Arne Duncan Gives For-Profit Colleges a Big Thumbs-Up

For-profit schools in general–and online education specifically–get a bad rap. There’s something about not having a traditional brick-and-mortar campus that makes people think of the degree mills that promised a doctorate in a weekend for three easy payments. Those days are gone, thank goodness, but not all for-profit institutions are providing the quality of education they should be. As is usually the case, a few bad apples are making everybody else look bad.

Secreary of Education Arne Duncan understands this, fortunately. In a briefing today, he went so far as to point out that “Some proprietary schools have profited and prospered but their students haven’t, and this is a disservice to students and to taxpayers. And it undermines the valuable work, the extraordinarily important work, being done by the for-profit industry as a whole.” If that isn’t a vote of confidence for the industry as whole, I don’t know what is.

The Market Agrees: Stocks Go Up for For-Profit Schools

When they heard about this proposed legislation on Wall Street, stocks started climbing. DeVry Inc.’s stock jumped a full 13 percent, making it one of the biggest gainers for the day. Other for-profit schools saw mixed reactions today, but as it becomes clear just which schools will be affected by the new rules, things are sure to sort themselves out.

It’s estimated that if no changes are made, only 5 percent of schools would be losing their federal funding 2012. That’s a good amount of time to get things up to par and not very many schools that have to do it. During the press briefing, Duncan commented, “We want to hit the ones at the bottom, those that simply aren’t working for students. The 5 percent would frankly be the bottom of the barrel.”

What Are the New Rules?

Under the proposal, schools would be grouped into three groups, largely based on former students’ federal student loan debt and income:

• The Good (Qualify for federal aid): A minimum of 45 percent of former students are paying down the principal on their federal loans. Graduates have at most a 20 percent debt-to-earnings ratio for discretionary income and 8 percent ratio for total income.
• The Bad (Subject to enrollment limits and required to warn about high debt levels): Between 35 and 45 percent of former students are paying down their principals, and graduates have a debt-to-earnings ratios of between 20 and 30 percent, and 8 and 12 percent, for discretionary and total incomes respectively.
• The Ugly (Do not qualify for federal aid): Less than 35 percent of students are paying down the principal on their loans. And their debt-to-earnings ratio is enough to make anyone’s life uncomfortable at over 30 percent for discretionary income and 12 percent for total income.

The idea is to make the schools responsible for the claims they make about preparing graduates for careers. And it seems perfectly reasonable to me. This can only help the image of for-profit education, which will be a boon for online education.

Recently, a new report from the Community College Research Center challenged these findings. Perfectly timed, the report’s release coincided with the University of California’s announcement that they are seriously considering offering degrees you can earn entirely online. After reading this report and sifting through the one-sided language, I found that it does a fair job of questioning the validity of the data used in the Dept. of Ed. report. As the report goes on, though, a bias against online education becomes clear.

A Critique of the Response to the Meta-Analysis of Online Learning Studies

Let’s break it down…

Stacking the Odds: Shortening the List in Favor of Face-to-Face Instruction

First, let’s look at how the response chopped the Dept. of Education’s list down to 7 studies. From the report:

“[O]f the 23 hybrid courses that were examined in studies included in the meta-analysis, 20 required the students to physically attend class for the same amount of time that students in a face-to-face course would attend; the online portions of these courses were either in on-campus computer labs or were completed in addition to regular classroom time.”

Okay, great point there. It’s important to distinguish between hybrid programs that require time online outside of a traditional class schedule and those that are split more evenly between face-to-face and online instruction. Now, let’s keep in mind that this response isn’t trying to tackle any further claims about hybrid education–they stop here, and those last three courses that were determined acceptable aren’t mentioned again.

The response is, though, focusing heavily on online education, so they decide to weed through the Dept. of Education list to find the studies “that compared fully online courses to face-to-face courses,” of which there were 28. They focused on seven of these, saying the others were not relevant because “(1) conditions are unrepresentative of typical college courses, or (2) target populations are dissimilar to college students.” Okay, so they’re only interested in semester-long courses, not studies on shorter courses; I can get behind that one.

