ATLANTA (AP) — Dave Ebersbach lost his job as a math teacher this summer, and he spends each day hoping that his poverty-stricken school in Ohio will call up and offer him his position back. He and thousands of other teachers around the country could get their jobs back now that the Senate has approved an emergency stimulus package designed to keep educators and other public employees out of the unemployment line. ANALYSIS: Teacher pension funds are short billions SURVEY: Self-evaluation better than parent, student evaluation, teachers say “My biggest thing is I want to go back to the school I was at for the students,” said Ebersbach, 43, one of 14 math teachers in the Toledo school district to receive notice a few weeks ago that their jobs were cut. “We’re in a high-poverty school and one thing the students need more than anything else is consistency. And they’re not going to get that.” The $26 billion measure passed Thursday is less than was initially proposed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan , but will provide $16 billion to help states balance their Medicaid budgets and $10 billion for grants to school districts to forestall layoffs. Republicans strenuously opposed the measure, denouncing it as yet another federal bailout the government cannot afford and calling it a giveaway to public employee unions. For educators across the country, it’s been a bewildering summer as money to save thousands of jobs stalled in Congress and unions and administrators sparred over ways to rehire laid-off teachers. The result has been what is referred to in education circles as the “yo-yo effect.” School budgets, facing severe reductions in state funding, are cut. Layoffs are made. And some or even all of the teachers are hired back over the summer as officials scramble for money. The money coming from Congress could help fill some of that void. But until districts actually have the money in hand, thousands of teachers must wait in limbo not knowing whether they’ll have jobs when school starts in a few weeks. Data provided by the U.S. Department of Education on how many jobs the bill is expected to fund reads like the medical chart of a battered patient: 16,500 in California. In Texas, 14,500. More than 9,000 in Florida. Some 161,000 education jobs across the country in all. “The Senate amendment will go a long way to protecting these jobs and ensuring that America’s educators are working to educate our way to a better economy,” Duncan said. “It’s the right thing to do for America’s students and America’s teachers.” Throughout the summer, many districts had despaired that Congress would deliver any money, and scrambled to find other ways to bring back the teachers, offering early-retirement incentives and negotiating furlough days. In Iowa, where 1,500 layoffs were announced earlier this year, the Des Moines district has called back all but 30 of the 173 teachers who were laid off. Twyla Woods, the district’s chief of staff, said they opened an early retirement option and hope to have enough attrition overall to bring back the remaining teachers. In Santa Cruz, Calif., 82 teachers were laid-off this spring and rehired again this summer, also largely due to a negotiated retirement incentive that 41 workers opted into. Teachers also agreed to take furlough days. The entry level salary in the district is $40,000. The efforts all saved jobs, but are not considered long-term solutions. In other districts, no solution was reached at all, leaving hundreds unemployed and hoping for federal money. Gretchen Marfisi in Florida was laid off in each of the last two summers, only to be rehired by the Broward County School District. This year she canceled her family vacation and put her life on hold before being called back Thursday. “Why are they firing all of us?” Marfisi said, her voice ringing with frustration. “Besides giving us all more gray hair and wrinkles, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of logic involved.” Marfisi is now preparing to unpack all her boxes of teaching materials once again. “It’s a relief to get a paycheck,” Marfisi said. “It’s just very weird and bizarre emotionally. It just in the process makes you feel like garbage.” Mike Langyel, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, worries about the long-term effects these series of layoffs will have on the teaching career. “We don’t need to turn this into a Wal-Mart employment where you’re in for a while and you’re out,” Langyel said. Teachers say the effect on morale has been overwhelming. “Somebody said to me, ‘Teacher: I thought that was one field that was recession-proof,’” Ebersbach said. “I’m at a 50-50 shot.” Turner reported from Atlanta. Armario reported from Miami. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Challenging civil rights organizations and teachers’ unions that have criticized his education policies, President Barack Obama said Thursday that minority students have the most to gain from overhauling the nation’s schools. “We have an obligation to lift up every child in every school in this country, especially those who are starting out furthest behind,” Obama told the centennial convention of the National Urban League . RACE TO THE TOP: 18 states, D.C. named $3B grant finalists VIDEO: Education is the key economic issue, president says The Urban League has been a vocal critic of Obama’s education policies, most notably the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” program that awards grants to states based on their plans for innovative education reforms. A report released earlier this week by eight civil rights groups, including the Urban League, says federal data shows that just 3% of the nation’s black students and less than 1% of Latino students are affected by the first round of the administration’s “Race to the Top” competition. Obama pushed back Thursday, arguing that minority students are the ones who have been hurt the most by the status quo. Obama’s reforms have also drawn criticism from education advocates, including prominent teachers’ unions like the American Federation of Teachers , who have argued that the reforms set unfair standards for teacher performance. Obama said the goal isn’t to fire or admonish teachers, but to create a culture of accountability. He pinned some of the criticism on a resistance to change. “We get comfortable with the status quo even when the status quo isn’t good,” he said. “When you try to shake things up, sometimes people aren’t happy.” Seeking to ease his strained relationship with the powerful teacher’s unions, Obama hailed teachers as “the single most important factor in a classroom,” calling for higher pay, better training and additional resources to help teachers succeed. “Instead of a culture where we’re always idolizing sports stars or celebrities, I want us to build a culture where we idolize the people who shape our children’s future,” Obama said. The president laid the groundwork for what he called “an honest conversation” about education with comments on several recent developments that were designed as sweeteners for his mostly minority audience. For instance, he said his goal with his domestic agenda, including the economy, health care and other priorities, is to create “an economy that lifts all Americans — not just some, but all.” That comment earned him significant applause and pleased murmurs in the room. The president also said he very much looks forward to signing a bill recently passed by Congress to reduce the disparities between mandatory crack and powder cocaine sentences. The matter has been a longtime thorn for the black community, as the quarter-century-old law that Congress changed has subjected tens of thousands of blacks to long prison terms for crack cocaine convictions while giving far more lenient treatment to those, mainly whites, caught with the powder form of the drug. “We got it done,” Obama said. “It’s the right thing to do.” And he forthrightly addressed the racial firestorm over the recent ouster of a black Agriculture Department official. He said the forced resignation of Shirley Sherrod “marked both the challenges we face and the progress we’ve made.” “She deserves better than what happened last week,” Obama said. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — A movement is underway to make it easier for entrepreneurs to navigate the lucrative and sometimes-tricky education market and introduce new technology and products into classrooms. An educator at the University of Pennsylvania wants to create one of the nation’s only business incubators dedicated to education entrepreneurs. The U.S. Department of Education is also getting into the act with a $650 million fund to boost education innovation. “Here’s this (market) that is huge, that is really important, that needs innovation, and there’s just nothing out there to sort of foster it,” said Doug Lynch, vice dean of Penn’s Graduate School of Education. “Let’s create a Silicon Valley around education.” K-12 schools and degree-granting institutions spend more than $1 trillion on education annually, federal statistics show. That represents immense potential for entrepreneurs — if they can resist the lure of more established tech firms and trendier ventures like social networks. There are other roadblocks. Despite constant talk of making U.S. students more competitive, Lynch said it can be nearly impossible to introduce a new product in the fractured K-12 market because of frequent changes in superintendents, policy and curricula. Each of the nation’s 15,000 school districts has its own needs and often cumbersome purchasing process. “It’s worse than trying to sell to the U.S. Army, in terms of the hoops you have to jump through,” Lynch said. The incubator he envisions at Penn — called NEST, for Networking Ed entrepreneurs for Social Transformation — would identify promising businesses and give them financial and logistical support, such as access to capital, work space and university expertise. Linking educational researchers, who tend to be theoretical, with entrepreneurs, who are more practical and action-oriented, could help unlock the market, said Kim Smith, co-founder of the NewSchools Venture Fund, which invests in education businesses. “If they can figure out a way to bridge those two communities, it could be a real contribution,” said Smith, now CEO of Bellwether Education Partners. Penn, an Ivy League university in Philadelphia, has already held two summits on education entrepreneurship and hosted its first business plan competition, sponsored by the school and the Milken Family Foundation. The top prize went to Digital Proctor, which creators say can identify typists through keystroke biometrics and thereby make it easier for teachers to root out test fraud. Digital Proctor beat out competitors from 27 states and three countries to win $25,000. In an interview, Digital Proctor CEO Shaun Sims said investors’ lack of familiarity with the education industry means entrepreneurs must make a double pitch: first on the market overall, then on the actual product they’ve developed. An incubator would “create an ecosystem for education” that attracts entrepreneurs who might otherwise venture into more investment-friendly efforts, he said. “You’re going to get the country’s best talent working in this market instead of going to Silicon Valley working on the next social network,” Sims said. The U.S. Department of Education hopes to bolster entrepreneurship with its Investing in Innovation fund. Jim Shelton, assistant deputy secretary for the Office of Innovation and Improvement, said it is easier than ever for schools to use new ideas and products because of increasing Internet connectivity, cheaper technology and the growing use of hard data to measure outcomes. “The shift toward evidence as the currency for education … will make it a much more rational market,” Shelton said. “It will be much easier for entrepreneurs to prove that what they have is what people should be spending time and money on.” Arizona State University is also embracing the emerging field. It held its first education entrepreneur summit last spring and has started discussions with Penn for some kind of partnership, said Julia Rosen, associate vice president for innovation and entrepreneurship. Arizona State’s business incubator, SkySong, has all types of companies but is intensifying its focus on education businesses because of the “incredible market potential,” Rosen said. “Individual consumers are increasingly willing to pay for education, whether it’s lifelong learning, private schools, tutoring (or) test prep,” she said. “We think education is going to be the next health care.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Civil rights leaders are criticizing Obama administration education reforms aimed at turning around low performing schools and closing the achievement gap for minority students. Eight civil rights organizations, including the NAACP , contend in a document released Monday the Education Department is promoting ineffective approaches for failing schools. They also claim the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” grant competition — a program with a goal of spurring innovative reform in states — leaves out many minority students. “We want to be supportive, but more important than supporting an administration is supporting our children across the country and ensuring that they have an opportunity to learn,” said John Jackson, president of the Schott Foundation for Education, one of the groups that developed the document. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and a White House adviser met with the groups Monday, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson , the Rev. Al Sharpton and the presidents of the National Urban League and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The groups distributed the document to members of Congress last week. Duncan has called education “the civil rights issue of our generation,” and many of the reforms the administration has pushed aim to improve educational opportunities for the most vulnerable students. “The administration is dedicated to equity in education and we’ve been working very closely with the civil rights community to develop the most effective policies to close the achievement gap, turn around low performing schools and put a good teacher in every classroom,” Education Department spokesman Justin Hamilton said. The Obama administration’s education reforms have drawn criticism from education advocates, including prominent teachers’ unions like the American Federation of Teachers , which gives money to many of the groups that signed the civil rights document. AFT President Randi Weingarten said she supports the proposal but that her organization had nothing to do with writing it. “I think the civil rights movement has done something really important here,” Weingarten said. “They are setting a very different prescription for how to ensure quality education for all.” The proposal calls into question many of the Education Department’s initiatives, including the $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition and the $3.5 billion to turn around low performing schools. Citing federal data, the groups say just 3% of the nation’s black students and less than 1% of Latino students are impacted by the first round of the Race to the Top competition, which awarded about $600 million for Tennessee and Delaware to undertake innovative reforms. Finalists for the second round of grants are to be announced Tuesday. “No state should have to compete to protect the civil rights of their children in their states,” John Jackson said. The document also proposes creating standards for equal access to early childhood education, effective teachers, college preparatory curriculum and quality resources. And it takes a critical viewpoint of the administration’s approach to turn around failing schools, including closing them or replacing much of the staff. “Low-performing schools will not improve unless we also change the resources, conditions and approaches to teaching and learning within the schools or their replacements,” the assessment states. But the plan has one glaring omission: no Hispanic groups signed on to support it. Raul Gonzalez from the National Council of La Raza said his organization decided not to endorse the document because there were concerns with how the groups see charter schools. The civil rights groups want charter schools to focus more on attracting diversity than the needs of the children in their community, Gonzalez said. “To suggest that a charter school started by community members who want to help kids in their community cannot serve 100% Hispanic kids in a community that’s 100% Hispanic — that they should be penalized for that or they shouldn’t be allowed to open up — that doesn’t make sense,” he said. But he applauded the civil rights groups for pushing for more financial support for programs that would help increase parental involvement in schools. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Civil rights leaders are criticizing Obama administration education reforms aimed at turning around low performing schools and closing the achievement gap for minority students. Eight civil rights organizations, including the NAACP , contend in a document released Monday the Education Department is promoting ineffective approaches for failing schools. They also claim the $4.35 billion “Race to the Top” grant competition — a program with a goal of spurring innovative reform in states — leaves out many minority students. “We want to be supportive, but more important than supporting an administration is supporting our children across the country and ensuring that they have an opportunity to learn,” said John Jackson, president of the Schott Foundation for Education, one of the groups that developed the document. Education Secretary Arne Duncan and a White House adviser met with the groups Monday, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson , the Rev. Al Sharpton and the presidents of the National Urban League and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The groups distributed the document to members of Congress last week. Duncan has called education “the civil rights issue of our generation,” and many of the reforms the administration has pushed aim to improve educational opportunities for the most vulnerable students. “The administration is dedicated to equity in education and we’ve been working very closely with the civil rights community to develop the most effective