The Business of Philanthropy

John Wilson the former National Education Association executive director, and now, a senior fellow at the Pearson Foundation, roused up yesterday to push back against recent New York Times stories implicating school administrators who took international trips sponsored by his foundation. After casting a few aspersions at the Times, whose foundation, he says, does the same thing, Wilson claimed the tours were simply philanthropy. No ulterior motives.

Still, Wilson readily admits his own conflict of interest. But in his mind, it was "the media attention to these innocent study tours [that] has created an appearance of inappropriateness and a suspicion around business decisions. Wilson complained that the Times' "reporter has not provided all the information about the strict ethics laws that educational leaders follow before taking advantage of these study tours."

I would have thought the trips themselves created the appearance of impropriety and it was incumbent upon the CCSSO, the Pearson Foundation and the travelers themselves to show otherwise, as Lu Young has begun to do. It is the media that has kept attention on issues related to private companies jockeying for public funds - which, as Wilson fails to point out, are at the end of the rainbow for Pearson.

I guess one person's philanthropy is another person's loss leader.

This from John Wilson Unleashed:

Sometimes Philanthropy is just Philanthropy

I have read with interest the articles in the New York Times attacking education leaders for taking study trips that were underwritten by the Pearson Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Pearson Education. I will admit that after the first article, I had hoped that this would be a one-time article by a cynical reporter looking for a good story that would resonate. Now, there have been two other articles. Of course, I could be cynical, too, and assume that his corporate bosses are pushing this story for other reasons since I know the New York Times Foundation has sponsored very similar trips.

After retiring as Executive Director of the National Education Association, I chose to accept a Senior Fellow position with the Pearson Foundation. I agreed to three days a month to assist Pearson Foundation leaders on fulfilling their mission around literacy, learning, and great teaching. I admit to a conflict of interest when defending this foundation that supports public education and teachers; however, I have no such conflict when it comes to telling what I know to be true.

I attended the study trips in Helsinki, London, and Rio de Janeiro as a voice for teacher unions. The trips were all organized by the Council of Chief State School Officers. That is one of many things I like about the Pearson Foundation. They trust educators to plan their own professional development. The programs were designed and executed by CCSSO staff. There were no sales presentations or side conversations about Pearson products. It was purely an educational study tour of countries doing better at student achievement than the United States. It was about deep and engaging conversations with leaders of those high-achieving countries. It was an experience that could not have occurred without philanthropic support. I worry when our educational leaders are "siloed" and not allowed to experience the global community that exists today, and I am impressed when they take the opportunity to learn from others.

I understand that the media attention to these innocent study tours has created an appearance of inappropriateness and a suspicion around business decisions. That is unfortunate and unfair. I do believe this reporter has not provided all the information about the strict ethics laws that educational leaders follow before taking advantage of these study tours. While education leaders may choose to decline to do future trips, I hope government will budget for our leaders to have a global perspective. I also hope Pearson Foundation will continue giving teachers the opportunity to visit other countries and for Teachers of the Year to come together and share best practices. I hope the Pearson Foundation will continue to donate thousands of books to schools and children to expand literacy. I hope the Foundation will continue to fund schools that are teaching our students 21st Century skills through digital media.

I hope others will speak up about the good work that philanthropic organizations like the Pearson Foundation do. They are vital to the success of our public schools. Let's not punish those who are willing to fund educational interests that government does not. Let's use as much ink to praise good work and publish truth.

For me, I subscribe to the words of Swedish statesman and former United Nations Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold, "Never, for the sake of peace and quiet, deny your own experience or convictions." I invite you to speak your truth.

Teach Your Teachers Well

This from the New York Times:

Arne Duncan, the secretary of education, recently called for sweeping changes to the way we select and train teachers. He’s right. If we really want good schools, we need to create a critical mass of great teachers. And if we want smart, passionate people to become these great educators, we have to attract them with excellent programs and train them properly in the substance and practice of teaching.

Our best universities have, paradoxically, typically looked down their noses at education, as if it were intellectually inferior. The result is that the strongest students are often in colleges that have no interest in education, while the most inspiring professors aren’t working with students who want to teach. This means that comparatively weaker students in less intellectually rigorous programs are the ones preparing to become teachers.

So the first step is to get the best colleges to throw themselves into the fray. If education was a good enough topic for Plato, John Dewey and William James, it should be good enough for 21st-century college professors.

These new teacher programs should be selective, requiring a 3.5 undergraduate grade point average and an intensive application process. But they should also be free of charge, and admission should include a stipend for the first three years of teaching in a public school...