The target population part of this little formula for whittling down the list of studies they aim to debase, though, doesn’t sit well with me. By only looking at “those studies conducted with undergraduate or graduate students in semester-long online courses”, they ignore the “professionals outside of the college setting”, who are taking online courses because they can’t fit a traditional campus education into their schedules–a good-sized chunk of online students. This one has other implications, too. By limiting their focus to students who are in a college setting, they’re also limiting their focus to studies done in a traditional college setting (i.e., a campus college, not an online one). Why is this important? Because campus-based schools are geared towards campus education not online education–and they should be; it’s their thing. Online instruction isn’t their thing, which means that they may not have done the best job developing the online versions of the classes mentioned in the studies. So the odds are stacked against online programs from the get-go because they’re only looking at campus colleges trying something new, which becomes even more clear when they start critiquing individual studies later on.

Online Instruction Holds Its Own while Getting Downplayed

Now that we know how they determined which bits of data to pay attention to, let’s look at the studies in question. Keep in mind as we go through, that these are online versions of campus courses designed by professors who usually teach in a traditional, face-to-face setting. I’m not saying that courses designed to be taught online by professors experienced in that medium of instruction would be that much better, but, gosh, doesn’t it seem like that would be the case?

Comparing strictly online courses to strictly campus courses (occasionally with a hybrid or additional online version of the course thrown in), the studies found…

• Caldwell (2006): “[...] no significant differences [...].”
• Cavus and Ibrahim (2007): “The advanced-collaboration online course significantly outperformed both the standard-collaboration online and face-to-face courses [...]; there was no significant difference between the standard-collaboration online course and the face-to-face course.”
• Davis, Odell, Abbitt, and Amos (1999): “[...] no significant difference [...]“
• LaRose, Gregg, and Eastin (1998): “[...] no significant difference [...]“
• Mentzer, Cryan, and Teclehaimanot (2007): “[...] students in the online and face-to-face classes had the same test scores, but the online group was less likely to turn in assignments [...].”
• Peterson and Bond (2004): “[...] the online group still scored similarly to the face-to-face group [...].”
• Schoenfeld-Tacher, McConnell, and Graham (2001): “[...] online students showed significantly higher adjusted post-test scores [...].”

For those of you keeping score, that’s six ties and one win for online education (two if you count Cavus and Ibrahim’s advanced collaboration class). Which is why it makes total sense when the response report summarizes by saying that there was a “lack of consistent differences in outcomes between online and face-to-face.” Wait, no, that doesn’t make any sense at all.

Grasping at Straws

My favorite part of this report has to be the way it clings to the following assertion [emph. added]:

In addition, eight students who had taken both an online and a face-to-face teacher education course from the two participating instructors were interviewed, and all eight felt that the face-to-face course had better prepared them for teaching.

I’m going to go out on a limb here and guess that this particular teacher education course wasn’t aimed teaching online courses. This finding only shows that a face-to-face teaching course better prepared students for face-to-face teaching, which isn’t surprising, let alone noteworthy. It’s easier to learn how to stand up in front of people and teach from someone who is standing up in front of you and teaching. The fact that the online students scored the same as their face-to-face counterparts is what should be held up as the primary finding, not that eight of the students who did both felt better prepared.

Some Notes on Another Critique of the Response to the… You Get the Idea

Education news website Inside Higher Ed wrapped up their summary of the report with this quote from John Bourne, executive director of the Sloan Consortium:

“I am exceptionally dubious of studies that tend to compare online education and on-the-ground education without even an attempt to understand the differences in the mechanisms of teaching. The jury is absolutely still out on this, and I don’t believe for a minute that it’s about the delivery mechanism, but what the affordances are of the delivery.”

Bourne added that he thinks both reports in question are flawed but interesting, which seems like a great place to leave things: up in the air (at least until we get some real studies done and have those analyzed by non-biased parties).

