Compass Point
A Weekly Collection of Data, Articles and Insights from the Commonwealth Educational Policy Institute
A project of the Virginia Commonwealth University's Center for Public Policy
L. Douglas Wilder School of Government and Public Affairs
Recent State and Local Education News
Virginia is a National Leader in Computer Science Education

Community Idea Stations
August 4, 2016

It’s been a defining year for Virginia as a national leader in computer science education. At a ceremony in June at Richmond’s Franklin Military Academy, Gov. Terry McAuliffe - with the help of a robot - signed the nation’s first law mandating computer science education as a core academic requirement for all Virginia students beginning in kindergarten and continuing right through graduation.


The new requirements, which will be integrated into the Virginia Standards of Learnings, will not mean the addition of any new SOL tests, something that CodeVA Executive Director Chris Dovi says was among a short list of priorities for his organization as it crafted the legislation and worked with lawmakers towards the new law’s passage. CodeVA also successfully advocated to add $1.1 million to the state’s biennium budget to target the training of teachers.

“Nobody wants more SOL tests,” said Dovi, who co-founded CodeVA with his wife, Rebecca, in 2013 as the state’s only advocacy and teacher training organization focusing on K-12 computer science education. Since its founding, the organization has trained more than 800 teachers and impacted more than 100,000 students.

What was a top priority with the legislation, Dovi says, was ensuring that computer science and computational thinking take their rightful and necessary place next to reading, writing and math as an essential literacy taught to all students.

Assembly hearings set for U.Va. on $2.2 billion investment fund
Richmond Times-Dispatch
August 9, 2016

Legislative leaders plan two hearings to allow the University of Virginia to explain its $2.2 billion investment fund that has rankled some members of the General Assembly.

House Appropriations Chairman S. Chris Jones, R-Suffolk, said Tuesday that he has invited the university to make a presentation on the Strategic Investment Fund to his committee on Sept. 19.

After the state Auditor of Public Accounts has completed its report on the fund, a joint meeting of the higher-education subcommittees for the House and Senate money committees also will hold a hearing, he said.

Virginia Beach schools replace 14 principals
The Virginian-Pilot
August 9, 2016

Fourteen of the city’s 86 public schools will have a new principal this year. Three are new to the division, 11 are reassignments. Find out who's got a new leader:

Daniel Smith has been named the head of Kellam High School, replacing Bruce Biehl, who retired after two decades at the school. Smith was previously the top administrator at Princess Anne High School.


Cheryl Askew is the new principal of Landstown High School, replacing Brian Matney, who was moved to the central office. Askew last served as principal of Ocean Lakes High School.

Funding cuts, tuition hikes will hit Virginia hard (Op-Ed)
The News Virginian
August 8, 2016

State funding cuts for higher education have increased tuition and mandatory fees at Virginia's public universities, making college less affordable, and jeopardizing the ability of many students to receive the college education that is key to their long-term financial success and essential to growing Virginia's economy.

Per-pupil state support for higher education in Virginia is down 22.5 percent between fiscal years 2008 and 2016, when adjusted for inflation. This puts Virginia in the top third of states in the country with the most severe per-student state investment. This continued reduction of state support across the country is not only driving up tuition, but also eroding educational quality by reducing faculty numbers and course offerings.

Alarmingly, Virginia's two-year colleges and 10 out of 15 of Virginia's four-year institutions have seen a reduction of more than 20 percent per pupil spending from the state, when adjusted for inflation.

Recent National Education News
Cost reaches $545K for Nevada in education savings account challenge
Las Vegas Review-Journal
August 9, 2016

Nevada taxpayers will spend more than half a million dollars to defend the state’s contested education savings account program.

The total price tag reached $545,000 on Tuesday as the state Board of Examiners voted 2-0 to approve a $125,000 extension to a contract with the out-of-state law firm Bancroft PLLC, led by former U.S. Solicitor General Paul Clement.

Since October, Clement has assisted the state attorney general’s office in crafting its defense of Senate Bill 302, which authorizes a voucher-style program for parents to spend per-pupil state funds on private school tuition.

State Lawmakers Should Look Abroad for Best Education Practices
U.S. News & World Report
August 9, 2016

A bipartisan group of state lawmakers urged their colleagues in state capitols across the country to take advantage of the new federal education law, the Every Student Succeeds Act, to adopt some of the best practices from successful education systems around the world in order to give their own K-12 systems a much-needed facelift.

As outlined in a new report released Tuesday during the National Conference of State Legislators’ annual conference, the group of 28 state lawmakers spent the last two years visiting and studying the education policies of some of the best education systems in the world, including Canada, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong, Japan, Poland, Shanghai, Singapore and Taiwan.