To fix our schools, we need teaching programs that are as rich in resources, interesting, high-reaching and thoughtful as the young people we want to attract to the profession. Show me a school where teachers are smart, well-educated, skilled and happy to be there, and I’ll show you a group of children who are getting a good education.

The Wealthiest Americans Ever

Another great New York Times interactive graphic: This one looks at personal wealth as a percentage of the economy at the time.

And this guy's Number One.

How Hard Can It Be to Teach? The Challenges Go Well Beyond the Classroom

One of my all-time favorite moments covering the New York City public school system occurred just before Christmas in 2003, at Public School 28 in Harlem. About 50 or 60 second graders, onstage in the school auditorium, serenaded Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein with a perfect rendition of “Feliz Navidad.”

When the singing stopped, Mr. Bloomberg applauded. “Children, that was beautiful,” he said. “Now, what I want you to do is say ‘Merry Christmas’ and ‘Happy New Year,’ first in Spanish, then in English.”

The problem was not a language barrier — nearly all of the children at P.S. 28 are bilingual — but rather the mayor’s notion that he could give four simultaneous commands to a group of 7-year-olds, as if they were his aides in the bullpen at City Hall or executives at his company, Bloomberg L.P.

Still, the students who had just finished singing so sweetly in unison dutifully tried to grant Mr. Bloomberg’s request.

“Meyeow, weow, eowah, eiwash, iwah,” they mumbled. Or something like that.
Working with children looks easy. It is not.

In four and a half years on the city schools beat, I have often repeated this anecdote to principals. And typically they chuckle, grateful for the recognition that many people, including the mayor, may underestimate how difficult it is to work in schools on a daily basis, and not just because of the intellectual challenges of teaching.

School professionals are called upon not only to educate children, but also to nurture curiosity and civic values, and even to teach the most basic manners. Once, while waiting to have lunch with my mother, now retired after more than 30 years as a teacher in a city elementary school, I stood in her school’s main entrance and watched a teacher walk by with her class, shouting: “Fingers out of your nose! Fingers out of your nose!”

Not only do professional educators have to know how to deal with children, they have to be clever about soothing an even wackier bunch: parents...

This from the New York Times.

Department of Justice civil rights focus shifting from race to religion: NYT

US Department of Justice (DOJ) civil rights investigations in the Bush administration have focused on issues of religious freedom and discrimination at the expense of race, the New York Times reported Thursday.

As an extreme instance, the Times pointed to DOJ intervention in a case helping a religious group secure the right to "distribute candy canes as part of a religious message that the red stripes represented the blood of Christ." The DOJ Civil Rights Division has also been active in enforcing a 2000 law that allows houses of worship to be exempt from local zoning restrictions, bringing lawsuits on behalf of churches, synagogues, and mosques across the country.

Since 2004, the department has maintained a semi-monthly newsletter focusing exclusively on religious freedom.The Times also highlighted unprecedented DOJ hirings [NYT chart] of graduated law students from a new wave of religious-affiliated law schools such as Regent University and Ave Maria . It quoted former DOJ lawyer Rigel Oliveri, who worked in the department during the Clinton and early Bush years, as saying that with increasing political appointee oversight of hiring decisions, "the change in the quality of people who were chosen was very pronounced," compared to previous years when hires from Harvard, Yale and other prestigious top-tier law schools dominated the department.

This from Jurist. The New York Times has more.

Kids’ growth patterns tied to adult hypertension

Development may impact kidneys or liver, leading to condition, study says

NEW YORK - Two distinct patterns of childhood growth may raise the odds of developing high blood pressure later in life, a new study suggests.

Low birth weight has been linked to high blood pressure and heart disease in adulthood by a number of studies. Researchers suspect that poor growth in the womb may “program” the body’s metabolism and development in ways that raise the odds of cardiovascular disease.

In the new study, researchers identified two different patterns of childhood growth, from birth to age 11, that were linked to high blood pressure in older age.

People with the first pattern tended to be short and underweight at birth, and to then gain weight slowly until age 2. After 2 years of age, they put pounds on more rapidly, so by the age of 11, they were of average body size.

People with the second pattern were also relatively short at birth and gained weight slowly throughout childhood, but by age 11, they were shorter and thinner than average.

This from MSNBC.

School Basics: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, Real Estate

LIKE the number of bedrooms or proximity to parks, quality of schools is a factor that can make or break a decision on whether to plunk down a small fortune on a house.

Not surprisingly, then, towns with blue-ribbon public school systems — like Greenwich, Fairfield and West Hartford — have consistently commanded some of the higher home prices in the state.

But prices within a town can fluctuate, even by neighborhood, based on the strength of the local elementary school, according to a new study by seven professors and students at Trinity College.

