Now, I am sad to report, Dr. Florida has concluded that we should just give up on community development.  Instead of supporting communities, explains The American Prospect in an article aptly titled “The Ruse of the Creative Class,” we should start supporting people.  His words from a May 2009 blog post: “People – not industries or even places – should be our biggest concern.  We can best help those who are hardest-hit by the [economic] crisis, by providing a generous social safety [net], investing in their skills, and when necessary helping them become mobile and move where the opportunities are.”

Had we known back then how easy it was to (re)create West Virginia, we could have saved  a lot of time and money by buying everyone suitcases and renting them Ryder trucks so they could move to more stylish bergs like Austin, Texas; Raleigh, North Carolina; and Boulder, Colorado.

Was Dr. Florida correct then or is he correct now?  Stay tuned.

Death ends a life, but it does not end a relationship, which struggles on in the survivor’s mind toward some final resolution, some clear meaning which it perhaps never finds.

- Robert Anderson, I Never Sang for My Father

It’s been more than 20 years since I last uttered those lines from Robert Anderson’s play, which also appear in a slightly different form in Tuesdays with Morrie, but they came racing back to me today.  I understand their meaning so much better now.

“I know House Speaker Earl Ray Tomblin is open-minded to looking at what is cost effective,” he said. ["]We need to look at where the money is needed most, everyday things for people to go to work. I don’t want to look at one thing.”

For eight long years, I watched Republicans exploit terrorism as a political issue.  For their efforts, we got into a war with a country that did not present an imminent threat and that had no Al Qaeda terrorists (at least before we got there) or weapons of mass destruction.  And for their efforts, we came to be viewed as a rogue nation throughout the rest of the civilized world as we discarded basic constitutional principles for “detainees” in facilities as diverse as Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and a notorious set of “secret” prisons scattered throughout the world.

Guess what?  They’re back!!

After the attempted terrorism incident on Christmas Day, former Vice President Dick Cheney issued a statement criticizing President Obama for his failure to act dramatically in response to a Nigerian’s man’s effort to blow up an airliner landing in Detroit with explosive materials hidden in his underwear:

As I’ve watched the events of the last few days it is clear once again that President Obama is trying to pretend we are not at war. He seems to think if he has a low key response to an attempt to blow up an airliner and kill hundreds of people, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war. He seems to think if we bring the mastermind of 9/11 to New York, give him a lawyer and trial in civilian court, we won’t be at war.

Mr. Cheney has been joined by an array of conservative commentators criticizing the President.

Guess what?  President Obama acted far more swiftly to the underwear bomber scare than President Bush reacted to the Richard Reid, the shoe bomber, eight years ago.

According to Politico,

Eight years ago, a terrorist bomber’s attempt to blow up a transatlantic airliner was thwarted by a group of passengers, an incident that revealed some gaping holes in airline security just a few months after the attacks of Sept. 11. But it was six days before President George W. Bush, then on vacation, made any public remarks about the so-called shoe bomber, Richard Reid, and there were virtually no complaints from the press or any opposition Democrats that his response was sluggish or inadequate.

It’s refreshing when legitimate news organizations do their homework and expose partisan propaganda for what it is.

Just then they came in sight of thirty or forty windmills that rise from that plain.  And no sooner did Don Quixote see them than he said to his squire: “Fortune is guiding our affairs better than we ourselves could have wished.  Do you see over yonder, friend Sancho, thirty or forty hulking giants?  I intend to do battle with them and slay them.  With their spoils we shall begin to be rich for this is a righteous war and the removal of so foul a brood from off the face of the earth is a service God will bless.

- Miquel de Cervantes, Don Quixote

In our search to create a carbon neutral world, we have begun to harness small, but not insignificant, amounts of wind energy.  Until recently my knowledge of wind energy was limited to a vague notion that there were a lot of windmills (not true) and wooden shoes in Holland.

Today I know a lot more about wind energy.  That knowledge makes me appreciate that making environmentally-correct decisions can be very complicated.  Some of the issues:

• Not all places are equal in terms of their ability to produce wind energy.  Only one region of West Virginia – the Potomac Highlands – is well suited for large-scale wind energy production.
• The best places for wind in West Virginia – the tops of large mountains – can be very hard to reach with 50+ ton wind turbines.
• Wind turbines can kill endangered species like Indiana bats.
• The noise created by wind turbines has been linked to negative health effects for nearby residents.
• Many people have concerns about the impact of wind turbines on viewscapes.  Would you want to stay at a bed and breakfast in Greenbrier County with a large wind turbine in plain view?  How about wind turbines in our “quasi-sacred” national forests and other public lands where, by the way, most of West Virginia’s harnessable wind energy can be found?

Unlike Don Quixote’s imaginary enemies, our environmental enemies – global warming, destroyed ecosystems, polluted streams – are quite real.  But slaying these real enemies might prove just as difficult for us as slaying imaginary enemies was for Don Quixote.

During the process of facilitating the development of West Virginia’s green jobs education and training plan, I had an opportunity to read some very rosy assessments of future green jobs needs.  Those reports (e.g., O*NET) repeatedly emphasized that green jobs were primarily, but not exclusively, going to be found in existing occupations.

As a result of these assessments, the leading national report on green jobs education and training, titled Greener Pathways, had this to say: “More time should be spent embedding green skills training within current curricula, and less energy inventing new programs.”  This admonition caused the West Virginia GREEN-UP Council to propose expending most new green education and training dollars on greening up existing programs and existing workers, not on starting a lot of new sustainability programs.

Is Greener Pathways right?  I think so:

• To design a green building, you must have basic architectural skills.
• To build or renovate a building using green products, you must have building and construction trades skills.
• To install or retrofit an energy efficient HVAC system or maintain a wind turbine, you must have basic electro-mechanical skills.
• To ensure that a community’s water supply is environmentally safe, you must have basic chemistry and biological testing skills.

While I’m convinced that a green revolution is upon us, I worry that students pursuing these new sustainability degrees will not be able to find jobs upon graduation unless they also have other, more practical skills.

