Selling the School

If you live outside a certain part of the US, the brand BBVA Compass may be unfamiliar to you, and if you are from an area served by BBVA Compass, you may think of them as just one more large, grim banking institution. 

Thanks to KIPP, that may be changing.


KIPP has sold the naming rights to its Houston campus for $1.8 million dollars to the Atlanta-based financial goliath.

The school itself will still be called KIPP Nexus, but the campus will be the BBVA Compass Opportunity Campus. This is a new school in the KIPP Houston chain opened this year with 90 kindergartners and 110 fifth graders. It joins the 28 Houston-area campuses and the 209 schools in the KIPP national chain.

The $1.8 million breaks down into a million and a half for capital projects and another $300K for operating expenses. This is reportedly BBVA Compass's largest adventure in education financing, with their "director of corporate responsibility and reputation" (yes, that's a thing) praising KIPP's "bar-none" and "spectacular" record of success.

This is not the first such venture in the Houston area. The Kinder Foundation (founded by former Enron executive Richard Kinder) sunk $7.5 million in the Houston ISD High School for the Performing and Visual Arts with the expectation that Kinder's name would be added to the title of the magnet school, but after a pushback from board and public members, the foundation released Houston ISD from the naming obligation.

Schools and school districts have sold out entered mutually beneficial partnerships with private interests before. There are plenty of school sports stadiums with sponsor names attached, and I suspect it would be impossible to count up the number of schools that use scoreboards which were "contributed" for "free"-- but with the company logo prominently displayed.


Charter schools have always depended upon the kindness of well-heeled strangers, though not often at the cost of naming rights. Is sponsorship of education a bad thing? We know that when the Koch brothers endow a college teaching position, they expect that school to teach the "correct" economic world view.

But what about K-12? Do we want our kids' school day to feature "Wal-Mart Presents the Spudville Junior High School"? If my child attends Exxon Senior High School, will she be allowed to learn about global warming? If my child's school is sponsored by Hobby Lobby, will she be required to learn that all non-heterosexuals are wrong and evil? IF we're a Disney school, am I forbidden to roll my eyes as I open class with the newest Disney trailer? Sponsorship is a tricky thing-- sponsors might not have to say a word if cash-strapped administrations decide on their own that nobody will be allowed to do anything that might spook the sponsors.

And how do these sponsorships do anything except widen the gap between haves and have-nots? In poor rural or urban communities where there are no deep-pocketed sponsors waiting to purchase show their support for schools, will the schools just fall further and further behind?

What if we break it down to the classroom level? Does Future Me end up starting the period by saying, "This Tuesday's lesson about participial phrases is brought to you by the folks at Tyson chicken-- nutritional swellness for your every meal." Or will I just play an ad? Must my students all write assignments with a Bic pen (the official pen of Franklin High School)? Do I get to wear a special teacher suit that's covered with logos, all NASCAR style? Do I get to negotiate my endorsement deals as a free agent, so that popular teachers get the best extra income by selling out like a soulless bandit entering productive partnerships with private business, or will the district negotiate all such deals so that I can look forward to a principal shoving a Pepsi logo hat in my face and saying, "You will wear this, or I'll put a letter in your file."

Mike Fe9niberg, co-founder of the KIPP conglomerate, says that the alternative id for corporate America to ignore K-12. I disagree. The alternative is for corporate America, along with the citizens of America, to pay a fair share of taxes to properly finance public education. Crazy talk, I know, but at least you can believe I mean it, because I have no sponsors paying me to say it.

Better Teacher Preparation

There are folks who believe that the problems with the teacher pipeline begin with college and university programs for preparing teachers in the first place. Are there ways that we could improve that part of the pipeline?

First of all, I'm not someone inclined to fight unconditionally for the traditional system, in part because I am not a product of it. My college experience was different in several key specifics:

1) My BA is in English, the subject I teach, on the theory that I should be as knowledgeable as can be about the subject I'm teaching. Because I was headed for teaching, there were a couple of English courses I was required to take. Beyond that, I emerged from college just as well-educated as any other English major.

2) I took only a couple of methods courses before student teaching-- however...

3) I took several methods courses while student teaching. Though my school was a small ruralish college, student teaching was in an urban setting (in my case, Cleveland Heights). We lived in a hotel in downtown Cleveland (corner of E9 and Superior) and took evening classes at a field office maintained by the school in that same hotel. My methods courses were taught by working classroom teachers, except for the one taught by the same professor who observed me while I was student teaching. This made the courses enormously practical ("So, this happened today. How could I have handled it. And this is what I'm planning in two days-- is this a good way to approach it?")

