Nonprofit News and Comment

EDUCATION

CHARTER SCHOOLS

“Charter school demand in Mass. disputed; Waiting list totals can count students more than once.” By James Vaznis. Boston Globe. April 8, 2013. A state tally showing more than 53,000 students on charter school waiting lists is overstating demand, according to a Globe review of state data. The state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, in tallying the waiting lists statewide and for many individual communities, including Boston, frequently counts the same students more than once. That’s because the state simply adds up the waiting lists from each charter school without collecting individual names to learn whether a student appears on more than one list or, in fact, may be enrolled at another charter school. Charter school leaders have been seizing on the large number of students on the waiting lists as evidence of soaring popularity for the schools and the need for more of them. But critics note that as lawmakers debate legislation this spring to raise a state-imposed cap on the number of charter school seats in Boston and other cities, they will do so without a full picture of demand.

HIGHER EDUCATION

“Admitting Email Search Errors, Harvard Turns to Boston Lawyer.” By Nicholas P. Fandos and Samuel Y. Weinstock. Harvard Crimson. April 11, 2013. University President Drew G. Faust acknowledged in an interview Tuesday that administrators do not yet have a complete picture of the sequence of events surrounding secret searches of resident deans’ email accounts, but said she hopes a forthcoming review by esteemed Boston attorney Michael B. Keating will clarify lingering uncertainty. “It should have been evaluated more carefully,” Faust said. “I think that Michael Keating is going to help straighten out some of the facts surrounding what were the searches, who knew what, and we’ll have a better answer for some of those questions.” Faust first announced Keating’s investigation at a April 2 faculty meeting where administrators admitted to inaccuracies in their original account of events put forth in a March 11 statement. She said on Tuesday that the original statement contained errors because administrators were under “a lot pressure” to respond quickly to a March 9 Boston Globe story first reporting the searches. Keating’s review, she said, is intended to “make sure that all the facts that we now understand to be the facts about the searches are indeed accurate and complete, because you’ve obviously seen that we’ve found the record-keeping spotty.” In their March 11 statement, Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith and Dean of the College Evelynn M. Hammonds said that the email searches only queried subject lines and were limited to resident deans’ administrative accounts. At the faculty meeting, they said that neither claim was true. And on Monday, four other College administrators told The Crimson that the administration’s updated account of events contained even more inaccuracies and mischaracterizations. Faust said she was unaware of those additional accusations when she spoke with The Crimson Tuesday, and FAS spokesperson Jeff Neal has declined to comment on the matter.

“A Muslim College Mixes Subjects to Achieve an American Feel.” By Mark Oppenheimer. New York Times. April 12, 2013. I was a bit late for my meeting last week with 19-year-old Mussab Abouabdalla, who I hoped would explain to me why anyone would attend Zaytuna College, an unaccredited three-year-old Muslim institution with about 30 students and not even 10 professors. I found Mr. Abouabdalla at Caffe Strada. He had arranged his books on the table as if to answer my question. By his right hand, on a neat stack, was the Koran, the Muslim holy book. Beneath it was the quadrivium, the Renaissance curriculum, comprising arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy. And at the bottom was the trivium, comprising grammar, logic and rhetoric, traditionally taught before the quadrivium. These seven arts were once the basis of a European education, and they have recently become popular with some Christian home-schoolers. Now, at Zaytuna College, the Greeks, the scholastics and the whole Western tradition are being taught alongside the Koran.

PRIVATE & PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS

“School Vote Stirs Debate on Girls as Leaders.” By Katherine Q. Seelye. New York Times. April 11, 2013. When the elite Phillips Academy here went coed in 1973, some worried that women would quickly take over this venerable institution, the alma mater of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Samuel Morse and Humphrey Bogart, not to mention both Presidents George Bush. In short order, the number of girls in the student ranks did roughly equal the number of boys. The faculty today is more than half female. And until her retirement last summer, the head of school was a woman, for nearly two decades. And yet some of the young women — and men — at the 235-year-old prep school feel that Andover, as it is commonly called, has yet to achieve true gender equality. They expressed this concern several weeks ago in a letter to the student newspaper, The Phillipian, and like a match to dry tinder, it set off a raging debate that engulfed the campus. The proximate cause of concern was the election, held Wednesday, for the top student position, called school president. Since 1973, only four girls have been elected, most recently in 2003. (The other top student position, that of editor in chief of the newspaper, has had nine girls and 33 boys.). The letter writers said this was an embarrassment, especially at a school considered so progressive. The paucity of girls in high-profile positions, they said, leaves younger students with few role models and discourages them from even trying for the top. But the broader concern involved age-old questions of whether men and women could ever achieve equality, the nature of sexism and the nature of a meritocracy, which Andover very much purports to be.

EDUCATION

CHARTER SCHOOLS

“Charter school experiment a success: Our view.” Editorial. USA Today. April 1, 2013. KIPP’s eighth-grade graduates go to college at twice the national rate for low-income students. A Houston district courted charters to open with their own teachers and principals inside two existing public schools. Mathematica Policy Research found that KIPP schools improved student achievement in math, reading, science and social studies. The arrival of charter schools in any city usually starts a fight. A rigorous new study of KIPP, the nation’s best known and most scrutinized charter network, blew away criticism that has fueled the charter fight. Critics have long contended that KIPP’s success with minority and low-income children is less about its methods than about skimming the best students with the most motivated parents. Not so, the five-year study of 43 KIPP middle schools concluded. Instead, Mathematica Policy Research found that KIPP schools improved student achievement in math, reading, science and social studies. Researchers compared students who had won lotteries to enter KIPP schools against students in the lotteries who lost out. Thus, students and their parents were equally motivated. Even so, the KIPP students did better.
The sooner educators figure out how to replicate charter successes, the better off students will be.

“Charter school operators guilty of misusing funds; The couple running Ivy Academia could face prison time over the $200,000 in public funds. The case is seen as having major implications for other charters.” By Howard Blume. Los Angeles Times. April 5, 2013. In a case that could have impact statewide, a Los Angeles jury Friday found the operators of a west San Fernando Valley charter school guilty of illegally taking or misappropriating more than $200,000 in public funds. Together, Yevgeny “Eugene” Selivanov, 40, and his wife, Tatyana Berkovich, 36, faced 26 felony counts for using state money in ways they insisted were legal under laws that apply to nonprofits and charter schools in California. Over several years, for example, they spent more than $34,000 on meals, entertainment and gifts that they classified as business expenses or gestures of appreciation for teachers. Charter advocates followed the case closely because it could expose other operators to prosecution and, because, they said, it could undermine the flexibility that is benefiting more than 410,000 California students now enrolled in those campuses. For charter critics, the result is a long overdue rebuke of an anything-goes mentality that they contend sometimes abuses the public trust and drains resources from students. “This message is going to resonate throughout the charter school community,” said prosecutor Sandi Roth. “You can’t spend the charter school funds for anything you want. It has to be money spent on the kids and the schools.” Charters are independently managed, publicly funded and exempt from some rules that apply to traditional schools. Defense attorneys argued that a charter school — California has nearly 1,000 — should be treated as nonprofits, which have flexibility in spending money, provided it furthers the mission of the organization.

FINANCE

“Investments in Education May Be Misdirected.” By Eduardo Porter. New York Times. April 3, 2013. James Heckman is one of the nation’s top economists studying human development. Thirteen years ago, he shared the Nobel for economics. In February, he stood before the annual meeting of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce and Industry, showed the assembled business executives a chart, and demolished the United States’ entire approach to education. The chart showed the results of cognitive tests that were first performed in the 1980s on several hundred low-birthweight 3-year-olds, who were then retested at ages 5, 8 and 18. If education is supposed to help redress inequities at birth and improve the lot of disadvantaged children as they grow up, it is not doing its job.

HIGHER EDUCATION

“Massachusetts: Harvard Admits Deeper Search.” By Richard Perez-Pena. New York Times. April 2, 2013. Harvard’s search of staff e-mail accounts went further than previously disclosed, administrators said Tuesday. They announced that an outside lawyer would investigate the matter and a task force would review privacy policies. President Drew Gilpin Faust and two deans revealed the developments in a faculty meeting, and the deans apologized. In investigating leaks about a cheating scandal, administrators searched subject lines in the accounts that 16 instructors have as resident deans. On Tuesday, administrators said that with one resident dean, the search included that dean’s personal Harvard account, but no e-mails were opened.
Related stories:
“Revelation of Second Email Search Contradicts Administrators’ Previous Statement; Smith and Hammonds Apologize for Handling of Searches at Faculty Meeting.” Harvard Crimson. April 3, 2013.
“Harvard e-mail searches broader than first described.” Boston Globe. April 2, 2013.
“Email Search Fallout Prompts Dismay Over Privacy, Trust.” Harvard Crimson. April 4, 2013.

“New Medical School Wants To Build Ranks Of Primary Care Doctors.” By Jeffrey Cohen. Morning Edition/National Public Radio. April 2, 2013. The Frank H. Netter School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., will open this fall. The school has a specific mission: minting doctors who want to go into primary care practice. Michael Ellison has a tough assignment. He’s the associate dean of admissions choosing the first class of a brand new medical school, the Frank H. Netter School of Medicine at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn. “We have over 1,600 applicants, and we will interview 400 for 60 spots,” Ellison says. The school has a very specific mission: minting doctors who want to go into primary care practice. Under the Affordable Care Act, millions more people with insurance may be headed to the doctor’s office. That means the medical system will need more doctors, nurses, physician assistants, and other health care workers to meet the demand. Quinnipiac is one of about a dozen new medical schools cropping up, and it’s spending $100 million just to get up and running.

‘Startup Takes Aim at Old-School Ways; Pittsburgh’s Saxifrage Offers Classes at a Fraction of the Price of Traditional.” By Douglas Belkin. Wall Street Journal. April 2, 2013. Tim Cook is fighting the sky-high cost of a college education by constructing his own school here without expensive buildings or well-paid deans. Classes are taught in local coffee shops. The administrative staff of two works in a church basement. The Saxifrage School, Mr. Cook’s two-year old experiment, is seeking to upend the traditional notion that college students need a sequestered, ivy-covered campus—and will endure the price tag that comes with it. He is gambling that for a nominal tuition—$395 a class—they will use the public library, the neighborhood YMCA and existing apartment buildings to study, play and live in. “What’s the point of spending a fortune to reinvent the wheel?” said the 28-year-old Mr. Cook. “Everything you need to operate a campus is already right there in the community.” With just four classes and 60 part-time students so far, Saxifrage is still a long way from competing with established universities. It doesn’t yet offer a degree or have accreditation. But it reflects a larger antiestablishment surge beginning to reshape higher education. In the last decade, the average cost of a public four-year school including tuition and fees has climbed to $17,860 a year from $12,304 in 2012 dollars. Student debt has soared as a result, and some are looking beyond traditional institutions. Neil Shah explains how young people have become more wary of taking on more debt in general as student loan debt has reached record levels

“The Golf Shot Heard Round the Academic World; The tale of a teed-off philanthropist and the head of Bowdoin College, where identity politics runs wild.” By David Feith. Wall Street Journal. April 5, 2013. It sounds like the setup for a bad joke: What did the Wall Street type say to the college president on the golf course? Well, we don’t know exactly—but it has launched a saga with weighty implications for American intellectual and civic life. Here’s what we do know: One day in the summer of 2010, Barry Mills, the president of Bowdoin College, a respected liberal-arts school in Brunswick, Maine, met investor and philanthropist Thomas Klingenstein for a round of golf about an hour north of campus. College presidents spend many of their waking hours talking to potential donors. In this case, the two men spoke about college life—especially “diversity”—and the conversation made such an impression on President Mills that he cited it weeks later in his convocation address to Bowdoin’s freshman class. That’s where the dispute begins. In his address, President Mills described the golf outing and said he had been interrupted in the middle of a swing by a fellow golfer’s announcement: “I would never support Bowdoin—you are a ridiculous liberal school that brings all the wrong students to campus for all the wrong reasons,” said the other golfer, in Mr. Mills’s telling. During Mr. Mills’s next swing, he recalled, the man blasted Bowdoin’s “misplaced and misguided diversity efforts.” At the end of the round, the college president told the students, “I walked off the course in despair.” Word of the speech soon got to Mr. Klingenstein. Even though he hadn’t been named in the Mills account, Mr. Klingenstein took to the pages of the Claremont Review of Books to call it nonsense: “He didn’t like my views, so he turned me into a backswing interrupting, Bowdoin-hating boor who wants to return to the segregated days of Jim Crow.”

PRIVATE & PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS

“Abuse Charge at Academy Stirs Inquiry.” By Jess Bidgood. New York Times. March 31, 2013. Prosecutors plan to investigate possible sexual abuse at Deerfield Academy, an exclusive private boarding school in western Massachusetts, after a report released by the school detailing its own investigation into allegations against two faculty members who taught there for decades. “We intend to independently investigate whether these abuse allegations were criminal in nature and, if so, whether or not the statute of limitations or other factors would preclude criminal prosecution,” David E. Sullivan, the district attorney for Hampshire and Franklin Counties, said.
The school’s report, which was released Saturday in a letter to the Deerfield community, said investigators had confirmed that Peter Hindle, a mathematics teacher who worked at Deerfield from 1956 to 2000, engaged in sexual conduct with at least one student. The investigation also found evidence that Bryce Lambert, who taught English at the school until 1990 and is now dead, engaged in sexual conduct with two students, and that investigators received additional reports of sexual misconduct that they could not corroborate. “The investigation also led us to the conclusion that the Deerfield administration in the 1980s could have — in the case of Peter Hindle — moved more forcefully to address reports of inappropriate behavior,” read the letter, signed by Philip Greer, the president of the school’s board of trustees, and Margarita Curtis, who is the head of the school. “Given Mr. Hindle’s denials and highly revered status, the administration relied solely on verbal and written warnings,” said the letter. “By any measure, Mr. Hindle’s behavior represents an outrageous violation,” read the report, which said Mr. Hindle lied to investigators, “raising serious questions about whether his admission was too limited.” Mr. Hindle, 78, declined to comment.
Related story:
“Former Students Recall Teachers Accused of Abuse.” New York Times. April 2, 2013.