In my opinion, this push to create stand-alone environmental sustainability programs is another example of higher education being out of touch with real world needs, even as it tries to address those needs.

• The first problem, I daresay, is with Vision Shared’s mission: “To bridge social, political and economic gaps by BRINGING PEOPLE TOGETHER to confront the issues and needs facing West Virginia.” I realize that bringing people together, which is better known as event planning or party planning to the uninitiated, can be quite an accomplishment, but it is hardly a “meaningful” accomplishment for an organization in existence for almost a decade. During my eight years working in government, I quickly learned that the problem with getting things done rarely is that key stakeholders don’t meet – the public policy world is filled with party planners.  Rather it was that no one ever does much of anything after being brought together.  An organization that makes bringing people together its primary mission is destined to fail at accomplishing much of anything else, regardless of whom it brings together.
• The second problem, I daresay, is with Vision Shared’s goal: “To strengthen the economy, reshape communities, promote progressive government and improve the quality of life for all West Virginians.”  No organization can be all things to all people – and certainly not with a $600,000 annual budget.

Like the organization itself, the report is a mile wide and an inch deep.  You have to skip to the top of page 12 (and can stop at the bottom of page 13) of the 18 page report to find a discussion of the group’s accomplishments during 2009.  The highlights listed:

• Early Child Development. They issued a report with some recommendations. No discussion of accomplishments in improving early child development.
• Creative Communities.  They held a conference. Again no discussion of accomplishments in creating or sustaining creative communities.
• Technology Based Economic Development. They created yet another free-standing non-profit organization – TechConnectWV.  Again no discussion of accomplishments in bringing technology-based economic development to West Virginia.
• Entrepreneurship.  They launched the Young Entrepreneurs Support (YES) Network.  Clever acronym, but what does it do?  And, yes, they created a business “plan” to focus on marketing West Virginia-made consumer goods.  How many new entrepreneurs do we have as a result of these efforts?  How many jobs have been created?
• Building Bridges and Empowering Citizens.  They supported the growth of yet another group – Generation West Virginia – and yet another conference for group participants.
• Results-Based Government.  They supported the creation of another state government agency, GO HELP, to coordinate governmental health care entities.  Much like the much-ballyhooed and failed Governor’s Cabinet on Children and Families?
• Permitting.  They crowed about legislation, passed in 2008, to make it easier for new entrepreneurs to find the information they need to engage in business in West Virginia.  It’s called Business4WV, folks, and it’s been around for a while.  Although not perfect, it’s very good and facilitated quite easily my entry into the small business world this past year. Surely no one seriously thinks West Virginians with the talent, drive, and ideas to create going business enterprises don’t create them because it’s hard to comply with basic business filing, permitting, and tax requirements.

What did Vision Shared accomplish? More plans, reports with recommendations, and conferences?  Another notoriously-difficult-to-sustain 501(c)(3) organization, another state government “coordinating” agency with little real power, and another solution to a business problem that doesn’t exist?  These are not meaningful accomplishments for a group that has been in “business,” literally and figuratively, for more than a decade.

(10) HigherEdThink. 29 July. This was the first post in what ultimately would become a series called “Antidotes to GroupThink” in which I summarize the ideas of people whose thinking is outside the mainstream of conventional wisdom.  Our first GroupThink antidote was Anne Neal, president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, who dared suggest that higher education trustees need to take a more active role in higher education governance.

(9) “There’s a Sucker Born Every Minute.” 13 July. In this post, I poked a little fun at the Charleston Gazette for publishing an op-ed commentary opposing the minimum wage from someone who works for “Dr. Evil,” a not-so-fine gentleman who operates bogus business and industry “think-tanks.”

(8) Gambling with Students’ Futures: Part II. 30 September.  This post highlighted a report about risky investments made by 529 plans.

(7) Chemical Peel, Anyone? 28 July. This post, the second in a series of posts on research parks, described the challenge of revitalizing the Dow Tech Center in South Charleston.  Not surprisingly, the advice contained therein appears to have gone unheeded by the powers that be.

(6) The Game of Charades. 21 July. I suspect it was the combination of my discussion of the hiring of Marshall University’s athletic director and my candor about higher education hiring practices that made this post so viewable.

(5) Heartbreak of Psoriasis. 23 July. In this post, I poked a little fun at Huntington’s Kinetic Park research park.

(4) Antidotes to GroupThink: Creative Communities. 21 September. A salute to my good friend Troy Body, who seemed to be a little perturbed that I described him as a “half-bubble off plumb,” a compliment if ever there was one.

(3) Making (Up?) the Grade. 28 September. This post compared and contrasted (mostly the latter) the WVU-Heather Bresch and MU-Emily Perdue academic controversies. I suspect lots of people were curious about whether I thought we were going to have a big scandal.  An alternative theory for this post’s popularity: The FBI, which I later accused of overreacting, has been monitoring me closely.  I do not dismiss the latter possibility lightly.

(2) Me Talk Football. 25 September.  At the prodding of a friend, I poked a little fun at a WVU press release promoting an article about a professor’s research on football brain injuries in Gentlemen’s Quarterly.  When HippieKiller referenced my post on his blog, the number of views rose dramatically.

Until one week ago, I would have told you that Me Talk Football was destined to be my most popular post of 2009, but another post slowly-but-surely sneaked up to take the top spot ….

(1) The Libelous World of Higher Education Blogging. 11 November. I don’t know if it was my disclosure that I knew someone had made a lot of false accusations about me behind my back, which produced numerous private emails but not a single public comment, or the story of the poor student sued by an overly sensitive Butler University administration that could not take a little criticism, that made this my most popular post.  My guess: it was both.

While titillating, the poor decisions highlighted in these stories pale in comparison to a poor decision made by the administration of Swanson Middle School in Arlington, Virginia, last week.  As part of a model United Nations debate, some students were assigned to argue in support of Afghanistan’s Taliban before administrators stepped in to stop the assignment after a few parents became angry.

