higher education

As the President prepares to speak to the nation Thursday regarding the need for comprehensive immigration reform, NAFSA: Association of International Educators has launched a campaign called "Reaching for a DREAM: Support a Path of Hope for Undocumented Students."

The campaign calls on as many people as possible to contact Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano and ask her to make "deferred action" the formal policy for DREAM Act-eligible international students. If "deferred action," now only instituted on an ad hoc basis, was to become formal policy, students would be able to stay in the United States to pursue their studies without fear of deportation while Congress debates the DREAM Act.

At Connecting Our World, NAFSA's online community in support of international education, advocates can send a message directly to the Secretary, tweet about the campaign, and share their story with the community.

Props to NAFSA for launching this campaign. Here's to hoping that Congress gets this thing done.

Great video from Chairman George Miller’s committee, the Education and Labor Committee, reminding the American people that his party has made college more affordable in multiple ways this Congress.

At the NAFSA: Association of International Educators Annual Conference and Expo this week in Kansas City, Missouri, members and the board of directors approved a resolution formally opposing SB1070, Arizona's unjust immigration legislation.

NAFSA's own Everett Egginton, a past president, describes the resolution in a blog post at the NAFSA website:

The resolution calls for the immediate repeal of anti-immigrant legislation by the State of Arizona urges other states to refrain from passing similar measures; asks the U.S. Congress to act quickly to enact comprehensive immigration reform; and resolves the association to not hold national and regional meetings in the State of Arizona until the situation is rectified.

[...]

Of course there is great meaning in this resolution for me at personal level as well, related to where I live, work, and seek personal satisfaction in my life. New Mexico, one of Arizona’s neighbors, is a majority-Hispanic state. But it’s not only the Hispanics in New Mexico that are hurt and embarrassed by this legislation; the hurt and embarrassment are felt across the entire state. As such, we as New Mexicans are concerned with the burdens of this legislation on our Arizona colleagues...

As an employee working in higher education (and a student studying it), I am encouraged to see higher education groups mobilizing on this issue. Unfortunately, those opposed to the legislation are in the minority nationally. This makes standing up and speaking out against this legislation even more paramount. Props to NAFSA for taking a stand. Hopefully similar groups follow its lead.

UPDATE: NAFSA has also launched an advocacy campaign here. (You can automatically tweet a message or post it to your Facebook status, and also write a letter to your governor asking that they take a stand against the Arizona law.)

Matt Bai wrote an interesting piece in the Times last week, noting how far we've come in our various debates since the 1960s, while acknowledging that, in some ways, we have not come far at all. Bai used the controversies surrounding Rand Paul and Richard Blumenthal to make his case.

Why then, to quote the ubiquitous Bono, is our political debate so stuck in a moment it cannot get out of? In part, it is probably because so many of the Americans most engaged in politics — as well as those who run campaigns and comment endlessly on them — are old enough to remember Altamont. It is your classic self-fulfilling prophecy: the more the ’60s generation dominates the political discourse, the less that discourse engages younger voters, and the longer the boomers hold sway over our politics.

On a deeper level, though, this all probably has as much to do with our basic human tendency toward moral clarity. As much as conservatives may view the decade as the crucible of moral relativism and the beginning of a breakdown in established social order, there remains something powerfully attractive about the binary, simplistic nature of it all, the idea that one could easily distinguish whether he was for war or against, in favor of equality or opposed.

By contrast, war today seems more a question of degrees and limits, while equality seems less about the laws of the land than about disparities in economic and educational opportunities that are subtler and harder to address. The choices of our moment are not nearly so neat or so satisfying as they were a generation ago, which makes them less useful as a basis for one’s political identity, and harder to encapsulate in some 30-second spot or prime-time rant.