policies to close the achievement gap, turn around low performing schools and put a good teacher in every classroom,” Education Department spokesman Justin Hamilton said. The Obama administration’s education reforms have drawn criticism from education advocates, including prominent teachers’ unions like the American Federation of Teachers , which gives money to many of the groups that signed the civil rights document. AFT President Randi Weingarten said she supports the proposal but that her organization had nothing to do with writing it. “I think the civil rights movement has done something really important here,” Weingarten said. “They are setting a very different prescription for how to ensure quality education for all.” The proposal calls into question many of the Education Department’s initiatives, including the $4.35 billion Race to the Top competition and the $3.5 billion to turn around low performing schools. Citing federal data, the groups say just 3% of the nation’s black students and less than 1% of Latino students are impacted by the first round of the Race to the Top competition, which awarded about $600 million for Tennessee and Delaware to undertake innovative reforms. Finalists for the second round of grants are to be announced Tuesday. “No state should have to compete to protect the civil rights of their children in their states,” John Jackson said. The document also proposes creating standards for equal access to early childhood education, effective teachers, college preparatory curriculum and quality resources. And it takes a critical viewpoint of the administration’s approach to turn around failing schools, including closing them or replacing much of the staff. “Low-performing schools will not improve unless we also change the resources, conditions and approaches to teaching and learning within the schools or their replacements,” the assessment states. But the plan has one glaring omission: no Hispanic groups signed on to support it. Raul Gonzalez from the National Council of La Raza said his organization decided not to endorse the document because there were concerns with how the groups see charter schools. The civil rights groups want charter schools to focus more on attracting diversity than the needs of the children in their community, Gonzalez said. “To suggest that a charter school started by community members who want to help kids in their community cannot serve 100% Hispanic kids in a community that’s 100% Hispanic — that they should be penalized for that or they shouldn’t be allowed to open up — that doesn’t make sense,” he said. But he applauded the civil rights groups for pushing for more financial support for programs that would help increase parental involvement in schools. Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Since Michael Crow was named president of Arizona State University eight years ago, the university has increasingly organized itself with an eye toward attacking some of the world’s greatest challenges. Rather than divide an institution into academic departments – those are just “social constructs,” he’d argue – Crow has pushed for new cross-disciplinary organizational structures that are defined by the problems faculty seek to solve – reforming K-12 education, for instance – rather than the disciplines of those who will try to solve them. “The standard rigid model is ossified,” Crow says with something approaching disdain. The “rigid” structures that have come to define academe are targets for Crow, a much-watched university president who sounds as if he’d like to take a sledgehammer to the kinds of colleges and schools that exist at most institutions across the country, including, for the most part, Arizona State. Crow’s philosophy is playing out across the four campuses that comprise Arizona State, where nine traditional engineering departments were recently combined into five schools. The new groupings include the School for Engineering of Matter, Transport and Energy, which gobbled up the departments of aerospace, chemical, materials science and mechanical engineering. In so combining the disciplines, Arizona State officials argue they are forcing faculty out of silos and making them work together for the greater good. They concede, however, that there’s still not much evidence to suggest whether Arizona State is really transforming or merely rebranding. “I think it’s a very valid question,” says Paul Johnson, executive dean of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering. “And for somebody who wants the hard data and the objective study of whether we really did something different, we’re probably a couple of years away from that.” Other manifestations of Crow’s approach can be found in the School of Evolution and Social Change, which replaced the university’s anthropology department with an expanded home for mathematicians, political scientists, geographers and sociologists who are trying – to quote the school’s stated mission – “to discover not only who we were but where we are going and how we may alter our destiny.” The grand rhetoric that defines the School of Evolution and Social Change is mirrored in other new schools that have emerged during Crow’s tenure. The School of Earth and Space Exploration, for instance, describes itself as “dedicated to expanding the frontiers of knowledge through the exploration of Earth, space, matter, time and life.” The Crow years have been so transformative that the university’s chief research officer describes the time that predated Crow’s tenure as “the BC era” (Before Crow). “Sometimes you feel people have rhetoric but there isn’t substance to it,” says Sethuraman (Panch) Panchanathan, deputy vice president of the university’s office of knowledge enterprise development. “I was amazed by [Crow's] intellect, his passion, and it was very clear to me he meant what he said.” While “the jury is still out” on whether Arizona State’s approach will pay off, Panchanathan already sees some positive signs. He notes, for instance, that the university’s research expenditures have tripled under Crow, growing from about $120 million in 2001 to $370 million in 2010. In an era when many research universities saw huge gains, however, those figures still pale in comparison to the types of expenditures churned out by the nation’s foremost research workhorses, which are often presumed to be the institutions best poised to really solve the world’s most vexing problems. In a 2008 ranking of the top-20 universities by research expenditures, none fell below $580 million, the National Science Foundation reported. Approach not without risk If Arizona State’s model is to gain acceptance or adoration, there are plenty of questions left to answer. Does renaming departments and organizing around cross-disciplinary problems really produce better research or better students? Can a broadened curriculum be designed without skimping on depth? Can professors from different disciplines agree on expectations for a tenure candidate whose scholarship combines elements as various as computer science and dance? Charles Vest, president of the National Academy of Engineering, says the questions surrounding Arizona State’s approach are numerous and may be unanswered for some time. While the ideas are interesting, “It is an experiment,” he says. “There’s nothing that guarantees it’s going to work.” “I think they’re very idealistic, and they’re trying to make a radical shift, and they know it,” says Vest, former president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). “They see [this approach] as a path to leapfrog, but it’s an experiment and it’s got a big risk.” The risk, Vest says, is that Arizona State will invest a lot of time, money and energy turning the academy on its head without producing tangible results, such as better research and the improved employability of students who are necessarily coming out of an experimental program. That said, the changes aren’t being dismissed as mere rebranding, Vest says. “I have not heard people talk about smoke and mirrors, and I think the reason is they’ve attracted enough clearly substantive people,” he says. “Does everybody assume this is the future and they’re going to be ahead of everybody else? No, I don’t think so.” In pursuit of “substantive people,” the university has mined traditional academic powerhouses to find leaders for its new programs. Kip Hodges, for instance, left MIT in 2006 to become the founding director of the School of Earth and Space Exploration. While Crow often defines Arizona State against traditional colleges – we don’t all have to be the same way, he often argues – Hodges says it’s not inconsistent that the university’s contrarian president still recruits talent from institutions that fit traditional standards of academic excellence. “It would be a better or more sustainable position, let’s say, to say that we don’t need the imprimatur, the blessing of those people at the other [traditionally elite research] universities,” Hodges says. “But what Michael’s trying to do – and everybody at the university is not Michael, of course – but what Michael is trying to say is you can play with the big boys and you can attract people from the big boys by doing things in a different way.” Hodges, who spent 23 years at MIT as a professor of