Is the purpose of education to indoctrinate students or to teach them to think?  While I believe in providing students with a common cultural foundation as part of their education a la E.D. Hirsch, Jr., I do not believe that should be taken as an excuse not to teach students to think critically and to attempt to understand others’ points of view, especially given that our country is at war in two countries in which a lot of people think quite differently than we.

Is there no valid argument to support the Taliban position?  Only a non-thinking person would say so.

• Argument No. 1: Afghanistan is a sovereign nation, and the United States should respect its sovereignty absent a serious and immediate threat from the government of that country.  At the time of its invasion, Afghanistan did not pose a serious threat to the United States, and thus its sovereignty should have been respected.
• Argument No. 2: The Taliban should not be held any more responsible for the actions of Osama Bin Laden than should the United States government’s puppet Karzai regime, which has not been able to reign in Osama Bin Laden or his network.
• Argument No. 3: The Taliban could be no worse than the current Karzai regime, which does everything from steal elections to kill family members with which it is feuding.
• Argument No. 4: The Taliban may engage in religious practices that we find repugnant and repressive, but their religious preferences should be respected in the same way that American Episcopalians respect the religious practices of American Catholics and American Jews.

While I could provide a strong response to each argument, it does not make the arguments unworthy of making or considering.  I want students to reach reasoned conclusions after considering many sides of an issue, not after being told what to think by one of our nation’s leaders.

Is it somehow wrong to expect eighth graders to think?  According to Linda Erdos, spokeswoman for the Arlington Public Schools, “There is a sensitivity that eighth grade kids don’t have the maturity level to do this at this point.”  I could not disagree more.  It’s never too early to teach a student how to think.

I, for one, worry far more about the students at Swanson Middle School than I do about the students at Paradise High School.

H/T The Answer Sheet

Today I want to go on record as being a Marshall University football fan who is pleased with the hiring of “Doc” Holliday as the new head coach, even as I note the absurdity of a $600,000 per year salary for teaching young men how to hang on to an oblong ball.  (Having said that, hanging on to an oblong ball can be quite a feat.  Just ask any Mountaineer fan who watched the Auburn game.)

Besides having a cool nickname, Doc Holliday seems to have made favorable impressions virtually everywhere.  Yet despite this, I’m reading vitriolic comments from both the Marshall University and West Virginia University faithful attacking the choice because of this local boy’s toils for West Virginia University or his new-found allegiance.

Unless they are playing Marshall University, I cheer for the Mountaineers.  Unless they are playing West Virginia University, most of my Mountaineer friends cheer for the Herd.  I really don’t understand the ill will of some fans toward the other school.

This is one MU and WVU fan who wishes Doc Holliday the best.

PS: For those of you wondering from whence the title of this post comes, those words are reputed to have been the last ever uttered by the other, only slightly-more-infamous “Doc” Holliday.

Position descriptions are critical to any effort to classify, compensate, or set performance expectations.  Despite this rather obvious fact, I received no support whatsoever for my efforts to get position descriptions updated across higher education.  To the contrary, numerous efforts were undertaken to ensure that I was stopped as several human resources “professionals” asserted with straight faces that higher education as we knew it would cease to exist if such a radical idea were not checked.

As a result, state employees will have up-to-date position descriptions come February, while higher education employees (also state employees) will not.  It’s amazing what a little leadership can accomplish.

• Three sites hit by bombs in Baghdad. A series of apparently coordinated car bombs exploded on Tuesday morning, killing at least four people and wounding 14 others ….
• Bomber strikes near hotel in Kabul. A blast killed at least eight people and wounded 40 more outside a hotel frequented by foreigners ….
• Bomb explodes in central Pakistan. A suspected car bomb ripped through a market near the home of a politician in central Pakistan on Tuesday, killing at least 10 people and wounding 25 others ….

There’s something happening here.

What it is ain’t exactly clear.

There’s a man with a gun over there.

Telling me I got to beware.

It’s time to stop, hey what’s that sound?

Everybody look what’s going down.

1) This decision is not likely to play well in Peoria or Parkersburg:

• Why should a West Virginia resident care about Indiana bats?  Of course, they’re endangered in West Virginia; they’re “Indiana” bats.
• The environmentalists are no longer satisfied with shutting down fossil fuel production; now they’re shutting down renewable energy production, too.

2) Although this decision will not play well, it appears that Invenergy could have done something very simple – apply for an Incidental Take Permit – to satisfy the Endangered Species Act.  Indeed the judge referred to Invenergy’s plight as “self-imposed.”

• Why do companies like Invenergy not jump through reasonable hoops like the Incidental Take Permit process?
• Invenergy is lucky that the bats hibernate from mid-November to the end of March, which means it can operate its wind turbines while it submits its permit request.

3) Even “clean” energy solutions sometimes raise environmental concerns, as this specific case illustrates.  The road to a carbon neutral world is likely to be a long and bumpy one.

When I was a student in West Virginia, tracked classes were common, but that has changed over the years.  The same trend has occurred in Massachusetts.  Why?  A concern that teachers effectively use tracking to stereotype and discriminate against students from disadvantaged backgrounds.

What does the study find?  Controlling for socio-economic status, more tracked students perform at advanced and proficient levels, and more detracked students perform at failing or needs improvement levels.  Indeed the more tracks your school has, the better students are likely to perform.

What schools are least likely to track?  Urban schools serving mostly poor children.

Could our efforts to help students from disadvantaged backgrounds with detracking actually be hurting them?  That is the real question.

While I am generally sympathetic to the Sierra Club cause, I think their opposition to these gifts is wrong-headed.  In my perfect world, West Virginia University, which actually has a competitive advantage in the field of energy research, would become a leader in the alternative and renewable energy fields.  To do that, they need money from people in the energy industry – and for good or ill, that includes people like Murray and Blankenship, who at least understand the potential benefits of energy research, even if their statements about global warming and other issues are far afield.