“A Reporter at Large: The Master: A charismatic teacher enthralled his students. Was he abusing them?” By Marc Fisher. New Yorker. April 1, 2013 .

EDUCATION

HIGHER EDUCATION

“More Than One N.Y.U. Star Got Lavish Parting Gift.” By Ariel Kaminer. New York Times. March 3, 2013. New York University attracts figures of international stature with the promise that the university is a rewarding place to work. Less well known is how rewarding it can be to leave. That fact came into view after President Obama nominated Jacob J. Lew, a former executive vice president of N.Y.U., to lead the Treasury Department. (The Senate confirmed his nomination last week.) In 2006, the university acknowledged, it awarded him a $685,000 bonus as he was leaving to take a position at Citigroup, an unusual payment for someone who was leaving voluntarily, especially at a nonprofit institution. Those rewards, and salaries to match, have at times been a point of conflict among members of the N.Y.U. community. “Most faculty find these numbers to be obscene, especially at an institution where adjunct teachers qualify for food stamps,” said Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis who is an outspoken critic of Dr. Sexton’s. “To students with a crushing debt burden, they are unfathomable.” But without question, large compensation packages have helped N.Y.U. recruit and retain people whom other schools might like to hire away, either for their academic reputations or for the money that they help bring in. But Senator Charles E. Grassley, an Iowa Republican and member of the Senate Finance Committee, said in a statement: “The problem of colleges that always seem to find money for the executive suite even as they raise tuition is not unique to New York University. “However, New York University is among the most expensive, has a well-funded endowment, and has high student debt loads. It should explain how its generous treatment of Mr. Lew and other executives is necessary to its educational mission.”

“Campus-oriented news, first-person reports from student activists and journalists about their campus; Anatomy of a Failed Campus: What Happened At NYU’s Tisch Asia?” By Zoë Schlanger and StudentNation. Nation. March 6, 2013. In November of last year, Tisch Asia’s 158 students gathered for an emergency meeting. After an email broke the news the night before, NYU administrators flew to Singapore from New York to explain that the school would cease to exist by 2015. It had fallen on hard times. NYU owed Singapore upwards of $9 million. Nothing could be done. A photographer at the meeting began snapping images of the moments that followed, capturing faces marked by shock, disappointment, and disbelief. The campus had been mired in confusion and a sense of precariousness for some time. Almost exactly a year before, in November 2011, Tisch Asia was rocked by the removal of Pari Shirazi, the founder and president of the program. Shirazi was fired for alleged misuse of private funds and embezzlement, charges which she is now fighting in a lawsuit against NYU. NYU students are well acquainted with the school’s efforts to establish its international presence. Countries are added so regularly to NYU’s ‘Global Network University’–sites in Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi, Sydney and Shanghai all sprouted in the past five years alone–that university president John Sexton now encourages students to refer to the Greenwich Village campus as “NYU in New York.” This rapid international expansion is the brunt of many jokes and plenty of sharp criticism. But buried beneath the ribbon-cuttings, there is a story of an NYU campus that failed, and a question as to why. So what happened in Singapore? It depends who you ask. Tisch Asia opened in 2007 to much fanfare as NYU’s first degree-granting program outside the US. Along with several other institutions, NYU was attracted to Singapore by the government’s ambitious ‘Global Schoolhouse’ initiative, which sought to bring 150,000 international students to the country by 2015, and raise the portion of its GDP coming from education from 1.9% to 5%. Tisch Asia’s neighbors on the island nation included The University of New South Wales, which also opened its Singapore campus in 2007, but closed a month into its first semester due to under-enrollment. The University of Nevada Las Vegas’ campus is set to close in a few years due to financial problems. Yale’s Singapore campus, which faced delays due to significant pushback, is set to open August 2013.

“Cooper Union Board Delays Tuition Decision.” By Ariel Kaminer. New York Times. March 7, 2013. Students, faculty and alumni of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art eager to learn the fate of the college’s distinctive no-tuition policy have been told to wait, again. The board of trustees, which met this week with the expectation of resolving the policy on undergraduate tuition, instead released a statement on Thursday saying only that it “will continue to review all options to address our financial challenges.” “We are grateful to all our constituents for their input and patience as the trustees continue their deliberations,” the statement said. At a school that with only a few early exceptions has been free since 1859, the prospect of charging undergraduates has produced cacophonous debates. With revenues — most of which derive from real estate holdings, notably the land under the Chrysler Building — falling behind expenses, Cooper Union enacted a policy last year of charging graduate students. The president, Jamshed Bharucha, also instructed faculty members to propose additional revenue streams, like new graduate programs and undergraduate tuition. Since that time, the campus at 41 Cooper Square in Manhattan has been rived by a student occupation, impassioned town-hall-style meetings, noisy protest stunts and widespread distrust. The board meeting this week took place at an undisclosed location, while critics of the administration registered their outrage via telephone. Cooper Union, founded as a charity to educate New York City’s poor, has over time become a very different institution. Today it is one of the most selective colleges in the country, attracting a diverse student body, some of whom could afford to enroll anywhere. Opponents of undergraduate tuition said it would betray the school’s mission and meritocratic spirit, but supporters say it is the only way out of a crisis severe enough to threaten the college’s existence.

“Activist Group Condemns Endowment’s Link to Gunmakers.” Harvard Crimson. March 8, 2013. [For story, go to Ethical Investing].

“Harvard Searched E-Mails for Source of Media Leaks.” By Richard Perez-Pena. New York Times. March 9, 2013. Harvard secretly searched the e-mail accounts of several of its staff members last fall, looking for the source of news media leaks about its recent cheating scandal, but did not tell them about the searches for several months, people briefed on the matter said on Saturday. The searches, first reported by The Boston Globe, involved the e-mail accounts of 16 resident deans, but most of them were not told of the searches until the last few days, after The Globe inquired about them. Resident deans straddle the roles of administrators and faculty members, teaching classes as lecturers while living in Harvard’s undergraduate residential houses as student advocates and advisers. In August, an administration memo to the resident deans, on how to advise students being brought up on cheating charges before the Administrative Board, a committee of faculty members responsible for enforcing regulations, made its way to news organizations. The e-mail searches were intended to find the source of leak, but no one was disciplined in the matter. Last August, Harvard publicly revealed that “nearly half” the students in a large class were suspected of having cheated on a take-home final exam in the spring of 2012 — either working together in violation of instructions, or outright plagiarizing material. Students identified the class as a government course with 279 people enrolled. Harvard declined to comment on Saturday about the e-mail searches, but offered what appeared to be an oblique defense.
Related story:
“Harvard secretly searched deans’ e-mail; Chasing leak in cheating scandal may have invaded privacy.” Boston Globe. March 10, 2013.

“N.Y.U.’s Global Leader Is Tested by Faculty at Home.” By Ariel Kaminer. New York Times. March 9, 2013. Embarking on an ambitious expansion at home, constructing a network of new campuses around the globe, wooing intellectual superstars and raising vast amounts of money, John Sexton of New York University is the very model of a modern university president — the leader of a large corporation, pushing for growth on every front. To some within N.Y.U., Dr. Sexton is a hero who has transformed the university. The trustees have thanked him by elevating his salary to nearly $1.5 million from $773,000 and guaranteeing him retirement benefits of $800,000 a year. But to others, he is an autocrat who treats all but a few anointed professors as hired help, ignoring their concerns, informing them of policies after the fact and otherwise running roughshod over American academic tradition, in which faculty members are partners in charting a university’s course. “He has a very evangelical sense of purpose,” said Andrew Ross, a professor of social and cultural analysis, “that does not extend beyond the concept that the university should be an entity of his own making.” “I think,” he added, “when other administrations see that they say, Well that’s what leadership should be. And when faculty see that they say, That is not what university leadership should be. It’s the style of a maverick C.E.O.” The debate over Dr. Sexton’s presidency will come to a head this week. The faculty of the university’s largest school, Arts and Science, has scheduled a five-day vote of no confidence. Given Dr. Sexton’s international stature, the vote may serve as the most important referendum yet on the direction of American higher education.

PRIVATE & PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS

“Boarding school? That’s so Back East; St. Paul’s School in rural Concord, N.H., is one of America’s most prestigious. Interesting how many of its alumni have ended up in L.A.” Los Angeles Times. March 5, 2013. We were in bare legs and shirt sleeves, drinking white wine on the patio at Lucques in West Hollywood — in February. But nearly everyone I spoke to was waxing nostalgic for snowy New England. The occasion was the alumni reception last week for St. Paul’s School in rural Concord, N.H., one of America’s most prestigious boarding schools and a bastion of WASP values. I’d been hearing a lot about California kids going back East for boarding school. For many Californians, who grew up going to public school, it’s a weird idea. Why would anybody want to leave their family? Or forsake our great city for the hidebound East Coast?

EDUCATION

CHARTER SCHOOLS

“Mathematica 2013 Study: KIPP Charter School Students Outperform Public School Peers.” By Joy Resmovits. Huffington Post. February 27, 2013. As charter schools enter their third decade, the advocates who created them still wonder whether they’re living up to their promise. A study released on Wednesday suggests some may be on the right track. The study, conducted by independent research firm Mathematica, is the most rigorous research showing that the Knowledge Is Power Program, an acclaimed national chain of charter schools, provides a significant learning boost to middle school students in multiple subjects. It also found that while KIPP serves more low-income students than public school peers, it serves fewer special education students and English language learners.Three years after students enroll in KIPP schools, they had 11 more months of math knowledge than their peers, according to the study. The research showed KIPP students had eight more months of reading knowledge, 14 more months of science knowledge, and 11 more months of social studies knowledge. Even those who have watched the growth of charters with a wary eye said they are impressed. “At this point, it’s simply not supportable to try and explain away the fact that KIPP schools -– at least KIPP middle schools –- increase testing outcomes more quickly than comparable district schools,” said Matthew Di Carlo, senior fellow at the Albert Shanker Institute, the think tank affiliated with the American Federation of Teachers union. “Their high-cost, high-intensity approach won’t work for all students, but those for whom it works really do show meaningfully positive results. We should give KIPP credit for that.” Charter schools are publicly funded, but can be privately run. Since KIPP’s founding by Teach for America alumni in Houston in 1994, it has since grown into a network of 125 schools in 20 states. The schools often feature a longer school day, carefully selected teachers, a strict discipline code, parental contract, and staffers available to parents after school hours. KIPP has also been a favorite of President Barack Obama’s administration, receiving millions in grant dollars from the U.S. Education Department.

“ALEC-Backed Laws Promote Controversial Charter Schools.” By Matthew Charles Cardinale. Interpress Service (ipsnews.net). February 28, 2013. The right-wing American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) and private education management firms are pushing for new “parent trigger” laws in states across the U.S. by lobbying many Republican and some Democratic legislators to make it easier to convert more traditional public schools to charter schools. Charter schools are a fairly new phenomenon in the U.S., with the first charter schools opening in the 1990s. The founders of a charter school are able to create a charter that defines the purpose and mission of the school, which does not have to necessarily follow the purpose and mission of a traditional public school. Charter schools are considered public schools and typically receive some public funds. However, at the same time, they have a private charter and are not part of the public school system. You can have the red apple or you can have the green apple, and both of them are sour. “The choice for parents is, are you going to trust a corporation where the CEO and the board are unaccountable, or are you going to trust the government?” said Kim Kahwach, an Atlanta parent who took an active role when the city’s public school system faced a recent accreditation crisis, and said she has concerns about the parent trigger proposal. “Those are the choices that are being put in front of you. You go charter or you go government. You can have the red apple or you can have the green apple, and both of them are sour,” Kahwach told IPS.

HIGHER EDUCATION

“With Federal Cuts Looming, University Researchers Say Outlook Is Gloomy.” By Nicholas P. Fandos and Nikita Kansra. Harvard Crimson. February 25, 2013. Part I of a two-part series examining how the looming cuts in federal funding could impact research at Harvard. Part II will run on Tuesday. Without a deal to avert unprecedented federal spending cuts scheduled to take effect Friday, research institutions including Harvard could be days away from the most damaging reduction of research funding in recent memory. The cuts—projected to be $85 billion from the federal balance sheets this fiscal year alone—are as unparalleled in scope as the problem, a $900 billion yearly federal deficit that Congress has forced itself to plug. As lawmakers warn of the threat such a deficit poses to federal government’s financial integrity, researchers and administrators at Harvard warn that what they call indiscriminate and poorly timed cuts could jeopardize the flow of new scientific ideas and those who generate them at a time when the economy stands to benefit from them more than ever. In total, the automatic cuts to all federal programs, better known as sequestration, are slated to progressively trim $1.2 trillion over the next ten years. After years of flat funding and increased demand for federal sponsorship, the University’s researchers, investigators, and administrators say the cuts, if enacted, will cast a long shadow over research at Harvard, where individual labs from the Medical School to the Faculty of Art and Sciences received approximately $650 million in federal monies during the 2012 fiscal year. Some agencies have already reduced grant totals in advance of the cuts, forcing labs across the University to proactively trim costs and refocus their research. At the same time, administrators have begun the process of reorienting the way the University solicits funding. “The bottom line for us is that there is a tremendous amount of uncertainty about what will happen if sequestration goes into effect,” University Provost Alan M. Garber ’76 said in an interview last week. “We expect regardless of whether Congress averts the fiscal cliff or not, that there will be serious long-term cuts in research spending, in real terms and in nominal terms.”
Related story:
“Anticipating Federal Cuts, Schools Streamline, Diversify Sponsored Funding.” Harvard Crimson. February 26, 2013.