The study examined the relationship between grade-school test scores and home prices in West Hartford’s 11 elementary school districts, and found that as one climbed, so did the other, in specific and predictable increments.

This from the New York Times.

House Panel Passes Bill to Cut Subsidies to Student Lenders

WASHINGTON, June 13 — The House education committee voted Wednesday to cut subsidies to student lenders and to halve the interest rates on a key student loan program over the next five years.

The bill, approved in a 30-to-16 vote that included many Republicans on the yes side, underscored the vastly changed landscape facing the student loan industry, which is facing major challenges this year, including investigations of its marketing and underwriting practices. The Senate education committee is taking up its own bill next week, expected to include even deeper cuts in subsidies to lenders than the $19 billion in the House bill, and President Bush also proposed cuts in payments to lenders.

This from the New York Times.

Cuomo Broadens Student Loan Inquiry

Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, whose scrutiny of student loans exposed secret ties between universities and lenders, said that he was broadening his investigation to examine the criteria lenders use when making loans and whether they violated civil rights statutes.

Testifying last week at a Senate Banking Committee hearing on private student loans, which do not carry federal guarantees, Mr. Cuomo said he would examine whether lenders were discriminating against students based on the institutions they are attending or other factors not directly related to their credit history.

What criteria are they using in the underwriting of these loans? Mr. Cuomo asked. Parental income? Student income? Student credit worthiness? How about the school you attend? How is that weighted?

While lenders have the right to consider a borrower's credit record in extending a loan, he said, "there are also civil rights and legal ramifications to what criteria they use, and that's what we're looking at."

He suggested that students at historically black colleges and universities were sometimes hit with more onerous interest rates and fees than other students.

This from the New York Times.

Miami Argues Over Removal of Schoolbook on Cuba

A three-judge panel heard arguments earlier this month over the Miami-Dade County school board’s decision to remove a children’s book about Cuba from elementary school libraries. Board members said the book painted too rosy a picture of life in Cuba.

“The books are rife with factual omissions, misrepresentations and inaccuracies that render them educationally unsuitable,” Richard Ovelmen, a lawyer for the board, told the judges in the Federal Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit. “The basic fact that there is a dictatorship, that there is a regime of 48 years is not mentioned.”

But a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, JoNel Newman, argued, “The school board can’t pull a book because of a political viewpoint.”

The board initially took the 32-page book, “Vamos a Cuba,” and its English version, “A Visit to Cuba,” off school library shelves in June 2006 after a parent objected to its contents.

The book, written by Alta Schreier and published in 2001, is part of a 24-book series for children in kindergarten through second grade that discusses travel around the world and different cultures. Its cover shows smiling schoolchildren dressed in the uniform of the Pioneers, the Communist youth group to which every Cuban student must belong.

This from the New York Times.

A Plan to Pay for Top Scores on Some Tests Gains Ground

Roland G. Fryer, a 30-year-old Harvard economist known for his study of racial inequality in schools, is back in New York to again promote a big idea: Pay students cash for high scores on standardized tests and their performance might improve. And he has captured the attention of Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein and Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg.

Across the country, educators have been experimenting with cash incentives. A program in Chelsea, Mass., gave children $25 for perfect attendance. Some Dallas schools pay children $2 for each book they read.

But the idea is controversial. Many educators maintain, among other objections, that children have to learn for the love of it, not for cash.

...“It makes me really nervous,” said Maggie Siena, the principal of Public School 150 in TriBeCa. “I suspect paying kids for achievement in any way tends not to work.”

...“The fundamental problem with education and motivating kids to learn what they need to learn is that the payoffs are so distant,” said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, a left-leaning research organization. “So it’s very hard to motivate students to do well. Good students get that motivation from somewhere — from peers, their parents, how they’re raised — but the kids who are unmotivated have a very hard time understanding that what they do today pays off decades from now.”

This from the New York Times.

Grade-School Girls. Grown-Up Gossip.

Well before they experience puberty, children today are deeply immersed in the dirty laundry of celebrities — their eating disorders, bouts with drinking and drugs, and run-ins with the law (and one another). The gritty details are all around them: on the Web, on cable, at the top of the network news and splashed across the covers of magazines.

The prevailing wisdom is that exposure to vast amounts of gossip, particularly about Hollywood’s so-called bad girls — Ms. Hilton, Ms. Spears and Lindsay Lohan, to name the most frequently chastised — is leading America’s impressionable 8-to-12-year-old girls into the gutter. But the reality is more complex.

In interviews, tweens tend to be highly judgmental of the much-publicized antics, turning them into age-appropriate morality tales that would make their parents proud and bring comfort to those who fear the next generation will be made up of pantyless party girls known more for their D.W.I.s than their G.P.A.s.