It would be great if higher education institutions never took money from benefactors who did not-so-good things, but we wouldn’t have some of the world’s finest educational institutions without the benefit of some ill-gotten gains – Duke University (built by tobacco), Carnegie Mellon University, and Rockefeller University, just to name a few.

Several things bother me about the “Stand for Christmas” movement:

• If there is a more un-Christian holiday than Christmas, I would like to know what it is.  Even a casual reader of the New Testament, much less regular church-goers like the “Stand for Christmas” people, should know that Christ was concerned with assisting the less fortunate, not in assuring that people who already have too much receive even more in the way of worldly possessions.  I’m pretty sure Christ would not want His name associated with the spectacle we call Christmas.
• I do not like the implied message being sent to my Jewish and Muslim friends: We are a Christian nation; either join us or leave.  That message seems very un-Christian to me, especially given the long tradition of individuals from these faiths adding so much to America.
• The movement runs counter to basic notions of religious liberty upon which our nation was founded.  As generally understood, religious liberty means that we live and let live when it comes to religion.  If a store wants to embrace religious diversity, we should embrace the store, not punish it.
• I actually grew up in a Christian church in which a minority did not celebrate Christmas because we don’t actually know whether it is Christ’s birthday.  Is there no room for such Christians in the “Stand for Christmas” world?

As for me and my house, we stand firmly AGAINST Christmas as it is practiced by far too many American households, and we will avoid stores that attempt to use Christ as an excuse to support conspicuous consumption.

And the Grinch, with his Grinch-feet ice cold in the snow, stood puzzling and puzzling how could it be so? It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes or bags. And he puzzled and puzzled ’til his puzzler was sore. Then the Grinch thought of something he hadn’t before. What if Christmas, he thought, doesn’t come from a store? What if Christmas perhaps means a little bit more…

• If you have a vendor like Mr. Diehl generating documents that would suggest that bids were solicited from other vendors when they were not, you logically have a state government employee, who ordinarily would do this work, as a co-conspirator.  Who might that person be?  Was he or she directed to assist in the cover-up?
• I recall that a General Services Division employee named Jim Burgess was dismissed about the same time, but received a sizable settlement after he alleged inappropriate procurement practices in connection with Governor’s Mansion renovations.
• There has been a lot of gossip about the Alcohol Beverage Control Administration and  the provision of liquor to the Governor’s Mansion.  It’s interesting that Mr. Diehl was a liquor vendor.

I don’t know enough to know precisely where this investigation may be headed, but I’d be really surprised if it’s over.

Today Senator Byrd speaks truth to power about coal.  His theme: “The time has come to have an open and honest dialogue about coal’s future in West Virginia.”

• Why aren’t we having that important dialogue?  Because politicians and industry are “scapegoating and stoking fear over the permitting process.”
• Can the world live without coal?  ”No deliberate effort to do away with the coal industry could ever succeed in Washington because there is no available alternative energy supply that could immediately supplant the use of coal….”
• What about mountaintop removal coal mining?  ”It is not a widespread method of mining, with its use confined to only three states.  Most members of Congress, like most Americans, oppose the practice, and we may not yet fully understand the effects of mountaintop removal mining on the health of our citizens.”
• What about climate change?  ”To deny the mounting science of climate change is to stick our heads in the sand….”
• What do we need to do?  ”West Virginians can choose to anticipate change and adapt to it, or resist and be overrun by it.”

West Virginia will pay a heavy price if it fails to heed Senator Byrd’s message.

Last weekend Marshall University ended its regular season 6-6 after four losing seasons.  MU probably could save a little money, too, if it dropped football, especially now that its football coach has resigned.  Some people in Morgantown say MU dropped it a few years back anyway.

PS: I’m a Marshall University graduate, so I can get away with this bit of heresy – or possibly not.

Reflecting on this, I read with amusement Kathleen Parker’s wonderful opinion piece in The Washington Post titled “The GOP’s Suicide Pact” on Sunday.  Ms. Parker makes fun of the GOP’s proposed ten-point  purity test “to weed out undesirables from their ever-shrinking party.”  If the purity test is adopted, a Republican will have to agree with at least eight of the ten points to receive party support.

The first purity test item: “We support smaller government, smaller national debt, lower deficits and lower taxes by opposing bills like Obama’s ‘stimulus’ bill.”  What about the bazillion dollar bailout of the financial services industry, which dwarfs the stimulus bill in terms of cost and was supported by many Republicans?  What about those earmarks Republicans were so fond of during the Bush administration?  What makes it OK to support one initiative, but not another, given that all have expanded government and increased national debt and deficits?

How about purity test number two: “We support market-based health care reform and oppose Obama-style government run health care.”  We will have no health care reform at all if we leave it to the market.  Isn’t the better question: What role should government play – regulator, provider, or some combination of the two?  But that would require nuanced thinking.

Lest any of you Democrats think Republicans have the market cornered on obsequiousness, I encourage you to look at the Wise and Manchin administrations.  Having observed both closely, I repeatedly saw people in key positions suppress good ideas because they knew it was better for them to go along and get along than to speak the truth. By way of example:

• I know of two situations in which state-level cabinet officials allowed flawed legislation to pass, rather than raise basic problems that readily could have been corrected, for fear of running afoul of the Governor.
• I repeatedly saw state-level cabinet officials avoid important public policy issues because the issues could not be summarized in a five-second sound bite.
• Read the op-ed commentaries of your state-level cabinet officials: Not one of them says anything meaningful or important, much less nuanced.  Indeed I would refuse to publish them if I were a newspaper editor.

Savvy political parties, politicians, and leaders don’t surround themselves with sycophants.

The most telling quotation: “My contention has never been that the student did not do the work to earn the grade,” Wyant said. “The problem for me has always been the way it was handled, and the fact that right from the beginning I knew it was not right. Other students do not get that kind of attention.”