The education hot zones are just a few of the countries that bested the U.S. on the Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, an international education assessment that compares the math, reading and science ability of 15-year-old students in of 65 countries.

Obama administration accused of trying to dictate education policy to states — again
Washington Post
August 9, 2016

The U.S. Education Department solicited public comment on draft regulations it has created for states to implement the school “accountability” and data reporting provisions of the new Every Student Succeeds Act — and, boy, did it get feedback, some of it scathing.

When Education Secretary John B. King Jr. announced the proposed rules in May, he said they were designed to “give states the opportunity to work all of their stakeholders … to protect all students’ right to a high-quality education,” and that they “give educators room to reclaim for all of their students the joy and promise of a well-rounded educational experience.”

King was referring to the mess created by No Child Left Behind, the K-12 education law that ESSA was passed last December to replace. NCLB, with accountability goals literally impossible to meet, had led to a severe narrowing of the curriculum and an over-emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing. Congress finally replaced No Child Left Behind — eight years late — because of NCLB’s flaws and because of criticism from across the political spectrum that the Obama administration had become too prescriptive and heavy-handed in education policy.



Should Public Universities Focus on Attracting Top Students or Increasing Affordability?

That question is one way to summarize the tension public colleges and universities feel in a recurring debate in the commonwealth - one that surfaced again in recent op-eds in the Washington Post and the Richmond Times-Dispatch by former rector of the University of Virginia Board of Visitors Helen Dragas.   Dragas wrote that  UVA had created a "slush fund" with a value greater than $2 billion for other initiatives that she felt should have been used to lower tuition for students.

The column produced a response from William H. Goodwin Jr., the current rector of the UVA board of visitors.  He wrote that the Strategic Investment Fund "could allocate as much as $100 million annually for initiatives with the highest promise to significantly improve the university and enhance quality and access for students."

The op-eds produced significant news coverage and requests for more information on its development from Virginia lawmakers.  

In the midst of this debate, we thought it would be interesting to ask where Virginia falls among the states in the level of indebtedness of its graduating students.  We pulled publicly posted data from The Institute for College Access & Success (ICAS) and visualized the data several different ways using Tableau Public.  ICAS also has a printable report on the debt load of the 2014 graduating class.

First, we looked at the average debt for a graduating student in 2014.  

Average amount of debt for graduating student in 2014  ( Click here for interactive graphic)
Dollar amount shown is average amount of debt for a graduating student in that state. Color shows in which relative quartile of the range the state falls. North Dakota does not have data available. Data from The Institute for College Access & Success - available at http://ticas.org/posd/map-state-data-2015#


What is immediately striking is that the debt load is significantly lower in the Southwest than it is in the Northeast and Midwest.  Utah shows the lowest average debt level ($18,921) while Delaware ($33,808) and New Hampshire show the highest ($33,410) followed closely by Pennsylvania.  Virginia falls in the middle range of states with an average debt load of $26,432.

Debt loads could be shifting at different rates though, so we also looked at the data compiled by ICAS to determine a percentage change in average debt loads for graduating students, comparing 2004 to 2014. 

Growth Rate of average graduating student debt 2004-2014. ( Click here for interactive map)   
  

Percent reported is growth over 10 years in average debt amount for graduating student from 2004 to 2014. Color shows in which quartile the state falls relative to other states - for example dark green is in the lowest 25% of the observed growth rates, dark red in the top quartile. Data from The Institute for College Access & Success - available at http://ticas.org/posd/map-state-data-2015#









When looking at the growth rate of student debt levels at the point of graduation, several states stand out - Maryland and Delaware saw the highest rates of growth at 118% and 129% respectively.  Again, the states in the Southwest saw relatively modest rates of growth, though the lowest growth was in Idaho at 17%.  Virginia, at a growth rate of 67%, is also in the middle of the pack.

Finally, we thought it would be interesting to incorporate another data point for each state compiled by ICAS - the percentage of students who have some level of debt - and graph that against the average debt load to see if there is a general trend.  Indeed there is.  With some variance, those states with higher average debt also have a higher percentage of students with any level of debt.  

Relationship of average debt level to percentage of students graduating with some level of debt.  (Click here for interactive map)

Chart graphs average amount of debt for a graduating student in 2014 against the percentage of graduating students who have some level of debt. Color shows the 10 year change in average debt amount from 2004 to 2014. Data from The Institute for College Access & Success - available at http://ticas.org/posd/map-state-data-2015#

What we can see from this visualization is that Virginia sits squarely in the middle once again.  Hawaii, though still with a relatively low percentage of students graduating with debt, stands out as the only "red" shaded state in the bottom left quadrant.  This means they have seen the average amount of debt for graduating students increase significantly in the past 10 years (82% in fact).  Delaware has the highest average amount of debt for its graduates and has seen the average increase significantly as well (129%) but still has a smaller percentage of students graduating with debt than many other states.  

