Spurred on by the need to court a waning youth vote, the Obama Administration addressed a concern that has been on many students’ and recent graduates’ minds: The cost of education in America. Calling college presidents from across the country into the Oval Office, President Obama chastised university leaders for their high prices and lack of leadership in the area of cost control and admonished them to rethink the “cost equation” that accompanies higher education.

The take-away message from President Obama’s private meeting with higher-education leaders on Monday was threefold: There needs to be a new sense of urgency on college affordability, there won’t be a one-size-fits-all solution as policies will have to affect all sectors of higher education, and the country needs innovations and cost-management from colleges and leadership from state legislatures.

That’s according to Thomas J. Snyder, President of Ivy Tech Community College, who participated in the meeting. President Obama and Arne Duncan, the Secretary of Education, are now in what Mr. Snyder described as listening mode, “but I suspect some pretty substantial proposals will evolve in the next few months,” he said.

Even Education Secretary Arne Duncan got in on the action, lecturing university leadership on the difficulties faced by recent graduates and called on colleges to “clamp down” on education costs. Soros-funded Campus Progress heralded these actions as a “step in the right direction” and praised Obama for his work helping students afford higher education. Obama patted himself on the back for his efforts, saying that his administration would “help more Americans attain a higher education at an affordable price.”

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CHICAGO – If well-known people want to avoid controversy, they should avoid making ugly comments about respected citizens and public officials, particularly in public.

That’s a lesson Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis has yet to learn.

Last week, while researching footage of Lewis for a documentary project, we at Education Action Group came across a YouTube video of Lewis giving the keynote address at the recent Northwest Teaching for Social Justice Conference in Seattle.

During the course of her remarks, Lewis attempted to draw a few laughs by making fun of U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan’s speech impediment.

“Now you know he went to private school ’cause if he had gone to public school he would have had that lisp fixed,” she said.
Lewis went on to laughingly talk about her former marijuana use during her college days.

“I spent those years smoking lots of weed – self-medicating,” she said. “Self-medicating – thank you! Sounds like you all did, too. Oh, I’m sorry, there’s kids here. I wasn’t supposed to say that, right? Too late!”

We thought Lewis’ comments were highly inappropriate for the leader of one of the nation’s largest teachers unions, so we released the pertinent clips of the video to the media.

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Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis recently appeared before the Northwest Teaching for Social Justice group and laid it on thick.

Lewis, who is also a vice president of the American Federation of Teachers, leveled a cheap personal attack at President Obama’s Education Secretary Arne Duncan.  See it, courtesy of EAGtv.

Speaking with a manufactured speech impediment in order to mock Duncan, Lewis said:

“‘Education is the civil rights issue of our time.’  Now, you know he went to private school ‘cause if he had gone to public school he would have had that lisp fixed.  I know – that was ugly wasn’t it?  I’m sorry.”

I thought we taught children not to mock or make fun of others.  Apparently the teachers are exempt from such lessons.

It is interesting to witness the vitriol from union leaders aimed at Democratic leaders who have proposed tepid, incremental education reform and school choice.

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On today’s edition of Coffee and Markets, Brad Jackson and Ben Domenech are joined by Francis Cianfrocca to discuss why an unprecedented 26 million Americans are underemployed, Rick Perry’s flat tax, and Steve Jobs’ appeal to Barack Obama to free our education system from the teacher unions.

We’re brought to you as always by BigGovernment and Stephen Clouse and Associates. If you’d like to email us, you can do so at coffee[at]newledger.com. We hope you enjoy the show.

Related Links:

An Unprecedented 26 Million Americans Are Now Underemployed
A long, steep drop for Americans’ standard of living
US ‘Misery Index’ Rises to Highest Since 1983
Second Miracle in 15 Years Needed for U.S. as Productivity Wanes
Texas Gov. Rick Perry calls for a flat tax
Steve Jobs Biography Reveals He Told Obama, ‘You’re Headed For A One-Term Presidency’
What if the NFL Played by Teachers’ Rules?
Will Charter Schools Cure America’s Blues?