earth, atmospheric and planetary sciences, says he struggled while there to bring scientists and engineers together in meaningful ways. He saw an opening, however, to do just that at Arizona State in a new school specifically designed for such collaboration. Indeed, Hodges came on with none-too-uncertain orders to recruit faculty – lots of them – from multiple disciplines, including astrophysics, cosmology, earth and space education, earth system science, planetary science and systems engineering. “I thought it was a really radically new way to look at things, and I was convinced enough of that that I drank the Kool-Aid and came to ASU at that point,” he says. The very fact that Arizona State lacks the elite status of a place like MIT may actually be an advantage when trying to do something different, Hodges says. “Turning a big successful university like MIT is a little like turning the Queen Mary,” he says. “It’s very difficult to get people to play in that possibility space.” That’s not to say, however, that a lot of universities of varying size and research status don’t encourage cross-disciplinary research, often through the establishment of centers and institutes. Indeed, it’s hard to find one that doesn’t. What’s different about Arizona State, however, is the degree to which the university has embraced the notion that new organizational structures may be necessary to break down silos. Students and faculty at many institutions, for instance, would likely scoff at the idea that departments needed to be killed off to encourage professors to work together. Pamela Matson, dean of Stanford University’s School of Earth Sciences, says she’s been impressed by the manner in which Arizona State has gone all-in on a systematic restructuring in service to transdisciplinary research and teaching. “They are going after this at a scale and rate that is beyond what most universities are doing, and that’s partly because they have the leadership of the university president,” says Matson, who is on an advisory board for Arizona State’s Global Institute of Sustainability. While Matson sees innovation at Arizona State, she’s not ready to anoint the university as the lone trailblazer in a pack of otherwise stagnant institutions. In the area of sustainability, for instance, Matson counts Stanford, the University of Minnesota and the University of California at Berkeley as other truly innovative institutions that have harnessed the talents of faculty from disparate disciplines in pursuit of common goals. “[Arizona State has] gone further out probably than other universities in sort of challenging the structure of the university to do this,” says Matson, a professor of environmental studies at Stanford and a senior fellow in the Woods Institute for the Environment. “On the other hand, I think there are a lot of ways of doing this that might have the same levels of success.” Crow was viewed by many as an innovator before he ever came on the scene at Arizona State, but his lofty ideas have historically had mixed success. As executive vice provost of Columbia University , Crow played an instrumental role in ushering in a much-ballyhooed project called Fathom. The for-profit online learning platform, which was designed to sell Columbia faculty lectures to the public, cost the university millions before financial difficulties proved its undoing. Crow was also a key supporter of “Biosphere 2,” a giant Columbia-supported terrarium that became the butt of jokes and even inspired a a Pauly Shore movie. The university abandoned its involvement with the project in 2003. Humanities find place in mix When Crow waxes philosophical about Arizona State’s grand plans, he often expresses a desire to “make the sciences less boring.” To that end, Crow’s stump speech is often more about going to space or building cool stuff to save the world than it is about the mechanics behind it. This reporter, for instance, has never heard him mention calculus. That said, the sciences in general are often front and center for Crow, raising another question: Where do the humanities fit into this experiment? To hear it from faculty, the humanities actually fit pretty well within Crow’s vision. The university’s Department of English — yes, it’s still a “department” — is hiring faculty and reducing student/faculty ratios. There’s also a recently developed School of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies that aims to “mold global citizens with democratic values.” If the humanities aren’t always on the tip of Crow’s tongue, it doesn’t mean they don’t have a place in his heart, says Sally L. Kitch, founding director of the Institute for Humanities Research. “No, I don’t think he does [talk about the humanities as much]. Can he be reminded? Yes,” says Kitch, a professor of women and gender studies. “I see a lot of my role [as keeping] the humanities in his purview. But I think his juices got flowing around what he sees in the sciences, and he continues to see that more easily.” Neal A. Lester, chair of the Department of English, agrees that his department has not been left behind while the sciences are growing. That said, he is sensitive to the frequent proclamation that departments are, by their very nature, fossils of a bygone era. That kind of thinking fails to capture that English professors have long worked across disciplines, well before schools became the hot trend in Arizona, Lester says. Indeed, Lester says he recalls once telling an administrator his concerns about quotations in a local news story that seemed to imply the schools were “more progressive” than the rest of the campus. “I’m hoping people aren’t perceiving that schools are something more cutting-edge than a department,” Lester says. Finances a motivation, too For all of the talk about a collective mission at Arizona State, there’s no doubt that budget cuts have a place in conversations about combining or eliminating departments. The university’s state budget has been cut by about $105 million or 20% since 2008. While tenure and tenure-track faculty positions have been protected, the university has eliminated 1,210 positions, of which 713 were layoffs. Richard Stanley, senior vice president and university planner, says the reorganizations have led to hundreds of positions being eliminated. Multiple administrative units that once governed history, religious studies, philosophy and three colleges of education, to name a few examples, have been crammed into single interdisciplinary units with fewer staff, he says. That said, Stanley and others argue that finances weren’t the core motivation for most of the reorganizations. “We haven’t put together any units that don’t make sense just for finding administrative savings,” he says. Many of the new units, however, are counting on growing — not just sustaining their numbers. Stanley says hiring will continue, even if it happens at a slower pace than administrators envisioned years ago. Tenure criteria being hammered out Even for those who have embraced Arizona State’s emphasis on breaking down traditional departmental structures and reorganizing in ways that promote interdisciplinary problem solving, there are still plenty of practical hurdles left to cross. If the focus of the institution is changing, should not the criteria for tenure as well? That’s become an increasingly perplexing question across the university, and there’s still considerable debate about how to best address it. “It’s been the most difficult part of my job to make that work effectively,” Hodges says. As would be expected, professors from varied disciplines bring different expertise and different expectations to a tenure debate. The School of Earth and Space Exploration is home to both earth scientists and astrophysicists, and “there are real culture differences between those two,” Hodges says. While earth scientists might complete one postdoctoral position for two years before landing a junior faculty position, astrophysicists often do two or three “postdocs” before they reach the same point on the faculty ladder. Consequently, an astrophysicist is likely to have a much longer record of publications than someone coming out of earth science. In a truly interdisciplinary school, however, professors from both disciplines would naturally evaluate each other for the awarding of tenure. Helping professors understand and respect the differing expectations of foreign disciplines remains a work in progress, as does reaching common ground on how those differences should inform scholarly expectations for the awarding of tenure, Hodges says. “It’s a difficult cultural shift with some people, I am sure,” he says. “I don’t mean to imply that every single faculty member we have has no problem with this brave new world. They are skeptical, and they have a long history of academia that’s on their side.” That long history also includes a mutual understanding of what departments and disciplines mean. So what happens when those boundaries disappear? Will a graduate of a nebulous new program be able to convince more traditional colleagues that he has the chops to hang with the best and brightest in his field? Johnson concedes that some faculty starting their careers in the Fulton Schools of Engineering are asking that very question. “What I have heard is some of the junior faculty will talk to their adviser at another school who will say ‘I don’t know what’s going on because you no longer are part of an identifiable structure,’ ” Johnson says. “The fact that we don’t have something called a chemical engineering department, someone might say ‘It must not be important there.’ ” But doing away with departments has not meant doing away with degrees. The Fulton Schools still offer all of the ABET-accredited programs they did before reorganizing, because “We felt that it was important for our engineering graduates to have identities and qualit[ies] that are recognized by employers,” Johnson wrote in an e-mail. What has changed, however, is an increasing emphasis on creating new “concentrations” within the traditional degree programs. A student working toward a civil engineering degree, for instance, might now also have a concentration in “sustainable engineering.” A hallmark of the new approach in engineering is developing curriculums that will encourage students and faculty to help confront a series of “grand challenges” laid out by the National Academy of Engineering. Those challenges include, among others, making solar energy more economical and providing access to clean water. The approach in engineering is mirrored in the Mary Lou Fulton Teachers College, which is working to establish itself as a force for improving teacher preparedness. That mission has been buoyed by a nearly $19 million gift from T. Denny Sanford , a South Dakota philanthropist and University of Minnesota alumnus. Sanford’s donation created a partnership between Arizona State and Teach for America , which recruits recent college graduates to teach in urban schools for a minimum of two years. “TFA makes teaching a profession of choice, and that’s exactly what it should be,” says Mary Koerner, the college’s dean. “Our motto should be, ‘If you can’t get into teaching, become a lawyer.’ ” The partnership with TFA, however, may highlight one of the vulnerabilities to Arizona State’s stated desire to solve complex problems: There may be more than one way to solve them. While TFA is not without fervent supporters, critics have charged that it infuses city schools with inexperienced teachers, who work for only a short time at entry-level salaries – squeezing out their more experienced counterparts. TFA officials and school administrators who hire TFA alumni dispute that characterization, but its critics persist. “TFA isn’t telling us what to do and they’re not going to dictate our academic program,” Koerner says. “I think one of the reasons faculty have not rebelled against this is that we are looking together at how this makes sense for our college. Nothing will be prescribed.” If faculty are increasingly receptive to new directions – Koerner’s college has been reorganized twice in the last year – it’s no doubt attributable in part to the fact that a critical mass of new professors have come into the institution knowing full well that Arizona State is trying to be a different kind of place. In other words, Crow is building an army of believers one professor at a time, and boy, is he hiring. Indeed, the university raised about $59 million for faculty hiring during Crow’s first seven years as president. “People are attracted to ASU because they want to do this kind of work,” Koerner says. “I don’t think we’d tap someone on the shoulder and say ‘You know, I think you’re not relevant anymore.’ I think if someone felt irrelevant they would probably leave.” Those who have bought into Crow’s vision are a special lot, Koerner says, willing to work in a place where they know things could change drastically at a moment’s notice. “Having an opportunity to define this place is pretty seductive for a lot of people; it is for me,” she says. “What do you have to give up? This is a pretty dynamic place; you have to be able to live with ambiguity.”

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — Forget about students spending one year in each grade, with the entire class learning the same skills at the same time. Districts from Alaska to Maine are taking a different route. Instead of simply moving kids from one grade to the next as they get older, schools are grouping students by ability. Once they master a subject, they move up a level. This practice has been around for decades, but was generally used on a smaller scale, in individual grades, subjects or schools. Now, in the latest effort to transform the bedraggled Kansas City , Mo. schools, the district is about to become what reform experts say is the largest one to try the approach. Starting this fall officials will begin switching 17,000 students to the new system to turnaround trailing schools and increase abysmal tests scores. “The current system of public education in this country is not working” said Superintendent John Covington. “It’s an outdated, industrial, agrarian kind of model that lends itself to still allowing students to progress through school based on the amount of time they sit in a chair rather than whether or not they have truly mastered the competencies and skills.” Here’s how the reform works: Students — often of varying ages — work at their own pace, meeting with teachers to decide what part of the curriculum to tackle. Teachers still instruct students as a group if it’s needed, but often students are working individually or in small groups on projects that are tailored to their skill level. For instance, in a classroom learning about currency, one group could draw pictures of pennies and nickels. A student who has mastered that skill might use pretend money to practice making change. Students who progress quickly can finish high school material early and move forward with college coursework. Alternatively, in some districts, high-schoolers who need extra time can stick around for another year. Advocates say the approach cuts down on discipline problems because advanced students aren’t bored and struggling students aren’t frustrated. But backers acknowledge implementation is tricky, and the change is so drastic it can take time to explain to parents, teachers and students. If the community isn’t sold on the effort, it will bomb, said Richard DeLorenzo, co-founder of the Re-Inventing Schools Coalition, which coaches schools on implementing the reform. Kansas City officials hope the new system will help the district that’s been beset with failure. A $2 billion desegregation case failed to boost test scores or stem the exodus of students to the suburbs and private and charter schools. The district has lost half its students and will close about 40% of its schools by the fall to avoid bankruptcy. Covington wants to start the system in five elementary schools in hopes of spreading it through the upper grades once the bugs are worked out. “This system precludes us from labeling children failures,” Covington said. “It’s not that you’ve failed, it’s just that at this point you haven’t mastered the competencies yet and when you do, you will move to the next level.” As it plans for the change, Kansas City teachers and administrators have visited and sought advice from a Denver area school district that uses the reform. Adams County School District 50 has about 10,000 students this past school year its elementary and middle students made the shift. The reform will be phased into the high schools starting in the fall. Count 11-year-old Alex Rodriguez as a convert to the new approach. He used to get bored after plowing through his assignments. He had to bring books from home or the library if he wanted a challenge because the ones at his old school were one or two grade levels too easy. “I liked school,” he said. “But it was hard sitting there and doing nothing.” His parents transferred the high achiever and his three younger siblings to the Denver area district after learning it was trying something new. His father, Richard Rodriguez , has been thrilled with the turnaround. “I wish school was like this when I was growing up,” he said. There also is growing interest in Maine, where six districts, with a combined 11,248 students, are transitioning to the reform, starting with staff training and community meetings and gradually changing what happens in classrooms. “It is incredible what is happening in the classrooms in Maine that are trying it,” said Diana Doiron, who is overseeing the effort for the state’s education department. Education officials in Kansas City, Maine and elsewhere said part of the allure is the success other districts have after making the switch. Marzano Research Laboratory, an educational research and professional development firm, evaluated 2009 state test data for over 3,500 students from 15 school districts in Alaska, Colorado, and Florida. Researchers found that students who learned through the different approach were 2.5 times more likely to score at a level that shows they have a good grasp of the material on exams for reading, writing, and mathematics. Greg Johnson, director of curriculum and instruction for the Bering Strait School District in Alaska, recalled that before the switch there were students who had been on honor roll throughout high school then failed a test the state requires for graduation. Now, he said if students are on pace to pass a class like Algebra I, the likelihood of them passing the state exam covering that material is more than 90%. He’s proud of that accomplishment and said teachers love it. “The most die-hard advocates for our system are our teachers because, especially the ones who were back with us before the change, they saw where things were then,” he said. “They see where things are now and they don’t want to go back.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

