Why a Return to Obama’s Student Loan Forgiveness Rules Would Be a Mistake

The battle over the Department of Education’s borrower defense to repayment rule, which governs student loan repayments when a student claims he has been defrauded by a university, has made its way to President Donald Trump’s desk.

Congress this week utilized the Congressional Review Act to overturn the Trump administration’s rewrite of the Obama-era rule.

As Politico reported:

House and Senate leaders on Tuesday enrolled the Congressional Review Act resolution to overturn [Education Secretary Betsy] DeVos’ new rule. That final procedural step now means that legislation will be presented to the White House for Trump’s signature or veto.

The Department of Education’s 2019 rewrite of the borrower defense to repayment rule brought commonsense reforms to the onerous Obama-era version of the rule.

Originally, the rule attempted to protect students from schools that had defrauded them, providing student loan forgiveness in full or in part.

Unfortunately, “fraud” in higher education is wildly difficult to define, and the Obama administration’s 2015 rewrite of the rule defines it so broadly that students could ask for their loans to be discharged if they thought they hadn’t received the education they were promised.

The Trump administration’s 2019 rewrite corrected that issue.

Taxpayers could be on the hook for student loan payments that are discharged under the rule. Given significant taxpayer exposure, the Obama-era borrower defense rule was rightly deemed by many as far too broad. DeVos has noted of that iteration, “All one had to do was raise his or her hand to be entitled to so-called free money.”

Importantly, the 2019 rewrite of the borrower defense to repayment rule would protect the due process rights of universities and American taxpayers from frivolous requests for student loan discharge.

American colleges and universities face significant financial stress during the COVID-19 pandemic. It’s more important now than ever that the federal government not place burdensome regulations on schools under the guise of borrower defense.

The Trump administration’s revision of the rule gives universities their day in court when a claim is brought against them, unlike the Obama administration’s version, which operated under the presumption of guilt for a college.

Schools could be required to post a letter of credit and face Department of Education penalties before any proof of wrongdoing. The mere accusation of fraud was enough to suggest a school was guilty. 

It seems apparent that the Obama administration’s higher education regulatory efforts focused disproportionately on the for-profit sector, and the original borrower defense to repayment rule was no exception.

While increased accountability for taxpayer dollars is badly needed across the higher education sector, there’s a troublesome narrative that all bad actors in higher education reside in the for-profit sector.

Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., even went so far as to state on the Senate floor that “these for-profit colleges are the coronavirus of higher education.”

That extreme hyperbole underscores the open hostility that many lawmakers have toward proprietary institutions while turning a blind eye to the significant shortcomings of many nonprofit institutions.

This isn’t the first time lawmakers have attempted to use higher education regulations to disproportionately target for-profit colleges.

The gainful employment rule, for example, which required schools to prove certain outcomes measures for students, only applied to for-profit colleges and to certain courses of study at nonprofits.

However, 60% of private nonprofit programs would fail the gainful employment rule, along with 70% of programs at public nonprofit institutions. The targeting of for-profit colleges under the guise of regulating “bad actors” simply doesn’t bear out in the facts.

The 2019 Trump administration rewrite of the borrower defense to repayment rule appropriately addresses the question of accountability.

Indeed, roughly 45 million Americans struggle with more than $1.6 trillion in outstanding student loan debt, with many graduating without the skills necessary to acquire a job, prompting increased scrutiny.

However, with hundreds of billions of dollars pouring into our universities each year through federal student aid programs, it is American taxpayers, rather than the universities, that pay the most significant price when students default on their loans.

DeVos has rightly taken taxpayer considerations into account with the 2019 borrower defense to repayment rule.

While some in Congress want to return to a regulatory environment that stifles growth and unfairly burdens quality schools and American taxpayers, the Trump administration should maintain a friendly regulatory environment, much like the president called for in his May 19 executive order on regulatory relief to support economic recovery.

Proper oversight respects due process and insulates taxpayers from student loan forgiveness. We should not backtrack on that smart regulatory reform.

