Killing Pell Grants to Save Them?

Basketball Buddy and Education Secretary Arne Duncan went before the Senate Appropriations Committee this week to talk about the increased funding that the Department of Education has requested in next year's budget. You can read all about it here.

One part of the discussion with Alabama Senator Richard Shelby caught my eye. No, it wasn't the criticism of Race to the Top,which certainly is a flawed program. It was the discussion of Pell Grants, which are grants of federal money to help economically disadvantaged students afford college and break out of the cycle of poverty.

Pell Grants, at risk in the ongoing debt-ceiling negotiations, figured prominently in the conversation. Duncan and Harkin said that cuts to the program have already been made, but expanding its funding its necessary. Increasing poverty and the recession have created greater demand for Pell Grants, making them key to eliminating college entrance barriers among underprivileged students.

"If we scale back on Pell access, we'll simply have a lot less people going to college," Duncan said.

The proposed spending plan calls for a $5.6 billion discretionary spending increase in Pell Grants.

Shelby had harsh words for Pell Grants' increasing cost to government, which he said has doubled since 2008.

"We are on the brink of breaking our commitment to students who wish to attend college because the Pell Grant program is on a fiscally unsustainable path," Shelby said. He said that new laws that expanded eligibility coupled with the recession made the program more costly. "We cannot continue to throw money at this problem," he said.

When Harkin repeated his maxim that cutting Pell funding would be "like turning a chainsaw on yourself," Shelby responded that no policymakers "want to chainsaw any program that's going to sustain our education system."

But, he argued, the reality of the country's financial situation means "we're all taking a chainsaw to our budgets right now."

I don't know, Senator Shelby, I think the last thing to do to demonstrate our commitment to students who wish to attend college is to gut or kill a program designed to make that possible.

Although I grew up in a working class home, I did not qualify for Pell Grants by basically "thismuch" but I was able to cobble together a great education through scholarships, loans and work-study funds. But Pell Grants serve a growing population-- from 1999 to 2008, the number of high poverty public schools increased from 12 to 17 percent of all US public schools, and the number of poor students increased. Since that time the real effects of the current recession has really kicked in, so I am afraid that those numbers are probably higher by now. Students who graduate from these schools will need a substantial amount of financial support in order to be able to afford college, especially given that state funding cuts to post-secondary schools has merely accelerated the already dizzying yearly increases that colleges have made since the 1980s.That is a reality that Senator Shelby apparently does not want to face as to why the funding for the program has been-- and should continue to-- increase.

College graduates earn more on average than high school graduates. Our society receives a return on its investment hundreds of times over when it invests in a better educated work force-- and helps create a more stable democracy and just society, as well. Funding for college education especially is an investment in our future.

Cutting funding to Pell Grants is crazy.

When "what's best for the kids" ISN'T.

Apparently our principal has been going to the movies lately, because she has been doing her best impersonation of Helena Bonham Carter (whom I already found icky) in her role as the Red Queen in Alice in Wonderland.

With a preremptory wave of her hand, the Red Queen has declared that "doing what is best for the kids" means killing the AP program in our district and replacing it with college credit classes through local universities. The reason why is that "not every kid passes the AP exams."

Well, of course not. If every kid passed them, they wouldn't be considered to be valuable assessments. This is a concept that too many people who make their living talking about education seem to completely misunderstand.

First of all, our district has an open enrollment policy for AP classes, at least for the ones which I teach. I have one student now whom I have recommended to be moved to a regular class for 7 months now due to attendance issues, and yet there's his name on my roster-- next to a failing grade-- every single day. So if you are going to make passing the tests the criterion for determining a program's value, perhaps you should empower teachers to save students who are not excelling to be more appropriately placed.

Now in reality, I don't mind open enrollment. If a kid wants to take my class, I'm more than happy to let him or her try. I've had kids, classic underachievers, who earned Ds in my class and yet were still happy with the experience, and since they and their parents were satisfied, and I couldn't convince them to try harder, that was that. They said they enjoyed the discussion, or they wanted to be with their friends, or whatever, but I certainly didn't try to kick them out of my class in a short-sighted effort to boost test scores. The scores that my students earn are THEIRS, not mine. But to get back to this topic-- if you're suddenly going to make passing the national exams your measure of value, then we teachers should be able to weed out those who are weaker. Sounds like the law of the jungle, but there it is.