FORT VALLEY, Ga. — During the school year, Mondays in this rural Georgia community are for video games, trips to grandma’s house and hanging out at the neighborhood community center. Don’t bother showing up for school. The doors are locked and the lights are off. Peach County is one of more than 120 school districts across the country where students attend school just four days a week, a cost-saving tactic gaining popularity among cash-strapped districts struggling to make ends meet. The 4,000-student district started shaving a day off its weekly school calendar last year to help fill a $1 million budget shortfall. It was that or lay off 39 teachers the week before school started, said Superintendent Susan Clark. “We’re treading water,” Clark said as she stood outside the headquarters of her seven-school district. “There was nothing else for us to do.” The results? Test scores went up. So did attendance — for both students and teachers. The district is spending one-third of what it once did on substitute teachers, Clark said. And the graduation rate likely will be more than 80% for the first time in years, Clark said. The four days that students are in school are slightly longer and more crowded with classes and activities. After school, students can get tutoring in subjects where they’re struggling. On their off day, students who don’t have other options attend “Monday care” at area churches and the local Boys & Girls Club, where tutors are also available to help with homework. The programs generally cost a few dollars a day per student. Experts say research is scant on the effect of a four-day school week on student performance. In fact, there is mostly just anecdotal evidence in reports on the trend with little scientific data to back up what many districts say, said University of Southern Maine researcher Christine Donis-Keller. “The broadest conclusion you can draw is that it doesn’t hurt academics,” said Donis-Keller, who is with the university’s Center for Education Policy, Applied Research and Evaluation. Many districts that have the shortened schedule say they’ve seen students who are less tired and more focused, which has helped raise test scores and attendance. But others say that not only did they not save a substantial amount of money by being off an extra day, they also saw students struggle because they weren’t in class enough and didn’t have enough contact with teachers. The school district in Marlow, Okla., is switching back to a five-day week after administrators decided students were not being served well by attending school only four days. The 440-student district tried the shorter week the spring semester this year to save $25,000 in operation costs. “It was harder on the teachers. We were asking the kids to move at a quicker pace,” said district Superintendent Bennie Newton. “We’re hoping the four-day week won’t come into play next year.” The move by Peach County in Georgia gets mixed reviews. Parents like Heather Bradshaw worry that their children are getting shortchanged on time with teachers. “I don’t feel like they’re having the necessary time in the classroom,” said Bradshaw, a single mother with a fourth-grade son at one of the county’s three elementary schools. “The schedule has slowed him down.” Other parents prefer the shorter schedule and don’t mind the hassle of finding a babysitter one day a week. “It makes the children’s weekend a little better, so they get more rest,” said LaKeisha Johnson, who sends her fourth-grade daughter to the Boys & Girls Club on Mondays. The trend of four-day school weeks started in New Mexico during the oil crisis of the 1970s and has been popular in rural states where students have to commute a long way. Other districts have used it as a way to try to fix schools with a long history of poor student performance by shaking up the schedule and giving children more time to study outside of school. Georgia, Oklahoma and Maine have changed their laws in the last couple of years to allow districts to count their school year by hours rather than days, allowing for a four-day week if needed. Hawaii schools were off every other Friday this year for schools to save money, giving them the state with the shortest school year in the country. From California to Minnesota to New York, districts — mostly small, rural ones with less than 5,000 students — are following the trend, hoping to rescue their bleeding budgets. For Peach County, the four-day week was enough of a success that the school district is trying it again next year, Clark said. The move saves $400,000 annually and is popular among teachers and students because they get extra rest, she said “Teachers tell me they are much more focused because they’ve had time to prepare. They don’t have kids sleeping in class on Tuesday,” she said. “Everything has taken on a laser-light focus.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

SUWANEE, Ga. (AP) — By third grade, students should know how to write a complex sentence and add fractions, no matter if they live in Georgia or California. Eighth-graders should understand the Pythagorean theorem. And by high school graduation, all U.S. students should be ready for college or a career. That’s the goal of sweeping new education benchmarks released Wednesday called the Common Core State Standards, a project that aims to replace a hodgepodge of educational goals varying wildly from state to state with a uniform set of expectations for students. It’s the first time states have joined together to establish what students should know by the time they graduate high school. “With these standards, we can provide all of the country’s children with the education they deserve,” said West Virginia schools superintendent Steve Paine, who gathered with other educators and officials from across the country at Peachtree Ridge High School in Suwanee just outside Atlanta to release the final draft of the standards. “Having consistent standards across the states means all of our children are going to be prepared for college and career, regardless of zip code.” States are expected to use the standards to revise their curriculum and tests to make learning more uniform across the country, eliminating inequities in education not only between states but also among districts. The standards also will ensure students transferring to a school district in a different state won’t be far behind their classmates or have to repeat classes because they are more advanced. Under Common Core, third-graders should understand subject-verb agreement, fifth-graders need to know about metaphors and similes and seventh-graders must understand how to calculate surface area. States that sign up are supposed to use the standards as a base on which to build their curricula and testing, but they can make their benchmarks tougher than Common Core. All but two states — Alaska and Texas — signed on to the original concept of Common Core more than a year ago. Critics worry that the standards will basically nationalize public schools rather than letting states decide what is best for their students. Texas’ commissioner of education, Robert Scott, has said that the state didn’t sign on to Common Core because it wants to preserve its “sovereign authority to determine what is appropriate for Texas children to learn in its public schools.” So far, the standards have been adopted by Kentucky, Hawaii, Maryland, West Virginia and Wisconsin. Another 40 states and Washington, D.C., have agreed to adopt the standards in coming months, said Gene Wilhoit, executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers , which joined with the National Governors Association in leading the Common Core project. “We don’t think it’s acceptable that because a student lives down in Atlanta and not up here, they should have different outcomes,” said Wilhoit before Wednesday’s event in the northern Atlanta suburbs. The federal government was not involved but has encouraged the project, including adoption of the standards as part of the scoring in the U.S. Department of Education ‘s “Race to the Top” grant competition. President Barack Obama has said he wants to make money from Title I — the federal government’s biggest school aid program — contingent on adoption of college- and career-ready reading and math standards. “As the nation seeks to maintain our international competitiveness, ensure all students regardless of background have access to a high quality education and prepare all students for college, work and citizenship, these standards are an important foundation for our collective work,” Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Wednesday in a prepared statement. Common Core was structured over a year of meetings with teachers, parents, school administrators, civil rights leaders, education policymakers, business leaders and others from across the country. The group produced