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The Obama administration, principally the president and Education Secretary Arne Duncan, are now routinely making public statements which are leading to one conclusion: instead of fixing American education, we should dumb down the standards.

According to the Associated Press, President Obama “is pushing a rewrite of the nation’s education law that would ease some of its rigid measurement tools” and wants “a test that ‘everybody agrees makes sense’ and administer it in less pressure-packed atmospheres, potentially every few years instead of annually.”

The article goes on to say that Obama wants to move away proficiency goals in from math, science and reading, in favor of the ambiguous and amorphous goals of student readiness for college and career.

Obama’s new focus comes on the heels of a New York Times report that 80% of American public schools could be labeled as failing under the standards of No Child Left Behind.

Put another way: the standards under NCLB have revealed that the American public education system is full of cancer. Instead of treating the cancer, Obama wants to change the test, as if ignoring the MRI somehow makes the cancer go away.

So instead of implementing sweeping policies to correct the illness, Obama is suggesting that we just stop testing to pretend it doesn’t exist.

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Big Government has covered the Obama Administration’s war on career colleges before, particularly the the Wall Street connections: noted short-seller Steve Eisman, who’s testimony in front of the Department of Education and in Congressional committees is shaping the Administration’s policy and potentially earning Eisman millions. Now, it seems Eisman is trying desperately to distance himself from what appears to be a destructive policy for America’s low-income and minority students.

Recently, the Administration and Education Secretary Arne Duncan proposed that career colleges and other for-profit educational institutions, be governed by the so-called “gainful employment rule” – a rule that limits or ends federal grant and student loan money for students at for-profit institutions with low graduation rates or low post-graduation employment. Although for-profit schools face essentially the same problems as not-for-profit institutions, students at for-profit schools tend to be lower-income and minority communities, who rely heavily on government assistance to earn the kind of education and skill level necessary to succeed in today’s harsh economic climate.

The rule has met with overwhelming opposition from a number of organizations and communities, and much of that criticism has been leveled at how the Administration came up with the “gainful employment rule.” Recently, it’s become apparent that Steve Eisman’s testimony motivated the Administration’s actions, even if he’s reticent to admit it.

From Business Week:

On April 16, Eisman met with Education Department officials, including acting deputy assistant education secretary David Bergeron, according to Justin Hamilton, a department spokesman. He sent multiple e-mails to a number of Education Department officials, including Duncan, on May 28, two days after airing his views at the Sohn conference in New York. He warned against the watering down of gainful employment, according to the documents obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request…

‘He shared a PowerPoint that he intended to use for a speech he was planning to give in May,’ Bergeron, the acting deputy assistant education secretary, said in a telephone interview. “It would have been inappropriate for us not to meet with someone that indicated that he had done serious research on the industry.’”

That Power Point contained some very important suggestions, designed to target the problem Mr. Eisman believed for-profit education was causing. One of those suggestions was a very coincidentally named “gainful employment” rule on slides 33 and 34 of his extensive presentation.

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Apparently oblivious to recent calls for civility, Obama’s Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and teacher union boss Randi Weingarten (who the union paid more than $600,000 in 2010) gave speeches in front of a “No Justice – No Peace” banner at Al Sharpton’s prayer breakfast.

Weingarten even closed her speech in solidarity with Sharpton’s group “fight.”  Weingarten expressed her desire that the American Federation of Teachers union members become “foot soldiers” in the “fight.”

Again, a Big Labor official proved they are not in tuned with society but focused, to borrow a phrase from Weingarten, “like a laser” on making government bigger.

Weingarten said that “we are often presented with the false choice of being for the children or being for students.”  It is the teachers union itself which creates Weingarten’s false choice.