Emily Perdue did the work, but it’s a crime because she was given special treatment?  By special treatment, I assume we’re talking about an expedited path for completing coursework after Marshall University treated students in this program pretty shabbily as best I can tell?  And just where is the quid pro quo – the thing that someone at Marshall University was promised in exchange for the favorable treatment?  Again I ask why anyone would take a matter like this before a federal grand jury?

• Michaele and Tareq Salahi.  Unless one of the Salahis grabbed a steak knife and used it on White House State Dinner guests, it’s not breaking news that they crashed a party.
• Tiger Woods.  Unless Tiger Woods’ wife beat him to death with one of his golf clubs for being an unfaithful spouse, (yes, I got my news from the National Enquirer while in the grocery check-out line), it’s not breaking news.
• Mark Snyder.  When the Marshall University Thundering Herd loses 52-21 to a hapless University of Texas El Paso football team, it’s not breaking news when the coach resigns.

Once the little tree had poked its head above the hosta plant, it seemed to grow and grow.  Realizing that the tree ultimately could not survive there, I decided that I would transplant it near my parents’ house.  But before I could do so, a neighbor, assuming I could not possibly want the little tree, cut it down for me.  Appreciating the incredible odds against which the little tree had grown and thrived, I was saddened that I had not acted in time to save it.

Earlier this week, I walked around the side of my house and saw that my hosta plants had died back for the winter – and standing proudly in the middle of one were four not-so-tiny sprigs of my little tree.  As I looked at them, I thought wistfully of a prose selection from A Tree Grows in Brooklyn that I cut for a Charleston Catholic High School student many years ago.  I had included the following lines at both the beginning and the end of the cutting:

There is a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky.  It grows in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it is the only tree that grows out of cement. It grows lushly, but only in the tenement districts.  That is the kind of tree it is ….

(The beginning of the book includes these words in the past tense.)

I remember having had great difficulty explaining to Irene that she should deliver these lines quite differently at the beginning and end because the words have a more significant meaning after one hears Francie’s story, which mirrored Irene’s own personal story, a point that Irene was too young to appreciate fully.

STORY NO. 2: On May 1 I walked out of my workplace for the last time.  Over a two-and-one-half year period, I had been deprived of virtually everything I needed to learn and grow professionally.  I spent those two and one-half years undertaking, with almost no support, project after project in which I had little or no expertise and/or interest, being systematically excluded from any project I might have found remotely interesting or for which I might have added value, and having the simplest administrative tasks made inordinately difficult.  Throughout that period and against all odds, I would get a little nourishment here and there, but it ultimately proved not to be enough.

Upon arriving home after my last day of work, I resolved to start afresh professionally and personally.  Recognizing that I needed to lose weight, I took a five-mile walk.  I walked five more miles the next day and five more miles two days after that.

Before too long I set a goal of walking 100 miles during the month of May.  When I reached that goal on May 21, I raised the goal to 150 miles – a goal I achieved on May 31.  Somewhere along the way during May, I set a new goal – to complete a 1,000 mile journey and do it in six months.  It just seemed right given Lao-tzu’s quotation: “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”

In early June I continued to walk day after day before wondering to myself whether I could jog.  So I began taking mini-jogs during my walks until one day in late June I managed to jog five miles.  Only a few weeks after that, I completed a ten-mile jog.

On July 28, three days ahead of schedule, I crossed the 500-mile mark and began preparing for the 15-mile Charleston Distance Run.  In a 16-mile test jog two weeks before the race, I developed a shin splint, which persisted for about a month, and prevented me from participating in the run.  But I soldiered on – mile after mile, day after day, toward my thousand-mile goal.

Unfortunately, several large work projects and family illness prevented me from reaching my October 31 goal, but still I persisted.  Today I completed the 1,000-mile journey.

For me the journey has been both physical and metaphorical – as I have become much healthier, found supportive colleagues, and undertaken new projects that again allow me to learn and grow.  And for that I am extremely thankful.

EPILOGUE.  Although a very long journey has come to an end, the scrappy little tree and I are not done.  You see, that little tree will be transplanted on Thanksgiving Day.  In its new home, it will have all the sunshine and moisture and breathing room it needs.

As the scrappy little tree and I begin new journeys, I am confident we will grow and thrive.  Thirty years from now, I predict, that scrappy tree will provide some traveler, who has no idea of its origin, some much-needed shade on a hot summer day.  As for me, who knows?

There is a tree that grows in Brooklyn. Some people call it the Tree of Heaven.  No matter where its seed falls, it makes a tree which struggles to reach the sky.

A poorly-kept secret: All but the nation’s top athletics programs regularly operate at a loss.  So in this time of dramatic belt-tightening across higher education, will other institutions follow Northeastern’s lead?  Don’t bet on it.

The single worst shoot-yourself-in-the-foot act that contributed to our loss of control of education reform happened about 20 years ago. That’s when leaders of business and industry, convinced that educators either didn’t know enough or didn’t care enough about educating the young to be trusted, hijacked our profession. And we let them.

Mr. Brady suggests that we have entrusted our educational system to people who are not professionals.  They think they know how to run a school because they know how to run a business and they attended school as student.

If you’re looking for a surgeon to remove a cancerous growth, a plumber to fix a leaky pipe, an artist to paint a portrait, a caterer to produce a wedding dinner, you don’t dictate which scalpels the surgeon picks up, which wrenches the plumber brings into the house, which brushes the painter will use, or select the caterer’s kitchen utensils.

Mr. Brady suggests that it’s fine for these non-professionals to engage in problem identification, but they should leave solution-identification and implementation to professional educators.

The new leaders were certain they knew what was wrong with America’s schools, and what had to be done to set them right: What was needed were “standards.” Clear, no-nonsense standards. Tough, demanding standards.

Mr. Brady thinks everyone is wasting a lot of time developing curriculum standards.  First, they are unnecessarily narrowing what students need to know. Second, they are encouraging memorization over the development of “an organized, self-reinforcing, dynamic body of knowledge.”  Third, they are stifling the development of new ideas by providing an official list of worthy ideas.

