The Nation's Report Card
  
The Department of Education just released results of the quadrennial National Assessment of Educational Progress tests in U.S. history, civics and geography given in 2018 to thousands of American eighth-graders: “Grade 8 Students’ NAEP Scores Decline in Geography and U.S. History; Results in Civics Unchanged Since 2014.”

The tests were administered from January to March 2018 to a nationally representative sample of 42,700 eighth-graders from about 780 schools. The news is not very good. Only 24% of students performed at or above the “proficient” level in civics. Worse yet, only 15% scored proficient or above in American history and 25% were proficient in geography. At least 25% of America’s eighth-graders are what NAEP defines as “below basic” in U.S. history, civics and geography. That means they have no understanding of historical and civic issues and cannot point out basic locations on a map.

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos referred to the recent national report card as “stark and inexcusable.” She blamed “antiquated” education methods for low test scores among the nation’s eighth-graders. That’s nonsense. I’d bet the rent money that eighth-grade students of earlier periods, say during the 1920s, ‘30s and '40s who were burdened with “antiquated” education methods such as having to learn algebra and geometry, identifying parts of speech and memorizing poems like “Old Ironsides” could run circles around today’s eighth-graders, high school graduates and perhaps some college graduates. I think we need to bring back these authentically antiquated education methods.

Part of the solution to our education problem is given by Dr. Jeffrey Sikkenga, professor of political science and executive director of the Ashbrook Center at Ashland University. He said: “Students need to go back to America’s past and ask it questions, starting with our Founding. They need to study great documents like the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln’s 'Gettysburg Address,’ and Martin Luther King’s ‘I Have a Dream’ speech. Not just read about them in boring textbooks, but read the documents themselves, for themselves. Have great conversations with those great minds — discover for themselves the story of America in the words of those who lived it.”

The school climate, seldom discussed, plays a very important role in education. During the 2017-18 school year, there were an estimated 962,300 violent incidents and 476,100 nonviolent incidents U.S. public schools nationwide. Seventy-one percent of schools reported having at least one violent incident, and 65% reported having at least one nonviolent incident. Schools with 1,000 or more students had at least one sworn law enforcement officer. About 90% of those law enforcement officers carry firearms.

I bet that decades ago, one would be hard put to find either armed or unarmed police officers patrolling the building. For example, between 1950 and 1954, I attended Benjamin Franklin High School in Philadelphia. The only time we saw a police officer in the building was during an assembly where we had to listen to a boring lecture on safety. Today, police patrol the hallways. Another school in north Philadelphia, Strawberry Mansion High School, once had 94 security cameras, six school police officers and two metal detectors. Students had to walk through the metal detectors to enter the building and were often searched by police officers. It was on the list of those most persistently dangerous schools in Pennsylvania.

Aside from violence, there are many instances of outright disrespect for teachers. First- and second-graders telling teachers to “Shut the f-— up” and calling teachers “bitch.” To note the attitude of some school administrators, a New Jersey teacher was seriously assaulted by a student. When she asked her principal to permanently remove the student from her classroom, the principal told her to “put on her big girl panties and deal with it.”

Years ago, the behavior of young people that we see today would have never been tolerated. There was the vice principal’s office where corporal punishment would be administered for gross infractions. If the kid was unwise enough to tell his parents what happened, he might get more punishment at home. Today, unfortunately, we’ve replaced practices that work with practices that sound good and caring, and we’re witnessing the results.

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As Budgets Tighten, Colleges Still Vulnerable to Ransomware

Colleges and universities around the country are proving to be easy prey to hackers with ransom demands. In Massachusetts, Cape Cod Community College was defrauded of $800,000 last year, while Colorado’s Regis University paid an undisclosed amount to regain access to their files after a ransomware attack—and still did not get access back.

Ransomware is a type of malicious software that, once it infects a computer system, allows attackers to lock out victims until they pay a ransom to regain access. With budgets getting tighter for public and private colleges in the wake of the coronavirus, funding IT security could slip through the cracks.

In many ways, a college is an ideal target for hackers. Even a small one has hundreds of people connecting to its network, and many campuses have old machines with out-of-date software used by students and the public. It only takes one person clicking on the wrong email to compromise the entire system. Colleges are “a prime environment for these attacks,” Jared Phipps, a cybersecurity expert, told Inside Higher Ed.

When a college’s IT system gets compromised, the ransom amount can vary considerably. When the admissions-tracking system at Grinnell, Oberlin, and Hamilton Colleges (which they share) was hacked, aspiring freshmen were offered the chance to see their files for around $4,000, which was later discounted to $60.

In contrast, when for-profit Monroe College was the victim of a ransomware attack, hackers demanded $2 million. Crowder College in Missouri saw a similarly high price tag of $1.6 million to regain control of its system. The University of Calgary and Carleton University in Canada and Los Angeles Valley College paid ransomware demands that cost the schools up to $35,000, according to the cybersecurity company Acronis.

Not all schools that get attacked are naïve about the threat of hackers, either. The Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey is known for the strength of its cybersecurity courses, but hackers still attempted to infiltrate its system. Stevens, however, was able to stop their system from being compromised.

