Higher Education Appropriations — Opportunity Knocks!

January 22, 2012

As always, I can’t wait to start the session!!!

This year, we are going to do amazing things in the Higher Education Appropriations Committee. As I’ve discussed elsewhere on this blog, we will change the world by better preparing Utah students for college, we will give our faculty a bit of a bump in pay, we will better align concurrent enrollment with future college success, and we will figure out how we will fund our public institutions on the basis of excellence instead of mere growth. In other words, we have much work to do!

We already do what we do and know what we know. Thus, I don’t want to take up too much committee time talking about what we already do. Instead, I want to use the skill and expertise of my wonderful committee members, the great people at the Utah System of Higher Education, the students, and the public, to discuss what we need to do in order to do things even better. So, here’s what I envision.

We will start with Innovators’ Week (or 2). First, we’ll hear from outside innovators, like Clayton Christensen, Burck Smith, Ellen Siminoff, and Erik Frank. They will tell us about the direction of higher education, the ability to provide excellence in an affordable manner, affordable individualized college preparation, and open textbooks.

Then, as part of Innovators’ Week (or 2), we’ll hear from innovators within our system. And, I want to highlight that point; innovation doesn’t necessarily mean cool stuff that’s going on elsewhere. We tend to make that mistake as policymakers. (Or, maybe I should own it and confess, I tend to make that mistake). Some of the greatest innovations we will ever find come from our own people who know our system, our unique challenges, our personnel, and our opportunities. I do not hold anyone in higher regard than many of the fine people within Utah’s higher education system who are dying to do things better. They lead me and inspire me.

Next, I would like to handle budget recommendations early – well before our last meeting, so that we can grapple with important policy issues.

Lastly, you guessed it, we’ll deal with those important policy issues – concurrent enrollment and performance-based budgeting.

I’ll lay this out to committee members on Tuesday. So, if you don’t like it, let me and my committee members know about it. In any event, come reason with us, and help improve this system and the lives of our students. Opportunity knocks!

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My Goals for Higher Education This Session

January 17, 2012

I’ve attended my classes and done my homework. Now it’s time for my report. So, here’s what I want to do this session for higher education. If you disagree, you’re on notice and you should contact me.

First, to address our biggest challenge – completion – I want to raise standards, assess high schoolers, and fully prepare high schoolers. The details of the plan can be found here.

Second, we need to take care of our valuable personnel. Higher education workers were left out of the Governor’s budget recommendation for a 1% bump. That’s not acceptable. They truly have done more (huge enrollment increases) with less (significant budget cuts).

The thinking, I assume, is that higher ed can raise tuition and find whatever money it needs in the students’ pockets. I disagree. The comparatively low tuition of Utah’s state institutions gives our students a significant advantage. Smart people don’t flippantly give away their advantages.

Part of our problem with completion rates is that too many of our students work part-time. Increased tuition means even more will do so, and even less will complete.The reality is that some of our institutions should raise their tuition (e.g., UofU and USU) and others definitely should not. But, all our valuable personnel should get a bump.

Those 2 items likely will command all the money that higher education might receive this session.

Now, for reform: it is not an oversight that I left out money for “mission-based funding.” I don’t know what the term means. So, I wouldn’t know what to fund.

It’s not that I’m unfamiliar with the concept. I pushed hard for mission-based funding for over a decade, finally telling the Regents 2 years ago that I would move us to mission-based funding with or without them. Last year I passed a bill, even called mission-based funding, that created a skeleton for funding institutions on the basis of excellence, instead of growth. But, much to my frustration, meat has not been hung on those bones. My bad. I thought others might take the lead. We’ll discuss this important issue in committee, and I’ll take the lead this next interim. But, for now, we’d just be funding a concept.

Along with discussing mission-based funding in committee, we need to preserve/improve concurrent enrollment. I’ve discussed that project here.

Those are my big 4: preparation, funding, mission-based funding, and concurrent enrollment. Agree? Silence is assent.