SOURCE 





Colleges plan for on-campus classes, even as scientists warn of risk for COVID-19

The leaders of major Boston-area colleges and universities say they are hoping to hold some or all of their courses on campus this fall, even as epidemiologists warn that colleges by their very nature might put students and faculty at risk for COVID-19.

“We are going to have to be more flexible than we’ve ever been in the way that we offer education,” Boston University president Robert Brown said Wednesday, speaking on a panel hosted by the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce where he and other campus leaders outlined how they plan to create safe campus environments this fall.

But experts in infectious disease said that will be a nearly impossible task.

“It’s going to be very challenging because some of the things that we know carry the highest risk of COVID transmission are those activities that colleges typically have lots of," said Dr. Paul Sax, clinical director of the Division of Infectious Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. He pointed to the often crowded nature of classrooms, dining halls, dormitories, and parties.

“There are many reasons to try, and there are many challenges to surmount,” said Kevin Volpp, the health policy division chief at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania. “You need a really good plan, really flawless execution . . . and a little bit of luck to stay open.”

Brown and the leaders of Emerson College, Northeastern University, Bunker Hill Community College, and the University of Massachusetts system all expressed optimism that they can transform the age-old methods and traditions of campus life in unprecedented ways to meet the new, constant threat of the virus.

“It is our hope to have some in-person classes . . . in the fall term,” said Lee Pelton, president of Emerson College, in the heart of downtown Boston. Pelton said his administrators are still trying to determine the structure of the fall semester. An announcement should come in the next two or three weeks, he said.

Sax said that schools could face another set of challenges if a second wave of the virus strikes this fall after students have already returned to campus. The fear is that colleges would have to suddenly evacuate their campuses, repeating the drill they went through in the spring.

“We’re all kind of bracing ourselves for that and concerned about it,” he said about a second wave.

The college presidents said they are working on new housing arrangements, classroom schedules, and other precautions. But the experts concede that they can only go so far in attempting to change the behaviors of the estimated 140,000 students who come to Boston every year.

Brown said his university is working on developing its own testing facility. Students would be divided into small residential groups in the dorms that would decrease the amount of mixing between students, and classes would be reimagined so that some students could start the semester online then come to campus when they are able.

“There is a tremendous amount of uncertainty that we have,” Brown said. “It’s very hard to be very precise.”

Joseph Aoun, the president of Northeastern, who has vowed to work toward opening in the fall, said his school will do its own testing and contact tracing and reduce the density of spaces on campus, including dorms. To that end, the university has already secured 2,000 extra beds in area apartments and hotels, he said.

Northeastern officials announced Wednesday that some faculty, staff, and students working in critical research labs and administrative functions that are hard to perform off campus will begin a slow return to campus in coming days. But they have yet to specify how they will bring back their 14,000 undergrads.

Martin Meehan, the UMass president, said the state university system is preparing for “all options” and said he is eager to restart much of the system’s $683 million of research, calling that “a first step” in reopening.

Pam Eddinger, president of Bunker Hill, said the majority of classes this fall will be taught online or in a hybrid format with a smaller number held in person. Some of the school’s support staff will continue to work from home to allow more physical distancing on campus, she said.

Much of the plan for Bunker Hill, which draws a majority of its students from an 8-mile radius around the Charlestown campus, depends on the city’s reopening plans and whether public transportation is safe and available by fall.

Scientists and health professionals remain skeptical about the ambitious plans to bring students back and said much will depend on the details.

Volpp, at Penn, is advising his institution and another college on the fall semester and said the questions administrators are tackling don’t have easy answers.

Colleges may be able to limit class sizes, require masks throughout campus, and reduce the number of students in a dorm. But can they ensure that students will live under such strict social distance requirements 24 hours a day? Volpp said that question remains unanswered.

Even if dorm rooms are all converted to singles, students must still share bathrooms, and research about the coronavirus has raised concerns about whether it can be spread through fecal aerosol droplets from flushing toilets, Volpp said.

