History > 2014 > USA > Education (I)

Harry Campbell

 A New Start for Newark Schools

NYT

20.10.2014

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/
opinion/a-new-start-for-newark-schools.html

Rage Against the Common Core

DEC. 27, 2014

The New York Times

SundayReview | Opinion

By DAVID L. KIRP

STARTING in the mid-1990s, education advocates began making a simple argument: National education standards will level the playing field, assuring that all high school graduates are prepared for first-year college classes or rigorous career training.

While there are reasons to doubt that claim — it’s hard to see how Utah, which spends less than one-third as much per student as New York, can offer a comparable education — the movement took off in 2008, when the nation’s governors and education commissioners drove a huge effort to devise “world-class standards,” now known as the Common Core.

Although the Obama administration didn’t craft the standards, it weighed in heavily, using some of the $4.35 billion from the Race to the Top program to encourage states to adopt not only the Common Core (in itself, a good thing) but also frequent, high-stakes testing (which is deeply unpopular). The mishandled rollout turned a conversation about pedagogy into an ideological and partisan debate over high-stakes testing. The misconception that standards and testing are identical has become widespread.

At least four states that adopted the Common Core have opted out. Republican governors who initially backed the standards condemn them as “shameless government overreach.”

Gov. Bobby Jindal of Louisiana, a Republican and a onetime supporter of the Common Core, sued his own state and the United States Department of Education to block the standards from taking effect. When Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, recently announced his decision to “actively explore” a 2016 run for the White House, he ran into a buzz saw of opposition because of his embrace of the Common Core.

Rebellions have also sprouted in Democratic-leaning states. Last spring, between 55,000 and 65,000 New York State students opted out of taking tests linked to the Common Core. Criticizing these tests as “unproven,” the Chicago schools chief, Barbara Byrd-Bennett, declared that she didn’t want her students to take them.

In a Phi Delta Kappa/Gallup poll conducted last spring, 57 percent of public school parents opposed “having teachers in your community use the Common Core State Standards to guide what they teach,” nearly double the proportion of those who supported the goals. With the standards, the sheer volume of high-stakes standardized testing has ballooned. “The numbers and consequences of these tests have driven public opinion over the edge,” notes Robert A. Schaeffer of the National Center for Fair and Open Testing, known as FairTest.

Students are terrified by these tests because the results can jeopardize their prospects for advancement and graduation. In New York, the number of students who scored “proficient” plummeted by about 30 percentage points in 2013, the first year of testing. Some 70 percent scored below the cutoff level in math and English; the 2014 results in math were modestly better, but the English language scores didn’t budge.

Many teachers like the standards, because they invite creativity in the classroom — instead of memorization, the Common Core emphasizes critical thinking and problem-solving. But they complain that test prep and test-taking eat away weeks of class time that would be better focused on learning.

A Gallup poll found that while 76 percent of teachers favored nationwide academic standards for reading, writing and math, only 27 percent supported using tests to gauge students’ performance, and 9 percent favored making test scores a basis for evaluating teachers. Such antagonism is well founded — researchers have shown that measurements of the “value” teachers add, as determined by comparing test scores at the beginning and end of the year, are unreliable and biased against those who teach both low- and high-achieving students.

The Obama administration has only itself to blame. Most Democrats expected that equity would be the top education priority, with more money going to the poorest states, better teacher recruitment, more useful training and closer attention to the needs of the surging population of immigrant kids. Instead, the administration has emphasized high-stakes “accountability” and market-driven reforms. The Education Department has invested more than $370 million to develop the new standards and exams in math, reading and writing.

Questioning those priorities can bring reprisals. During the search earlier this year for a New York City schools chancellor, Education Secretary Arne Duncan lobbied against Joshua P. Starr, the superintendent of schools in Montgomery County, Md., in part because he had proposed a three-year hiatus on high-stakes standardized testing.

Last year, Mr. Duncan said that opposition to the Common Core standards had come from “white suburban moms who realize — all of a sudden — their child isn’t as brilliant as they thought they were, and their school isn’t quite as good as they thought they were.”

He has only recently changed his cavalier tune, acknowledging, “Too much testing can rob school buildings of joy and cause unnecessary stress.”

It’s no simple task to figure out what schools ought to teach and how best to teach it — how to link talented teachers with engaged students and a challenging curriculum. Turning around the great gray battleship of American public education is even harder. It requires creating new course materials, devising and field-testing new exams and, because these tests are designed to be taken online, closing the digital divide. It means retraining teachers, reorienting classrooms and explaining to anxious parents why these changes are worthwhile.

Had the public schools been given breathing room, with a moratorium on high-stakes testing that prominent educators urged, resistance to the Common Core would most likely have been less fierce. But in states where the opposition is passionate and powerful, it will take a herculean effort to get the standards back on track.
 

David L. Kirp is a professor of public policy at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author, most recently, of “Improbable Scholars: The Rebirth of a Great American School System and a Strategy for America’s Schools.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on December 28, 2014, on page SR19 of the New York edition with the headline: Rage Against the Common Core.

    Rage Against the Common Core, NYT, 27.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/28/opinion/sunday/
    rage-against-the-common-core.html

Raising Ambitions:

The Challenge in Teaching

at Community Colleges

 

DEC. 19, 2014

The New York Times

By GINIA BELLAFANTE

Three years ago, Eduardo Vianna, a professor at LaGuardia Community College in Queens, had a student who passed an entire semester without speaking in class. Like many others, the student, Mike Rifino, had come to LaGuardia requiring remedial instruction.

But the following semester Mr. Rifino turned up in Dr. Vianna’s developmental psychology course. This time he took a seat closer to the front of the room. Taking that as a positive sign, Dr. Vianna asked him to join a weekly discussion group for students who might want to talk about big ideas in economics, education and politics, subjects that might cultivate a sense of intellectual curiosity and self-understanding among students whose backgrounds typically left them lacking in either.

“The group met on Friday afternoons,” Dr. Vianna said, “and Mike’s friends were asking him why he was wasting his time; the students who came weren’t getting any credit.”

At the time, Mr. Rifino was working as a cashier at a Gap in a mall on Queens Boulevard, and feeling despondent about it. Dr. Vianna then introduced him to Erich Fromm’s writing on Marx, and something in Mr. Rifino ignited, as he began to examine his own sense of alienation. He quickly finished his work at LaGuardia, and transferred to Hunter College in 2012. In the fall he began a doctoral program in psychology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.

Among trajectories for community college students, Mr. Rifino’s path is decidedly out of the ordinary. Of the full-time students who started at LaGuardia in 2008, as he did, less than 17 percent graduated within three years. Only a quarter of LaGuardia students complete their associate degree in six years, a figure that is high for urban community colleges.

Five years ago, with Detroit’s deadened factories as a backdrop, President Obama announced an initiative to mint five million more community college graduates by 2020. The announcement coincided with a report from the Council of Economic Advisers anticipating a significantly greater demand for jobs requiring analytic skills. Two-year colleges enroll nearly half of all undergraduates in this country, the majority coming from the lower half of the income distribution. In the case of LaGuardia, more than two-thirds of its students come from families making $25,000 a year or less. It is hard to see how economic mobility might regain momentum, or how an educated citizenry might be maintained, without community colleges accomplishing their mission of graduating the poor and struggling.

In the years since the president’s announcement, education scholars have argued, too little focus has been placed on what would intuitively seem to be one of the most crucial elements of increasing success rates: improving the quality of teaching. “The teaching of teachers,” Gail O. Mellow, LaGuardia’s president and the author of books and papers on community college education, said recently, “is the single most neglected aspect of higher education.” And teaching at community colleges bears little resemblance to teaching anywhere else. “It really cannot be emphasized enough,” a group of researchers wrote in a paper four years ago, “that perhaps no other cohort of instructors in American education confronts such a consistently low-performing group of students on a daily basis.”
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LaGuardia loses about one third of its students during their first year; without engagement, the prospect of their success seems all but impossible.

As a specialist in developmental psychology, Dr. Vianna has spent much of his career examining the way young people from disadvantaged backgrounds acquire knowledge and use it, the way the identities they have forged in the face of myriad deprivations can influence and impede the process of learning. At LaGuardia, where some of the city’s least-prepared students land, and where he has taught for 10 years, he is, in some sense, involved in a near-constant project of professional development. His classroom is his laboratory.

One enormous challenge for community college instructors is that many students arrive with the notion that a college education is essential, but remain unconvinced that what they will learn during the course of their studies is equally so. To create a world of young people skilled at analysis you first need to create a world of young people receptive to complexity, and many of Dr. Vianna’s students, he said, “cringe at complexity.”

“There’s a mistrust and antagonism between teachers and students because authority hasn’t traditionally been good to them,” he said. “Their experiences in the education system have been coercive. It’s not really clear to them what the value of academic knowledge actually is. If they come here with the goal of doing something very specific — to become a stewardess, or a makeup artist — they may think, ‘What’s the point?’ ”

Dr. Vianna got an illuminating look into how deeply some students question the intrinsic value of learning when he gave students an assignment on the work of the psychologist Edward C. Tolman, a pioneer in the concept of latent learning. Dr. Vianna gave students a graph with two curves that corresponded to the conditions in Mr. Tolman’s famous experiments with rats, which showed that they learned to navigate mazes even when they were not rewarded. Despite the evidence that learning could occur in the absence of external incentives, many students looked at the data in front of them and determined precisely the opposite.

“They could not contrast the curves and generalize what they meant in context,” Dr. Vianna said. “What it suggests, is that data contradicts their assumptions and confuses them. Often learning requires changing one’s position toward some issue and they resist this.”

Dr. Vianna came to the United States in the late 1990s to study developmental psychology, after he had already obtained a medical degree in Brazil and practiced child psychiatry in Rio de Janeiro. There, he had seen patients who were autistic, defiant or struggling in school, but he resisted the notion of viewing them through the lens of psychopathology. Instead, he sought to explore more about learning theories and to develop new ones. He enrolled at the Graduate Center and received his doctorate in 2006.

His course load leaves little time for reflection. Dr. Vianna teaches five classes a semester, which is typical of instructors at two-year colleges; as a tenured faculty member at a top private college he might be required to teach two. Compensation is hardly robust; the average salary for a professor at a two-year college is $61,000 a year, 28 percent lower than the average at a private four-year institution.

Despite the demands, community college professors are not relieved of the obligation to publish. Across the board at CUNY, which includes LaGuardia, there has been a greater push toward scholarship, Paul Arcario, LaGuardia’s vice president of academic affairs and provost, told me. “When I started 25 years ago, many people were hired simply with a master’s, ” he said. During the past year, LaGuardia has hired 70 new full-time faculty members (for a total of 400), nearly two-thirds of whom have Ph.Ds. The other 800 instructors, however, are adjuncts.

“For me personally, in terms of my career,” Dr. Vianna said, “how much to keep investing in the practice rather than in my own writing and grant writing is a struggle.” Were it not for the fact that his work is to a great extent informed by his students, he told me, his time for scholarship would be virtually nonexistent.

“Some professors at the grad school said, ‘Don’t go to a community college, you’ll never do any research,’ ” he said. “In my case, I was so happy to have a job. I didn’t have a green card. The population deeply interested me, and I knew that I could make a difference.”

Life for academics at community colleges scarcely resembles a David Lodge novel. Dr. Vianna and his wife, Dusana Podlucka, who has a doctorate in psychology and also teaches, part time, at LaGuardia, live in a 506-square-foot rent-stabilized apartment with their 8-year old daughter, Paula, on Lexington Avenue downtown. Paula, an avid cellist, occupies the bedroom and her parents sleep in the living room, on a foldout sofa.

LaGuardia instructors face an additional challenge unique to a school that is arguably one of the most ethnically diverse in the world, as it draws many of its students from the immigrant neighborhoods surrounding its campus. A professor might have students in a class who have completed undergraduate degrees in New Delhi or Baku and others who have barely received high school equivalency diplomas here.

One afternoon a few weeks ago, in a review session for a test he was giving in his general psychology class, Dr. Vianna presided over a conference table. One student had no difficulty understanding the arguments presented, about the neurobiology of mood disorders, and the history of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual. Others struggled fruitlessly with the concept of causality versus correlation. “What are the causes of depression?” Dr. Vianna asked. “A deep sadness,” one student answered.

Professors at elite four-year colleges can trust that students share a bank of references, that they will understand principles of critical inquiry, that they will appreciate conceptualization for its own sake. None of this can be assumed at a community college, where “the idea of academic discourse is completely foreign,” Melinda Karp, assistant director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University, said.

To introduce and make uniform the expectations of college, LaGuardia and some other two-year colleges across the country have recently begun requiring new students to take a freshman seminar, which is aimed at connecting students to faculty members in their majors. Beyond that, its purpose is to guide students toward the habits and styles of thinking that college, and by extension, adult life, demand. This past semester, Dr. Vianna taught the freshman seminar for the first time, in two sections, focusing on the subjects of inequality and climate change. He asked students to read works by Naomi Klein and David Harvey, who ties the rise of neoliberalism to the growth of various manifestations of economic imbalance.
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Some of the material was very difficult — students learned about credit default obligations, for example, and their role in the Wall Street crash — and some of that difficulty was unwelcome. Students balked when Dr. Vianna demanded nuanced answers. Many of the students in the class had never heard of the financial crash of 2008. (Only two of the freshman seminar students knew what the G.O.P. was when Dr. Vianna made a reference to it.)

“The thing about the 1 percent owning 40 percent of the wealth, they were shocked,” Dr. Vianna said of his students.

One student, who had started the semester wearing his headphones, had eventually become engaged. But another, who had been fidgety and distracted much of the time, completed the course announcing that she saw no need for an understanding of history. A third, in the midst of a final oral presentation on gender in which she talked about the media’s prejudicial representation of women, simply stopped short and sat back down.

Most students were, if not transformed in every instance by what they had learned, at least unsettled, and by the end of the semester they could challenge one another’s beliefs based on what they had absorbed in class, arguing for example about whether it was hard work or native talent that drove success.

Much of what Dr. Vianna is skilled at doing — teaching material that speaks to students’ experiences, leading and facilitating discussion rather than dictating, continually assessing what works and what does not — might seem like an entirely obvious approach. But these methods have yet to be widely adopted in the universe of colleges educating the most vulnerable students. Teaching is rarely mentioned in doctoral programs, and at elite colleges and universities it is not nearly as relevant to the outcome for students. In a forthcoming book titled “Taking Teaching Seriously: Why Pedagogy Matters!” the writers, including Dr. Mellow, LaGuardia’s president, cite studies suggesting that by the time students enroll in an Ivy League institution, college itself only negligibly affects their intellectual development.

Data on what kind of teaching works most effectively at the community college level is scant. But what is known from learning theories generally is that constructivist methods, which prize active student participation over passive receipt of information, are intensely valuable.

“There’s a lot of talk about moving community colleges to more constructivist approaches,” Ms. Karp, of Columbia’s Center on Community Colleges, said. “The challenge is how do you get there?”

One paradox of life at a community college is, in some sense, the absence of a community. There are no residence halls and students often live far from one another, typically juggling jobs and parenthood as well.

Three years ago, Dr. Vianna began a program at LaGuardia called the Peer Activist Learning Community, or P.A.L.C., where students under his guidance gather weekly for sessions of self-directed learning. They often decide together what texts they will read and delve further into. The group is based, in large part, on the theories of the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky, who believed that learning was crucially dependent on social interactions. It was as a proponent of Vygotsky that Dr. Vianna became interested in collaborative learning.

P.A.L.C. offers a venue for the kinds of heady conversations that might otherwise occur late at night over red wine of middling quality, in a dormitory lounge. Some students have come voluntarily, others have been coaxed into it by Dr. Vianna. But out of approximately 30 students who attended P.A.L.C. sessions regularly for at least one semester, 25 have transferred to four-year colleges. One of those students was Mr. Rifino.

The group has been such a success that Dr. Vianna, along with Mr. Rifino and another CUNY graduate student began an offshoot for high school students. One afternoon when I visited the group, the students were making their way, line by line, through an essay by the feminist political scientist Iris Marian Young, wrestling with the meaning of phenomenology.

That same day, Mr. Rifino spoke to a second group of high school students, in the spirit of someone telling a conversion narrative at an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. Some of the students in the room were struggling with the same issues he had. “I didn’t take learning into my own hands,” Mr. Rifino said. “I didn’t care about current events; I didn’t understand the BP oil spill when it happened,” he said.

Mr. Rifino then spoke of his days behind the cash register at the Gap. “These activities for me were naturally unsatisfying,” he told the group. Through P.A.L.C. he was exposed to Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” as well as Marx. He acquitted himself with rigor, and decided that he wanted to pursue a life in academia.

Dr. Vianna, who was also there, asked students if they, too, felt stuck at times. One student responded that no, he did not, things came easily to him. Many of the others rolled their eyes. Another student said that though he had done well in history he struggled with math. “I derided myself,” he said. Another talked about getting a 57 on a test.

Mr. Rifino nodded in recognition.

“My skills, my abilities, I thought they were fixed and they weren’t,” he said. “We all have unlimited potential, I think.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on December 21, 2014, on page MB1 of the New York edition with the headline: Raising Their Sights.

    Raising Ambitions: The Challenge in Teaching at Community Colleges,
    NYT, 21.12.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/21/nyregion/
    raising-ambitions-the-challenge-in-teaching-at-community-colleges.html

F.C.C. Chief

Aims to Bolster Internet for Schools

 

NOV. 17, 2014

The New York Times

By EDWARD WYATT

WASHINGTON — With a goal of fiber-optic lines reaching to every school and a Wi-Fi connection in every classroom, Tom Wheeler, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, is expected on Monday to propose a 62 percent increase in the amount of money the agency spends annually to wire schools and libraries with high-speed Internet connections.

Mr. Wheeler will propose that the annual cap on spending for school Internet needs be raised by $1.5 billion, to $3.9 billion, according to an F.C.C. official who spoke on condition of anonymity but was authorized to release details of the proposal. The initiative is part of a continuing overhaul of the Universal Service Fund and its educational component, known as E-Rate.

The new spending would lead to an increase of roughly 16 percent in the monthly fee on consumers’ phone bills. The fee is used to finance the Universal Service Fund, an $8.7 billion effort that provides phone and broadband connections for low-income populations, rural areas, and schools and libraries.

F.C.C. officials say consumers would pay less than $2 a year in additional fees per phone line, or less than $6 extra per household, on average; currently the average household pays about $36 a year. But the amount an individual household pays can vary widely, with fees assessed on both home and mobile service. Businesses pay into the program as well.

“While the impact on consumers will be small, the impact on children, teachers, local communities and American competitiveness will be great,” the F.C.C. said in a statement scheduled to be released on Monday.

The spending increase is the next phase of an overhaul of the E-Rate program that the F.C.C. started in July. Then, the F.C.C. approved a shift in funds from legacy programs like telephone and paging systems to Wi-Fi and other high-speed broadband connections. E-Rate constitutes about 28 percent of the overall Universal Service Fund.

But that overhaul, which was approved by a 3-2 commission vote, provoked blistering dissents from the agency’s two Republican commissioners, who said the majority ignored their suggestions for streamlining paperwork requirements and that the review did not do enough to tighten controls on spending. Over all, the Universal Service Fund has grown about 20 percent since President Obama took office.

The new proposal will probably meet similar opposition but could win the support of the commission’s three Democrats, including Mr. Wheeler. The proposal is expected to be voted on at the Dec. 11 commission meeting.

Greater spending for Wi-Fi and fiber-optic lines is needed, F.C.C. officials said, because schools serving more than 40 million students say they do not have broadband connections that are fast enough to take advantage of the most robust digital learning features.

Imbalances in infrastructure affect some schools far more than others, however. Seven in 10 rural districts say none of their schools can meet high-speed Internet connectivity targets today. Schools in affluent areas are three times more likely to meet speed targets as those in low-income areas, the F.C.C. says.

As schools expand Wi-Fi, it increases the strain on the wires that carry Internet service to them, resulting in the need to upgrade to high-speed fiber-optic connections as well.

By increasing the E-Rate budget, the F.C.C. hopes to pay for Wi-Fi connections throughout schools and for upgrades to the networks that carry data to the schools.

“The growth will be a combination of payments for costly one-time nonrecurring infrastructure upgrades and increasing monthly recurring charges for Internet access,” the F.C.C.’s proposal says.

