History > 2007 > USA > Education (IV)

Harvard’s Aid to Middle Class

Pressures Rivals

December 29, 2007
The New York Times
By JONATHAN D. GLATER

Just days after Harvard University announced this month that it would significantly expand financial aid to students from families earning as much as $180,000 a year, William G. Durden, president of Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa., got a query from a student’s father, asking whether the college would follow Harvard’s lead.

“He even said, ‘I know this costs a lot of money, but you should do it anyway,’ ” Dr. Durden said. The president replied that Dickinson, a small liberal arts college where the full annual cost of tuition, fees, room and board nears $45,000, did not have the money to match Harvard’s largess.

Because of Harvard, Dr. Durden said ruefully in recalling the exchange, “a lot of us are going to be under huge pressure to do these things that we just can’t do.”

By substantially discounting costs for all but the very wealthiest students, Harvard shook up the landscape of college pricing. Like Dr. Durden, officials of other colleges say its move will create intense pressure on them to give more aid to upper-middle-class students and will open the door to more parental price haggling.

Some colleges had already been moving to eliminate loans from all their financial aid packages and replace them with grants. In the weeks since Harvard’s announcement, a stampede of additional institutions — the University of Pennsylvania, Pomona, Swarthmore, Haverford — have taken the same step, which will help middle- and upper-middle-income families.

But Harvard, in adopting that practice, has also gone far beyond it: for families earning $120,000 to $180,000 a year, costs will now be limited to about 10 percent of income, meaning that students from such families will pay a maximum of $18,000, a deep discount from the university’s full annual cost of more than $45,600.

Officials at colleges without anything like Harvard’s $35 billion endowment say a rush to give tuition discounting to the middle and upper middle class at institutions like theirs could end up shifting financial aid from low-income students to wealthier, make pricing seem even more arbitrary and create pressure to raise full tuition to pay for all the assistance.

“Harvard has started to redefine the financial aid landscape, and it’s redefined it in a way that is quite beneficial to the wealthiest institutions,” said Jenny Rickard, dean of admissions and financial aid at Bryn Mawr. “It is just a handful of schools that can really respond this way, but it leaves others kind of pulling their hair.”

In the competitive scramble for prestige and rankings, numerous colleges already try to lure some top students away from the Ivy League by showering them with “merit aid” even if they are well off and can afford full tuition. The practice is controversial, with some college administrators scorning it as a way of “buying” a better incoming class, sometimes at the expense of lower-income students.

Some administrators say there will now be pressure to provide more merit aid to relatively wealthy high achievers, reducing the amount available to poorer students.

“It could lead to schools’ doing this sort of thing because they want to be part of the top group,” David W. Oxtoby, president of Pomona College in California, said of Harvard’s move. If that meant those colleges had to reduce the number of their low-income students, Dr. Oxtoby said, “that would be terrible, exactly the wrong outcome.” (Pomona itself, where full costs are more than $45,000, does not provide merit aid.)

Some academics who study higher education predict that Harvard’s decision may even reduce economic diversity at Harvard itself, even though the university already allows any admitted student from a family earning $60,000 or less to attend virtually free of charge.

Donald E. Heller, director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Pennsylvania State University, said that if Harvard’s new aid program encouraged more middle- and upper-middle-income students to apply, then the number of slots for low-income applicants in an entering class would probably decline.

“They’re just going to get crowded out,” Dr. Heller said.

William R. Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard, said that the university was committed to helping poorer students attend but that years of research had shown that students from families in the middle and upper-middle class were not even applying, most likely because they had decided that the price was simply unaffordable.

“People were voting with their feet,” Dean Fitzsimmons said. “It was pretty clear that we were missing out on some pretty exciting students.”

Parents and other critics have complained for years that tuition has steadily increased faster than the rate of inflation, and college affordability has become an issue in Congress. Senator Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee, has suggested that colleges be required to spend more of their endowments as a condition of keeping their tax-exempt status. And a bill approved by the House Education and Labor Committee last month would seek to shame, by listing publicly, those colleges that raise tuition significantly faster than their peers.

But administrators at colleges without enormous endowments to help them cut student costs say they fear that Harvard may have created a wave of haggling by families and made college pricing and student aid packages seem even more opaque.

“It will educate those parents into thinking, ‘Eighteen thousand dollars a year is what we ought to be paying; why should we have to pay more than that?’ ” said John Strassburger, president of Ursinus College, where full costs are currently $43,160.

Jonathan Burdick, dean of admissions and financial aid at the University of Rochester, where costs are nearly $45,000, said: “Harvard has made it harder for everybody. They’ve given fuel to the argument that colleges are charging more than they should.”

Ms. Rickard, dean of admissions and financial aid at Bryn Mawr, where total costs run over $45,000, said the college had so far resisted substituting grants for loans because it would make it harder to spread aid as widely. “The reason we have the loans is it enables us to support more students,” she said.

For some public universities, Harvard’s move provided a rationale to argue for more state assistance to hold the line on student costs. Robert J. Birgeneau, chancellor of the University of California, Berkeley, where total costs are roughly $25,000, said, “My intention, frankly, is to use the Harvard announcement to try to exert pressure on the government of California to increase resources for financial aid.”

And in New York, State Senator Kenneth P. LaValle, a Republican who heads the Senate Higher Education Committee, said he would introduce legislation to provide enough state aid to limit to 10 percent the amount of income that a middle-class family — which he defined as one earning up to $150,000 — would have to pay for college.

“It’s Harvard,” Mr. LaValle said. “They created a new paradigm. People will pay attention to it. And we need to pay attention to the affordability issue as it applies to middle-income taxpayers.”

