The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: arne duncan
Education Secretary Duncan Steps Down; Obama Picks Deputy To Replace Him

Education Secretary Duncan Steps Down; Obama Picks Deputy To Replace Him

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan, one of the last remaining members of President Barack Obama’s original Cabinet, will step down in December, a White House official said on Friday.

Obama has picked John B. King Jr., who currently acts as Duncan’s deputy, to replace him, the White House said.

(Reporting by Roberta Rampton and Julia Edwards)

Photo: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan participates in an open meeting of the President’s Advisory Council on Financial Capability for Young Americans at the Treasury Department in Washington, October 2, 2014. REUTERS/Yuri Gripas

Obama Administration Rules Target For-Profit Colleges

Obama Administration Rules Target For-Profit Colleges

By Chris Kirkham, Los Angeles Times (MCT)

The Obama administration on Thursday will publish new regulations intended to target for-profit career colleges that leave students with debts they cannot repay.

The U.S. Department of Education rules will sanction schools with students who carry too much debt compared with their earnings after graduation. Programs that fail to meet debt-to-income requirements for two out of three consecutive years would lose eligibility for federal student loans and grants — the primary revenue stream at for-profit colleges.

The for-profit college industry includes schools such as the University of Phoenix, ITT Technical Institute and Everest College, owned by Corinthian Colleges Inc., based in Orange County, Calif. Corinthian has been in the crosshairs of more than a dozen state and federal regulators for more than a year amid allegations that the company falsified student job placement rates and steered students into high-interest loans.

The Santa Ana, Calif.-based company announced in July that it would sell the vast majority of its campuses, after the Department of Education restricted access to federal student loans and grants.

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the new regulations are intended to weed out programs that rely heavily on taxpayer subsidies but don’t follow through on promises of career training.

“The quality of these programs today varies tremendously,” Duncan said in a briefing with reporters Wednesday. “While some are strong, today too many of these programs fail to provide the training (students) need, while burying them in debt they cannot repay.”

Some for-profit schools receive up to 90 percent of their revenue from federal loans and grants.

Students at for-profit schools default on federal loans at a much higher rate than those at traditional public colleges — more than 19 percent after three years, compared with less than 13 percent at public institutions. For-profit schools enroll about 11 percent of all college students, but the sector is responsible for 44 percent of student loan defaults.

The move by the Education Department is a second attempt at regulating career colleges, after a federal judge struck down an earlier version of the rules in 2012. An industry trade group successfully sued to halt the regulations, calling them “arbitrary.”

The rules apply to for-profit colleges and certificate programs at community colleges and private nonprofit schools. The regulations apply to each college’s specific programs, such as criminal justice or nursing, meaning some could be disqualified while others remain eligible.

The Education Department will judge schools by tracking their graduates’ finances, using Social Security Administration data. To pass the test, graduates must have annual loan payments that are less than 20 percent of discretionary earnings (based on a complex formula set by the federal government that compares income to certain poverty levels) or 8 percent of total earnings.

Programs with higher debt-to-income burdens for several years in a row would be disqualified. For example, programs would lose eligibility if graduates have loan payments that are more than 12 percent of total income and 30 percent of discretionary income in two out of three consecutive years.

The new regulations also require programs to prominently disclose information on graduation rates and loan debt to prospective students.

The department estimated that approximately 1,400 programs would fail the debt-to-income test out of 5,500 covered by the regulations.

Both the for-profit college industry and its critics took issue with the new regulations.

An industry trade group, the Association of Private Sector Colleges and Universities, called it a “fundamentally flawed and misguided proposal.”

“The regulation will hurt the very students it is intended to help by restricting educational access for millions of students and unfairly targeting certain institutions,” Steve Gunderson, the group’s president and chief executive, said in a statement.

Several student advocacy groups argued the rules were too weak. The administration dropped an earlier part of the rule, for example, that would have also penalized programs with too many students defaulting on loans.

“While the administration deserves praise for issuing a final rule despite relentless lobbying by the for-profit college industry, it can and must do much more to protect students and taxpayers from well-documented abuses,” said Pauline Abernathy, vice president of the Institute for College Access & Success, an Oakland, Calif., group that focuses on student debt issues.

AFP Photo

Teachers Union Targets Education Secretary At National Convention

Teachers Union Targets Education Secretary At National Convention

By Howard Blume, Los Angeles Times

LOS ANGELES -= A national teachers convention on Sunday called for President Barack Obama to put Education Secretary Arne Duncan on an “improvement plan” as a prelude to replacing him.

The action was taken by the American Federation of Teachers, which is meeting in Los Angeles. It represents another marker in the long-running erosion of relations between organizations that represent instructors and the Democratic president they helped to elect twice.