Libraries need upgrades too, and in low-income and rural areas they are important because they often provide the only available Internet connection for many people. Yet half of all public libraries report connection speeds of less than 10 megabits per second. Mr. Wheeler has said 25 megabits per second should be considered “table stakes” in 21st-century communications.

Because schools and libraries usually serve dozens to hundreds of Internet users at a time, speeds have to be even higher. The F.C.C. has set target speeds for schools, for example, of 100 megabits per 1,000 students in the near term and 1 gigabit per 1,000 students in the longer term.

For the new spending plans to meet rapidly growing needs, other F.C.C. initiatives to lower acquisition costs for schools and libraries will have to work as well.

Those include programs to use group buying to lower costs to schools and to increase transparency of what individual districts pay in order to iron out huge regional differences in costs.

Mr. Wheeler, speaking at an education technology conference in September, told of a district in Mississippi that paid $750 a month for a 1 gigabit per second Internet connection, while across the state line in Louisiana, a school paid $5,000 for the same service.

“The data we have collected,” Mr. Wheeler said, “suggests that in many cases broadband service providers can do a lot better for our nation’s schools and libraries.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on November 17, 2014, on page B4 of the New York edition with the headline: F.C.C. Chief Aims to Bolster Internet for Schools.

    F.C.C. Chief Aims to Bolster Internet for Schools, NYT, 17.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/business/f
    cc-chief-aims-to-bolster-internet-for-schools.html

Privacy Concerns for ClassDojo

and Other Tracking Apps

for Schoolchildren

 

NOV. 16, 2014

The New York Times

By NATASHA SINGER

HUNTER, N.Y. — For better or for worse, the third graders in Greg Fletcher’s class at Hunter Elementary School always know where they stand.

One morning in mid-October, Mr. Fletcher walked to the front of the classroom where an interactive white board displayed ClassDojo, a behavior-tracking app that lets teachers award points or subtract them based on a student’s conduct. On the board was a virtual classroom showing each student’s name, a cartoon avatar and the student’s scores so far that week.

“I’m going to have to take a point for no math homework,” Mr. Fletcher said to a blond boy in a striped shirt and then clicked on the boy’s avatar, a googly-eyed green monster, and subtracted a point.

The program emitted a disappointed pong sound, audible to the whole class — and sent a notice to the child’s parents if they had signed up for an account on the service.

ClassDojo is used by at least one teacher in roughly one out of three schools in the United States, according to its developer. The app is among the innovations to emerge from the estimated $7.9 billion education software market aimed at students from prekindergarten through high school. Although there are similar behavior-tracking programs, they are not as popular as ClassDojo.

Many teachers say the app helps them automate the task of recording classroom conduct, as well as allowing them to communicate directly with parents.

But some parents, teachers and privacy law scholars say ClassDojo, along with other unproven technologies that record sensitive information about students, is being adopted without sufficiently considering the ramifications for data privacy and fairness, like where and how the data might eventually be used.

These critics also say that the carrot-and-stick method of classroom discipline is outmoded, and that behavior apps themselves are too subjective, enabling teachers to reward or penalize students for amorphous acts like “disrespect.” They contend that behavior databases could potentially harm students’ reputations by unfairly saddling some with “a problem child” label that could stick with them for years.

ClassDojo does not seek explicit parental consent for teachers to log detailed information about a child’s conduct. Although the app’s terms of service state that teachers who sign up guarantee that their schools have authorized them to do so, many teachers can download ClassDojo, and other free apps, without vetting by school supervisors. Neither the New York City nor Los Angeles school districts, for example, keep track of teachers independently using apps.

If parents wish to remove their child’s data from ClassDojo, they must ask the teacher or email the company.

“There is a real question in my mind as to whether teachers have the authority to sign up on behalf of the school,” said Steven J. McDonald, the general counsel of the Rhode Island School of Design and a leading specialist on federal education privacy law. “Since this is a free service,” he added, “one wonders if there is some other trade-off.”
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Sam Chaudhary, the co-founder of ClassDojo, said his company recently updated its privacy policy to say that it does not “sell, lease or share your (or children’s) personal information to any third party” for advertising or marketing.

“We have committed in the terms of service to never selling the data,” Mr. Chaudhary said. “It’s the user’s own data.”

The company plans to generate revenue by marketing additional services, like more detailed behavior analyses, to parents.

But ClassDojo could make money from the information it collects in other ways. Another section of the privacy policy says the company may show users advertisements “based in part on your personally identifiable information.”

Mr. Chaudhary said ClassDojo gave students feedback as a way of encouraging them to develop skills like leadership and teamwork. Some special-education teachers also use the program to set individualized goals with students and their parents.

“Kids are being judged at school every day,” Mr. Chaudhary said. “They are just being judged on a narrow set of things. If we can broaden that set, it’s a good thing.”

But critics say that the kind of classroom discipline that Class Dojo promotes is not made effective by packaging it in an app that awards virtual badges for obedience.

“This is just a flashy digital update of programs that have long been used to treat children like pets, bribing or threatening them into compliance,” said Alfie Kohn, the author of “The Myth of the Spoiled Child” and other books on learning and child-rearing.

Teachers who use ClassDojo can choose which behaviors to reward or discourage. Kelly Connolly-Hickey, an English teacher at West Babylon Senior High School in West Babylon, N.Y., rewards students who “brought in supplies” or “brightened someone’s day” while docking points for cellphone use.

“Knowing that they are being graded on how they behave and participate every day makes it easier for them to stay on task,” Ms. Connolly-Hickey said of her students.

She added that she had not read ClassDojo’s policies on handling student data, but that she had shown the principal of her school how she used the app.

“I’m one of those people who, when the terms of service are 18 pages, I just click agree,” she said.

Teachers can decide whether to display students’ points or to use the system in private mode. Mr. Fletcher, the third-grade teacher, said he used ClassDojo publicly in an effort to be transparent. He deliberately awards many more points for good behavior than subtracts them for being off-task.

Last month, after a well-mannered class discussion about the motivations of characters in a picture book, Mr. Fletcher invited each student to the white board to award him- or herself a point for teamwork. With each point, the app emitted a contented ping.

“I don’t ever award the kids points or take away points without them knowing,” he said. “What I am trying to do is put the ownership back on the kid.”

Melinda McCool, the school’s principal, said she felt Mr. Fletcher used the app judiciously, and had asked him to show other teachers how he used it.

But at least one school is concerned that the app could make a student feel publicly shamed.

“I have told all my staff, ‘You cannot display this data publicly,’ “ said Matt Renwick, the principal of Howe Elementary School in Wisconsin Rapids, Wis.

His school also requires teachers to obtain permission from a child’s parent before they start using any app that transfers the student’s data to a company.

Parents are also divided over ClassDojo.

Some like being able to use the app to follow their child’s progress and receive reports from teachers.

“It’s a great way to get the prognosis on your child,” said Gabrielle Canezin, whose daughter is in Mr. Fletcher’s class.

But Tony Porterfield, a software engineer in Los Altos, Calif., asked a teacher to remove his son’s information from ClassDojo. He said he was concerned that it might later be aggregated and analyzed in unforeseen ways.

“It creates a label for a child,” he said. “It’s a little early to be doing that to my 6-year-old.”

ClassDojo has received nearly $10 million from investors, including General Catalyst Partners, Shasta Ventures, New Schools Venture Fund, Paul Graham and Yuri Milner. Mr. Chaudhary says he and his team have studied ClassDojo’s effectiveness by visiting classrooms, conducting weekly phone calls with a few dozen teachers, and surveying 1,000 teachers.

Such an anecdotal approach does not sit well with evidence-based educators.

“That’s like polling people in McDonald’s about how they like the food,” said Brett Clark, the director of technology at Greater Clark County Schools in Jeffersonville, Ind. “They are not asking the teachers who looked at the app, walked away and said, ‘Not in my classroom.’ ”
 

A version of this article appears in print on November 17, 2014, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Clicks, Not Gold Stars.

    Privacy Concerns for ClassDojo and Other Tracking Apps for Schoolchildren,
    NYT, 16.11.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/17/technology/
    privacy-concerns-for-classdojo-and-other-tracking-apps-for-schoolchildren.html

Handling of Sexual Harassment Case

Poses Larger Questions at Yale

 

NOV. 1, 2014

The New York Times

By TAMAR LEWIN

NEW HAVEN — A sexual harassment case that has been unfolding without public notice for nearly five years within the Yale School of Medicine has roiled the institution and led to new allegations that the university is insensitive to instances of harassment against women.

The case involves a former head of cardiology who professed his love to a young Italian researcher at the school and sought to intervene in her relationship with a fellow cardiologist under his supervision.

A university committee recommended that he be permanently removed from his position, but the provost reduced that penalty to an 18-month suspension.

After that decision, The New York Times obtained extensive documents related to the case and interviewed 18 faculty members who expressed anger at how it had been handled, with no public acknowledgment of wrongdoing. After The Times contacted Yale last week, the university announced that the former cardiology chief, Dr. Michael Simons, “had decided” not to return to his post.

The case involving faculty at one of the nation’s leading medical schools comes as dozens of colleges are under scrutiny by the federal government for their handling of sexual misconduct allegations against students.

Dr. Simons began his advances to Annarita Di Lorenzo, the Italian researcher, 18 years his junior, on Feb. 12, 2010, by slipping her a handwritten love letter in effortful Italian.

Dr. Di Lorenzo told him that the letter was unwelcome and insulting to her, her new boyfriend and Dr. Simons’s wife. But Dr. Simons told her that she was choosing the wrong man since he was in a position to “open the world of science” to her.

In 2011, Dr. Di Lorenzo moved to Cornell. But her boyfriend, now husband, Dr. Frank Giordano, remained at Yale, and asserts that his career stalled after Dr. Simons disparaged him and froze him out professionally.

Finding no help within the medical school, the couple filed formal complaints to the University-Wide Committee on Sexual Misconduct, and the committee ruled last year that Dr. Simons had sexually harassed and created a hostile work environment for Dr. Di Lorenzo. The committee found that Dr. Simons had publicly derided Dr. Giordano but it stopped short of saying negative actions like removing him from a grant had been retaliatory since so many factors, including subjective ones, come into play in a cardiology chief’s decisions. It did find that Dr. Simons had exercised improper leadership and compromised decision-making regarding Dr. Giordano. They are both 57.

In interviews, Dr. Di Lorenzo, now 39, and Dr. Giordano said they had suffered as a result of poor treatment by the university.

In response to their complaints, the committee recommended Dr. Simons’s ouster as chief of cardiology and a five-year bar from any high administrative position.

But the provost, Ben Polak, planned to allow him to return as chief and never removed him from his posts as the director of the Yale Cardiovascular Research Center and as a co-director of the Yale University College London Collaborative. Both the provost and Yale’s president, Peter Salovey, declined to comment. Many professors remain angry.

“There will be continued concern by the faculty as long as Michael Simons is allowed to continue in his positions,” said Dr. John Schley Hughes, a professor of medicine.

Responding to The Times, Dr. Simons acknowledged in a written statement that he had pursued a junior colleague.

“For this error in judgment I have apologized, and I genuinely regret my action,” he said.

Still, he said that he had never abused his position at Yale to punish or retaliate against any faculty member, and that his decisions had always been based on professional criteria.

The faculty complaints go beyond the Simons case to broader concerns about the climate for women at the medical school.

Over all, Yale University has made progress in its treatment of women, especially undergraduates, since 2010, when fraternity members on the quad chanted, “No means yes, yes means anal” — leading to an investigation by the federal Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights. That investigation is over, and the university has a Title IX coordinator responsible for ensuring gender equity and a sexual misconduct committee, which heard the complaints against Dr. Simons. Yet at the medical school, many faculty members say little has changed.

A dozen faculty members — male, female, senior and junior — talked with a Times reporter last week about their distress over the school’s handling of the Simons case on the condition that the conversation be in a group and that most participants not be quoted directly.

One participant, Joan Steitz, a prominent molecular biologist, was an exception, saying that in recent years, she had been “very disappointed” by what she sees as the medical school’s lack of progress in ensuring equality for women on the faculty and its lack of openness on decision-making.

Some medical school professors question the value of the universitywide committee, even with its outside fact-finders and trained members from across the university’s different schools, given that the provost can overturn its recommendations, without disclosing them or saying why he rejected them.

Dr. Simons and the school have their defenders: As word spread last week about The Times’s queries, two women on the faculty at the research center contacted The Times to say that he had been an outstanding leader who had promoted women, and that the accusations had been blown out of proportion.

Since the reduced suspension of Dr. Simons was announced last November, senior women on the faculty and, separately, junior women in the cardiology department had taken their concerns about his expected return in June 2015 to Dr. Salovey, the university president.

In a follow-up letter to the president, the senior women said the climate for women at the medical school had “substantially deteriorated under the current leadership.”

“We expressed concern about the lack of transparency or honesty in the communication announcing Dr. Simons’s leave, and particularly the absence of any suggestion that there had been wrongdoing,” the letter said, referring to their meeting. “The communication could easily have been interpreted as Dr. Simons being awarded a special academic leave relative to some important work.”

This past summer, Dr. Salovey reappointed the medical school’s dean, Dr. Robert J. Alpern, to a new term.

Among the unhappy faculty, many fault Dean Alpern. Some question the involvement of the provost, formerly the chairman of Yale’s economics department, where Dr. Simons’s wife, Katerina, was a faculty member.

Last month, a majority of senior faculty from the department of medicine — by far the school’s largest division — attended a town-hall-style meeting with the dean, requested by the professors, to discuss the medical school’s expectations of professional behavior, the climate for women and recent complaints of sexual harassment. In the last two weeks, the same issues were raised at smaller meetings.

Some faculty members said they had emerged from the meetings unconvinced of Dean Alpern’s commitment to women’s advancement.

Some saw the dean as being dismissive when he announced the formation of a new task force on gender equity, saying it was necessary because some women felt there were problems. Dr. Daniel C. DiMaio, a genetics professor, said it was not just women complaining. The dean replied, “O.K., Dan and some women think there’s a problem.”

In an interview last week, Dean Alpern said that he was a strong believer in equality for women and that his remark had been a clumsy effort at humor.

Several of the faculty members who attended the meetings said that while they could not recall the dean’s actual words, the message they had come away with was that he seemed confused by the standards for sexual harassment, and thought brilliant researchers who attract grants might be given extra latitude.

Faculty members hypothesized that Dr. Simons wins enough grants — including $5 million a year from the federal government in the last two years — that university administrators’ eagerness to keep the money flowing might make them inclined to relax the standards.

“I do not believe in a double standard,” said Dean Alpern, whom many faculty members consider to be Dr. Simons’s strongest supporter.

The dean has told faculty members that he did not try to influence the committee findings, and knew no more than what he had read in emails and announcements.

Dr. Thomas Duffy, an emeritus professor of hematology, asked, “Whose responsibility is it, if not the dean’s, to know what’s going on?”

The long sexual harassment saga springs from a friendship gone sour: Before Dr. Simons left Dartmouth to come to Yale in 2008, he had been friendly with Dr. Giordano, and tried to recruit him to Dartmouth. Dr. Giordano first became friendly with Dr. Di Lorenzo in December 2009, when both took the same train to New York City to attend a dinner given by the Simonses.

On Feb. 12, 2010, Dr. Simons handed Dr. Di Lorenzo his love letter, saying he wanted to kiss her lips in Liguria, and “every part of your body in every continent and city of the world.”

Over the next years, Dr. Giordano’s career languished. He has said his advancement was stalled by his exclusion from important meetings and assignments. He has not received tenure.

His relationship with Dr. Simons became so difficult that Dr. Jack Elias, then Yale’s chairman of medicine and now dean of Brown’s medical school, took over his direct supervision to protect him from Dr. Simons, the committee reported.
 

Dr. Margaret Bia, a nephrologist at the school for four decades, said the faculty outcry over the case has been unprecedented. “The senior faculty of medicine has never mobilized like this around an issue that everyone is fired up about,” she said.

A version of this article appears in print on November 2, 2014, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Harassment Case Stirs Doubts on Women’s Treatment at Yale.

    Handling of Sexual Harassment Case Poses Larger Questions at Yale,
    NYT, 1.10.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/us/
    handling-of-sexual-harassment-case-poses-larger-questions-at-yale.html

The American Dream Is Leaving America

OCT. 25, 2014

The New York Times

SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist
 

THE best escalator to opportunity in America is education. But a new study underscores that the escalator is broken.

We expect each generation to do better, but, currently, more young American men have less education (29 percent) than their parents than have more education (20 percent).

Among young Americans whose parents didn’t graduate from high school, only 5 percent make it through college themselves. In other rich countries, the figure is 23 percent.

The United States is devoting billions of dollars to compete with Russia militarily, but maybe we should try to compete educationally. Russia now has the largest percentage of adults with a university education of any industrialized country — a position once held by the United States, although we’re plunging in that roster.

These figures come from the annual survey of education from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, or O.E.C.D., and it should be a shock to Americans.

A basic element of the American dream is equal access to education as the lubricant of social and economic mobility. But the American dream seems to have emigrated because many countries do better than the United States in educational mobility, according to the O.E.C.D. study.

As recently as 2000, the United States still ranked second in the share of the population with a college degree. Now we have dropped to fifth. Among 25-to-34-year-olds — a glimpse of how we will rank in the future — we rank 12th, while once-impoverished South Korea tops the list.

A new Pew survey finds that Americans consider the greatest threat to our country to be the growing gap between the rich and poor. Yet we have constructed an education system, dependent on local property taxes, that provides great schools for the rich kids in the suburbs who need the least help, and broken, dangerous schools for inner-city children who desperately need a helping hand. Too often, America’s education system amplifies not opportunity but inequality.

My dad was a World War II refugee who fled Ukraine and Romania and eventually made his way to France. He spoke perfect French, and Paris would have been a natural place to settle. But he felt that France was stratified and would offer little opportunity to a penniless Eastern European refugee, or even to his children a generation later, so he set out for the United States. He didn’t speak English, but, on arrival in 1951, he bought a copy of the Sunday edition of The New York Times and began to teach himself — and then he worked his way through Reed College and the University of Chicago, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a university professor.

He rode the American dream to success; so did his only child. But while he was right in 1951 to bet on opportunity in America rather than Europe, these days he would perhaps be wrong. Researchers find economic and educational mobility are now greater in Europe than in America.

That’s particularly sad because, as my Times colleague Eduardo Porter noted last month, egalitarian education used to be America’s strong suit. European countries excelled at first-rate education for the elites, but the United States led the way in mass education.

By the mid-1800s, most American states provided a free elementary education to the great majority of white children. In contrast, as late as 1870, only 2 percent of British 14-year-olds were in school.

Then the United States was the first major country, in the 1930s, in which a majority of children attended high school. By contrast, as late as 1957, only 9 percent of 17-year-olds in Britain were in school.

Until the 1970s, we were pre-eminent in mass education, and Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz of Harvard University argue powerfully that this was the secret to America’s economic rise. Then we blew it, and the latest O.E.C.D. report underscores how the rest of the world is eclipsing us.

In effect, the United States has become 19th-century Britain: We provide superb education for elites, but we falter at mass education.

In particular, we fail at early education. Across the O.E.C.D., an average of 70 percent of 3-year-olds are enrolled in education programs. In the United States, it’s 38 percent.

In some quarters, there’s a perception that American teachers are lazy. But the O.E.C.D. report indicates that American teachers work far longer hours than their counterparts abroad. Yet American teachers earn 68 percent as much as the average American college-educated worker, while the O.E.C.D. average is 88 percent.

Fixing the education system is the civil rights challenge of our era. A starting point is to embrace an ethos that was born in America but is now an expatriate: that we owe all children a fair start in life in the form of access to an education escalator.

Let’s fix the escalator.

•

I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 26, 2014,
on page SR13 of the New York edition with the headline:
The American Dream Is Leaving America.

    The American Dream Is Leaving America, NYT, 25.10.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/26/opinion/sunday/
    nicholas-kristof-the-american-dream-is-leaving-america.html

A New Start for Newark Schools

OCT. 19, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By RAS J. BARAKA

NEWARK — IN 1995, the New Jersey State Department of Education took control of Newark’s schools, disbanding the local board and appointing its own superintendent. I had just then become a teacher in Newark.