Two recent posts here - The Race to the Bottom and The Race to the Top? – summarize research and analysis that support Mr. Brady’s contentions.

Today we are watching the greatest higher education system on earth implode: On Thursday the University of California System increased tuition 32 percent and still needs $913 million (not too far from $1 billion) in cuts to balance budgets.  On Friday students across the UC system protested and students at Santa Cruz and Berkeley took over buildings. Meanwhile California’s community colleges cut students, classes and staff at a time when community colleges are expanding by leaps and bounds elsewhere.

Has California hit rock bottom?  Some people say no; I say yes.  Why?  Any state in which the state’s former finance director seriously researches whether the state can convert from a state to a federal territory so the federal government can step in to address the fiscal crisis has no direction to go but up.  Incredible, just incredible.

Dr. Cox reports that first generation college students “admitted to feeling intimidated by professors’ academic knowledge ….  Essentially, students were afraid that the professor would irrevocably confirm their academic inadequacy.”  She goes on to say that first generation college students are reluctant to ask for assistance even when they need it.

That was very true of me even though I excelled at virtually every academic endeavor I ever undertook.  It took me years before I could bring myself to ask a question or speak unless spoken to in class, and I was near the end of my formal education before I was able to talk to a professor outside of class.  While I rarely needed academic assistance, I never asked for it even when I did.  My few bad grades resulted from my inability to ask for help from my professors when I didn’t understand something.  Meanwhile, I observed classmates from different socioeconomic backgrounds having no such difficulty even when they asked stupid questions (and yes there are stupid questions, beginning with those you ask because you didn’t bother to read your assignment) and wondered what was wrong with me.

Dr. Cox notes that first generation college students tend to devalue teaching methods that don’t involve professors lecturing to (or more aptly “at”) them.  I remember thinking that about the Socratic method when first exposed to it in law school.  I initially thought it allowed the professor to prepare less; only after several years, and practicing it as a professor, did I realize that it takes more time to prepare and forces students to prepare for (or drop) your class.

After reading the book review, I now am wondering two things: (1) How on earth did I ever graduate from college, much less earn a law degree?  And even more baffling, how did I find my way into higher education?  (2) Have I been an ineffective professor for students just like me?  I hope not.

I will be reading Dr. Cox’s book, which is available through Harvard University Press.

The idea is a good one: Create longitudinal databases containing all kinds of student information so researchers have a ready repository to support formative and summative evaluation, as well as policymaking.  I liked the idea so much that I drafted House Bill No. 3340 (2009), which passed the West Virginia Legislature during the 2009 regular session and mandates that public and higher education work together to develop shared educational data systems.

The Fordham study warns, however, that many states developing data warehouses do not have basic security systems needed to protect student privacy in place.  The study lists eight security “musts” for any educational data system.  Scarily, my former employer does not meet half of the security “musts,” which is not unusual, according to the report.

For anyone interested in a detailed FERPA tutorial, the first part of the report contains an excellent one – the best I’ve ever read.

Everywhere you turn in the higher education world, you hear policy makers trumpeting the importance of producing more STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) graduates.  Indeed Rising Above the Gathering Storm, a significant report issued by the National Academies several years ago, argued that America was on the verge of losing its competitive edge because it was not producing enough STEM graduates and urged national goal-setting.

After reviewing thirty years of educational and labor data, however, the Rutgers and Georgetown researchers have concluded that we’re producing more than enough STEM graduates.  The problem, if there is any, is that fewer than half of STEM graduates work in STEM fields 10 years after they graduate.

I have a hunch this is an important study (I’m not saying it’s correct, just important) that will receive little additional attention as states like West Virginia charge headlong into STEM graduate program expansion.  I make this observation in part because no one seems to have paid any attention to published data that suggest that West Virginia loses an overwhelming number of its STEM graduates to other states, making West Virginia’s return on its hefty STEM investment very poor.

• Charter schools.  The only quality studies showing significant positive effects are for popular, oversubscribed charter schools operating in large urban school districts (of which we have so many in West Virginia).
• Reconstituting the teacher workforce.  Studies demonstrate that teachers affect student outcomes, but how do we recruit, reward and retain the best teachers?  That’s not so easy, suggests the white paper.
• Early childhood programs.  Studies of two expensive early childhood programs implemented in the 1960s and 1970s found significant long-term effects, but later studies of other programs are less favorable.
• Content standards.  ”The lack of evidence that better content standards enhance student achievement is remarkable given the level of investment in this policy and high hopes attached to it.”  Enough said?
• Curriculum.  While recognizing the challenge of evaluating the differential impact of curricula, the white paper points out that study after study has found significant effects in a wide variety of contexts.

After reading the Race to the Top guidelines and this white paper, I am confused.  Surely we’re not preparing to spend $4 billion to promote questionable educational policies.

In a test of the software’s effectiveness, it was given several of Winston Churchill’s famous wartime speeches, as well as Ernest Hemingway’s, William Golding’s, and Anthony Burgess’s prose, to decipher.

Some of the more humorous conclusions:

• Churchill’s call to ‘fight them on the beaches’ was too repetitive, and he used ‘upon’ and ‘our’ too frequently.  His reference to the ‘might of the German army’ lost him points because the computer assumed he meant to use ‘might’ as a verb, not a noun.
• Hemingway needed to write with more care and detail and was rated below average.
• Burgess’ opening lines in “A Clockwork Orange” were incomprehensible.

Such software, of course, is all the rage in the United States.

• The proposer much show that the innovative idea has community (e.g., parents, students, county of board of education) support.  Is any innovation zone going to succeed without such support?  No.
• The proposer must have the support of 80 percent of school employees.  Is any innovation zone going to succeed without such support?  No.
• The proposer must demonstrate “quality of innovation design.”  Is that a bad thing?  No.  Do you want your child attending a school where the innovation has not been well thought out or is inconsistent with educational best practices research?  I hope not.
• The proposer actually must undergo an interview and a school visit before we hand over the keys to our children’s futures.  A radical requirement?  I don’t think so.