“Yale third in total cash donations.” Yale Daily News. February 26, 2013. The University completed a successful fiscal year 2012 in fundraising with a total of $543,905,260 in cash donations — the second-highest amount ever raised for Yale and the third-highest total for all U.S. colleges and universities this year, according to the Council for Aid to Education’s annual fundraising survey.
Vice President for Development Joan O’Neill said 78 percent of the cash donations were pledges made during the Yale Tomorrow campaign, which took place from September 2006 to June 2011. Donors filling their outstanding pledges after the conclusion of the campaign significantly bolstered Yale’s performance during the 2012 fiscal year, which ended on June 30, 2012. O’Neill said donations fell slightly from the fiscal year 2011 total of $580 million, the last year of the fundraising campaign. “Yale’s second-biggest year is a big accomplishment, and it demonstrates the great success of the Yale Tomorrow campaign,” O’Neill said, “so we’re seeing the benefit of that.” O’Neill said nearly 58 percent of the roughly $540 million raised in cash donations went into the University endowment, 26 percent went directly toward specified uses such as research funding and 14 percent was mostly split between facilities funding and unrestricted use. She added that donors are still deciding how to allocate the remaining small percentage of the donations. University President Richard Levin said the large donation figure did not surprise him, adding that Yale received a nine-figure pledge and a number of eight-figure pledges during the campaign, so donors fulfilling some of those pledges this year added to the total.

“The Fall of Academics at Harvard.” By Elizabeth S. Auritt and Delphine Rodrik. Harvard Crimson. February 28, 2013. On a Thursday night in the spring of 2012, students huddled in study groups in Lamont Café, racing against the clock to finish an assignment due the next day. Notes and textbooks were shared, suggestions passed back and forth. There were dozens of students there, or at least enough that voices echoed to amplify the buzz of discussion. The task’s guidelines for completion were hazy, and the fact that the course had many section leaders with varying expectations heightened the confusion. It was easy for members in the crowd to help each other out. For those who didn’t understand, didn’t have time, or just didn’t care, group work turned into copying. That summer, after Lamont had emptied out for the semester, the accusations came. The cheating was “unprecedented in anyone’s living memory,” according to Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris. But the students who had collaborated in Lamont that spring evening faced no accusations. They had not been enrolled in Government 1310. The students in Lamont, who were described by a fellow classmate, had been working on a problem set for Economics 10. It was Government 1310, though, that received national attention after Harris announced in August that the Administrative Board was investigating approximately 125 students for inappropriate collaboration on a take-home final in a spring course. The scandal was followed by months of discussion and closed-door deliberations, ending this February 1 with an announcement from Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Michael D. Smith that left the results hushed and inconclusive. Over half of the students were forced to withdraw; about half of the remaining cases resulted in disciplinary probation. Government 1310 has been treated by some administrators as the unfortunate exception, an isolated incident whose case has now been closed. But as academic integrity dances uncertainly through a campus whose gates and walls are engraved with a motto of truth, Veritas is at stake.

EDUCATION

CHARTER SCHOOLS

“Oregon’s largest charter school miseducated student for years, graduated her unable to read or write.” By Betsy Hammond, Oregonian. February 20, 2013. Katherine Brafford is a young woman of sparkling intellect whose interests span from genetics to Gregorian chant. She also has a rare vision impairment that has worsened to the point that she needs the same services as someone who is blind. Last year, Oregon Connections Academy, an online charter school with more students than any other Oregon public school, graduated her — despite failing to teach her to read or write independently. The way the school and its sponsoring school district treated Brafford, knowing she could not see to read or write, offers a nightmarish example of what advocates for disabled students have long feared: Charter schools can be reluctant or unable to serve special education students as required by law. When given early, effective help, young people with disabilities can grow up to become contributing members of society. Since 1975, federal law has required all public schools to offer that support. In Oregon, that applies to more than 70,000 students. But charter schools don’t appear to be doing their share. The U.S. Government Accountability Office reported last year that charter schools enroll a disproportionately low share of students with disabilities. Another 2012 report, by the Center for Law and Education, said that when charter schools do serve such students, they tend to be those with common, less-intense conditions such as learning disabilities. Oregon changed its charter school law effective July 1, 2011, to try to secure better treatment. It now requires the district that authorizes a charter school — not the district where a student lives, as was true before — to ensure students’ special education needs are met.

“Turkish charter schools growing as some question cleric ties.” By Steven A. Rosenberg. Boston Globe. February 21, 2013. A group of Turkish-born educators running Everett’s Pioneer Charter School of Science is poised to open another school, adding to a growing number of math- and science-focused charter schools across the country operated by Turkish-Americans. Last Friday, Elementary and Secondary Education Commissioner Mitchell Chester recommended that the state approve a second ¬Pioneer school for grades 7 through 12, which would open in the fall in Saugus and serve more than 300 students. Chester did not endorse Pioneer’s other application for a similar school planned for Woburn. Pioneer’s two proposed schools are among 11 charter school applications the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education will vote on at its Feb. 26 meeting. “Our success is based on hard work,” said Barish Icin, the school’s executive director. Pioneer’s school year is 200 days, or 20 days longer than the public school academic year. The school offers Turkish as a language option and in the past has offered an after-school Turkish dance club, but otherwise shares, according to Icin, the same mission as the state’s other charter schools. “We get our students ready for college and the competitive workplace ahead,” Icin said. While Icin said Pioneer is a home-grown school with no ties to other educational institutions, its oper¬ation is similar to dozens of other Turkish-led charter schools around the United States. Common practices by the schools ¬include spending public funds to obtain H1B temporary visas for foreign-born teachers and using some of the same vendors, headed by Turkish ¬natives. Several of the staff and board members have also been affiliated with other Turkish-run charter schools across the country, ¬either before or after they worked at Pioneer. The similarities have served as a red flag for some Massachusetts educators, who have asked whether the schools are linked to Fethullah Gulen, a Turkish imam. Gulen, who fled Turkey more than a ¬decade ago for the United States and now holds permanent residence status in Pennsylvania, leads a movement of millions of people who have embraced his modern interpretation of Islam.

“Boston charter school faces probation.” By James Vaznis. Boston Globe. February 22, 2013. One of Boston’s oldest and largest charter schools is facing possible probation because of declining academic achievement, a rarely ¬imposed sanction that could lead to the school’s closing. The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education is scheduled to vote Monday on whether to place the Boston Renaissance Charter School on probation, a recommendation pushed by Mitchell Chester, the state’s commissioner of elementary and secondary education. In a memo to the board, Chester called academic performance at the school of 950 students in preschool through grade 6 “very troubling,” citing MCAS scores that have been slipping for several years. “The academic performance . . . is certainly not what is expected from a mature charter school,” Chester wrote in the memo dated Feb. 15, which was provided this week to the Globe. The school must show “substantial improvement” by December 2014, when the state will decide whether to renew its five-year operating license. In an effort to ensure future success, Chester is requesting that the school hire an outside consultant to evaluate its programs and to ¬develop a plan by June 15 to remedy the academic performance.

“Better Charter Schools in New York City.” Editorial. New York Times. February 22, 2013. From a national standpoint, the 20-year-old charter school movement has been a disappointment. More than a third of these independently run, publicly funded schools are actually worse than the traditional public schools they were meant to replace. Abysmal charter schools remain open for years, even though the original deal was that they would be shut down when they failed to perform. New York City’s experience, however, continues to be an exception. For the second time in three years, a rigorous study by Stanford University’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes shows that the typical New York City charter school student learns more in a year in reading and math than his or her peers in their neighborhood district schools. The difference, over a typical year, amounts to about a month’s more learning in reading — and a whopping five months’ more learning in math. That is good news, especially given the fact that about three-quarters of the city’s charter school children come from poor families. But a mixed picture emerged when the Stanford researchers measured charter schools on students’ learning growth (year-to-year improvement) as well as their overall achievement, as compared with the city as whole. The Stanford center rocked the education world in 2009 with a national study finding that only 17 percent of charter schools offered students a better education, as measured by test scores, and that an astounding 37 percent offered a worse one. Against this standard, New York is doing well, according to the new study, especially in math, where 63 percent of the charter schools studied outperformed their traditional district schools and only 14 percent performed worse. In reading, however, only 22 percent of the charter schools outpaced their public school counterparts, while 25 percent lagged behind their peer district schools.

HIGHER EDUCATION

“Stanford becomes 1st school to raise more than $1 billion in a year.” By Alejandro Lazo. Los Angeles Times. February 20, 2013. The nation’s top fund-raising institution last year, Stanford University, raised $1.03 billion from donors, the first to raise more than $1 billion in a given year. Out of the nation’s top 10 fund-raising institutions, two others were in California, with the University of Southern California raising $492 million and the University of California, Berkeley raising $405 million, according to a list by the Council for Aid to Education. Among other California schools, UCLA raised $344 million and Caltech pulled in $100 million. Big donors overall felt a little more charitable toward U.S. colleges and universities last year. Giving to these institutions rose 2.3% in 2012 over the prior year. A total of $31 billion was given to higher education institutions, still shy of the record $31.6 billion set in 2008, according to the council. About half of the institutions — 52.8% — raised the same last year as they did the year prior.
Related story:
“Report Says Stanford Is First University to Raise $1 Billion in a Single Year.” New York Times. February 20, 2013.

“Capital: Obama, Rubio Put Higher Education on Notice.” By David Wessel. Wall Street Journal. February 20, 2013. President Barack Obama and Sen. Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican, don’t agree on much. But both want to change the way Washington decides which colleges are eligible for the $175 billion a year the federal government spends on grants, loans and tax breaks for students. It’s another sign of the intensifying political pressure on American higher education to slow the pace of tuition increases and to brace for the biggest changes in its business model since the end of World War II. President Obama called for colleges to rein in their costs during his State of the Union address Tuesday night. But new data show those who attend schools with lower tuition often end up paying in other ways. Mr. Obama has been preaching the virtues of accountability and transparency for some time. It didn’t start with him: George W. Bush’s education secretary, Margaret Spelling, tried too. Now, the White House has taken it up a notch. The State of the Union repeated rhetoric Mr. Obama has used before, but one paragraph in an eight-page elaboration that accompanied the State of the Union address asked Congress “to consider value, affordability and student outcomes in making determinations about which colleges and universities receive access to federal student aid.” How? “Either by incorporating measures of value and affordability into the existing accreditation system or by establishing a new, alternative system….” That got the colleges’ attention. The president previously had talked about linking a small slice of federal aid to measures of performance. Now he seemed to be suggesting wholesale change. Then came Mr. Rubio. In his response to the State of the Union, he said, “We need student aid that does not discriminate against programs that nontraditional students rely on—like online courses or degree programs that give you credit for work experience.”

“Sorry Yale, but Harvard mints the most mega-rich alums.” By Paul O’Donnell . NBC News. February 21, 2013. Can you spot the billionaire-to-be? Harvard tops the list of the schools graduating the most mega-rich. Pictured here: Harvard Business School students cheer during their graduation ceremonies in Boston, Massachusetts, in this June 4, 2009 file picture. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has its hedge-fund quants, the University of Southern California has its movie moguls. But if you really want your child to be a billionaire, you might want to send them to Harvard. Harvard has graduated some 52 billionaires, with a collective fortune of $205 billion, to lead Wealth-X’s global list of universities ranked by alumni worth $1 billion or more. That’s nearly twice as many as the No. 2 school, the University of Pennsylvania, which has 28 billionaire alumni worth a collective $112 billion. And these numbers don’t include either Microsoft’s Bill Gates or Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg both of whom attended Harvard but didn’t stay to get their degree. Together they are worth some $45 billion. Before dismissing Harvard as a domain of rich kids who mostly inherit their wealth, consider that the school also claimed the highest percentage of self-made billionaires in the study. Seventy-four percent of the school’s billionaire alumni “built that,” Wealth-X found. “It shows the power of networks,” said David Friedman, president of Wealth-X. “Harvard has this entrenched, powerful network that extends across so many sectors and is incredibly pro-active about connecting its alumni. You get a great education, but you also get access.” Harvard’s success, said Friedman, “validates what we all whisper and now we know: It’s not just what you know, it’s who you know.”

“Herhold: The story of a fortune returned to two local universities.” By Scott Herhold. San Jose Mercury-News. February 23, 2013. Emma and Jack Anderson were almost perfectly matched — both tall, both smart, both ambitious. “They were like two peas in a pod,” said Emma’s second cousin, Donna Bliss. “Where he went, she went. Where she went, he went.” The two owners of Globe Printing, one of San Jose’s premier print shops for a half-century, left more than $17 million to be split between Santa Clara University and San Jose State University. The gift emphasized SJSU’s journalism and mass communications department. When I read about the gift in my colleague Sal Pizarro’s column a couple weeks ago, my first question was, “Who knew there was so much money in print?” My second was, “Who were these people?”

TECHNOLOGY

“The Trouble With Online College.” Editorial. New York Times. February 19, 2013. Stanford University ratcheted up interest in online education when a pair of celebrity professors attracted more than 150,000 students from around the world to a noncredit, open enrollment course on artificial intelligence. This development, though, says very little about what role online courses could have as part of standard college instruction. College administrators who dream of emulating this strategy for classes like freshman English would be irresponsible not to consider two serious issues. First, student attrition rates — around 90 percent for some huge online courses — appear to be a problem even in small-scale online courses when compared with traditional face-to-face classes. Second, courses delivered solely online may be fine for highly skilled, highly motivated people, but they are inappropriate for struggling students who make up a significant portion of college enrollment and who need close contact with instructors to succeed. Online classes are already common in colleges, and, on the whole, the record is not encouraging. According to Columbia University’s Community College Research Center, for example, about seven million students — about a third of all those enrolled in college — are enrolled in what the center describes as traditional online courses. These typically have about 25 students and are run by professors who often have little interaction with students. Over all, the center has produced nine studies covering hundreds of thousands of classes in two states, Washington and Virginia. The picture the studies offer of the online revolution is distressing. The research has shown over and over again that community college students who enroll in online courses are significantly more likely to fail or withdraw than those in traditional classes, which means that they spend hard-earned tuition dollars and get nothing in return. Worse still, low-performing students who may be just barely hanging on in traditional classes tend to fall even further behind in online courses. A five-year study, issued in 2011, tracked 51,000 students enrolled in Washington State community and technical colleges. It found that those who took higher proportions of online courses were less likely to earn degrees or transfer to four-year colleges.
Related story:
“Some ‘Cyber Schools’ Falling Short Of Their Sales Pitch.” All Things Considered/ National Public Radio. February 19, 2013.