The express intent of the takeover was to intervene temporarily to improve the quality of our schools, increase the achievement of students and better manage the system’s finances. Since the state was on the receiving end of a 1994 State Supreme Court ruling that the underfunding of public schools in urban districts was unconstitutional, the timing seemed suspicious, to say the least. It felt as if we were being annexed.

Nearly 20 years later, it is clear that the state has failed on all counts. Local control must be returned to Newark’s public schools immediately.

Over the years, the court-ordered remedies for Newark’s schools were eroded or ignored. A $6 billion schools construction program never materialized. Instead, thanks to state control, Newark has become a laboratory for experiments in top-down reforms.

Successive state-mandated initiatives came and went. Occasionally, there were useful ideas that yielded results — for example, in lower grades when resources were focused on early childhood learning. But when there was no dramatic breakthrough, programs were withdrawn, and some new plan hatched. Over time, the cycle hurt teachers’ morale and bred cynicism among parents.

During state control of Newark’s schools, a lack of consultation and consent has been a persistent problem. Reports show at least one neighborhood school was shut down and the real estate sold off; others were changed to charter schools without a vote — a clear violation of state charter laws.

You might think that Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 million donation in 2010 to kick-start a foundation for Newark schools would have been a game changer. But little funding went directly to Newark’s schools. Instead, the first $1.3 million was wasted on a poorly conducted community outreach campaign. Then another $100 million, including funds from Zuckerberg, went to a program for teacher merit pay.

Principals were given the power to re-interview teachers for their jobs and in some cases hire new teachers. But the rejected teachers joined a pool of floating staff members in the “rubber room” downtown, until reassigned to other schools or bought out. So even as Newark teachers worked without a contract, the state went on a hiring and cash-incentive spree.

There was not enough accountability or transparency about the spending. We only know this much thanks to demands filed by community groups under New Jersey’s Open Public Records Act.

The state’s maladministration of Newark’s public schools continues to this day. When Superintendent Cami Anderson’s “Renew Schools” reform plan ran into difficulties because of its lack of public consultation, foundation dollars went to a community-engagement program. Yet the latest iteration, the “One Newark” plan, has only plunged the system into more chaos.

Consider the reports I’ve received of Barringer High School (formerly Newark High School). Three weeks into the school year, students still did not have schedules. Students who had just arrived in this country and did not speak English sat for days in the school library without placement or instruction. Seniors were placed in classes they had already taken, missing the requirements they’d need to graduate. Even the school lunch system broke down, with students served bread and cheese in lieu of hot meals.

Things are no better for parents. Under One Newark’s universal enrollment scheme, a secret algorithm determined what school was the “best fit” for each child. Often, this ended up placing each child in a family in a different school, none of which was the neighborhood school the parents chose. The superintendent even had to devise a new busing program service for the unpopular One Newark plan.

To cap it all, last year the school system operated with a deficit of $57 million.

Gov. Chris Christie likes to say that he is “the decider” of what happens in Newark’s public schools. What that means is that he and his appointees now own the failure of the state’s policies. Advocates of both traditional and charter schools, parent groups, ministers, student organizations and local elected officials have called on New Jersey to relinquish its hold over our schools.

The real issues that reform should address are ensuring that every 3- or 4-year-old child is enrolled in a structured learning environment, and that all our teachers get staff development and training. We must be more effective at sharing best practices and keeping our class sizes manageable. If necessary, we should put more than one teacher in the classroom, especially for students from kindergarten to third grade.

We also need to fix additional problems like a historically segregated curriculum, which offers stimulating choices in wealthy suburbs but only the most basic courses to our inner-city children. And we must break the cycle of low expectations that some educators have of the children they teach, merely prescribing repeat classes if students don’t pass.

The first step in a transition to local control of Newark’s schools is a short-term transfer of authority to the mayor. I would quickly appoint a new superintendent. Once basic functions were restored to the district, we would move as soon as possible to return control to an elected school board with full powers.

It is clear that we cannot rely on the good faith of the state to respond expeditiously. Federal intervention appears our only recourse. I have written to the Justice Department’s Office of Civil Rights in support of the lawsuits that parents, students, advocates and educators in our city have brought, requesting that the federal government intercede. The right of Newark’s citizens to equitable, high-quality public education demands the return of local, democratic control.
 

Ras J. Baraka, a former high school principal,
is the mayor of Newark.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 20, 2014, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: A New Start for Newark Schools.

    A New Start for Newark Schools, NYT, 20.10.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/20/opinion/a-new-start-for-newark-schools.html

Why Poor Students Struggle

 

SEPT. 21, 2014

By VICKI MADDEN

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
 

I WAS rushing to change trains at Delancey Street in downtown Manhattan earlier this year when a tall young man stepped in front of me, blocking my way through the crowd. He said my name and I looked up.

“Kelvin!” I cried. As we hugged, I considered what month it was. March. Why wasn’t he upstate at school? He knew what I was thinking.

“I’m taking a year off. Everybody told me I should go to college, but I didn’t really know what I was doing there.”

I told him that I had taken a year off from college myself. And that when my son was unhappy at his small-town college, I had recommended a transfer to Hunter College, a return to the city. I suggested he get in touch with the college counselor at the secondary school in Brooklyn where I’d taught him. “Josh can help you with a transfer,” I said.

He nodded, but I walked away unconvinced that he would ask for help. A couple of months later, another former student came out from behind the cash register at a grocery store in Brooklyn to hug me and reassure me that she would be back in college in September — she just needed to earn some money. As we caught up, she told me that yet another classmate had left a top-tier college in Maine.

The effort to increase the number of low-income students who graduate from four-year colleges, especially elite colleges, has recently been front-page news. But when I think about my students, and my own story, I wonder whether the barriers, seen and unseen, have changed at all.

In spite of our collective belief that education is the engine for climbing the socioeconomic ladder — the heart of the “American dream” myth — colleges now are more divided by wealth than ever. When lower-income students start college, they often struggle to finish for many reasons, but social isolation and alienation can be big factors. In “Rewarding Strivers: Helping Low-Income Students Succeed in College,” Anthony P. Carnevale and Jeff Strohl analyzed federal data collected by Michael Bastedo and Ozan Jaquette of the University of Michigan School of Education; they found that at the 193 most selective colleges, only 14 percent of students were from the bottom 50 percent of Americans in terms of socioeconomic status. Just 5 percent of students were from the lowest quartile.

I know something about the lives behind the numbers, which are largely unchanged since I arrived at Barnard in 1978, taking a red-eye flight from Seattle by myself. The other students I encountered on campus seemed foreign to me. Their parents had gone to Ivy League schools; they played tennis. I had never before been east of Nebraska. My mother raised five children while she worked for the post office, and we kept a goat in our yard to reduce the amount of garbage we’d have to pay for at the county dump.

My former students are attending Franklin and Marshall, Barnard, Bard, Colby. They are so much more worldly than I was. They’ve grown up in New York City, so they’ve hung out on the High Line, eaten sushi, visited museums and colleges on class trips. Their adjustment to college life in small towns hits different bumps than mine did.

When a miscommunication about paperwork or a parent’s slight rise in income leads to a reduction in financial aid, however small, that can be enough for a student to consider withdrawing. If you don’t have $700, it might as well be a million.

Kids at the most selective colleges often struggle academically, but they are capable of doing the work. The real key is whether they feel comfortable going to professors to ask for help or teaming up with other students in study groups and to manage the workload. At that school in Brooklyn, I taught history, leading students through writing 10-page position papers with proper citations, as well as presenting and defending their work to a panel of adults. Other teachers did the same in their subjects. Through the college application process, these students had help with every step — including convincing their parents that going away to school would be a good thing.

But once those from lower socioeconomic backgrounds arrive on campus, it’s often the subtler things, the signifiers of who they are and where they come from, that cause the most trouble, challenging their very identity, comfort and right to be on that campus. The more elite the school, the wider that gap. I remember struggling with references to things I’d never heard of, from Homer to the Social Register. I couldn’t read The New York Times — not because the words were too hard, but because I didn’t have enough knowledge of the world to follow the articles. Hardest was the awareness that my own experiences were not only undervalued but often mocked, used to indicate when someone was stupid or low-class: No one at Barnard ate Velveeta or had ever butchered a deer.

Urban students face different slights but ones with a more dangerous edge. One former student was told by multiple people in his small Pennsylvania college town not to wear a hoodie at night, because it made him look “sketchy.” Standing out like that — being himself — could put him at risk.

To stay four years and graduate, students have to come to terms with the unspoken transaction: exchanging your old world for a new world, one that doesn’t seem to value where you came from. The transition is not just about getting a degree and making more money. If that was all socioeconomics signified, it would not be such a strong predictor of everything from SAT scores and parenting practices to health and longevity.

Perhaps because I came from generations of people who had left their families behind and pushed west from Ireland, West Virginia and Montana, I suffered few pangs at the idea of setting out for a new land with better opportunities. I wanted the libraries, summer houses and good wine more than anything that I then valued about my own history.

In college, I read Richard Rodriguez’s memoir, “Hunger of Memory,” in which he depicts his alienation from his family because of his education, painting a picture of the scholarship boy returned home to face his parents and finding only silence. Being young, I didn’t understand, believing myself immune to the idea that any gain might entail a corresponding loss. I was keen to exchange my Western hardscrabble life for the chance to be a New York City middle-class museumgoer. I’ve paid a price in estrangement from my own people, but I was willing. Not every 18-year-old will make that same choice, especially when race is factored in as well as class.

As the income gap widens and hardens, changing class means a bigger difference between where you came from and where you are going. Teachers like me can help prepare students academically for college work. College counselors can help with the choices, the federal financial aid application and all the bureaucratic details. But how can we help our students prepare for the tug of war in their souls?
 

Vicki Madden, an instructional coach for the New York City Department of Education, has taught English and history in New York City schools since 1985.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 22, 2014, on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Poor Students Struggle.

    Why Poor Students Struggle, NYT, 21.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/opinion/why-poor-students-struggle.html

With Tech Taking Over in Schools,

Worries Rise

 

SEPT. 14, 2014

The New York Times

By NATASHA SINGER

At a New York state elementary school, teachers can use a behavior-monitoring app to compile information on which children have positive attitudes and which act out. In Georgia, some high school cafeterias are using a biometric identification system to let students pay for lunch by scanning the palms of their hands at the checkout line. And across the country, school sports teams are using social media sites for athletes to exchange contact information and game locations.

Technology companies are collecting a vast amount of data about students, touching every corner of their educational lives — with few controls on how those details are used.

Now California is poised to become the first state to comprehensively restrict how such information is exploited by the growing education technology industry.

Legislators in the state passed a law last month prohibiting educational sites, apps and cloud services used by schools from selling or disclosing personal information about students from kindergarten through high school; from using the children’s data to market to them; and from compiling dossiers on them. The law is a response to growing parental concern that sensitive information about children — like data about learning disabilities, disciplinary problems or family trauma — might be disseminated and disclosed, potentially hampering college or career prospects. Although other states have enacted limited restrictions on such data, California’s law is the most wide-ranging.

“It’s a landmark bill in that it’s the first of its kind in the country to put the onus on Internet companies to do the right thing,” said Senator Darrell Steinberg, a Democrat who wrote the bill.

Gov. Jerry Brown has not taken a public position on the measure, or on a related student privacy bill regulating school contracts with education technology vendors. If he does not act, the bills will become law at the end of this month. Senator Steinberg said the bills had broad bipartisan support and were likely to be enacted.

James P. Steyer, chief executive of Common Sense Media, a children’s advocacy and media ratings group in San Francisco, said the bills were ultimately intended to shore up parents’ trust in online learning.

“You can’t have an education technology revolution without strong privacy protections for students,” said Mr. Steyer, whose group spearheaded the passage of Mr. Steinberg’s bill. “Parents, teachers and kids can now feel confident that students’ personal information can be used only for educational achievement.”

In a sign of the rapid growth of the education technology industry, even Mr. Steyer’s group has partnerships with Google, Apple, Amazon and other companies that distribute the group’s educational materials and its ratings of games and apps for children.

The California effort comes at a pivotal time for the industry. Schools nationwide have been rushing to introduce everything from sophisticated online portals, which allow students to see course assignments and send messages to teachers, to reading apps that can record and assess a child’s every click. These data-driven products are designed to adapt to the abilities and pace of each child, holding out the promise of improved academic achievement.

Last year, sales of education technology software for prekindergarten through 12th grade reached an estimated $7.9 billion, according to the Software and Information Industry Association.

As schools embrace these personalized learning tools, however, parents across the country have started challenging the industry’s information privacy and security practices.

“Different websites collect different kinds of information that could be aggregated to create a profile of a student, starting in elementary school,” said Tony Porterfield, a software engineer and father of two pre-teenage sons in Los Altos, Calif. “Can you imagine a college-admissions officer being able to access behavioral tracking information about a student, or how they did on a math app, all the way back to grade school?”

Last year, parent groups and privacy advocates raised those kinds of concerns about inBloom, a student data warehouse that offered to streamline how educators and apps retrieved student information; inBloom withered in the face of that opposition, closing down in April.

A federal law, the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, limits the disclosures of student education records by schools that receive public funding. But critics have long complained that the 40-year-old law, written for the file-cabinet era when student records were kept on paper, has not kept pace with digital data-mining.

Privacy advocates say many of the details now collected by education sites and apps are not covered by the law because they do not form part of the institutional student education records maintained by schools. A recent study by researchers at Fordham Law School in Manhattan reported that some public schools in the United States did not limit the kinds of information their education technology vendors collected from students or how the companies used those details.

Over the last year, states have introduced more than 100 bills to regulate the collection or handling of students’ information. Many are narrow in scope. Lawmakers in Florida, for instance, passed a measure to prohibit schools from fingerprinting students or collecting scans of their palms or irises — scuttling the palm-scanning payment systems in school cafeterias there.

The California measure takes a fuller approach, formally extending privacy protections to a much wider array of information than the official student education record covered by the federal law.

Among other things, the California bill prohibits companies from selling, disclosing or using for marketing purposes students’ online searches, text messages, photos, voice recordings, biometric data, location information, food purchases, political or religious information, digital documents or any kind of student identification code. The idea is to prevent companies from using information about students for any activity not intended by schools.

“The California statute is filling the void,” said Joel R. Reidenberg, a professor at Fordham Law School who is an expert in education privacy law. “They are modernizing the protection of student privacy for the computer era in schools.”

California lawmakers did make some concessions to industry. An exception in the legislation, for instance, allows companies to use student data for “legitimate research purposes.”

Last year, Senator Steinberg sponsored an “eraser button” law that gives minors in California the right to delete their digital footprints. Subsequently, other states introduced their own eraser button bills, and the senator predicted that legislators elsewhere would now sponsor their own comprehensive student privacy measures. In Washington, D.C., this summer, two senators introduced a national student data privacy bill.

But Mr. Steinberg said he thought his current effort had implications beyond education. The California student privacy measure would essentially advance a fundamental principle of data rights for everyone: that a person who agrees to let a company collect personal details about them for a specific purpose has the right to decide whether that company may subsequently use that same information for unrelated activities.

“The bill sets a standard that is applicable to the larger privacy debate,” Mr. Steinberg said. “Personal information should only be used for other purposes with the permission of the individual.”
 

A version of this article appears in print on September 15, 2014, on page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: With Tech Taking Over in Schools, Worries Rise.

    With Tech Taking Over in Schools, Worries Rise, NYT, 21.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/22/opinion/why-poor-students-struggle.html

Student Loan Debt Burdens

More Than Just Young People

 

SEPT. 12, 2014

The New York Times

Your Money | Retiring

By ELIZABETH OLSON

JANET LEE DUPREE, 72, was surprised when she received her first Social Security benefits seven years ago. About one-fifth of her monthly payment was being withheld and she called the federal government to find out why.

The woman, who is from Citra, Fla., discovered that the deduction from her benefits was to repay $3,000 in loans she took out in the early 1970s to pay for her undergraduate degree.

“I didn’t pay it back, and I’m not saying I shouldn’t,” she said. “I was an alcoholic, and later diagnosed with H.I.V., but I’ve turned my life around. I’ve been paying some of the loan back but that never seems to lower the amount, which is now $15,000 because of interest.

“I don’t know if I can ever pay it back.”

She is among an estimated two million Americans age 60 and older who are in debt from unpaid student loans, according to data from the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Its August “Household Debt and Credit Report” said the number of aging Americans with outstanding student loans had almost tripled from about 700,000 in 2005, whether from long-ago loans for their own educations or more recent borrowing to pay for college degrees for family members.

The debt among older people is up substantially, to $43 billion from $8 billion in 2005, according to the report, which is based on data from Equifax, the credit reporting agency. As of July 31, money was being deducted from Social Security payments to almost 140,000 individuals to pay down their outstanding student loans, according to Treasury Department data. That is up from just under 38,000 people in 2004. Over the decade, the amounts withheld more than tripled, to nearly $101 million for the first seven months of this year from over $32 million in 2004.

While older debtors account for a small fraction of student loan borrowers, who have accumulated nearly $1 trillion in such debt, the effect of owing a constantly ballooning amount of debt but having a fixed income can be onerous, said Senator Bill Nelson, Democrat of Florida, chairman of the Senate Special Committee on Aging.

“Those in default on their loans can see their Social Security checks garnished, leaving them with retirement income that leaves them well below the poverty line,” he said at a committee hearing this week to examine the issue.

“Some may think of student loan debt as a young person’s problem,” he said, “but, as it turns out, that is increasingly not the case.”

That is the problem that Rosemary Anderson, 57, described to the committee. The woman, who is from Watsonville, Calif., has a home mortgage that is under water, as well as health and other problems, and $64,000 in unpaid student loans. She borrowed the money in her 30s to fund her bachelor’s and master’s degrees, but fell behind on her student loan payments eight years ago.

As a result of compound interest, her debt has risen to $126,000. With her $526 monthly payment, at an 8.25 percent rate, she estimates that she “will be 81” by the time it is paid, and will have laid out $87,487 more than she originally borrowed.

Mrs. Dupree, in a telephone interview, said she, too, needed some relief. As a part-time substance abuse counselor for a nonprofit based in Ocala, she said she could barely afford the $50 each month that she negotiated with the federal government as payment for her growing debt.

She is supporting a measure introduced by Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, and a committee member, that would allow people who borrowed money for education before July 2013 to refinance at current, lower interest rates.

A person who took out an unsubsidized loan before July of last year “is locked into an interest rate of nearly 7 percent and older loans run 8 percent to 9 percent and even higher,” Ms. Warren said. The measure would lower the interest rate to 3.86 percent for undergraduate loans and a little higher for graduate and parent loans.

But the future of the bill is unclear. It was stalled in the Senate in June by Republican senators, like Lamar Alexander, of Tennessee, who said college students didn’t need a taxpayer subsidy to help pay off a student loan. “They need a good job.”

The measure would help 25 million people refinance their student loans, but impose a tax increase on people making over $1 million — which Senator Mitch McConnell, of Kentucky, the majority leader, labeled a “tax increase bill styled as a student loan bill.”

Adam Brandon, executive vice president of the conservative organization FreedomWorks, which opposed Senator Warren’s bill, said such legislation “only makes the current student loan bubble worse by continuing to encourage people to take out more loans than they can afford.

“The market needs to work out who can afford these loans. We shouldn’t be trying to game the market and have people end up with so much debt they can’t afford their car payments.”

Even though the number of retiree debtors is small, $1,000 deducted from their Social Security payments “can make a real difference for affected senior citizens or disabled adults surviving on Social Security,” said Sandy Baum, a professor at the George Washington University Graduate School of Education and Human Development, and a researcher at the Urban Institute.

For most beneficiaries, she said, “the average monthly payment of $1,200 is the primary source of income.” While the government should be holding student borrowers to account for their debt, “and there may be some who just decide not to pay,” she said “most are people who are not earning money so it doesn’t make sense to ask them to pay.”

As the ranks of retirees grow, more attention is being focused on the education debt incurred by the next group of people approaching retirement, those 50 to 64 years old. A 2013 AARP study of middle-class families found that aging households were carrying increasing amounts of debt.

While mortgages account for most of that debt, education debt levels have been rising for the preretiree group, noted Lori A. Trawinski, a director at the AARP Public Policy Institute.

“As of 2010, 11 percent of preretiree families had education debt with an average balance of $28,000. Growing debt burdens pose a threat to financial security of Americans approaching retirement, since increasing debt threatens their ability to save for retirement or to accumulate other assets, and may end up leading them to delay retirement,” she said.

