergarten to 12th grade for free) and taken advantage of a state law that lets them attend Texas colleges and universities and pay in-state tuition.

Olvera and the others in the group call themselves DREAMers, named for the 2001 law commonly referred to as the Texas Dream Act that qualifies them for in-state tuition — and for the Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act, the federal bill they hope will one day pass and allow them to legally live and work in the United States. More than 16,000 of them were attending community colleges and universities across the state last year — including 612 at UT — and many of them are flocking to campus groups that have formed a growing national network aimed at fighting for undocumented students.

Gov. Rick Perry's opponents have used the law to slam him, saying he's being soft on illegal immigration. They point to the fact that at UT, non-Texas residents pay about $22,700 per year more than in-state students, or about $91,000 over four years. Perry has defended his record on border security and immigration enforcement but caused a stir among conservatives in one debate when he said that anyone who disagreed with Texas' law was "heartless."

In a Sept. 22 debate in Florida, Perry defended the law by saying: "We need to be educating these children because they will become a drag on our society. This was a state issue, Texans voted on it, and I still support it greatly." Many in the crowd booed. His opponents pounced.

"Why should they be given preferential treatment as an illegal in this country?" asked Rick Santorum.

Mitt Romney said: "That kind of magnet draws people into this country to get that education. It makes no sense."

Perry's defense of the law has made him more popular among undocumented students, who have soured on President Barack Obama because they believe he's broken his promise to pursue immigration reform.

"I may disagree with Rick Perry on a lot of things, but I do want to thank him because he passed (the law) and he's gotten a lot of heat about it and he hasn't backed down," said Olvera, the 22-year-old president of the University Leadership Initiative, a campus group made up of current and former undocumented immigrants.

Qualifying for tuition

Former state Rep. Rick Noriega, who introduced the Texas Dream Act in the state Legislature in 2001, said the idea for the bill grew from a meeting he had with Rosendo Ticas, an undocumented Nicaraguan immigrant who was mowing lawns in Houston but wanted to go to college to become an airline mechanic. Ticas told Noriega he couldn't afford the higher tuition charged to international students.

Noriega, a Houston Democrat, said he asked the University of Houston to do an anonymous survey in his inner-city district to see how many others were in Ticas' situation, and the study found so many of them that Noriega decided to file what would become House Bill 1403.

Noriega said he remembers seeing undocumented students from around Texas descend on the Capitol to testify in favor of the bill at a committee hearing.

"The committee room was packed, and the committee didn't leave until way past midnight to hear every story from every one of these kids," said Noriega, who now heads Avance, a San Antonio nonprofit aimed at helping low-income families prepare their children for school. "And I can tell you there wasn't a dry eye in the committee room. They passed it out of the committee that night on a unanimous vote."

Noriega said the business community helped give the bill the push it needed to reach Perry's desk. Groups such as the Texas Association of Business and the Dallas Chamber of Commerce came out in support, he said, arguing that the bill would help create a better-educated workforce. Only four lawmakers out of 181 voted against it. Noriega said Ticas went to college and is now a mechanic for Continental Airlines. He also became a U.S. citizen, Noriega said.

To qualify for in-state tuition, students have to fill out an affidavit promising to apply to become legal residents as soon as they are able to. They also have to graduate from a Texas high school that they attended for at least three consecutive years before graduation. U.S. citizens, by comparison, can receive in-state tuition after living in Texas for one year.

For the fiscal year that ended Aug. 31, 2010, the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board counted 16,476 students who had filled out the affidavits — or about 1 percent of the total enrollment in Texas colleges and universities, said coordinating board spokesman Dominic Chavez. About 12,000 of them attended community college.

Being considered Texas residents by the education system also allows undocumented students to compete for Texas Grant money, the taxpayer-funded awards given to students who show financial need. The state gave out more than 68,000 Texas grants in fiscal year 2010 totaling $274 million; Chavez said 2,156 grants totaling $7.8 million went to undocumented students — about 3 percent of the money. "They're just like any Texas resident. Some get (the grants); some don't," he said.

Chavez said undocumented students paid about $33 million in tuition and fees in 2010. "In-state tuition is not a free ride," he said.

But the idea that undocumented students are taking coveted slots at public universities — and getting taxpayer-funded grants to pay for their schooling — angers people like Maria Martinez, executive director of the Immigration Reform Coalition of Texas.