EDUCATION

CHARTER SCHOOLS

“D.C. debates growth of charter schools.” By Emma Brown. Washington Post. February 11. 2013. It’s the latest sign that the District is on track to become a city where a majority of children are educated not in traditional public schools but in public charters: A California nonprofit group has proposed opening eight D.C. charter schools that would enroll more than 5,000 students by 2019. The proposal has stirred excitement among those who believe that Rocketship Education, which combines online learning and face-to-face instruction, can radically raise student achievement in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods.Rocketship’s charter application — which is the largest ever to come before District officials, and which might win approval this month — arrives on the heels of Chancellor Kaya Henderson’s decision to close 15 half-empty city schools, highlighting an intense debate about the future of public education in the nation’s capital. A growing number of activists have raised concerns that the traditional school system, facing stiffer-than-ever competition from charters, is in danger of being relegated to a permanently shrunken role. And they worry that Washington has yet to confront what that could mean for taxpayers, families and neighborhoods. “Maybe we need an entire school system full of charters,” said Virginia Spatz, who co-hosts a community-radio talk show on D.C. education. “But we need to have that after public conversation, not by accident.” Politicians appear to have heard the call. Mayor Vincent C. Gray (D) acknowledged in his State of the District address Tuesday that charters — which are publicly funded but independently run — are likely to soon educate half the city’s students.

“Education commissioner recommends 5 new charter schools.” By James Vaznis. Boston Globe. February 15, 2013. The Massachusetts commissioner of elementary and secondary education announced today that he is recommending approval of five new charter school proposals and the expansion of 11 existing charter schools. The state Board of Elementary and Secondary Education will vote on the proposals at its monthly meeting on Feb. 26. The board almost always approves the commissioner’s recommendations. The five charter school proposals, including two in Boston, prevailed in a crowded field that originally boasted 22 proposals last summer. That field was subsequently winnowed down in the fall to 11 finalists. “We have many outstanding charter schools in Massachusetts, and I support the continued establishment and growth of quality charter schools that set high expectations, demonstrate results, and prepare all students for success in college, career, and life,” said Mitchell Chester, the state commissioner of elementary and secondary education. “I believe the five new charter schools that I am recommending are well positioned to become academically successful and viable organizations that will close proficiency gaps and equip students with the knowledge and skills they need to succeed.”

“S.F. district raises charter school rent.” By Jill Tucker. San Francisco Chronicle. February 15, 2013. Imagine renting a 1,000-square-foot San Francisco apartment for $950 – a year. It may seem impossible in one of the least-affordable real estate markets in the country. Except for city charter schools. For the past 10 years, the alternative public schools have paid a relative pittance to rent space from the school district. At 95 cents per square foot annually, the district was nearly $2 below Oakland’s charter school rental rate, $5 shy of Los Angeles and nearly $8 less than Berkeley, which has only one charter school that rents space. To rent on the retail market would cost a school around 15 times what San Francisco Unified charges charters. San Francisco district officials, who hadn’t raised charter school rent in five years, realized this year that they could charge more under state law and decided to triple the rent to $2.79, phasing in the increase over two years. Eight charter schools will be hit with the increase, generating an additional $500,000 a year for the district. But charter schools and their advocates say any rent increase will have an impact on what happens in the classroom.

HIGHER EDUCATION

“$10 Million Donation To Fund New Endowment at Divinity School.” By Zohra D. Yaqhubi. Harvard Crimson. February 11, 2013. The Harvard Divinity School announced a $10 million gift from James R. Swartz ’64 and former Divinity School artist-in-residence Susan Shallcross Swartz last Wednesday. The donation—one of the largest in the school’s history—will fund the creation of the Susan Shallcross Swartz Endowment for Christian Studies, supporting new professorships, fellowships, and programming at the Divinity School. “My hope is that the endowment will inspire scholarship and reinvigorate debate, service, and teaching for generations to come,” Susan Swartz said in a press release. The gift comes as Harvard plans to embark on a University-wide capital campaign as soon as late 2013. Swartz said she hopes the endowment will “allow [Divinity School] Dean [David N.] Hempton to take the School into the future, and to improve the currency of the leadership that HDS exercises.”

“Yale partners with Banco Santander.” By Julia Zorthian. Yale Daily News. February 13, 2013. Spanish bank Banco Santander entered a formal agreement with the University last week when it committed significant funding to the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization. Ernesto Zedillo GRD ’81, director of the Center for the Study of Globalization Director and former Mexican President, said Banco Santander will give $250,000 a year to the organization for the next three years. The bank will provide the funds through Santander Universities Global Division, an organization through which Banco Santander creates partnerships with universities worldwide to support progress in education. The agreement is the next step in a partnership that has existed since January 2011, when Banco Santander first agreed to issue grants to the University. Banco Santander has an established commitment to funding universities worldwide as well as specifically in the United States through its Universities USA foundation. Universities USA has formed agreements with 26 universities and colleges since its creation through Sovereign Bank in 2009, according to a Feb. 6 press release from the Yale Office of Public Affairs and Communications. The Office of Public Affairs and Communications declined to comment beyond its press release.

“Studying the Soul of a City at NYU.” By Lisa Fleisher. Wall Street Journal. February 13, 2013. “What you hope is that they have built the infrastructure to deal with that big influx of people,” he said. Those kinds of challenges, facing cities world-wide, seemed to consume Mr. Marron’s thoughts these past few months, as he and top administrators at New York University planned the opening of the Marron Institute on Cities and the Urban Environment, which will be announced Wednesday. Mr. Marron, a university trustee, the founder of Lightyear Capital LLC and former chairman and CEO of PaineWebber Group Inc., will donate $40 million to launch the institute. Richard Revesz, the outgoing dean of the NYU School of Law, will lead the institute, which will consolidate the university’s scholarship and research on cities and urban issues. The idea was born two years ago when Mr. Marron and other trustees were hearing an early presentation on a university bid for city funding for an applied-sciences center. NYU President John Sexton said he remembered looking over at Mr. Marron, who was writing down line after line of notes. “If I were to say there was a moment where the spark lit the flame of knowledge, it was [then],” Mr. Sexton said. “He said to me, ‘This is very important, but the issue’s bigger. This isn’t just a matter of applied science, it’s a matter of social science, it’s a matter of humanities and the soul of a city.’”

“Sororities Extend Bids to 174 Women.” By Laya Anasu and Elizabeth S. Auritt. Harvard Crimson. February 13, 2013. The voices of a crowd of women fell to a hush in the Mount Vernon Ballroom at the Sheraton Commander Hotel as the clock hit 7 p.m. 174 pairs of hands rushed to tear open envelopes containing cards revealing the identity of their new sisters. The women shrieked with excitement as they ran to locate their sororities. At this year’s bid day, sororities at Harvard extended bids, or offers of acceptance, to 174 girls, a modest decrease from the 199 bids offered last year. Each of the three sororities on campus, Delta Gamma, Kappa Alpha Theta, and Kappa Kappa Gamma, met the limit of at least 54 new members. Members of the Cambridge-Area Panhellenic Council have worked to inform women about the addition of Alpha Phi to Greek life at Harvard by talking to students and sporting Alpha Phi memorabilia such as water bottles and pins. “We’re all walking around and trying to spread the word on campus,” Duarte said. After the women received the bids from their sororities, each chapter held their own festivities to welcome the new members.

“With end of Levin years, donations expected to rise.” By Julia Zorthian. Yale Daily News. February 14, 2013. University President Richard Levin may only have four and a half months left in office, but when it comes to fundraising, Yale’s leader of 20 years has no intentions of easing up now. Levin said the University is currently negotiating a number of large donations which he said could raise this year’s fundraising total well above last year’s, though he declined to comment on the precise number or size of the potential gifts. Vice President for Development Joan O’Neill said in an email that the fundraising total for new gifts and pledges is higher now than this time last year, a positive result of what Levin called an informal push for donations at the end of his presidency. Levin and O’Neill said the donations will primarily fund core budget expenses in order to create a comfortable fiscal starting point for President-elect Peter Salovey when he takes office this summer. “It’s my last year, and I am trying to raise some significant gifts,” Levin said. “The number of significant conversations going on is pretty large, so hopefully we’ll end up with a year that is considerably better than last year.” The promising number of gifts and possible donations may be a direct result of more assertive fundraising on the parts of Salovey, Yale College Dean Mary Miller and other members of the faculty and development staff, whom Levin and O’Neill said are also meeting with donors. O’Neill told the News in September that she expected this push in light of Levin’s departure.

“Negative credit outlook given to higher ed.” By Sophie Gould. Yale Daily News. February 13, 2013. Though Moody’s Investor Services affirmed Yale’s top credit rating last month, the agency recently expressed concerns about the financial future of the higher education sector at large. In a January report, Moody’s — a prominent credit rating agency — revised its “outlook” for the entire higher education sector to “negative,” indicating its expectation that the political and economic conditions in which educational institutions operate will continue to deteriorate. The announcement marks a shift from recent years, when although Moody’s gave most of the higher education sector a negative outlook, it considered top research universities, including Yale, “stable.” David Jacobson, a spokesman for Moody’s, told the News that the agency extended the negative outlook to even the top universities this year in response to several trends that have been putting pressure on universities’ traditional sources of revenue, but Jacobson and Yale administrators interviewed agreed that Yale is in no danger of losing its “Aaa” credit rating. “In previous years, the higher-rated universities received a good stream of income from their endowments and from research grants from the government and other places,” Jacobson said. “Now, endowment returns have not been good for this past year, and there are talks of both budget and sequestration issues [in the government] that may cut back on some of the funds for research as well.” The report said anemic endowment returns in the fiscal year that ended June 30 would reduce universities’ abilities to support their budgets with endowment funds over the next several years. Universities with larger endowments are more dependent on their endowments to cover their operating costs, Jacobson said. Universities’ endowment returns for the current fiscal year will depend largely on the investment environment, which has the “potential to be volatile,” Jacobson said.

“A Michigan Avenue Institution.” By Joel Henning. Wall Street Journal. February 13, 2013. ‘I can remember the first time that a work of art knocked my socks off. It was Van Gogh’s ‘Peach Trees in Blossom,’” recalled Douglas Druick, the wiry, diminutive president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago. The 67-year-old, now in his second year on the job, was promoted from within after 26 years in the Art Institute’s curatorial ranks, most recently as chairman of both the department of prints and drawings and the department of medieval to modern European painting and sculpture. We are talking in his office hard by one of his old haunts—the department of prints and drawings. Mr. Druick was 15 years old when he first saw that Van Gogh painting in Montreal in 1960, and from then on this Canadian-born son of an American mother and Canadian father, raised in Montreal, has been passionate about art. After completing his studies at Oberlin and Yale in art history and philosophy, Mr. Druick headed back north, quickly taking charge of European and American prints at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. But as early as 1981, Chicago’s Art Institute had its eye on him. Harold Joachim, the curator of prints and drawings, was thinking of retirement and, according to Alan Artner, the Chicago Tribune’s former art critic, “expressed a hope that it would be Douglas Druick” who succeeded him. Two years after Joachim’s death in 1983, Mr. Druick did take that post, and he hasn’t left the Michigan Avenue building since. Appointing a curator with no executive experience to lead an encyclopedic museum on a par with the Metropolitan Museum and the National Gallery is unusual. But the timing was right for Mr. Druick. Mr. Cuno oversaw the final planning and fund-raising for the $294 million, 264,000-square-foot Modern Wing of the Institute, designed by Renzo Piano, and John H. Bryan, former chairman of the Art Institute’s board of trustees, said that “Douglas is his perfect successor. He is internationally regarded for his curatorial talent, and nobody knows the Institute’s collections and its staff better than Douglas. He was my choice and the unanimous choice of the trustees. And, Jim Cuno himself recommended Douglas as his successor.”

“$5 Million Gift to Aid Juilliard Program for Minority Students.” By Daniel J. Wakin. New York Times. February 14, 2013. The Juilliard School said on Thursday that it had been promised a $5 million gift that will go a long way toward guaranteeing the survival of music lessons for poor minority schoolchildren. The money comes courtesy of a former journalist turned venture capitalist, Michael Moritz, and his wife, Harriet Heyman, a writer. Juilliard said it needed $7 million to fully endow its Music Advancement Program. The course provides 65 students between 8 and 14 with ear training, instrument lessons and theory classes on Saturdays, at low cost. The conservatory was poised to suspend the program in 2009, citing budget cuts and difficulty raising money for operations. News reports at the time about threats to the program prompted an initial round of contributions that kept it alive. Mr. Moritz and Ms. Heyman said they were making the gift in memory of Ms. Heyman’s father, Carl K. Heyman, a public school student on Chicago’s South Side who “had a good ear and could not read notes, played five-string banjo in a band, and cut an accounting final to go hear George Gershwin and Paul Whiteman play ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’” according to a dedicatory note.