The Government Accountability Office warned this week about the growth of educational debt among seniors. It released a report that relied on different data from that used by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, but nonetheless painted an ominous picture of lingering debt burden.

“As the baby boomers continue to move into retirement, the number of older Americans with defaulted loans will only continue to increase,” Charles A. Jeszeck, the G.A.O. director of education, work force and income security, testified at the hearing. “This creates the potential for an unpleasant surprises for some, as their benefits are offset and they face the possibility of a less secure retirement.”

More than 80 percent of the outstanding balances are from seniors who financed their own education, the G.A.O. report concluded, and only 18 percent were attributed to loans used to finance the studies of a spouse, child or grandchild.

But the default rate for these loans is 31 percent — a rate that is double that of the default rate for loans taken out by borrowers between the ages of 25 and 49 years old, according to agency data.

“Such debt reduces net worth and income and can erode retirement security,” Mr. Jeszeck said. “The effect of rising debt can be more profound for those who have accumulated few or no financial assets.”

And such student loan debt “can be especially problematic because unlike other types of debt, it generally cannot be discharged in bankruptcy,” he added.

As a result of unpaid student debt, Social Security payments can be reduced to $750 a month, which is a floor Congress set in 1998. Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, and a member of the committee on aging, said she was planning to introduce a measure to adjust the amount for inflation “to make sure garnishment does not force seniors into poverty.”

For people like Ms. Anderson, help cannot come too soon.

“I incurred this debt to improve my life,” she told the committee, “but the debt has become my undoing.”
 

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A version of this article appears in print on September 13, 2014, on page B5 of the New York edition with the headline: Student Loan Debt Burdens More Than Just Young People.

    Student Loan Debt Burdens More Than Just Young People,
    NYT, 12.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/13/business/
    student-loan-debt-burdens-more-than-just-young-people.html

Help Families From Day 1

SEPT. 2, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By CLARE HUNTINGTON

THE opening of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s universal pre-kindergarten program this week will give 53,000 children access to free, full-day pre-K in New York City, compared with 20,000 enrolled last year. This is well worth celebrating, and other cities and states should follow suit. But this investment in school preparation is not enough. If we want to close the income-based achievement gap, we need to begin much earlier.

Families are the ultimate pre-pre-school. Research in neuroscience and other fields has established that parents and caregivers provide a crucial foundation during the first few years of life. Our public policies, however, make it much harder for families, especially families living in poverty, to lay this foundation.

In my research, I have cataloged government policies that undermine parent-child relationships during early childhood. Our legal system, for example, destabilizes low-income, unmarried families, distracting them from parenting. Forty-one percent of children are born to unmarried parents. These parents are usually romantically involved when the child is born, but these relationships often end. Rather than help these ex-partners make the transition into co-parenting relationships, the legal system exacerbates acrimony between them. States impose child support orders that many low-income fathers are unable to pay, creating tremendous resentment for both parents. And courts are not a realistic resource for many unmarried parents, leaving them to work out problems on their own.

Our workplace protection laws likewise do too little to address the needs of families. The dearth of paid parental leave means that many parents have to choose between their job and bonding with their newborn. Our unwillingness to regulate the scheduling of part-time work means that some parents scramble daily to find child care. And our inability to substantially raise the minimum wage means that parents often have to work multiple jobs, limiting time at home.

Finally, land-use policies rarely prioritize building physical environments that facilitate simple but vital parent-child interactions, like going to a playground or the library. Too many impersonal neighborhoods lack spaces where parents and children can spend time with other families, providing much needed social support.

All of these examples, and so many other policies, fly in the face of what we know about the importance of a child’s first few years. When parents are consumed by fractious relationships, it is harder to provide children with the one-on-one interactions that are the building blocks for brain development. When parents have to work multiple low-wage jobs with unpredictable schedules, satisfying the universal advice to read to children is remarkably difficult. When families don’t have access to safe playgrounds, they lack the space for casual play and the opportunity to meet other parents for the all-important kvetch.

I don’t want to rain on the pre-K parade, but we can’t pretend that school preparation begins at age 4. Four is better than 5, but zero is far better than 4.

To promote co-parenting and family stability, we should develop alternatives to the court system. Since 2006, for example, the Australian government has funded Family Relationship Centers, which offer free or low-cost, community-based mediation to help parents who are separating cooperatively manage the transition from one household to two. In the United States, the federal Office of Child Support Enforcement has begun to recognize the importance of connecting fathers with job training and ensuring that fathers have access to their children, efforts that have increased earnings and child support payments. We need to adopt programs like these much more broadly.

To help low-wage workers give their children the time and attention critical to child development, we need regulations that allow parents more control over their schedules. Living wage legislation, like Seattle’s recent $15-an-hour provision, and a sizable increase in the earned-income tax credit, one of our most effective poverty-fighting tools, would also go a long way toward helping parents meet their children’s needs.

Finally, to ensure that all families live in neighborhoods that help parents interact easily with their children and other parents, local governments should look to the Stapleton development in Denver. This community, built on a decommissioned airport, includes mixed-income housing, sidewalks, common areas, parks, shops, schools and public transportation. This pattern of development allows families to be together easily and create essential social ties.

But this didn’t just happen. At every stage, Denver’s involvement was key. The city ensured that the plan was part of the sale agreement for the airport, funded needed infrastructure, and sold the land incrementally so the developer did not have to take on the kinds of loans that force quick and cheap development.

Critics will dismiss these ideas as unnecessary intervention in family life, or more big government. But this is simply wrong. Our legal system is already deeply involved in every aspect of family life, from defining what a family is in the first place to subsidizing families through public education and deductions for dependents. The real question is not the magnitude of that involvement, but the ends it serves.

It will take tremendous political will to build a policy framework to improve early childhood. The progress we’ve seen toward universal pre-K is encouraging. Now we need to start on Day 1.
 

Clare Huntington, a law professor at Fordham, is the author of “Failure to Flourish: How Law Undermines Family Relationships.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on September 3, 2014, on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Help Families From Day 1.

    Help Families From Day 1, NYT, 2.9.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/opinion/help-families-from-day-1.html

How to Get Kids to Class

To Keep Poor Students in School,

Provide Social Services

 

AUG. 25, 2014

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By DANIEL J. CARDINALI

ARLINGTON, Va. — FOR the 16 million American children living below the federal poverty line, the start of a new school year should be reason to celebrate. Summer is no vacation when your parents are working multiple jobs or looking for one. Many kids are left to fend for themselves in neighborhoods full of gangs, drugs and despair. Given the hardships at home, poor kids might be expected to have the best attendance records, if only for the promise of a hot meal and an orderly classroom.

But it doesn’t usually work out that way. According to the education researchers Robert Balfanz and Vaughan Byrnes at Johns Hopkins, children living in poverty are by far the most likely to be chronically absent from school (which is generally defined as missing at least 10 percent of class days each year).

Amazingly, the federal government does not track absenteeism, but the state numbers are alarming. In Maryland, for example, 31 percent of high school students eligible for the federal lunch program had been chronically absent; for students above the income threshold, the figure was 12 percent.

Thanks to groundbreaking research compiled by Hedy Nai-Lin Chang, the director at Attendance Works, we have ample proof that everything else being equal, chronically absent students have lower G.P.A.s, lower test scores and lower graduation rates than their peers who attend class regularly.

The pattern often starts early. Last year in New Mexico, a third-grade teacher contacted the local affiliate of Communities in Schools, the national organization that I run, for help with a student who had 25 absences in just the first semester. After several home visits, we found that 10 people were living in her two-bedroom apartment, including the student’s mother, who had untreated mental health issues. The little girl often got lost in the shuffle, with no clean clothes to wear and no one to track her progress. Nor was there anything like a quiet place to do homework.

Embarrassment and peer pressure turned out to be the most immediate problem. By buying new clothes to replace the girl’s smelly old ones, we were able to help her fit in and get her to school more often. We found additional community resources for both the third grader and her family, including a mentorship group, a housing charity and mental health experts for her mother. As her home life stabilized over the second semester, the absences all but stopped, and at the end of the year she moved up with her class.

Her situation is common, but there are nowhere near enough happy endings. That’s because policy makers usually treat dropout rates and chronic absenteeism as “school” problems, while issues like housing and mental health are “social” problems with a different set of solutions.

To bridge this divide, our community school model seeks to bring a site coordinator, with training in education or social work, onto the administrative team of every school with a large number of poor kids. That person would be charged with identifying at-risk students and matching them up with services that are available both in the school and the community.

This approach is effective and affordable: at Communities in Schools, which operates in 26 states and the District of Columbia, 75 percent of the students whose cases we manage show improved attendance. We provide our services at an average cost of $189 per student per year, a cost that is shared among government agencies and community partners to minimize the impact on school budgets.

It’s relatively easy to find these at-risk students. That’s because poverty is not evenly distributed; it is increasingly concentrated in specific neighborhoods. According to 2012 census estimates, 7.9 million children live in neighborhoods where at least 30 percent of residents are poor.

Chronic absenteeism tends to follow the same pattern. In Florida, for instance, 15 percent of public schools are home (or not home) to 52 percent of chronically absent students. This grotesque fact paradoxically makes it easier for us to focus our resources: We can effectively reach the most at-risk students with minimal waste or overlap. Politicians of all stripes are beginning to recognize the potential of this approach. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York City, a Democrat, plans to open 40 community schools at a cost of $52 million, while in Michigan, Gov. Rick Snyder, a Republican, has announced a major expansion of a program that puts workers from the state’s Department of Human Services inside struggling public schools.

We do not need to reinvent the wheel to solve this problem. Child Trends, an independent research institute, recently conducted a nationwide study to identify the most effective strategies for school-based provision of social services. Just 1.5 million kids are receiving these services. The number should be much higher.

The key is to put dedicated social-service specialists in every low-performing, high-poverty school, whether they are employed by the school district or another organization. This specialist must be trained in the delivery of community services, with continued funding contingent on improvement in indicators like attendance and dropout rates.

Putting social workers in schools is a low-cost way of avoiding bigger problems down the road, analogous to having a social worker in a hospital emergency room. It’s a common-sense solution that will still require a measure of political courage, something that all too often has itself been chronically absent.
 

Daniel J. Cardinali is the president of Communities in Schools.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on August 26, 2014,
on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline:
How to Get Kids to Class.

    How to Get Kids to Class, NYT, 25.8.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/26/opinion/
    to-keep-poor-kids-in-school-provide-social-services.html

Homicide Charges Likely

in Baruch College Fraternity Retreat Case

JULY 4, 2014

The New York Times

By ARIEL KAMINER

Pennsylvania authorities expect to bring charges against most of the 30 or so Baruch College students who were on a rural fraternity retreat in December when a freshman died after a pledging ritual, a police official said this week.

Chief Harry W. Lewis of the Pocono Mountain Regional Police Department, who oversaw the investigation, said the charges would probably include homicide, which Pennsylvania law defines as anything from involuntary manslaughter, a first-degree misdemeanor that could result in less than a year of jail, to premeditated murder. He said the students could also be charged with hazing, a misdemeanor.

Charges had been expected to be filed by May, but Chief Lewis said prosecutors were still awaiting a medical report and a digital animation that would depict the events surrounding the death of the freshman, Chun Hsien Deng. Local authorities have said that Mr. Deng, 19, died on Dec. 9 after a ritual in which fraternity pledges were strapped into weighted backpacks and blindfolded, then made to find their way across a frozen lawn while others tried to tackle them.

The students were from Pi Delta Psi at Baruch, in Manhattan, and had rented a home in Tunkhannock Township, Pa.

A coroner found that Mr. Deng, who went by the name Michael, had suffered “blunt force head trauma.” When fraternity members noticed that he was unresponsive, they carried him inside, changed his clothes and conducted Internet searches on head injuries, the authorities said, and waited an hour or more before driving him to a hospital, where he was placed on life support.

Several students left the house after Mr. Deng was taken to the hospital, Chief Lewis said, and some tried to hide their cellphones from police officers. But he said that “every video, photo, content, conversation” was successfully retrieved from their phones, including “rituals, pictures” and panicked communications about concealing evidence.

In addition, Chief Lewis said, prosecutors intend to present the computer animation. “We want to put it all together,” he said. “Because of the backpack, because of being pushed and how he hit his head, all those things being combined, we want to be able to show exactly how it happened, instead of just explaining how it happened.”

The district attorney’s office declined to comment on details of the case.

Computer animation is an increasingly popular tool among litigators. When George Zimmerman was tried for killing Trayvon Martin in a Florida subdivision, the defense commissioned an animation to dramatize the events of their fatal encounter. Mr. Zimmerman was acquitted.

An article in a 2004 publication of the American Bar Association says computer animation is “the most sophisticated demonstrative evidence presentation system available to litigators today,” but the article notes that “courts also recognize a computer animation’s dramatic effect and inherent potential to mislead or confuse the jury.”

In Pennsylvania, the rules governing its use were set forth in a 2006 case, Commonwealth v. Serge, said Colin Miller, a University of South Carolina law professor who runs the EvidenceProf blog. That case, involving the appeal of a life sentence for murder, established three criteria that animation must meet to be admitted as evidence.

The first, Professor Miller said: “Is it a fair and accurate representation of the evidence that it purports to portray?” The second is whether the animation addresses and clarifies issues relevant to the trial. The third is whether its value outweighs its potential to prejudice jurors.

“Usually in these cases,” he explained, “the animation is admitted but some type of limiting instruction is given” — a warning by the judge that the animation is nothing more than a tool to illustrate some testimony or other form of evidence.

“The big concern is that jurors will see this animation and it’s going to overwhelm anything someone might say on the witness stand,” Professor Miller said.

Thomas M. Goutman, a partner at the Philadelphia firm White and Williams who has written about the use of computer animation, said it could be a particularly effective way to simplify complex expert testimony. But he added, “It can backfire unless it’s extremely scrupulous.”

Mr. Goutman cautioned that if the opposing counsel could point to any factual errors, even small ones, “the jury may feel as though they’re trying to pull something over on them.”

Mr. Deng, a Queens native who graduated from the Bronx High School of Science, where he was a member of the bowling and handball teams, lived in a Baruch residence hall and studied finance. A lawyer for his family, Douglas E. Fierberg, said they had not gotten much information from Pennsylvania authorities. Having previously announced that they would pursue a lawsuit, Mr. Fierberg added that the family would “wait to see what form of justice they’re able to obtain through the criminal process” before deciding how and against whom the suit might proceed.

Hazing has been a growing concern on college campuses, but Baruch, a college to which most students commute from their homes in Brooklyn or Queens, has no strong fraternity presence. Pi Delta Psi, which describes itself as an “Asian American cultural fraternity,” did not have a house of its own and held meetings in a small shared office.

At Baruch, which is a part of the City University of New York, the disciplinary process “is still underway,” said Christina Latouf, the college’s spokeswoman. Some students, on the advice of their lawyers, have declined to speak with college officials “until potential criminal charges are clarified,” she said, and are suspended in the meantime.

The Baruch chapter of the Pi Delta Psi fraternity was disbanded after Mr. Deng’s death. Pi Delta Psi’s national organization says the Pennsylvania retreat was not sanctioned and violated the fraternity’s rules.

Andrew Kayserian, who is the current national president, said the organization was waiting until the prosecution is resolved before taking steps against the Baruch members. “But most likely they are going to be former members,” he said.
 

A version of this article appears in print on July 5, 2014, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Homicide Charges Likely in Baruch Pledge’s Death.

    Homicide Charges Likely in Baruch College Fraternity Retreat Case,
    NYT, 4.7.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/05/nyregion/
    homicide-charges-likely-in-baruch-college-fraternity-retreat-case.html

Student Borrowers and the Economy

JUNE 10, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

 The Opinion Pages | Editorial

President Obama took an important step this week when he signed an executive order providing relief to millions of struggling student loan borrowers and urged Congress to pass a student loan refinancing bill that is scheduled for a vote in the Senate on Wednesday. Both the executive order and the refinancing bill speak to a grave problem that has trapped recent college graduates and threatens the long-term health of the economy.

This problem has its roots in the financial crisis, which destroyed trillions of dollars in household savings and home equity that families might otherwise have used to pay for college. (Even before the recession, the state colleges, which educate about 70 percent of the nation’s students, reacted to state budget cuts by raising tuition.) With no other choice, students and their families financed college by relying more heavily on student loans. According to the federal Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, student debt has doubled since 2007 and now stands at about $1.2 trillion.

Stagnant wages and a tough job market have made it difficult for borrowers to repay these debts. According to federal statistics, for example, about seven million of the nation’s 40 million student loan borrowers are in default. The people in this large and growing pariah class have difficulty getting jobs or credit, or renting apartments. But borrowers who narrowly earn enough to make loan payments are not much better off; they have to put off car purchases and bunk with their parents because they can’t afford rents, and they can’t even begin to think about saving for retirement.

As an official from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau told a Senate hearing earlier this month, student debt is having a kind of “domino effect,” damaging other areas of the economy. And unless federal policy makers intervene in a muscular way, this generation of student borrowers could become a long-term drag on the economy.

The executive order signed on Monday will help up to five million student loan borrowers. It will expand access to the federal government’s Pay as You Earn program, which allows borrowers to arrange affordable payments and qualify for loan forgiveness. It requires the Department of Education to evaluate more stringently how well the companies that collect federal loans keep borrowers out of default. Most significantly, it requires the department to help people who have defaulted rehabilitate their records through a program allowing lower payments.

Homeowners, businesses and individuals can take advantage of low interest rates to refinance their debts. Student borrowers, however, have few such options. The Senate bill, known as the Bank on Students Emergency Loan Refinancing Act, would create a fund — paid for by a new minimum tax on millionaires and billionaires — that would be used to help people with federal or private student loans refinance those loans at lower interest rates.

The bill might pass the Senate, but House Republicans will oppose any such tax. Still, by bringing the matter to a vote, Senate Democrats underscore the need to do something about dire indebtedness among recent graduates, and also give members of their party a potent issue on which to run in the midterm elections. Even if the refinancing bill were to become law, it would represent only part of the solution. To get a handle on this problem, Congress needs to reconfigure the student aid system to prevent the most vulnerable student borrowers from falling too deeply into debt in the first place.

A version of this editorial appears in print on June 11, 2014,

on page A22 of the New York edition with the headline:

Student Borrowers and the Economy.

    Student Borrowers and the Economy, NYT, 10.6.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/11/opinion/
    student-borrowers-and-the-economy.html

The Great Divide

Stop Holding Us Back

June 7, 2014 2:30 pm
The New York Times
By ROBERT BALFANZ
Opinionator
- A Gathering of Opinion From Around the Web
 

This month, more than three million high school students will receive their diplomas. At more than 80 percent, America’s graduation rate is at a record high. More kids are going to college, too. But one-third of the nation’s African-American and Latino young men will not graduate.

In an era when there is virtually no legal work for dropouts, these young men face a bleak future. It is not news that the students who don’t make it out of high school largely come from our poorest neighborhoods, but the degree to which they are hyper-concentrated in a small set of schools is alarming. In fact, according to new research I conducted with my colleagues at Johns Hopkins University, half of the African-American boys who veer off the path to high school graduation do so in just 660 of more than 12,600 regular and vocational high schools.

These 660 schools are typically big high schools that teach only poor kids of color. They are concentrated in 15 states. Many are in major cities, but others are in smaller, decaying industrial cities or in the South, especially in Georgia, Florida and North Carolina.

This seemingly intractable problem is a national tragedy, but there is a solution. In the high schools where most of the young men are derailed, the number of ninth-grade boys who desperately need better schooling and extra support is typically between 50 and 100. Keeping many or even most of those boys on track in each entering ninth-grade class in 660 schools does not seem impossible.
Brian Stauffer

If we know where to focus our efforts, we can put strategies in place that have shown promise, particularly over the last few years. While early childhood is critical, the most treacherous time for young African-American and Latino men is from ages 11 to 21. At the very moment they are the most developmentally vulnerable, the response from schools, foster care, the health system and child protective services gets weaker, while the response from the justice system is harsher. Their family responsibilities grow, and their neighborhoods turn meaner. Their middle and high school experience becomes make or break.