    Harvard’s Aid to Middle Class Pressures Rivals, NYT, 29.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/29/us/29tuition.html

A School in Georgia

as a Laboratory for Getting Along

December 25, 2007
The New York Times
By WARREN ST. JOHN

DECATUR, Ga. — Parents at an elementary school here gathered last Thursday afternoon with a holiday mission: to prepare boxes of food for needy families fleeing some of the world’s horrific civil wars.

The community effort to help refugees resembled countless others at this time of year, with an exception. The recipients were not many thousands of miles away. They were students in the school and their families.

More than half the 380 students at this unusual school outside Atlanta are refugees from some 40 countries, many torn by war. The other students come from low-income families in Decatur, and from middle- and upper-middle-class families in the area who want to expose their children to other cultures. Together they form an eclectic community of Buddhists, Christians, Hindus, Jews and Muslims, well-off and poor, of established local families and new arrivals who collectively speak about 50 languages.

“The fact that we don’t have anything in common is what we all have in common,” said Shell Ramirez, an American parent with two children at the school.

The International Community School, which goes from kindergarten through sixth grade, began five years ago to address a pressing local problem: how to educate a flood of young refugees. It has evolved into a laboratory for the art of getting along, a place that embraces the idea that people from different cultures and classes can benefit one other, even as administrators, teachers and parents acknowledge the many practical difficulties.

For example, the school’s weekly newsletter is published in six languages; yet it still is not intelligible to many parents. Some refugee children arrive at the school having never seen a book. And while the school devotes extraordinary energy to a specialized curriculum designed for refugees, it must still satisfy exacting American parents.

“If it were easy,” said a co-founder, Barbara Thompson, “everybody would be doing it.”

Refugees began arriving in Decatur in the 1990s, when aid agencies pegged the area as perfect for newcomers because of its low rents and proximity to jobs in downtown Atlanta, just 10 miles to the west. In the late ’90s, nearly 20,000 refugees arrived in Georgia, most to this area.

Soon this once mostly white suburb on the western side of Stone Mountain, a historical bastion of the Ku Klux Klan, had become one of the more culturally and ethnically diverse areas in the country.

The children of these refugees present unique challenges for the school. Many suffer post-traumatic stress from the horrors they have witnessed. Few speak English when they arrive. Some have no formal education and are innumerate and illiterate, even in their native tongues.

To complicate matters, many refugee parents cannot help with homework or understand report cards.

Some children have had to be taught to stand in line, or the significance of raising one’s hand.

Linda Dorage, who teaches English as a second language at the school, said she had even had to introduce children to “just the concept of a two-dimensional image meaning something.”

One early student, a goat herder from Mauritania, did not know how to use a door knob. A Sudanese girl was so traumatized by war and relocation that she insisted on sitting on the floor beneath her desk each day.

“The teacher decided she would go under the desk with her and do lessons under there,” Ms. Thompson said. “She drew her out in her own good time.”

Addressing Unmet Need

Until the community school came along, most refugee children found themselves in conventional public schools. To understand the difference, it helps to visit the family of He Tha and Mya Mya, a Burmese husband and wife who arrived with their four children last summer after 25 years in refugee camps in Thailand.

The family now lives in a two-bedroom apartment, its walls bare except for a homemade shrine of hand-drawn figures in red and blue ink around a photograph of friends left behind. Written below the photo is, “Never say goodbye.”

Mr. He Tha’s eldest children — 15-year-old Monday and 18-year-old Baby Boy, who was given his name for arriving a month premature — were too old for the community school. They were placed at a high school, where they receive an hour of English instruction and spend the rest of the day in regular ninth-grade classes, even though they speak hardly a word of English.

Asked what it was like to spend hours in classes he could not understand, Baby Boy laughed and blushed.

“It’s boring,” he said.

Mr. He Tha’s younger two children — Tuesday Paw, 12, and Eh Dee Na Poe, 7 — attend the community school.

Refugee children there receive daily classes in English as a second language, and additional individual instruction based on their needs. There are after-school classes until 5:15 p.m. each weekday, along with art and music classes, and French and Spanish for all students. Classes are relatively small, 18 students on average, and each has an assistant to the teacher. Students wear uniforms — light blue or white collared shirts, and dark blue pants or skirts — so that clothing does not become a distracting status symbol.

Many on the staff understand the refugee experience first-hand. One survived the Rwandan genocide. The lunchroom lady is from Srebrenica, driven from the town during Serb soldiers’ massacre of some 8,000 Bosnian men and boys.

“I constantly remind them how lucky we are,” said Hodan Osman, 27, a tutor who at age 10 was separated from her parents during the civil war in Somalia.

“We could have been killed,” she said, “and not only are we here, but we’re in a place where we’re celebrated. I tell them they can take everything away from you, but your knowledge is in your head, and it makes you brave.”

Naza Orlovic, a teacher’s assistant from Bosnia, said her experience as a refugee allowed her to recognize and to soothe hurt feelings that frequently arose out of cultural misunderstandings. Ms. Orlovic recalled comforting a Liberian boy, who was upset when other students could not follow his jokes because of his thick West African accent.

“I said, ‘Tell them to me,’” Ms. Orlovic recalled, speaking in a thick Bosnian accent herself. “Because they don’t understand my jokes either.”

The school has classes for the parents and older siblings of refugee students. On Thursday nights, there are computer classes. On Saturdays, the school offers English classes and tutoring.

Mr. He Tha attends those classes, along with his wife, Baby Boy and Monday. Speaking through a translator, he said he hoped to learn a little English so he could get a job. But he added that the family’s prospects depended in large part on the education his children received.

