At public four-year schools, many of them ravaged by state budget cuts, average in-state tuition and fees this fall rose 7.9%, or $555 a year, to $7,605, according to the College Board‘s “Trends in College Pricing.” The average sticker price at private nonprofit colleges increased 4.5%, or $1,164, to $27,293.

Massive government subsidies and aid from schools helped keep in check the final price many students paid. But experts caution that federal aid can only do so much and even higher tuition is likely unless state appropriations rebound or colleges drastically cut costs.

“Just when Americans need college the most, many are finding it increasingly difficult to afford,” said Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education.

When adjusted for inflation, the tuition increases this fall amount to 6.6% at public four-year colleges and 3.2% at private ones, according to the College Board.

Many students are finding relief in expanded federal aid, including tax credits, veterans’ benefits and a record expansion of the Pell Grant program for low-income students. In 2009-10, 7.7 million students received $28.2 billion in Pell Grants — an increase of almost $10 billion from the year before, according to a companion College Board report, “Trends in Student Aid.”

Even so, the maximum Pell grant covers just 34% of the average cost of attending a public four-year college, down from 45% two decades ago.

For now, government subsidies and aid from schools are helping hold down net tuition and fees — the actual cost students pay when grants and tax breaks are factored in.

Estimated average net tuition and fees this fall at public four-year colleges were $1,540, while at private colleges they were $11,320. Both are up from last year, but below what students paid five years ago.

“Despite the fact sticker prices have gone way up, there is so much grant aid out there that many students are really paying less than they did before,” said Sandy Baum, a senior policy analyst for the College Board and a Skidmore College economics professor.

That’s also contributed to a growing gap between those who receive aid and the one-third of full-time students who pay full freight for college, the report says.

Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, said it’s important to note that tuition is climbing after a decade in which family income did not rise for 90% of Americans, and at a time when many areas of the country face high unemployment.

“We’re kind of on a national treadmill,” Callan said. “We’re putting additional aid in that is helping to buffer some students from the severity of this. But the tuition increases and the bad economy are raising the need for financial aid much faster than our investment in aid is moving.”

The student aid report found that grant aid per full-time undergraduate student increased an estimated 22% from 2008-2009, while federal loans increased 9%.

The Obama administration’s restructuring of the federal student loan program this year will direct more money to Pell Grants and tie future increases in the maximum grant to inflation. But college officials say the impact will be minimal because next year’s increase is small and tuition is rising faster than inflation.

Most students attend public schools, and states continue to cut appropriations. After adjusting for inflation, per-student state spending on higher education dropped nearly 9% in 2008-09 and another 5% in 2009-10 — and that spending includes soon-to-expire federal stimulus money.

Community colleges, which educate about 40% of college students, remain affordable, with tuition averaging $2,713. Lower income students receive enough aid to attend essentially for free.

Still, tuition rose 6% at public two-year colleges. State and local budget cuts paired with skyrocketing enrollment have prompted some schools to cut courses and limit enrollment.

The priciest private colleges are creeping closer to shattering the $60,000 ceiling in total cost to attend.

David Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, emphasized net tuition and fees have declined 7.4% in the past decade in inflation-adjusted dollars because colleges are expanding student aid.

“Every institution that I talk to understands the absolutely critical role of aid and it’s going to be the thing they try to hold at the top of the list of priorities,” Warren said.

On average, about 55% of bachelor’s degree recipients at public colleges borrow money, and their debt is $19,800 by graduation, the College Board found.

Tuition at public colleges rose 7.9% this fall to avg. $7,605

Incidents like this, and the suicide last month of the Rutgers University student Tyler Clementi, could grow rarer, say legal experts and student advocates, following the U.S. Department of Education‘s release Tuesday of anti-discrimination guidelines.

The “guidance letter,” reportedly in the works for months, tells schools, colleges and universities that bullying should be treated as more than just a breach of campus codes; it also must been seen as a possible violation of federal law.

“I am writing to remind you,” wrote Russlynn Ali, assistant secretary for civil rights, “that some student misconduct that falls under a school’s anti-bullying policy also may trigger responsibilities under one or more of the federal antidiscrimination laws enforced by the Department’s Office for Civil Rights.”

Though Ali’s letter did not stake out any new policy ground, it did signal the Obama administration’s tighter embrace of its duty to police civil rights infractions.

