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Articles of Interest
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State & Local Policy
Northern Virginia Community College shares no-textbook-cost degrees
Eduation Dive
November 30, 2015
Tidewater Community College's Z-Degree program in business administration was billed as the nation's first textbook-free degree program. Northern Virginia Community College’s Extended Learning Institute has moved forward to make the courses more easily accessible to other schools. They were already available by request, but the joint announcement with Lumen Learning could speed adoption of OER courses more generally.
According to the Virginia Community College System, which encompases both Tidewater and Northern Virginia, Tidewater’s Z-Degree courses will also be released, along with more than 100 courses in the Zx23 Project. The system’s ed tech team expects 2016 to bring a “dramatic increase in publicly available, high-quality OER courses.”
SOL Innovation Committee charts a new education road map
The News Virginian
November 30, 2015
Legislators, educators and others engaged in public policy agree that Virginia's Standards of Learning need retooling after nearly two decades of existence.
But the question is, what direction to take the education accountability system. There is a renewed emphasis on making students ready for the workforce. And there is no longer a conventional belief that students should all seek expensive four-year college degrees. The college degrees do not necessarily lead to career employment.
For the past 18 months, a Standards of Learning Innovation Committee that includes educators, legislators, Virginia's secretary of education and an attorney, has grappled with how to build on the SOL system.
The committee recently released a second round of recommendations to Gov. Terry McAuliffe that includes more detail on providing alternate assessments for students from elementary to high school, including providing a writing component in core subject areas at all levels.
There is also a redesign of Virginia high schools. The options for the latter portion of high school include earning a workplace credential, successful completion of an apprenticeship and/or internship, completion of dual enrollment or AP courses, and finishing the high school program and completing a locally scored portfolio assessment.
Undocumented students gain in-state tuition benefits in Virginia
CBS 6
November 25, 2015
Recent policy changes at the national and state level have opened the door for undocumented students to be eligible for in-state tuition. According to the State Council of Higher Education in Virginia, there were 81 undocumented students who received in-state tuition benefits and the number is expected to increase in the years to come.
When President Barack Obama implemented the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals policy, it changed Lemus’ life. He had previously fought as an activist for the passing of the DREAM Act. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services website defines DACA as a renewable status that legally grants deferment from the risk of being deported, but does not grant lawful status as a citizen. The status is valid for two years at a time.
In 2014, Lemus and other students in Virginia gained the option to pay in-state tuition after Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring released an opinion granting this to those who qualify under DACA for at least a year.
Rising Enrollment In Northern Virginia Schools Outpaces Neighboring Districts
WAMU 88.5
November 30, 2015
Across our region, schools are bursting at the seams as student enrollment numbers increase. But the last decade has seen uneven growth across the Washington region, as Northern Virginia school districts increase rapidly while neighboring jurisdictions in Maryland keep pace with the rate of population growth.
The most dramatic growth has been in Loudoun County, where enrollment has increased a mind-boggling 67 percent over the last decade. That's far outpacing the rate of population growth in Loudoun over the last decade, which was 43 percent.
Federal Policy
How schools would be judged under ‘Every Student Succeeds,’ the new No Child Left Behind
The Washington Post
November 30, 2015
Federal lawmakers on Monday released the final text of a compromise bill to rewrite No Child Left Behind, including closely watched language outlining how the nation’s K-12 schools would be judged — and how struggling schools would be improved — if the legislation passes.
The bill, dubbed the Every Student Succeeds Act, would largely shift authority from the federal government to states and districts, giving local officials far more power to define what it means for a school to be successful and to decide how and when to intervene in schools that persistently fail to live up to expectations.
It attempts to thread the needle between conservatives who want to shrink the federal government’s footprint in education and civil rights advocates who worry that some states, left to their own devices, will obfuscate or ignore the poor performance of schools serving low-income and minority students.
Specifically, under the Every Student Succeeds Act:
- The testing regime remains in place. States would still be required, as they are now, to test students annually in math and reading in grades 3 through 8 and once in high school, and publicly report the scores according to race, income, ethnicity, disability and whether students are English-language learners.
- Test scores still matter, but how much is up to the states. States would be charged with designing systems for judging schools. Each system would have to include measures of academic progress, including test scores, graduation rates and (for non-native English speakers) English language acquisition. But it would also have to include a measure of school climate, such as student engagement or access to advanced courses. All of the academic indicators together must count for “much” more than the non-academic factor, but the definition of “much” is not clear.
Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
November 30, 2015
New tenure policies under consideration for faculty members across the University of Wisconsin System fail to meet professional standards for academia and jeopardize the system's reputation, according to faculty leaders at three campuses.
The Legislature last summer eliminated tenure from state law — something faculty had considered ironclad — and directed the governor-appointed Board of Regents to establish its own tenure policy.
A special task force appointed by the board is meeting Monday to consider a draft policy with a key directive: It must align with broad layoff provisions legislators inserted into state law as part of the biennial budget. The provisions give the UW System flexibility to dismiss tenured faculty in the midst of tight budgets and fast-changing workforce needs.
The draft policies "separate faculty from their primary responsibility for educational concerns," says a letter sent late last week to the UW System Tenure Policy Task Force by chapter presidents of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) at UW-Madison, UW-Milwaukee and UW-Whitewater.
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How are the degrees awarded by Virginia colleges distributed by locality?
This week as we return from Thanksgiving break, our newsletter takes a look at something for which many Virginians are grateful - a completed college degree - and asks how the degrees granted by Virginia institutions are distributed across counties.
We're interested in this question in part because of one of our upcoming Commonwealth Education Poll questions. In January we'll be reporting the responses of a representative sample of the Virginia population to this question:
How much do you think Virginia’s public colleges and universities contribute to economic development in your area? [
A great deal, Quite a lot, Not much, Not at all]
A college degree is a powerful economic credential both for an individual (whose earning power is increased significantly) and for the communities in which college graduates live (companies considering a new location for expansion often want to know about the educational profile of a locality). While universities are often seen as economic drivers in their own local area, they also serve the entire state, especially public institutions that charge a lower rate of tuition for in-state students than others.
Increasing the number of college grads has been a consistent and bi-partisan policy initiative highlighted by the "Top Jobs 2021" legislation proposed by Governor McDonnell and enacted by the General Assembly in 2011. The headline goal of the legislation was to increase the number of college grads by 100,000 by 2025. Another popular call for policy-makers has been to increase the number of degrees awarded in STEMH (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathmatics and Health) professions. The State Council on Higher Education in Virginia reported substantial progress toward that goal
in January 2015 but sounded a note of caution as degree completion slowed in 2013-14 compared to 2011-12.
While the state level picture is interesting, we also wondered how localities fared in increasing the number of graduates from their jurisdiction in the first three years after the Top Jobs legislation was enacted. We looked at data that aggregates reports from all Virginia colleges and universities to calculate the number of degrees (associate, bachelor and graduate) awarded to students by their locality of origin (e.g. a student who applied to enter the school from an address in Roanoke City would be assigned to the city when they receive their degree, regardless of where they go from there). The same data can be accessed from the
SCHEV website.
Below is a first visualization (
click on it to view it interactively) which gives a sense of how the overall number of degrees are distributed around the state - of course the larger localities contribute larger numbers of graduates but the fact that 13.5% of all degrees awarded in the state schools (public and private) were awarded to persons originating from Fairfax County is striking. (The shading here indicates the percentage of those degrees that are in a STEMH field.)
But we're more interested in how the number of degrees has changed since the Top Jobs legislation was enacted. The first map below shows the change in the number of degrees awarded while shading the locality for the percent change. Of course these numbers do not account for underlying population change, but they still provide a picture of where the number of graduates has been increasing.
The bottom map shows a different variation, this time providing circles on a locality based on the number of STEMH degrees that were awarded to people hailing from that locality. The shade of the circles (and the percentage labels) are then based on the change in the share of STEMH degrees out of all degrees for that locality. For example, the share of Fauquier County residents awarded a STEMH degree was 23.8% in 2010-11 but rose to 29.2% in 2013-14, so there was a 5.4% change in the share of degrees that were STEMH.
Several other visualizations are available for interactive exploration
here. If you're curious what is happening in your county or city, please check it out.
This week in our Education Law section, we share another excerpt from our October 2015 Education Law newsletter which looked at Cyber-bullying on college campuses. Again this year our poll will ask
"Based on what you know, how safe are COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES in Virginia?"