If you're interested in exploring more detailed data on Virginia student debt, the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV) has a helpful report titled " Who borrows and how much do they borrow?" They also have a nice interactive tool that allows you to visualize median debt at the time of graduation, whether for a particular institution or a set of institutions like all public 4-year schools.  

The op-ed by Dragas, written just days after she ended her term on UVA's board of visitors and therefore became free of commitments by board members to not comment publicly on internal deliberations, also raises interesting free-speech questions.  

Though the parameters for faculty are somewhat different than appointed members of a board of visitors, we thought sharing an excerpt from our March 2016 Education Law newsletter might be helpful.  The newsletter, written by legal expert Kathleen Conn, reviews the key rulings on free-speech in academic settings and summarized implications for administrators seeking to balance respect for free speech with interests for civil discourse on campuses.   

We hope you have a great week!

 

Sincerely,
CEPI
Education Law Newsletter - Regulating Professors' Online Speech:  Academic Freedom or "Incivility"

Excerpted from the March 2016 edition of CEPI's Education Law Newsletter, written by noted legal scholar Kathleen Conn, Of Counsel with the Education Law Group of King, Spry, Herman, Freund & Faul, LLC in Bethlehem, PA.  Read the full newsletter on our website.

Introduction
The then-Chancellor of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Phyllis Wise, polarized the higher education community in August 2014 when she orchestrated the rescinding of the tenure track position offered to Steven Salaita by the Department of American Indian Studies nine months before. Wise accused Salaita of incivility in his tweets criticizing Israel’s shelling of Palestine and the resultant killing of innocent Palestinian children. A number of Salaita’s hundreds of tweets that summer were crude and vulgar, liberally spiced with curses condemning President Obama and any others who supported him or the state of Israel. A significant number of major donors to the university had threatened to withhold support if Salaita were allowed to join the faculty, but many university departments and other groups animatedly supported Salaita’s right to First Amendment freedom of speech and academic freedom. The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) censured the university.

Salaita mounted two lawsuits against the university’s administration and John Doe donors, one to force the university to release emails and other documents relevant to his case, and the other alleging substantive violations of his constitutional rights. Revelations incident to the lawsuits triggered the resignation of Chancellor Wise and a shuffling of university administration. Salaita ultimately agreed to a settlement amounting to $875,000, of which, $275,000 went to his lawyers. Salaita has moved on, and he now teaches in Beirut and continues to publish a voluminous number of tweets. The controversy that swirled around Salaita’s job loss has apparently waned, but the questions that were raised have not been put to rest. What are the free speech rights of professors at public colleges and universities when they “speak” online? Does the right of academic freedom protect professors’ online speech? And what role should “civility” play in evaluating the speech and expression of higher education faculty? Without a court decision in the Salaita case, no new judicial precedent has been established. However, a jurisprudence relating to academic freedom and professors’ First Amendment speech rights has existed for at least three generations.

Academic Freedom or Employer Regulation: Judicial Pronouncements
The U.S. Supreme Court has long championed academic freedom in public colleges and universities. In Sweezy v. New Hampshire, Chief Justice Earl Warren authored the often-quoted paean to academic freedom stating that, “The essentiality of freedom in the community of American universities is almost self-evident . . . To impose any strait jacket upon the intellectual leaders in our colleges and universities would imperil the future of our Nation . . . .”

Ten years later, in Keyishian v. Board of Regents, Justice Brennan reaffirmed the Court’s support for academic freedom, stating forcefully:

Our Nation is deeply committed to safeguarding academic freedom, which is of transcendent value to all of us and not merely to the teachers concerned. That freedom is therefore a special concern of the First Amendment, which does not tolerate laws that cast a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom.

However, the Court’s First Amendment jurisprudence has also recognized that free speech may have to yield in the face of more practical concerns. Public universities are not only academic bastions; they are also businesses, run by various administrators and Boards of Trustees who employ faculty and staff members. Alongside its pronouncements on the pre-eminence of academic freedom and the First Amendment rights of professors, the Supreme Court has also upheld the right of the state as employer to regulate the speech of its employees. In a trilogy of decisions from 1968 to 1983, roughly paralleling in time the Court’s development of its student speech jurisprudence, the Court fashioned a comprehensive analysis by which lower courts might strike a balance between the rights of public employees to freedom of speech and expression and the rights of the state as employer to regulate employee speech.

__________________________________________

Read the rest of the newletter on our website