“The future is done for us,” Mr. He Tha said, gesturing toward himself and his wife. “We are just support for our children. We don’t want to see them have the same problems we had.”

No ‘Enclave’ for Refugees

The community school was born a decade ago when Ms. Thompson, then a freelance writer, met William L. Moon, the principal at a prestigious private school in Atlanta, and Sister Patty Caraher, a Sinsinawa Dominican nun and social activist who once taught under segregation at an all-black high school in Mobile, Ala.. Each had done volunteer work on behalf of refugee children, and each had concluded that such children’s needs were not being met through conventional schooling.

The three conceived of a school that would include hours of individual attention and an empathetic environment. They hoped to model it on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s notion of “the beloved community,” where people of all races, nationalities and classes were accepted, and on the common schools established in the 19th century by Horace Mann.

“The mission,” Ms. Thompson said, “was never to create an enclave for refugees only, because that would just separate them more.”

The founders saw this formulation as not just idealistic but practical. Studies have shown that low-income students benefit academically from exposure to middle- and upper-middle-class students. And Ms. Thompson and her colleagues believed that exposure to a wide range of cultures and ethnic backgrounds would appeal to affluent, socially minded parents.

Ms. Thompson, Mr. Moon and Sister Caraher received seed money from several local charities and help from advocates for refugees and other concerned neighbors. Mr. Moon assumed the role of principal. The school leased space from a church and, in 2002, was granted charter status by the local school board and the state.

There were plenty of early difficulties. The school was short on money. Though it receives county, state and federal money, it must still raise some $400,000 a year. Classrooms at the church were small and the tensions high, particularly among children whose lack of English got in the way of their expressing themselves.

An effort to form a parent-teacher association failed because of language differences; the sheer number of translators needed for such meetings made them impractical.

Early on, some American parents who had been drawn to the community school because of its small class sizes and curriculum — French and Spanish from kindergarten on, art and music for all students — pulled out their children because they felt the emphasis on refugees got in the way.

And some new arrivals to the school had to overcome intense trauma before they could begin learning.

Teachers noticed that two sisters from Afghanistan seemed terrified as they arrived each day. As refugees in Pakistan, the children had worked making carpets. Exhausted, they regularly dozed at school, which drew beatings. The sisters had assumed such beatings were standard at every school.

Despite these challenges, the school grew. A new grade was added each year. A second campus was opened in space rented from another church a few miles away. Volunteers poured in, mostly retired teachers and students from nearby Emory University and Agnes Scott College.

All the while, administrators and teachers said, the school took its energy from the optimism many of its students had toward their new lives in the United States. Sometimes that optimism was hard to miss. One second grader from Congo is named Bill Clinton.

A Draw for Americans

The diversity at the community school extends to American families. Twenty percent of the students are African-American, and roughly 10 percent are white. About two-thirds of the students come from families that qualify for reduced-price or free lunches, while some of the other students are the children of doctors, lawyers and bankers.

Parents from low-income families tend to choose the school over other nearby public schools because it is safe and has small classes. More affluent parents seek it for the potential benefits of exposure to so many cultures. Most of the middle- and upper-middle-class parents are social progressives from Decatur, a liberal enclave. But not all.

Harvey Clark, whose son Zade is in the fifth grade, is a veteran of the Persian Gulf war and a Nascar fan.

“They’re getting exposed to cultures that they normally would not be exposed to except in National Geographic,” Mr. Clark said of the American children. “Instead of my boy having to go off to war to meet foreign people, he can do it here in town.”

But the interactions between parents from so many backgrounds are complicated. There is still no parent-teacher association because of language barriers. American parents organize food drives for newcomers, give them rides and help them connect with doctors when children get sick. But getting to know one other takes effort.

“My children don’t just know about the Iraq war; they know the difference between Kurds and other Iraqis,” said Shell Ramirez, who has a son and a daughter at the school. “But it’s not for everybody. It’s something you have to buy into.”

Buying in may be easier for children than for adults. Consider the friendship between Ms. Ramirez’s 9-year-old son, Dante, and Soung Oo Hlaing, an 11-year-old Burmese refugee with dwarfism.

Dante likes to read Harry Potter books and to play Shrek on his Wii video game console. He lives in a comfortable house; his father works at a large consulting firm.

Until he arrived last summer, Soung had lived in a refugee camp in Thailand. He spoke no English. His father supports the family by working at a chicken processing plant for $10 an hour.

The two boys met on the first day of school this year. Despite the language barrier, Dante managed to invite the newcomer to sit with him at lunch.

“I didn’t think he’d make friends at the beginning because he didn’t speak that much English,” Dante said. “So I thought I should be his friend.”

In the next weeks, the boys had a sleepover. They trick-or-treated on Soung’s first Halloween. Soung, a gifted artist, gave Dante pointers on how to draw. And Dante helped Soung with his English. “I use simple words that are easy to know and sometimes hand movements,” Dante explained. “For ‘huge,’ I would make my hands bigger. And for ‘big,’ I would make my hands smaller than for ‘huge.’”

Ms. Ramirez said that coordinating Dante’s social life was much more complicated than if he were at a more typical local school. “Slumber parties are definitely a pain,” she said. “It can be quite confusing if one of the kids doesn’t know his phone number and the parents don’t speak English.”

But even so, Ms. Ramirez said she became close with Soung’s family because of the boys’ friendship. She drives them to appointments, has had them over to bake cookies, and spent a recent weekend afternoon trying to program the family’s remote control. To celebrate an ethnic holiday, Soung’s mother, Mu De, recently gave Ms. Ramirez a traditional Burmese sarong.

