Candidates stump for school choice

If Barack Obama wins the Democratic nomination, Americans will have two presidential candidates who are open to school choice measures. Barack Obama went on Fox News Sunday this week and said, “We should be experimenting with charter schools” and “different ways of compensating teachers” — beliefs he’s long held but not always trumpeted, The New Republic’s Josh Patashnik says. Obama advocated charter schools and performance-pay for teachers in Illinois, and has even hinted that he wouldn’t rule out the idea of school vouchers.

John McCain visited New Orleans Thursday on his “It’s Time for Action” tour, stopping in cities the campaign said the federal government has forgotten, but where local solutions are working.

New Orleans has become a proving ground for charter schools in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. According to the campaign, it has the highest percentage of students in charter schools among U.S. Cities. Most of the city’s students now attend charter schools. Last year, students in New Orleans charter schools out-scored their peers in traditional public schools on a standardized test.

A president friendly to charter schools could spur the already-growing charter school movement. The number of charter schools nationwide grew by 11 percent in 2006, serving a student body that is on average 53 percent minority and 54 percent low-income, according a survey from the Center for Education Reform.

In Grand Rapids, Mich., J.C. Huizenga, the founder of National Heritage Academies, a national chain of 55 K-8 charter schools located in six states, recently announced plans to started a college prep high school to go head-to head with a new public college prep school.

Chicago school teacher Will Okun recently described his frustrations with traditional city schools in an blog post entitled “The Mire.” The Chicago Public Schools have 27 charter schools on 48 campuses. Hundreds are on the waiting lists, and the city plans for more by 2010.

Okun, while cautioning parents and policy-makers to remember the students left behind in the public schools, describes parents desperate to pull their children from traditional schools:

Charter-school parents speak of higher graduation rates, better facilities, more extracurricular opportunities, caring teachers, and stricter discipline. Most importantly, these parents speak of charter schools with a sense of hope and purpose that no longer exists in most public high schools on the West Side. … I do not blame parents for wanting to surround their children with other children and parents who give education top priority.”

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Corrupt university professors still on the payroll

This is not how West Virginia University wanted to build its national reputation. Six months after his inauguration, President Mike Garrison is struggling to hold his administration together - and keep his job - amid a scandal that erupted after the school granted Gov. Joe Manchin's daughter a master's degree she didn't earn.

Two top university officials resigned last weekend over their part in the episode. Major donors have canceled plans to donate millions. Members of the Faculty Senate are planning a no-confidence vote on Garrison next week. And critics inside and outside the university have demanded the president resign over what appears to be an instance in which political pull influenced the awarding of a degree. "If you have smart officials, they know this would be one of the quickest ways to ruin the reputation of the university," said Thomas Morawetz, a professor and authority on ethics at the University of Connecticut law school. "It is a serious violation of norms."

With more than 27,000 students, West Virginia is the pride of a state where people say they "bleed blue and gold." Mountaineer alumni include the governor and NBA Hall of Famer Jerry West. The university has helped generations of West Virginians - many of them the sons and daughters of coal miners and steelworkers - lift themselves up in a poor state. But it also perennially ranks among the nation's top party schools.

Now some fear the scandal threatens the university's effort to improve its academic reputation and turn itself into a national research powerhouse. Garrison himself has made high-tech research a priority, successfully lobbying the state Legislature for a multimillion-dollar "bucks for brains" program. An editorial in the student newspaper, The Daily Athenaeum, said the administration has "trivialized all degrees this university has awarded and will award." "I suppose this is the price paid for attending a university with such an intimate connection to its state, a final reminder of how dirty West Virginia can be, and not just from the coal dust of economic fallout," student columnist Chad Wilcox wrote separately.

The scandal cracked wide open last week after an investigative panel issued a report saying the university showed "seriously flawed" judgment last fall in retroactively awarding an executive master's of business administration degree to Heather Bresch, who attended the school in 1998 but did not earn enough credits. The panel said the business school gave Bresch credit for classes she didn't take, and assigned grades "simply pulled from thin air," giving her special treatment because of who she is. The degree has since been rescinded. The governor, a Democrat, has denied exerting any pressure and said he first learned of the dispute only after it became a news story. Bresch told The Associated Press that she believes she did nothing wrong.