My home away from home back in the day

 4) I was observed at least once a week, sometimes for several class periods. Seriously. My professor knew some of my students by name.

5) My first year of teaching. I was a regular first year teacher to my district, but an intern to my college's graduate program. I still took classes at that same field office, and the same guy who watched me through student teaching checked in on me in my new classroom (just not so often).

That's the system that produced me, and every time I'm host to a student teacher, I'm again aware of how different many other teacher programs are. That said, there are many things that the current system does well, many things that are necessary for preparing the teachers of tomorrow, like the study of pedagogical methods, child development, and classroom management. I would still trust a person with a teaching degree and traditional certificate before I turned to someone who has nothing to offer except a pulse and a college degree in whatever.

So what would I change in order to make college programs more effective and useful?

1) Put working teachers in the driver's seat.

Education is the only professional field in which working, experienced professionals have no say in how people are trained for or admitted to the profession. Too many (not all, but too many) education courses are taught by people with no actual classroom experience. I don't care if you're a super-duper education researcher-- a whole lot of education research on "effective" methods and "proven" approaches is bunk, and the people who know the difference between the bunk and the non-bunk are working in classrooms.

I've known of education professors who worked as substitute teachers in their local districts. That's awesome. And as I, and people like me, approach the end of a teaching career, local college education programs ought to be calling us up and trying to recruit us for their program.

And no college education department anywhere should settle on a list of course requirements until a bunch of experienced working teachers have signed off on it.

2) Provide actual supervision and support for student teachers.

For a program to visit a student a mere three times for a brief drive-by is criminal-- particularly when the person doing the "observation" has never met the student teacher before that first visit. Visits should be extensive and often. Student teachers should be in some sort of setting (classroom, meetings, whatever) that allows them to seek and receive guidance as the student teaching is going on.

3) Address the underlying philosophies

Here's a major irony of the standards movement-- while we are supposedly shifting students to Really Understanding The Concepts behind what they're doing and not just performing tricks, we have shifted teacher education toward producing technicians, mechanics who just unpack a standard here, align a lesson there, and tighten some bolts on the meat widgets in the classroom.

Why are you teaching? What are your goals? What are your underlying assumptions about education, knowledge, human nature, human growth, and the values behind all of this? If you don't know the answer, you're just a worksheet deliver service utilized by a content delivery system.

4) Broadening the Pool

This is probably the hardest part, but it's important because so many states are trending in the wrong direction.  Too many places are responding to the teacher "shortage" by opening the door to any warm body that's willing to take the job. This will not work. They will continue to recruit people who have neither the training nor the ability for teaching, and the warm bodies will either leave quickly or stay and do a lousy job.

Meanwhile, by opening the door to any warm body, they devalue the profession and make it less appealing. The creation of fast food anybody-can-do-them jobs did not spark interest in culinary schools.

The "shortage" is simply a failure of states to make teaching attractive. Instead, they've transformed it into a job that offers little autonomy, little job security, lousy pay, general disrespect, and the chance, not to improve children's lives, but to read a script and prep the kids for a bad standardized test. This is not how you attract and retain the best and the brightest, or even people who would otherwise be drawn to teaching.

There's a big conversation to be had about teacher training programs, and we aren't having it, though I keep waiting. In the meantime, colleges looking to recruit for their teacher program staff know where to find me.

FL: DeVos-Financed Board Member Wants FBOE Seat

If you live outside of Florida, you may not know about Shawn Frost. But like much going on in the educational swamplands of Florida, this is a story worth paying attention to, because some version of it may be coming to an election near you.

So who is Shawn Frost, and how did he get to be a big name in Florida education?

Well, Shawn Frost is this guy:

This particular Facebook post has since been removed, but it seems to capture Frost's special je ne sais quoi.

Frost is currently a member of the Indian River County School Board. He wanted this seat, badly enough to leave his wife and children back in their home at Vero Beach, FL (still listed as his "where I live" on Facebook), and move into a room above his parents' garage to meet the residency requirements (all of this was hashed out in court, ultimately in Frost's favor).

The seat that Frost ran for in 2014 was the seat held by the president of the Florida School Boards Association, a group that Frost and like-minded folks consider a bit too chummy with the public education system. Frost has been (according to Facebook) a marine, a science teacher, and a senior project manager at EFront, a software learning management system. And according to a Frost-boosting profile of Frost, he works with business start-ups.