For now, the women communicate mostly through gestures. But it will not be long before Soung is translating. His English has improved markedly, enough so that he regularly torments Dante with a reliable schoolyard prank: he tapes a piece of paper bearing the words “kick me” on Dante’s back.

“They’re two peas in a pod,” Ms. Ramirez said.

‘Worthy of My Best Shot’

The long-term prospects are far from certain. Because it is experimental, the school is more at risk of closing if its students fail to make adequate yearly progress, the standard by which the national education law judges public schools.

Academically, the school seems to be on track. It has met the annual requirement under the No Child Left Behind education law each of the past four years. And this year the school was one of two for disadvantaged children that were commended by the Georgia Board of Education. It was cited for closing the performance gap between low- and high-scoring students, a feat that the school accomplished without lowering its higher scores.

Ms. Thompson, Mr. Moon and Sister Caraher said a short-term goal was to combine their two campuses. Mr. Moon said he wanted to open a health clinic for refugees at the school. And supporters are trying to start a school for refugee children who arrive in their teens, with less time than younger refugees to make up for lost years.

In the meantime, refugees continue to arrive, most recently from Burundi, Eritrea and Burma (now known as Myanmar), and some of their children will inevitably learn their first words of English at the school.

“When you see those kids who are as positive as they are, and you know what kind of problems they’re going through,” Mr. Moon said, “you just say, ‘This is worthy of my best shot.’”

    A School in Georgia as a Laboratory for Getting Along, NYT, 25.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/us/25school.html?hp

Parents Defend School’s Use of Shock Therapy

December 25, 2007
The New York Times
By LESLIE KAUFMAN

Nearly a year ago, New York made plans to ban the use of electric shocks as a punishment for bad behavior, a therapy used at a Massachusetts school where New York State had long sent some of its most challenging special education students.

But state officials trying to limit New York’s association with the school, the Judge Rotenberg Educational Center in Canton, southwest of Boston, and its “aversive therapy” practices have found a large obstacle in their paths: parents of students who are given shocks.

“I understand people who don’t know about it think it is cruel,” said Susan Handon of Jamaica, Queens, whose 20-year-old daughter, Crystal, has been at Rotenberg for four years. “But she is not permanently scarred and she has really learned that certain behaviors, like running up and hitting people in the face, are not acceptable.”

Indeed, Rotenberg is full of children who will run up and hit strangers in the face, or worse. Many have severe types of dysfunction, including self-mutilation, head banging, eye gouging and biting, that can result from autism or mental retardation. Parents tend to be referred there by desperate education officials, after other institutions have decided they cannot keep the child.

While at Rotenberg, students must wear backpacks containing a device that allows a staff member to deliver a moderate shock to electrodes attached to the limbs, or in some cases palms, feet or torso, when the students engage in a prohibited behavior. Both the children’s parents and a court must consent to the shocks.

Michael P. Flammia, the lawyer for Rotenberg, defended the practice in an interview.

“People want to believe positive interventions work even in the most extreme cases,” he said. “If they did, that is all we would use. Many of these kids come in on massive dosages of antipsychotic drugs, so doped up that they are almost comatose. We get them off drugs and give their parents something very important: hope.”

But for state officials, many behavior experts and even some former Rotenberg parents, the shock therapy at the school represents a dangerous, outdated approach to severe behavioral problems, reminiscent of the electric shock helmets used on some autistic patients into the 1980s and now discredited.

They say Rotenberg does not use shock punishments only for dangerous self-mutilation, but rather for a wide variety of actions, including shouting profanities and spitting, which are known to be effectively treated with less extreme punishments. And critics of the school say that unlike the more widely known electroconvulsive therapy, which has been used successfully in cases of severe depression and is being used experimentally on severely autistic people, applying shock as a punishment is not widely supported by the scientific community.

“People don’t use it anymore because they don’t need to. It is not the standard of care. There are alternative procedures that do not involve aversives like electronic shock,” said William Pelham, a behavioral specialist and director of the Center for Children and Families at the State University of New York at Buffalo. “And I am not talking about drugs as an alternative. I am talking about other behavioral treatments.”

Still, the parents say the shocks are making a difference in their children’s lives as nothing else has. In 2006, after New York issued an immediate ban on electric shock for behavior modification, Ms. Handon was among the parents of more than 40 children who sued and won a court injunction to keep treatments going.

In January, the state, which pays for treatment of all New York students at Rotenberg to age 21, enacted a new ban on the treatment for those students, to take effect in 2009; it also set new restrictions on who can begin the therapy in the interim. But the parents amended their suit, and a trial beginning in 2008 will decide the issue.

“The point is that at Rotenberg, they still manage Crystal to control what she needs to do,” Ms. Handon said. “Her behaviors were not acceptable for society. Now I think I can bring her home.”

The Rotenberg Center, which says it is the only school in the nation using electric shock, has been the subject of many critical reports by the news media and state investigators.

Just last week, Massachusetts investigators issued a report saying a child at the school was shocked 77 times in three hours last summer as a result of a prank.

The report, by the Department of Early Education and Care, found that a former student pretending to be a school official demanded the punishment of two students, and that counselors administered shocks without double-checking. One of the children suffered first-degree burns. “Our kids should not be sent there, and we will act immediately,” Gov. Eliot Spitzer of New York said in response to the report.

But unlike many special education schools, Rotenberg, as a matter of policy, never rejects or expels a child, except an adjudicated sex offender. As a result, it continues to get referrals from around the nation.