Also, we’re going to discuss accreditation. It is a huge anchor that stifles innovation, efficiencies, and reform. Unfortunately, the reign of the regional accreditation agencies is supreme. But, I’m working on a plan for the states to band together to change that. Stay tuned.

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Concurrent Enrollment

January 1, 2012

Point 1. Concurrent enrollment is awesome.

Many Utah high school students take courses that give them both high school and college credit. Through these concurrent enrollment (“CE”) courses, students can get a feel for college work, some college credit, and some additional academic challenge.

Point 2. Concurrent enrollment has some problems (funding, quality, excess credits).

Funding. CE is a financial loser for colleges. With cuts to state funding – made worse by significant enrollment numbers – Utah colleges have recently given notice that they will reduce CE offerings.

Quality. Because the quality of CE varies significantly, colleges receive students who have credit on the transcript but actually lack the foundational skills that should have been acquired.

Excess College Credits. Many Utah students graduate high school with an associates degree. Again, awesome! However, half those credits won’t count toward a baccalaureate degree. Though any and all education is great, Utah can’t afford to pay for any and all education. CE courses need to track toward a degree.

Point 3. The problems need to be addressed now.

With colleges now moving to reduce offerings, something will need to be done this legislative session regarding CE.

Point 4. Perspective: we’re dealing w/ success, not failure.

It is important to approach a challenge like this with the right perspective. CE mostly works very well. In an innovative way, we created lots of different CE courses Some work. Some don’t. We now simply need to retool.

Point 5. The solution might be at hand.

This past year, Utah developed 6 general education courses – specifically for CE – to deal with the 3 problems outlined above (funding, quality, and excess credits). These 6 courses – called TICE courses, for Technologically-Intensive Concurrent Enrollment courses – can be delivered more affordably, using technology and high school teachers. To assure quality, outcomes and competencies can be measured across the state; that way, we can see which high schools are getting it done and which ones are struggling. And, because they are general education courses, the TICE courses will track toward baccalaureate degrees.

Point 6. We need to expand the number of TICE courses.

Drawing lessons from implementation of the 6 TICE courses, let’s create some more TICE general education courses.

Point 7. We need to establish foundational requirements to better assure success in the college-level courses.

As I’ve written – oh, a couple dozen times on this blog – our students’ lack of basic math and English skills are dooming most of them to fail in college. Well, let’s use CE to help fix that problem. The first step toward taking CE courses should be successful passage of the College Success Primer.

Point 8. Public ed and higher ed requirements need to align better.

Face it. Most of us take math in college, to check a box and move on to a happier place where we no longer need to worry about math classes. Yes, there are plenty of exceptions; I get it. But, most of us get through life just fine using algebraic math skills. Anything else, we Google it or phone a friend. So, why do we take math in high school, forget it, bog down in college on the same math, relearn it, and, ultimately, forget it for life? Maybe because we like to bang our heads against a wall.  It’s a dumb pathway. Instead, we should embed college in our high schools. Take algebra. Pass it. Receive college credit. Box. Checked.

Point 9. We should consider a funding stream for concurrent enrollment.

A few years ago, a bill was passed (then, vetoed) that would have funding CE by charging students a fraction of normal tuition (about 1/10th the cost – meaning somewhere between $15 and $30/course). That still left the students with an effective 9/10th scholarship. The rationale, loosely speaking, for the veto was that “public education is free.” Well, ya, but higher education isn’t public education. Higher education is based on a user-pay model. So, flash forward and, now, without that funding stream, the offerings are being cut. We might want to consider a model where anyone can take the courses for high school credit, but payment (again, 1/10th the normal cost) needs to be made to receive the college credit.

Point 10. Let’s do this.

Because we are building on success, this one shouldn’t be too difficult to figure out. Maybe I’m completely wrong on these points, and someone will want to correct me or chart a different pathway. That’s fine. The thing is, we need to get the conversation going in earnest before the session. So, let’s talk.

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Are Utah Students Prepared for College?