Emphasis is mine. I find myself agreeing with Bai's explanation, especially given my work with college students. Our students today are getting their bachelor's degree and I would wager that, the way we construct our educational system in this country, a significant number get out of it without having to think critically about issues. If I'm a student and I have followed external formulas guiding my behavior, never having this behavior challenged, I am not even aware that there is anything other than my cozy dualistic system from which I can choose (Harvard developmental psychologist Robert Kegan would say I am subject in my meaning-making capabilities). Of course a simplistic, yet disingenuous politics is going to thrive.

In order for us to challenge this lack of preparation we are offering our students, we must challenge the hegemonic structure dictating that campaigns or discussions on public affairs must run this way. Simultaneously, we must purge ourselves of the assumption that we must go to college to have a chance to learn this. These are big tasks; these notions unobtrusively penetrate our lives everyday, seducing us to believe that, because its the way things work, we must follow it. You go to college, get a four degree, and then work somewhere because you are deemed to be bright enough to do so and be a citizen. There's a code for it: it's "tradition." It's romanticized. The degree is money, we're taught. Yes, our realities are much more contextual than they used to be; our technology, while improving our lives and making them more efficient, gives us a tangential responsibility of learning supplemental skills to be able to cope with the effects of the improvements.

Yet, how many of these college degree-holding, former students come home from work and sit in front of their TVs, allowing the sonorous voices of Bill O'Reilly, Wolf Blitzer, and/(but most likely) or Keith Olbermann to fill their living rooms? Many, I'd be willing to bet. And it's because "we're tired." We've been thinking all day. We need someone to explain things to us, not help us understand anything better. And so when Blitzer's voice gets pitchy with excitement, indelicately discussing stories as complex as the history of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the opportunity to parse what he is saying, to explore it, to uncover it, comes and goes. "Why is this garbage on TV?," someone might ask. But given the way we tackle education in this country, we are all too often incapable of answering our own questions.

So when I read Matt Bai's piece last week, I couldn't help but get excited. A writer for one of the main cogs in this hegemonic structure takes notice of the primary problem -- it's a welcome event. Yet, until we have younger people willing to challenge the status quo of journalism and education in this country (and older ones courageous enough to assist), our external formulas will triumph.

You've read about this movement before here.

And now, it's taken another step forward.

After a failed student campaign a year ago, William and Mary students put together an organization called Students for a Better Williamsburg (SBW), an organization engaging local government in order to provide the best outcomes for students. This effort led to the amendment of a housing ordinance, making it more student friendly and eliminating an issue that divided the town and gown factions in the community for years.

This past spring, a student ran for a Williamsburg city council seat once more. Last Tuesday night, Scott Foster, a graduating senior, dominated the contest.

Foster was elected to the Williamsburg City Council on Tuesday night, becoming the first William & Mary student ever to do so. The 22-year-old said his win was a victory for town and gown relationships.

"Today, the people of Williamsburg demonstrated that our city is truly unified," Foster said Tuesday night. "When I decided to run for City Council, I hoped to receive the student vote. Now, I have been additionally honored and humbled to have received such strong support from across our City."

Foster received 1559 votes in the election, 741 more votes than the next finisher, Planning Commission Chairman Doug Pons, who also earned a seat on the council Tuesday night. Five candidates, including one incumbent, ran for the two open positions. According to Foster's campaign, approximately 67 percent of his votes came from students and the remaining votes came from residents.

Over 1000 William and Mary students voted for their fellow student in the election, ensuring that college students will have a strong voice in the city's government. Between this victory and the aforementioned organization of Students for a Better Williamsburg, William and Mary students have provided students across the country with a model for organizing within the system to produce positive outcomes.

How did Foster do it? Well, in textbook Millennial fashion. Foster used online social networking to spread the news, and then benefited from a student-coordinated voter registration and GOTV effort on William and Mary's campus.

Foster benefited from a coordinated get-out-the-vote campaign by William & Mary students. Earlier this year, student organizations, including the Student Assembly, worked to encourage students to vote in the election through a series of registration efforts. Approximately 300 students registered this year as a result of the drive. More than 2,100 students are registered to vote in the City of Williamsburg and early estimates indicate that roughly 50 percent of registered students voted in Tuesday's election.