Finally in
our poll snapshot, we review the results of one of our higher education questions from 2015 - how people assess the quality of four-year, community college and internet-based college programs. We'll be asking a slightly different question in our 2016 poll, namely:
With the cost of tuition increasing some students are following a 2+2 plan – they attend a community college for two years before transferring to a four year school for their final two years. Even if you do not currently have kids, how much would you favor or oppose your child spending two years at a community college before completing a four year degree at another university?
If you're interested in these results, keep an eye on this newsletter and our website in January as we release the poll.
We hope you have a great first week of December!
Sincerely,
CEPI
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Poll Snapshot: Quality of four-year colleges vs. community college.
Gallup released a poll this past summer showing that Americans generally consider the quality of community colleges to be on par with four-year colleges. A smaller percentage thought the same about internet-based college programs.
Our own poll of Virginians in January showed fairly similar perceptions, though Virginians had somewhat higher opinions of the quality of eductional options accross the board. Four year colleges and universities were judged to provide good or excellent quality by 80% of respondents; community colleges by 78% and internet-based programs by 43%.
(To read the full results of the poll, visit our
website. Question 21 is cited above - topline results are on page 30 of the 2015 poll with demographic breakouts on page 64-66.)
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Cyberbullying in Higher Education: Not Just Kid Stuff Anymore
Excerpted from from Kathleen Conn's
October 2015 Education Law Newsletter.
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Direct and Indirect Student-on-Student Cyberbullying
As its names imply, direct cyberbullying occurs when the target of the cyberbullying is specifically addressed in the communication. However, a cyberbullying message can be communicated in a way that it reaches a broad audience, perhaps even those unintended by the creator of the message. For example, postings can be uploaded to a publicly accessible Facebook account, or a generalized ranting which is actually a cyberbullying communication can be “tweeted,” and thus made available to a limitless, immediate audience. Web postings available to third parties can also be construed as a cyberbullying message by someone mentioned in the content of the posting. Such web postings were the subject of litigation between a sophomore student at the University of Delaware and his university (Murakowski v. University of Delaware, 2008).
Murakowski v. University of Delaware
Maciej Murakowski was disciplined by the University of Delaware for posting allegedly threatening messages on a website hosted on the university’s server. Murakowski sued the university, claiming violations of his First Amendment rights to freedom of speech and of his Fourteenth Amendment rights to due process. The court took judicial notice of the violent and misogynous nature of his postings, including instructions on how to skin a live cat, and how to kidnap, rape, and murder young women. Several female classmates reported that they were afraid of Murakowski and one woman was so fearful that she requested to absent herself from a class in which Murakowski was enrolled. Murakowski defended his right to post what he said were “humor pieces” meant to shock. However, the university ordered him to undergo psychological testing and to move out of his campus dormitory.
The court applied the trilogy of student speech cases from the K-12 setting, especially the Tinker v. Des Moines (1969) and the Lovell v. Poway (1996) rulings to decide that (1) Murakowski’s postings did not cause material disruption of school operations nor significantly and adversely impact the greater college community, and (2) his essays were not “true threats.” Therefore, the court ruled that the young man’s speech was protected by the First Amendment, and awarded nominal damages. The court, however, citing Goss v. Lopez (1975), another decision from the K-12 context, ruled that the university had provided due process, and dismissed Murakowski’s Fourteenth Amendment claim.
Keefe v. Adams
In a more recent decision , Keefe v. Adams (2014) the issue of indirect cyberbullying arose when a student in a Minnesota state college nursing program was removed from the program after students complained about his posting allegedly threatening and insulting comments on his Facebook page. Craig Keefe complained on Facebook about a change in an assignment, stating there was “not enough whiskey to control that anger.” He also posted that he would take an electric pencil sharpener and “give someone a hemopneumothorax with it before long.” (A hemopneumothorax is a punctured lung, a critical injury.) He also called a classmate a “stupid bitch” and posted other profanities. When confronted by college administrators and removed from the program, he sued, claiming denial of his freedom of speech and right to due process. He contended that college administrators had no right to judge his speech, which was made outside the college setting. Noting the application of the First Amendment in the school setting, the court nevertheless upheld Keefe’s removal from the program based on the fact that his behavior was unbecoming of the nursing profession and that his postings transgressed professional boundaries. On August 28, 2014, Keefe filed an appeal in the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals, which is pending.
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