]This from the New York Times.

Redshirting: When Should a Kid Start Kindergarten?

According to the apple-or-coin test, used in the Middle Ages, children should start school when they are mature enough for the delayed gratification and abstract reasoning involved in choosing money over fruit.

In 15th- and 16th-century Germany, parents were told to send their children to school when the children started to act “rational.”

And in contemporary America, children are deemed eligible to enter kindergarten according to an arbitrary date on the calendar known as the birthday cutoff — that is, when the state, or in some instances the school district, determines they are old enough.

The birthday cutoffs span six months, from Indiana, where a child must turn 5 by July 1 of the year he enters kindergarten, to Connecticut, where he must turn 5 by Jan. 1 of his kindergarten year. Children can start school a year late, but in general they cannot start a year early. As a result, when the 22 kindergartners entered Jane Andersen’s class at the Glen Arden Elementary School near Asheville, N.C., one warm April morning, each brought with her or him a snack and a unique set of gifts and challenges, which included for some what’s referred to in education circles as “the gift of time.”

This from the New York Times.

What CLASS are you?

The NY Times helps you figure out

HOW CLASS WORKS

While there are many characteristics that might be used to describe one's class, among the most influential are Occupation, Education, Income and Wealth. This interactive graphic helps you look at these factors. The 1st tab shows the Components of Class; the 2nd tab looks at How Class Breaks Down; the 3rd tab looks at Income Mobility; the 4th tab presents the data from a NY Times nationwide poll on class issues.

For more on this topic, check out the NY Times special section: Class Matters.

ABOUT THE SERIES

A team of reporters spent more than a year exploring ways that class - defined as a combination of income, education, wealth and occupation - influences destiny in a society that likes to think of itself as a land of unbounded opportunity.

� Day 1: Overview

� Day 2: Health

� Day 3: Marriage

� Day 4: Religion

� Day 5: Education

� Day 6: Immigration

� Day 7: New Status Markers

� Day 8: The 'Relo' Class

� Day 9: The Hyper-Rich

� Day 10: Class and Culture

� Day 11: Up From the Projects

50 Years Later, Little Rock Can’t Escape Race

Black students like Elizabeth Eckford faced hatred to integrate Central High in Little Rock, Ark., in 1957. Today white school board members are supporting an embattled black superintendent. Photo by Will Counts/Associated Press.

Fifty years after the epic desegregation struggle at Central High School, the school district here is still riven by racial conflict, casting a pall on this year’s ambitious commemorative efforts.

In the latest clash, white parents pack school board meetings to support the embattled superintendent, Roy Brooks, who is black. The blacks among the school board members look on grimly, determined to use their new majority to oust him. Whites insist that test scores and enrollment have improved under the brusque, hard-charging Mr. Brooks; blacks on the board are furious that he has cut the number of office and other non-teaching jobs and closed some schools.

The fight is all the more disturbing to some here because it erupted just as a federal judge declared Little Rock’s schools finally desegregated, 50 years after a jeering white mob massed outside Central High to turn back integration.

In 1957, the fight was over whether nine black students could attend an entirely white high school. Now it is over whether the city’s black leaders can exert firm control over the direction and perquisites of an urban school district in the way that white leaders did for decades.

This from the New York Times.

U. of Texas Fires Officer Over Tie to Loan Company

The University of Texas fired the director of financial aid at its Austin campus for improper conduct last week, reporting that he had more ties to a student loan company than had been known and had begun recommending the lender to students a few months after he bought stock in its parent company.

The university announced the dismissal of the director, Lawrence W. Burt, who had been on paid leave since last month, as it released a 33-page report — with an additional 100 pages of internal e-mail messages, letters and analyses from the Austin financial aid office — that provided the most detailed public documentation yet of how lenders sought favor inside a university.

The report described a university financial aid office that was oblivious to conflicts of interest and kept meticulous track of “lender treats” like ice cream, happy hours and birthday cakes that apparently were considered in deciding whether to put loan companies on lists of lenders recommended to students. The report called the compilation of such lists “flawed” and done at the sole discretion of Dr. Burt, who was placed on leave after it was disclosed he held stock in Education Lending Group while making decisions about Student Loan Xpress, one of its affiliates.

“It is not at all clear that the factors considered by Dr. Burt” in putting together lender lists “served the students’ best interests or, even if they did, it is not clear how these factors were weighed in making the final decision,” the report said. It said Student Loan Xpress was one of the most frequent givers of “treats.”

This from the New York Times.