On election day, the Student Assembly provided transportation for students between the Sadler Center and the Stryker Building voting location. Sarah Rojas ‘10, outgoing president of the assembly, also sent an e-mail to the College's students, encouraging them to vote in the election.

[...]

Much of Foster's campaign was run by students who utilized a website and social media outlets such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and YouTube. Foster also spent a good deal of time meeting city residents.

After his upcoming graduation, Foster plans to continue his studies at William and Mary in 2011, attending the William and Mary Law School.

Crossposted at Politics for the Common Good.

Rarely do I intentionally blend my graduate school lessons learned with the material discussed in this blog. I'm starting to realize that's a mistake.

As a graduate student in a Student Affairs in Higher Education program, I endeavor to eventually work on a college campus, encouraging students to mind their civic habits and responsibilities, while simultaneously teaching them about life throughout that journey. In order to fulfill graduation requirements for my masters program, I must work in an office on campus for twelve hours a week; such an experience usually involves creating some form of original work. In working with a leadership institute on campus, I have managed to perform my own bricolage, mixing two seemingly disparate elements together: politics and education. I have organized a series of discussions in which students having no knowledge of politics can contribute to a conversation, along with the political elite on campus, on what politics means to them. I guess one could metaphorically associate this effort with the training wheels needed for what is hopefully a life-long career marrying civic responsibility with education.

My motivation for pursuing what can be an all-too-frustrating task was initially selfish. I was a political science major. I didn't have the guts to denigrate characters in political attack ads or the logical skills needed to practice the law. I liked living and working on a college campus as an undergraduate. Voila. Student affairs allows me to straddle the line between politics and education.

But, as many a graduate student has come to know, this line I speak of is fictional. That's the lesson I have learned this year, perhaps nowhere better than these dialogues. Navigating a curriculum rooted in social constructivism, understanding that there is never a "right" answer, but merely socially-constructed knowledge, has sharpened my realization that politics is in everything we do. Yes, it's in presidential elections every four years. It is in the partisan bickering and strategizing that goes on in Washington. But it is also in fraternity and sorority elections. It is in where you get your coffee in the morning. It is in the choice of news you wish to consume. Politics is everywhere.

My experience with undergraduates at my former place of employment and my current institution reveals to me that I was not alone in seeing the line. Politics can be compartmentalized into a convenient box. Students associate politics with Washington DC, voting, Congress, and the like. In one of our political dialogues this month, one of the students expressed boredom with politics. "Whenever I see politics on TV I change the channel," they explained. "It's just not fun. I don't really want to get involved." Yet, the act of channelsurfing itself is political. They did get involved in their decision to forego public affairs programming.

Unfortunately that involvement was unseen, and small in magnitude. I am recognizing that while student affairs practitioners and scholars spend quite a bit of time on social justice education, we tend to spend less time on civic education, developing the set of tools needed to engage in one's community. While service-learning and voter registration drives have been trendy on college campuses over the last two presidential elections, engagement in local and state politics continues to suffer. It's no wonder students associate politics with dysfunctional Washington.

If we were to take a problem-solving approach in our student affairs practice, we might make some headway.

Embracing a problem-solving approach to learning would be appropriate if we seek to rid higher education of the “mind/body split” that compartmentalizes intellectual discussion from one’s public actions (hooks, 1994, p. 16). A problem-solving approach would require the construction of deep and sustainable relationships between student affairs educators and the rest of the faculty, staff, and administration; a problem-solving-based model would necessitate an emphasis on the common good, meaning that students would see departments and offices role model this approach by collectivizing agendas as much as possible and placing the institution’s mission (which would ideally emphasize problem-solving) above their own. In addition to the construction of strong relationships, a problem-solving approach would encourage student affairs educators to create Freirian relationships with students; with an emphasis on community problem-solving, student/teacher and teacher/student “learn from and teach each other” – “doing ‘with’ rather than ‘for’” (as cited in Manning 1994, p. 95).