Furthermore, nationwide there are hundreds of thousands of kids who take AP tests and do not pass them. Is our very average high school supposed to somehow bust the curve-- and AP scores are curved to represent a certain score distribution each year, make no mistake about that-- just to justify the value of the AP program? Once again, though, here's reality: for the amount of work I am allowed to assign, and the average amount of dedication my students show when a few of them won't give up working 40 hours a week outside of school or whatnot, my students score nicely above the national average on the test in my subject area. However, "above the average" certainly doesn't mean "every kid passes." Yep, for the Red Queen, "better than most" is still not good enough. Gee, why does that sound familiar? Apparently, someone's been drinking the NCLB kool-aid.

Then there's the concept that every kid would pass college credit courses. Traditionally, students have passed college credit classes because.... now pay attention... they have certainly not been taught as college classes. They have not been taught up to college standards. Which is why they were at once both immensely popular with students and looked at askance by the colleges which these students eventually attend. College credits earned through these dual enrollment classes are not as transferable as one might imagine due to the wildly variant quality of standards that vary from high school to high school and from teacher to teacher. At our school, teachers teaching college credit classes were certainly ...encouraged... to keep the classes as easy as possible by administrators who don't want the parents screaming about their kid "being failed by Ms. Mean Teacher" even if they refuse to do the work or study.

Now, dual enrollment college credit classes are ENORMOUSLY popular with the universities that sponsor them. Why? Because the high school teachers teaching these classes are not compensated for being adjunct instructors through these programs. So that means we get to do all of the paperwork required of faculty at these institutions with the only compensation for this extra work and responsibility being the "respect" that the term "adjunct instructor" provides. And anyone in higher academe can tell you-- that would be less than zero. And yet, Local U will charge each one of my students $200 a semester for zero investment upon that university's part. They don't provide texts, they don't provide materials, the kids don't use the college facilities, and they don't compensate their servants-- I mean, their instructors. Now if those students go on to attend Local U, that school will miss out on the full tuition for those courses for which the students received credit-- but that actually doesn't happen as often as you might think. It's a cash cow! And I'm the one chewing the cud, as the teacher.

Yes, I am already an adjunct instructor. And 38% of my students last semester failed the elective course that I taught. Flat out refused to do the papers, but wouldn't drop the class either and would not come for help. Why? Because they were allowed to enroll even though they did not meet the minimum requirements of prior grade point average to take the class. One counselor baldly stated that she enrolled a student with a GPA of less than 1.0 in my class because she couldn't put him anywhere else. So if we're hoping for 100% of students to earn a credential of college credit, no matter how hollow or tarnished, this is not the way to do it.

So it has been decreed that we are going back to college credit without the solicitation of any faculty imput. Since these will probably be easier than the AP classes, our AP program will probably be knocked on the ropes. Kids still will not be learning as much as they should. And, on a personal note, since I am one of the few qualified to teach these classes, I will see the AP program that I have worked so hard to build up over all these years be gutted, and I will be rewarded with at least six different "preps" each year. And if I thought this would really be good for the kids, I wouldn't mind. No really-- I am more gung-ho than most when it comes to sacrificing for the good of the kids.

But, if I could actually get the attention of my redoubtable Queen, here's one last thing I would ask her to consider. Happy teachers do a better job than unhappy teachers. Teachers value strong leaders who support them more than pay increases. And with this, "Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead" attitude, you are alienating the last group of people in the world that you should if you want to look successful in YOUR career. You may have heard of the results from the recent Gates Foundation survey of 40,000 educators-- of which I was one:

While higher salaries are important, teachers say they are less important than a supportive leader. Fewer than half of teachers (45%) say higher salaries are absolutely essential for retaining good teachers. More teachers say it is absolutely essential to have supportive leadership (68%), time to collaborate (54%), and quality curriculum (49%).

Right now, I'm batting 0 for 3 in that list of priorities.

To be blunt, the teachers who have worked the hardest for the students, and who have been the most flexible in issues of scheduling and providing opportunities for students, should be the LAST people whose lives you would make into a living hell. All for the sake of making it easier-- NOT better-- for the kids.

Off with our heads!!!!

And those of us with teenagers just felt the nausea rise

Tuition keeps on out-stripping inflation.

Why has college tuition been rising so high and fast? Will college costs ever drop back to more affordable levels?