“That kind of question creates challenges for college administrators,” he said. “It is a risk-benefit equation. It’s impossible to make this zero risk.”

College campuses are especially close-knit communities where students, faculty, and staff thrive on those daily interactions and conversations. But that unique environment may be their Achilles’ heel, experts said.

“College campuses are small worlds,” said Kim Weeden, a sociology professor at Cornell University.

Weeden, along with her colleague Ben Cornwell, studied student course selections at Cornell during the fall of 2019 and found that in a typical week, a student crossed classes with more than 500 other undergraduates and graduates. That excludes interactions they may have in the dorms, dining halls, or walking between classrooms.

Universities can change schedules so students take fewer classes during the week to reduce their interactions, Weeden said. But that’s only part of the solution.

“Course enrollments are just one piece of the puzzle” she said. “The really tricky questions come around housing and dining and transition between classes, where they have fewer levers to pull.”

Not all campus leaders have been so optimistic about returning. In an op-ed published in The Atlantic last week, Michael Sorrell, president of Paul Quinn College in Dallas, said schools are deluding themselves if they think they can safely reopen in a few months.

“We should not let our own financial and reputational worries cloud our judgment about matters of life and death,” Sorrell wrote.

Still, some public health experts said colleges can bring back students to some degree, and many are trying to figure out how many students and how.

Sandro Galea, the dean of the BU School of Public Health, said he expects institutions to adapt with smaller classes, fewer students in dorms, everyone on campus wearing masks, contact tracing programs, efforts to boost hygiene, and areas cordoned off to isolate those who may get the virus.

“Ultimately, it’s an issue of managing risk,” Galea said. “How do colleges and universities adapt to the risk?”

Gerri Taylor, a member of the American College Health Association’s COVID-19 task force and a retired director of the Bentley University health center, said colleges will need this summer to determine whether they can safely open.

Some colleges still need to replenish their supplies of N95 masks and face shields, after donating them to hospitals during the height of the crisis, Taylor said.  They need that equipment pretty desperately,” she said.

For many colleges, the situation depends on the public health guidelines in place at the time, where the institution is in the country and its ability to isolate the campus, and the financial resources it has to do the testing, hire more clinicians, and buy the protective gear, Taylor said.

Ultimately, it may be more difficult for colleges in big cities that are hot spots for the virus, Volpp said.  “Colleges in Boston and colleges in New York will have bigger challenges,” Volpp said. “There is a lot of interest and strong desire to do it . . . but one thing that’s clear as you think through the challenges — it’s going to be a difficult road.”

SOURCE 






Reading wars hit home during lockdown lessons

“Dogs say ‘woof’, cats say ‘meow’, what does the letter ‘a’ say?”

And so it began. Perched at the dining table, armed with a 257-page guide on teaching a child to read, I was about to try to do just that. My daughter, Margot, had been at school for two months when the niggling concerns about her reading progress began.

Aged 5½, she could read and write her name independently, but not much else. Despite years of reading to her, singing songs and learning rhymes — many of which were learned by heart — she had difficulty identifying all the letters of the alphabet consistently, while her ability to link the letters with their various sounds was hit-and-miss.

Her teacher reassured me that she was where she was meant to be for a foundation-level student. Still, I was haunted by a conversation I’d once had with a prominent education academic who suggested all the journalists she knew had their children reading by the time they started school.

One evening, I sat down with my daughter to read one of the readers sent home from school and noticed how her eyes were automatically drawn to the pictures. It was hardly surprising; the images were obnoxiously large, overshadowing the much smaller text. As I suggested she point at each word and try to sound out each of the letters, she ignored me and started blurting out what she guessed they might be based on the image.

Frustrated by my gentle attempts at bringing her attention back to the words, she told me crossly that Eagle Eye was helping her to read.

As an education journalist, I know all about this Eagle Eye character who encourages children to guess an unfamiliar word by looking at the picture. Along with pals Lips the Fish (“get your lips ready to try the first sound”) and Skippy the Frog (“let’s skip that word altogether”), these child-friendly characters are a common feature of classrooms that adhere to the balanced literacy approach to reading instruction.