Chavez said she has a daughter at Texas A&M University at Galveston who didn't qualify for Texas Grant money, and some of her daughter's friends are from out of state and are paying significantly more than undocumented students.

"I think that's a travesty, that we have someone who can get a job here, but we favor people who can't work here," Chavez said. "I just think it's backwards."

The bill passed in a different political environment. It came before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks brought more focus on securing the nation's borders and before the economic meltdown and subsequent recession. Since 2001, opponents have tried to overturn the in-state tuition law during every legislative session — and have failed each time.

Rep. Charles Perry, R-Lubbock , filed a bill to nullify in-state tuition earlier this year. The bill never got out of the House Education Committee, he said, explaining that lawmakers were more focused on the state budget crisis during the session. He said Republicans will file similar legislation when they return in 2013.

Perry, who isn't related to the governor, said that because the law doesn't give students the right to legally work after graduation, the state has "not made a good investment" by giving them a tuition break. He also sees it as a magnet for more illegal immigration.

"If we continue to provide things for noncitizens, ... there's a heck of an incentive to draw folks in," he said.

Rick Perry's defense of the law has drawn the ire of many conservatives, along with groups like the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, which opposes illegal immigration.

Perry has called it a states' rights issue, but "when a policy induces illegal immigration, it becomes more than a states' rights issue," said Jon Feere, legal policy analyst at the center. "If Texas lays out the welcome mat for illegal immigrants, it affects the whole country.

"I just don't see why a student from Oklahoma should pay a higher tuition than a student from another country who happens to be in the country illegally," Feere said. "American citizens should come before illegal aliens."

Open about their status

Olvera was 11 when his mother brought him to Texas from Mexico, along with his brother and two sisters. He assimilated quickly in Houston public schools, going from English as a second language classes to regular classes to advanced placement classes. Now he's at UT, studying government and education and hoping to become a social studies teacher and work in underprivileged areas. Like his undocumented friends, Olvera can't get a driver's license and can't legally work to help pay for college. Scholarships and internships are mostly out of reach because of his immigration status.

Most of the UT DREAMers are open about their immigration status. When they speak in public, they often give their full names, followed by "I am undocumented and unafraid." They are politically sophisticated after years of lobbying state lawmakers at the Capitol and members of Congress in Washington. And like their peers, they are fluent in social media and using the Web to promote their cause.

The UT group has 30 to 40 active members, Olvera said. At one of their regular weekly meetings late last month, the 20 or so students and supporters of the group discussed the political ramifications of being used as an attack line by presidential candidates.

Julieta Garibay, the group's 31-year-old founder, warned the group that opponents of the law in the Legislature are likely to have the votes they need to reverse it in 2013.

But they won't let that happen without a struggle, she said.

"We're here for the long fight," Garibay told them. "We're here because we believe in this with all our heart."

Garibay said she was 12 when her mother brought her and her older sister to Austin from Mexico City, fleeing an abusive husband and the city's suffocating pollution. Garibay and her sister both graduated from Anderson High School. It was 1998, three years before the Texas Dream Act passed.

Garibay said she decided to return to Mexico to study nursing. During two years at the University of Guanajuato, she said, she was constantly criticized for being too outspoken, for dressing and talking like an American.

"I realized it wasn't my home anymore. Austin was my home," she said.

When she returned to Texas — she said she was driven across the border in a vehicle that was waved through by customs agents — she heard about a pilot program that allowed undocumented students to attend college, and got her associate degree from Dallas Community College.

The Dream Act allowed Garibay to fulfill her dream of attending UT. She put herself through the nursing program by waiting tables and baby-sitting and went on to get her master's in nursing.

The knowledge that she couldn't work as a nurse in the United States because of her undocumented status was a big part of her decision to start the University Leadership Initiative in 2005. Garibay, her sister and her mother were the first members. An additional 10 or 12 people joined the effort after they sent a message to other groups that had immigrant members, she said.

They met every week or two, she said, and started with a petition urging members of Congress to support a federal DREAM Act. And she and other members decided they could only be effective if they were open about the fact that they were undocumented. "There was a lot of fear," she said, but her mother supported her. "She said, 'You have to fight for what you believe in. Nobody else will do it for you.'"

The UT group is now part of a national network — called United We Dream — that emerged from the early battles for in-state tuition a decade ago.