Currently, nearly 100 of the more than 200 children at Rotenberg are from New York State, down from roughly 140 in 2006. The school says that it also has children from 10 other states, including California and Illinois, and that it has had students as young as 10. At a cost of about $228,000 per child per year, the students receive a range of therapies, including, in the case of more than 40 of the New Yorkers, the use of electric shocks.

Just how painful those shocks are has been an area of particular debate. Technically, the lowest shock given by Rotenberg is roughly twice what pain researchers have said is tolerable for most humans, said James Eason, a professor of biomedical engineering at Washington and Lee University. The highest shock given by Rotenberg is three times the lowest amount.

The lawyer for Rotenberg, Mr. Flammia, said the current has to hurt to work. He described the highest shock as “a hard pinch.”

But a former teacher from the school, who asked not to be named because he signed a confidentiality agreement as a condition of employment and fears he could be sued for speaking to a reporter, said he had seen children scream and writhe on the floor from the shock.

Mr. Flammia called the accusation false. If a teacher saw such things, he should have reported it, the lawyer said. No teacher ever has made that sort of report, he added.

Ms. Handon said she does not care what the critics say, not even those perturbed by the report of the prank shocking. She said her fierce loyalty to her daughter’s school was not hard to understand. Crystal developed slowly as a baby. She was eventually found to be mentally retarded and placed in special education. But by the time she was 13, the local schools could no longer hold her and Ms. Handon, a divorced mother of five, was having troubles as well.

She described her daughter as “the sweetest person,” a child obsessed with Michael Jackson who loves to dance to “Billie Jean.” But Crystal’s condition led to peculiar antisocial behavior, her mother said. Even after her adolescence, she would strip off her clothes and park herself naked in the living room. She would bite herself on her arms and legs until she bled, and then would peel off the scabs until she left deep black scars.

Then there were her rages. Denied something, she would throw furniture and shatter windows. Once, she ripped the door frames out of the plaster walls of her family’s apartment. “I was always afraid the landlord was going to evict us,” Ms. Handon remembered — not an inconsequential fear for a woman like her who had once been homeless.

As a young teenager, Crystal was moved to residential placements, but even those special education schools could barely handle her. They would use restraints and psychotropic drugs. Crystal grew to 180 pounds and was “so doped up,” her mother said, “that she could barely walk straight.”

When she was 16, education officials recommended Rotenberg. At first Ms. Handon wouldn’t consider a place that used shock as therapy, but over time she began to see advantages. Rotenberg would take her child off the medicines. They would punish her only for behavior in her control, like spitting, not for bedwetting. And while the shock hurt, Ms. Handon said she believed it caused no permanent damage or health risk

In their lawsuit, the parents contend that none of the other options have been satisfactory and that other schools have simply drugged their children to remove the bad behavior, without teaching them how to behave differently. The state’s perspective, however, is that Rotenberg uses shocks too capriciously, that shocks are used to curb trivial behaviors, like cursing, and that positive reinforcement would often provide similar results.

“The use of electronic skin shock conditioning devices as used at J.R.C. raises health and safety concerns,” state evaluators wrote in 2006 after a surprise inspection. They also “compromised” the “privacy and dignity” of the students, the evaluators wrote.

Ms. Handon, however, does not share these qualms. She said she likes the fact that the school will let her visit any time, unannounced. From her computer, she can monitor Crystal’s progress. One green bar chart keeps track of the number of times her daughter has engaged in prohibited behavior; another, the number of times she was given a shock. In the past month, it appears that her daughter has been given shocks only four times, down from the 200 a month she received at first.

To Ms. Handon, this is a sign that her daughter is learning to control herself. When Crystal is too old for special education, her mother plans to keep her at home for good. In the meantime, however, she says her daughter is having too much fun.

“She loves that place,” Ms. Handon said. “If she knows she is returning from vacation on a Monday, on Saturday she will pack her bags and start begging to go.”

    Parents Defend School’s Use of Shock Therapy, NYT, 25.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/nyregion/25shock.html?hp

Op-Ed Contributor

Gold in the Ivory Tower

December 21, 2007
The New York Times
By HERBERT A. ALLEN

THE separation of the wealthiest from the rest of the country is alarming. But it would be even more alarming if we recognized that income isn’t the only measure of wealth. Health and education are forms of wealth, too, essential to happiness and a strong society. Yet in the discussion of America’s growing wealth gap, they too often go unnoticed.

Disparities in health care and in education are widespread. In the realm of education, however, there’s a particularly corrosive shift that’s taking place, one that has tremendous consequences for the development of America’s best minds: the growing gap between super-wealthy colleges and universities — and the rest of the academic world. There is a widening division that gives top colleges and universities a huge financial advantage over their poorer counterparts.

America’s wealthiest colleges have endowments that are thousands of times greater than those at the least fortunate schools. The chasm is far deeper than that in other realms. After all, overpaid chief executives and investment bankers pay inheritance and income tax, so their wealth diminishes over time. Heavily endowed colleges and universities, however, suffer no such setbacks.

Amherst, Harvard, Princeton, Williams, Yale and other top-tier colleges have per student endowments that approach (and in some cases exceed) $1 million. Because they are accredited educational institutions, the gains on their investments go untaxed, adding billions to their coffers each year.

It’s certainly true that these academic institutions have worked hard to be excellent. They deserve to be rich. They should be congratulated.

But should they be allowed to be so protected by the tax code that they can use their disproportionate wealth to raid poorer colleges and scoop up the best teachers by offering better pay, benefits and tenure-track positions? Should they further separate themselves from less fortunate colleges by taking the best high school students and offering them ever richer deals? (This month, for instance, Harvard announced that it would increase the financial aid it offers to middle-class and upper-middle-class students. Other schools are expected to follow suit.)