December 12, 2011

Before my daughter could read, she entered a competition and was awarded a blue “Participant” ribbon. She proudly showed it to me and said, “Look! I won!” It didn’t hurt anything to smile and say, “Yes! You did!”

But, in some things, it is harmful to confuse participation with victory. And, even worse, if we believe that our weaknesses are, instead, strengths, we will never work to eliminate those weaknesses, and they will persist.

I recently pointed out that the college readiness of Utah students is ugly. In other words, I didn’t hand out a blue Participant ribbon. My bad. Maybe I should have said that our college preparation levels are big-boned or have sweet spirits, because my candid (and accurate) assessment has caused that great guardian of the status quo – offense – to raise its wounded head.

Well, facts are facts. If we don’t examine them, we won’t improve. If we examine them, but merely take offense that we aren’t being handed a blue “Participant” ribbon, we won’t improve. In the case of education, if we ignore facts or if we take offense at facts, our failure to improve will have significant consequences for our students. So, I suggest we buck up, examine the data, determine whether we need to improve, and, if so, buck up again, and, then, chart a course for improvement.

Why does it matter? A student’s success in college correlates directly with that student’s preparation for college. In Utah, we see that a student with an ACT composite score of 16 has a mere 16% likelihood of graduating from college. But, a score of 32 suggests a whopping 95% likelihood of graduating. ACT scores between those low and high numbers produce a steady, upwardly trending line of likely college graduation. (See this Nov. 2011 Audit).

ACT data shows that only 27% of Utah high school students who take the test are college ready. As a result of this lack of preparation, very few of our incoming freshmen qualify to take required degree-oriented math courses. In other words, Utah students are so poorly prepared for college math that the Utah System of Higher Education (“USHE”) has embedded into the curriculum a credit bearing developmental class (Math 1010). Math 1010 counts only as an elective credit, not as an actual math credit toward any degree. Thus, even the students who avoid the 900-level remedial math courses, still mostly end up taking the developmental 1010 class and, then, also, the math class(es) their degree requires. Because they did not acquire basic math skills in high school, they must waste time in a 1010 class that could be spent taking a course that actually meets a degree requirement for math or taking another elective to explore an area of possible interest.

Anyone can take offense at anything. But these facts simply are facts. And, if left uncorrected – because people use the offense card to stifle critical conversations – these facts will inevitably lead to the continued failure of Utah students to complete college. Because I think that outcome is horrible for our students, I’m going to have the conversation.

And what does this conversation say about high school teachers and incoming freshmen? It simply says that they are trapped in a system that is not making sense. It is the status quo that should be criticized and changed, not the players. So, please note, I do not criticize the players. Instead, I criticize the status quo of an impersonalized curriculum. We teach the herd decimals. After a few weeks, we hand every member of the herd a decimals “Participant” ribbon. We then teach the herd fractions. After a few weeks, we hand every member of the herd a fractions “Participant” ribbon. We then teach . . .. But, wait. What if a student didn’t actually master decimals? Well, too bad. The herd has moved on to fractions.

My dastardly – and maybe offensive – plan is to assess what each student knows toward the end of high school and, then, tailor instruction to address that student’s specific deficiencies. Crazy, huh?

The vast majority of our public education teachers are hard working and wonderful. Their dedication inspires me! Combined, my kids have now had about 60 teachers in the Washington County School District. Excepting probably 3, I could not be more pleased with those teachers. 57 out of 60 – those are Hall of Fame numbers! I am forever grateful for the work they have done with my children. But, those great teachers work in a system that is not allowing them to properly prepare our students for college – simply because it does not allow for proper assessment and individually-tailored instruction for each student (as detailed here), not because of a lack of skill, effort, or dedication by the teachers. So, I’m not quite sure why a teacher would take offense at a call to assess/individualize instruction – unless the teacher is guarding the status quo of impersonalized curriculum.