It also more conclusively fleshed out how existing laws will be applied. Most pointedly, it made clear that campus officials must take immediate and appropriate action to impartially investigate harassment allegations and respond in a way that is “reasonably calculated to end the harassment, eliminate any hostile environment and its effects, and prevent the harassment from recurring.” If not, the full powers of the Department’s Office of Civil Rights will be called upon, Education Secretary Arne Duncan warned. “Are we putting people on notice? The answer is yes,” he said. “If we have to, we’re more than prepared to step in.”

In the Emory case, the university already has affirmed its commitment to providing a “safe, inclusive and welcoming environment” for everyone, as well as its intolerance for discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, according to a statement attributed to John L. Ford, senior vice president for campus life.

The student, unnamed by the campus newspaper, wants to use the incident as a learning opportunity for Emory students, according to Michael D. Shutt, director of Emory’s office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender life. Such campus-wide efforts are welcome, according to the Department of Education’s letter. It recommends not just separating the victim and perpetrator, but also rewriting policy, if necessary, and educating the wider community.

“If there’s a culture toward being discriminatory or whatever ‘-ism’ you want to insert there, if there’s a culture there, the institution as a whole has a responsibility to shift that culture or at least educate people,” said W. Scott Lewis, president of the Association for Student Conduct Administrators and a partner in the National Center for Higher Education Risk Management. “In the world of student conduct, everything is about accountability and education.” He viewed the letter’s release as properly framing bullying and harassment in the context of civil rights.

Advocates for gay and lesbian students and for Jewish students enthusiastically greeted the release of the letter as bolstering protection of victimized groups. “This is a bold step,” said Shane Windmeyer, executive director of Campus Pride, a Charlotte, group advocating for safer college environments for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender students. Windmeyer was especially pleased that the department signaled its willingness to use Title IX, the 1972 law barring sex discrimination, to guard against abuses based on sexual orientation.

Though federal law does not explicitly protect students on the basis of sexual orientation, the letter spells out a more expansive view, one that says sex discrimination can be punished if students are harassed “for exhibiting what is perceived as a stereotypical characteristic for their sex, or for failing to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity and femininity.” To Windmeyer, such language is “a great step forward.”

Rep. Brad Sherman, D-Calif., hailed the letter for applying Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to incidents of anti-Semitism. Though Title VI does not apply to religion, the letter, here too, stakes out an expansive view. It cites as actionable discrimination against students on the basis of “actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.”

“The policy is now clear,” Sherman said in a statement. “Colleges and universities will no longer be permitted to turn a blind eye when Jewish students face severe and persistent anti-Semitic hostility on their campuses. The schools will now be compelled to respond.”

Colleges’ responses are mandatory, even if a student does not formally file a complaint, according to the letter. In fact, college and university administrators are on the hook for addressing harassment incidents about which they know or “reasonably should have known,” wrote Ali. Such an expectation is troubling to Ada Meloy, general counsel for the American Council on Education, especially because the letter applies both to K-12 schools and to colleges and universities.

“Certainly, in a K-12 environment, there are teachers who come and go in hallways. It’s different from a higher ed situation,” said Meloy. “It’s very difficult for institutions to meet a ‘should have known’ standard — especially when it’s often applied in hindsight.”

The emphasis on K-12 creates other problems for higher education institutions looking for guidance on how to respond. Sorting through what qualifies as harassment and what doesn’t depends largely on the specific facts, department officials emphasized. When campus officials receive guidance letters such as the one released Tuesday, they rely on the examples, culled from actual events, that are cited in these guidelines.

Tuesday’s letter, however, cited four examples — and none dealt with higher education. “The new guidance reinforces the complexity for colleges and universities, as well as K-12 schools, in addressing peer-to-peer harassing behavior,” said Ann H. Franke, a lawyer who consults nationally with colleges and universities on academic freedom, workplace issues, and student affairs. “The more fact patterns they put in front of us the more detail we get.”

Others saw in the letter an even more unwelcome blending of assumptions of the roles played by K-12 and higher education institutions. The letter urges a paternalistic stance that is inappropriate for colleges and universities and would impinge on the First Amendment right of free speech, wrote Will Creeley, director of legal and public advocacy for the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, in Philadelphia.