When a college gets attacked, it can attract a lot of media attention, but post-secondary institutions are not the only targets. Around 500 K-12 schools in the United States, Zdnet noted, were affected by cyberattacks through September of last year, including 15 public school districts comprising over 100 schools. After three public school districts in Louisiana were victimized, Governor John Bel Edwards declared a state of emergency so the state could access federal funds and resources to shore up their IT security.

When a school succumbs to an attack, cybersecurity experts recommend not paying ransoms, according to the University of California-Berkeley Information Security Office. If schools do pay, experts worry that successful attacks will encourage hackers to target more places with vulnerable IT systems. The hard lesson of experience also cautions colleges not to cave: as Regis University showed, even if a school pays, they don’t always get access restored.

What college leaders need to do, according to UC-Berkeley, is to create a contingency plan in case a ransomware attack succeeds.

Schools should maintain separate file backups and have a recovery plan in place. They also need to keep operating systems and antivirus software up-to-date and restrict users’ permissions to install software. Multifactor authentication, where someone logging in needs to enter a code sent to another email or their phone after entering their password, can also reduce a system’s vulnerability to attacks, as Inside Higher Ed noted. Colleges need to take steps to make a successful attack less likely, but they can’t count on prevention to always work.

The number of attacks appears to increase over the year and cluster around the beginning of the school year, Zdnet noted. However, determining the number of attacks that target educational institutions is almost impossible, as no one tracks the number of attempted or failed attacks (if they’re even detected), and the number of attacks often depends on who is doing the counting.

For example, one cybersecurity firm counted 500 attacks while another reported over 1,000. For example, Armor reported 72 attacks affecting 1,039 schools in 2019 while Emsisoft reported 89 attacks affecting 1,233 schools.

Though difficult to track, the federal government is taking cybersecurity increasingly seriously. Last year, Congress passed a bill requiring the Department of Homeland Security to establish Cyber Incident Response Teams, which became law in December. It created “a permanent group of security specialists that agencies and industry could call on when their IT infrastructure gets compromised,” journalist Jack Corrigan noted. The CIR teams have the potential to help colleges who face IT attacks they can’t weather on their own, though Congress won’t have any data on the teams’ effectiveness for four years (when the Department of Homeland Security is required to provide a report).

While the federal government is taking cybersecurity seriously and requesting $18.8 billion for it for 2021, including $2.6 billion for the Department of Homeland Security. State and local governments and affected schools are putting less money into this critical area.

Many state and local governments don’t have dedicated cybersecurity budgets, and the news isn’t much better at colleges or universities. According to the 2019 Campus Computing Survey, 67 percent of college IT directors said that their budgets haven’t recovered from cuts made after the 2008 recession. Without increased budgets, government and college IT departments can’t retain employees for long, resulting in lost productivity from constantly training replacements.

Some schools that have been affected by cyberattacks and ransomware have learned from their mistakes and taken action. Regis University not only rebuilt its computer systems but merged its Anderson College of Business with the College of Computer and Information Sciences because the process revealed that students could benefit from understanding how a large organization is managed and relies on information technology, according to a Regis press release.

Their ransomware attack has also given them the opportunity to turn media attention into a marketing opportunity. Earlier this year, it hosted a cybersecurity conference called “Stronger Together” that focused on prevention strategies to stop cyberattacks. The conference’s main theme was that it’s only a matter of time before a business, institution, or government agency is affected by a cyberattack.

As colleges become ever more reliant on the internet and the number of devices on campus increases, providing more ways for malevolent actors to cause chaos, college leaders need to consider how they’ll react in a crisis.

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Australia: Universities in turmoil as dirty little secrets come out

These are tumultuous times for Australian universities. This week alone, at the University of Adelaide, the vice-chancellor has taken “indefinite leave” and the chancellor has resigned. In unrelated moves, other VCs signalled their intent to move on even before the COVID-19 crisis hit. Michael Spence is leaving the top job at the University of Sydney at the end of the year. There are departures by other university leaders, including at the University of Queensland.

Is it foolish to hope for different, improved leadership at our major universities? Certainly, if incoming VCs are smart, they will turn their attention to domestic students who have long been ignored in favour of cash cows in China. But to understand what stands in the way of providing Australian students with an excellent university education, one needs to first understand the entrenched problems at our biggest tertiary institutions.

This week, Inquirer spoke to someone who knows first-hand how universities are run, what their motivations are and what has gone wrong in the past 15 years. This insider, a high-flying professor of media and communications, says Australia’s major universities essentially are run by two people. Their names are Joe Stalin and John Elliott.

The communist dictator needs no introduction. But Elliott might; the rambunctious Australian businessman became famous in the 1970s and 80s for his aggressive pursuit of money and for not giving a “pig’s arse” about his critics.

The professor is speaking only slightly tongue in cheek when she says universities are beholden to the worst forms of authoritarianism and laissez-faire economics.