Five-Star Degree or Fast-Food Education?

An article in the San Francisco Chronicle starts off with the following:

Taking online college courses is, to many, like eating at McDonald’s: convenient, fast and filling. You may not get filet mignon, but afterward you’re just as full.

The point here is definitely valid, online education leaves one “just as full” of valuable knowledge and critical thinking skills as on-campus education does. But let’s get one thing clear here, there is a huge difference between what we call fast food and healthy, delicious food that is prepared quickly and served conveniently.

If UC does this properly, the program won’t be a cheap knock-off of their campus experience; it’ll be the same high-quality degree without having to find a parking spot on campus, without having to find a cheap place to subsist near campus while earning a degree, without having to wade through a sea of freshman carrying a heavy book bag to find your cramped lecture hall. The point is that making the degree logistically easier to get doesn’t mean making it less rigorous–it’s still just as difficult to earn the degree, but students wouldn’t have to jump through a bunch of hoops to do so.

Campus Education Got Served

Let us not forget the 2009 report from the U.S. Department of Education in which traditional campus education totally got served. To wit…

Students who took all or part of their class online performed better, on average, than those taking the same course through traditional face-to-face instruction.

Let’s not be one-sided about this, the study did find that hybrid programs are more effective than strictly campus or strictly online degree programs. I don’t mean to make this out to be some kind of one-size-fits-all competition that ignores the fact that different people learn differently and will excel in different types of programs. Online education won, though. Okay, okay, hybrid education won, but in the interest of polarizing the argument (a favorite American pastime), we’ll just skip over that tidbit.

Univ. of Massachusetts and Stanford: Online Degree Mills? No. Not Even a Little.

Let’s look at few other institutes of high-quality higher education and their online programs.

• UMassOnline: The University of Massachusetts has been offering undergraduate and graduate degrees online for years now. They even credit themselves as being “a leader in distance education for over 25 years” on their site.
• Stanford: One of the big names in higher education in the country, Stanford University has been offering completely online degrees since 1998. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but isn’t Stanford still a highly ranked school?

The big counter example to these programs is the one through University of Illinois, or rather the one that was offered through U of I. Their Global Campus program simply wasn’t done properly. Inside Higher Ed covered the story, quoting one professor at the school in a way that summed up the whole debacle:

The department said, ‘This is garbage, and we will not put our degree on it,’ and Global Campus said ‘We’ll offer it.’

So, to wrap things up, there is most certainly a difference between fast food and timely, convenient food. U of I tried to offer the former with a big logo on the front, and they crashed and burned–rightly so. Stanford and U. Mass are doing the latter, and they seem to being doing quite well with it, thank you very much. Which camp the University of California will fall into remains to be seen, but I’ve got my fingers crossed for them.

Wal-Mart Employees to Get Tuition Breaks for Online College

In a partnership with American Public University, Wal-Mart is going to start offering it’s employees a 15 percent tuition break. They’ve dedicated $50 million to dissemination over the course of three years. According to former education under secretary Sara Martinez Tucker, who is now on the company’s external advisory council, If 10 to 15 percent of Wal-Mart employees take advantage of this, that’s like graduating three Ohio State Universities,” which gives you an idea about just how many people work at Wal-Mart.

From the New York Times’ article on the subject:

The program will initially allow about 200,000 employees in positions like cashier, department manager and distribution center unloader to accrue credits for training they already receive in their jobs.

For instance, a department-level manager, who receives training from Wal-Mart in areas like pricing, inventory management and ethics, would be eligible for 24 on-the-job credits, at no charge, toward a 61-credit associates’ degree. A cashier would be eligible for six credits toward a 61-credit associate’s degree or a 120-credit bachelor’s degree.

Credits for work experience and a 15-percent tuition break? It’s an online college, too, which means that–really–any employee with Internet access is good to go. I’m still not sure I’ll shop there, but I’m proud of Wal-Mart. It’s a fantastic nod to online education, too.