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Over the last several months, as attention has been focused elsewhere, the Obama Administration and Education Secretary Arne Duncan have been waging a quiet war against for-profit schools and universities – educational institutions that offer  job training and degrees in in-demand fields to students looking for an alternative to four-year non-profit schools, or a more accessible price tag.

The Administration has fired a number of rounds at the industry, but recently unveiled it’s secret weapon: a “gainful employment” restriction on federal loan money available to students at for-profit schools. While for-profit schools have had their difficulties, their deficiencies aren’t that dissimilar to those of their not-for-profit counterparts, but this weapon could kill off for-profits as a viable option to not-for-profit education. Essentially, students at for-profit schools that have either a low graduation rate or an unacceptably high number of unemployed, graduated students would be denied federal student loan and grants. As Forbes points out, these schools serve primarily lower-income and minority communities who depend so heavily on student loans, such a restriction could put the whole industry in jeopardy.

Which, of course, is exactly what the Obama Administration would like to see happen. And, from recent news, it seems that they and their network of associates will do just about anything to make sure it happens.

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As “Waiting for ‘Superman’” so eloquently points out, the industrial assembly-line model of America’s public schools, created decades ago, isn’t working.  In fact, it’s setting us further and further behind our global competitors.

Today, it is essential that our children graduate high school and college prepared for the fierce competition they will face in the global marketplace.  Their economic survival will be determined by their ability to compete with countries like China, India, and other emerging economies.

This requires that our public schools be innovative and effective.  Instead, our schools are using a failed, one-size-fits-all approach to education that may actually end up hurting our children.

It’s interesting that our slide began in the 1970s.  Just ten years earlier, collective bargaining, the crowning glory of labor unions, took root in our public schools. Coincidence?

Collective bargaining agreements, which carry the weight of law, enshrine such policies as seniority (last hired, first fired), tenure (lifetime job protection in as little as two years) and due process (an extra-legal process outside the court system).  Oh, and automatic yearly raises– not for performance, but simply for logging another year in the system.  In other words, we give teachers raises simply for not dying over the summer.

This is a beautiful system – if you’re a public school employee.  But if you’re a student in the public school system, well, it’s like being drafted by the Detroit Lions.

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President Barack Obama is making his bid to be ”the education president.” At the start of NBC’s recent Education Nation summit in New York, Obama appeared on the Today Show and touted what he claimed were a wide-ranging set of reforms to improve America’s K-12 schools.

Yet Obama’s education vision deserves an F for at least three reasons:

1. Money Talks. Obama says that the educational system needs new ideas and more money. Despite a doubling in inflation-adjusted per-pupil spending since the early 1970s, student achievement is flat at best. But Obama is placing most of his bets on the money part. While he brags constantly about his Race to the Top initiative, in which states competed for $4 billion to fund innovative programs, he’s spent more than $80 billion in no-strings-attached stimulus funds to maintain the educational status quo.

2. Choice Cuts. Candidate Obama said that he’d try any reform idea regardless of ideology. Yet one of his first education-related moves after taking office was to aid his Senate mentor, Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), in killing a successful and popular D.C. voucher program that let low-income residents exercise the same choice Obama did in sending his daughters to private school.

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Recently, Big Government told of a proposed fiscal year 2009 federal budget earmark intended for the Save-A-Life Foundation (SALF), a Chicago-area nonprofit that went belly-up late last year. The article questioned why IL Democrat Congresswoman Jan Schakowsky, who introduced the appropriation, wanted to fund SALF years after the charity was the subject of a string of media exposes, including four hard-hitting ABC7 Chicago I-Team reports.