Before unravelling that, first understand that this prominent professor says she would normally put her name to what she tells Inquirer “in a heartbeat”. Except for one thing: “I would get sacked,” she says. “My contract says that I cannot bring my university into disrepute so if I put my name to this, my job would be in jeopardy. And I have a mortgage to pay.”

Put another way, these are escape clauses for poorly run universities to avoid scrutiny by people in the know.

But back to Stalin and Elliott. Stalin’s authoritarian fist was particularly evident in a tutorial room at the University of Technology Sydney for first-year communications students. A few weeks ago, a young student — we will call him David, as he doesn’t want to get blackballed by university administrators — decided to quit his communications degree. He sent a thoughtful and honest email to his lecturer and tutor explaining why. He said he hoped the feedback would be used in a constructive way so future students might discover intellectual curiosity rather than authoritarian censorship.

David wrote that he “found the course and tutor extremely prescriptive in opinion, presenting very niche ideological standpoints as absolute objective fact, (and) this was reinforced by a proactive effort by you to shut down any opposing point of view. Anytime I suggested anything that went against the consensus, I was shut down and even laughed at.” The young law student says he enrolled in communications expecting respectful, philosophical discussions about our political systems. It didn’t turn out that way.

Going by David’s experience, tutorials should be renamed dictatorials about identity politics, victimhood and shame. Instead of encouraging students to think, listen, learn and discuss issues, the tutorial room in David’s communications degree became a place where his different views were mocked and ignored as “inherent ignorance (from) a white male”.

Speaking to Inquirer this week, he said even putting aside the silly politics of the course, what are students going to do with guff about the whole world being a battleground where every smaller group is oppressed by a “dominant group”? Maybe get a job at the ABC?

“Never in my entire life did I expect to be alienated from class discussion because of my skin colour or my gender, especially in a class supposedly attempting to break down such barriers. I cannot believe that in this day and age my identity was held paramount in deciding if I was correct, not what I had to say. I wonder what the response would have been had I suggested a fellow student’s opinion was inherently invalid purely because she was female,” David wrote to his lecturer. The lecturer wrote a cursory response, saying she was pleased that he was able to withdraw without incurring course costs.

Monolithic thinking is dangerous, particularly at universities. If tutorials cannot accommodate a genuine diversity of views, including those of David, then universities don’t deserve a dime from taxpayers.

Alas, it’s not just little Stalins running dictatorials who are dumbing down a university education for Australian students.

As the professor of media and communications tells Inquirer, the greedy corporatist agenda of university administrators, relying on a gravy train of international students, mostly from mainland China, is also lowering standards at universities that crow about their rankings.

She says chasing fees from international students has been under way for 15 years, with foreign agents acting for our universities to arrange “huge parties and junkets” for potential overseas students and also the “doctoring” of English language tests. The professor says she has seen hundreds of foreign students arrive with band 6 scores — meaning competent — on the standardised speech, reading and writing tests known as the International English Language Testing System. She would give them no more than a band 3, which is “extremely limited” according to IELTS.

These results have big ramifications for foreign students who are out of their depth, struggling in a foreign country away from families, without the skills to learn properly. And the consequences for local students are equally poor.

“Masters and postgraduate students’ programs, which are the money-spinners to attract foreign students, have been dumbed down often to a point where the standards expected are below that of what we expect of undergraduate students,” she says.

While her heart goes out to struggling foreign students, she says students with insufficient English language skills mean “domestic students are frequently irritated, particularly with group assignments. They are paying a lot of money for a postgraduate course and many definitely feel they are not challenged enough.”

These dirty little secrets about foreign cash cows and dumbed-down courses, previously whispered about among lecturers and students, deserve to be exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic as the tap of money from international students dries up.

“Without in anyway being xenophobic, reliance on international students is the wrong answer. It’s an add-on, that’s all. We should be really focusing on how we educate Australians, and thinking about what we need to build a strong economy and society,” says the professor.

Our best universities could start the post-COVID reform process by treating domestic students better. One young man recently reapplied to enrol in a full-fee masters program at one of Australia’s grandest sandstone universities. His marks were a tiny fraction away from the entry mark for the course. Within minutes of sending a thoughtful and polite email seeking admission, explaining special circumstances that would have lifted his score over the threshold, he was effectively told to rack off.

Smart businesses wouldn’t be so brazenly rude and dismissive about new full-fee paying customers when they are running under capacity because of the economic lockdown. Our small businesses are eagerly trying to attract customers in new ways, adapting wherever they can. But our cashed-up major universities run by overpaid VCs have grown arrogant and complacent. They would rather go cap in hand to the federal government pleading for more taxpayer money after they have raked in Chinese money to fund research papers to bump up their rankings to attract more foreign students. All the while they have dumbed-down standards, leaving local students without a quality education. It’s a disgrace.

Having worked in Australian universities for 20 years, at very senior levels, the professor says “the level of bureaucracy is insane, the systems are not serving … the students. It’s a plague on our house.”

Perhaps when our politicians, who collect taxes and spend our money on our behalf, understand what has gone wrong at our major universities, VCs of taxpayer-funded universities will feel a moral imperative to step up with better leadership, improve standards and ensure that Australian students are getting the very best education.

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