Likewise, our students are far from dumb. In fact, I happen to think that the vast majority are brilliant, with unlimited capabilities. Their possibilities are tremendous! But, they are being set up for failure by a system that is not properly assessing them and providing individually-tailored instruction based on that assessment. So, again, I’m not quite sure why a student would take offense at a call to assess/individualize instruction – unless the student is guarding the status quo of impersonalized curriculum.

If my wording isn’t quite right, I apologize. But, I don’t think my vision is wrong. If we are going to improve Utah’s college completion rate, our incoming students must be much better prepared for college. This can be accomplished with proper assessment and individually-tailored instruction. The tools exist to do this affordably.

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What Education Innovation Looks Like

December 9, 2011

Schmoop!

I can tell you about the future of education, or you can just look for yourself. Peck around on the Shmoop website, and ask yourself how much it would cost to deliver this awesomeness to Utah students.

Currently, Shmoop’s website is pointed toward AP and college placement testing, but don’t let that limit your vision. They are in the student-learning business. And, they are one of the innovators that is changing the rules and improving outcomes. In an engaging way, and in a stinking affordable way, they help students learn. They are finding their way into libraries and schools, and they are changing the dynamic.

I just had a fabulous meeting with Shmoop founder Ellen Siminoff, and I couldn’t be more excited!

I am recommending that the Utah System of Higher Education put together a product (1) to inform high school students (and their parents) whether they are college ready and (2) to remediate the specific deficiencies of students who are not ready. For too long, USHE has been accepting grossly unprepared students and, as a result, USHE has been taking lots of money from those students and lots of money from taxpayers but actually graduating few of those students. (Undisputable fact: a majority of unprepared students who enter college will not graduate college – no matter what the colleges do with those students. Once they start college, time and money are working against them. The delay of remediation stacks the deck against too many of the unprepared students.). Shmoop shows what remediation tools look like. Other businesses also show what the tools look like. The tools do exist.

So, did you hazard a guess how much this awesomeness costs? Answer: when it comes through a school, it costs a couple of bucks a year per student – as in $2/course. Or for all of Shmoop’s offerings, they get greedy and want $5.

Shmoop helps show that affordable answers exist to our most vexing problems in education – if we will brave enough to ask the right questions. We have educational opportunities today that mankind has never enjoyed, not even as recently as 4 or 5 years ago. The only thing in the way of racing forward is the incredible weight of the status quo.

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My Plan to Double Utah’s Graduation Rate by 2020

December 3, 2011

I will introduce legislation to double Utah’s college completion rate over the next 8 years. Currently, our state system graduates about 40% of its students. By comparison, BYU graduates its students at twice that rate. With slight changes to existing programs, the institutions in the Utah System of Higher Education (“USHE”) can graduate 80% of their students by 2020. This legislation will fit well with Governor Herbert’s existing goal of having 66% of our population obtain a post-secondary degree, since that would be a mathematical impossibility with our current completion rate.

The reason for Utah’s low completion rate is poor college preparation. Students requiring developmental courses likely will not graduate college. Yet, the vast majority of students entering the USHE system do require developmental courses. Thus, it is to be expected that most will not complete.

Students who require developmental courses in college have less than a 25% likelihood of completing – no matter where they go to college. Some might want to dispute this statistic, by pointing to their own experience. They went to college unprepared, but managed to complete. The key is to understand that those individuals do not disprove the well-established rule. Rather, those individuals simply are part of the 25% of unprepared students who manage to complete. For every one of those individuals, there are three others who went to college unprepared and did not complete.

To increase college completion rates – and to reach Governor Herbert’s lofty 2020 goals – our task must be to increase the readiness level of students entering the USHE system. Do that, and completion rates will follow.

The good news is that Utah is tremendously well-positioned to accomplish this task. We have significant experience actually doing it. As I described in this post, we already know how to effectively remediate struggling students. We first determine their academic weaknesses. Then, we address those items with an adaptive learning program that constantly assesses mastery while teaching, so that students either master the task at hand and move on to the next task or, if they don’t master it, circle back and readdress the task. This kind of individualized assessment and instruction is a must for real progress. And, remember, this kind of remediation happens every day on our college campuses.