Balanced literacy emerged from whole-language reading instruction, spawned in the late 1960s, whereby children were expected to learn to read whole words naturally, merely as a result of plentiful exposure to books and writing. While balanced literacy concedes that children may need some guidance, it is based on a problematic theory called multi-cueing, also known as three-­cueing, which surmises that a reader looks for meaning, structure and visual cues to help make sense of what is on the page.

Countless researchers from across the globe have dismissed multi-cueing as an ineffective system on which to base reading ­instruction lacking in any evidentiary basis. Yet cueing strategies are popular in many primary classrooms because children often experience some early success using picture cues and context to identify words, especially when aided by repetitive and predictable texts.

However, as Sir Jim Rose, whose landmark 2006 review of reading in the UK was key to the development of Britain’s Primary National Strategy for Reading, has pointed out, “children who routinely adopt alternative cues for reading unknown words, instead of learning to decode them, later find themselves stranded when texts become more demanding and meanings less predictable”.

Through my work I had written about many schools that had transformed their reading results and they typically shared one common feature: they had implemented a phonics program.

While the mere mention of the word phonics risks sparking an outbreak in the long-running reading wars, the debate has at least moved on from whether to teach phonics — the research says we should — to how it is best taught.

In Victoria, where I live, the­ ­Department of Education and Training promotes a balanced literacy approach to teaching reading, in which phonics is taught in ways deemed “meaningful to children”, such as reading books, having fun with rhymes and writing their own stories.

“Phonics instruction should take place within a meaningful, communicative, rich pedagogy, and within genuine literacy events,” the department’s Literacy Teaching Toolkit states.

With phonics in context, a typical lesson might involve the teacher reading with students and periodically stopping at a word to discuss the relationships between letters and sounds (known as phonemes). Occasionally there may be a lesson on a letter or sound, but they are not typically presented in a systematic, cumulative way.

In many other states, such as NSW and South Australia, public education authorities have endorsed a different approach called systematic synthetic phonics. Also known as “blended” phonics, it involves teaching a child about the individual letter-sound relationships first, then having the child combine or synthesise these sounds to form words. While learning to read successfully entails more than simply learning phonics skills — it also depends on the development of phonemic awareness, vocabulary, fluency and comprehension skills — major reviews of the teaching of reading in Australia, Britain and the US during the past 18 years have consistently identified ­phonics as a key component of an effective program.

The research also comes down on the side of synthetic phonics.

According to the NSW Education Department’s guide for schools on effective reading ­instruction: “There are a number of different approaches to teaching phonics, with varying levels of effectiveness. The most effective method is called synthetic phonics.” The document highlights results from a longitudinal study undertaken in Scotland that compared synthetic phonics with two analytic phonics programs.

At the end of these programs, children in the synthetic phonics group were reading around seven months ahead of children in the other two groups and were spelling eight to nine months ahead of the other groups.

Seven years on, those in the synthetic phonics group had extended their advantage further.

I was attracted to the simplicity at the core of the synthetic phonics approach; the way children were taught sequentially, starting out learning some simple letter-sound relationships, working towards the more complex end of the spectrum. For a parent with no teaching expertise, it seemed somewhat achievable. And with schools effectively set to close indefinitely because of the coronavirus pandemic, I finally had the time to help my daughter learn to read.

Having asked several literacy specialists and teachers what programs they rated, I settled on one devised by US author Stephen Parker called Teaching a Preschooler to Read (also suitable for primary schoolers). Parker, a retired teacher, has a knack for using plain language to explain a pretty technical topic. The guide, aimed specifically at parents, maps out clearly what to teach, when to teach it and how.

My first task was to refamiliarise myself with what is known in literacy circles as the alphabetic code. As Parker explains, the alphabet itself is only part of the code, with the 26 letters symbolising 44 different sounds. There are 20 vowel sounds (such as the short A in apple or axe but also the longer A in acorn) and 24 consonant sounds (B in bat and D in dad but also “th” and “sh” and the “ng” in king).