But the secondary schools these students attend are not specifically designed for them. It is not unusual for up to half the students to miss a month or more of school, and often more students are suspended in a year than graduate. In a 22-school sample that we studied closely, nearly all ninth-grade students were either too old for their grades, had repeated ninth grade, needed special education, were chronically absent or had academic skills at the seventh grade level or below. The norm in this environment is to fail classes and then repeat ninth grade. But most students do no better the second time around. Either they drop out then or they may briefly transfer to another school before dropping out later. This is a highly predictable, almost mechanical course, which is why we call those schools dropout factories.

We have also learned that most students who eventually drop out can be identified as early as the sixth grade by their attendance, behavior and course performance, according to studies by the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins, where I am the director, and the University of Chicago Consortium on Chicago School Research. Using those indicators, it is possible to identify by the middle of ninth grade virtually everyone who will drop out. These young men are waving their hands early and often to say they need help, but our educational and student-support systems aren’t organized to recognize and respond to their distress signals.

In 2008, my colleagues and I decided to focus on those struggling sixth and ninth graders. What if we reorganized entire schools with teams of teachers who shared a common group of students? What if we added more time for English and math and offered coaching for teachers and principals? What if we welcomed students to school, called them if they didn’t show up and helped with homework? What if we used an early warning system that identified struggling students based on their poor attendance, behavior and course performance and then worked to get each student back on track?

To try to provide all that, we developed Diplomas Now, a partnership of three national nonprofits, which works with more than 30,000 students in 40 of the toughest middle and high schools in 14 big cities. (Although I am focusing here on boys, because they have lower graduation rates than girls, the program is coed.)

To evaluate our progress, MDRC, a social policy research organization, is conducting a randomized field trial. Initial indications are positive. In the 2012-13 school year, the program achieved a 41 percent reduction in chronically absent students, a 70 percent reduction in suspended students, a 69 percent reduction in students failing English and a 52 percent reduction in students failing math.

This is not an anomalous result. A recent study of public schools in Chicago shows that getting students back on track in the ninth grade leads to higher graduation rates and that African-American males in particular experience the greatest benefits when schools are reorganized to focus on ninth grade.

What do we need to do on a national scale? First, high-poverty secondary schools need to be redesigned with the special problems of their students in mind, with a focus on freshman year. In practice, this means starting new schools and transforming existing ones.

Second, early warning systems need to be instituted so that teachers and other committed adults can step in at the first sign a student is in trouble, whether it’s cutting class, mouthing off or floundering in English or math.

Third, we should employ additional adults to support students who need daily nagging and nurturing to succeed, especially during the key transitional years in sixth and ninth grades.

We also need the larger community, including local businesses and faith-based organizations, to mentor students by showing them how to set goals, apply to college and acquire workplace skills.

This sounds expensive, but it does not have to be, particularly if we stop wasting money on failed strategies like holding kids back in high school. Asking struggling students to repeat a grade under the same circumstances almost guarantees the same result.

We are already paying a lot for failure. On average, holding a student back costs $11,000. The 660 high schools that produce half of African-American male dropouts spend more than $500 million a year to retain more than 46,000 boys and girls in ninth grade.

There is an unexpected path forward, the outlines of which are in view. We can provide our most vulnerable children with a better chance for adult success. They deserve no less.

Robert Balfanz is a research professor

at Johns Hopkins University School of Education

and the director of the Everyone Graduates Center.

A version of this article appears in print on 06/08/2014,

on page SR5 of the NewYork edition with the headline:

Stop Holding Us Back.

    Stop Holding Us Back, NYT, 7.6.2014,
    http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/07/stop-holding-us-back/

Class, Cost and College

MAY 17, 2014
The New York Times
SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist

THE word “crisis” pops up frequently in “Ivory Tower,” a compelling new documentary about the state of higher education in America.

It pops up in regard to the mountains of student debt. It pops up in regard to the steep drop in government funding for public universities, which have been forced to charge higher and higher tuition in response. That price increase is also a “crisis” in the estimation of one of many alarmed educators and experts on camera.

And “crisis” isn’t even their direst appellation. Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia University professor of American studies who functions as the movie’s conscience, notes an “apocalyptic dimension” to today’s discussion of college’s failings. The movie is set on verdant campuses. It’s rife with lecterns, books and graduation gowns. And yet it’s a kind of horror story.

Scheduled for theatrical release next month, “Ivory Tower” does an astonishingly thorough tour of the university landscape in a brisk 90 minutes, touching on the major changes and challenges, each of which could sustain its own documentary.

But as I watched it, one theme in particular kept capturing my attention. One set of questions kept coming to mind. How does our current system of higher education square with our concerns about social mobility? What place do the nation’s universities have in our intensifying debate about income inequality? What promise do they hold for lessening it?

The answers in “Ivory Tower” and beyond it aren’t reassuring. Indeed, the greatest crisis may be that while college supposedly represents one of the surest ladders to, and up through, the middle class, it’s not functioning that way, at least not very well.

I followed up with a few of the people in the movie, including Delbanco, who is the author of a 2012 book titled “College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be.” I asked him how well colleges were abetting social mobility.

“They are falling down,” he said, adding that in the days of the G.I. Bill, they did a much better job of it.

Anthony Carnevale, another contributor to “Ivory Tower,” gave me a similar assessment.

“The good news is that more and more kids are going to college,” said Carnevale, the director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce. “The bad news is that higher education is becoming more and more stratified.”

In 2011, the most recent year for which figures are available, roughly 75 percent of the students at the 200 most highly rated colleges came from families in the top quartile of income, he said. Only 5 percent came from families in the bottom quartile, and while that’s up from 3 percent in 1994, it’s no huge advance or cause to rejoice.

Carnevale told me that since 1994, 80 percent of the white young men and women in this country who have headed off to college have gone to schools ranked in the top 500 by Barron’s. But 75 percent of the black and Latino young men and women who have entered college over the same period have gone to two-year or open-admissions schools outside the top 500.

“We’re sorting students by class,” he said. The most prestigious colleges are crowded with the richest kids.

There are poor kids around, too. “Ivory Tower” showcases one, David Boone, a young black man from Cleveland who is attending Harvard with the kind of robust financial aid that it and similarly well-endowed universities — Columbia, Stanford, Yale — can use to diversify their student bodies.

But those student bodies aren’t all that diverse. Harvard’s main student newspaper did a survey of the freshman class this academic year and found that 29 percent of respondents reported family incomes of at least $250,000, while only 20 percent reported family incomes of under $65,000.

It’s wealthier kids who more easily stud their résumés with the extracurricular baubles that catch an admissions officer’s eye. It’s wealthier kids who are more likely to get extensive test preparation. Delbanco noted that superior SAT results correlate closely with high family incomes, so when colleges decide to care and crow about the altitude of their student body’s median SAT score, they’re privileging economically advantaged young people over disadvantaged ones.

And more than half of the poor kids who score in the top 10 percent on the SAT or the ACT don’t apply to the most selective colleges, said David Coleman, the president of the College Board, which administers the SAT. He and the College Board have joined a growing push to make sure those students have the necessary information and encouragement to do so. “We as a country must do everything we can to make sure these hard-working, high-achieving students claim their futures,” he said.

Harvard and its ilk are just a small part of the story, though. Many more young people turn to public universities, where tuitions have gone up much faster than Americans’ incomes have.

Those schools have simultaneously become more invested in admitting students from affluent families. In a 2011 survey of college admissions officers, more than half of those at public research universities said that they had recently ratcheted up their efforts to recruit students who could pay full freight.

A story by Paul Tough in The Times Magazine this Sunday illuminates another troubling way in which college favors the rich. “Whether a student graduates or not seems to depend today almost entirely on just one factor — how much money his or her parents make,” Tough writes, adding, “About a quarter of college freshmen born into the bottom half of the income distribution will manage to collect a bachelor’s degree by age 24, while almost 90 percent of freshmen born into families in the top income quartile will go on to finish their degree.”

We need to address that disparity. Andrew Rossi, the producer and director of “Ivory Tower,” says we also need to pump more public money back into higher education to keep tuition down and college affordable. He additionally advocates caps on tuition at public schools.

Watching “Ivory Tower,” which visits Harvard and Columbia and Wesleyan, I was reminded anew of the greatness of America’s universities, which remain the envy of the world.

But as the movie looked at the climbing walls and other gleaming perks that today’s hypercompetitive schools make sure to have, and as it mentioned the stratospheric salaries of university presidents who keep the donations rolling in, I was also reminded of a luxury product. The top colleges, shinier than ever, are Porsches. They can take you far and fast, but it’s a lucky few who get behind the wheel.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on May 18, 2014,

on page SR3 of the New York edition with the headline:

Class, Cost and College.

    Class, Cost and College, NYT, 17.5.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/opinion/
    sunday/bruni-class-cost-and-college.html

White House to Press Colleges

to Do More to Combat Rape

APRIL 28, 2014
The New York Times
By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — Reacting to a series of highly publicized rapes on college campuses, the White House on Monday released guidelines that increase the pressure on universities to more aggressively combat sexual assaults on campus.

The recommendations urge colleges, among other measures, to conduct anonymous surveys about sexual assault cases, adopt anti-assault policies that have been considered successful at other universities and to better ensure that the reports of such crimes remain confidential. The guidelines are contained in a report by a White House task force that President Obama formed early this year, and the administration is likely to ask Congress to pass measures that would enforce the recommendations and levy penalties for failing to do so. The government will also open a website, NotAlone.gov, to track enforcement and provide victims with information.

Many advocates for such a crackdown may see the proposals as an inadequate response to a crisis, but the White House is hamstrung about what it can do without congressional action and has just begun its own attack on the issue.

“Colleges and universities need to face the facts about sexual assault,” Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. said. “No more turning a blind eye or pretending it doesn’t exist. We need to give victims the support they need, like a confidential place to go, and we need to bring the perpetrators to justice.”

The task force says that one in five college students has been assaulted, but that just 12 percent of such attacks are reported.

Mr. Obama appointed the panel after a number of recent cases — at Yale, at Dartmouth and at Florida State — focused attention on the problem and led to accusations that college and university officials are not doing enough to police sexual crimes committed by students. The resulting furor has led to calls that Washington, where Congress and the administration are already moving to crack down on sexual assault in the military, take similar action when it comes to colleges and universities.

“The American people have kind of woken up to the fact that we’ve got a serious problem when 20 percent of coeds say they’ve been sexually assaulted,” said Representative Jackie Speier, Democrat of California.

Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand, Democrat of New York, said the recommendation for mandatory sexual assault surveys “has been consistently the No. 1 request of student survivors and advocates.”

“I am pleased that the task force has recommended this important step to increasing transparency and accountability, and look forward to growing our bipartisan coalition supporting this and other much-needed reforms,” she said.

The report emphasizes that universities need to do a better job to make sure that sexual assault reports remain confidential. Sometimes fears that reports will become public can discourage victims from coming forward.

The task force further found that many assault-prevention training efforts are not effective, and it recommends that universities and colleges institute programs like those used at the University of New Hampshire and the University of Kentucky, which train bystanders on how to intervene.

Lawmakers and the White House have previously condemned the assaults on campuses, but the federal government has largely left responses up to college officials and the local authorities. Congress last year passed the Campus Sexual Violence Elimination Act, which requires that domestic violence, dating violence, sexual assault and stalking cases be disclosed in annual campus crime statistics. But victims’ advocates say that does not go far enough.

And a federal law from two decades ago that requires colleges and universities to disclose information about crime on and around their campuses, including sexual offenses, is rarely enforced, critics say.

There have been some high-profile instances in which the Department of Education has gotten involved in an effort to raise awareness by imposing fines at universities where the most egregious cases have been reported.

Last year, the agency fined Yale University $165,000 for failing to disclose four sexual offenses involving force over several years. Eastern Michigan University paid $350,000 in 2008 for failing to sound a campus alert after a student was sexually assaulted and killed. The department also reached a settlement last year with the University of Montana at Missoula after investigating the university’s sexual-misconduct policies and finding them woefully inadequate.

Under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, universities that violate student rights in sexual assault cases also risk the loss of federal funding, but the punishment has never been applied.

In the recommended “climate surveys,” participants anonymously report their experiences with unwanted physical contact, sexual assault or rape, and how their schools responded. Some lawmakers would like to see such surveys be mandatory and to possibly make federal funds like Pell grants contingent on their being carried out.

Ms. Gillibrand and Senator Claire McCaskill, Democrat of Missouri, who both spent much of last year trying to legislatively police sexual assault in the armed forces, have now turned significant attention to such problems on the nation’s campuses.

“After a year of working hard to reform how the military handles sexual assault cases,” Ms. Gillibrand said in an email, “the stories I have heard from students are eerily similar.”

Ms. McCaskill said she planned to conduct her own survey of 350 colleges.

In all, nearly a dozen senators seeking new federal funding to battle campus sexual assaults.

Michael D. Shear contributed reporting.

A version of this article appears in print on April 29, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

White House Sets A College Agenda On Sex Assaults.

    White House to Press Colleges to Do More to Combat Rape,
    NYT, 28.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/29/us/
    tougher-battle-on-sex-assault-on-campus-urged.html

End College Legacy Preferences

APRIL 24, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
By EVAN J. MANDERY

SOMEONE reading about the Supreme Court’s decision upholding Michigan’s ban on affirmative action — and by extension similar measures passed by voters in California, Texas, Florida and Washington — might develop the misimpression that affirmative action is on the wane. In fact, it’s alive and well: Public and private colleges routinely give preferential treatment to children of alumni.

If you have kids, or plan on having them someday, you know that acceptance rates at elite colleges are at historic lows. Stanford led the stingy pack, admitting but 5 percent of applicants, with Harvard and Yale trailing close behind at 5.9 percent and 6.3 percent respectively.

For “legacies,” the picture isn’t nearly so bleak. Reviewing admission data from 30 top colleges in the Economics of Education Review, the researcher Michael Hurwitz concluded that children of alumni had a 45 percent greater chance of admission. A Princeton team found the advantage to be worth the equivalent of 160 additional points on an applicant’s SAT, nearly as much as being a star athlete or African-American or Hispanic.

At Harvard, my alma mater, the legacy acceptance rate is 30 percent, which is not an unusual number at elite colleges. That’s roughly five times the overall rate.

The disparity is so great it makes the most sense to conceptualize college applications to elite colleges as two separate competitions: one for children whose parents are legacies, the other for children whose parents aren’t.

Admissions officers will hasten to tell you that in a meritocracy many legacies would get in anyway. Let’s pause to consider the usefulness of the term “meritocracy” in a system where the deck is stacked at every level in favor of rich, white students before conceding the premise. It’s surely true that many children of alumni are brilliant, hard-working and deserving of a seat at a top college. That’s quite different from saying the system is fair. In 2003, Harvard’s admissions dean said that the SAT scores of legacy admits were “just two points below the school’s overall average.” These are students who have enjoyed a lifetime of advantage. We’d expect them to have outperformed nonlegacies, at least by a bit, and yet they’ve done slightly worse.

Reasonable minds can differ on the morality and wisdom of race-based affirmative action. Where I teach, at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, which is about as egalitarian as institutions come, I’ve seen firsthand what the data show: College is a ticket out of poverty, and exposing young men and women to diverse classmates and role models raises the ceiling on what they believe is possible for themselves. That said, I acknowledge the desire for a colorblind, meritocratic society as an honorable position. But how can anyone defend making an exception for children of alumni?

One needn’t have a dog in this hunt to be troubled by legacy. It’s disastrous public policy. Because of legacy admissions, elite colleges look almost nothing like America. Consider these facts: To be a 1 percenter, a family needs an annual income of approximately $390,000. When the Harvard Crimson surveyed this year’s freshman class, 14 percent of respondents reported annual family income above $500,000. Another 15 percent came from families making more than $250,000 per year. Only 20 percent reported incomes less than $65,000. This is the amount below which Harvard will allow a student to go free of charge. It’s also just above the national median family income. So, at least as many Harvard students come from families in the top 1 percent as the bottom 50 percent. Of course this says nothing of middle-class families, for whom private college is now essentially unaffordable.

These facts will trouble any parent of modest means, but it’s time to recognize this as an American problem. Together with environmental destruction, social inequality is the defining failure of our generation. The richest .01 percent of American families possess 11.1 percent of the national wealth, but 22 percent of American children live in poverty.

There are only two ways this gets better. One is a huge reformation of the tax structure. The other is improved access to higher education. Few investments yield a greater return than a college degree. Education has great potential to combat inequality, but progress simply isn’t possible if legacy persists.

To justify this practice there would need to be, in lawyer language, a compelling justification. There is none. Elite colleges defend legacy as necessary to fund-raising. It isn’t. Neither Oxford nor Cambridge nor M.I.T. considers legacy. Their prestige is intact, they attract great students, and they have ample endowments. Moreover, technology has transformed fund-raising. Presidential candidates raise money through grass-roots campaigns; colleges can, too.

Legacy evolved largely as a doctrine to legitimize the exclusion of Jews from elite schools. It endures today as a mechanism for reinforcing inequality, with particularly harsh consequences for Asians, and fundamentally contradicts the rhetoric of access in which elite colleges routinely engage.

Harvard, Yale, Stanford, Princeton and Columbia collectively have endowments of about $100 billion. They have the means to end this abhorrent practice with a stroke of a pen and the financial resources to endure whatever uncertainty ensues. Just a hunch, but I think the economically diverse students admitted to these great colleges would be successful and generous to their alma maters, not in the hope of securing their child a place in a class, but out of genuine appreciation of a legacy of equal access.

Evan J. Mandery, a professor at John Jay College

of Criminal Justice, is the author of “A Wild Justice:

The Death and Resurrection of Capital Punishment

in America.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 25, 2014,

on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline:

End College Legacy Preferences.

    End College Legacy Preferences, NYT, 24.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/25/opinion/end-college-legacy-preferences.html

College for Criminals

APRIL 9, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Op-Ed Contributor
By BILL KELLER

IN February, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York announced plans to underwrite college classes in 10 state prisons, building on the success of privately funded and widely praised programs like the Bard Prison Initiative. Mr. Cuomo pointed out that inmates who got an education had a much better chance of finding a job and were much less likely to menace their neighbors after release. He noted that the cost — $5,000 per inmate per year — would be a bargain compared with the $60,000 it costs to incarcerate a prisoner for a year.

Mr. Cuomo’s proposal was a baby step: $1 million in a corrections budget of $2.8 billion. It was also a bolt from the blue, announced as an applause line to a receptive audience of minority legislators without any advance work. And when the first, predictable bleats of resistance were heard, the governor dropped the college initiative from his budget.

The punch lines of the opposing politicians (mostly Republicans, but some Democrats) all struck the same theme: How dare the governor offer taxpayer money to educate convicted criminals when decent citizens skimp and borrow to send their kids to college? “It should be ‘do the crime, do the time,’ not ‘do the crime, earn a degree,’ ” said George D. Maziarz, a state senator from western New York. “It is simply beyond belief to give criminals a competitive edge in the job market over law-abiding New Yorkers who forgo college because of the high cost.” In other words, let criminals be criminals.

An upstate assemblyman, James N. Tedisco, warned that educating inmates “makes them smarter criminals.” Invoking the chemistry-lessons-gone-lethal of “Breaking Bad,” he envisioned Mr. Cuomo’s proposal “turning a bunch of Jesse Pinkmans into Walter Whites — all on the taxpayer’s dime.”

Some of the outcry had a Willie Hortonish racial overtone. A “Kids Before Cons” online petition drive organized by Republican Assembly staffers juxtaposed two photos. One portrayed jubilant white kids tossing their graduation caps in the air, over the caption: “Studied hard. Worked summer jobs. Saved. Took out loans ...” The second featured a line of minority prisoners in orange jumpsuits: “Stole a car. Robbed a bank. Shot a bystander. Got a free college education paid for by YOU.”

You can take from all this a lesson about the impetuous politics of Andrew Cuomo. You can deplore the eagerness of cynical or small-minded lawmakers to pander to our least generous instincts. But the instincts are real. The larger shame is the deep American ambivalence about the very purpose of prison.

Considering that the United States is the world’s leading warden, we should be able to answer with some conviction this question: What is prison for?

First, punishment, although it is often demeaning, brutal, psychologically debilitating and wildly disproportionate to the offense.

Second, public safety. Social scientists argue about how much of our recent decline in crime is attributable to a surge in incarceration (I’ve heard estimates from 3 percent to 30 percent). But common sense says at least some of it is.