multiple drafts and collected comments from more than 10,000 people online. “The world is small now, and we’re not just competing with students in our county or across the state. We are competing with the world,” said Robert Kosicki, who graduated from a Georgia high school this year after transferring from Connecticut and having to repeat classes because the curriculum was so different. “This is a move away from the time when a student can be punished for the location of his home or the depth of his father’s pockets.” Copyright 2010 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Two years ago, hiring overseas agencies — paid by the college in the form of per-student commissions — to recruit international students was taboo. Few colleges would publicly admit to the practice, which is illegal under U.S. law when it comes to recruiting American students. Today, while ethical qualms persist, and the debate over the payment of per-student commissions still simmers, more colleges have embraced the recruitment strategy — and more still are willing to consider it. “It’s a moving landscape,” says Susan Sutton, associate vice chancellor of international affairs at Indiana University Purdue-University Indianapolis (IUPUI) and associate vice president for international affairs for the Indiana University system. “Two years ago, I would have said, categorically, IUPUI and IU, as a system, do not use agents and will not use agents. End of discussion.” Now, she’s on a system-wide task force to evaluate the use of agents. “We don’t use them at this moment and are unlikely to do so in the next couple of years, but the door has been cracked open. Let me put it that way,” says Sutton. What’s changed? There’s been a recession, for one thing. And college leaders that in more flush times embarked on grand plans to internationalize their campuses have been looking for cost-effective strategies for increasing and diversifying their international student enrollments. These international students are typically full-paying. But international recruiting can be an expensive proposition with little guarantee on return; this being the case, the prospect of paying an outside company a portion of a student’s tuition revenue only after he or she has matriculated has proven an attractive model. RECRUITERS: U.S. colleges find growing market overseas, in Vietnam ON THE WEB: Shifts in grad school enrollment INSIDE HIGHER ED: ‘The Chinese are coming’ “Colleges and universities, a lot of them, are just hungry to internationalize themselves,” says Richard W. Ferrin, president and CEO of World Education Group, an agency and education services company that recruits international students (including with agents) and forges articulation agreements between its partner U.S. colleges and foreign universities. “This is for a variety of reasons, sometimes financial – we want these full-paying international students to help with our budget flows – and even with the best of educational aims, we want a more diverse student body. We’re at a time when U.S. higher education is saying we want to internationalize for educational, financial, social, and political reasons, and most don’t have the budgets to send out representatives from their institutions to go all over the world,” says Ferrin, formerly the president of Salem International University. Seeing the opportunity, big, well-regarded international education companies – including Hobsons and IDP Education – have stepped into the marketplace, and are developing networks of agents to recruit students for U.S. colleges. Another change, and arguably the most significant one, is that a young nonprofit association, the American International Recruitment Council, which formed in 2008, has quickly established itself as a player and has offered a degree of quality assurance to the marketplace. With aims to regulate and professionalize the industry, AIRC certifies agencies that meet its standards. Just last week, AIRC announced the certification of 16 more agencies, bringing the total number of certified agencies to 24, operating in 35 countries. (One agency was denied certification. Per its policy, AIRC declined to disclose this agent’s identity.) “Now there is a large group of certified agents. They have been validated, if you will, they have been vetted,” says Marguerite J. Dennis, vice president for enrollment and international programs at Suffolk University, in Massachusetts . “Now it’s up to us, those of us who are involved in international education, to determine if we want to use them.” “I think this is a tremendous opportunity for the United States,” says Dennis. “Forget my school. Forget any individual school. We have been at a distinct disadvantage for years.” The use of international recruiting agents is common practice for colleges in Australia and Britain , but U.S. universities have reasons they’ve resisted it. For one, federal law restricts incentive compensation when it comes to recruiting domestic students; the 1992 law emerged out of concerns that recruiters would bring in unqualified students in order to collect commissions. While there are no such legal restrictions when it comes to international student recruitment, many have been skeptical of applying different standards offshore. Beyond general questions about the wisdom of commission-based recruiting – there are fears that agents will pass along students who lack the ability to succeed or otherwise would be poor matches for the institution — there’s also a general concern that agents acting on behalf of a college could engage in abusive or unethical practices or misrepresent the institution, undermining its global brand. “We still have lots of reservations about whether we need to do it and whether that would result in students who really should be coming to Indiana as opposed to being cajoled into it,” says Sutton, of IUPUI. “The concerns are that some agents – bad agents, let’s call them bad agents – would gouge the prospective students, and by gouging I mean overcharge them for what they’re doing and act in ways we view as unethical. There are concerns that bad agents would not understand Indiana, and would misrepresent what we are, and therefore that it could tarnish the university name.” On the other hand, “the appeal is this: that no university can be everywhere at once,” says Jim Plunkett , executive director of admissions at La Salle University, in Philadelphia, another institution that does not currently work with agents but is considering it. “The lure of using the international agent — the right one — is that you already have an advocate for your university embedded in that country, someone who knows the culture, someone who knows the language, someone who knows the education system.” The rise of the agent model The ability to distinguish the good agents from the bad is the premise of a standards-setting organization like AIRC, which certifies agencies that have successfully completed a process akin to accreditation, complete with self-study and site visit. “This was the missing link,” says John Deupree, AIRC’s executive director. “Before there was no standards process or quality assurance process. In our view, the biggest barrier to the use of agents has been removed.” AIRC’s number of member colleges climbed past 100 this month. Its members are predominantly small, tuition-dependent private colleges and regional public universities, with a few larger research universities and community colleges thrown in. The most elite colleges are not represented. Many larger, more well-known institutions, both public and private, can recruit effectively on their own. They can invest funds to send their own admissions officers to Beijing or Bangalore, and spend enough time there to build contacts with high schools and prospective students. While not every college will use agents, “the receptivity has grown startlingly fast” – including from the corporate world, says Mitch Leventhal, AIRC’s chair and president, and vice chancellor for global affairs for the State University of New York system. “I have seen a very significant increase in interest from private companies in a variety of fields, as well as private equity firms, that are either looking for places to invest their money or looking to tap into what they see as a potentially large new industry in U.S. higher education, that is, the recruitment space.” “I’ve been visited by at least eight companies, either in private equity or related fields, who have come specifically because they’ve observed the heating up of this market and are trying to figure out if they can serve it in some way. That’s a really significant change that’s happened in the last 12 months,” says Leventhal. He adds: “It’s early, it’s changing quickly, and there’s opportunity. Truthfully, in five years there will probably be some major players who have established themselves, and they may not be companies that exist yet or that we even know are going to be in that spot.” Two companies that are vying to be in that spot are IDP and Hobsons, Australian and British companies, respectively. IDP, which is AIRC-certified, has moved most quickly in building a portfolio of universities, and now has agreements to recruit students for 60 colleges in the United States – including, to take a