That glowing profile was posted at the website of ExcelinEd, the newest incarnation of Jeb Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education which has long been the heavy hand reshaping the Florida education biz into something more appealing for profiteers and less useful for actual students. And the occasion of the profile was another of Frost's achievements.

Remember, Frost and friends didn't much care for FSBA. But booting the FSBA president out of her seat was not enough-- Frost decided to round up some like-minded reformy board members and create a new group-- the Florida Coalition of School Board Members (FCSBM).  In particular, FCSBM is unhappy that FSBA is trying to stand in the way of the Florida legislature's various reformster-feuled proposals, going so far as to drag the state into court. Because when local school districts are attacked, they should welcome their dismemberment and defunding graciously, I guess.  Oh, and the FCSBM address for incorporation was Frost's Vero Beach home.

So how did a carpetbagger manage to unseat the head of the state School Board association?

With some pricey help. We'll get into how some of this was spent in a second, but here's a char that breaks down the financial backing for Frost's campaign.

from The Indian River Guardian

That's the American Federation of Children, the group that, in 2014, was still being run by Betsy DeVos, was tied closely to ALEC, and was funding reformy candidates left and right. Well, actually, only right. Here's how the Indian River Guardian reported on the race:

Frost, a newcomer to local politics with some questionable residency qualifications, (See: Frost says he is living in garage apartment at his father’s house in District 1), defeated Brombach 54 percent to 46 percent. In addition to being helped by local, though nationally funded, attacks on Brombach, Frost was helped by a flood of additional attack mailers, all paid for by the Florida Federation for Children. More outside help came from individual contributors to Frost’s campaign. Some two thirds of the direct contributions to Frost’s campaign were from out-of-state donors.  In the reporting period ending August 18, Frost raised $6,340, $5,500 from out of state contributors, including several described as “venture capitalists.”

Frost has actually announced that he will not seek another term on the school board-- because he has bigger targets in mind:

I have to choose between reform on a small scale — Indian River County — and reform on a larger scale…I’ve chosen to focus on the state level.  I will be joining, hopefully, the state board of education, and working on those constitution amendments over the next year, and that won’t leave time for running for office.

And there it is. The reformster pattern is to get your foot in the door-- any door-- and just keep failing upward into positions of greater and greater power. And now Florida is looking at one more anti-public-ed person in a position of power in their state.

I'm in Pennsylvania-- I really don't set out to spend so much time and attention of Florida, but they just keep providing examples of the worst of what can happen when the public school is under attack, and while I believe there are reformsters out there who are actually motivated by concern for students and education, none of them ever seem to turn up in the Sunshine State, so the attempts to carve up public education are just so... naked. In the other 49, we just need to keep paying attention. And if you're in Florida, God bless you, good luck, and make some noise (there's even a facebook page). 

ICYMI: Hello, December Edition (12/3)

Is this your first time here? Here's a collection of worthwhile reads from last week-- not all of the, but some of them. Give them a read and remember-- writers get read when you pass them on!

The FLCRC Seems Hell Bent on Privatizing Public Education

Florida does this weird thing with their constitution every several years. It's about time for it to happen again, and it doesn't look good for public education.

I Am the Teacher South Carolina Wants To Retain, and I Am Barely Hanging On

One more state having trouble holding on to teachers; one of them wrote a newspaper editorial to explain why

What Really Happened at the School Where Every Senior Got into College

Yet one more example of how miracle schools don't exist, and if sounds too good to be true, it is.

No We Didn't Sign Up for This

If this is a hair whiny for your tastes, I feel you. But it's a good listing of many ways the profession has changed in a short time.

How To Avoid Writing Like an Academic

For those of us who teach writing, a cool little set of instructions.

We Don't Need No Education

The editorial board at Metro Times takes Michigan's anti-public-ed GOP to task.

Bias in VAMS

There's another VAM lawsuit going on (this one in New Mexico) and Audrey Amrein Beardsley is there. In addition to an update, she offers some expert opinion from Michael T Kane.

A Punishing Decade for School Funding

The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities looks at how school funding has been doing since the crash of 2008. Come for the chart, stay for the analysis.

Are Schools Responsible for Teaching Boys To Respect Girls?

It's the issue of the month, and Nancy Flanagan has something thoughtful to say about it. If you don't save your EdWeek reads to follow her, you should.