Undocumented students in California, New York and other states began organizing to push for access to higher education, and those groups began connecting and supporting each other as each state debated the issue. Today, Texas is one of 12 states that give in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants.

In 2003, the groups organized under a new banner, the United We Dream Coalition, to push for a federal DREAM Act. Each time the legislation was introduced, students from across the country would descend on Washington to lobby Congress. But year after year, they've watched it fall short. One year, Garibay said, she left all three of her degrees at Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison's office in protest.

The trips to Washington led to more cross-pollination and a realization by the far-flung groups that they needed a national organization.

United We Dream launched in 2008, and Carlos Saavedra, who said he was brought to Massachusetts from Peru at age 12 and obtained legal residency a few years ago, became its first staffer.

Today, United We Dream has eight staff members and relies on donations from individuals and foundations to finance its work — which largely consists of supporting and organizing a national network that has grown to about 40 groups with 5,000 to 6,000 members, said Saavedra, the group's national coordinator.

DREAMers from around the country are gathering in Dallas for their national congress, which ends today . During the two-day gathering, Saavedra said, they will elect new leaders, attend panel discussions, decide what next year's campaign will be and attend training sessions on such topics as building new groups and media relations.

"Our theme for this year is Dream Nation, because we're growing so much," Saavedra said. "It's a good problem to have."

dharmon@statesman.com; 445-3645

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Interactive: A state-by-state look at voter ID laws for 2012 elections

Check out the interactive map of the states where voter ID laws go into effect in 2012here

This is crazy!

-Patricia

By Mary Mahling and Carla Uriona
Friday, November 04, 2011

When Mississippi decides on Initiative 27 next week, voters will determine whether or not they’ll have to show photo identification the next time they go to the polls. The election on Nov. 8 will be the final act of what has been a dramatic year for voter ID laws. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, dozens of states considered either passing new voter ID rules or tightening existing provisions to require not just an ID but a photo ID. In the first category, Kansas, Rhode Island and Wisconsin enacted new laws. In the second category, Alabama, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas tightened laws already on the books. The voter ID push came largely from Republicans, who say the rules are necessary to prevent voter fraud. Meanwhile, Democratic governors in Minnesota, Missouri, Montana, New Hampshire and North Carolina vetoed voter ID laws, calling them an unfair burden on voters who may not have driver’s licenses or other forms of government-issued identification.

It is important to note that even in some states where identification is required, voters without the requisite ID can still cast a ballot that will be counted. In Michigan, for example, a person without an ID can vote on the spot if he or she signs an affidavit, and several other states have similar failsafe systems for voters without ID. Voters who lack the requisite ID are advised to check with their state or local election officials to confirm whether they can still cast a ballot.

Despite Cuts, UT-Arlington Won't Increase Tuition

The article notes that, "UT-Arlington has experienced significant growth — thanks, in part, to the bolstering of its online offerings. This fall, enrollment reached an all-time high of 33,439 students, a 34 percent increase from five years ago. Under the current funding system, more students draw more state dollars."

Keywords: ONLINE OFFERINGS. The article also mentions savings generated from a hiring freeze and "voluntary departure of some faculty and staff."

-Patricia

by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
November 8, 2011

Despite shrinking state support, University of Texas at Arlington President Jim Spaniolo signaled today that his school would not raise tuition in the upcoming 2012-2013 academic year.

Since tuition deregulation in 2003, UT-Arlington has increased its price tag every year. The average annual tuition rate has risen from $4,123 in the 2001-2002 academic year to $9,292 this year. And that's where it will remain next year. Additionally, the annual rate for room and board at the school will stay steady at $7,554.

"Because we’re concerned about affordability, about the uncertain economy, about shrinking financial aid at the federal and state level, we wanted to make a statement to our students," Spaniolo told the Tribune.

Spaniolo made his recommendation Tuesday evening to UT-Arlington's tuition review committee, a group made up primarily of students. The institution's official request to the University of Texas System regents is not due until December, but Spaniolo anticipates that the usual consultation process that goes into it will be smoother than normal given this opening bid. The UT System regents had told institutions that they could request tuition increases of up to 2.6 percent for undergraduates and 3.6 percent for graduate students.