Changing the Face of America’s Youth… with White Paint

An elementary school in Prescott, AZ was in the process of getting a lovely mural painted. The mural was encouraging “green transportation” and just so happened to be located at a prominent intersection, where passersby were able to shout their support for the cause… by shouting “racial slander from their cars.” Why? Because the mural depicted a few students who attend the ethnically diverse school in a larger-than-life fashion. It just so happened that–you guessed it–the students were not white.

A city councilman, Steve Blair, got the town all riled up by ranting on his radio show. My personal favorites of his quotes:

“To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?”

“Personally, I think it’s pathetic. You have changed the ambiance of that building to excite some kind of diversity power struggle that doesn’t exist in Prescott, Arizona. And I’m ashamed of that.”

Wait, I’m sorry, just what are you ashamed of, Mr. Blair? The irony? The kids go to the school. I wonder how he feels about Obama’s presidency–yikes. Fortunately, he’s been fired from his radio show. Even more fortunately, the principal of the school has apologized for his previous statements, saying now that the mural will go up as it was originally intended. Now, if only we could get Texas to put all of that history back in the books, we’d be in business.

Don’t Mess with Textbooks: Even More People Being Left Out of History in TX

Today, we’re starting off with U.S. History Since 1877. First up on the list…

1. Oveta Culp Hobby. And another strong, successful, historically significant woman makes the list but not the cut. Oveta was the first secretary of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare (not to mention, obviously, the first female secretary of the dept.), which later became the Department of Health and Human Services. She was the first woman in the Army to receive the Distinguished Service Medal; she was the first commanding officer of the Women’s Army Corps; and she even served as chairman of board at the Houston Post. All in all, she seems pretty suspect–good thing they took her out of the books.
2. Herbert Hoover. Okay, really? We’re just coming out of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression. Mainstream newspapers were actually making reference to Hoovervilles, and their cutting ol’ Herbert out of the curriculum? Are we going to pretend no one’s ever screwed up economic policy before?
3. Shirley Chisholm. Shirley wasn’t all that important, right? I mean, she was just the first black woman elected to Congress, the first woman to make a bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, and the first black presidential candidate, male or female, for a major political party. Now that I re-read that it seems like she might just have earned her spot, too bad Texas doesn’t agree.
4. Eugene Debs. Eugene Debs was a socialist. There I said it. He was also a union leader; one of the founding members of the International Workers of the World, the American Railway Union, and the International Labor Union; and the five-time presidential candidate of the Socialist Party. A vehement opponent of World War I, Eugene spent a fair amount of time in jail for his speeches and exploits, but he always managed to bounce back. We can’t have our children growing up thinking that everything will be okay if they speak out against America, war, or capitalism–that just wouldn’t be right.
5. Robert La Follette. Hailed by some as “arguably the most important and recognized leader of the opposition to the growing dominance of corporations over the Government”, Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette actually managed to get 17 percent of the national popular vote when he ran for president in 1924 as the Progressive Party candidate. It’s no wonder this guy’s pages are being pulled; when he was governor of Wisconsin, he championed all sorts of crazy ideas, like the first workers’ compensation system, minimum wage, and women’s suffrage.