Third, rehabilitation. The bureaucracies that run prisons are called departments of “corrections” for a reason. This is at least as important as the first two purposes, because nearly 95 percent of the incarcerated are eventually released back into society.

This is not a bleeding-heart cause. Leading conservatives and red-state politicians have supported prison college programs as a matter of public safety and fiscal prudence. A RAND meta-analysis of 58 studies concluded that inmates who participated in these programs were 43 percent less likely to return to a life of crime; even assuming that the most redeemable inmates are the likeliest to sign up, this is an incredible return on a modest investment. Moreover, wardens and prison guards believe such programs lower the explosive tensions in prison.

Yet while 76 percent of prisons in the country offer high school diploma programs, only a third offer college degrees, which are, more than ever, a prerequisite for decent jobs. Education programs are among the first things to go in a recession. Now — when the economy is in slow recovery, the crime rate is relatively low, and there is an emerging national awareness that our way of punishment wastes money and lives — should be an opportune time to expand inmate education. But it has to be sold, not sprung without groundwork.

Experts who have studied the American way of crime and punishment far longer than I have tell me, to quote Michael P. Jacobson, a veteran corrections official who heads a public policy institute for the City University of New York, that they see “almost a complete disconnect between what we know and what we do.”

“The influence of high-profile crimes, fear of crime, issues of race, the acquisition of cheap political capital — all have had far more influence on criminal justice policy than what we know works, or what is fair or just,” Mr. Jacobson told me.

Governor Cuomo is now trying to rally private donors to underwrite his college program for a year, with an understanding that he will get the state to take over in Year 2. Let’s hope. But apparently the inmates of Sing Sing and Attica are not the only ones in need of correction.

Bill Keller, a former executive editor and Op-Ed columnist

of The New York Times, is editor in chief

of The Marshall Project, a nonprofit news organization

focused on criminal justice.

A version of this op-ed appears in print on April 10, 2014,

on page A25 of the New York edition with the headline:

College for Criminals.

    College for Criminals, NYT, 9.4.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/10/opinion/college-for-criminals.html

Giving Up on 4-Year-Olds

MARCH 26, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

A new report released by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, examining the disciplinary practices of the country’s 97,000 public schools, shows that excessively punitive policies are being used at every level of the public school system — even against 4-year-olds in preschool. This should shame the nation and force it to re-evaluate the destructive measures that schools are using against their most vulnerable children.

Black students, for example, are suspended at three times the rate of white students. Minority children with disabilities fair worst of all; the race effect is amplified when disability comes into the picture. More than one in four minority boys with a disability — and nearly one in five minority girls — receive an out-of-school suspension. Students with disabilities make up 12 percent of the student population, but 25 percent of those are either arrested or have their disciplinary cases referred to the police.

This is distressing enough when it happens to adolescents. But the new data show that disparate treatment of minority children begins early — in preschool. For example, black children represent 18 percent of preschool enrollment but nearly half of all children who receive more than one out-of-school suspension.

The fact that minority children at age 4 are already being disproportionately suspended or expelled is an outrage. The pattern of exclusion suggests that schools are giving up on these children when they are barely out of diapers. It runs counter to the very mission of early education, which is to promote school readiness. It harms children emotionally at an age when they are incapable of absorbing lessons from this form of punishment. And it places those children at greater risk of falling behind, dropping out or becoming permanently involved with the juvenile justice system. Federal civil rights officials do not explain why minority preschool students are being disproportionately singled out for suspension.

Regardless of the causes, there are ways to combat this crisis. Walter Gilliam of Yale University, who has studied the expulsion problem extensively, has suggested several ways to minimize it. Among other things, Mr. Gilliam has called for: limiting enrollment to 10 students per preschool teacher (preferably less) so that teachers have adequate time with the students; making sure that those teachers work reasonable hours; and giving them access to children’s mental health consultants who can assist them with the occasional difficult case. Young children with challenging behaviors should not be thrown out but should be assessed to see if a more therapeutic environment might better suit their needs. The goal should be to do everything possible to bring them into the mainstream.

The Obama administration has taken some steps to end practices that disproportionately and unjustifiably subject minority students to suspension, expulsion or even arrest for behavior that should be dealt with by the principal. It has ramped up civil rights investigations and forced some districts to modify their policies.

Earlier this year, it issued extensive guidance to school districts on to how recognize and avoid discriminatory practices, and it called for more training for teachers in classroom management. School districts need to re-examine how they discipline students, especially the youngest and most fragile in their care.

A version of this editorial appears in print on March 27, 2014,

on page A30 of the New York edition with the headline:

Giving Up on 4-Year-Olds.

    Giving Up on 4-Year-Olds, NYT, 26.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/27/opinion/giving-up-on-4-year-olds.html

A Quick Way to Cut College Costs

 

MARCH 20, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages|Op-Ed Contributor
By STEVE COHEN

COLLEGE admission notifications have begun to arrive. With every thrilling acceptance comes something far less welcome: the heart-stopping reality of what it all costs.

Tuition has risen almost 1,200 percent in the last 35 years, and the sticker price for many four-year private colleges and out-of-state public universities exceeds $250,000. Even at state universities, the average four-year cost for residents is more than $80,000 for tuition, room, board and expenses. But every college offers need-based financial aid, right? Well, sort of.

A college aid package can be made up of three elements: grants (sometimes called scholarships), loans and work-study programs. The biggest single source of aid is the federal government — but in the form of loans ($68 billion, 37 percent of all aid, in 2013). About 5 percent of aid comes from states and a large part from the college’s own resources. Much of the college’s contribution comes in the form of a discount from the school’s already inflated tuition, which, with a straight face, administrators call a grant.

When colleges compute their aid packages, they start with a student’s expected family contribution — that is, what the government expects a family to be able to contribute, not what the family expects. The E.F.C. is calculated by the federal government based on data submitted by the family on the Fafsa form (the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, which is mandatory if the student wants any sort of financial aid, even work-study jobs in the school cafeteria). The Fafsa’s complexity rivals that of a tax return, but it is less user friendly.

Weeks after submitting their Fafsa to the federal Department of Education, families are told what their expected contribution is. The formula itself is set by Congress. For most middle-class families, the number is shocking because it has little basis in real-life economics.

Consider a family of four, earning $100,000 in income and having $50,000 in savings. The E.F.C. says that this family will contribute $17,375 each year to a child’s college expenses. A $100,000 income translates into take-home pay of about $6,311 monthly. An E.F.C. of $17,375 means the family must contribute about $1,500 a month — every month for four years. But cutting family expenses by 25 percent every month is unrealistic.

Alternatively, the family could use its savings. But that would deplete their $50,000 before the start of the child’s senior year, leaving nothing for the proverbial rainy day, or for the second child’s education.

Financial advisers familiar with the peculiarities of the college aid world say there isn’t much they can do to help once families receive their E.F.C. As Ian Welham, the founder of Complete College Planning Solutions, told me, “When families see their E.F.C. number for the first time, most parents ask, ‘Is this for four years?’ I have to tell them, ‘No, that’s just for one year.’ I also have to explain that the E.F.C. is the minimum a family is going to pay. In many cases, they’re asked to pay considerably more.”

When colleges craft a student’s financial aid package, the school deducts the E.F.C. from the sticker-price tuition, room, board and expenses to establish a family’s need. It then allocates federal money the child is eligible for, and only last does it dip into its own resources, if the school has money available.

Private colleges have more flexibility. Because some of the wealthiest schools, like Princeton, have basically eliminated loans entirely from their packages for middle-class families, it can be less costly to attend a private college with a higher sticker price than a state university with lower tuition. State schools have smaller endowments and less money for financial aid.

But what about the huge federal scholarship programs Congress regularly trumpets? Most are not available to middle-class families; only federally subsidized loans are. And at 3.86 percent subsidized interest rates — plus loan origination fees — federal education loans are available on less attractive terms than car loans.

The largest and best-known scholarship program is the $34 billion Pell Grant. But 95 percent of all Pell Grants go to families earning under $58,875 annually. For the 5 percent of middle-class families who do get Pell grants, the average award is $2,500.

Congress has done little to help middle-class families. Seventy-one percent of college students graduated last year with an average of $29,400 in debt. Estimates suggest that parents have taken on almost as much.

Meanwhile, lobbying expenditures by colleges, universities and higher-education organizations have totaled more than a half-billion dollars over the past five years — the eighth highest special-interest category attempting to influence Congress.

I’m not suggesting that students and their parents shouldn’t contribute. But burdening students with huge loans and parents with depleted savings is a bad policy that is driven, in part, by unrealistic E.F.C.s.

“The E.F.C. gives colleges ‘plausible deniability,’ ” said Scott Farber, president of A-List Education, a tutoring and education consulting company. “It allows them to say, ‘We didn’t set these family contribution figures; the government did.’ That artificially high E.F.C. is essentially creating an artificial price support for colleges.”

Since Congress controls the E.F.C. formula, it makes sense for political leaders who are serious about controlling college costs and student debt to start by making the E.F.C. more realistic. But tinkering with the E.F.C. formula won’t be sufficient because there are so many problems with it. For example, it doesn’t take into consideration geographic differences in cost-of-living, or the lack of liquidity in one’s home.

So let’s get serious instead. Congress and the president should drastically cut the E.F.C. — by around 75 percent, to reflect the fact that since 1980 tuition has risen at nearly five times the rate of the Consumer Price Index. Doing so would force colleges to construct financial aid packages without the artificial price supports of inflated contribution numbers — and make paying for college less agonizing.

Steve Cohen is a lawyer at Kramer, Dillof, Livingston & Moore

in New York and a co-author of “Getting In: The Zinch Guide

to College Admissions & Financial Aid in the Digital Age.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on March 21, 2014,

on page A29 of the New York edition with the headline:

A Quick Way to Cut College Costs.

    A Quick Way to Cut College Costs, NYT, 20.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/21/opinion/a-quick-way-to-cut-college-costs.html

Ned O’Gorman, 84, Dies;

Poet Founded Innovative Harlem School

MARCH 7, 2014
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Ned O’Gorman, an award-winning poet who gained his widest attention for starting a storefront school in Harlem — a “liberation camp,” he called it — to bring literature, Latin and love to disadvantaged children, died on Friday at his home in Manhattan. He was 84.

The cause was pancreatic cancer, his sister, Patricia O’Gorman Schonfeld, said.

Mr. O’Gorman said he was inspired to open his school, in 1966, by reading radical education theorists like Paul Goodman. But the reality was simpler. “I was merely a fool poet,” he said, “with nothing but poetry in his bag, hoping the energy and joy that brought poems from chaos would carry me to the children.”

The school, the Children’s Storefront, has flourished in three adjoining townhouses on East 129th Street, becoming a fully accredited, tuition-free school with a $4 million budget and a student body of about 170 children, from prekindergarten through eighth grade.

Mr. O’Gorman’s story began as a struggle for identity in a wealthy but troubled family that had ties to French royalty.

Edward Charles O’Gorman was born in Manhattan on Sept. 26, 1929, to Annette de Bouthillier-Chavigny and Samuel Franklin Engs O’Gorman. He grew up in Southport, Conn., and Bradford, Vt. By his account, the family lived on inherited money in a high-society whirl, at least until the pile of money had been slowly frittered away. Many years later, he wrote that he had felt neglected by everyone but his nanny and had lived in a world of imaginary friends.

He also grew up hiding his homosexuality, he wrote in a 2006 memoir, “The Other Side of Loneliness.” He said he had been “wounded into poetry.”

He graduated from St. Michael’s College in Vermont and earned a master’s degree from Columbia, where the poet Mark Van Doren, one of his teachers, praised his poems. He had begun to develop a distinctive, passionate literary voice ripe with exuberant metaphor and concerned with social justice.

In all, Mr. O’Gorman published a half-dozen books of poetry, the second of which, “The Night of the Hammer,” won a Lamont Poetry Prize from the Academy of American Poets in 1958. The poems told of the tumult of a young writer not out for parental approval. In one he wrote, “Bring it down, the whole confusion/with no jot withheld, no delusion.”

He said that after a trip to Europe, where he stayed in an Austrian monastery, he decided to be a priest but was twice rejected — by the rector at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Dunwoodie, N.Y., who told him he regarded poets as unstable, and by a Benedictine monastery after a psychological test. Mr. O’Gorman believed that the abbot suspected that he was gay.

In his early years Mr. O’Gorman, a tall man with a longshoreman’s build, lived in Greenwich Village, where he was active in Dorothy Day’s Catholic Worker Movement. (In later years he lived in relative luxury near Lincoln Center and the ballet and opera that his mother had taught him to love.) In 1965, the State Department employed him to teach American studies in Chile, Argentina and Brazil.

By the mid-1960s, Mr. O’Gorman was literary editor of the Roman Catholic magazine Jubilee. He corresponded with intellectual luminaries like Susan Sontag and Thomas Merton and later collected their thoughts in the book “Prophetic Voices: Ideas and Words on Revolution” 1969). He was awarded two Guggenheim fellowships.

All the while he was searching for a way to combine his political, religious and poetic urges. He found it in Harlem, where he was working as a volunteer for a Catholic antipoverty program. As he told The Daily News of New York in 2006, a priest had challenged him: “There’s a storefront on Madison Avenue and 129th Street, and if you want to do something with it, you can have it.”

Mr. O’Gorman collected donations, using his social connections, and two months later started a children’s library in the store, naming it after Addie Mae Collins, one of three black children killed in the 1963 bombing of a church in Birmingham, Ala.

The library grew into a ragtag preschool for about 50 children. Mr. O’Gorman provided lunch from a hot plate, sometimes serving Dinty Moore canned stew with pineapple chunks.

The enterprise reflected Mr. O’Gorman’s playful, rambunctious personality. His stated goal was the expansive one of reversing “the pervasive lack of imagination” in nurturing young minds, and he offered an eclectic program: French and Chinese lessons, classical music and Shakespeare, along with reading, writing and arithmetic.

To Mr. O’Gorman, each child — or “angelic spirit,” in his phrase — demanded special treatment. One boy couldn’t speak a word at age 3, but he had perfect pitch, so teachers used music to teach him the rudiments of speech.

Children responded by calling Mr. O’Gorman “Neddie Boy.” He hugged every child at the beginning of the day. If one failed to appear, he sent a car for him. When a reporter for The News asked what was so special about him, a girl named Willow replied, “Love.”

“Ned was often the only person in their lives who believed in them,” said Elsie Vanderbilt Aidinoff, who taught at the school and was chairwoman of its board.

In 1981, the preschool became an elementary school, starting with four kindergartners. Mr. O’Gorman helped graduates get into elite public high schools like the Bronx High School of Science and private ones like Dalton, but he was equally devoted to students with special needs. There were no admission standards.

By the late 1990s, the school had acquired larger quarters on East 129th Street and was boasting college graduates; the first earned a degree from Haverford College in Pennsylvania in 1994. There were disappointments, though they were rare. One of the few students Mr. O’Gorman ever asked to leave the school was shot by police officers while trying to rob a store. In the 13-year-old’s pocket were 35 vials of crack.

In 1998, the Storefront’s trustees, seeking to stiffen the curriculum and build an endowment, saw the freewheeling Mr. O’Gorman as not suitable for the task. They grew frustrated with his reluctance to find a successor, even as he said one was needed, and finally compelled him to retire. He attributed the ouster to his “poetic inability to contain myself.”

Mr. O’Gorman did not escape criticism from other quarters. After he urged in an article in The New York Times in 1975 that the government be more assertive in taking children away from abusive parents, readers wrote letters accusing him of elitism and of disrespecting Harlem families.

The child psychiatrist and author Robert Coles, who was otherwise an admirer, wrote in a review of Mr. O’Gorman’s 1978 book, “The Children Are Dying,” that Mr. O’Gorman made it easy for people to dismiss him for “peddling his noblesse oblige, his clever generalizations and his self-dramatizing stories.”

Besides Ms. O’Gorman-Schonfeld, Mr. O’Gorman is survived by another sister, Annette Kamal.

The same year Mr. O’Gorman retired from the Storefront, he started a new preschool, the Ricardo O’Gorman Garden and Center for Resources in the Humanities, on West 129th Street. The name was in memory of a son he had raised from diapers and adopted. Ricardo had died of AIDS two years earlier at 26. The school, informally known as the Garden, continues to thrive.

A version of this article appears in print on March 8, 2014,

on page D6 of the New York edition with the headline

Ned O’Gorman, 84, a Poet Who Founded an Innovative

School in Harlem, Is Dead.

    Ned O’Gorman, 84, Dies; Poet Founded Innovative Harlem School,
    NYT, 7.3.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/08/nyregion/
    ned-ogorman-poet-who-founded-innovative-school-in-harlem-dies-at-84.html

Colorblind Notion Aside,

Colleges Grapple With Racial Tension

FEB. 24, 2014
The New York Times
By TANZINA VEGA

ANN ARBOR, Mich. — A brochure for the University of Michigan features a vision of multicultural harmony, with a group of students from different racial backgrounds sitting on a verdant lawn, smiling and conversing.

The scene at the undergraduate library one night last week was quite different, as hundreds of students and faculty members gathered for a 12-hour “speak out” to address racial tensions brought to the fore by a party that had been planned for November and then canceled amid protests. The fraternity hosting the party, whose members are mostly Asian and white, had invited “rappers, twerkers, gangsters” and others “back to da hood again.”

Beyond the immediate provocation of the party, a sharp decline in black undergraduate enrollment — to 4.6 percent of the student body in 2013 from 6.2 percent in 2009 — and a general feeling of isolation among black students on campus have prompted a new wave of student activism, including a social media campaign called “Being Black at the University of Michigan” (or, on Twitter, #BBUM). Members of the university’s Black Student Union have petitioned campus administrators to, among other things, increase enrollment of black students to 10 percent.

Similar episodes and tensions have unsettled colleges including Arizona State; the University of California, Los Angeles; the University of Mississippi; and Dartmouth.

In the news media and in popular culture, the notion persists that millennials — born after the overt racial debates and divisions that shaped their parents’ lives — are growing up in a colorblind society in which interracial friendships and marriages are commonplace and racism is largely a relic.

But interviews with dozens of students, professors and administrators at the University of Michigan and elsewhere indicate that the reality is far more complicated, and that racial tensions are playing out in new ways among young adults.

Some experts say the concept of being “postracial” can mean replicating some of the divisions and insensitivity of the past, perhaps more from ignorance than from animus. Others find offensive the idea of a society that strips away deeply personal beliefs surrounding self-identification.

“There’s this preconceived notion that our generation is postracial, but there’s these incidents that happen constantly that disprove that point,” said Zach Fields, a business major here, who is white. He attributed many high-profile incidents — including a number of fraternity parties nationwide that have used racist symbols, including watermelons and gang signs — to ignorance.

“I feel like they don’t mean to be so offensive,” Mr. Fields, 20, said of the party organizers. “It’s not a conscious racism. It’s subconscious.”

Tyrell Collier, 21, the speaker of the Black Student Union, who is majoring in sociology and Afro-American and African studies, said racial tensions on campus had been mounting for months.

“There was a very tense climate brewing all semester, and I think the party was just the peak,” he said. Mr. Collier added that his group, which spearheaded the popular social media campaign, had received inquiries from other black student groups around the country looking to use similar tactics.

“We’re clearly not postracial,” said Tiya A. Miles, chairwoman of the department of Afro-American and African studies. “Sometimes I wonder if having a black president lets people feel like that gives them cover. It absolves people of being prejudiced.”

The number of complaints related to race and ethnicity filed against colleges and universities rose to 860 in 2013 from 555 in 2009, according to the Office for Civil Rights at the federal Education Department. Some experts believe that the increase reflects, at least in part, the role of social media in creating and then publicizing episodes.
Continue reading the main story

Students nationwide responded to a reporter’s request on Facebook and Twitter for stories about racial issues on college campuses. The experiences they described ranged from overt racism to more subtle forms of insensitivity.

Charles Tkacik, a freshman at Johnson & Wales University in North Miami, Fla., who is white, said in an email that while public demonstrations of racism were rare at his university, “there is a deep layer of contempt and hatred among a percentage of students toward other races.”

“Some students believe certain races to be ‘dirty, noisy and rude,’ ” Mr. Tkacik wrote.

Jordan Taylor, a black student at the State University of New York at New Paltz, shared a photo of a “colored only” sign that had been placed on a water fountain in his freshman year.