This is not necessarily meant to be a model for other institutions to follow, Spaniolo said. "We think that our circumstances are such that we can afford to do this, not that we have extra money," he said. For example, UT-Arlington has experienced significant growth — thanks, in part, to the bolstering of its online offerings. This fall, enrollment reached an all-time high of 33,439 students, a 34 percent increase from five years ago. Under the current funding system, more students draw more state dollars.

The university generated savings this year through a staff hiring freeze and the voluntary departure of some faculty and staff. Also, officials anticipate significant revenues from a large real estate development project next to campus that will bring in shops, student housing, and a special events arena.

Still, UT-Arlington is one of the institutions vying to be the state's next public top-tier university. That takes money, and money is tight. In 2001-2002, state support made up 45 percent of the school's revenue. This year, it only makes up 21 percent.

"We feel at the end of the day we’ll be ahead of the game taking this approach as opposed increasing tuition even by a modest amount in the next year or so," Spaniolo said. "We feel confident this will not slow us down."

With student debt becoming a growing concern, he said, "We want to make sure our students who are enrolled will stay enrolled, and those who might enroll will do so and continue on."

This could turn out to be just a temporary respite for students. Usually, the UT System sets tuition rates every other year, as they will do in early 2012. Along with its request to keep tuition steady next year, UT-Arlington will request the option to increase tuition up to the maximum allowed amount for 2013-2014 if that is deemed necessary.

ACLU Report Blasts Private Prisons

Check out the full report: Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration.

Here's the Executive Summary:

The imprisonment of human beings at record levels is both a moral failure and an economic one — especially at a time when more and more Americans are struggling to make ends meet and when state governments confront enormous fiscal crises. This report finds, however, that mass incarceration provides a gigantic windfall for one special interest group — the private prison industry — even as current incarceration levels harm the country as a whole. While the nation's unprecedented rate of imprisonment deprives individuals of freedom, wrests loved ones from their families, and drains the resources of governments, communities, and taxpayers, the private prison industry reaps lucrative rewards. As the public good suffers from mass incarceration, private prison companies obtain more and more government dollars, and private prison executives at the leading companies rake in enormous compensation packages, in some cases totaling millions of dollars.

The Spoils of Mass Incarceration
The United States imprisons more people — both per capita and in absolute terms — than any other nation in the world, including Russia, China, and Iran. Over the past four decades, imprisonment in the United States has increased explosively, spurred by criminal laws that impose steep sentences and curtail the opportunity to earn probation and parole. The current incarceration rate deprives record numbers of individuals of their liberty, disproportionately affects people of color, and has at best a minimal effect on public safety. Meanwhile, the crippling cost of imprisoning increasing numbers of Americans saddles government budgets with rising debt and exacerbates the current fiscal crises confronting states across the nation.

Leading private prison companies essentially admit that their business model depends on high rates of incarceration. For example, in a 2010 Annual Report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), the largest private prison company, stated: "The demand for our facilities and services could be adversely affected by . . . leniency in conviction or parole standards and sentencing practices . . . ."

As incarceration rates skyrocket, the private prison industry expands at exponential rates, holding ever more people in its prisons and jails, and generating massive profits. Private prisons for adults were virtually non-existent until the early 1980s, but the number of prisoners in private prisons increased by approximately 1600% between 1990 and 2009. Today, for-profit companies are responsible for approximately 6% of state prisoners, 16% of federal prisoners, and, according to one report, nearly half of all immigrants detained by the federal government. In 2010, the two largest private prison companies alone received nearly $3 billion dollars in revenue, and their top executives, according to one source, each received annual compensation packages worth well over $3 million.

A Danger to State Finances
While supporters of privatization tout the idea that governments can save money through private facilities, the evidence for supposed cost savings is mixed at best. As state governments across the nation confront deep fiscal deficits, the assertion that private prisons demonstrably reduce the costs of incarceration can be dangerous and irresponsible. Such claims may lure states into building private prisons or privatizing existing ones rather than reducing incarceration rates and limiting corrections spending through serious criminal justice reform.

