Schools for Tomorrow Blog

There was a kind of remarkable story this week, buried beneath CSAPs and the mounting DNC coverage.

The Denver Post reported that CU raised $162 million in private contributions this past year, a new record.  At 6.8% of CU’s $2.4 billion annual budget, this amount is coming close to the 8.8% of operating budget that comes from state support for CU.

Now, of course the private contributions are mostly for buildings and endowment funds, rather than annual operations, so the comparison is not totally “apples to apples.”

But, the percentage of support from annual private giving may soon surpass state contributions, especially if Referendum C expires in 2010/11 without some other solution to the state budget constraint problem   That would mark another milestone for the state’s flagship and largest institution, still directed by an elected board of regents from across the state, becoming more private, in reality, than public.

Do we want that?

There’s lots of chatter – and some misinformation – floating around about the Wednesday ruling by the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that found the Colorado Commission on Higher Education was wrong in barring Colorado Christian University students from various state financial aid programs. (See opinion.)

A federal district judge ruled in favor of the state last year. (See opinion.)

The commission relied on a state law that bars aid that helps “pervasively sectarian” institutions. (See state law here. IBy the way, the same law bars for-profit schools from participating in aid programs. No money if you go the University of Phoenix)

The three-judge appellate panel disagreed, writing, “We find the exclusion unconstitutional for two reasons: the program expressly discriminates among religions without constitutional justification, and its criteria for doing so involve unconstitutionally intrusive scrutiny of religious belief and practice. We reverse, and order that summary judgment be granted in favor of the university.”

The ruling noted that the University of Denver, nominally Methodist, and Regis University, a Jesuit institution, participate in state scholarship programs and the College Opportunity Fund student stipends. (Spend a day on any of the campuses, though, and you’ll agree that CCU is a very different institution from DU or Regis.)

The case attracted all sorts of high-profile liberal and conservative groups as “friends of the court” on the both sides, including the NEA, CEA, AFT and national PTA.

The appellate ruling drew predictable huffing and puffing from local leaders of the ACLU and Progress Now.

But, quite frankly, the ruling makes a fair amount of sense. It is constitutionally risky business to have CCHE bureaucrats making decisions about what “pervasively sectarian” means. It would be better to draw a bright line barring participation by any institution with any religious tie.

And, it would be far better to bar any private institution.

Which brings us to the COF. (The case, by the way, is not just about the COF. The dispute started in 2003, before the stipends were created, when Colorado Christian applied to participate in existing scholarship programs. The CCHE denied the application.)

The COF is not a scholarship program; it’s a discount applied to any resident student’s bill if they apply for it, regardless of grades or family income.

The COF really isn’t a program at all; it’s an accounting trick dreamed up by the legislature during hard times in 2004 to get around the Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights. COF money, topped off with another financial fiction named “fee for service,” allows state colleges and universities to get state money as “enterprises” that aren’t subject to TABOR limits.

Since COF and fees for service are just plain old tax dollars with different names, those tax dollars ought to be spent only for their original purpose – the funding of state colleges and universities.

More and more Colorado universities are using standardized tests with students to better understand their academic progress.  The Post reports:

Increasingly, colleges and universities want to see how well they are doing their jobs — either internally or against competitors — by giving students tests to measure basic college- level skills.

Some call the endeavor the "No Child Left Behind" movement for colleges, but so far, individual student performance isn’t studied as much as class achievement.

At the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs, for example, engineering professors decided to sprinkle more writing in assignments after an assessment test showed certain majors were lagging in the area.

Though many college administrators agree on the need for some sort of test, academics and policy experts are wildly split on what to do with the results.

Some colleges, like CSU, are pushing for more transparency. They want to be held accountable on student growth and want parents to look at this, rather than the U.S. News and World Report rankings, to gauge whether a college is good.

NCLB-enforced standardized testing has, for better or for worse, become rooted in our public K-12 system.  But the same approach to assessment and measurement has not yet crept into higher education.

Testing at the higher ed level brings with it the same problems and benefits as testing at lower levels.  The risks are many:  narrowing of the curriculum, the danger of tying teacher pay to inappropriately narrow measures of performance, cultural bias, and so on.  That said, there is probably more to be gained than lost in this recent wave of higher ed assessments.  Standardized testing has always been best suited to diagnostic, “temperature checks,” rather than high stakes pronouncements about the overall quality of students, teachers, or institutions.  As long as tests are used for these purposes, they should be able to illuminate key areas of concern for universities looking to improve.

No surprise here: energy interests on the Western Slope are using distortions and scare tactics to turn people against a proposed ballot measure that would change the state tax on mineral extraction.

Initiative 113 would boost revenues and fund a college scholarship program, wildlife protection,  clean-energy projects and assistance to communities affected by energy development. Money would be generated by removing a tax exemption that resulted in Colorado’s so-called severance taxes being among the lowest in the mountain west.

The current law allows energy companies to offset state severance taxes with the amounts they pay in local property taxes. The initiative would strip away that offset.