Bresch, 38, is not only the governor's daughter. She is chief operating officer of generic drug maker Mylan Inc., a major West Virginia benefactor with a lab in Morgantown that employs about 2,000 people. Mylan was one of the companies that raised the money to create the Executive MBA program, which is for full-time executives. Mylan's chairman, Milan "Mike" Puskar, is a Manchin supporter and one of West Virginia's biggest contributors. The business school deanship is endowed in Puskar's name, and the football stadium was named for him after he donated $20 million in 2003.

Bresch is also a friend and former high school and West Virginia classmate of Garrison. He, in turn, worked for Democratic former Gov. Bob Wise and was once a Mylan lobbyist. Now, Garrison - who was a 38-year-old lawyer with much stronger political credentials than academic ones when he was tapped for the presidency - finds himself the target of critics among the faculty, alumni and the state Republican Party. Garrison should resign, and "he needs to take all his cronies with him," said GOP chairman Dr. Doug McKinney. "They've shown there's entirely too much connection between the statehouse and the president's office."

One philanthropic group, the McGee Foundation, has dropped plans to donate $1 million in cash and an additional $1 million worth of art, and other, smaller donors have threatened similar action, officials said.

Garrison said this week that he will not resign. "I was not involved in any way in the decision," he said. And the university Board of Governors - which hired him and has the power to fire him - issued a statement affirming its "full support" of Garrison. The governor also said he believes Garrison should not step down.

The resignations of Provost Gerald Lang and R. Stephen Sears, dean of the business school, have not satisfied the most vocal of the critics, particularly since Lang and Sears will remain as tenured professors, with Lang earning nearly $200,000 a year and Sears almost $160,000. Lang presided over the meeting last October during which Sears made the final decision to grant the governor's daughter a degree. "It's nice that the dean and provost were offered up as sacrificial lambs, but the cancer is still there," said Peter Kalis, a lawyer and 1972 graduate. He said Garrison and the chairman of the Board of Governors must go, too, if the university is to "reclaim its independence and integrity."

The scandal is not the first major crisis of Garrison's young administration: Football coach Rich Rodriguez abruptly left in December for a job at Michigan, complaining that the university broke a promise to give him greater control over the football program. Rodriguez and West Virginia are now locked in bitter public feud and a lawsuit over a penalty clause in his contract that says he owes the university $4 million for leaving early. Rodriguez claims Garrison had assured him privately that he would not enforce the clause; Garrison denies that.

On Thursday morning, protesters showed up for a speech on campus by former President Clinton. "Mountaineers always free; Mountaineers earn degrees; Garrison must go," read one sign. Another sign bore a drawing of a diploma and the words: "Free while they last."

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The Left's grip on learning

Comment from Australia by Imre Salusinszky



When I abandoned university teaching at the beginning of 2003, after 20 years, I was careful not to construct a "God that failed" narrative around my reasons for going. You know what I mean: how the university system let me down, by its surrender to political correctness, or managerialism, or economic rationalism, or whatever.

In fact, while all those forces had some impact on the working lives of academics between 1983 and 2003, universities remained outstanding places to work. There are few jobs, possibly none, that allow their employees as much freedom to pursue their own interests. And within the constraints of increased demands for accountability -- demands that have affected every sector of the workforce, not just tertiary education -- universities in Australia continue to provide supportive environments for teaching and research.

I left for largely personal reasons and without a trace of bitterness or resentment. That said, there were irritating, almost daily incidents on campus that confirmed the takeover of universities by the world view of the green Left. For example, there was the exchange student from the US who, close to tears, told me of how, during a role-playing exercise in a drama class, his tutor had instructed him, in front of the other students: "You're an American, so you play thebully."