6. Ralph Nader. Unless you missed the past few presidential elections, you know who Ralph Nader is–and you probably have a good idea about why he’s being taken out of school books–at least conservative school books. What you might not now is that he’s been behind more consumer rights issues than you can shake a stick at. His article, Unsafe at Any Speed, heavily contributed to the passage of the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, which brought us seat belts, stronger windshields, and other things that our kids shouldn’t learn about… right?
7. Ross Perot. This oil tycoon ran for president a few times in the ‘nineties. I’m guessing that Texas would just like to forget the whole thing ever happened. Ross was like the Texas-tea version of the Monopoly guy: eccentrically stereotypical and crazy rich. Fortunately, they found a rich, faux-cowboy to help us forget about the off-kilter oil tycoon.
8. John Steinbeck. John Steinbeck wrote Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, two books still assigned by a large number of high school English teachers, which is fortunate because it looks like our kids won’t be learning about this guy in history class anymore. I really don’t have a clue as to why he’s being cut from U.S. history classes. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature and the United States Medal of Freedom–seems like a good guy to keep in there.
9. Thomas Jefferson. Before you start getting all uppity, the decision to strike Thomas Jefferson from the annals of world history (not U.S. history) was actually overturned. The original argument was that TJ wasn’t actually an Enlightenment thinker, but was, rather, only influenced by them, so he shouldn’t be included. He wasn’t ever going to be cut from U.S. history, but boy, was that ever a great way to get everyone all riled up. “They’re taking Thomas Jefferson out of the school books! Get your pitch forks and torches!”
10. Vladimir Lenin. Isn’t there some famous quote about being condemned to repeat the past? I know that Lenin was a sort of socialist, but wasn’t he the really, really bad kind? The kind that would support all of that anti-pinko rhetoric that’s all the rage lately?
11. Oscar Romero. He was the Archbishop of San Salvador and gained must of his international renown for speaking out against poverty, injustice, and terror. Why pull him? Perhaps because of a the little American blunder that didn’t earn him any popularity points with the already-sort-of-upset El Salvadorian Marxist radicals who assassinated him shortly there after. He’d written to President Carter to ask that the American funding be cut off and was ignored, but word got out. Whoops.
12. Desmond Tutu. Desmond Tutu seems like a good guy to learn about. His anti-apartheid stance got him international recognition, a Nobel Peace Prize (1984), the Albert Schweitzer Prize for Humanitarianism (1986), the Gandhi Peace Prize (2005), and the Presidential Medal of Freedom (2009). Other humanitarian interests: gay rights, women’s rights, and climate change–and we can’t have kids coming home talkin’ about those, now can we?
13. Thomas Hobbes. Thomas Jefferson may have been spared the axe in the world-history department, but Thomas Hobbes didn’t get the same kind of love. He’s been cut from the U.S. Government curriculum.
14. Mary Kay Ash. The founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, Inc. is getting cut from economics courses, bringing the total number of historical women in the curriculum to zero. So much for women entrepreneurs.
15. Sigmund Freud. Okay, so most Freudian psychology has been shown to be wrong, but still, cutting the father of psychoanalysis from high school psychology classes? I won’t read too much into this one; sometimes the cutting of one of the most important historical figures in a field is just the cutting of one of the most important historical figures in a field, you know?

That concludes the list of those who got the axe in the name of celebrating what is commendable about American history and bringing a more centrist position to the curriculum. While the “white-washing” of history seems to be getting quite a bit of attention, it seems to me that we should be more concerned about the number of women’s rights leaders (and women in general) who were purged from the curriculum.

Of course, the hefty “white-washing” reaction is also due in part to decisions like calling the slave trade “Atlantic triangular trade” and referring to American imperialism as “expansionism”. These find-and-replace tactics for dealing with major historical concepts are disconcerting, particularly when the terms really don’t mean the same thing. That’s another blog post for another time, though, and I’m already steamed enough about just the historical figures getting pulled.

More Historical Figures Cut from Texas Textbooks

And the final cut from the third-grade textbooks is…

1. Pecos Bill. Along the same lines as Paul Bunyan, Pecos Bill was one of the tall tales of the old West, but is that really all there is to this one? (Because I begged the question, you should be pretty sure that it isn’t.) No! Enter William Rufus Shafter, a Union Army officer during the Civil War and a general in the Spanish-American War who earned the title Pecos Bill for his service in the Indian Wars, during which he led the 24th Infantry in campaigns against the Cheyenne, Comanche, Kickapoo, and Kiowa tribes of Texas. No real need to confuse third-graders with the morality of killing native Americans after serving the Union–particularly when you’ve gotten a cartoon character and cowboy legend named after you.
2. Moses Austin. Moses was an interesting character. He was involved in the lead industry in the late 18th century and was the first to get permission for Anglo Americans to settle in Spanish Texas. While he and his son, Stephen F. Austin, were major pioneers of contemporary Texas, Moses did something that probably didn’t put him in a favorable light with Texas educators: he declared his loyalty to the Spanish crown. I’m not sure why they’re so concerned; it seems like a little “he totally ate some lead and went bats” paragraph could have made an excellent segue into a science/safety lesson.
3. Henry Cisneros. This one follows the whole white-washing-of-history argument that’s got so many people riled up. Henry served four terms as mayor of San Antonio, TX–which gave him the special distinction of being the second Hispanic mayor of a major U.S. city. He went on to work as the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development under Bill Clinton, where he made significant progress housing the growing homeless population across the country. Sounds like a no-good socialist to me–well, as long as you ignore the fact that he made his own way in a classically pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, American style, that is.
4. Miriam A. Ferguson. The first female governor of Texas, Miriam Amanda Wallace “Ma” Ferguson was also the second female governor in the U.S.–and the first one actually elected. Granted, she was essentially just replacing her husband, who’d been impeached and convicted, but nonetheless, she most certainly got elected. A bit of a populist and not one to shy away from tough issues like how stupid prohibition was (even though she wasn’t a drinker) and how the KKK could go take a flying leap, she’s an obvious choice for being cut from the textbooks.
5. Clarence Birdseye. The man responsible for inventing the way we freeze food, Clarence was probably cut because he sold his company to Goldman Sachs in 1929–and we all know how much bad PR they’ve been getting lately. Seriously though, Birds Eye frozen foods is still named after this guy. Learn something new everyday…
6. Carrie Chapman Catt. This one’s easy. Three words: Women’s Suffrage Leader. She was instrumental in getting the 19th amendment passed, allowing women to vote… finally. After she was done in the U.S., she went on to help found the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which has since been renamed as the International Alliance of Women. The further I get into this list, the more I wonder why “white-washing history” is such a big concern while let’s call it “turning history into a giant sausage fest” or, more accurately and less flippantly, “purging history of all of the strong women who helped make America the place it is today” is largely being ignored in the press. If it’s the winners who write the history books, then it must be the sore losers who make underhanded curriculum laws.
7. Carl Sagan. I think this one can be summed up in a single quote:
   
   

   Some people think God is an outsized, light-skinned male with a long white beard, sitting on a throne somewhere up there in the sky, busily tallying the fall of every sparrow. Others–for example Baruch Spinoza and Albert Einstein–considered God to be essentially the sum total of the physical laws which describe the universe. I do not know of any compelling evidence for anthropomorphic patriarchs controlling human destiny from some hidden celestial vantage point, but it would be madness to deny the existence of physical laws.

   Anyone who knows words like “anthropomorphic” and “patriarch” must be trying to undermine society, right?

8. Santa Barraza. This Hispanic artist often portrays the historical, emotional, and spiritual aspects of Nepantla, the borderlands of Texas and Mexico. Why’d she get cut? Probably because colorful, emotionally compelling visions of what it’s like to be split between two cultures make it more difficult to dehumanize illegal immigrants.
9. Sandra Cisneros. The House on Mango Street, a book by Sandra Cisneros, is probably the most accessible story about the difficulties faced by Mexican-Americans coming of age in the U.S. Add that to the fact that Sandra is probably the most famous author to come out of Texas, and it’s clear why they’d never think of cutting–oh, never mind, she’s gone.
10. Cynthia Parker. Cynthia was captured as part of a Comanche raid on Fort Parker when she was nine years of age. When, at age 34, she was re-kidnapped, she had quite a bit of difficulty reintegrating into the Texan community and tried to escape several times. Had she learned to bake pies and hate native Americans like a normal woman of the times, I’m sure she would have been left in the books, but history isn’t always as clearly cut as certain people might like.
11. Phil Gramm. This former Democratic Congressman, Republican Congressman, and Republican Senator from the great state of Texas was behind the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which is thought to have helped get the subprime-mortgage and global-economic crises going. Is it any wonder they don’t seventh graders learning about this guy?
12. C.M. “Dad” Joiner. He discovered what was, at the time, the largest oil deposit on Earth in Texas. With all of the bad press that oil is getting lately (global warming, ever-growing spills in the Gulf), it’s no wonder they’re trying to re-brand Texas tea, er, oil.