According to the Colorado Municipal League, the initiative would increase severance tax revenue from $186 million to $446.9 million for fiscal year 2009-2010

Club 20, an influential Western Slope group of business leaders, recently commissioned a study of the proposed ballot initiative. The study, conducted by Jim Evans, the retired executive director of the Associated Governments of Northwest Colorado, found that the ballot measure would deprive Western Slope residents of their first-born children, blot out the sun and cause a plague of locusts to descend upon the land.

Well, not really. But the Evans study did find that it would “take money from the areas most affected by the energy boom,” according to the Grand Junction Sentinel.

Evans applied the terms of the proposed ballot measure, the Scholarship Initiative, to the past six years of severance-tax receipts. In only one of those years would the local-government share of severance tax revenue have increased, Evans said.

In analyzing the highest-revenue year of those six years, 2006, local governments would have seen a $23 million revenue loss and a loss of $45 million overall.

“It’s a raw deal any way you slice it,” said state Sen. Josh Penry, R-Grand Junction.

The problem is, Evans’ analysis, uncritically reported by the Sentinel (whose reporter didn’t even bother to gather substantive reaction from supporters of the initiative) is both inaccurate and incomplete in almost all its particulars, according to Matt Samelson, director of special projects for the Donnell-Kay Foundation. (Full disclosure: DK is a funder of Education News Colorado, as well as a key supporter of the ballot initiative).

Samelson fired off an e-mail to Club 20 Executive Director Reeves Brown, pointing out inaccuracies in the Evans study. “It’s no surprise that Club 20 would oppose the ballot initiative,” he wrote.  “But stating that “Because of this adverse impact to locally impacted communities, the Club 20 Executive Committee has voted unanimously to oppose Initiative #113" is a disservice to your membership…

“Because when I plug in the proposed severance tax structure using  FY2007 severance tax inputs and outputs, I get a set a numbers that indicate local communities in impacted areas would have received more money.  In fact locally impacted communities would have received $79.36 million in FY2007, which is $18.21 million more than was dedicated to (the Department of Local Affairs) for the same time frame.”

Samelson also wrote (and key terms will be defined in paragraphs below, so don’t despair): “As a result of the ad valorem credit and stripper well exemption, 75% of all the oil and gas wells in Colorado don’t pay the severance tax.  So if the framework of  (the ballot initiative) had been in place during FY 2006-7 (no ad valorem credit and the altered stripper well exemption), Colorado would have received $256 million in severance revenue instead of the $122 million it did receive from the current tax structure.”

I asked Samelson to explain this in laymen’s terms, and here’s what he wrote me:

“Ad Valorem credit:  Oil and gas producers in Colorado are allowed to apply 87.5% of the property tax against their state severance tax.  In communities where the property tax is high, such as Weld County, the property tax credit can negate the producer’s entire severance tax liability.  For example, producers in Weld County from 2002-2006 pulled $7 billion dollars of oil/and gas out of the ground, but because of the ad valorem credit, they didn’t pay severance tax for three of those five years.  (Source: Randy Udall “Torched and Burned”)  The severance proposal #113 removes this tax credit.

Stripper wells:   Colorado has another exemption for small wells.  If an oil well produces 15 barrel or less of oil per day, then it doesn’t have to pay the severance tax.  If a natural gas well produces 90,000 cubic feet of gas or less per day, it also doesn’t have to pay the severance tax.  The severance proposal #113 lowers the threshold for these exemptions to 7.5 barrels per day of oil and 45,000 cubic feet of natural gas per day.”

Initiative 113 has been criticized by some in the higher education community because it pours resources into scholarships instead of patching the gaping hole in higher ed funding. That is a criticism worthy of debate. But the predictable Chicken Little attacks from the energy business are the latest manifestations of the politics of distortion and half-truth.

Let me start with a shout out for the "Hot Lunch" speakers program, sponsored by the folks at the Donnell-Kay and Piton foundations. The choice of guest experts has been truly eclectic, and it appears that a lot of folks from different backgrounds and perspectives get a chance to attend the lunches.

The one group that seems to be notably absent is the teacher education community…the people who run the ed schools.  Now that I think of it, I can’t identify one Colorado person from that subculture who is even active in education reform discussions.

Let’s see…Wendy Kopp from Teach for America comes to town, and tells inspiring stories of highly motivated Ivy League grads without the benefit of even a single day in ed school and yet seem to survive two years of the toughest urban school environments. 

What’s that say about the importance of ed schools? 

Other than Stanford, Columbia and Harvard, are there any ed schools worth a damn? 

Who are these people and why don’t they get out very much?

Hey, Tony and Van…how bout making ed schools a topic next year?

The Guvna is talking up his scholarship proposal this week, which could mean $130 million in college financial aid a year.  Ritter wants the program to be the “last dollar in” after federal grants and private help.  The Post reports:

Though Ritter technically has little power over the scholarship program’s rules, he also pushed the state’s Higher Education Department to get to work so its details come before November. …

The Colorado Promise Scholarship Fund should help needy and middle-income students, but these students should first seek federal grants and other money, Ritter said.