In this model, collaboration is the name of the game. The common good is at the heart of this effort, with problems uniting academic disciplines, student affairs staff, and students as opposed to egos, departments that are siloed off from each other, and disengaged students. To get here, we do need to re-examine our social justice efforts.

In order to face society’s problems today, our students must first begin the process of understanding and exploring their identity, their values, and how they view difference. In addition, the educational nature of problem-solving demands from students the ability to see an issue from another’s perspective. Following these tough lessons, students also need to learn about power and privilege, the source of many of the problems our students will be trying to solve.

Politics does not have to be perceived as a bad thing. The derivation of the word -- “polis” is the Greek word for a city or state, thus “politikos,” or politics, means affairs/issues of the city/state -- is hardly negative. However, college students unfortunately associate the broken system currently in Washington with politics; consequently, "politics" gets a bad name and other, more positive opportunities for political engagement become invisible. With just a bit more effort, student affairs practitioners can reveal the other side of politics -- civil conversations, learning from others, changing their realities to help themselves and others -- and align programs with our institutions' "citizenship"-laden mission statements.

Given the ugliness of our political dialogue these days, this is an encouraging sign.

The Center for Political Participation and the Civic Engagement Council at Allegheny College have invited approximately 300 colleges and universities to participate in the National Conference of College Democrat and Republican Leaders May 18-19. The purpose of the event is to enhance communication between young Democrats and Republicans, examine civility in politics and establish a high bar for the respectful exchange of ideas.

[...]

The Allegheny conference will offer sessions on moderation, compromise and problem solving. Student leaders will participate in mock debates, discuss policy advocacy, and critique relevant films. Participants will confront contentious, often polarizing, topics in a workshop setting, while being encouraged to be mindful of opportunities to discover common ground.

[...]

Several colleges are planning to send students to the National Conference of College Democrat and Republican Leaders, including Harvard University, Louisiana State University, Thiel College, the University of Florida and the University of Southern California.

I am pleased that we're seeing this kind of discussion among young progressives and conservatives in the college ranks. This will hopefully set the tone for a new generation of political operatives/citizens so that we can focus on problem-solving as opposed to name-calling. I am also eager to see how this conference impacts the strength and bipartisan nature of on-campus events this fall.

While an organizer tells me there is currently little more to offer in the way of information than what is already included in the press release, I do know that there is no registration fee and that the college's Center for Political Participation will be making accommodations for attendees.

Full disclosure: Allegheny happens to be my alma mater. Go Gators!

What a landmark day in Congress. After years of the government subsidizing banks that give unfortunate interest rates and basically screw over young people we have finally won. Billions of dollars was spent to lobby members of Congress to stop this. Not surprisingly Republican members overwhelmingly refused to take the side of the people over the big banks with a unanimous vote of 56 to 43 in the Senate and 220 to 207 in the house.

According to the New York Times:

"Democrats have long denounced the program, saying it fattened the bottom line for banks at the expense of students and taxpayers.

“Why are we paying people to lend the government’s money and then the government guarantees the loan and the government takes back the loan?” said Representative George Miller, Democrat of California and chairman of the Education and Labor Committee.

Democrats celebrated the legislation, a centerpiece of President Obama’s education agenda, as a far-reaching overhaul of federal financial aid, providing a huge infusion of money to the Pell grant program and offering new help to lower-income graduates in getting out from under crushing student debt. Still, the final bill is less ambitious than the original proposal."

The youth community rejoiced, particularly those who work tirelessly to engage government about the overwhelming cost of higher education to young people who now graduate with over $22,000 in debt and into a job market with a nearly 20% youth unemployment rate.