“At an institution of higher education, students may range in age from 17 to 67 and beyond, and must be treated like the adults they are,” Creeley wrote in an e-mail. “Our nation’s colleges and universities have a legal duty to respond to instances of true harassment. They must also respect the expressive rights of their students. These dual obligations to protect free speech and prosecute actual harassment need not be in tension.”

Experts, advocates weigh in on Ed. Dept. anti-bias letter

Michelle Rhee, who recently resigned as schools chancellor in Washington, D.C., is being talked up as a potential candidate for New Jersey education commissioner or Newark school superintendent after she leaves her current job on Oct. 31.

Gov. Chris Christie is her fan and Newark Mayor Cory Booker is her friend. Both have top education jobs to fill.

Right now, the official word is that Rhee isn’t in the running for either job.

“We don’t have any comment except to say that the governor admires what Michelle Rhee accomplished in the D.C. schools and wishes her well,” Christie spokesman Michael Drewniak said in an e-mail.

And Booker spokeswoman Anne Torres said in e-mail that “at this moment in time, there are no plans to talk to Ms. Rhee about the position.”

Christie fired his education commissioner, Bret Schundler, in August after the state failed to win a $400 million competitive grant from the Obama administration. Clifford Janey, Newark’s superintendent, was told shortly after the Schundler dismissal that his contact wouldn’t be renewed. In 2007, Janey was fired as the Washington, D.C. schools chancellor and was replaced by Rhee.

The Newark job pays $280,000 a year and the statewide commissioner position about half that.

Newark’s schools will receive $100 million in Facebook stock over the next five years from the social networking site’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, making New Jersey’s biggest school district the center of education reform efforts.

Rhee didn’t return telephone messages left with her aides Wednesday and Thursday. She told ABC’s Good Morning America she’s looking to remain in K-12 education but wants to move closer to her fiance, Kevin Johnson, the mayor of Sacramento, and a former player with the Phoenix Suns basketball team.

But the Garden State could still be on her mind, according to one of her acquaintances, Derrell Bradford, executive director of a Newark school-choice group called Excellent Education for Everyone.

Before she announced her resignation Wednesday, Rhee e-mailed Bradford several times to learn about Newark’s schools and the reforms underway there, but Bradford said she never directly expressed an interest in working there.

Newark and Washington are both overwhelmingly minority school districts with high levels of per-pupil spending — over $20,000 a year in Newark — and substandard student achievement, Bradford said. Turning Newark around is the type of challenge Rhee would love, he said.

“The stuff she is about is the core of the education reform agenda,” he said. “People make the mistake of believing that education reform is something you can hatch and implement in the classroom. It is really about political and social change.”

In Washington, Rhee toughened teacher evaluations, closed badly performing schools and linked teacher pay to student achievement. She stressed scores on standardized tests, which rose for the first two years of her tenure. Elementary school math and reading scores dipped this year, though middle-school and high-school scores continued improving.

Rhee, 40, was admired by Washington’s white residents for her aggressive reforms, but her critics, including many of the city’s black residents, derided her as arrogant and uncompromising. She is lionized in Waiting for ‘Superman,’ a documentary about American schools.

In her most controversial statement, she told a business magazine that some of the 266 teachers she fired last fall either had sex with children or hit them. She later said only one of the teachers had been accused of sexual misconduct.

Joseph Del Grosso, president of the 5,500-member Newark Teachers Union, said what he’s read about Rhee worries him. The next superintendent should seek to work with union members, not antagonize them, he said, and would “not use the whip but use logic and temperance to figure out solutions.”

“People want to be involved. People don’t want to be dictated to,” Del Grosso said. “The dictatorial superintendent hardly ever lasts.”

Might D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee go to N.J.?

The American Opportunity Tax Credit was included in the $814 billion economic stimulus bill Obama signed last year. He had proposed making the tax credit permanent in his 2011 budget proposal, but Congress has not acted on his request.

Obama appeared in the White House Rose Garden on Wednesday with three families who have taken advantage of the tax credit. Obama says the credit is worth $10,000 over four years and will help families invest in their children’s future.

A Treasury Department analysis says 12.5 million people used the credit last year, for an average of about $1,700.