A list of those 44 phonemes was my constant companion during the coming weeks, and I swear I started to have nightmares about mixing up those short and long vowel sounds.

Stage one of the program kicked off with teaching my daughter the five short vowel sounds as well as M, N and S .

With a new Sharpie I wrote each letter on an index card and we practised saying the letters and their corresponding sounds every day. We also started to pay more attention to letters in our environment. Walking down the street, I’d point to the number plates on cars and ask Margot whether she could spot any of “her letters”, as we’d call them, and sound them out.

With her confidence growing, we moved on to decoding simple two and three-letter words. As with the letters, I wrote them on the index cards. To make a game, I had her flip them over and attempt to sound them out.

“A-n … An!” She got it on the first attempt.

I asked when she would use such a word.

“I would like an apple,” she replied. I was quietly impressed.

She moved on to the next word.

“M-a-n … Man.” Again no problem.

“N-a-n … Nan.” Ditto.

And that brought us to the word “sun”. She looked at it, then looked at me with a strained ­expression.

“Snake,” Margot said. I asked her to try again, this time concentrating on each letter. “Sam! S-s-s-sit!” She was becoming frantic, reeling off any word she could think of that started with S.

We were done for the day.

The next time we sat down to practise phonics I introduced her to the Decoding Dragon. The invention of Melbourne linguist and author Lyn Stone, the dragon’s job was to chase away those Guessing Monsters, including the hit-and-miss Eagle Eye.

While I was no fan of Eagle Eye, I decided to redeploy him. I told Margot that Eagle Eye had a new job and would help her focus on each of the letters as the Decoding Dragon would help her to sound them out.

Our little sessions continued. Some days were great. Others — quite a few actually — were a grind. Small children have very short attention spans and I learned my daughter has quite a stubborn streak. Overall, I could see a trend of improvement and a growing confidence. Each time she successfully sounded out a new word, I’d place the index card into her “special word box”.

“Look how many words are in your word box!” I said one morning. “I know,” she said, “I’m killing it.”

I made a decision early on to be upfront with the school about tackling phonics at home and my intention to replace the predictable readers for decodable books.

The teacher was receptive and supportive, going so far as to recommend several online apps for decodable readers, many of which were free as a result of the pandemic. However, concerned about the amount of screentime we were already having, I decided to purchase a hard-copy set. At $420 for 60 readers, they weren’t cheap but I felt it was a necessary investment.

One morning I took to Twitter and mentioned how excited I was that the readers had arrived in the post, only to see first hand how divisive their use is in literacy circles.

With titles such as Pat the Rat, The Pan and The Map, decodables are designed so a novice reader can practice reading the words they have already been explicitly taught.

“A pan sits!” mocked one teacher. “Fit rats. No thankyou.”

“Read to your daughter with ‘real-world’ words,” demanded another.

I won’t lie; I don’t particularly love the books. The language is basic and sometimes seems stilted. They won’t win any literary prizes. But they are not aimed at me — a proficient reader — but at a child, for whom deciphering the strange squiggles on the page is a hugely laborious task.

Further, they are merely a stepping stone along the path to becoming a reader

We’ve been at this caper for two months now and have just moved on to stage two of the program, which involves introducing the letters D, P, G and T. In the meantime Margot’s teachers, who have been doing an exceptional job teaching the children remotely, have introduced the digraph “th” as well as a bank of common ­English words such as the, is, was and my.

With school set to resume next week, I find myself reflecting on her progress. Can she read independently? Not even close; we are still very much at the start of this process. But I no longer feel that underlying sense of guilt about whether I could be doing more to help her out.

The word box is getting quite full and my daughter can now read many of them automatically. At night, when I read her a bedtime story, she will stop me to point out words she knows.

The other day I told her she was starting to read like a grown up. “I know,” she replied, “The Decod­ing Dragon has been helping me.”

SOURCE