What to do? Well, here’s one solution: tax the investment income of the wealthiest colleges (though not their endowments). If the endowments of all academic institutions were evaluated on a per student basis, a standard could be set that could begin to allow revenue sharing.

Our graduated income tax system sets varying tax rates based on income levels. Similarly, we could establish standards for the endowments of colleges and universities.

An example: Harvard or Williams (my alma mater) have endowments that are well over $500,000 per student. Why not take the colleges whose endowments exceed that per student amount and tax their capital gains? The tax revenue could then be put into a designated pool and distributed pro rata to colleges under the base level. The college with the lowest per student endowment would get the highest share.

It’s a form of revenue sharing that would allow the poor schools back into the competition for the best teachers and students. The impact on the rich colleges would be minimal.

The investment income from Harvard’s endowment in the last academic year was reported to be nearly $7 billion — a 23 percent gain from the year before. At even the current low tax rates it wouldn’t hurt Harvard to give up $1 billion or so of its gains in order to make the sharing of our intellectual wealth fairer. Other colleges could make such a donation similarly unscathed.

I know it won’t be easy to convince well-off schools to share their wealth. But they should. They should see this act as part of a down payment on their professed mission: to create a stronger, smarter and ultimately more stable society.
 

Herbert A. Allen is the president of an investment firm.

    Gold in the Ivory Tower, NYT, 21.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/21/opinion/21allen.html

Report to Urge Sweeping Change for SUNY System

December 15, 2007
The New York Times
By KAREN W. ARENSON

Warning that New York has “slipped in stature” and that its once-powerful position in national research has “faded,” a commission set up by Gov. Eliot Spitzer is recommending that the state free its public colleges and universities to raise tuition without the Legislature’s approval and to charge different prices from campus to campus.

“New York State’s public higher education institutions face a chronic problem — they have too little revenue and too little investment,” said the report.

Those changes, sure to face political resistance, are among many broad proposals to reshape the public university system that are outlined in a report to be delivered to the governor on Monday.

The 30-member commission is calling for the state to create its own low-cost student loan program, to clear up a $5 billion backlog in maintenance and construction at its public universities and to hire 2,000 new full-time professors — including 250 academic stars who could bring in research dollars and prestige.

And it proposes a $3 billion Empire State Innovation Fund that public and private universities could tap for research grants in fields like bioscience, engineering and medicine that can fuel economic development.

The commission, which is issuing its first report in time to influence Governor Spitzer’s next budget, used strong language to paint a picture of a public higher education system in dire need of repair, especially at its high-end research universities, in an era of stiff competition nationally and internationally.

In the report, which was obtained by The New York Times, the commission pointed in particular to the state aid structure and limits on campus autonomy. “New York’s public institutions are constrained by over-regulation on tuition pricing and insufficient state aid,” it said.

The report added that a dearth of revenues had compromised academic quality and left the colleges far too short of full-time faculty members. It said the most competitive states had “far more revenue to support academic programs and services.” It called for a rejuvenated higher education system that would foster more research and technological innovation and draw in more of the most talented students from the United States and abroad.

Governor Spitzer has said that higher education will be a priority for the coming year, and his senior adviser, Lloyd Constantine, has worked closely with the commission. But with the state forecasting budget difficulties, it is not clear how much of the plan the governor will adopt, or whether he will have the muscle to win its approval after a year of political missteps. The tuition proposals in particular could be a hard sell in the Legislature.

The report did not provide a cost estimate for the commission’s recommendations or suggest how the state should pay for them.

A spokesman for the governor said on Friday that Mr. Spitzer would not comment until he received the report on Monday. The commission chairman, Hunter R. Rawlings III, the former president of Cornell University, also declined to comment.

New York is one of the few major states to shy away from differential tuition pricing, which allows research universities, which are more costly to run, to charge more. Under New York law, schools within the state and city systems can charge different tuition only for special degrees like medicine or law. Community colleges, which are subsidized by local governments, also charge different tuition.

In California, by contrast, students in the California State University system pay less than $4,000 a year in tuition and fees, while students at the University of California system campuses pay more than $8,000. Differential pricing in New York would most likely lead Stony Brook, Albany, Binghamton and Buffalo to charge more than SUNY’s other four-year colleges.

Besides suggesting that colleges get more autonomy, the commission recommends a plan for all campuses designed to assure more stable financing.

Under a “compact” for public education, the state would pay the annual operating costs of salaries and energy and assume 20 percent of the costs of new investments that it approves.

In return, the universities would be allowed modest regular tuition increases and would be expected to step up fund-raising to shoulder other costs. The commission report calls for the tuition changes to be phased in over three years and suggests the first increases might be an average of 2.5 percent to 4 percent a year.

The commission said these tuition increases would not result in added costs to needy students who get state assistance.

Undergraduate tuition for state residents is now $4,350 a year at SUNY and $4,000 at CUNY. SUNY’s tuition jumped 28 percent and CUNY’s 25 percent in 2003, the first increases since 1995. Some campuses charge fees totaling $1,000 or more.

SUNY’s 64 campuses have become economic and cultural centers as well as sites for higher education, and legislators guard them the way they guard local military bases. Lawmakers have also kept tight control of tuition, saying their constituents don’t want to pay more. While the SUNY and CUNY systems officially have the right to set their own tuition rates now, the money goes to the state, and if the money is not returned to campuses through appropriations, schools do not benefit from raising tuition.

Lawmakers have steadily fought off efforts in the past to allow the research centers at Albany, Binghamton, Buffalo and Stony Brook to charge more than other colleges or to allow regular indexed tuition increases.