Do firms that provide business start-ups with venture capital adopt the laissez faire approach advocated by the Daily Mail for schools?  Of course not.  They expect business plans that include everything from hiring plans to marketing plans to budgets.  And they don’t give away their money without someone (generally quite a few people) meeting with the applicant.  Why should our schools be any different?  If anything, the stakes are higher.

It’s one thing to be critical of the bureaucracy within existing school systems.  It’s another thing altogether to be critical of the “due diligence” that the State Department of Education seeks to perform to ensure that our children are entrusted to people with solid plans to educate them innovatively.

• The brief takes policymakers to task for relying too heavily on graduation rate calculations that examine only first-time, full-time fall cohorts.  If we assume that all students start in the fall as full-time students, the measure works.  But more than half of all community college students, for example, do not meet these criteria.
• The brief criticizes policymakers for not taking “inputs” (e.g., numbers of disadvantaged students being served) into consideration when evaluating an institution’s success in graduating students.  To paraphrase (rather loosely) former Texas Governor Ann Richards, it’s not too hard to score a home run when you were born on third base; not so for those less fortunate.
• The brief suggests that policymakers should place greater emphasis on remediation milestones because most students, particularly at the community college level, need it and because so few students who need it succeed in college.
• The brief suggests that policymakers should gather data on whether students actually put their degrees to work by obtaining jobs in their fields of study or jobs that require the most recently attained credential.

It’s amazing that someone has to write a report making these points.  All are obvious and well known.

The blogger, “Soodo Nym,” was critical of administrators for dismissing his stepmother as chair of the University’s school of music.  Among other things, he wrote that the dean of the College of Fine Arts was “power-hungry and afraid of his own shadow” and that he “lied” to faculty and left the meeting “embarrassed” for having done so.  He also sent an email in which he said: “We can create much more trouble than we have so far,” which supposedly put Butler’s provost in fear for his own safety.

Several observations:

• It never ceases to amaze me how thin-skinned some people who reach positions of power can  be.  If you are a leader, you should expect to be criticized, fairly or unfairly, from time to time.  It goes with the territory.
• If there’s any area that should be a “free speech” zone, it is a college campus.  I would not want to attend any institution that sued its students for libel for criticizing, even unfairly, its administrators.
• I would much rather have had my accuser publish his accusations on a blog, rather than behind my back, even if more people might see/hear them.  At least you can refute the former.

Some quotations worthy of reflection:

• “I’ve never traveled out of the mid-Atlantic region, the latest issues of The New Yorker and Harper’s have never appeared on my family’s coffee table, and before arriving on the campus, I thought every working person got paid by the hour.”  College access professionals need to understand that, even under the best of circumstances, students from poor socio-economic backgrounds have not had the quality or quantity of enrichment opportunities of their upper and middle class classmates.
• “As a high-school senior trying to decide where to attend college, I felt besieged by information.”  College access professionals need to appreciate that there is ample, indeed overwhelming, information available to poor students about college selection, admissions, and financial aid.  What is missing is quality counseling to help poor students put all of this information into context.  Such counseling can be provided effectively only by a professional counselor or peer, not through a website or brochure.
• “I don’t want to alienate myself by letting my college friends know that I’m not well traveled and don’t understand their references, so I act as if I were in the know, hoping they won’t suspect that I’m from a different class.  This ‘cultural passing’ gives me a feeling of accomplishment but also leaves me dejected, knowing that I am still an outsider.”  College access professionals need to understand that many such students try hard to hide their otherness and are reluctant to seek support.
• “There were undoubtedly other working-class students on the campus, who could have provided me with the support I needed, but I couldn’t find them.”  Most campuses have African-American groups, religious groups, LGBT groups, etc., but no groups for poor students.  Poor students could benefit from a support group.

Several observations about THE rankings:

• They favor British institutions with four of the top ten institutions located in the United Kingdom, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the source of the rankings.
• They favor research universities.  Of the 54 American institutions on the list, all are research universities and none is a small liberal arts college.
• They favor institutions with significant numbers of faculty from other countries, something that, in my humble opinion, helped my education not one jot as I struggled to understand what many of them were saying.

The interesting news this year: the slip in American universities’ rankings.  The drop is due in part to major international investment in building first-class research universities, particularly in Asia.  Some experts predict the downward trend will continue, in part because the United States will have less money to invest in higher education as it struggles to pay down its mounting debt.

Needless to say, no West Virginia institution made the international 200.

As best I can determine, the only scenario that would produce an indictable federal crime is this: Someone made it easy for Emily Perdue to earn grades for her independent study because her father is the State Treasurer AND he or someone close to him somehow exerted influence inappropriately (not just as a concerned parent) to obtain a favorable outcome on behalf of Miss Perdue.  I can’t imagine the second half of the equation being satisfied in the absence of some clear quid pro quo, which no one has suggested publicly to date.  Furthermore, the quid pro quos available to a State Treasurer, unlike a Governor, Senator, or Congressman, truly are very limited.

While certainly worthy of internal examination by Marshall University’s provost and faculty senate, the Perdue matter hardly seems worthy of CRIMINAL investigation. To an outsider, these subpoenas appear to be political.

Some basic information for those of you who may not know:

• Federal No Child Left Behind legislation allowed states to establish their own student proficiency standards and measure performance against those standards, so there are as many proficiency standards as there are states.
• The NAEP is a national test given to a sample of students in each state and provides the only ready means of comparing student performance across states.

The report’s executive summary states disingenuously that the report is not intended “to imply a judgment about state standards,” but rather “to be descriptive of state-to-state variation in the location of the state standards on a common metric.”  Don’t be fooled!

What judgment does NCES want you to make?  ”States are setting the bar too low,” says U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan.