Top Ed Tech Trends Fake News

Finally, your long read of the week, but well worth it, putting fake news in the context of our country as a whole and ed tech baloney in particular. From Audrey Watters.

Are Two Tiers the Right Choice?

I have long argued against a two-tiered education system. I may be wrong.


I was thinking about the two tiers last night as I was busy hollering at my elected representatives on twitter and facebook and the phone (I would have dispatched pigeons if I had them). It has long been a political go-to line to talk about the Two America's, usually as part of a promise to bring them together. I don't recall ever seeing such a brazen attempt to take the Two America's and build a bigger wall between them.

We could talk about the specifics of the Republic Tax Bill, but of course nobody really knows all the provisions (except maybe the corporate lobbyists who wrote them) because the bill was rammed through quickly without debate, discussion, or even being read first. But we know the broad outlines-- give more money to the rich. Give some pennies to everyone else, but only for a year or two-- and those pennies will be eaten up by all the other costs that the non-wealthy will bear. We will have a country where for some people $500 is lunch money chump change and for some people $500 is the difference between survival and financial ruin.

We could talk about the proven failure of trickle down economics, the approach that hasn't worked, ever. Nor does it make sense that it would. I don't spend more on my business just because I've got more money-- I expand my business because I think there's enough demand to support it. And demand does not grow because ten rich guys each have a few billion more. Demand grows because a billion poor and middle class people have more money to spend-- and the security to believe they don't have to hold onto it as a safeguard against unexpected disaster. Taking on a trillion or two in debt so that rich people can be richer doesn't help.

But wait-- you say-- aren't the Republicans eternally concerned about our Huge Deficit. How can they add a trillion to that already-huge gap? That, of course, will be Act II of this play. Some day in the not-too-distant future, the GOP will look around and go, "Holy smokes! Look at that huge deficit! We'd better start cutting things like Medicare and Medicaid and Social Security." Orrin Hatch has already stated that "we don't have money" to re-instate CHIP, the health insurance program for children.

Has the GOP horribly miscalculated, opening itself up to a blue wave in 2018? Maybe, but I'm not feeling very optimistic this morning, so I'm going to say that 1) the donor class will provide huge campaign financing, 2) the Democrats will nominate dopes and 3) the low-information voters who do get some sort of tax benefit in the first year will fail to notice that it disappears completely after the election.

So maybe we do need a two-tiered system of schools in this country. One tier for the wealthy, some nice private schools (complete with vouchers that give yet another kickback of tax dollars to the rich) that prepare them to be future leaders and well-off masters of the universe. And then another tier for those who had the misfortune to be poor and must be prepared to live on the bottom rungs of the ladder, because there is no hope in hell that they will ever get out. Oh, sure, a handful now and then will be found worthy, just to keep the fiction alive that we still have the prospect of upward mobility in this country (and always making sure to include a person or two of color so that it's clear, you know, that we aren't that racist). But mostly they will need the skills and training to survive in America's basement, because if they're born there, they will probably stay there, always living one health problem or bad accident away from financial ruin, never able to afford any education after high school, and condemned to a high school that is either an underfunded public school or a selective and possibly fraudulent charter school, established specifically to help them be more comfortable in their proper place (perhaps delivered through some half-assed software program that maintains their permanent personnel file for the convenience of their corporate overlords). Certainly this is what some people already envision; it's what Betsy DeVos means when she suggests that students should be "allowed" to go to school in a place that's the "best fit," like a snotty rich girl in an 80s comedy looking down her nose at lower class children and saying, "Dear, wouldn't you be happier somewhere with your own kind?"

Maybe asking one public school system to serve both Americas is too much.

Sorry to be so grim. I'm sure I'll rally. But this morning it feels as if the ed reform debates are simply the tail on a larger dog that is busily devouring some of the basic ideals that have previously driven this country. It feels as if somehow we've just lost the whole American plot, and the drive to bust up public education and sell off the pieces is just one more symptom.

Keeping Up Appearances

Sometimes in this country we are far less concerned with actually doing a thing than we are with looking as if we're doing a thing.

Airport security is a prominent example. Year after year, security experts remind us that airport security sucks, that it is just an elaborate piece of theater. It doesn't actually make us safer, but it puts on a show. It certainly looks like we're making the skies safer-- unless, of course, you understand what you're looking at.

The Keeping Up Appearances approach is handy when really getting serious about a problem would be difficult and expensive. KUA is all about going through some motions that will reassure folks without actually having to expend the work and money it would take to really deal with an issue.
 