“Cooper Union’s Tradition of Free Tuition May Be Near an End.” By Ariel Kaminer. New York Times. February 15, 2013. The new academic building was glamorous, its perforated metal skin shooting up dramatically from the streets of the East Village, then swerving around a daring gash of glass. It made a statement about just how far the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art had come, from its 19th-century origins as a charity for the poor to one of the most selective colleges in the nation. But that was before market convulsions shook the school’s finances, and before the truth about its dire budgetary situation came to light. Now the audacious building, at 41 Cooper Square, completed in 2009, has become the most visible symbol of a debate about the future of Cooper Union on the eve of what could be the most important decision in its history. The university, which offers world-class instruction in art, architecture and engineering, but no expensive athletic programs, no tricked-out student centers, no plush lawns to sprawl on between classes, is currently losing $12 million a year, about a fifth of its overall budget. So 153 years after the inventor and industrialist Peter Cooper founded a school long rhapsodized as “free as air and water,” it is considering whether to end its most famous tradition, and start making undergraduates pay to attend.

“An Ohio Christian College Struggles to Further Define Itself.” By Mark Oppenheimer. New York Times. “He made Cedarville feel more like Heaven,” said Zak Weston, a senior at Cedarville University, a Baptist college near Dayton, Ohio. “If you thought someone would be untouchable, it would be Carl.” It’s not often that a college’s chief disciplinarian inspires such love. But Carl Ruby, who last month resigned as vice president for student life at this little-known Christian college, has become a symbol of some very public trials, as faculty, students and trustees at Cedarville try to figure out what kind of Christians they are. Are they sectarian or broad-minded? Fundamentalist or open? Republicans, or independent of political parties? Those who want a less fundamentalist, more open Cedarville believe that Dr. Ruby is a martyr to their cause. For much of its history, Cedarville, which was founded in 1887, was affiliated with the General Association of Regular Baptist Churches, a fundamentalist organization wary of association even with other conservative groups. But over the past decade, Cedarville, which has 3,400 students, has moved away from its Regular Baptist identity.

“Laurie Tisch gives $15M for food programs; With part of the money, the philanthropist will launch a center for food policy at Columbia’s Teachers College.” By Lisa Fickenscher. Crain’s New York Business. February 13, 2013. Philanthropist Laurie Tisch, who has long been active in the arts community, is deepening her involvement in food-related issues with a $15 million commitment to help hunger organizations and to fund a new policy center at Columbia University’s Teachers College. Her foundation, the Laurie M. Tisch Illumination Fund, will announce on Thursday the launch of the Laurie M. Tisch Center for Food, Education & Policy at Teachers College, during a forum being held at the school. Among the roster of public officials who will be speaking are New York City Council Speaker Christine Quinn, Newark Mayor Cory Booker, Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer and USDA Undersecretary of Food, Nutrition and Consumer Services Kevin Concannon. Ms. Tisch’s foundation will disburse $15 million over the next five years, including $3.5 million to establish the policy center at Teachers College, which will focus on research that Ms. Tisch hopes will help influence government programs. “Public officials like Christine Quinn and Cory Booker want to know where public dollars can make a difference, and they are making their decisions based on what information is out there,” Ms. Tisch said. In December, Mr. Booker made headlines when he lived on just $33 worth of food a week to learn about what it’s like for people who rely on food stamps and to shine a light on government-assisted nutritional programs for the poor. The $3.5 million will allow Teachers College’s program in nutrition to hire more faculty members and to provide fellowships for students, among other things, said Illumination Fund Executive Director Rick Luftglass. “The specifics are to be determined.”

“Stanford Tops College Fundraising List.” By Richard Gonzales. All Things Considered/National Public Radio. February 20, 2013. Stanford University has set a new record for college fundraising: more than $1 billion in a single year. How did the school do it and what does it do with the money? Financial donations last year to colleges and universities rose to the highest amount since 2008. It’s one sign that the economy might be finding its feet. On a list released today by the Council for Aid to Education, the usual schools demonstrate their fundraising prowess: Harvard, Yale, USC, and topping them all is Stanford. In 2012, it became the first university to raise more than a billion dollars in a single year. Yes, that’s billion with a B. NPR’s Richard Gonzales reports on how Stanford brought in that money and what the school might do with it.

“Morehouse gets $3 million gift from Ray Charles Foundation; Obama to give commencement speech at Morehouse College; Ray Charles Foundation recovers unspent money.” By Fran Jeffries. Atlanta Journal-Constitution. February 17, 2013. The Ray Charles Foundation has awarded Morehouse College a $3 million gift. The gift will secure the naming of the academic wing of the Ray Charles Performing Arts Center at the college after the late singer’s mother, Aretha Robinson The announcement was made Saturday night during Morehouse’s 25th Annual “A Candle in the Dark” gala, the largest fund-raiser for the historically black college for men. “I know that Ray Charles had a long-standing relationship with Morehouse based on professionalism, integrity and honesty,” Valerie Ervin, president of the foundation, said in a statement. “He genuinely valued the education and preparation that Morehouse provides to young men.” Ervin noted that the relationship between Charles and Morehouse began several years ago when he was invited to Atlanta to perform with the college’s jazz ensemble. Ray Charles’ friend and former Morehouse Trustee Bill Cosby opened that performance, but it was his long-time manager, Joe Adams, who introduced Charles to Morehouse, Ervin said. Adams was an avid contributor to Morehouse, having given a personal gift in support of the construction of the performing arts center, now named for Charles.

PUBLIC SCHOOL PHILANTHROPY

“Anonymous donor offers $20 million to rebuild Palo Alto High School athletic facilities. By Jason Green. San Jose Mercury-News. February 14, 2013. An anonymous donor is offering to give the Palo Alto Unified School District up to $20 million to rebuild the outdated indoor athletic facilities at Palo Alto High School, district officials revealed this week. The unprecedented gift was greeted enthusiastically by trustees at Tuesday night’s board meeting. “We are incredibly lucky to have a community that cares as much about our schools and our facilities as much as our community does,” said Board Member Melissa Baten Caswell. Although the small and main gymnasiums at Paly are in need of replacement, they were not among the projects that made the cut to receive funding from a $378 million bond measure passed by district voters in 2008. “It’s in our plans, but it is far out in our plans,” Baten Caswell said. “We would have to do some more bonds beyond where we are today in our plans. This would speed that up dramatically.” The anonymous donor is a parent of a student in the district and his extended family has a long history of community involvement and philanthropy, according to a report prepared by Bob Golton, the district’s bond program manager. Under a plan the district is developing with the donor, the $20 million would be combined with $5.47 million in bond funds that have been allocated for a new weight room at Paly, Golton said. The donor would then work with an architect and construction company to build new gymnasiums as well as a wrestling room, dance studio,

TRADE SCHOOLS

“L.A. Unified aviation training center gets $100,000 donation; The mechanics vocational school had been facing closure or relocation after 40 years at Van Nuys Airport because of budget cuts and a rent increase. The gift will keep it going at least a year.” By Dalina Castellanos. Los Angeles Times. February 11, 2013. Single-engine Cessnas and a former Coast Guard HH-52 helicopter will continue to line one of the most unique classrooms within the Los Angeles Unified School District, thanks to a $100,000 donation announced Monday. The North Valley Occupational Center-Aviation Center had been facing closure or relocation after 40 years at Van Nuys Airport because of budget cuts and a rent increase. In recent weeks, the vocational school — which has produced thousands of mechanics — gained some high-powered backers, including L.A. Councilman and mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti. Now the owners of the largest aircraft antenna manufacturer in the United States have contributed $100,000 to keep the center in place for at least another year while district officials negotiate a new lease with Los Angeles World Airports. The current rent is about $12,000 a month.

EDUCATION

FOR-PROFIT SCHOOLS

“Martha Coakley widens probe of for-profit schools; Targets lending and recruiting.” By Todd Wallack. Boston Globe. February 4, 2013. Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley has broadened her investigation into recruiting and lending practices at for-profit colleges and trade schools, which critics say leave students with mountains of student loan debt, but often do not lead to decent-paying jobs. Coakley, who began examining a handful of schools two years ago, said she is now looking into whether more than a dozen institutions that do business in Massachusetts misled prospective students about the cost of course work, the odds they would graduate, or the likelihood they would find employment in their field of study. “The more we look, the more we see it as a real problem,” said Coakley, comparing it to the increase in subprime mortgages during the housing boom, when some lenders encouraged home buyers to take out loans they could not afford or did not understand. “This has potential to be a predatory business.” There are about 3,000 for-profit schools nationwide, including at least 136 in Massachusetts.

HIGHER EDUCATION

“College Endowments Remain Flat, Showing Schools Need New Source Of Revenue: NACUBO-Commonfund Study.” By Tyler Kingkade. Huffington Post. February 5, 2013. A new survey released Friday made clear that declining support from state legislatures and slow growth in endowments means colleges and universities will need to find new streams of revenue or drastically scale back their operations. The annual National Association of College and University Business Officers-Commonfund survey found college endowments on average remained essentially flat for FY 2012, declining .3 percent. The sluggish performance follows a banner year of fundraising in FY 2011. Then, endowments grew 19.2 percent. Most schools own equities outside the U.S., so volatility in Europe and China created drag on schools’ endowment growth, the survey concluded. Foreign returns declined 11.9 percent. Although endowments are outperforming the S&P500 over a 10-year period, growing at 6.2 percent a over a decade, they aren’t expanding at the rate colleges need. Colleges need their endowments to grow by 7.4 percent over 10 years to match inflation and repay money withdrawn from endowments. The study raises alarm since participants reported that an average of 8.7 percent of their operating budget was funded by their endowment, a growth from the typical four to five percent. Endowments are used to help fund scholarships, repairs or improvements to campuses and professorships, but they’ve struggled to simply reach the level they were at before the stock market crash of 2008, the recent NACUBO-Commonfund surveys show.

“Justice’s Plans for Event Tied to Pepsi Stir Outcry by Yale Alumni.” By Adam Liptak. New York Times. February 6, 2013. A long-running dispute between Yale University and some of its alumni over the university’s connections to PepsiCo, the giant beverage and snack company, has — in a way — reached the Supreme Court. PepsiCo is sponsoring a conference in April for women who attended Yale, and Justice Sonia Sotomayor, a graduate of Yale Law School, is scheduled to make remarks, to the dismay of some alumni. “The very idea that she would be headlining a Pepsi event is shocking,” said Louise Harpman, who holds an architecture degree from Yale. Ms. Harpman said she opposed corporate sponsorships of such events in general. “I didn’t go to Pepsi University,” she said. Worse, she said, “this is an objectionable company from a public health perspective.” The conference, which is scheduled to last a day and a half, will be held at a Washington hotel and will cost $250 to attend. Justice Sotomayor is one of several speakers and will not receive a fee. Kathleen Arberg, the Supreme Court’s public information officer, said the justice’s participation was appropriate. In a statement, Peter Land, a PepsiCo spokesman, said, “Promoting diversity, equal opportunity and leadership development are core to PepsiCo’s DNA, and we’re proud to be a sponsor of this event.” Ms. Harpman said that she had been alerted to the sponsorship by the materials inviting her to the conference and that some of the alumni with whom she had discussed the matter shared her discomfort. But public criticism did not appear to be widespread, and Tom Conroy, a Yale spokesman, said the university welcomed PepsiCo’s participation.

“Faculty Members Take Home Lessons from Scandal; Faculty say communication with students is key, and an honor code may be on its way.” By Nicholas P. Fandos and Sabrina A. Mohamed. Crimson. February 8, 2013. The week after Harvard made an announcement intended to put to rest its largest cheating investigation in recent memory, faculty members said they need to do a better job communicating course expectations to students and laying down the groundwork for academic honesty at a time when technology is blurring the lines of right and wrong. Citing a lack of information from the University, faculty members interviewed for this article were hesitant to remark on the administration’s handling of the Government 1310 case, in which about 125 students were investigated for inappropriately collaborating on a take-home final in assistant government professor Matthew B. Platt’s “Introduction to Congress” course last spring. Instead, in private conversations and departmental meetings, professors said they have begun to examine the source of the problem and the role that they might play in combatting it.

“For fossil fuel divesting, an uncertain future.” By Sophie Gould.” Yale Daily News. February 8, 2013. [For story, go to Ethical Investing].

PRIVATE & PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS

“L.A.’s first Hebrew-language charter school raises questions; Lashon Academy is to teach modern Hebrew, have no religious component and aim for a diverse student body. But some worry that dual-language charters blur the line between public and private schools.” By Stephen Ceasar. Los Angeles Times. February 4, 2013. When Lashon Academy opens its doors this fall, its students will be taught to read and write in both English and Hebrew — a first for a public school in Los Angeles. But the approval of the charter school last month has raised concerns that it and others, particularly dual-language charters, blur the line between private and public campuses by accepting public money to cater only to a certain demographic. Lashon Academy, planned for Van Nuys, is modeled after the Hebrew Language Academy Charter School in Brooklyn, N.Y., which opened in 2009. Others have been approved in Harlem, N.Y., and San Diego. Charters are independently run and publicly funded. The school is to have an hour of Hebrew instruction every morning, with the rest of the day spent on other subjects. Instructors, if they are able, will conduct such classes as art, music and physical education in Hebrew. The Los Angeles Board of Education approved the charter application unanimously, with one member absent. Officials with the Hebrew Charter School Center, a New York-based nonprofit, dismiss that notion, saying their schools — including Lashon — are no different from any other dual-language program and will enroll a wide variety of students. L.A. Unified has more than 200 charter schools, nine of which are dual-language instruction. These include schools that teach Spanish, Korean, German and even Nahuatl, a language spoken by the Aztecs. The Hebrew Charter School Center helped Lashon’s officials craft its application and provided financial backing. The center’s executive director, Aaron Listhaus, said Van Nuys was chosen specifically to tap into the diversity in the area — a concentration of low-performing elementary schools, students from low-income families and non-English speakers.