Campus Progress Senior Advocacy Associate Pedro de la Torre III released a statement touting the advocacy they did with their outreach site StudentsOverBanks.org which released an ad that aired on CNN, MSNBC, and during Comedy Central’s "The Colbert Report."

“Today Congress took action to eliminate an inefficient and corrupt student loan system and finally put the interests of students over banks. Young people overwhelmingly support health care and student aid reform, and are heartened to see that the change they voted for has become a reality.”

“Today will go down in history as the day when the federal government chose to invest in college students over bank profits,” said United States Student Association (USSA) President Gregory Cendana. “By ending wasteful subsidies to private lenders and directing over sixty billion dollars of savings into financial aid programs, this legislation will ensure that millions of low-income and traditionally underrepresented students have access to higher education.”

Rich Williams, Higher Ed Associate at the US PIRGs was similarly enthusiastic:

"The federal Direct Loan program will increase student protection from aggressive private loan marketing. Lenders used inducements to convince financial aid offices to push private student loans on students and families. These private loan products are more akin to credit cards with variable interest rates as high as 18% and limited repayment options and benefits. Originating loans from the federal government will give the time students need to assess their financing options in a fair setting.

“This legislation helps renew the promise of student aid programs for the tens of millions of students who rely on grants and loans to achieve a college education. We applaud Congress for prioritizing the Pell grant program, and education, and we look forward to President Obama’s final signature.”

These groups should be commended for their advocacy and their hard work to bring a grassroots force to back up members of Congress who took a stand for our nation's youth. Congratulations to students across the country who will have things a little bit easier in the future.

Millennials (young Americans born 1982-2003) rate the quality of education and the cost of college near the top of the list of issues about which they are most concerned, just behind jobs and the economy. This week, President Barack Obama responded to those concerns with the release of his plan to fix the No Child Left Behind Law and focus the federal government's efforts even more on ensuring school's deliver the results and outcomes that Millennials and their parents expect from America's institutions. The announcement capped a remarkable series of events that saw Democrats joining parents and educators across the country in taking important steps to address those educational needs, providing Millennials new hope that their investments in politics and civic engagement will finally pay off.

NDN's newest survey research indicates that Millennials, unlike all other generations, rate education generally, and the cost of a college education specifically, as two of the top four critical problems they believe government must address and fix. Clearly, Millennials, like older generations, see a need to improve public education in America. And, in fact, Millennials perceive this need from a very personal perspective. While the Millennial Generation is slightly more positive about the overall quality of education in the United States (41% positive/50% negative) than older generations (32%/62%), they give significantly lower grades to the education they have personally received than older generations. Seventy percent of Millennials believe that the poor quality of public education stems from a lack of money and the way schools are managed and organized. Unlike the majority of older generations, Millennials are about evenly split on whether or not unions and work rules are a major problem in our system of public education. In response to attitudes like these, an increasing number of urban school districts are beginning to abandon the strategy of incremental reform and adopting more radical and dramatic changes to address the concerns of Millennials and their parents.

In Rhode Island, the Central Falls school board fired all the teachers, the principle and the administrators in an under-performing high school where half the 800 students were failing every subject and only seven percent were proficient in math. Unable to reach agreement with the teachers on how to pay for the changes needed to break this cycle of mediocrity, the board invoked the "turnaround option" sanctioned by the Obama administration's school reform initiative, which allows school boards to start over at failing schools with a brand new set of teachers and administrators. Given the President's unwavering support for systemic reform of schools that fail to educate children embodied in his Race to the Top initiative, the White House's support of the school board's actions should not have come as a surprise to those still trying to protect the status quo.

In Kansas City, Missouri the school board, that previously had stood in the vanguard of those believing primarily in racial integration and increased per pupil spending as the solution to the problems of education in urban environments, decided to try a completely different approach. Less than third of Kansas City elementary school students are now reading at or above grade level and no more than a quarter of most of their schools' students have achieved the levels of proficiency required for the skills they will need in life. Faced with these results, and the prospect of running out of money by next year, the board voted to close about half of the district's schools in order to "dramatically enhance education for each of our students by combining our very best teachers and very best resources in fewer schools," as Kansas City's School Superintendent put it.