The union stopped short of calling for Duncan’s immediate departure — as had the National Education Association, at its meeting in Denver earlier this month. But the lesser step was no indication of greater regard.

Nate Goldbaum, a Chicago delegate, called Duncan “the man who is taking away all that we hold dear.”

He proposed calling for Duncan’s outright resignation, an idea that attracted strong support until an alternate proposal emerged from Dennis Kelly, president of United Educators of San Francisco.

Kelly offered the improvement-plan language to echo the union’s insistence on protecting due process for teachers who face discipline or dismissal. Union leaders said these rights are under assault.

More broadly, union activists and their allies have accused Duncan of allying with anti-union forces seeking to “privatize” public schools and pave the way for corporate interests to profit from public funding devoted to education.

Duncan’s department has pressured states and school districts to limit teacher job protections and to use student standardized test scores as a substantial portion of a teacher’s evaluation. The goal, Duncan has said, is to develop a higher-quality workforce by helping teachers improve while also making it easier to remove those who don’t.

Duncan has consistently defended himself as a friend of teachers, noting that he supports some form of tenure, while also wanting to make these job protections more difficult to achieve. Duncan applauded a June court ruling that struck down California’s tenure rules and some other teacher job protections.

The anger of the rank and file had the potential to put AFT President Randi Weingarten in an awkward position. She met with Duncan last week and has stressed keeping open channels of communication.

She called putting Duncan on an improvement plan a “constructive approach” with the appropriate symbolism. At the same time, the passion of delegates demonstrated the “sense of betrayal” many felt about Duncan and the administration, she said.

Photo: House Committee on Education and the Workforce Democrats via Flickr

National High School Graduation Rate Exceeds 80 Percent For The First Time

National High School Graduation Rate Exceeds 80 Percent For The First Time

By Lalita Clozel, Tribune Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON — The national high school graduation rate has reached a record high of more than 80%, but disparities based on students’ racial, socio-economic and disability status remain alarming, according to an annual report by America’s Promise Alliance, a nonprofit group founded by former Secretary of State Colin Powell.

An estimated four out of five public high school students obtained their diploma in 2012, according to the report, which used the latest available data from the Department of Education. But figures were lower for minority students. Seventy-six percent of Latino students and 68 percent of African-American students graduated, the report found.

“We have to be honest that this is a matter of equity and that we have to change the opportunity equation,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday. “All of America’s children are our children.”

Recent improvements in the nation’s high school graduation rate — which has risen 8 percentage points in six years — have been driven by the closure of so-called “dropout factories,” typically high-minority schools that graduate less than 60 percent of students. In 2002, those schools enrolled almost half of all African-American students but by 2012, that number dropped to only 23 percent.

The results underscore the need for more federal funding to ensure that all students are provided with the same opportunities, said Daniel J. Losen, the director of the Center for Civil Rights Remedies at UCLA.

“We still have many school districts where it looks like apartheid in America,” he said. “It’s going to require more than the contributions of the private sector and the competitive grants of the federal government.”

Several categories of students face persistently lower odds of graduating, including those with physical and mental disabilities, those from low-income families and those learning English as a second language.

The nation’s graduation rate began decreasing in the 1990s, but with rising awareness of the dropout crisis in certain school districts, states and districts began implementing reforms in the 2000s, which are now beginning to bear fruit.

“Schools were for a long time ignoring this facet,” said Losen. “They were focused for the longest time on test scores.”

Joanna Hornig Fox, the deputy director of the Everyone Graduates Center at Johns Hopkins University and one of the report’s authors, attributed the improved rates in part to recent federal education reform bills, including No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top, which implemented nationwide standards and performance-based funding for public schools.

Fox said that thanks to efforts to ensure “students do a great more deal of writing and explain their thinking,” now students in poorer districts are “not just filling in the blank.”

In California, which enrolls 14 percent of the nation’s high school students and the largest number of Latino and low-income students, the graduation rate is encouraging but still uneven. The overall rate reached 79 percent in 2012, but was only 61 percent for students with disabilities and 62 percent for those not yet fluent in English.

If California does not succeed in delivering more high school diplomas to disadvantaged and minority students, the national graduation rate might stagnate, the report suggests.

“California has been doing better,” said John Gomperts, president of America’s Promise Alliance. But he added, “California is not where it needs to be.”

One troubling and unexplained factor is the disparity in how many students are disciplined or required to repeat a grade, experts say. Statistics released in March by the Department of Education revealed that black students were three times more likely to be suspended and expelled than white students, and were disciplined at a higher rate than their peers as early as kindergarten.

“There’s no champagne corks being popped, I don’t think,” Losen said. “We still have racial and socioeconomic isolation in our public schools.”

Photo: Flickr via alamosbasement