Those questions have been frustrating parents and students for years. A new report provides some surprising answers that will, unfortunately, probably only frustrate and anger them even more. At public colleges, tuition has generally been driven up by rising spending on administrators, student support services, and the need to make up for reductions in government subsidies, according to a report issued by the Delta Cost Project, a nonprofit based in Washington, D.C.

In some cases, such as at community colleges (which educate about half of the nation's college students), tuition has risen while spending on classroom instruction has actually fallen. At public colleges especially, the current economic troubles will likely only accelerate the trend of rising prices and classroom cutbacks, says Jane Wellman, the author of the report. After analyzing income and spending statistics that nearly 2,000 colleges reported to the federal government, Wellman concludes: "Students are paying more and, arguably, getting less in the classroom." (Watch video)

Among the more surprising findings:

--The main reason tuition has been rising faster than college costs is that colleges had to make up for reductions in the per-student subsidy state taxpayers sent colleges. In 2006, the last year for which Wellman had data, state taxpayers sent $7,078 per student to the big public research universities. That's $1,270 less (after accounting for inflation) than they sent in 2002.

--Public universities have been reining in overall spending per student in recent years. Flagship public universities' spending per student has risen from about $12,400 in 1995 to $13,800 in 2006 after accounting for inflation. But since 2002, spending at public colleges has generally not exceeded inflation.

--Increases in spending were driven mostly by higher administration, maintenance, and student services costs. Public universities spent almost $4,000 per student per year on administration, support, and maintenance in 2006, up more than 13 percent, in real terms over 1995. And they spent another $1,200 a year on services such as counseling, which was up 23 percent. Meanwhile, they spent about $8,700 a year on classroom instruction for each student, up about 9 percent.

--Big private universities, powered by tuition and endowment increases, have increased spending dramatically while public schools have languished. Total educational spending per student at private research universities has jumped by almost 10 percent since 2002 to more than $33,000. During that same period, public university total spending was comparatively flat and totaled less than $14,000 a year.

That growing gap between rich schools and poor schools worries observers like Wellman. The cost of attending a public university, even after subtracting out aid and inflation, rose more than 15 percent in the last five years, according to the College Board. But almost all of the recent price increases at public universities are "backfilling for cuts in state funds," Wellman says.

Some college presidents say the report shows they haven't been raising prices irresponsibly.

"Virginia Tech" explained David Hodge, president of Miami University of Ohio. "Everybody expects us to do a lot more security. Students are coming with more physical disabilities and emotional needs. There are greater expectations for career services," he says. And that kind of administrative and support spending "is a really good investment. It helps the students."

In addition, public schools tend to serve many low-income students and minority students who need more remedial classes and extra counseling services than better-prepared students who attend elite private universities, says F. King Alexander, president of California State University--Long Beach.

One of the reasons that Duke University costs about $51,000 a year is that the elite schools are in a bidding war for top faculty and better services for students, says college spokesman Michael Schoenfeld. In addition, competition for the best students forces schools to offer bigger and bigger scholarships, which means few students actually pay the full sticker price, he notes. Duke's record-breaking flood of applications for the next academic year shows there's still plenty of demand for what private universities offer, he says.

But as more and more states facing budget crises consider further subsidy cuts and tuition hikes for public schools, parents and students are increasingly objecting to price increases for any reason. "Enough is enough," says James Boyle, president of the College Parents of America. A tsunami of applications at lower cost schools such as the California State University campuses shows that students and parents are voting with their feet. "The changing market for higher ed will cause colleges to hold down their expenses and state legislators to increase their subsidies," Boyle predicts.

I personally think Boyke is kidding himself. We haven't seen tuition hold steady in the last thrirty years, regardless of the economic exigencies.

So if tuition increases cause colleges to increase scholarships, why do they continue in this vicious cycle?

I also know that a lot of it has to do with all the amenities colleges feel they have to offer to today's students, most of whom have never shared anything much less a room, in their brief little lives. My own beloved alma mater now has a top of the line set of athletic facilities, a huge, shiny student union building, and a fabulous new basketball arena. When I attended TU, we had to go downtown to the Convention Center for basketball games, and the student union building had a bookstore the size of my current bedroom, just about. I'm not jealous -- good for them!-- but you know that tuition has had to rise to allow this kind of slew of building projects. And I just don't think a working class kid today would be able to afford it, which is a real shame.