Then there was the honorary degree proffered to anti-nuclear messiah Helen Caldicott. Modern universities are creatures of the Enlightenment and should advance its aims. If there is a more potent counter-Enlightenment figure in Australia today than Caldicott, I can't think of him or her. At the time she was honoured, I mused on the confused response I would surely have elicited from the relevant committee if I had nominated a true Enlightenment figure and a genuine intellectual, such as Paddy McGuinness, for a doctorate.

And speaking of the counter-Enlightenment, every election would see the doors of some of my colleagues in the humanities faculty plastered with Greens propaganda, with several standing as candidates.

All of this was harmless, up to a point. One of the lessons life has taught me is that the inherent qualities of human beings -- their decency or mendacity, goodwill or nastiness -- cannot easily be read from their political opinions. I got on well with my colleagues and, even after I "came out" as a supporter of microeconomic reform and started moonlighting as a columnist who specialised in sending up the cultural Left, most of them seemed well disposed towards me.

Along with much else, the situation in universities, and my own situation, shifted ground after 9/11. Following the terror attacks, the cultural Left (as distinct from the mainstream political Left) made the classic misjudgment it has made whenever democracy and fascism have come into conflict in the past century: it refused to pick sides on the principle that anybody who attacks the US and its allies cannot be all bad.

My colleagues' expressions of horror at the loss of life on 9/11 were heartfelt, but were almost always followed by a subordinate clause beginning -- like this one -- with but. Exactly a week after the attacks, I received an email from the academics' union representative on campus inviting me to a candlelight "vigil for justice and peace" in support of the victims of 9/11: not the 3000 victims of the terror attacks, but the arbitrary and so far hypothetical victims the Great Satan was about to unleash his fury upon.

"We have all been saddened, horrified, at the events in the US last week," the email began. "Many of us are now extremely worried about the talk of war and vengeance on the yet unidentified enemy, and the escalation of violence that may occur if bombing of towns and cities in targeted countries occurs." The email went on to encourage union members to attend the vigil, "if you would like to stand up and be counted and send a message to our civic leaders and fellow Australians that indiscriminate violence against 'suspects' will not be OK, that the targeting of Muslims, Arabs, Afghanis or other people of a certain ethnicity, as undesirable, is not OK, or if you just want to be with others who are sad, worried and concerned about war and justice." I didn't. Events such as this, while they did not cause me to leave the university, certainly did not incline me to linger.

So what has prompted these autobiographical meanderings? It is that the Young Liberals have launched a campaign, under the banner Make Education Fair, in which they are asking university students to report examples of political bias by their lecturers, with a view to holding a Senate inquiry into the issue. The Young Libs have already been accused of a sinister exercise in McCarthyism, but that tends to be the response whenever the question of bias in public institutions -- schools, universities, public broadcasting, museums and galleries -- is raised. Those for whom diversity is a key buzzword appear to flee the concept when it is applied to them.

I don't think there is anything wrong with left-leaning academics or ABC broadcasters. I don't think they need to be disciplined, far less sacked. But the dangers of allowing the political spectrum in these institutions to begin at Bob Brown and veer left from there are manifold. It leads to a bifurcated culture in which intellectuals lose contact with the mainstream and frequently develop a sense of hostility and embattlement towards it. Second, it means students are not being introduced to some of the most exciting intellectual ideas of our time, those associated with free-market economics and contemporaryliberalism.

And in the longer term, the effect of an undiluted green gospel, presented as a curriculum in schools and universities, could be devastating. If the idea is allowed to take hold unchallenged that, rather than wealth creation, it is the effort to limit and regulate wealth creation that underwrites our wellbeing, future generations will have a much lower standard of living than we enjoy.

Rather than sinister, I regard the Young Libs' campaign as quixotic. You won't, and shouldn't, change the beliefs of people who work in universities or other public institutions; rather, you should try and make sure there are a range of beliefs represented. Diversity really is the point. But when it is those already in place who control recruitment, courtesy of staff capture, the possibilities of cultural change quickly recede.

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