Those 12 bring us all the way up through seventh grade. Join me tomorrow for the final rundown, in which we will learn about the remaining group of historical elites who are having their pages torn from history books in Texas.

I started looking into the matter a bit more closely. I found some assessments of the situation that make the excitement over the matter sound ridiculous, like a bunch of loud, liberal nonsense. I found others that made it sound like the end of all freedom and proper, public education was right around the corner. Reading the articles on both sides closely, it seemed like those for the change were leaving a lot out and using deceptive language that had that special going-to-come-back-and-bite-you ring to it, and those against it were doing an awful lot of speculation. I wanted the real story, so I started looking through some of the changes being made (freely available, though not entirely up to date, on the Texas Education Agency website).

Left Out of History: Who’s Getting Cut from Texas’ New Textbooks?

Going through this list, I found 33 names that will be removed from the annals of history in social studies textbooks. Let’s take a look:

1. Henrietta King. Rancher and philanthropist, she moved to Texas, got married, ran the housing and education facilities for Mexican-American ranch hands until the Civil War, and is best known for successfully bringing King Ranch out of its post-war debt and into the national spotlight for cattle and horse breeding. Apparently, our children can’t learn about a successful business women who supported immigrant workers. That kind of role model could be dangerous. She was cut from second-grade books.
2. Florence Nightingale. This famous nurse is being cut from second-grade textbooks as well. Considered the founder of professional nursing as a field, she had some strong feelings about the place of women in Victorian England, specifically about women being forced into an overly feminine, helpless role in society. A piece of her writings, Cassandra, has been hailed as “a major text of English feminism, a link between Wollstonecraft and Woolf.” Certainly can’t have our girls looking to someone like this for inspiration or hero worship.
3. Dolores Huerta. Co-founder of the United Farm Workers of America and a member of the Democratic Socialists of America, she’s been cut from third-grade books. Way to dodge that tricky subject, Texas; that’ll fool the kids for sure.
4. Paul Bunyan. This legendarily over-sized lumberjack supposedly created the Grand Canyon by dragging his axe behind him after a long day of felling trees and frolicking with Babe, his blue ox. Why he’s getting cut is beyond me–I doubt it’s because he’s too eco-friendly; dude could’ve clear-cut Alaska in no time flat.
5. Robinson Crusoe. Another one that baffles me, Robinson Crusoe is the hero of the eponymous novel written by Daniel Dafoe. Maybe it’s because ol’ Crusoe was stranded near those pinkos the Venezuelans? Maybe they don’t want third-graders thinking about disobeying their parents’ wishes to go chase their sea-faring dreams? Who knows.
6. Louis Daguerre. Okay, so kids probably don’t need to learn about the daguerreotype process anymore because we’re all using digital. Besides, this artist, photographer, and inventor was French, and I think a few idiots are still dreadfully upset at the French for not coming to help us wage an illegitimate war in Iraq.

Let’s call this part one. Tune in next week for the stunning conclusion of this discussion about this underhanded manipulation of the very educational foundation of an entire generation. Also in Monday’s post, we’ll discuss irony and how it is a) not a black fly in your chardonnay, and b) probably something a lot closer to the country’s loudest proponents of personal civil liberties engaging in censorship.