Assemblywoman Deborah J. Glick, chairwoman of the Assembly’s Higher Education Committee, served on the commission. She said she could not comment on the report.

She said she had no doubts that the public universities “have been systematically underfunded and undercapitalized, and that has to be corrected.”

    Report to Urge Sweeping Change for SUNY System, NYT, 15.12.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/15/nyregion/15educ.html?hp

Ohio Goes After Charter Schools That Are Failing

November 8, 2007
The New York Times
By SAM DILLON

COLUMBUS, Ohio — Ohio became a test tube for the nation’s charter school movement during a decade of Republican rule here, when a wide-open authorization system and plenty of government seed money led to the schools’ explosive proliferation.

But their record has been spotty. This year, the state’s school report card gave more than half of Ohio’s 328 charter schools a D or an F.

Now its Democratic governor and attorney general, elected when Democrats won five of Ohio’s six top posts last November, are cracking down on the schools, which receive public money but are run by independent operators. And across the country, charter school advocates are watching nervously, fearful the backlash could spread.

Attorney General Marc Dann is suing to close three failing charter schools and says he is investigating dozens of others. It is the first effort by any attorney general to close low-performing charter schools.

Gov. Ted Strickland said he wanted to carry out his own crackdown.

“Perhaps somewhere, charter schools have been implemented in a defensible manner, where they have provided quality,” he said. “But the way they’ve been implemented in Ohio has been shameful. I think charter schools have been harmful, very harmful, to Ohio students.”

Some 4,000 charter schools now operate across the nation, most advertising themselves as a smaller, safer alternative to the neighborhood school. Nationwide, the movement has gained traction among Democrats, partly because of the successes of a few quality nonprofit operators.

But some charters are mediocre, and Ohio has a far higher failure rate than most states. Fifty-seven percent of its charter schools, most of which are in cities, are in academic watch or emergency, compared with 43 percent of traditional public schools in Ohio’s big cities.

Behind the Ohio charter failures are systemic weaknesses that include loopholes in oversight, a law allowing 70 government and private agencies to authorize new charters, and financial incentives that encourage sponsors to let schools stay open.

Even the Republican-controlled legislature recognized a problem in December, passing a law that requires failing charter schools to improve or face closing in mid-2009. Speaker Jon Husted of the Ohio House, the Republican who wrote the law, said Mr. Dann’s lawsuits, based on an untested legal strategy, were precipitous and had usurped the legislature’s powers.

“This is like suing the American Cancer Society just because they haven’t yet cured cancer,” Mr. Husted said.

The partisan struggle here comes just as the charter school movement has been making important inroads among Democrats. In the 1990’s, President Bill Clinton and other centrist Democrats endorsed charters as a useful new option that could improve public schools through competition. But teachers’ unions, a backbone of the party, have fought them, partly because most operate nonunion.

This year, Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama and former Gov. Bill Richardson, candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination, have all voiced support for quality charters. So have a few teachers’ union officials.

Charter school advocates worry that Mr. Dann’s crackdown may prove popular with Democratic and independent voters nationwide. Ohio’s labor leaders enthusiastically applaud it.

“If chronically lousy charters aren’t closed, the charter movement will continue under assault from its opponents,” said Todd Ziebarth, a policy analyst at the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

After Ohio’s first 15 charters were authorized in the fall of 1998, they proved popular, especially in Cleveland, Dayton and other cities where parents were dissatisfied with often chaotic public schools. Others were added at a breakneck pace. Experts said too many opened too fast.

Federal money helped fuel the growth, with up to $450,000 available to every new school in its first three years. Ohio sweetened that incentive with $50,000 more. Some Ohio charters were formed, not to innovate in the classroom, but to take advantage of the start-up money, experts said, which is in addition to state financing allocated by enrollment numbers.

Ohio’s charter authorization system also encouraged rapid growth. Most states limit the number of authorizing agencies to a handful; New York, for instance, has three. Ohio allows 70 groups, including universities, nonprofits and many unconventional agencies to be authorizers.

One provincial sponsor, the Lucas County Educational Service Center, has authorized scores of schools around the state, more than any similar agency in the nation.

Many people with good intentions but few educational credentials rushed to open charter schools. William Peterson, a former University of Dayton football star with no experience in school administration, opened four, all now in academic emergency. One, the Colin Powell Leadership Academy in Dayton, is the target of a lawsuit by Mr. Dann.

Also setting Ohio apart has been the large number managed by commercial companies. The state’s largest commercial operator, David Brennan, an Akron industrialist, is a major donor to Republican candidates. Most of his 30 or so charter schools are on academic emergency or watch.

A string of reports by educators sympathetic to charters have recognized Ohio’s need for stepped-up quality control.

“A subset of Ohio charter schools is performing abysmally,” said an October 2006 study by the National Association of Charter School Authorizers and two other groups, recommending that Ohio authorities conduct a “housecleaning.”

It was partly in response to that report that the legislature passed the law to force failing schools to improve or face closing in 2009.

But the Democrats who took office in January wanted quicker action. Governor Strickland, in his first budget last spring, proposed a moratorium on new charters and to bar commercial operators from managing those already running. The legislature beat back those proposals, but in an interview, Mr. Strickland said he hoped to move again, “the next opportunity I get.”

And in September, Mr. Dann filed his suits against the Powell Academy and two other Dayton-area schools, Moraine Community School and New Choices Community School.

In an interview, Mr. Dann said he was investigating the academic and financial records of dozens of charter schools and that he intended to file more lawsuits, part of what he called an effort to use his oversight powers more vigorously than did his Republican predecessors.