Ed Reform has been a great example of the Keeping Up Appearances approach. At every critical juncture, when we could be asking "How can we best deal with this issue," policy leaders, bureaucrats, and politicians have instead asked "How can we look as if we're dealing with this issue?"

Coming up with national education standards would be a huge and difficult undertaking, requiring a lot of eyes and ears and tons of brainpower, as well as collecting and sifting through a mountain of research that exists and creating another mountain of research that doesn't exist. And that's before we even get to creating a structure by which a robust, resilient and constantly-revising set of standards can be kept up-to-date while responding to ongoing  feedback.

But, hey-- that would be hard, and expensive. So let's just have a few self-appointed, high-self-esteem guys throw something together on the fly. We'll call in some political favors, get some rich backers, and push the Common Core out there. They aren't real national educational standards, but they make it look like we've got them. Close enough.

It's also really hard to tell exactly how well students are doing, or how effective schools and teachers are. It would require several more mountains of research into what real success looks like both in the short and long run, and that in turn would lead us to new, complex and creative measures of those most important factors that we have identified. It would take a whole organization just to collect, analyze, and interpret the data. It would be super-hard and hella expensive.

So instead, let's just make every kid take a standardized test. It won't really measure anything worth measuring, but it sure looks as if we're gathering honest-to-goodness data about student achievement and teacher effectiveness. Close enough.

Even school choice. I mean, we could set up a full, robust network of schools in a community, with each school offering different strengths and programs. We'd have to allow for extensive training and research into effective approaches, and the real expense would be staggering, with multiple facilities instead of one, and a surplus of seats. With students spread over several different entities, the oversight requirements just to keep students from falling through the cracks, let alone making sure that the various choice schools are delivering on their promises-- well, that would be a fairly huge extra department as well. The entire system could be impressive and exciting, but it would involve the costs of running several schools where we used to only fund one-- the taxpayer bill would be enormous, but if people were really serious about choice and variety and a superior education for every single child in America, political leaders would be able to lead a call for much higher taxes to make this dream real.

Or, we could just let anybody open any old kind of charter school, provide zero oversight, and let everyone fight over funding that is a fraction of what's needed. And just scrap that whole "make sure every child gets an outstanding education (and not just an opportunity)" business. Close enough.

High quality full education? Eh, just get some reading and math in there. In fact, just stick to the stuff that employers ask for. Attacking the problems of poverty? Just make some noises about how education will fix everything, somehow. Systemic racism? Just, you know, act real concerned occasionally. Trying to fix the teacher "shortage"? Have a committee issue some findings.

We could list dozens of ways in which policy leaders, politicians, and bureaucrats try to half-ass their way to looking as if they are addressing an issue in education. If you have been in the classroom for more than five years, you already have a list of all the times our "leaders" announced their latest plan to "fix" something about schools by way of some not-really-serious program whose real objective is to keep up appearances, to look as if we are actually working on the issues. The people really working on solutions-- those are the ones standing by the "leaders'" elbows saying, "Well, you know, that part where I get to make a bunch of money pretending to address this issue-- I like that part. Keep that part."

Meanwhile, teachers are in actual classrooms addressing actual issues with actual students, where authentic solutions are required. I can't help a student by trying to look as if I care about him. I can't teach a unit by trying to look as if we're studying it while I try to look as if I know what I'm talking about. I won't come up with evaluations for the students by looking as if I went over their work.

This lack of seriousness has always been a feature of public education. If it seems worse right now, that is perhaps because the White House is occupied by a guy who's mostly trying to look as if he's a President, surrounding himself with people who look as if they would be good for their jobs. Education has always been plagued by half-assed smoke and mirrors; now it's just a national problem for all sectors as well.

Killing Higher Ed

I will say this for the current GOP regime-- where there have been few features that can distinguish their ed policies of their Democratic predecessors, they are managing to find and underline one. Obama-Duncan-et. al paid lip service to the goal of a college education and made the college entry rate one of the centerpieces of their programs.

But the GOP is making itself equally clear that college sucks, that it is an institution that they neither respect nor love. Some data suggests this attitude is a recent development, though as with many ugly attitudes abroad these days, it could be that the anti-college feelings have always been there, but now feel a new-found freedom to tromp around in the light of day.

But the anti-college crowd is not just tromping around-- they have begun tromping on the institution itself, with policies designed to kill higher education as we know it.