“School Plans Its 17th Move, but Its First Since 1892.” By Jenny Anderson. New York Times. February 5, 2013. After debating nearly seven years about where to move, the board of the Collegiate School, New York City’s oldest and one of its most prestigious private schools, announced Tuesday that it had purchased land for a new building between West 61st and 62nd Streets and between West End Avenue and Riverside Boulevard. It will be the 17th move for the school since its founding in New Amsterdam in 1628, but the first since 1892, when the West End Collegiate Church and the Collegiate School moved to the Upper West Side. Collegiate, a small yet fiercely competitive all-boys school, is renowned in private school circles for its academic rigor — its college placement list is the envy of many — its students’ self-confidence and its inelegant facilities. Shabby chic, minus the chic, permeates the school. “We like that they come to a place that’s a little bit worn, lived-in, tattered and they make do,” said the headmaster, Lee M. Levison.

PUBLIC EDUCATION PHILANTHROPY

“JPMorgan donates $300K to help kids learn; The goal is to get South Bronx students to college in part by addressing problems at home. But organizations that get the money need to show they are making progress.” By Theresa Agovino. Crain’s New York Business. February 6, 2013. JPMorgan Chase has donated $300,000 to The Children’s Aid Society and Phipps Community Development Corp. for a program to help kids in the South Bronx make it to college. The grant, awarded in December, will go toward hiring two executives to help put together a coalition of community stakeholders that will include schools, health care providers and social service agencies. The group will focus on helping children learn. It will also focus on reducing barriers to academic achievement in part by addressing problems at home, should they exist, like poverty, drug abuse and neglect. The consortium will track children’s progress and the program’s own effectiveness, for example, by measuring reading scores or making sure children are getting immunizations and health checkups. The program represents two trends in the nonprofit world: having different organizations work together to save money by not replicating services and establishing targets to measure effectiveness. “There are a lot of good nonprofits out there that all have good intentions,” said Gayle Jennings-O’Bryne, vice president of JPMorgan Chase Global Philanthropy. “This is an opportunity to take the best of each and combine all their specialties.” The grant is set to last a year and by that time the two nonprofits hope to have selected the organizations that will be in the consortium and develop the milestones. It hasn’t been decided how many organizations will be asked to join or how many families will be included.

EDUCATION

CHARTER SCHOOLS

“Charter schools’ building costs cited; Report sees damage to education budgets; more public funding sought by supporters.” By Martine Powers. Boston Globe. January 28, 2013. As charter schools lobby the State House for increased funding for building improvements, they have a new tool to help them make their case: A report expected to be released Monday outlines the financial challenges faced by Massachusetts charter schools that lease or purchase their own facilities. According to the study, published by two charter school advocacy groups, Massachusetts charter schools spend an average of $1,235 per student on facilities — $342 more than what they are provided by the state. To bridge that gap, charter schools must tap into their education budgets, using an average of 7 percent of funds that could otherwise go toward classroom learning. Charter school supporters are hoping the new research will buoy calls for their schools to receive a bigger piece of the state budget pie — despite concerns that a funding increase might divert resources from public schools. “Charter school students should have the same amount of money paid for their education as their peers in the community,” said Marc Kenen, executive director of the Massachusetts Charter Public School Association , which did not write the report but is helping to publish it. “We’re hoping that the Legislature will see that charter students are getting the short end of the stick.” Charter schools currently must find a way to pay for their facilities through a mix of public and private funding. The study recommended increasing the per-pupil facilities allowance, as well as mandating that charter schools have first access to buying unused public schools. The issue of how to finance charter school facilities has come to a head as charter schools have grown in popularity. In recent weeks, charter school advocates have encouraged legislators to abolish a state-imposed cap on the number of charter schools allowed to operate in low-performing school districts.

“Democratic majority on education panel wants charter school to share in cuts.” By Robert Long. Bangor Daily News. January 30, 2013. The Legislature’s Education Committee voted 8-5 along party lines Wednesday to include charter schools in $12.6 million in cuts to education aid, sparking the latest partisan battle on education reforms. Majority Democrats said the vote endorsed fairness. Republicans labeled it an attack on a key component of education reform measures enacted since 2011 by the LePage administration and the GOP-led 125th Legislature. Gov. Paul LePage’s administration did not include any cuts to charter school funding in the $12.6 million reduction proposed in state aid to schools as part of a spending curtailment order announced in late December to help fill a $35.5 million hole in the current state budget. On Jan. 4, Finance Commissioner Sawin Millett told the budget-writing Appropriations Committee that savings realized by cutting state aid to Maine’s two charter schools, which serve just more than 100 students, would be inconsequential. He reiterated that stance Wednesday. “We declined to curtail quasi-governmental groups with very small budgets because it’s more trouble than it’s worth,” Millett said. But Democrats have questioned the fairness of excluding charter schools from the proposed cuts since they were announced. On Wednesday, all eight Democrats on the Education Committee voted to apply a formula that would reduce aid to charter schools by the same per-student rate that funding to districts in which those students live would be cut. All five Republicans on the committee voted against the recommendation, which now goes to the Appropriations Committee.

“Charter Schools That Start Bad Stay Bad, Stanford Report Says.” Huffington Post. January 31, 2013. When it comes to charter schools, the bad ones stay bad and the good ones stay good, according to a report on charter school growth released by an influential group of Stanford University scholars on Wednesday. “There are very predictable lanes on quality, and once you get into a lane, a new school tends to not move very much,” said Macke Raymond, the economist in charge of the university’s Center for Research on Education Outcomes institute and an author of the report. “High stays high and low stays low.” The report, “Charter School Growth and Replications,” found that, with some exceptions, charter schools that start strong are likely to stay that way, just as low-performing schools usually remain at the bottom. The study ranked charter schools within five levels based on performance, and found that 80 percent of schools in the bottom level during their first year remained there for five years. Similarly, 94 percent of schools that started at the top remained there. The only schools that changed levels were elementary schools and those in the second-lowest group, with half becoming worse and half becoming better. “Substantial improvement over time is largely absent from middle schools, multi-level schools and high schools,” the authors wrote. “Only elementary schools showed an upward pattern of growth” if they started out in the bottom two levels. Charter schools are the fastest-growing sector of American public schools. Wednesday’s report has tremendous implications for charter-school policy. Many states, such as Michigan, currently authorize the creation of new charter schools by organizations that operate existing charter schools — even if their existing schools sometimes do not serve students well.

“More Lessons About Charter Schools.” Editorial. New York Times. February 1, 2013. The charter school movement gained a foothold in American education two decades ago partly by asserting that independently run, publicly financed schools would outperform traditional public schools if they were exempted from onerous regulations. The charter advocates also promised that unlike traditional schools, which were allowed to fail without consequence, charter schools would be rigorously reviewed and shut down when they failed to perform. With thousands of charter schools now operating in 40 states, and more coming online every day, neither of these promises has been kept. Despite a growing number of studies showing that charter schools are generally no better — and often are worse — than their traditional counterparts, the state and local agencies and organizations that grant the charters have been increasingly hesitant to shut down schools, even those that continue to perform abysmally for years on end. If the movement is to maintain its credibility, the charter authorizers must shut down failed schools quickly and limit new charters to the most credible applicants, including operators who have a demonstrated record of success. That is the clear message of continuing analysis from the Center for Research on Education Outcomes at Stanford University, which tracks student performance in 25 states. In 2009, its large-scale study showed that only 17 percent of charter schools provided a better education than traditional schools, and 37 percent actually offered children a worse education. A study released this week by the center suggests that the standards used by the charter authorizers to judge school performance are terribly weak.

HIGHER EDUCATION

“Michael Bloomberg’s Contributions To Johns Hopkins University Top $1 Billion.” Huffington Post. January 27, 2013. New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has pledged $350 million to Johns Hopkins University, mainly to expand its interdisciplinary research on an array of issues including global health and urban revitalization as his lifetime giving to his alma mater eclipses $1 billion. The university announced the commitment late Saturday saying it believe Bloomberg, who amassed his fortune creating the global financial services firm Bloomberg LP, is now the first person to give more than $1 billion to a single American university. The $350 million commitment is the largest ever to the Baltimore-based university, Johns Hopkins said in a statement. Most of the latest gift, $250 million, will be part of a larger effort to raise $1 billion to foster cross-disciplinary work at Johns Hopkins, the statement said. Funds initially will be used toward appointment of faculty for interdisciplinary work on an array of issues that also will include individualized health care delivery, sustainability of water resources and the science of learning. The remaining $100 million is to be devoted to need-based financial aid for undergraduate students, awarding 2,600 Bloomberg scholarships in the next 10 years, it said. It added that the latest gift brings Bloomberg’s giving to the institution just more than $1.11 billion in the 49 years since he graduated – including his first gift of $5 in 1965 only a year after he received his bachelor’s degree in engineering from Johns Hopkins.

“Dwight Hall faces overhaul; The public service organization Dwight Hall will oversee a significant update of its financial and communication practices.” By Cynthia Hua. Yale Daily News. January 28, 2013. For the first time in decades, Dwight Hall is undergoing a major overhaul to its operations. Following the retirement of former Executive Director Alex Knopp in September and former Financial Director Ray Bendici last spring, the public service organization hired Jeannette Archer-Simons as interim director to complete structural and organizational changes, said Constance Royster ’72, chair of Dwight Hall’s Executive Committee. Archer-Simons said Dwight Hall staff, students and board members are updating the organization’s financial management, communications, facilities and bylaws to make the organization more efficient, while allowing for a “time of reflection” at Dwight Hall. “We’re strengthening the financial oversight and practices,” said Will Redden ’14, Dwight Hall’s current co-coordinator. “Our standards and practices … were out of date and a little lax, and we’ve been able to update them thanks to [Archer-Simon]’s expertise.” Though all staff, students and board members interviewed declined to provide information about the specific practices that led to the overhaul, Jensen Reckhow ’13, co-coordinator for the 2011–’12 year, said the board previously had an “unclear direction” and inefficient communication.

“Law Schools’ Applications Fall as Costs Rise and Jobs Are Cut.” By Ethan Bronner. New York Times. January 30, 2013. Law school applications are headed for a 30-year low, reflecting increased concern over soaring tuition, crushing student debt and diminishing prospects of lucrative employment upon graduation. As of this month, there were 30,000 applicants to law schools for the fall, a 20 percent decrease from the same time last year and a 38 percent decline from 2010, according to the Law School Admission Council. Of some 200 law schools nationwide, only 4 have seen increases in applications this year. In 2004 there were 100,000 applicants to law schools; this year there are likely to be 54,000. Such startling numbers have plunged law school administrations into soul-searching debate about the future of legal education and the profession over all. Responding to the new environment, schools are planning cutbacks and accepting students they would not have admitted before. A few schools, like the Vermont Law School, have started layoffs and buyouts of professors. Others, like at the University of Illinois, have offered across-the-board tuition discounts to keep up enrollments. Brian Leiter of the University of Chicago Law School, who runs a blog on the topic, said he expected as many as 10 schools to close over the coming decade, and half to three-quarters of all schools to reduce class size, faculty and staff. After the normal dropout of some applicants, the number of those matriculating in the fall will be about 38,000, the lowest since 1977, when there were two dozen fewer law schools, according to Brian Z. Tamanaha of Washington University Law School, the author of “Failing Law Schools.”

“Slifka adapts to financial challenges.” By Cynthia Hua and Apsara Iyer. Yale Daily News. January 31, 2013. After over two years of growth in its programming, the Slifka Center has begun to implement a series of structural changes intended to address the organization’s financial challenges. A decline in the center’s endowment due to the onset of the economic crisis in 2008 in addition to operational deficits have forced the organization to consolidate its resources and to re-evaluate its spending and fundraising methods, said Associate Rabbi Noah Cheses. The changes have been instituted by a newly reappointed Board of Trustees with greater experience in financial management, Cheses said. Staff and board members said the new policies, the reorganized board and the departure of four staff members since last spring, including former Executive Director Steven Sitrin, has created a difficult transition period for the staff of the Slifka Center. “The primary motivation for this change is financial,” Rabbi James Ponet ’68 said. “We’re a pretty well-funded organization but have indeed experienced this period of economic contraction.” The organization’s financial struggles have resulted from its rapid expansion in recent years without adequate fundraising systems in place, Cheses said. From 2008 to 2010, contributions and grants to Slifka increased by around $200,000, while its total expenses increased by nearly $300,000 to reach $2,440,244 total in 2010, according to the organization’s tax records. The center must raise over $1 million in “annual current-use funding” to maintain present spending levels, according to a job description for the new executive director — a position currently filled by interim Executive Director David Raphael. Cheses said because of the change in leadership and reduction in staff members, the Center is struggling to operate at previous levels.

“Endowment return tops natn’l average.” By Sophie Gould. Yale Daily News. February 1, 2013. While Yale posted a 4.7 percent endowment return in the fiscal year that ended June 30, 2012, most other colleges saw almost no change in the size of their endowments, according to the 2012 NACUBO-Commonfund Study of Endowments. Released today, the study indicates that Yale’s endowment fared well compared to other U.S. college and university endowments in the latest fiscal year. The 831 institutions represented in the study saw an average return of -0.3 percent in fiscal 2012 — a sharp drop from the 19.2 percent average return they reported in fiscal 2011. Experts interviewed attributed lower endowment returns largely to lackluster financial markets last year, which they said suffered in part because of the debt crisis in Europe, but have already begun to rebound in fiscal 2013. “Many endowments are still in recovery mode from the credit crunch in 2008,” said Andrew Karolyi, a finance professor at Cornell University, adding that most asset classes, including Yale’s favored alternatives, “did not have a banner year.” Endowments valued at over $1 billion yielded an average return of 0.8 percent last year — a figure William Jarvis ’77, managing director of the Wilton, Conn., investment firm the Commonfund Institute, said helps set Yale’s performance in context. Though a return of 4.7 percent is significantly lower than Yale’s 21.9 percent endowment return in fiscal 2011, Jarvis said Yale’s performance last year was “actually quite respectable.” Schools with larger endowments can take more investing risks, said Matthew Spiegel, a finance professor at the Yale School of Management, because they can afford to “gamble a bit more” in the hopes of earning a higher return. While smaller endowments saw higher returns than larger endowments during the recession because they were less heavily invested in alternative assets, larger endowments have begun once again to outperform their smaller counterparts, the study said.