“We’re already changing behavior,” he said. “If you think all the other failing charter schools aren’t trying to figure out how to improve their academic performance, you’re mistaken.”

He added, “There are some great charter schools in Ohio that fill a gap in our education system.”

But teachers’ unions have filed several previous lawsuits attacking Ohio’s charter schools, most of them unsuccessful, and leaders of the state’s charter movement portrayed Mr. Dann’s efforts as a political attack.

“These suits are the latest in a long line of Democratic assaults on the charter school program in Ohio,” said Terry Ryan, a vice president of the Thomas B. Fordham Foundation, which sponsors several Ohio charter schools. Mr. Ryan said it was hypocritical to sue failing charters without moving against Ohio’s scores of failing neighborhood schools.

Gary L. Hardman, founder of the New Choices school, said that his staff had energetically sought to improve the performance of the dropouts, pregnant teenagers and other at-risk students who attend the school, and that Mr. Dann had misjudged its academic record as well as the school’s resolve to stay open.

“The attorney general thought we’d roll over, but I’m not closing,” Mr. Hardman said. “All my students would be on the streets.”

A pro-charter group is helping Mr. Hardman pay the fees of a Columbus lawyer, Chad A. Readler, who said he intended to challenge Mr. Dann’s legal argument that the three charter schools are “charitable/public trusts” that should be closed for breaking their pledge to provide students with a public education exceeding state standards.

“The charitable trust law has never been used before in Ohio or anywhere else to try to regulate or shut down public schools,” Mr. Readler said.

The Powell Academy did not contest Mr. Dann’s suit. Instead, Mr. Peterson resigned in early October, and his successors recently announced that the academy would close in January.

“We were in academic emergency for three years, that’s a fact, so we were low-hanging fruit,” Mr. Peterson said. “But what surprised us toward the end was the political aspect. You’ve got a Democratic versus Republican situation in Ohio, the balance of power has shifted, and it’s a lot more hostile to school choice than it was before.”

    Ohio Goes After Charter Schools That Are Failing, NYT, 8.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/08/us/08charter.html?hp

50 Public Schools Fail Under New Rating System

November 5, 2007
The New York Times
By ELISSA GOOTMAN and JENNIFER MEDINA

Under a blunt new A through F rating system, whose results Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg unveiled today, 50 public schools across New York City, most in Manhattan and the Bronx, have been designated failures, placing them in danger of closing as early as the end of the school year and putting their principals’ jobs on the line.

Another 99 schools across the city received D’s, according to the complex formula the Education Department used to assign the letter grades to more than 1,200 schools. Although the department had planned to assign the grades around a curve, more schools than expected — 23 percent — received A’s. Thirty-eight percent of schools received B’s.

Of the five boroughs, Queens had the highest proportion of A schools, 28.85 percent, and the lowest share of F schools, .77 percent. On Staten Island, where many residents pride themselves on their local schools, the reverse was true; 5 percent of schools received A’s, while 8.33 percent received F’s.

City officials have described the report cards as the linchpin of the Bloomberg administration’s efforts to overhaul the school system. Schools Chancellor Joel I. Klein has repeatedly said that the grades, which are based on a calculation that compares schools with similar populations and gauges not just proficiency but the gains that individual students make year by year, are the most accurate and comprehensive way of determining whether schools are moving their students forward year by year.

The largest portion of a school’s grade, 55 percent, is based on the improvement of individual students on state tests from one year to the next, a so-called growth model analysis. Thirty percent of the grade is based on overall student achievement on state tests. An additional 15 percent is based on the school’s environment, measured by attendance figures and parent, teacher and student surveys.

The grades also reflect a comparison of schools with similar student populations. Elementary school populations are grouped mainly by racial and socioeconomic background; middle and high schools are grouped by students’ test scores from previous years.

Because the grades are based largely on improvement, not simply meeting state standards, some high-performing schools received low grades. The Clove Valley School in Staten Island, for instance, received an F, although 86.5 percent of the students at the school met state standards in reading on the 2007 tests.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, some schools that had a small number of students reaching state standards on tests received grades that any child would be thrilled to take home. At the East Village Community School, for example, 60 percent of the students met state standards in reading, but the school received an A, largely because of the improvement it showed over 2006, when 46.3 percent of its students met state standards.

Some grades lined up with longstanding reputations. Some of the city’s most prestigious and selective schools — like Stuyvesant High School and Anderson School, both in Manhattan — received A’s. In Community School District 26 in Queens, long considered a top district citywide, 52 percent of schools received A’s, the highest share of any district.

Twenty-three high schools did not receive grades, and officials said they were still under review. The decision not to release those grades came after some principals panicked that their draft grades were based on inaccurate data. In an e-mail message to high school principals on Friday, James Liebman, the Education Department’s chief accountability officer, wrote that those schools would receive their report cards within a week of the rest of the schools.

The newest schools in the city, including small high schools that have not had a graduating class, did not receive letter grades at all.

The report cards also include a "quality review" report, an observation of the school written by one of several consultants hired to visit the schools last year.

Some parents and educators have already complained that the grades are simplistic and place too much emphasis on standardized test scores.

Chancellor Klein has said that principals who receive D’s and F’s could face administrative reorganization at their schools, or be removed from the system entirely. Principals who do well on the report cards are eligible for bonus pay, and teachers at certain schools whose schools’ grades improve from this year to next will also be eligible for bonuses, under a recent agreement with the city teachers’ union.

50 Public Schools Fail Under New Rating System, NYT, 5.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/05/education/05cnd-reportcards.html