Students Gain Only Marginally on Test of U.S. History

Federal officials reported last week that students in 4th, 8th and 12th grades had scored modestly higher on an American history test than five years earlier, although more than half of high school seniors still showed poor command of basic facts like the effect of the cotton gin on the slave economy or the causes of the Korean War.

This from the New York Times.

New Demographic Racial Gap Emerges

With the number of nonwhite Americans above 100 million for the first time, demographers are identifying an emerging racial generation gap.

That development may portend a nation split between an older, whiter electorate and a younger overall population that is more Hispanic, black and Asian and that presses sometimes competing agendas and priorities.

This from the New York Times.

U. of Texas Fires Officer Over Tie to Loan Company

The New York Times reports:

The University of Texas fired the director of financial aid at its Austin campus for improper conduct yesterday, reporting that he had more ties to a student loan company than had been known and had begun recommending the lender to students a few months after he bought stock in its parent company.

The university announced the dismissal of the director, Lawrence W. Burt, who had been on paid leave since last month, as it released a 33-page report — with an additional 100 pages of internal e-mail messages, letters and analyses from the Austin financial aid office — that provided the most detailed public documentation yet of how lenders sought favor inside a university.

The report described a university financial aid office that was oblivious to conflicts of interest and kept meticulous track of “lender treats” like ice cream, happy hours and birthday cakes that apparently were considered in deciding whether to put loan companies on lists of lenders recommended to students. The report called the compilation of such lists “flawed” and done at the sole discretion of Dr. Burt, who was placed on leave after it was disclosed he held stock in Education Lending Group while making decisions about Student Loan Xpress, one of its affiliates.

Spellings Pulls A Gonzales

Alexander Russo's blog commentary from This Week in Education was recently picked up by the Huffington Post. Here's his take on Spelling's Capitol Hill performance last week.

The only thing saving Education Secretary Margaret Spellings

from drifting into Alberto Gonzales territory

right now is, well, Alberto Gonzales.

If it weren't for the fact that everyone's attention is focused on him, more folks would notice that Spellings has been up to some very Gonzales-like things over at the Department of Education. (You can watch a video of the testimony here.)

In response to the growing litany of reports and investigations surrounding misdeeds in the multi-billion-dollar student lending industry, Spellings has, somewhat unbelievably, claimed that she lacked the authority to take on the lenders and universities who were manipulating the system for financial gain.

In response to the scandal surrounding an early literacy program called Reading First, which independent reports have found full of conflicts of interest and unwise if not illegal implementation, Spellings argues that she wasn't Secretary then and that everyone involved - former Secretary Rod Paige, former Assistant Secretary Gene Hickock, and others - has left.

True, Spellings wasn't Secretary back then when Reading First was headed off the rails. But it's not like she wasn't there. Before becoming the EdSec, Spellings was head of the Domestic Policy Council, which oversees education from the White House.

And yet, Spellings claims clean hands.

"It would have been impossible for me to have been intimately involved with oversight of all those programs," she said last week in Los Angeles about her responsibilities at the DPC. It's a response that comes awfully close to Gonzales infuriating claims to have not been involved in the Attorney General firings, and to not remember key events.

The Gonzales-Spellings similarities don't end there.

Like Gonzales, Spellings is continually vexed by a former employee who contradicts her account of events. For Gonzales, it's Kyle Sampson. For Spellings, it's Chris Doherty, the former head of the Reading First program, who was summarily dismissed when things started to heat up.

Doherty claims that the White House was intimately involved in every step of the implementation of the program, which allegedly violated federal statutes by excluding certain reading programs from being used. ("Four Officials Profited From Publishers, Report Finds," The Washington Post)

But none of this has led to the type of bipartisan piling-on that Gonzales has endured, nor the calls for her resignation...

For her part, Spellings has done her best to address the allegations against her management of these programs, and to divert attention when she can't. She announced the departure of one top student lending official on Tuesday, just before she was scheduled to testify. ("Federal Student Loan Official Is Resigning", The New York Times) She encouraged the House passage of a student lending "sunshine" law the day before she was to appear, which took much of the steam out of the Thursday proceedings. ("House Passes Ban on Gifts From Student Lenders", The New York Times)

This editorial from the New York Times underscores the point:

“It’s not our fault.” That’s what Education Secretary Margaret Spellings seemed to say while testifying before Congress last week about her department’s failure to halt the payoffs, kickbacks and general looting of the public treasury by a lending company that collected nearly $300 million in undeserved subsidies. But that doesn’t track with the federal Higher Education Act, which clearly authorizes the secretary to disqualify from federal programs lenders who employ payoffs, kickbacks and unethical practices like those that have been found to be commonplace in the college lending business.