“Harvard Lobbying Steady in 2012; University Spends More Than $500,000 in Washington.” By Nikita Kansra and Samuel Y. Weinstock. Harvard Crimson. February 1, 2013. Harvard’s Office of Federal Relations spent about $510,000 on lobbying in Washington D.C. in the calendar year of 2012, approximately the same amount as in 2011, according to public records filed with Congress. Throughout 2012, Harvard lobbied on legislation relating to education, federal research funding, and charitable deductions, among other issues, according to the forms. Their efforts targeted both chambers of Congress, the White House, and the Departments of Education and Health and Human Services. A little more than $100,000 of the money spent by Harvard on lobbying in 2012 went to the law firm O’Neill, Athy, and Casey, which advises and conducts research for the University’s lobbyists. Harvard’s lobbying expenditures were significantly higher than those of its peer institutions like Princeton University, Columbia University, Cornell University, and Brown University, all of which spent less than $250,000 in 2012, and Dartmouth College, which spent nothing on lobbying. Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania each spent $540,000 and $680,000, respectively. Harvard’s D.C.-based federal relations office coordinates the University’s lobbying efforts by communicating with members of the Massachusetts congressional delegation and with members of committees that cover issues of concern to Harvard, such as budget appropriations, science, health, education, and labor.

“Harvard Punishes Dozens of Students for Cheating.” By Jennifer Levitz. Wall Street Journal. February 1, 2013. Dozens of Harvard University students have been disciplined, with many forced to temporarily withdraw, as a result of the cheating scandal that shook the Ivy League institution in late August. Harvard on Friday released the much-awaited results of its investigation into the controversy, in which 125 undergraduates were alleged to have cheated on a take-home exam in a course titled Government 1310. Detailing the punishments meted out by the Harvard College Administrative Board in decisions made between late September and December, the university said more than half of the students were forced to withdraw, a penalty that typically lasts from two to four semesters. Of the remaining cases, about half were put on disciplinary probation—a strong warning that becomes part of a student’s official record. The rest of the students avoided a punishment. “The large number of administrative board cases this past fall highlighted the fact that we, as a faculty, must redouble our efforts to communicate clearly and unambiguously to our undergraduates about academic integrity,” Michael D. Smith, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, wrote in an email to the campus community on Friday. The scandal, the largest such case at Harvard, started brewing in spring 2012, when a faculty member teaching the government class noticed that a number of students appeared to have copied one another’s answers on a take-home exam. The instructor referred the case to the administrative board, which conducted a review and found that 125 exams looked fishy.
Related stories:
“Students Disciplined in Harvard Scandal.” New York Times. February 1, 2013.
“Harvard details suspensions in massive cheating scandal.” Boston Globe. February 2, 2013.

“Alumni donation: Ohio’s gain is Chandigarh’s loss.” By Alkesh Sharma. Times of India. February 3, 2013. It is a loss that Chandigarh would repent and a gain Ohio would wallow in. When US-based philanthropist, business tycoon and Punjab Engineering College (PEC) alumnus Monte (Manmohan) Ahuja, 66, wanted to pay back to his alma mater, he was forced to choose Ohio State University, where he studied after passing out of PEC. He made a donation of $ 3.5 million to Ohio varsity which he could have to PEC. Reason? Administrative lacunae in the Chandigarh college and exasperating gaps in its system. Ahuja, an entrepreneur and chairman of Ohio-based Mura Holdings LLC, a funding enterprise, had passed out from mechanical engineering department of PEC in 1967 and then moved to the US where he completed his masters in engineering from Ohio State University and later went for an MBA from Cleveland State University. Last month, he donated the amount to the Ohio institute to support engineering students and for the setting up of Monte Ahuja Endowed Dean’s Chair. So far, he has donated over $60 million (over Rs 300 crore) to various departments of institutions he has attended in the US. “I cherish my days spent at PEC and I had passed with distinction from the college. I always wanted to contribute to my college in some way — through donation or any kind of help. I tried to meet officials but the response was discouraging. I think they do not have the concept of reaching out to its alumni like it’s in the top colleges in the US. I will wait for the day for a response,” said Ahuja.

PRIVATE & PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS

“Christian school sues ex-teachers who refused to give proof of faith.” NBCLosAngeles.com. January 29, 3013. [For story, go to Law & Public Policy].

“The Plan to Save Catholic Schools; How to combat falling enrollment while keeping standards high.” Op-ed. Wall Street Journal. January 31, 2013. This is Catholic Schools Week, when dioceses across the country celebrate the great gifts that are our Catholic schools. It has been a somewhat somber Catholic Schools Week for me, since in the Archdiocese of New York we recently announced that 24 of our schools will be closing at the end of this academic year. According to the National Catholic Education Association, the closings will join a national trend that has seen Catholic-school enrollment in the U.S. decline by 23.4% since 2000, a loss of 621,583 students. It is sometimes hard to understand why enrollment has dropped. After all, even the enemies of Catholic education—and, sadly, there are some who wish our schools would disappear altogether—grudgingly admit that Catholic schools are unparalleled in providing a first-rate education that also emphasizes character and virtue. Students kick off National Catholic School Week on Monday in Robstown, Texas. I have heard from many leaders in business and finance that when a graduate from Catholic elementary and secondary schools applies for an entry-level position in their companies, the employer can be confident that the applicant will have the necessary skills to do the job. Researchers like Helen Marks (in her 2009 essay “Perspectives on Catholic Schools” in Mark Berends’s “Handbook of Research on School Choice”) have found that students learning in a Catholic school, in an environment replete with moral values and the practice of faith, produce test scores and achievements that reliably outstrip their public-school counterparts. This is why, to the consternation of our critics, we won’t back away from insisting that faith formation be part of our curriculum, even for non-Catholic students. As education expert Diane Ravitch has observed, “A large part of the Catholic schools’ success derives from the fact that they are faith-based and that they sustain a sense of genuine community, as well as stability. To me, and I am not Catholic, the success of Catholic schools depends on maintaining their religious identity, that is, keeping the crucifixes in the classrooms as well as the freedom to speak freely about one’s values.”

EDUCATION

CHARTER SCHOOLS

“State may get new charter schools.” By Isaac Stanley-Becker. Yale Daily News. January 23, 2013. Charter schools may soon be on the rise in New Haven and statewide. Twenty-four groups across the state interested in opening new charter schools sent letters of intent to the Connecticut Board of Education in advance of the Board’s formal request for proposals scheduled for later this month. Of the 24 letters, four concern plans for schools in New Haven. Though charter school enrollment in Connecticut has increased steadily since the first charter schools opened in 1997, less than 2 percent of all public school students in the state are currently enrolled in charter schools. The number of students on waitlists has consistently outstripped enrollment increases, a pattern illustrated by figures released from New Haven’s enrollment lottery. Last year, 528 families vied for 80 kindergarten spots at Amistad Academy, while Elm City College Prep saw 307 students competing for 57 spots. Both are charter schools that accept only New Haven residents. Leaders of the four New Haven charter initiatives emphasized the flexibility and increased parental choice afforded by charter schools. But before the proposals can become reality, they must first be approved by the state Board of Education, a hurdle complicated by uncertain funding and resistance from teachers unions.

HIGHER EDUCATION

“New Cornell Technology School Will Foster Commerce Amid Education.” By Ariel Kaminer. New York Times. January 21, 2013. Their curriculum devotes months to helping a company solve a current technological challenge. Their progress is supervised not just by an academic adviser, but also by an industry adviser. Their vast campus on Roosevelt Island, when it is built, will intersperse classrooms with office buildings, where high-tech companies can rent a suite and set up shop. And when they showed up Monday for the very first day of classes at Cornell NYC Tech, the most ambitious institution of higher education to open in New York City in decades, students arrived not at some temporary structure on the edge of a construction site but to 20,000 square feet of donated space in the middle of Google’s $2 billion New York headquarters. Cornell NYC Tech, a new graduate school focusing on applied science, is a bold experiment on many fronts: a major expansion for an august upstate school, a high-impact real estate venture for Roosevelt Island, an innovative collaboration with a foreign university, a new realm of influence for City Hall. But the most striking departure of all may be the relationship it sets forth between university and industry, one in which commerce and education are not just compatible, they are also all but indistinguishable. In this new framework, Cornell NYC Tech is not just a school, it is an “educational start-up,” students are “deliverables” and companies seeking access to those students or their professors can choose from a “suite of products” by which to get it. Colleges and universities across the country — a great many of which are scrambling to find new ways to finance scientific research, as well as new ways to profit from the fruits of that research — are watching closely.

“When Universities Sell Art.” By Jon Wiener. Nation. January 21, 2013. A Rembrandt portrait that had been protected by Columbia student protesters in 1968 and later sold by Columbia for $1 million is back on the market this year, with a price tag of $47 million. The story of the 1658 painting, Man with Arms Akimbo, has many lessons, starting with the folly of universities selling art to make money. When radical students at Columbia occupied several buildings, including Low Library, the administration building, in May 1968 to protest university complicity in the Vietnam War, the painting hung in the office of then president Grayson Kirk. According to The New York Times, the student occupiers agreed to allow police to remove the painting to protect it. Student radicals in 1968 were criticized as barbarians out to destroy the university and all that it stood for. But the students at Columbia protected the university’s Rembrandt—and then the university put it in storage, and sold it in 1975 in a secret transaction with a private collector. A painting that should have been on display disappeared from public view for the next forty years—in exchange for which the university got $1 million. So who were the real barbarians?

“With Investigation Complete, Harvard Plans a Cheating Scandal Announcement.” By Elizabeth S. Auritt and Jared T. Lucky. Harvard Crimson. January 22, 2013. Harvard has delivered verdicts to all of the approximately 125 students ensnared in the Government 1310 cheating scandal and plans to make an announcement about the results of the investigation near the start of the spring semester, according to a Harvard spokesperson. Jeff Neal, a spokesperson for the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, wrote in an emailed statement that the Administrative Board finished evaluating the set of cases in December. Though Neal did not provide a specific date for the planned announcement, he wrote that it would come “near the beginning of the new semester, after students and faculty have returned to campus.” He also did not say how much new information would be released, but the Ad Board’s website states that the Board is bound to confidentiality about case specifics even after an investigation has concluded. The completion of the investigation marks a turning point for the scandal that Dean of Undergraduate Education Jay M. Harris called “unprecedented in anyone’s living memory” when it was first announced at the end of August. Over the past semester, the Ad Board investigated approximately half of the undergraduates enrolled in last spring’s offering of Government 1310: “Introduction to Congress” for plagiarism and inappropriate collaboration on a take-home final exam. Administrators said that each case would be resolved on an individual basis. Harvard did not put forward a deadline for the completion of the investigation, yet one student said in an interview with The Crimson that he was told that his case would be resolved by November at the latest. Ultimately, some cases were not resolved until near the end of the fall semester.
Related story:
“Alumnus Slams Harvard’s Handling of the Cheating Scandal.” Harvard Crimson. January 25, 2013.
“Harvard cheating inquiry raises concerns.” Boston Globe. January 26, 2013.

“Bloomberg pledges $350 million to Johns Hopkins University.” By Nick Anderson. Washington Post. January 26, 2013. New York Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has pledged a $350 million gift to Johns Hopkins University to support interdisciplinary research and student financial aid, a commitment that will push his lifetime donations to his alma mater to more than $1 billion, the university announced Saturday. Hopkins officials said they believe that Bloomberg will become the first person to reach the $1 billion level of giving to a single U.S. institution of higher education — an assertion that’s hard to verify because many donors give anonymously to universities. It is also difficult to compare the dollar value of modern donations to those in earlier eras. But Bloomberg’s philanthropy to Hopkins is by any reckoning remarkable. A list of major higher-education gifts compiled by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2012 was topped by a $1 billion commitment for scholarships from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Bloomberg’s first gift to Hopkins was $5 in 1965, a year after he graduated from the private Baltimore university with a bachelor’s degree in engineering. His first $1 million pledge to Hopkins came in 1984, endowing a professorship in the humanities. Now the 70-year-old billionaire, who made a fortune in the financial information business, has pledged $250 million to promote research in water resource sustainability, individualized health care delivery, global health, the science of learning and urban revitalization. In addition, he has pledged $100 million for scholarships to aid undergraduate students in financial need. The combined commitment of $350 million — the largest gift ever to the university — will bring his lifetime donations to Hopkins to $1.118 billion.
Related story:
“$1.1 Billion in Thanks From Bloomberg to Johns Hopkins.” New York Times. January 26, 2013.

PRIVATE & PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS

“Private Schools’ Foreign Aid; Facing Hard Times, U.S. Academies Lure a Growing Number of Asian Students.” By Joel Millman. Wall Street Journal. January 22, 2013. As growing numbers of Chinese students seek a college education in the U.S., many are turning to American high schools as a steppingstone. The resulting surge in Chinese enrollment has helped private high schools, and religious academies in particular, reap much-needed revenue. There are now 23,795 Chinese students in U.S. private high schools, up from 4,503 in 2008, according to federal figures. With public high schools restricted from admitting foreign students, the demand has been a boon to private academies, which have seen enrollment and their finances suffer, in part due to the economy. Families of most Chinese students here pay $49,600 a year versus the $12,600 paid by local students, who don’t live on campus. Subtracting the room and board charges, plus required health insurance, of $12,500 a year means the foreign students pay a premium of about $24,500. To attract students from abroad, St. Mary’s attended school fairs in China, established ties with Chinese education officials and hired a student-placement agency. A subsequent jump in enrollment has turned St. Mary’s fortunes around. Many people in other countries see a U.S. college degree as the path to success—and an American high school as the doorway. In the current academic year, almost 42,845 students from China, South Korea, India, Japan, Taiwan and Vietnam attend U.S. private high schools, according to the Department of Homeland Security, up from 27,235 in 2008. Enrollment at all private high schools peaked at about 6.1 million in 2005, Education Department data show. By 2009, the most recent year for which figures are available, it had fallen to about 5.5 million—and religious institutions accounted for about 80% of the decline. Religious schools have been hit by the downturn as well as the growing popularity of home schooling and charter schools among parents who used to send their children to Christian institutions, education officials said. But this year, the number of students from Asia in religious schools rose to 18,591 from 10,611 in 2008, with Chinese accounting for most of the rise. In 2008, about two-thirds of Asian students attending private high schools in the U.S. went to secular institutions, but about half of the increase seen this year were enrolled in religious schools.
Related story:
“New York Archdiocese to Close 24 Schools.” New York Times. January 22, 2013.