sampling, Bellarmine University , in Kentucky; Colorado State University; Dean College, in Massachusetts; Duquesne University, in Pennsylvania; Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, in Florida; Guilford College, in North Carolina; John Carroll University, in Ohio; the Johns Hopkins University Global MBA Program; Lipscomb University, in Tennessee; Lyon College, in Arkansas; Mary Baldwin College, in Virginia; Thomas College, in Maine; and the Universities of Hartford, North Dakota and San Diego. One year into IDP’s efforts on this front, “the U.S. school perception of what we do is a lot more open-minded than I was expecting it,” says Mark Shay, the company’s regional director for the United States. “That’s been tremendously encouraging.” Also one year in, Hobsons, which is an applicant for AIRC certification, has signed up 27 U.S. universities as partners, and, at the upcoming NAFSA: Association of International Educators conference (which begins today), it plans to start signing up the next 25 or so (Hobsons, unlike IDP, has not released its list of clients). “We’re being cautious because we want to make sure we get this right,” says Jeremy Cooper, president of Hobsons Integrated Marketing Solutions. “We feel as though we’ve had some key successes this year. For us, it’s just about continuing the pace.” Hobsons’ ultimate goal is to build a broad-based, representative portfolio of 150 to 200 U.S. universities that its network of agents can refer students to; IDP, in five years, hopes to represent 500 U.S. colleges. The partner colleges will pay a flat fee, in IDP’s case, and a proportion of tuition, in Hobsons’ case, after the students are settled on campus (after the first add/drop date for IDP, and the final withdrawal date, for Hobsons). The results for colleges that have contracted with these companies, in terms of increased or diversified international student enrollments, are still to be determined; stay tuned until fall 2011. Many institutions, however, have high aspirations for growth, and see the use of agents as a key component of their growth strategy. Using agents, Leventhal would like to grow the international enrollment of the 64 SUNY campuses from the current figure, 18,164, about 3.9% of the 465,000 students enrolled, to 31,500, which, assuming current enrollment levels, would represent an increase of the proportion of foreign students to 6.8%. The University of Mississippi, which has contracted with IDP, has goals of increasing its international enrollment, currently at 3%, to 4 to 5%, over a growing student body, says Greet Provoost, director of the office of international programs. “We’re very growth-driven,” she says. Provoost adds, however, that the growth in international enrollment is two-pronged. “Number one, yes, it is increasing the brand recognition of the university, which has a lot to do with marketing and putting out tentacles that are working on your behalf, like IDP for example. But I also see it very much as a result of an effort to do what we do internally better as well, to be able to enroll more of the students who apply and who are admitted.” Reservations about the agent model Ethical questions regarding the use of agents, however, are by no means settled. “There is no question that we are seeing more corporate entanglements when it comes to recruitment of international students,” says Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. “We certainly have no objection in the abstract to arrangements that may involve a profit motive. Certainly the bookstore has been outsourced to profit-making companies and the cafeteria has been. But we have misgivings when it comes to what we view as a fairly core component of the university mission. I think that’s the real crux of our objection and concern, is that unlike the cafeteria, unlike the bookstore, this has to do with one of the most fundamental academic functions of the university. Outsourcing this or subjecting this to the profit motive may well be crossing a threshold we don’t want to cross.” Nassirian cites what’s happened in Australia by way of warning. While Australia is often described as a huge success story when it comes to cross-border higher education – having increased its international enrollment from 228,119 students in 2002 to 491,565 students in 2009 – its system has been strained by the rapid growth. A recent review of the international education sector was spurred partly by collapses of shaky for-profit vocational colleges and investigated a range of complaints involving unscrupulous providers offering low-quality education programs and false and misleading information provided by education agents. As regards to agents, a government report published in February, demonstrates the possibility for abuse when colleges are not conscientious: “During the review some [higher education] providers indicated monitoring their offshore education agents’ activities was difficult and there were suggestions the Australian Government should directly regulate the activities of their education agents. Other providers indicated a disturbing abrogation of their responsibilities, a lack of good business sense or a thorough understanding of the complexities of operating an export business…. It is most concerning to hear that some providers do not believe their education agents are accurately representing them and yet they are taking no action to either cease using such agents or ensure their education agents act in an ethical manner.” On the one hand, says Leventhal, of AIRC, Australia, long a leader in international recruitment, may now have a lesson to learn from the United States – rather than attempt to regulate overseas recruitment agencies through legal measures, the country could turn to a voluntary system of accreditation or certification (per AIRC’s model). On the other hand, says Nassirian, of AACRAO, perhaps the United States still has lessons to learn from Australia’s growth pains: “We may kill the goose that laid the golden egg. American higher education enjoys the highest prestige in the world in terms of desirability mostly because American institutions have been so meticulous in their approach to international students.” The other national association representing admissions professionals, the National Association for College Admission Counseling, includes a blanket prohibition in its standards of good practice against commission-based recruiting; it makes no distinction between domestic and international recruitment. This has long been the case. That said, the association’s admissions practices committee is now considering the issue, with the intention of clarifying its stance specific to the payment of commissions in international student recruiting, says David Hawkins, NACAC’s director of public policy and research. “There needs to be some clarity as to NACAC’s position one way or the other,” he says. Marjorie S. Smith, associate dean and director of international student admission at the University of Denver, remains an interested skeptic; she still has a lot of questions about the use of agents. “This may be naivet? on my part, but I don’t see why we would pay an outside agent to find students for us overseas, when we don’t pay outside agents to find American students,” she says. “To me, there’s no mystery to recruiting international students. It’s not like these companies know how to do what we don’t. It takes a professional staff, just as it does for domestic recruitment, and just as you do for domestic recruitment, you need to know the market, you have to get to know the counselors and you have to make yourself available to students.” Whereas, she says, “When you pay [an outside agent] to enroll a student, you lose some control and you run the risk of misrepresentation. You could get slimed.” “I’m going to watch the growth of AIRC, and their efforts to control the potential negative aspects, and applaud for them and root for them as loudly as possible,” Smith says. “But in the meantime, we’re going to make our investment more directly through scholarships and recruitment travel and social media, and our ever increasing Web presence, and we’ll also continue to work with the dozens of agents that we do – but these are agents who work for the family and not for us.” Much of the recent rhetoric about the use of agents, paid by the college via commission, suggests that those institutions that don’t jump on board the bandwagon will be left behind. But as several professionals point out, institutions don’t have to use agents. At American University, “it’s not our policy to do so but there’s also no need,” says Evelyn Levinson, American’s director of international admissions and chair of NAFSA’s Knowledge Community on Recruitment, Admissions and Preparation (she stresses that she is stating her personal views and is not speaking on behalf of either American or the NAFSA group). “We’re doing a great job on our own.” “From experience, I can say that universities can do really well by using internal expertise,” adds Negar Davis, director of global relations and promotion at Pennsylvania State University , another institution that does not use agents. “They can still be successful and still attract quality students to their campus, who truly understand what they’re coming into.”