But that speaks to the root of our problem. We remediate our students too late. Once students hit college, they have a clock working against them. As Stan Jones from Complete College America points out, the longer it takes a college student to get through college, the less likely it is for that student to complete. Remediation works against the clock, and it adds significant expense to the cost of college. Thus, we are remediating our students after they have reached a point when their deficiencies likely will preclude them from graduating. Therefore, my plan is to have USHE work with our K-12 system, to package USHE’s remedial expertise for use by K-12 students and, to the desire they want to use it, Utah’s school districts and charter schools.

Under our current system, not suggesting fault by anyone, it is a nearly impossible for our hard-working K-12 instructors to individualize their instruction, without these adaptive instructional tools. Without these tools, we simply cram too many students in a classroom – with too wide a range of abilities – to expect individualized instruction. We teach the herd. Some students are bored, and others are lost. But, with these tools, all students can receive instruction appropriate to their level of understanding.

The assessment tool would be available online, free to students and their families. (Unlike the ACT/SAT testing, students could retake this test as many times as they want, each time learning the specific things they need to work on). On a strictly voluntary basis, students could take the test and, on their own, work to complete the individualized instruction. However, the experience of our colleges suggests that the remedial education works far better with accompanying classroom instruction. Thus, Utah high schools should offer the remedial courses as part of their curriculum. However, some school districts might not want to deliver the courses or might want to address college readiness in other ways. Thus, the decision whether to offer the courses as part of the high school curriculum would best be left to the discretion of each school district and charter school. Where public schools decide not to offer the courses as part of the curriculum, it can be expected that private providers would step up and offer the classroom component of the course for families that are able and willing to pay for the extra advantage.

USHE institutions spend tremendous sums of money dealing with the effects of unprepared students. Were an effective program to eliminate many of those remediation costs, USHE institutions would benefit from the savings. Thus, it can be expected that each institution would provide financial incentives to encourage incoming students to utilize the assessment and, if necessary, the remedial tools, before enrolling at the institution.

Development of an effective remediation program for high school students, while still in high school, will significantly boost college readiness and, as a result, college completion rates. But, the goal, of course, is not to remediate high school students, but, instead, to have them acquire core competencies as they progress through the K-12 system. We also can do that, and we are working to do that. I have tremendous faith in the leadership being provided by Superintendent Shumway and our State Board. But, it will take more time and money to address the systemic issues than it will take to develop the USHE remediation program. Thus, if handled properly, the USHE remediation program that I outline here will provide a bridge, with one-time money, to allow public education to move forward with the college/career readiness program that it currently is developing.

My plan is to start with a USHE remedial math program, because this is our area of greatest need. I will seek a one-time appropriation of $5 million, which I believe is a realistic sum, based on USHE’s experience developing concurrent enrollment classes. In developing these assessment and instruction tools, Utah will benefit from the significant baseline resources USHE currently has – specifically, the experience of our USHE institutions in providing remedial courses – and we benefit from USHE’s experience in delivering concurrent enrollment courses to Utah high school students.

As soon as we have learned valuable lessons from our remedial math courses, we will utilize those lessons to improve our USHE math remediation program and to add a remedial English course.

We can do this. And, by doing this, we will significantly improve our State and the lives of thousands of our citizens. Governor Herbert called a moonshot. This is his rocket.

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To Significantly Improve Education in Utah

December 1, 2011

Man! Did Rep. Ipson and I see something amazing today!

We visited Southwest High School – the Washington County adult education high school. Anyone 16-years old or older can attend, as long as they are not enrolled in a traditional school. About 1% of the student body is there because they want to accelerate their graduation. The other 99%? I’m glad you asked.

Southwest gets some self-referrals, it gets students who have been kicked out of traditional schools, and it gets students from the abused women’s shelter, Vocational Rehabilitation, homeless shelters, “lost children” from polygamist communities, Juvenile Justice Services, Drug Court, Adult Probation & Parole, and Purgatory. That last place is the name of the local prison, but it also could serve as an apt metaphor for the educational status of many of the students. Though most students have completed 10th or 11th grade, they have the academic functioning level of 8th grade.