“Cathedral Grammar School will close.” By Haven Orecchio-Egresitz. Boston Globe. January 25, 2013. Because of an ongoing decline in student enrollment, Cathedral of the Holy Cross Grammar School will close at the end of the school year, said Terrence Donilon, a spokesman for the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston. The Rev. Kevin O’Leary, rector of the parish in the South End, made the decision to consolidate Cathedral Grammar into other Boston-area Catholic schools. An open house will be held at the school Feb. 6 from 6 to 7:30 p.m. to give parents the opportunity to learn more about each of the Catholic schools open to their children.
Related story:
“Heavy hearts over closing of Cathedral Grammar School.” Boston Globe. January 27, 2013.

“24 Catholic Schools to Close; Falling Enrollment Prompts Decision.” By Lisa Fleisher and Sophia Hollander. Wall Street Journal. January 22, 2013. Two dozen Roman Catholic schools in New York learned Tuesday they would permanently shut their doors at the end of the school year, in what the church said it hopes is the last round of closings for the foreseeable future.
The Archdiocese of New York will close 22 elementary schools throughout its jurisdiction, which includes Manhattan, the Bronx, Staten Island and seven other counties. The closures will affect more than 4,300 students, or about 9% of the elementary schools’ enrollment. Two high schools with 424 students will also be closed, officials said. A student exits the Holy Cross school in Manhattan in New York Tuesday. The announcement is the latest blow to an educational network that has been reeling from dwindling enrollment in recent years, even as it maintains enviable academic standards. The closings have been planned for years as part of a massive restructuring intended to stabilize the remaining Archdiocese schools and make the system sustainable for future generations. But like any amputations undertaken to survive, the cost has been high: The new closings come on top of shuttering 26 elementary schools and four high schools in 2011. Under Edward Cardinal Egan, 37 schools were closed between 2000 and 2009. Mr. McNiff said the closures are necessary for the long-term viability of the school system, which saw enrollment decline by more than 25,000 students since 2003. Still, the decision came as a shock to some schools. Many had been scrambling to raise funds and develop plans to prove they could remain viable.

TECHNOLOGY

“Revolution Hits the Universities.” By Thomas L. Friedman. Op-ed. New York Times. January 26, 2013. Lord knows there’s a lot of bad news in the world today to get you down, but there is one big thing happening that leaves me incredibly hopeful about the future, and that is the budding revolution in global online higher education. Nothing has more potential to lift more people out of poverty — by providing them an affordable education to get a job or improve in the job they have. Nothing has more potential to unlock a billion more brains to solve the world’s biggest problems. And nothing has more potential to enable us to reimagine higher education than the massive open online course, or MOOC, platforms that are being developed by the likes of Stanford and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and companies like Coursera and Udacity. Last May I wrote about Coursera — co-founded by the Stanford computer scientists Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng — just after it opened. Two weeks ago, I went back out to Palo Alto to check in on them. When I visited last May, about 300,000 people were taking 38 courses taught by Stanford professors and a few other elite universities. Today, they have 2.4 million students, taking 214 courses from 33 universities, including eight international ones. Anant Agarwal, the former director of M.I.T.’s artificial intelligence lab, is now president of edX, a nonprofit MOOC that M.I.T. and Harvard are jointly building. Agarwal told me that since May, some 155,000 students from around the world have taken edX’s first course: an M.I.T. intro class on circuits. “That is greater than the total number of M.I.T. alumni in its 150-year history,” he said. Yes, only a small percentage complete all the work, and even they still tend to be from the middle and upper classes of their societies, but I am convinced that within five years these platforms will reach a much broader demographic.

EDUCATION

CHARTER SCHOOLS

“LePage charter school proposal to re-ignite legislative debate over school funding.” By Gabor Degre. Bangor Daily News. January 6, 2013. Gov. Paul LePage is preparing legislation that would eliminate the cap on the number of charter schools allowed in Maine, an initiative that is sure to cause significant debate among incoming lawmakers who already face a weighty agenda and difficult funding issues in the education sector. Department of Education spokesman David Connerty-Marin said Sunday that LePage’s charter school legislation is still under development but confirmed that the governor is intent on abolishing the limit of 10 new charter schools in Maine over the next decade that is currently written into state law. As with most legislative action in recent years, much of the debate likely will focus on how the change would affect already stretched public school funding. Opponents of the charter school law have long argued that charter schools will pull too much funding away from public schools. Under Maine’s charter school law, state education dollars follow students from their previous public schools to the charter school of their choice. However, LePage and other proponents insist that providing as many options as possible for Maine students is crucial to education reform efforts.

“Racial divide seen in Mississippi debate over charter schools, reform.” By Sarah Carr. The Hechinger Report. MSNBC. January 9, 2013. Mississippi lawmaker Kenneth Wayne Jones, a Democrat, briefly became a political pariah last winter when he voted in favor of a proposal to expand charter schools in his state. He was the only African-American state senator to support the bill, which most members of Mississippi’s legislative Black Caucus disavowed. Jones liked the idea of expanded school options for families, but he also understood his colleagues’ mistrust. “You’ve got conservative Republicans all of a sudden showing a lot of concern about the education of African-American children, while in the same breath they are denying them health care,” Jones said. This winter, charter supporters will make their fifth attempt in five years to bring charters to Mississippi, one of a dwindling number of states without a real charter school law. (The state has an existing law so restrictive that no charters have opened.) But the deep-rooted skepticism of the state’s black leadership remains one of the biggest obstacles to bipartisan support for charters in Mississippi and throughout the South, where powerful white Democrats are a disappearing breed. It also speaks to broader mistrust among black officials nationwide — particularly those who came of age before or during the civil rights movement — toward contemporary school reform efforts they believe are being imposed by outsiders on low-income, minority communities.

“High desert charter school first success for parent trigger law.” No by-line. Los Angeles Times. January 8, 2013. Mojave Desert parents made history Tuesday by becoming the first Californians to successfully use the state’s landmark parent trigger law to win approval of new charter management for their failing school. After an 18-month legal and political battle over the law, the Adelanto school board voted unanimously to approve the request by parents at Desert Trails Elementary School that a charter school operator take over their campus beginning in August. The chosen operator, LaVerne Elementary Preparatory Academy, is based in Hesperia and is affiliated with the University of La Verne. The successful vote came after two opponents of the parent trigger petition lost the school board election in November and a third opponent left his seat for the Adelanto City Council. One of the new school board members, Teresa Rogers, was a parent leader of the petition campaign. “We applaud the school board members for their courage and commitment,” Desert Trails parent leader Cynthia Ramirez said in a statement. “The school board has set an example for other parents and districts across the country on how to use Parent Trigger legislation to transform otherwise failing public schools,” Ramirez said. The 2010 parent trigger law allows parents to petition to overhaul their failing school by replacing staff and revising the curriculum, closing the campus or converting to an independent, publicly financed charter school. More than 20 other states have considered a similar law and at least six others besides California have adopted one, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

HIGHER EDUCATION

“Dartmouth Controversy Reflects Quandary for Endowments.” By Randall Smith. New York Times. January 7, 2013. Jon Gilbert Fox for The New York TimesThe $3.49 billion endowment fund at Dartmouth, an Ivy League college in Hanover, N.H., returned 5.8 percent for the 12 months that ended in June. By the numbers, the endowment at Dartmouth had a banner year. The $3.49 billion fund returned 5.8 percent for the 12 months that ended in June — the best in the Ivy League. But the performance has been clouded by controversy. Last year, an anonymous letter signed by “the friends of Eleazar Wheelock,” referring to the university’s founder, asked New Hampshire state officials to investigate the endowment over potential conflicts of interest raised by trustee-related investments. Although the state attorney general’s office decided that an investigation was not warranted, the situation highlights a thorny problem for college endowments. Trustees’ connections can prove profitable for the universities, offering access to top-performing hedge funds and private equity firms that may not be open to other investors. But they can also create the appearance that the colleges may have nonfinancial motives for picking investments. And if the investments do not perform well, it can be stickier to fire the money manager. “It’s probably better not to” engage in such transactions, said John S. Griswold, executive director of the Commonfund Institute, the research arm of a money manager that caters to educational endowments in Wilton, Conn. “It avoids the perception of conflict of interest and self dealing.”

“Downturn Still Squeezes Colleges and Universities.” By Andrew Martin. New York Times. January 11, 2013. An annual survey of colleges and universities found that a growing number of schools face declining enrollment and less revenue from tuition. The survey, released by the credit ratings agency Moody’s Investors Service on Thursday, found that nearly half of colleges and universities that responded expected enrollment declines for full-time students, and a third of the schools expected tuition revenue to decline or to grow at less than the rate of inflation. “The cumulative effects of years of depressed family income and net worth, as well as uncertain job prospects for many recent graduates, are combining to soften student market demand at current tuition prices,” Emily Schwarz, a Moody’s analyst and lead author of the report, said in a statement. The growing financial challenges for colleges and universities come as students and graduates have amassed more than $1 trillion in student debt, and many are struggling to pay their bills. Nearly one in six people with an outstanding federal student loan balance is in default, the federal government says. Before the financial crisis of 2008, colleges and universities routinely raised tuition with little effect on the number of prospective students who applied. Some private colleges said that applications actually rose when they increased prices, apparently because families equated higher prices with quality. But that attitude has changed, in part because family incomes have declined. Ms. Schwarz also noted, “Tougher governmental scrutiny of higher education costs and disclosure practices is adding regulatory and political pressure to tuition and revenue from rising at past rates.” In addition, she noted that budget negotiations in Congress could lead to cuts in student aid programs while the share of students that depend on government help continued to rise. At public universities, federal loans finance a median of 40 percent of student charges; at private schools, the median is 21 percent. While nearly half the schools that responded to the survey expected enrollment declines, the changes are expected to be minimal and overall enrollment should remain relatively flat. The enrollment declines are more pronounced among graduate programs; small, lower-rated universities; and public schools in the Northeast and Midwest, where the number of high school seniors is declining. By comparison, about 15 percent of the schools that responded to the survey in the fall of 2010 reported enrollment declines.

PRIVATE & PAROCHIAL SCHOOLS

“Catholic Education, in Need of Salvation.” By Patrick J. McClosky and Joseph Claude Harris. Op-ed. New York Times. January 6, 2013. Catholic parochial education is in crisis. More than a third of parochial schools in the United States closed between 1965 and 1990, and enrollment fell by more than half. After stabilizing in the 1990s, enrollment has plunged despite strong demand from students and families. Closings of elementary and middle schools have become a yearly ritual in the Northeast and Midwest, home to two-thirds of the nation’s Catholic schools. Last year, the Archdiocese of Philadelphia closed one-fifth of its elementary schools. Cardinal Timothy M. Dolan, the archbishop of New York, is expected to decide soon whether to shut 26 elementary schools and one high school, less than three years after the latest closings. Catholic high schools have held on, but their long-term future is in question. This isn’t for want of students. Almost 30 percent of Catholic schools have waiting lists, even after sharp tuition increases over the past decade. The American Catholic population has grown by 45 percent since 1965. Hispanics, who are often underserved by public schools, account for about 45 percent of American Catholics and an even higher proportion of Catholic children, but many cannot afford rising fees. Since the early 19th century, parochial schools have given free or affordable educations to needy and affluent students alike. Inner-city Catholic schools, which began by serving poor European immigrants, severed the connection between poverty and low academic performance for generations of low-income (and often non-Catholic) minority kids. Until the 1960s, religious orders were united in responding to Christ’s mandate to “go teach.” But religious vocations have become less attractive, and parochial schools have faced increasing competition from charter schools. Without a turnaround, many dioceses will soon have only scatterings of elite Catholic academies for middle-class and affluent families and a token number of inner-city schools, propped up by wealthy donors. As in other areas, the church has lost its way, by failing to prioritize parochial education. Despite the sex-abuse scandals and two recessions, church revenue — which flows from parishes via Sunday donations, bequests and so on — grew to $11.9 billion in 2010, an inflation-adjusted increase of $2.2 billion from a decade earlier. Yet educational subsidies have fallen; the church now pays at least 12.6 percent of parochial elementary school costs, down from 63 percent in 1965.

TECHNOLOGY

“Students Rush to Web Classes, but Profits May Be Much Later.” By Tamar Lewin. New York Times. January 7, 2012. In August, four months after Daphne Koller and Andrew Ng started the online education company Coursera, its free college courses had drawn in a million users, a faster launching than either Facebook or Twitter. The co-founders, computer science professors at Stanford University, watched with amazement as enrollment passed two million last month, with 70,000 new students a week signing up for over 200 courses, including Human-Computer Interaction, Songwriting and Gamification, taught by faculty members at the company’s partners, 33 elite universities. In less than a year, Coursera has attracted $22 million in venture capital and has created so much buzz that some universities sound a bit defensive about not leaping onto the bandwagon. Other approaches to online courses are emerging as well. Universities nationwide are increasing their online offerings, hoping to attract students around the world. New ventures like Udemy help individual professors put their courses online. Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have each provided $30 million to create edX. Another Stanford spinoff, Udacity, has attracted more than a million students to its menu of massive open online courses, or MOOCs, along with $15 million in financing. All of this could well add up to the future of higher education — if anyone can figure out how to make money.