The Two Biggest Benefits of the New Student Loan Laws

1. Payment Caps. The current program, which was rolled out in July of 2009, caps student loan payments at 15 percent of the borrower’s discretionary income (read: the money that you wouldn’t necessarily die without having. The most recent legislation, which will affect student loans issued after 2014, caps the pay-back rate at 10 percent.
2. Loan Forgiveness. Another bit of great news for future borrowers: while the current legislation provides for forgiveness of a borrower’s remaining student debt balance after 25 years, the new bill that just went through brings that down to twenty years. Better news for everyone in public service: your loan will be forgiven after just ten years under both sets of legislation.

I know a few teachers who are still up to their necks in student debt, even after more than a decade of teaching and making payments. I found out the other day that a relative of mine working (quite successfully, I might add) as a public defender will still be paying off his student loans when his kids start heading to campus in a few years–and he’s been at it for close to twenty years. In short, these new lower caps and forgiveness programs are good for us as a country and should be treated as such.

And Now for Something Completely Different: You Got a Scholarship for What?

Student loans are a great way to pay for college–that is, unless you can someone else to foot the bill. I’ve heard quite a number of versions of the whole unclaimed-scholarships bit. Some say that millions go unclaimed; other say it’s closer to billions; and still others say that that whole thing is a bunch of hooey dreamt up to make high schoolers feel about playing computer games instead of applying for scholarships. Whatever the reality of the situation is, there are a few scholarships that fall right under Woefully Esoteric. Thanks to The Wall Street Journal for gathering up these gems:

• Stuck at Prom Scholarship Contest. The winners of this scholarship took home three grand. What merited the award? Making prom attire out of Duck brand tape. It took ninety hours of work for Izzy Bristow and John Dyer to make their outfits.
• Tall Clubs International. Short people need not apply for this scholarship. Women over 5′10″ and men over 6′2″, however, can collect $1,000 if they have good grades and write a great essay on being tall. This scholarship is presumably to make up for having to sit in those awkwardly sized desk-chair combos during lectures.
• Scholar Athlete Milk Mustache of the Year (SAMMY). Drink milk enthusiastically without regard for the actual location of your mouth? You could be one of the 25 yearly SAMMY winners. If you do it right, you might get to star in a genuine “Got Milk?” ad–in addition to the trip to Disney World and the $7,500 you’ll hopefully put at least partially towards learning how to drink milk in an appropriate, albeit less profitable, fashion.

The article went on to note a few last-name-oriented scholarships, among others. If you aren’t lucky enough to land one of these weird ones, don’t give up hope. Paying for college can be difficult, but it’s worth it.

Duncan Calling This an Education Catastrophe

U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan told reporters that if Congress doesn’t act now, layoffs at public schools could be anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 nationwide. “It is brutal out there, really scary,” Duncan said. “This is a real emergency. What we’re trying to avert is an education catastrophe.” To this, Sen. Harkin added, “We must act soon. This is not something we can fix in August. We have to fix it now.” At this point, Duncan hasn’t officially endorsed the bill, which has 13 other Democratic co-sponsors, but he has made it clear that something must be done and soon.

Concerns about where the money will come from are being raised; though, at this point they hardly seem damning. On the Republican side of things, Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee said, “I wonder from whose schoolchildren we are going to borrow this money, because we have a looming debt crisis in this country and we’ll need to debate this. We all want to help our children and our schools, but that is a deep concern.” With all of the other inflammatory language being thrown around thanks to recent health care and student loan reform, a response like that is downright unsettlingly measured and calm. Sen. Richard C. Shelby of Alabama, also a Republican, even went so far as to say, “We cannot get ahead by under funding education.”

Take 2? First Attempt Stalled in the Senate

This isn’t the first bill of this kind. That means two things: this problem isn’t a new one (which means that the clock is really ticking now), and it didn’t work the first time. The stimulus law that was enacted in Feb. 2009 directed almost $100 billion to education for just this reason, but the funding is going to run out soon. Unlike the other sectors that received bailout money, public education can’t really get back on its feet and start making money again–it’s not a business; it’s our nation’s future.