This year, advocates of for-profit prisons trotted out privatization schemes as a supposed answer to budgetary woes in numerous states:

Arizona has announced plans to award 5,000 additional prison beds to private contractors, despite a recent statement by the Arizona Auditor General that for-profit imprisonment in Arizona may cost more than incarceration in publicly-operated facilities. Arizona's Department of Corrections is the only large agency in that state not subject to a budget cut in fiscal year 2012 — in fact, the Department's budget increased by $10 million. According to a news report, private prison employees and corporate officers contributed money to Governor Jan Brewer's reelection campaign, and high ranking Brewer Administration officials previously worked as private prison lobbyists.
Florida has responded to exploding incarceration costs largely through increasing reliance on private prisons. Although the assertion that private prisons save taxpayer money is highly questionable, supporters of privatization, according to a recent news report, claim that privatization in Florida is necessary to rein in the prison system's budget, which stood at $2.3 billion in 2010. A recent editorial in the Orlando Sentinel expressed the view that privatization "has eclipsed and shelved potentially more fruitful, cost-effective changes. One of them is sentencing reform." On September 30, 2011, a Florida court enjoined the Department of Corrections from implementing the privatization of prisons in 18 counties, finding that the planned privatization failed to comply with procedures mandated by state law. The court stated, "[t]he decision to issue only one [request for proposal] and only one contract for all 29 prison facilities [subject to proposed privatization] was based on convenience and speed, … rather than on any demonstrated savings or benefit advantage."
Ohio recently announced that it will become, on December 31, 2011, the first state in the nation to sell a publicly operated prison, Lake Erie Correctional Facility, to a private company, CCA. Notably, the head of Ohio's corrections department had served as a managing director of CCA. The claim that prison privatization demonstrably reduces costs and trims government budgets may detract from the critical work of reducing the state's prison population.
Louisiana narrowly defeated a proposal, pushed by Governor Bobby Jindal in a desperate attempt to generate short-term revenue, to sell off three state prisons to private companies. The Louisiana House Appropriations Committee blocked the bill by a vote of 13-12, with legislators expressing deep concern about the wisdom of selling off the state's assets.
The federal government is in the midst of a private prison expansion spree, driven primarily by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), an agency that locks up roughly 400,000 immigrants each year and spends over $1.9 billion annually on custody operations. ICE now intends to create a new network of massive immigration detention centers, managed largely by private companies, in states including New Jersey, Texas, Florida, California and Illinois. According to a news report, in August 2011, ICE's plans to send 1,250 immigration detainees to Essex County, New Jersey threatened to unravel amid allegations that a private prison company seeking the contract, whose executives enjoyed close ties to Governor Chris Christie, received "special treatment" from the county. The fiscal crisis confronting the federal government, however, has done nothing to dampen Washington's spending binge on privatized immigration detention.

Atrocious Conditions
While evidence is mixed, certain empirical studies show a heightened level of violence against prisoners in private institutions. This may reflect in part the higher rate of staff turnover in private prisons, which can result in inexperienced guards walking the tiers. After an infamous escape from an Arizona private prison in 2010, for example, the Arizona Department of Corrections reported that at the prison, "[s]taff are fairly 'green' across all shifts," "are not proficient with weapons," and habitually ignore sounding alarms. Private facilities have also been linked to atrocious conditions. In a juvenile facility in Texas, for example, auditors reported, "[c]ells were filthy, smelled of feces and urine."

Just three weeks before the release of this report, prisoner fights in several locations throughout a private prison in Oklahoma left 46 prisoners injured and required 16 inmates to be sent to the hospital, some of them in critical condition. The risks to safety confronting inmates in private prisons are especially relevant at present, as the U.S. Supreme Court considers a case that could, depending on the outcome, prevent federal prisoners in private institutions from seeking compensation for constitutional violations — including deliberate indifference to prisoners' physical well being.

Shrewd Tactics
Certain private prison companies employ shrewd tactics to obtain more and more government contracts to incarcerate prisoners. In February 2011, for example, a jury convicted former Luzerene County, Pennsylvania Judge Mark Ciavarella of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy in connection with payments received from a private prison developer. Tactics employed by some private prison companies, or individuals associated with the private prison industry, to gain influence or acquire more contracts or inmates include: use of questionable financial incentives; benefitting from the "revolving door" between public and private corrections; extensive lobbying; lavish campaign contributions; and efforts to control information.

* * * *

Part One of this Report traces the rise of the for-profit prison industry over the past 30 years, demonstrating that private prisons reaped lucrative spoils as incarceration rates reached historic levels. Part Two focuses on the supposed benefits associated with private prisons, showing that the view that private prison companies provide demonstrable economic benefits and humane facilities is debatable at best. Part Three discusses the tactics private prison companies have used to obtain control of more and more human beings and taxpayer dollars.