Obama urges Congress to make college tax credit permanent

It’s a claim made by a charter school leader in the education documentary Waiting for Superman, which places much of the blame for bad schools nationwide on union rules that protect incompetent teachers.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced on national television last week that he would overhaul the way city teachers are granted tenure, linking their advancement to improving student test scores.

“Just as we are raising the bar for our students through higher standards, we must also raise the bar for our teachers and principals — and we are,” Bloomberg said.

But city teachers say that if bad teachers have won tenure protection it’s the fault of the administrators who gave it to them.

“We don’t make that decision. Whoever the principal is makes that decision,” said LezAnne Edmond, a Manhattan high school teacher with 15 years of experience.

Teacher tenure has its roots in academic tenure, which was intended to protect academic freedom; once granted, professors are rarely fired. Tenure rules for K-12 teachers vary from state to state, with some operating more like universities and others that offer no stronger protection than job security laws that prevent people from being fired without cause.

States including California, Florida and Colorado have passed or proposed legislation to change tenure laws in hopes of securing education funding under President Barack Obama‘s “Race to the Top” program.

New York City teachers can win tenure after three years. Once they are granted tenure they cannot be fired without an administrative hearing. What the teachers union calls due process, Bloomberg and Schools Chancellor Joel Klein call a system that has protected incompetence.

The issue gained prominence with the Sept. 24 release of “Waiting for ‘Superman,’” opening to wider release on Friday. The documentary from “An Inconvenient Truth” director Davis Guggenheim suggests that kids receive a superior education in charter schools without unions.

NBC‘s Sept. 27-28 education summit covered much of the same ground. Bloomberg used a 15-minute MSNBC segment to announce a tenure crackdown.

“We’ll do more to support teachers and reward great teaching, and that includes ending tenure as we know it,” he said. Bloomberg said principals must start denying tenure unless their students have made two years of progress on state tests.

Michael Mulgrew, the president of the United Federation of Teachers, responded that principals can already deny tenure “for any reason” and that teachers “would welcome an objective tenure-granting process based on agreed-upon standards.”

But the union has opposed using state test scores — the city’s preferred benchmark — to measure teacher performance.

City Department of Education spokeswoman Natalie Ravitz said the union is being disingenuous.

“On one hand, they seem to be blaming principals for too many teachers getting tenure,” she said in an e-mail. “On the other hand, they don’t want principals to take into account student performance when making tenure decisions.”

This year, 3.7% of teachers who reached the end of their three-year probationary period were denied tenure, up from 2.3% the year before. Another 7.2% saw their probation extended by a year.

Ernest Logan, president of the union representing New York City principals, said his members take student achievement into account.

“I don’t think people are just granting people tenure because they’ve been there three years,” Logan said.

Veteran city teachers say they need tenure for job security and to protect the First Amendment rights it was designed to safeguard.

“I need tenure to speak out,” said Arthur Goldstein, a union chapter leader at Francis Lewis High School in Queens.

Goldstein said he has complained publicly about overcrowding and other issues.

“I’m standing up for the kids of Francis Lewis High School and I absolutely need tenure,” he said.

Katharine Dawson, who retired last summer after 12 years as a city schoolteacher, said tenure “protects you from favoritism, it protects you from all kinds of things.”

Asked about tenure protecting bad teachers, she said, “Maybe there’s two bad teachers per school. Is it worth throwing the baby out with the bathwater?”

One teacher whom Bloomberg would like to throw out is Melissa Petro, whose essay about using Craigslist to sell herself as a prostitute was published in the Huffington Post on Sept. 7, the same day she was awarded tenure by the principal of her Bronx elementary school.

Bloomberg demanded that Petro be pulled from the classroom, but she has tenure and cannot be fired without due process. She has been assigned to an office job pending an investigation. A phone number for Petro could not be found.

NYC takes aim at teachers’ ‘tenure for breathing’

In a report released Monday, a marketing firm working for the Coalition for Educational Success, an advocacy group for several privately held for-profit companies, argues that community colleges engage in “unsavory recruitment practices” and offer students “poorer-than-expected academic quality, course availability, class scheduling, job placement and personal attention.”