Rep. Schakowsky eventually cancelled her earmark for SALF, perhaps in response to scrutiny last January from a conservative blogger, Doug Ross. She wouldn’t answer his questions then, and, according to Big Government, she still won’t now.  Here’s what Ross and Big Government wanted to know:

1. What was the dollar amount of Schakowsky’s intended 2009 earmark for SALF?

2. Why was Rep. Schakowsky funding a non-profit years after it was the subject of four ABC7 News Chicago exposes?

3. What’s the relationship between Rep. Schakowsky and the charity’s founder/president Carol J. Spizzirri, whose organization obtained “at least $8.6 million in federal and state grants”? (Chicago Tribune)

4. Does Rep. Schakowsky think SALF should be investigated in order to determine if those millions were properly spent?

Since Rep. Schakowsky’s 2009 SALF earmark didn’t get funded, do these questions matter? Why not let this sleeping dog lie and…move along, nothing to see here?  On the other hand, one might ask if this illustrates the degree of due diligence Rep. Schakowsky applies to all her funding requests.

But this article isn’t about those questions, it’s about this question: Since the money didn’t go through, why should Schakowsky refuse to disclose the facts or answer whether or not she thinks the organization should be investigated? Since the ABC7 series, others have raised more questions about SALF and what happened to all the money they received? (And so will we, in a later article.)

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The power to make money, and the ability to receive a reward for assuming risk, have been cornerstones of America’s economic success.  A free-enterprise system made the U.S. the world’s only remaining superpower.

Sadly, all of the above are foreign concepts to the government-run public education system.  Karen Lewis, the new president of the Chicago Teachers Union, recently fired this shot across the administrators’ bow:

I’m giving notice to [Chicago Public Schools’ CEO] Ron Huberman and the board: you’ve met your match.  We will no longer be played.

…

We’re going to put business in its place: out of our schools.  These corporate heads and politicians seem willing to trade off our childrens’ and educators’ futures to pad their bottom line.

Her speech goes on with one-liners that would make Mao Tse-Tung (and Karl Marx) blush.  Anita Dunn, call your office!  This is the type of person we should expect to teach students an appreciation of what’s made America great?  Perhaps Ms. Lewis would fit better in the Havana Education Association than any teacher group in America.

The National Education Association recently considered a New Business Item at its annual convention which called for bouncing Education Secretary (and former CPS CEO) Arne Duncan and replace him with “a person who is aligned with the interests of the NEA, its members, and especially the students it serves.”  The reason?

The D.O.E. must be led by someone who sees all students as deserving of an excellent public school and the federal funding it requires, not just those in states that can win resources by best adopting  Sect. Duncan’s competitive philosophy.

Leaving aside my quibbles with the reform competition known as “Race to the Top,”  what has made it successful is the fact that states have had to one-up each other in terms of legislating reforms to in order to compete for the money.  I can see why that wouldn’t fly in the public schools of say, Cuba.  But apparently it’s just as unwelcome in the union halls of Chicago and elsewhere in America.

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UPDATE: Cost figures for the period 1970 through 1980 in the original version of chart 2, below, were inaccurate, and have been corrected in the revised version of the chart that appears below. This change does not affect the text of the article.

***

Teachers unions, the Obama administration, and most Democrats in Congress want to spend another $23 billion that we don’t have to shore up public school employment. If we don’t go along, they tell us, it’ll be a “catastrophe” for American education. With fewer teachers our kids will supposedly learn less, further crippling our already wounded economy.

They couldn’t be more wrong.

Over the past forty years, public school employment has risen 10 times faster than enrollment (see chart). There are only 9 percent more students today, but nearly twice as many public school employees. To prove that rolling back this relentless hiring spree by a few years would hurt student achievement, you’d have to show that all those new employees raised achievement in the first place. That would be hard to do… because it never happened.

Student achievement at the end of high school has been flat for as long as we’ve been keeping track—all the way back to 1970. But we did get something in return for all that hiring: a great, big, fat, BILL.

If you graduated from high school in 1980, your entire k-12 education cost your fellow taxpayers about $75,000, in 2009 dollars. But the graduating class of 2009 had roughly twice that amount lavished on their public school careers. The extra $75,000 we’re now spending has done wonders for public school employee union membership, dues revenue, and political clout. It’s done a whole lotta nothin’ for student learning (see chart).