But perhaps the most dramatic news of the week came from Detroit where a coalition of nonprofit organizations, Excellent Schools Detroit, announced its plan to replace Detroit's failing public schools with 70 new ones and make a $200-million investment over the next ten years in order to achieve its goal of graduating 90% of Detroit kids from high school by 2020 and having 90% of graduates go on to college. Currently, about 58% of students in Detroit's school system and 78% of those enrolled in charter schools in the city graduate from high school, while fewer than 25% enroll in college.

The plan includes a push for mayoral control of Detroit Public Schools, but more importantly the establishment of an independent commission to grade every school in the city, including charters, every year against a uniform set of standards and outcomes focused on achieving educational excellence. The new Standards and Accountability Commission will establish a competitive public education marketplace complete with report cards grading each school's progress against an agreed upon set of standards that will enable parents to become smart shoppers for their child's education. The commission will also suggest closures in order to weed out failing schools, half of which, under the plan, would be closed or replaced with schools under new management by 2015. Like the Kansas City solution, the plan does not rely on increased funding from the state but rather the commitment of Detroiters to the future of their children. The idea was greeted with cheers from everyone except the members of the current school board.

Meanwhile, back in the U.S. Senate, a flurry of phone calls and emails from Millennials across the nation, convinced a majority of Democratic Senators to join in an effort to rescue Pell grants for students attending college from dramatic cuts that would have reduced payments by 60% for eight million students and eliminated the money altogether for another half a million. The House had already passed the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act, which would reform the student loan program by eliminating the current subsidies to private lenders who make student loans guaranteed by the federal government and invest the money saved in increasing the size and availability of Pell Grants. But six Democratic Senators, who should know better, had argued that the nation couldn't afford to continue to make these investments in its future and should instead continue to underwrite the bank's profits, even as students on campuses across the nation demonstrated to protest increases in tuition at cash strapped state universities.

Since Republicans were united in defending the interests of banks over Millennials, the only way to enact President Obama's student aid reform proposal was to include the concept in the budget reconciliation package, central to efforts to finally pass health care reform, which only requires a simple majority in the Senate for passage. After hearing from their House colleagues on the political benefits and policy importance of the concept, even budget hawks like North Dakota Senator Kent Conrad, chairman of the Budget Committee, agreed to find a way to bundle the two items by adjusting the education portion to account for a revised Congressional Budget Office cost analysis. The principle driver of the increased costs of the program is the popularity of this type of college financial aid among Millennials struggling to stay out of debt and still get the education they need to get a good paying job. By combining ways to reduce the cost of college with a major expansion of health care in the reconciliation package, Democrats have taken a major step forward in solidifying the support of all elements of the Democratic Party's 21st Century majority coalition-from young voters to minorities.

This new coalition presents the best opportunity for Democrats to solidify a dominant majority coalition since FDR and the New Deal. But key members of the coalition, especially Millennials, are currently not convinced that voting in 2010 will make much of a difference, given the results they have seen from Congress in the first year of the Obama administration in the election of which they played such a significant role. But these recent events suggest the country is finally beginning to listen to the voice of this new generation and address its concerns. As educators and parents at the grass roots of this revolution begin to have an impact in cities across the nation, the best thing that Democrats in Congress could do before this week is out is pass both health care and student aid reform as part of their budget reconciliation process. Doing so would finally begin to align the nation's budgetary priorities with its future and bring hope for Millennials that changes they can believe in will continue to flow from their investment in the country's political process.

From the Press Conference this morning. For details on this and what has been going down with reform on student loans see the earlier blog post.

Rep. George Miller

Rep. Xavier Becerra

Rep. Jim Clyburn