A black student at Princeton said a racial epithet was once scrawled on his dorm room door. A Korean-American student at the University of Minnesota described being asked by her classmates if she “did massage” or “wore a kimono at home.”

Race is very much an open issue at the University of Michigan. In 2006, Michigan residents voted in favor of Proposition 2, which prohibited affirmative action based on race or ethnicity in admissions and hiring at public institutions. The Supreme Court is expected to rule on the measure this year. These issues are playing out when the minority population is growing nationwide but shrinking on some college campuses.

“I think there is no question that Prop 2 has made it much more challenging for us,” Martha E. Pollack, the university provost and executive vice president for academic affairs, said of the affirmative action vote. “It was difficult to be the kind of community that we wanted to be even when we could use affirmative action.”

Alex Ngo, 21, who is majoring in communications, rejected the notion of colorblindness. “When I hear people say, ‘We’re all people, we’re all human, I don’t see color,’ to me that means, ‘I don’t see you, you don’t exist,’ ” he said. Mr. Ngo, who is Chinese and gay, said he had been subjected to racist and homophobic epithets.

Some students, like James Rice, 21, who is white, see being colorblind as a worthy goal in certain situations. If race is something “not taken into consideration in society in places like education and the workplace, I feel like it’s a really good goal,” Mr. Rice said.

But many others said that failing to account for the reality of race created an unrealistic view of the world.

Gurdit Suri, 19, a finance and international studies major who described himself as a “turban-wearing Sikh,” said he often felt judged by fellow students. “It doesn’t matter how many awards I can get, how many tests I can take, how many times I volunteer,” he said. “I am the other to a lot of people in this campus. People will make judgments about me, implicit or not.”

For many students, racial issues play out as they did for previous generations, as a constant attempt to bridge an often-subtle divide. Nikia Smith, a black freshman, said tensions could be woven into the fabric of daily life — for example, if a white student did not hold a door open for a black student who was about to walk through it. Maybe the student was just in a rush, Ms. Smith, 19, said. But “in my mind, I could be thinking, ‘Oh, it’s because I’m black.’ ”

David J. Leonard, a professor in the department of critical culture, gender and race studies at Washington State University, said young people often viewed racism as something associated with extremist groups like the Ku Klux Klan. “People who don’t see themselves like this think: ‘We can poke fun. We can engage in stereotypes,’ ” Dr. Leonard said. “Racism gets reduced to intent, as if intent is all that matters.”

While black undergraduate enrollment at the University of Michigan has ebbed and flowed over the years, peaking in the 1990s, James J. Duderstadt, a professor of science and engineering who was president of the university from 1988 to 1996, said it was difficult to determine whether racism on campus had, in fact, increased.

He said he believed that the recent spate of activism on diversity was being propelled by two issues: a lack of state funding for public institutions that has led colleges to admit more out-of-state students, who tend to be more affluent and less diverse, and challenges to affirmative action laws in states like Michigan and California.

Some experts say that, rather than being uniformly postracial, young people often see different worlds when they contemplate race — just as their parents did. Blanca E. Vega, a doctoral candidate at Teachers College at Columbia University, who is writing her dissertation on racial conflicts in higher education, said white people tended to see much more progress on race.

“There’s a mismatch in the perceptions of race and racism,” Ms. Vega said, “depending on who you speak with and depending on their racial background.”

A version of this article appears in print on February 25, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Colorblind Notion Aside, Colleges Grapple

With Racial Tension.

    Colorblind Notion Aside, Colleges Grapple With Racial Tension,
    NYT, 24.2.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/25/us/
    colorblind-notion-aside-colleges-grapple-with-racial-tension.html

Hard Times at Howard U.

FEB. 4, 2014
The New York Times
By CHARLAYNE HUNTER-GAULT

IT COULD BE SAID that Dr. Wayne A.I. Frederick, acting president of Howard University, was to the manner born. On his birth 42 years ago in Port of Spain, Trinidad, his mother had already determined he would follow in the footsteps of the man she admired most: Eric Williams, who before leading Trinidad and Tobago to independence from Britain had taught at Howard.

“For her,” Dr. Frederick explained, “Howard was an almost mystical place, which had done so much for our country.”

Wayne Frederick was afflicted with sickle cell anemia, which is often accompanied by long-term pain and fatigue and can lead to early death. That, too, shaped his path. He was in a race against time. Graduating one year ahead of his high school class, he enrolled at Howard and received both his undergraduate and medical degrees in six years. He remembers mentors like the legendary Dr. LaSalle D. Leffall, who embraced and encouraged him during his surgical residency.

Wearing a conservative pinstripe suit, white shirt and dark tie, Dr. Frederick was taking an early-morning break in the boardroom next to the president’s office, recently vacated by Sidney A. Ribeau, who retired suddenly amid trustee unhappiness and friction that had gone public.

Dr. Frederick, who was provost until this appointment, wants to ensure that Howard remains true to its mission: preparing African-Americans to be leaders. The Mecca, as students refer to this epicenter of black scholarship, has produced more African-American Ph.D.’s, lawyers, engineers and architects than any other institution. But Dr. Frederick must confront a complex of uncomfortable realities, some brought on by the economy, some by financial mismanagement and board infighting, and some by the nation’s diversifying landscape.

Historically black colleges and universities, known as H.B.C.U.’s, once held a monopoly. Today, they struggle to compete with elite colleges that have stepped up recruiting for the best and brightest black students. Howard admitted almost 60 percent of applicants last year; among current freshmen, the top 25 percent in SAT math and reading scored 1190 and up; 15 years ago the threshold was 1330.

Other uncomfortable realities include new restrictions on the federal loans that many students depend on (89 percent of Howard’s receive some sort of financial aid). Howard’s teaching hospital has also been a drain on resources; once the sole choice for middle-class patients in a segregated society, it is now used mostly by those who cannot afford to pay elsewhere. And the university has been hit with a downgrade of its credit rating by Moody’s Investors Service that makes fund-raising even more difficult.

Howard is not unique in the constellation of private and public H.B.C.U.’s, or even in the overall higher education community. Earlier this year, Moody’s put out a negative outlook on the entire higher education sector.

But as the saying goes, when white America catches a cold, black America catches pneumonia.

HOWARD, which sits on a sprawling 258-acre campus in Northwest Washington, has educated many of the civil rights leaders who fought to end segregation at white colleges and universities, among them Thurgood Marshall and Vernon Jordan Jr.

As a newly minted lawyer, Mr. Jordan worked on my successful case to desegregate the University of Georgia in 1961. (Now a Howard board member, he declined to be interviewed for this article.) In those days, the State of Georgia went so far as to pay black graduate students to study in other states if no black institution in Georgia offered the courses they wanted to take.

In my case, the University of Georgia had the only journalism school in the South — my dream was to be Brenda Starr, having read the exciting exploits of the comic strip character from an early age. Hamilton Holmes, who was also part of the lawsuit against the State of Georgia, had gone to Morehouse, the men’s H.B.C.U. in Atlanta, for almost two years before our victory. But the University of Georgia had more laboratory facilities than Morehouse, and Hamp, as he was known to his friends, wanted to be a doctor, so he chose Georgia.

The lawsuit made it possible for me and other students to pursue our dreams in places that had always been closed to African-Americans. Little did any of us realize the price many black colleges would pay for equal opportunity.

Take Fisk University, a leading black college in Nashville that graduated an army of freedom fighters who risked their lives to bring about equality and change in the South, as well as the lead attorney in my case in Georgia, Constance Baker Motley. Enrollment reached a little over 1,500 in the ’70s. Today, Fisk has 645 students. And like other H.B.C.U.’s whose enrollments are 1,000 or less, the prognosis for survival is not good.

The economic issues that bedevil higher education in general are even more disruptive in the H.B.C.U. community, in part because many of the students are first in their families to go to college. Forty-six percent of students at historically black colleges come from families with incomes lower than $34,000, and half qualify for federal low-income Pell grants, according to the United Negro College Fund, which finances scholarships for 37 private black colleges. The organization also manages a Gates Foundation scholarship program that allows disadvantaged students to choose any institution. Only 19 percent of the recipients have chosen black colleges.

Many families have had to scurry for alternative financing, or had to leave their dreams behind altogether, after the Department of Education recently toughened eligibility criteria for Parent Plus loans.

A coalition of black organizations have protested what William R. Harvey, president of the historically black Hampton University, called “a debacle.” Michael L. Lomax, president and chief executive of the United Negro College Fund, has urged the department to return to the old loan policy and be more transparent and inclusive in any future process. At an H.B.C.U. conference in September, Education Secretary Arne Duncan explained that higher credit requirements were “designed to protect parents and taxpayers against unaffordable loans,” but apologized for poor communication about the changes, and promised to facilitate appeals.

But damage has been done. Denials have led to some 17,000 fewer students attending black colleges, costing the institutions more than $150 million in revenue, according to the United Negro College Fund. Howard lost 585 students, though about half were readmitted thanks to an intense fund-raising campaign.

Enrollment at Howard has fallen from a high of 11,321 students in 1980 to 10,297 today, although this fall the university attracted the second-largest freshman class in 15 years.

Founded by church organizations and white philanthropists in 1867, Howard had a mission: to educate newly freed blacks after the Civil War. As a result, though it is a private university, Howard has enjoyed special appropriations from the federal government — $200 million in the past decade. But as a result of congressionally mandated, across-the-board cuts — a.k.a., the sequester — Howard lost $12 million last year.

As Eleanor Holmes Norton, Washington’s congressional representative, put it: “Because of its historic reliance on government funds, that made Howard better off, but now, with the sequester, Howard, which was better off, is now worse off.”

THIS PAST SEPTEMBER, Howard students demonstrated behind a barrier as trustees, faculty members and the university president marched into the stately brick Cramton Auditorium for the fall convocation. The orderly but vocal students wore signs that read: “Transparency, Accountability and Responsibility” and “No More Howard Runaround.” 
Students took aim at the chief financial officer, demanding his removal, and the chairman of the board, Addison Barry Rand, head of AARP, the advocacy group for senior citizens.

“Do you run AARP like Howard University?” one sign read. And others: “Don’t tweet about it. Be about it.” “Save the Mecca.” “Stop Outsourcing Jobs” (a reference to the chief financial officer, an independent contractor).

Glynn Hill, editor of Howard’s student newspaper, The Hilltop, summarized the mood on campus for me this way: “Students and the alumni that we’ve engaged on Twitter are both anxious and on the edge of their seats to see how the university continues to move forward.”

Howard has been in turmoil for several years over its fiscal direction as well as a series of public relations blunders, notably the news of bonuses to high-level administrators amounting to $1.1 million amid cost-cutting and tuition increases. In a letter to trustees last June, Howard’s academic deans — at the moment, 6 of the 13 are interim — charged that “fiscal mismanagement is doing irreparable harm” to the university, and urged they remove the C.F.O. (he and the university parted ways in November).

Eric Walters, then faculty senate chairman, in his own letter had called administrative actions “morally repugnant” in light of tuition and fee increases, which have amounted to some 40 percent over four years (to $22,883). He also cited noncompetitive faculty salaries, faculty furloughs, inadequate funding for graduate students and degree offerings being slashed.

“You cannot grow a university by overly cutting,” Dr. Walters told me recently. “Poor decisions made in terms of staffing have come back to haunt us. You will drain the life out of the faculty.”

If the pot was boiling at the Mecca, it was stirred by Renee Higginbotham-Brooks, a Howard graduate, lawyer and vice chairwoman of the board, who last April sent a letter to trustees with a dire warning: Unless some “crucial decisions” were made promptly, the university would be gone in three years. She called for the dismissal of Mr. Rand and Dr. Ribeau, citing poor fiscal management and blasting expenditures like $107 million for two new dorms, although they were funded by bonds.

The letter somehow went public, leading to board “hiccups,” as one trustee put it. (Members would talk only anonymously because of this sensitive time of transition at Howard. Mr. Rand and Dr. Ribeau did not respond to repeated requests for interviews. Ms. Higginbotham-Brooks said she had nothing more to say on the matter.)

While board hiccups are not exclusive to Howard, it is not often that an institution’s internal politics hit the fan and the news media. And when they did, Mr. Rand countered in a statement that the university had balanced its budget for the past four years and restored its endowment of more than $500 million to prerecession levels. The bonuses had been decided under the previous president but awarded under Dr. Ribeau.

Some faculty members, like Greg E. Carr, chairman of the Department of Afro-American Studies, said Dr. Ribeau had done a reasonably good job, given that he had come in during a recession and from a predominantly white institution, Bowling Green State University, that didn’t have the same issues, or students, as did Howard.

He praised Dr. Ribeau for setting in motion a plan to raise $25 million in scholarship funds and the biggest “academic renewal project” in the university’s history.

The project’s goal, supported by Dr. Frederick, was to become more competitive nationally by strengthening popular degree programs and shedding underpopulated ones, some with as few as a half-dozen students. Of 171 programs, 21 are being restructured, and 25 have been cut, including German studies, classics, art history, fashion and a master’s in public administration, as STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math) are being built up.

That plan, too, was controversial. After protests erupted, the university backtracked on some cuts, including retaining a B.A. in philosophy and in African studies.

“If you have a mandate to bring Howard into the 21st century, you have to be cognizant of the politics on the ground,” Dr. Carr said. “You can have that understanding, but you have to be able to leverage that understanding to build consensus to move forward.”

Dr. Ribeau “saw the writing on the wall” and stepped down in December but is being paid for the remaining 18 months on his contract, board members said. (The search committee expects to name a permanent replacement by the end of this school year.)

Not long after Dr. Ribeau’s departure, the board held its annual retreat to discuss the state of Howard and the way forward. Some former board members and big contributors attended, but one of those present said that less than half of the 33 trustees showed. Several told me that they are intent on reinventing the board. “We’ve moved on, toward building board unity,” one said. “We will be rebuilding expectations of the board members and weeding out people who don’t have time.”

MANY FAMILIAR with the Howard situation, as well as with other troubled H.B.C.U.’s — five have closed their doors in the past 20 years — insist that what is critical for getting back on track is understanding that “new occasions teach new duties,” in the words of James Russell Lowell.

Within 50 years, people of color will be the American majority. The associate director of the White House Initiative on H.B.C.U.’s, Meldon Hollis, shared with me estimates showing that by 2060 the population under 18 is expected to be 38 percent Hispanic, 33 percent white and 15 percent black. “And that,” he said, “is a demographic tidal wave that not only affects white schools but black schools, too.”

Already, two historically black colleges are now predominantly white — West Virginia State and Bluefield State, also in West Virginia — and one, St. Philip’s College in San Antonio, is predominantly Hispanic.

As a sign of things to come, Mr. Hollis recently journeyed to Brazil and worked out an agreement in which the Brazilian government will pay for 1,000 of its students to attend H.B.C.U.’s for two years.

“It is foolish to think that significant change can’t come to a sector like H.B.C.U.’s,” said John S. Wilson Jr., president of Morehouse. “It is happening now and there is no guarantee that we will all survive.” Dr. Wilson, a 1979 graduate of Morehouse, points to the example of women’s colleges.

“When I was at Morehouse in the late ’70s,” he continued, “there were 250 to 300 women-only colleges and now there are 47. Similarly, in the 1970s, somewhere between 75 and 85 percent of African-Americans in higher education were being educated inside H.B.C.U.’s.” Today, of African-American students in higher education, only about 9 percent are attending historically black colleges.
 

As Dr. Harvey of Hampton points out, “H.B.C.U.’s are not monolithic, just like white schools.” The Department of Education lists 100, including community colleges and religious schools. Some, like Hampton and the women’s college Spelman, have enjoyed enrollment growth and relative financial stability.

“The strongest and best colleges that will not only survive but thrive are the ones that can further clarify and amplify their value proposition,” Dr. Wilson said. At Morehouse, “we have to tout a stronger, clearer value proposition that can attract more of the best and most driven students. We are going to have to give them an experience on this campus that is so powerful that our pool of applicants will expand well beyond African-American men and beyond our borders.”

Still, it is likely to be a tough row to hoe. Morehouse, whose graduates include the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Dr. David Satcher and Spike Lee, lost 500 students between 2009 and 2013.

When he arrived at Morehouse in 2013, Dr. Wilson said, it was in deep financial trouble. Dr. Wilson, who has a master’s and a doctorate in administration, planning and social policy, cut $5 million in administrative costs, eliminated 75 positions and closed one residence hall. He calls the current time at Morehouse “a period of repair.”

Dr. Wilson, who is 56, is an example of what many argue is needed now to rescue black colleges: a new breed of leader who has an allegiance to the H.B.C.U. culture — the caring, almost familial culture that nurtured a young Wayne Frederick — but who can prepare students for a technology-based future and embrace new business models. Among the younger generation of presidents often cited are Walter M. Kimbrough, the 46-year-old president of Dillard in New Orleans (his Twitter name: @Hip HopPrez), and Dr. Frederick.

Dr. Frederick is confident that Howard can move forward. “It’s going to take a lot of hard work and elbow grease,” he said, adding, however, that if budget cuts continue to be enforced and no changes are made to the Plus program, the road is going to be tougher.

“I don’t know what families are going to do,” he said in a clearly despondent whisper.

His priorities include the things most agree need urgent attention simultaneously: a financial literacy program for students and their parents; more support for students early on, including fortifying academic advising, to help turn around a four-year graduation rate of 42 percent (63 percent within six years); and the development of new revenue streams and diversification of current ones, concentrating on what most H.B.C.U. presidents say is a major weakness: alumni giving.

That last goal, Dr. Frederick said, is “a complicated issue.” Howard graduates traditionally give to institutions in their community, he explained. “They tend to support local churches and local groups. They give not just of their money but of their time.”

Dr. Frederick, who also has an M.B.A., acknowledges that he has to take a hard look at Howard’s business model. “We have to diversify that revenue stream, including monetizing our real estate assets, reducing dependence on tuition and growing our endowment,” he said. He is working with a financial services company to try to reverse the declining fortunes of Howard’s teaching hospital, where cost overruns amounted to $21 million in the fiscal year 2012, cutting deeply into Howard’s overall budget. And like wealthier traditional institutions that are attracting students with low- or no-cost online courses, Howard is beginning to offer courses online.

When asked if Howard should wean itself from federal support, Dr. Frederick politely objected to the word. “I don’t see it as weaning,” he said. “The federal government appropriation is not just a support for Howard but is a support that’s in the national interest. Students at H.B.C.U.’s account for approximately 3 percent of all students enrolled at colleges and universities in the United States, but account for 18 to 20 percent of African-American college graduates. So they represent a very important pipeline. Also, a large number of Ph.D.’s in STEM are coming from H.B.C.U.’s, of which Howard is the No. 1 producer. So it’s definitely in the national interest. No doubt about that.”

Dr. Frederick plans to visit states already sending students to Howard — Maryland, New York and California — as well as go where there is potential, like Florida and Pittsburgh. He also hopes to marry Howard’s traditional mission with one that looks at the country’s changing demographics.

“We’ve fulfilled our mission around a lot of black students, but our charter was never really created solely for black students,” he said. “In the future, as we become a more global society, we will always be in a position to embrace the world around us.”

Mr. Hill, the student editor, who has been at Howard three years, said he already feels he is a part of the “last of vintage Howard.”

“We had a serious Afrocentric feel to the campus,” he said. “But now it’s fairly obvious that the campus has gotten a little lighter. Nowadays, you can’t count the number of white kids, and I had never seen Asians before now. Students are even playing Frisbee!”

Still, 93 percent of undergraduates at Howard are black, and African-Americans are likely to remain the majority for years to come, even as Howard and other black institutions grapple with “making a way out of no way,” to borrow the civil rights mantra.

During my visit to campus, students talked about how they had realized their dreams by coming to Howard. I met Jamila Mitchell, who wants to be an optometrist, and Miajah McGraw, a Spanish major, both from Virginia, at a popular coffee shop.

Ms. Mitchell, ranked fifth in her high school class, said she chose Howard because of the scholarship it offered covering tuition for four years and because, having attended a predominantly white school, she sought a different experience. Howard’s diversity — “all kinds of different black people, especially the international aspect” — came as a surprise, she said. “I learned to work with different groups of people on all sides of the spectrum.”

Both women said they felt academically prepared, but they complained that there were not enough chairs or spaces to study, and many of the classrooms were in need of renovation. In too many, Ms. McGraw said, “you burn up in summer and freeze in winter.”