Interestingly,

• The report finds dramatic differences between the proficiency standards of the five highest and lowest NAEP-scale-equivalent states.
• Significant numbers of states set standards below NAEP basic performance cut points.  In fourth grade reading, for example, 31 states (including West Virginia) set proficiency standards below the basic cut point.
• The rigor of state standards has a positive correlation to NAEP proficiency at the 4th grade level, but not at the 8th grade level – which should cause someone to ask whether we spend waste too much time setting these standards if they seem to have no impact on student achievement … but it won’t, I assure you.

How did West Virginia fare among the 48 states for which data were reported for 2007?

• 43rd at Grade 4 reading and a whopping 26 points below NAEP basic and 56 points below NAEP proficient.
• 44th at Grade 8 reading and 14 points below NAEP basic and 52 points below NAEP proficient.
• 36th at Grade 4 math and 3 points above NAEP basic and 32 points below NAEP proficient.
• 41st at Grade 8 math and 9 points below NAEP basic and 46 points below NAEP proficient.

Lake Wobegon anyone?

Creating an education pathway from apprenticeship training to associate’s degree: It’s a good thing.  Creating an additional pathway from associate’s degree to bachelor of applied science degree?  That would be a really good thing.

Given to organizations pursuing promising higher education innovations, the FIPSE grant will support the System’s Integrated Pathways for Adult Student Success (I-PASS) initiative aimed at addressing the need to expand high-need enrollment, particularly among adults; strengthening Adult Basic Education and Developmental Education; and improving persistence and completion rates.

Major initiatives focus on educational pipeline expansion and leakage reduction, with resources being devoted to an accelerated I-BEST exploratory curriculum involving early career planning, expanded learning support center services, and counselor/ coaches as primary points of contact for adult students, as well as improved recruitment strategies.

It’s a good thing.

Who are these four people?  Brother Peter Madoff and his daughter Shana, both lawyers, who were chief compliance officer and compliance director, respectively, in a business that was in blatant non-compliance with all kinds of securities trading laws and sons Mark and Andrew Madoff, co-directors of trading for a business that never really executed the trades it claimed.

Does the trustee allege they were co-conspirators with Bernard Madoff?  No, just stupid.  His legal theory in not-so-legalese: These people shouldn’t be allowed to profit as a result of being dumber than a box of rocks, if that truly was the case – recognizing, of course, that willful ignorance is not ignorance at all.

If only it were always true that people were not allowed to profit from being dumb ….

Several weeks ago, the U.S. Treasury Department issued a report on 529 plans in which it disclosed that such plans had lost about $25 billion.    How much is that?  Well, to put that amount in perspective, it’s a lot more than the $16.4 billion the United States spends annually on the nation’s largest financial aid program: the Pell grant program.

Why all the losses?  Fund managers were investing in some of the same kinds of investments in which higher education endowment fund managers were investing.  If you think the endowment fund investment strategy was crazy, consider how crazy it is to place money you know you’re going to need in just a few years in high-risk investments.  It’s no different than placing your retirement savings in high-risk investments right before you retire, something any credible financial advisor would tell you not to do.

For a masterful undressing of 529 plans and their investment strategies, please read a commentary by Kevin Carey, policy director with Education Sector, in The Chronicle of Higher Education last May.

As tax-free 529 plans primarily benefit the rich, this is a case where the rich have gotten not richer, but poorer.

But as the schools, one by one, disclose their numbers, the managers of these endowments are indicating their continued support for a diversified portfolio chock full of alternative investments like hedge funds, private equity and real estate — the very things that have caused so much trouble.

None of these managers would want me on their Boards of Trustees.  In my humble opinion, the goals of non-profit investing should be to ensure that the corpus is maintained, while making a conservative return.  Why?  Well, Harvard University and Yale University, as well as West Virginia University and Marshall University, are just too important to have their endowments (our donations!) frittered away on high-risk, high-reward options, even if the returns generally will be higher over the long term.  Non-profit higher education institutions also need consistent revenue, not obscene profits.  These high-risk strategies should be considered breaches of fiduciary duty.

In yesterday’s newspaper, Miss Perdue and her father talked to a reporter about the story.  For those of you who were saturated and satiated with coverage of the WVU-Bresch degree scandal, stop reading the newspaper for a few more days.

Interestingly, there appear to be some significant similarities and differences between this story and the Bresch story.

Significant similarities:

• The daughter of a powerful politician;
• A fairly quick investigation/decision by the provost (vulnerable to second-guessing as a “rush to judgment”);
• A decision that favored the daughter; and
• FERPA (privacy law) violations by an individual or individuals seeking to expose the “truth.”

Significant differences:

• We are talking about grades in two classes, not a full-blown degree.
• Miss Perdue actually can produce work that she completed.  She also claims to have met with the dean on multiple occasions recently, which should be easily verifiable.
• Miss Perdue has a reasonably good GPA and appears to be a fairly conscientious student.
• This professor may have an axe to grind with the dean.
• To date, there’s no evidence whatsoever that the State Treasurer or friends of the State Treasurer did anything to influence the outcome.
• To date, there’s no evidence of presidential involvement (beyond, I would hope, his being apprised of the results of the provost’s investigation) or connections to Miss Perdue or her father.
• This issue appears to have been treated as the truly academic matter it is.

Predictions:

• You’ll be learning about several things you probably should not, given federal student privacy laws, as this story unfolds.  This is a serious downside to being a politican’s daughter; you are a public figure whether or not you want to be.
• This story will not have the “legs” that the Bresch story had because of the “axe-grinding” issue and the evidence that work actually was completed.

(a)   The Journal of the American Medical Association?

(b)   The New England Journal of Medicine?

(c)   Brain: A Journal of Neurology?

(d)   The Journal of Neuroscience?

(e)   GQ?

If you guessed (e), you, of course, are correct.  In between articles titled “Why We’re Wild About Olivia Wilde: A Sexy Video and Exclusive Photos,” “I Kissed a Teenage Lesbian (and I Liked It)” and “Me Talk Presidential One Day” (I wonder which of these three links is destined to become my blog’s most clicked link ever) is an article titled “Game Brain” about Dr. Bailes’s research.