Today's Wall Street Journal covers the House GOP's higher education package (I know-- paywall-- but if we use WSJ coverage, we can be assured that no liberal bias is tainting the report).

The proposal ordinarily would face a long year of hearings and revisions, but these days, God only knows. But we need to pay attention, because the bill is ugly. Ugly.

This, it should be noted, is over and above the assault on college that is folded into the tax "plan."  That collection of baloney takes away interest deductions for student loans, obliterates a tax credit, and counts graduate school tuition waivers as income (which will mean that people with actual incomes of around $15K will end up paying taxes on "incomes" of around $50K). All of these will make college more expensive.

The proposed bill is called The Promoting Real Opportunity, Success and Prosperity Through Education Reform Act (PROSPER), and it will also put higher education out of the reach of many students. However it does more than that-- it also changes the fundamental nature of higher education into something that really isn't higher education at all.

Student loans would be capped, so that students and their families would be limited in the amount of money they can borrow. So for many students, that would be enough for a "game over." The bill also rolls back loan forgiveness for those who spend a decade in the public sector, and loan repayments would no longer be adjusted to fit income levels. Working at a minimum wage job while trying to make your $600/month loan payments? Sucks to be you, college grad.

These changes favor people who are trying to use college as a profit center and students as their cash cows, so it fits that the bill also is a big fat wet kiss to for-profit colleges. The Obama administration had started to crack down on these predators (though they were none too quick about it). While Betsy DeVos's USED has been rolling back those rules, this bill goes a step further and prohibits USEDs of the future from implementing "gainful employment" rules. Those were the rules that said if you were advertising your predatory college by promising jobs and nobody who graduated from your predatory college was actually getting jobs, the feds were going to stop handing you money. Various other rules will also be scrapped, like rules against giving student recruiters incentive pay for every sucker they managed to con into attending these predatory schools.  The reasoning seems to be that a bunch of rules unfairly affect for-profit schools, when the for-profits ought to get the same breaks as everyone else, because how are those folks supposed to rake in the money if they have to follow rules and stuff.

The help for the for-profits underlines the change in the very purpose of higher education under the bill. Here's education opponent Virginia Foxx:

Rep. Virginia Foxx (R., N.C.), chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce which drafted the proposal, lamented that so much of higher education was considered “irrelevant” by employers. She hopes to better harness technology by pushing accreditors to lean on schools to accept more creative alternatives to higher education.

Or as the WSJ itself puts it:

The act focuses on ensuring students don’t just enroll in school, but actually graduate with skills that the labor market is seeking.

That's it. The purpose of colleges and universities is to provide companies with the trained meat widgets they require to make money. Anything else you thought was an important part of higher education-- inquiry, study, growth, expanding the horizon of human understanding-- that stuff is all crap. The only measure of "education" that matters is "does somebody want to pay you money to do that."

And since "higher education" is to be redefined as "place to fulfill more advanced employer desires," well, we don't really need those four-year ivy covered hotbeds of liberal quackery at all, do we? Here's Betsy DeVos just two days ago:

Students should be able to pursue their education where, when and how it works for them and their schedules. Financial aid should not be withheld simply because they pursue a nontraditional path. Politicians and bureaucrats should not dictate to students when and how they can learn.

In other words, when it comes to getting a piece of that sweet federal student aid money, why should actual colleges and universities have all the fun. Apprenticeships, for example, ought to count.

There's more. Community colleges will get money to form corporate partnerships (send your child to Exxon Training College) and minority-serving colleges will get tighter accountability rules (because, you know, Those People). And everyone has to prove that they support the freedom of right-wing speakers to appear on campus (because snowflakes).

And because we love the Law of Unintended Consequences, one last point from Foxx:

Under the committee’s proposal, if an institution’s program or repayment system doesn’t set up a student for success, then it cannot be eligible for student aid.

This has one clear consequence-- if colleges want to get paid, they must make sure not to accept any students with less than great prospects. It's just like charters! If you take a potential failure into your school, she'll cost you money-- so screen carefully.

While much of this is a continuation of Obama-Duncan (let the private sector in! judge education based on employability!) the GOP is bringing a heightened level of enthusiasm to this tromping of education.

You begin to see why this is the PROSPER act-- it is designed to help vendors of training services (including for profit predatory colleges) and future employers prosper. Of course, rich families will continue to send their children for an actual higher education, but for the rest of the Lessers-- well, what they really need is training that will help them become useful tools for their future corporate masters.