The Selling of Public Services.
By Seth Sandronsky
Do failed policy proposals
from public education officials enjoy an afterlife when their creators depart
Washington for the private sector? This is no academic question. In fact, the
career arcs of two former federal policymakers may well have foreshadowed the
life-or-death clash over the accreditation of San Francisco City College
(CCSF), one of California’s 112 community colleges. The state is home to about
10 percent of America’s 1,100 two-year colleges.
As San Francisco Superior
Court Judge Curtis Karnow’s ruling on the Accrediting Commission
for Community and Junior College’s bid to decertify CCSF draws
near, the story of Margaret Spellings becomes instructive. Spellings, who was
George W. Bush’s second-term Secretary of Education, commissioned a
controversial 2006 report called “A Test of Leadership:
Charting the Future of U.S. Higher Education.”
The report’s language was
very much in tune with the pro-business Bush zeitgeist. The commission’s
chairman was Charles Miller, a private investor who was joined by Nicholas
Donofrio, the executive vice president of IBM Corp., and by James J.
Duderstadt, the corporate vice president for Microsoft Corp. Their report
predicted disaster unless colleges began protecting their “market share” by
preparing students for the “global marketplace.”
The word “accreditation”
also appeared throughout the report and seemed to signal a proposed crackdown
on schools that did not share the Spelling Commission’s private-sector
worldview. Consider this conclusion: “Federal and state policymakers and
accrediting organizations should work to eliminate regulatory and accreditation
barriers to new models in higher education that will increase supply and drive
costs down.”
The report claimed to
speak for the public interest. “The growing public demand for increased
accountability, quality and transparency,” it continued, “coupled with the
changing structure and globalization of higher education requires a
transformation of accreditation.”
The commission’s report
was heavily criticized by the
American Association of University Professors and others.
“The problem with the
Spellings market-based approach is that it does not address the proliferation
of for-profit programs,” Alan Singer, a professor at Hofstra University ‘s
Department of Teaching, Literacy and Leadership, wrote Capital & Main in an email. “They are designed to take
advantage of federal loan programs for poor students but saddle them with a
heavy debt burden and provide these students with few marketable skills.”
The Spellings Commission
called for, but failed to deliver a federal policy of reforming postsecondary
education. That priority, however, remains on tap in the Obama administration.
Spellings left the U.S.
DoED to work as a consultant for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which calls
itself “the world’s largest business federation representing the interests of
more than three million businesses of all sizes, sectors, and regions.” There
is no comparable advocacy group for labor and the public interest – neither of
which sector comes close to spending the amount of money to affect policy as
the Chamber does.
Echoes of Spellings’ 2006
report, with its anti-regulatory doom and gloom forecasts, turned up in a 2011 Chamber
report prepared by Spellings and what were called “edupreneurs.”
“The United States is
losing ground internationally in degree, credential and skill attainment;
tuition is increasing faster than the cost of living; and traditional
institutions are experiencing a productivity crisis,” she said at a
Chamber-sponsored forum.
Spellings left the Chamber in June,
2013 and currently helms the George W. Bush Presidential Center at Southern
Methodist University in Dallas.
Which brings us to Vickie
Schray, who worked under Spellings at the U.S. DoED. Since January, 2011,
Schray has worked as the senior vice president of regulatory affairs and public
policy for Bridgeport Education, which enrolls 60,000 students and provides
for-profit online college instruction. She contributed to the Spellings report
and also authored another DoED 2006 paper, “Assuring Quality in
Higher Education: Recommendations for Improving Accreditation.” In
it, Schray noted the presence of commercial entities in postsecondary education
as a positive trend for the public sector.
“The rise of private,
for-profit entities,” Schray wrote, “has also prompted discussions about how
best to assure and promote quality in higher education based on leading public
and private practices.”
It’s a position fiercely
disputed by school-privatization critics, including Diane Ravitch, the
historian and former assistant education secretary in the George H.W. Bush
White House.
“The same data-based
techniques used to close down hundreds—perhaps thousands—of K-12 public schools
is now being applied to postsecondary education,” she wrote in an email to
Capital & Main, when asked to comment on the kind of closure-as-punishment
policies faced by CCSF.
In the meantime, the Obama
White House has proposed a framework that rates postsecondary education.
According to a DoED press release, “The
ratings system can help inform policy, accreditation and funding decisions by
states’ education authorities, policies and practices of accreditors and
others.”
The public can submit
feedback on the draft framework for a new college ratings system, effective in
the 2015-16 school year, through February 17, 2015.
“The U.S. Department of
Education [under Secretary Arne Duncan] proposes to grade institutions of
higher education,” Ravitch said, “using criteria that will inevitably promote
standardization and whatever the DoED values.”
Reposted from Capital and
Main.
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