Isabella Hazell El-Diery, a freshman from Massachusetts, has not been following the melodrama over Howard’s president. Certainly there was room for improvement, she said, but she has learned more than classroom lessons here. She had visited Howard three times before finally making her decision, swayed by her interest in international affairs and internship possibilities in the nation’s capital. “I felt it was somewhere I could learn to do great things,” she said. “Amazing people are always coming to Howard to speak.”

There was something else that was important to her identity, coming as she did from a mostly white high school. Her mother is Jewish, her father black. “I didn’t learn about slavery until I got here,” Ms. El-Diery said. “It’s also about being black here, and that’s important because you are learning about where you came from.”

These students, Dr. Frederick said, embody Howard’s sacred trust as well as his hope for Howard’s future. “Our contributions are still groundbreaking,” he said, “and are absolutely key to contributing to a more complex society.”

Correction: February 4, 2014

An earlier version of this article misstated the amount of money cut from the federal appropriation to Howard. It was $12 million, not $2 million. The article also misspelled the name of the company that downgraded Howard’s credit. It is Moody’s Investors Service, not Moody’s Investor Service.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault is a former reporter for The Times, NPR, CNN and PBS. Her latest book is “To the Mountaintop: My Journey Through the Civil Rights Movement,” re-released in paperback last month.

    Hard Times at Howard U., NYT, 4.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/education/edlife/
    a-historically-black-college-is-rocked-by-the-economy-infighting-
    and-a-changing-demographic.html

Gay Marriages

Confront Catholic School Rules

JAN. 22, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL PAULSON

SAMMAMISH, Wash. — Eastside Catholic prides itself on teaching acceptance. At the end of Crusader Way, by the school’s entrance, banners hang celebrating “relationships” and exhorting passers-by to “remember to take care of each other.” Students use a sign-language gesture to remind one another of the school’s emphasis on unconditional love.

But now the school is unexpectedly grappling with how it defines both love and acceptance. Last month, a well-regarded vice principal was forced to leave his job as soon as administrators became aware that he had married a man; in the weeks since, the suburban Seattle school has been roiled, first by protests in support of the vice principal, and then by the resignations of those who sought his departure. The chairman of the school’s board resigned last month, and on Tuesday, Eastside, a middle and high school with about 900 students, announced the resignation of its president.

The ouster of Mr. Z, as the former vice principal, Mark Zmuda, is known, comes amid a wave of firings and forced resignations of gay men and lesbians from Roman Catholic institutions across the country, in most cases prompted not directly by the employees’ sexuality, but by their decisions to marry as same-sex marriage becomes legal in an increasing number of states.

This month, the band and choir director at a Catholic school in Ohio was fired hours after he told the school’s president that he planned to marry his boyfriend; in December, a French and Spanish teacher at a Catholic school in Pennsylvania was fired days after telling his principal he was applying for a marriage license in New Jersey. Similar ousters have taken place at Catholic schools, universities and parishes in Arkansas, California, Illinois, Missouri, New York and North Carolina.

For Catholic school and church leaders across the country, the issue is clear. The Roman Catholic Church opposes same-sex marriage, and school officials, including Mr. Zmuda, generally sign contracts saying they will abide by church teachings so that their lives can be models for their students.

But for some young Catholics, the firings are mystifying, particularly given the new tone set by Pope Francis. At Eastside Catholic, some students have taken to crafting banners with the quotation “Who am I to judge?,” words uttered by the pope when asked about gay priests; others have been trying to reach the pope via Twitter, hoping he will somehow intercede.

“He made it safe for people to raise issues and questions that, in the past, they were shut down for,” said Nancy Walton-House, whose son attended Eastside. “There’s a lot of hope, and maybe some naïveté, about how fast things can happen.”

Eastside’s senior-class president, Bradley Strode, a 17-year-old wrestler and lacrosse player, is seeking a meeting with the archbishop of Seattle, arguing that even if the church’s doctrine does not change, its employment practices should.

“It was just shocking that the Catholic Church would turn its back on a teacher for something that didn’t affect his work performance,” he said. “Gay marriage was something I never really thought about before, but everyone can agree that employment discrimination is wrong.”
A sign backed Mark Zmuda, the former vice principal and swimming coach at Eastside Catholic. David Ryder/Reuters

Last week, Archbishop J. Peter Sartain of Seattle issued a statement defending the school and rejecting the notion that the firing ran contrary to the direction of the new pope.

“Pope Francis has often reminded us of the limitless mercy of God, for Jesus came to bring his father’s mercy,” Archbishop Sartain said. “At the same time, Pope Francis has also reminded us of our responsibility as Catholics to live the timeless truth of church teaching on a wide variety of topics, including the sacredness of traditional marriage.”

Some students have quietly expressed support for the decision to remove Mr. Zmuda, but the prevailing sentiment at the school has been upset, reflecting, in part, the shifting attitudes toward same-sex marriage among young people.

“A lot of it is just generational,” said Christian Smith, a professor of sociology at Notre Dame who studies the religious lives of teenagers. “It’s a distinct minority who thinks there’s something wrong with same-sex relationships, and that’s a big change from older generations.”

Eastside Catholic, faced with intense blowback and sustained publicity over the removal of Mr. Zmuda, has defended its decision but is clearly concerned about the impact on applicants and donors as some students, parents and alumni ask what the ouster means about the school they have chosen and cheered.

This month, in a step many in the school community have found confusing, administrators gave a short-term contract to a choreographer who, in a show of support for Mr. Zmuda, had announced on talk radio that she was engaged to her girlfriend.

“It’s great that they’re keeping me, but it’s a little confusing,” said the choreographer, Stephanie Merrow, 41, who taught the school’s students to dance in a 2012 production of “Footloose,” and is now doing the same for this year’s production of “Guys and Dolls.”

“I feel for them,” she said. “I think maybe a mistake was made, and now what do they do?”

The school’s president, Sister Mary E. Tracy, had also sent mixed signals. She initially suggested to Mr. Zmuda that he might be able to keep his job if he got divorced, and then oversaw his ouster. After weeks of protest, she asked Julia Burns, an 18-year-old senior, to share with the public this comment: “I look forward to the day when no individual loses their job because they are married to a person of the same sex.” Sister Mary did not respond to requests for an interview.

On Tuesday, when the board announced Sister Mary’s resignation, it called the step “a difficult, but necessary decision so that a new leader can be brought in to ensure the entire Eastside Catholic community is moving forward on a positive path.”

Mr. Zmuda had not been at the school long, but he was liked by students, especially on the swim team, which he coached. He married in July, seven months after same-sex marriage became legal in Washington State, and he was ousted in December, shortly after the school’s administration received a complaint from a teacher about his marital status.

As students began to hear about his dismissal, they sprang into action.

“I found out about it and just texted 15 or 16 people,” said Ian Edwards, 17, a senior. Word spread quickly, and students staged an impromptu sit-in, skipping classes and gathering in a commons to talk, and, in some cases, to cry. “We just shouldn’t allow this discrimination to happen.”

Over the next weeks, the students took to social media to rally support, gathering signatures on an online petition and communicating via Twitter and texts. They protested outside Sammamish City Hall, at a Seahawks game and outside the archdiocese of Seattle, where they were joined by Ed Murray, then the city’s mayor-elect, who is Catholic and gay. Also this month, many students wore orange — the more attention-getting of the school’s two colors — to class one day to express their concern; and on Jan. 31, the students are hoping that other Catholic schools across the nation will join them in a similar act.

Alumni and parents are organizing online as they seek to force change at the school.

“If I had read the school handbook and it said, ‘We will hire you, but if we find out you are gay and you are married, we will fire you,’ I would not have put my kids there,” said Florence Colburn, who has two children at the school.

And Corey Sinser, 26, said he was an enthusiastic alumnus (class of 2006), but that now, “I worry that this will have a negative effect on the type of students who want to come, or the type of teachers who want to work there.”

Some are hoping Mr. Zmuda will get his job back; others are seeking a change in the school’s employment practices.

Julia Troy, 17, a senior, said she believed that speaking up was an outcome itself.

“I have gay friends, and I care about them,” she said. “Even if all that happens is they know that I support them, that’s enough for me.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 23, 2014,

on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:

Gay Marriages Confront Catholic School Rules.

    Gay Marriages Confront Catholic School Rules, NYT, 22.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/23/us/
    gay-marriages-confront-catholic-school-rules.html

Old Job Is Hurdle for Napolitano

on Campuses

JAN. 20, 2014
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. — The choice sounded ingenious: Take a high-profile political figure — a former governor and cabinet member — and have her apply her acumen to the task of rebuilding one of the great public university systems ravaged by decades of eroding state support.

So when Janet Napolitano, the former secretary of homeland security and governor of Arizona, was named president of the University of California last summer, expectations soared.

But her political skill was confronted almost immediately by a liability on campuses filled with foreign-born students, hundreds of whom lack legal immigration status — her role in the Obama administration’s deportation of 1.9 million unauthorized immigrants.

Now Ms. Napolitano faces a dual task of reviving the University of California and simultaneously overcoming the deep distrust of her within some quarters of the system.

So she has relied on a time-tested political strategy: the listening tour. Ms. Napolitano has spent days at each of the 10 campuses, attending lectures, touring labs and holding meetings with students, faculty members and staff members. Any one of them can easily rattle off the problems caused by state budget cuts: tuition that has more than doubled, star faculty members who left for higher-paying private universities where their research would be fully funded, and academic counselors crushed by increasing caseloads.
Launch media viewer
Students opposed to deportations demonstrated as Ms. Napolitano toured the campus there. Richard Hartog for The New York Times

But at nearly every stop along the tour she has also been confronted by protesters whose fury is not about the budget. As she walked into the faculty club at the University of California, Santa Barbara, one recent evening, for example, the polite chatter welcoming her fought a din of “Napolitano has got to go.” When Chancellor Henry T. Yang walked over to the students mounting the objection, they asked: “How can you support her? She’s hurt our families.”

When Ms. Napolitano appeared on a panel about Latinas in education that was sponsored by Eva Longoria, the Mexican-American actress with a master’s degree in Chicano studies, the ushers’ directions to the arriving audience were drowned out by shouts of “Education, not deportation!”

“What this reveals is a law that doesn’t match our moral standards, and that weight is falling on these students,” Ms. Napolitano said after another student protester interrupted her at the panel. As she tells her critics, she has always argued that enforcement of existing laws is the only way to get lawmakers to back a comprehensive immigration overhaul.

In one of her first policy changes this fall, Ms. Napolitano announced that she would set aside $5 million to assist the roughly 1,000 undocumented students in the system, spread across the campuses. The money is a tiny fraction of the $25 billion overall budget, but it won praise from Latino leaders and campus activists, who will decide whether to use the money for specialized counseling centers or direct scholarships.

“The legacy of deportations is going to be with her for a long time to come, and it is something that she is going to have to live with,” said Antonia Hernandez, the president of the California Community Foundation and a former chairwoman of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who spoke with Ms. Napolitano at the University of California, Los Angeles. “She is acknowledging that diversity is a weakness that the system needs to address. If it is only educating the wealthy upper class, there is not going to be a lot of will to put money into that kind of public institution.”

Complaints about deportations are just the beginning of Ms. Napolitano’s challenges. For years, the state has put less and less money into the university system, reducing the state’s contribution to levels not seen since the Great Depression — forcing the system to increasingly rely on tuition, government research grants and private dollars, even as it reduced the number of courses offered and cut back on library hours. In many ways, Ms. Napolitano’s primary job is convincing people who will never set foot on a University of California campus that the system deserves their tax dollars.

She is not the sort of magnetic leader who wins over skeptics with charm. But what she lacks in charisma she makes up in dogged efforts, inviting some of her harshest critics to intimate meetings and quickly deciding whether their criticisms warrant action. She travels with a beefy security detail provided by the university. At 56, she has never married and is a self-described wonkish workaholic, telling audiences that she takes home budgets to read in bed.

That hard-nosed demeanor could make her the perfect match for Gov. Jerry Brown, who has become deeply involved in the university over the past year and is arguably the most important figure in its future. The governor, who served on the search committee that selected Ms. Napolitano, has insisted that a $140 million increase proposed in the governor’s budget this year be tied to a tuition freeze and an improving graduation rate.

Even as she continues to court the public, Ms. Napolitano’s most pressing long-term task is to convince the governor and state legislators that the system both needs and deserves more money to regain its luster.

“We need to make it clear that when we ask for something we’re not just going with our hand out to be a supplicant, but we’re saying this is an investment and here are all the many ways we are going to give you a return on that investment,” Ms. Napolitano said in a recent interview. “The days of just getting money are over. We have to be a place — and we are — that the state can turn to help solve its problems.”

To bolster her case, Ms. Napolitano is encouraging more work on sustainable energy, convinced that researchers across the system can help the state cut down on fuel costs and the system’s environmental impact. She is explaining how medical research affects patients all over the world. And she is constantly explaining the way the state’s economic success depends on the university.

With the need for more money, the university system has increasingly relied on out-of-state and foreign students, who pay a far higher tuition rate. While such students still make up less than 10 percent of the overall enrollment, the reliance has fueled the widespread notion that local high school students are being squeezed out of the system. And many state and university leaders fret that Latinos continue to lag behind the numbers of whites and Asians enrolling in the system.

While blacks and Latinos make up more than half the graduating high school seniors in California, they account for less than a third of the university system’s freshman class. A video by a U.C.L.A. student lamenting the low number of black males who graduate there each year has garnered attention, illustrating the need for Ms. Napolitano and other top officials to sell the system to the public.

These days, Ms. Napolitano speaks about financial aid any time she has an audience. In courting Latino leaders both on and off campuses, she has implicitly acknowledged the importance of having their support and of changing the topic from deportation to education.

“At some point, I hope the protesters evolve and realize that it is not going to foster immigration reform in this country,” Ms. Napolitano said in an interview. “But I am the one with the ability to foster a thriving education system for them, and they’re not inhibiting my ability to get at it.”

A version of this article appears in print on January 21, 2014,

on page A11 of the New York edition with the headline:

Old Job Is Hurdle For Napolitano On Campuses.

    Old Job Is Hurdle for Napolitano on Campuses, NYT, 20.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/21/education/
    old-job-is-hurdle-for-napolitano-on-campuses.html

What’s the Matter With Kansas’ Schools?

January 7, 2014
The New York Times
By DAVID SCIARRA
and WADE HENDERSON

KANSAS, like every state, explicitly guarantees a free public education in its Constitution, affirming America’s founding belief that only an educated citizenry can preserve democracy and safeguard individual liberty and freedom.

And yet in recent years Kansas has become the epicenter of a new battle over the states’ obligation to adequately fund public education. Even though the state Constitution requires that it make “suitable provision” for financing public education, Gov. Sam Brownback and the Republican-led Legislature have made draconian cuts in school spending, leading to a lawsuit that now sits before the state Supreme Court.

The outcome of that decision could resonate nationwide. Forty-five states have had lawsuits challenging the failure of governors and legislators to provide essential resources for a constitutional education. Litigation is pending against 11 states that allegedly provide inadequate and unfair school funding, including New York, Florida, Texas and California.

Many of these lawsuits successfully forced elected officials to increase school funding overall and to deliver more resources to poor students and those with special needs. If the Kansas Supreme Court rules otherwise, students in those states may begin to see the tide of education cuts return.

Kansas’ current constitutional crisis has its genesis in a series of cuts to school funding that began in 2009. The cuts were accelerated by a $1.1 billion tax break, which benefited mostly upper-income Kansans, proposed by Governor Brownback and enacted in 2012.

Overall, the Legislature slashed public education funding to 16.5 percent below the 2008 level, triggering significant program reductions in schools across the state. Class sizes have increased, teachers and staff members have been laid off, and essential services for at-risk students were eliminated, even as the state implemented higher academic standards for college and career readiness.

Parents filed a lawsuit in the Kansas courts to challenge the cuts. In Gannon v. State of Kansas, a three-judge trial court ruled in January 2013 for the parents, finding that the cuts reduced per-pupil expenditures far below a level “suitable” to educate all children under Kansas’ standards.

The judges also found that the Legislature was not meeting even the basic funding amounts set in its own education cost studies. The judges called the school funding cut “destructive of our children’s future.”

To remedy the funding shortfall, the judges ordered that per-pupil expenditures be increased to $4,492 from $3,838, the level previously established as suitable.

Rather than comply, Governor Brownback appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court. A decision is expected this month.

A victory for the parents would be heartening, but if it comes, would Governor Brownback and legislative leaders uphold the right to education guaranteed to Kansas school children?

The signals thus far are not promising. If the Kansas Supreme Court orders restoration of the funding, legislators are threatening to amend the state’s Constitution by removing the requirement for “suitable” school funding and to strip Kansas courts of jurisdiction to hear school finance cases altogether. And if the amendment fails, they have vowed to defy any court order for increased funding or, at the very least, take the money from higher education.

A court-stripping constitutional amendment, and defiance of a state Supreme Court order, would shred the very fabric of Kansas’ government and send shock waves through state capitals across the nation. It would allow elected branches to avoid any responsibility to adhere to the language and interpretation of their state constitutions by the courts. It would gravely undermine judicial independence and shut the courthouse door to vulnerable children who, as a last resort, seek legal redress to vindicate their fundamental right to an education.

As the Gannon trial judges noted, matters such as education are placed in constitutions because they are “intended for permanence” and “to protect them from the vagaries of politics.”

Kansans rightfully take pride in their strong public school system. But as Kansas goes, so may go the nation. The Kansas Constitution, like those in other states, demands that every child be given the educational opportunity to meet his or her promise. This requires, at a minimum, adequate and suitable school funding. Governor Brownback and legislators must meet the constitutional command and, by so doing, advance the core American value of equal opportunity for all.

David Sciarra is the executive director

of the Education Law Center.

Wade Henderson is the president and chief executive

of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights.

    What’s the Matter With Kansas’ Schools?, NYT, 7.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/08/opinion/
    whats-the-matter-with-kansas-schools.html

Zero Tolerance, Reconsidered

January 5, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Schools across the country are rethinking “zero tolerance” discipline policies under which children have been suspended, even arrested, for minor offenses like cursing, getting into shoving matches and other garden-variety misbehavior that in years past would have been resolved with detention or meetings with a child’s parents.

These reappraisals are long overdue. Studies have shown that suspensions and expulsions do nothing to improve the school climate, while increasing the risk that children will experience long-term social and academic problems. Federal data also indicates that minority students are disproportionately singled out for harsh disciplinary measures.

These policies date back to 1994, when Congress required states receiving federal education money to expel students for bringing guns onto school property. States and local governments broadened and distorted this mandate to expel children for minor infractions. At the same time, schools began stationing police officers in hallways, which also increased arrests for nonviolent behavior.

The scope of the problem became clear three years ago when the Council of State Governments Justice Center, a nonprofit policy group, issued a study of school discipline polices in Texas. It showed that nearly 6 in 10 public school students were suspended or expelled at least once between seventh and 12th grade. But only a tiny fraction of the disciplinary actions taken against students were for serious criminal conduct requiring suspension or expulsion under state law.

Children who are removed from school are at heightened risk for low achievement, being held back, dropping out or becoming permanently entangled in the juvenile justice system. The Texas Legislature has taken steps aimed at keeping minor misconduct cases from reaching the courts. One law recommends that school districts consider less harsh sanctions, like a warning letter or counseling. Another measure prohibits police from ticketing and fining children under the age of 12 on school grounds or on a school bus.

A similar evolution is taking place in California. The Los Angeles school district became the first in the nation to ban suspensions for “willful defiance,” a catchall category that accounted for more than 40 percent of the state’s suspensions in the 2011-12 school year. A new state law allows suspension for serious offenses, like those involving violence or weapons, but requires schools to try alternative strategies, including parent-teacher conferences, before suspending students for nonviolent infractions.

Change is also afoot in Broward County, Fla., one of the nation’s largest school districts. The district has entered into an agreement with civil rights groups and law enforcement to keep troubled children in school, where they can receive counseling and other forms of help. Broward’s superintendent said it was wrong to keep saddling students with criminal records that can hurt their chances of getting a job or college financial aid, or of entering the military. School systems across the country should pay attention.

    Zero Tolerance, Reconsidered, NYT, 5.1.2014,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/06/opinion/zero-tolerance-reconsidered.html