Let’s skip to the chase. What are the results? Last year, the 462 enrollees achieved 496 grade-level gains, and 313 graduation diplomas were issued. And – to make those numbers truly jaw dropping – those gains and diplomas were outcome based, meaning that they represent mastery of assessed competencies, not mere endurance of enough seat time. These numbers are off-the-chart amazing!

Let me give you a bit of perspective. By way of comparison, consider the students from Utah’s traditional high schools who go on to college. On average, this group enjoys tremendous learning advantages over Southwest H.S. students. We should expect much higher academic outcomes from the college-bound group. But, we get worse results. Tragically, only 27% of the more-advantaged group manages to graduate high school actually ready for college, meaning that, unlike the Southwest H.S. students, these students did not progress a grade level per year.

Let’s drive the point home a bit more. Let’s isolate just the Southwest High School students who are locked up at Purgatory. They, too, significantly outperform our more-advantaged Utah students. Last year, the 114 inmate students achieved 94 level gains. This is an 82% grade level achievement rate for prisoners, compared to the 27% grade level achievement rate for our traditional college-bound students. How can that be?

Unlike the Southwest H.S. students, the progress and promotion of the more-advantaged group has been based on sitting in a chair for an amount of time, not on assessed competency. It never mattered whether the more-advantaged group actually learned anything; so, they didn’t learn much.

These results speak to a lack of educational seriousness in Utah. How about we change that?

A quiz for anyone who remotely follows public education discussions in Utah: what will be the response to my call to improve educational outcomes? C’mon, this one is easy. The response will be that more money is needed. It’s Pavlovian – talk about results, salivate money.

Well, let’s look at the financing for Southwest High School. To achieve these results, the public dialogue has trained us to assume that we must throw a mountain of cash at Southwest’s challenging students, right? Wrong. Southwest achieves its superior results with 1/10th the money spent on the more-advantaged traditional students.

Did you catch that? Superior results, for a much more challenging student population, with 1/10th the money.

We focus on many things in our traditional schools. Unfortunately, educational competencies are not one of them. At Southwest, students are individually assessed. It first is determined what an individual student knows. Then, it is determined what an individual student needs to learn. Lastly, the student is taught those things and actually learns them. But, surely, this costs a fortune? Well, okay, but only if 1/10th of what we spend on traditional students counts as a fortune.

The assessment and the instruction are delivered online (A+nyWhere Learning System). Students go to the physical high school, when they can work it into their schedule. Teachers are in the high school’s 3 classrooms, to help when a student needs a live, flesh-and-blood helper. And it works. For 1/10th the cost, students gain actual, assessed competencies. Lives are changed. How cool is that?

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Higher Education Success for Latinos

November 15, 2011

At each of my visits last week to WSU, USU and the U of U, students or faculty brought up the need for a success strategy for Latinos. Latinos lag behind other ethnic groups in terms of higher education attainment. That is an issue – a compounding issue, given that the U.S. population increases by four people each minute and that two of the four are Latino.

I believe the first three points of my white paper – improving college readiness, cost, and flexibility – form the foundation of a success strategy. This morning I read a good article on Latino higher education success published by the National Conference of State Legislatures that seems to agree. Some highlights:

Raymund Paredes, Texas Higher Education Commissioner, stresses that “access without preparation is not opportunity. If you’re not well-prepared, your chances of succeeding in college are very, very low.”

UTEP President Diana Natalicio says that “you must do the following: raise aspirations, prepare students for academic success in college; make sure education is affordable; allow students to participate on their own terms – such as on weekends, evenings and online; and ensure everyone can participate, regardless of family and work obligations.”

Texas Rep. Joaquin Castro says that “developmental or remedial education is ‘the graveyard of higher education, where many dreams die.’”

Thoughts?

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