The time to halt the expansion of for-profit incarceration is now. The evidence that private prisons provide savings compared to publicly operated facilities is highly questionable, and certain studies point to worse conditions in for-profit facilities. The private prison industry helped to create the mass incarceration crisis and feeds off of this social ill. Private prisons cannot be part of the solution — economic or ethical — to the problem of mass incarceration.

-Patricia

by Haleigh Svoboda | Texas Tribune
11/3/2011

A report released Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union criticizes the private prison industry for profiting at the expense of a growing prison population.

The report, titled “Banking on Bondage: Private Prisons and Mass Incarceration," accuses private prison companies of lobbying for laws that result in higher incarceration rates. Higher incarceration rates result in more government contracts, which, according to the report, are the primary source of funding for these companies.

“Mass incarceration needlessly wastes scarce tax dollars, contributes to torn communities, and disproportionally affects people of color; too many nonviolent offenders are behind bars, which contributes nothing to public safety,” Terri Burke, executive director of the ACLU of Texas, said in a press release.

Two leading industry companies, Corrections Corporation of America and the GEO Group, received a combined $3 billion in annual revenue in 2010. According to the report, the CCA acknowledged in records submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission that current sentencing laws increase the company’s profits.

CCA officials could not be reached for comment. The GEO Group declined to comment.

In 2010, the U.S. prison population made up 25 percent of the world’s prisoners, according to the Congressional Research Service. The U.S. incarcerates roughly 2.3 million people, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

In a press release, the ACLU said that lobbying and campaign contributions are two tactics used by private prison companies to secure more government contracts. The release also said that both CCA and GEO donated to Gov. Rick Perry’s 2010 gubernatorial campaign. Government contracts at the local, state and federal levels make of part of these companies’ revenues.

A&M Chancellor Sharp Making His Mark, Cutting His Pay

by Reeve Hamilton | Texas Tribune
November 6, 2011

Eight weeks after he was put in charge of the Texas A&M University System, Chancellor John Sharp is shuffling the top staff, hiring management consultants to streamline the administration and cutting his own pay.

So far, none of the changes are as dramatic or headline-grabbing as his sudden firing of Deputy Chancellor Jay Kimbrough in September. In fact, they are all telegraphed in a report by his transition team (attached below).

That team included System General Counsel Ray Bonilla, Sharp's former comptroller's chief of staff Tom Duffy, former Deputy Comptroller Billy Hamilton, and E.J. Pederson, a former executive vice president of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and a close friend of the chancellor.

"Our overall conclusion is that while some organizational changes are needed, the Texas A&M University System has enormous potential to achieve sustained greatness as one of the premier public university systems in the nation — and in the world," they wrote in the introduction to their report. They said their findings are not definitive but are designed to quickly address needed organizational changes.

Sharp told The Texas Tribune he concurs with nearly all of the recommendations. One called for placing all communications and public relations staff throughout the system on annual contracts so that the system's overall messaging could be reviewed frequently. Instead, Sharp and the A&M System regents decided that such personnel will simply serve at the will of the chancellor and their respective president.

Many of the recommendations have already been met or are about to be. The report calls for an outside management review of the administration, and this week it was announced that MGT of America — which Sharp has called upon in the past — has been secured for the project. Frank Ashley, the current vice chancellor of academic affairs, has been moved into the newly recommended role of vice chancellor of diversity. A new vice chancellor for government affairs who will coordinate their federal and state relations had also been selected. Greg Anderson, previously the system's chief investment officer, is now the system's new chief financial officer.

While it was not recommended by the team, Sharp has also cut his own salary by 5 percent. He said he was inspired by Prairie View A&M University President George C. Wright, who responded to current financial difficulties to returning to the classroom. Sharp said he's not a good teacher, but hoped this sacrifice — which takes his salary down to $507,000 — might strike a similar symbolic chord. He described it as "good for the goose, good for the gander."

Ultimately, Sharp said he hoped the changes he has made — and those that are on the way — have sent a message to the A&M, legislative and Texas communities. "We just want to get everybody on the same page," he said. "We want the Legislature to know we're being inclusive all over the state of Texas. We will have our organization in place to where it's doing the most efficient job possible."

Here's the full transition team report, including what members say should be done about the system's airplanes.