"We think it’s a plan that promotes shared responsibility," he said. …

The Colorado Promise Scholarship Fund was the governor’s brainchild. His staffers spent months pondering how to spend an estimated $300 million that the state could raise annually if voters agree to retire a tax subsidy on the oil and natural-gas industry.

The proposal has been a bit controversial because of the way it allots funding, but most people can get behind helping more kids go to college.  The “last dollar in” concept – requiring students to take advantage of other all other available funding first — is a good idea because it makes our tax dollars go the furthest, but it comes with its own challenges.

One of the biggest roadblocks to students receiving financial aid is lack of awareness that aid even exists, or lack of knowledge of how to get said funding.  The reality is that most low-income students in Colorado can already secure enough aid to pay their tuition.  The problem, frequently, is not that students cannot pay tuition, but that they cannot pay all their other bills, or they do not see the value in suffering from lost wages in the present as an investment in the future.

Increasing the amount of money available to students to go to college is a good thing, but an even more important goal is changing a culture in which too many students never even consider going to college. College (or, to be more politic, “a post-secondary choice”) should be a consideration for all students, whatever their income.

With recent talk of voucher legislation affecting K-12 schools, Colorado’s very own “voucher” program for college students, the College Opportunity Fund (COF), is under fire.  COF was supposed to help low income kids pay their college tuition by throwing a couple thousand bucks their way.  But COF is meeting with grumbles, especially among Dems.  According to the Rocky:

Schools say COF is too complicated. While most eligible students get the stipend, more than 3,000 this year didn’t apply and needlessly paid up to $2,600 more for their education or defaulted on their bills.

"The bottom line is that COF was a noble goal that met reality," said Tony Kinkel, president of Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs. "It’s time to get rid of it."

David Skaggs, a former Democratic congressman and now executive director of the state Department of Higher Education, said he’s received only complaints about the funding system.

"There’s a consistent theme . . . all in the ‘We avoided TABOR but other than that this isn’t worth it category.’ "

The initial rationale for COF – exempting tuition from the TABOR revenue cap and providing support to low income students —  was laudable, even though its initial supporters might have gotten a little too caught up in the market-based ideology behind it.  But however well intentioned, it never flew.  The process to apply for COF is complicated, so many students never even bothered. 

Providing an affordable higher education to all Colorado kids is a good idea.  Let’s hope that the next plan that comes down the line does its job.  As a start, may I suggest (or at least daydream about) eliminating TABOR.  That’s the main reason our state needed COF to begin with.

The news this week that the University of Colorado has proposed the creation of a Visiting Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy has stirred me to venture into writing about higher education. At least one notable figure on campus is skeptical:

CU political science professor emeritus Ed Rozek recently bought an ad in the Daily Camera in which he tallied voter registration records of faculty and administrators.

Rozek’s finding: Of 825 faculty members in arts and sciences, business, education, journalism and law, he found only 23 registered Republicans.

Rozek did not break out the number of registered Democrats or independents.

Still, Rozek said he found the idea of an endowed chair in conservative views “humorous” and said it smacks of tokenism.

“What is needed is pluralism of ideas, meaning no political party has a monopoly on any campus,” Rozek said. “All views - socialism, communism, democracy - should be discussed.”

Rozek said he would prefer 10 visiting scholars from the world’s leading institutions of higher learning coming to teach at Boulder every year.

Seemingly unlike many who post on this site, I long have inhabited the “conservative” world of thought and action. Nevertheless, I agree with the emeritus professor that this CU proposal is a well-meaning but absurd attempt at tokenism. I almost feel a little self-conscious even writing about this topic. But when you scan the reader comments below the Rocky Mountain News story, you get the sense that this issue has generated far more heat than light.

You can hardly find agreement on a definition of “conservative” thought, much less try to force it into a pre-packaged box. Does the university need more economists who prefer capitalism to Keynesianism? More historians unhampered by politically correct notions that subdivide every layer of history based on race, class, and gender? Humanities teachers who can take an authentic, rather than condescending, look at Judeo-Christian ideas, values, and contributions?

Do they want a devotee of Austrian economics? A disciple of Edmund Burke and Russell Kirk? A Straussian political scientist or a proponent one of the neo-conservative offshoots? An Ayn Randian Objectivist? A Catholic Acton Institute scholar? Maybe they could find a formula for balancing the different strains in the annual rotation.

And what is the university trying to accomplish anyway? To make conservatism into a museum exhibit? (“Here, class, is the species known as conservatus Americanus, an unenlightened relic of a bygone era….”)

While I doubt that’s the general intention, it’s more likely to be the actual result. My guess is that many in the university are trying to inoculate themselves against charges raised by the Ward Churchill and other controversies that have fed the largely well-earned stereotype as the People’s Republic of Boulder.

Yes, CU is trying, however meekly, to take a stab at improving intellectual diversity on campus. But a real solution would be far more intricate and complicated, I imagine. When and whether it’s achievable or worthy of trying to achieve are questions larger than I’m willing to answer.

The news this week that the University of Colorado has proposed the creation of a Visiting Chair in Conservative Thought and Policy has stirred me to venture into writing about higher education. At least one notable figure on campus is skeptical: