LWRT (Last Week in Retweets): September 22, 2014

Topics last week include high-stakes testing, predatory lending, retention alliances, City College of San Francisco's accreditation battle, student evaluations, and (I'll bet you thought I forgot about) college ratings.

Fatal Attraction: America’s Suicidal Quest for Educational Excellence, Yong Zhao

Zhao takes the American K-12 system to task for its efforts to emulate the "authoritarian education" system at work in China, arguing that the characteristics of the system that Western commentators have praised (personal responsibility, high family priority for education, clear standards and goals) are actually tools used by the Chinese state to control the population. The common motivation is getting "results" in the form of measurable test scores. While the argument is directed at K-12, I have argued that "big data" in higher education tends in a similar direction, and a similar argument could be directed toward the assessment process.

New 11-University Alliance Plans Efforts to Help Graduate More Needy Students, Chronicle of Higher Education

An alliance of public research universities with large numbers of low-income students will collaborate to increase graduation rates among those students. The University Innovation Alliance will test approaches to improving retention and graduation "at scale" by mentoring each other on projects, sharing data, and hiring consultants. The project will place heavy emphasis on analytics, not surprising given that it is chaired by the President of Arizona State University and receives more than a third of its funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Lumnia Foundation. 

Federal Government Sues Corinthian Colleges over Predatory Lending and Fraudulent Jobs Claims

The Federal Consumer Finance Protection Bureau filed suit against Corinthian Colleges, Inc. for vioplations of the Consumer Finance Protection Act and the Fair Debt Collection Practices Act. The suit alleges that Corinthian created a predatory lending scheme by deceiving students, accreditors, and the Department of Education about their graduates' career prospects and job placement rates and artificially inflated tuition to create a gap between costs and federal financial aid to increase borrowing through its own loan program, and used harassment to collect loans in default. These loans allowed Corinthian to comply with federal regulations requiring that TItle IV aid not exceed 90% of an institutions revenue, and thus to receive more federal aid. Corinthian was forced to shut down most of its operations and sell off the bulk of its campuses last month after the Department of Education placed severe limits on its receipt of Title IV aid.

Key ruling finds that City College's accreditors violated the law, as Oct. 27 trial looms, San Francisco City Attorney's Office

A California court ruled that the WASC Accrediting Commission on Community and Junior Colleges violated state and federal law in revoking City College of San Francisco's accreditation last year. ACCJC lacked sufficient academic representatives on its accreditation team and failed to avoid conflicts of interests involving team members. Consequently, the ACCJC was in violation of state laws prohibiting unlawful or unfair business acts by non-profit organizations. The ruling presents further challenges to the accreditor's efforts to shut down CCSF over severe financial problems and what it considered inadequate assessment efforts. Many federal and state public officials have been working to challenge the commission.

Scholars Take Aim at Student Evaluations’ ‘Air of Objectivity,’ Chronicle of Higher Education; Better Teachers Receive Worse Student Evaluations, Harvard Business Review

Two separate studies identified substantial problems in the use of student evaluations to evaluate teachers' performance. Philip B. Stark and Richard Freishtat of the University of California at Berkeley argued that averaging questions with ordinal scales, low response rates. and poor question design compromise the mathematical validity of typical aggregated results. They argue that "Averages of numerical student ratings have an air of objectivity simply because they are numerical," and advocate instead for a system less reliant on statistics, which they note is in use at Berkeley's statistics department.

Michela Bragaa, Marco Paccagnellab, and Michele Pellizzaric find that the additional effort required of students by the most effective teachers has a negative effect on evaluations, as well as a significant influence of weather on evaluations.

Rating the President's Ratings System, Forbes; Why Federal College Ratings Won't Rein in Tuition, New York Times

Critiques of the proposed federal PIRS ratings system continued. Andrew Kelly, in Forbes, offered several lines of technical criticism of the principles proposed for the system, arguing aming other things for separate accountability and consumer information systems, for using the net price to admitted rather than attending students, and value-added measures of student outcomes. He concludes that poorly chosen measures will favor institutions with low access and high success, which will be able to improve their scores more easily than others.

Susan Dynarski, in the New York Times' Upshot data journalism blog, argues that no rating system will be effective because ratings fail to address the real cause of tuition growth, at least a public universities: state funding cuts. Dynarski shows that while tuition at public colleges has increased dramatically, revenue per student has increased only 1.8% in real terms since 1988. State support per student fell from $8,600 to $6,100 in that period, while tuition doubled from $2,700 to $5,400. (Several years ago I showed that this was also the case at UVU.)

Thanks to this week's contributors: @dynarski, @sivavaid (via @Rebecca_Raphael), @AEIeducation (via @shermandorn, @SocProf (via @raulpacheco and @drcompton), @professorkarla, @PhilOnEdTech, @chronicle (via @jenebbeler), @alexisgoldstein (via @tressiemcphd).