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The race issue refuses to disappear from American politics because problems tied to race persist.

Just as children are often the best witnesses to the shortcomings of parents, so the ill treated are often testimony to a nation’s shortcomings.

Sen. James Meeks (left)

The civil rights movement showed that in a nation which is free, civil, and moral, a few can create a non-violent revolution and change the world when their claims are just and moral, and when they are willing to fight and persist.

Just as that movement, starting with a few black leaders in the 1960’s, showed that our nation was sick and needed to be healed, the same thing is happening today.

A superb example is the remarkable leadership of Rev. James Meeks in Chicago.

Pastor Meeks, the spiritual leader of one of Chicago’s largest black churches, is also a Democrat senator in the state legislature.  Working with both Democrats and Republicans, and with the help of a free market think tank in Illinois, Meeks put together legislation to provide vouchers for kids in Chicago’s worst public schools to escape and attend a private school.

Increasingly, school choice initiatives around the country are being championed at the grass roots by local black leaders, often Democrats, for whom the truth is too straightforward to deny.

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Leave it to teachers unions: they sure know how to be obnoxious at the most inappropriate times.

The West Virginia chapters of the American Federation of Teachers and National Education Association have teamed up with the miners union and the AFL-CIO to produce a television ad attacking Democratic State Sen. Erik Wells.

Like President Obama and his Education Secretary Arne Duncan, Wells supports charter schools.  The AFT and NEA do not.  Therefore, exploiting the deaths of 29 miners, the unions find Wells unfit for legislative service.

It’s a perfect example of the depth teachers unions will stoop to attack political candidates – even Democratic candidates they traditionally support.

Wells contends that state law already protects mine safety whistleblowers, and no further legislative action is necessary, according to the Charleston Daily Mail. Now the unions want him to pay for that honest opinion.

But why should that stop the teachers unions?  What makes this particularly distasteful is watching the teachers unions – who supposedly look out for the interests of teachers – spend their resources to attack a candidate over mine safety.

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This is big government at its finest hour. The Democrats have officially killed a successful private school voucher program banishing more than 3,300 low-income children back to the DC schools they so desperately wanted to escape. The Heartland Institute reports:

The leaders of D.C.’s school choice movement, Kevin P. Chavous (former D.C. Councilman) and Virginia Walden Ford (executive director of D.C. Parents for School Choice), today issued the following statement:

“House and Senate Appropriators this week ignored the wishes of D.C.’s mayor, D.C.’s public schools chancellor, a majority of D.C.’s city council, and more than 70 percent of D.C. residents and have mandated the slow death of the D.C. Opportunity Scholarship Program. This successful school voucher program—for D.C.’s poorest families—has allowed more than 3,300 children to attend the best schools they have ever known.

The decision to end the program, a decision buried in a thousand-page spending bill and announced right before the holidays, destroys the hopes and dreams of thousands of D.C. families. Parents and children have rallied countless times over the past year in support of reauthorization and in favor of strengthening the OSP.

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Earlier this year Robert Chanin, the recently retired general counsel for the National Education Association, discussed the effectiveness of teachers unions at a gathering in San Diego:

Despite what some of us would like to believe, it is not because of our creative ideas. It is not because of the merit of our positions. It is not because we care about children. And it is not because we have a vision of a great public school for every child.

NEA and its affiliates are effective advocates because we have power.

You can see that portion of his 20 minute speech here:

Chanin’s honesty was, in a way, refreshing. For too long the NEA, as well as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT), have been hiding their intentions behind the guise of student advocacy, using children as human shields to block criticism.

But the truth is that the NEA and AFT are huge national labor unions with political agendas and have a great deal of influence with state and national lawmakers.  NEAexposed.com and AFTexposed.com are designed to bring attention to those facts.

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