The report crystallizes arguments from the for-profit sector that community colleges — perceived as the Obama administration’s preferred set of institutions to offer work force training — are ill-equipped to serve the students they already enroll and would struggle in taking on larger enrollments. The document’s release just ahead of today’s summit is intended to tarnish the event’s luster and the praise for community colleges that will come from President Obama and others, and it emerges amid the for-profit sector’s aggressive lobbying, advertising and rallying against the U.S. Department of Education‘s proposed regulations on “gainful employment” and a Senate panel’s investigation of the sector.

“Community colleges play a vital role in the American economy,” said Jean Norris, managing partner of Norton Norris, the firm that produced the report. “However, they are not the only choice. Community colleges have some systemic issues that really need to be addressed and the singular focus on the problems of the career colleges is a waste of time and money and forgets the institutions that serve a much larger number of students.”

For one part of the report, Norton Norris sent “secret shoppers” to meet with admissions officers at 15 community colleges and found that none would provide graduation rates, even when asked. In the report, these findings are likened to those identified by the Government Accountability Office on undercover visits to for-profit colleges, where investigators were told they didn’t have to repay loans and encouraged to lie on financial aid forms. The firm also surveyed current for-profit college students who had been enrolled at community colleges, asking them to compare their satisfaction levels at the two different kinds of institution. In all but one category — price — the for-profit colleges came out on top.

David S. Baime, senior vice president of government relations and research at the American Association of Community College, characterized the report as “garbage” and said it was yet another attempt by the for-profit sector to fight scrutiny from the Obama administration and those on Capitol Hill. “It probably makes sense as a sort of PR strategy to try to run us down and sort of boost themselves,” he said.

Norris insisted that it was not her aim to attack community colleges, but rather to “highlight issues beyond the career college sector that are the same ones the career college sector is being attacked for.”

At last week’s Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions hearing questioning for-profit colleges’ student outcomes and student debt, Senator Michael B. Enzi (R-Wyo.) accused the committee’s chair, Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), of examining the sector without looking at how it fits into the broader landscape of U.S. colleges and universities. “I agree there is clearly a problem in higher education — now you’ll notice I didn’t limit that comment to for-profit schools,” Enzi said. “It’s na?ve to think these problems are limited to just the for-profit sector. We’ve been looking at this in a vacuum.”

While researchers said that some of the report’s findings could be accurate, the study itself is of questionable value.

“We can’t call this research,” said Sara Goldrick-Rab, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “The for-profits are under attack and this report is being paid for by for-profits. We need to be asking many of these questions, but a report like this one isn’t providing meaningful answers.”

In the report’s introduction, Norton Norris concedes a string of flaws with the report. The sample surveyed for the study “was one of convenience and may not represent all student experiences,” the report said. The students given a chance to respond to the survey were ones who withdrew or graduated from a nonprofit college before enrolling at a for-profit, admittedly meaning that “bias may be present” among respondents. The response rate was 10%. And the survey was “custom-designed and thereby not previously proven valid and reliable.”

Thomas R. Bailey, director of the Community College Research Center at Columbia University‘s Teachers College, said he saw the report as “a tactic” for for-profit institutions in their battle against greater regulation. “Certainly from [for-profit colleges'] perspective it would be reasonable to try to put out an argument that says there are many problems with community colleges.”

Nonetheless, Bailey said, some of its findings are true. “Community colleges have low resources, the counselor-to-student ratio is extremely low. It’s not surprising that students are not very well-informed about their options at community colleges. But, again, I don’t think we can look at this as a reliable document.”

For-profit college report takes aim at community colleges

He also is calling on public-private partnerships and philanthropies to help the schools meet his goal to produce a well-educated workforce that is prepared to compete globally.

On Monday, he announced an initiative through which companies, labor unions and two-year colleges in 50 states would collaborate to improve job training and workforce development.

Today, he is scheduled to address business leaders, educators, and others at a White House summit aimed at better aligning learning with workforce goals.

“We want to make it easier to join students looking for jobs with businesses looking to hire,” Obama said Monday at the start of a meeting with his economic recovery advisory board. “We want to put community colleges and employers together to create programs that match curricula in the classroom with the needs of the boardroom.”

Among companies that have already signed on: McDonald’s, which will expand a literacy program, and Gap, which expects to hire up to 1,200 community college students next year.

Among initiatives to be unveiled today: a $35 million competitive grant, funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, to improve completion rates at community colleges in nine states; and a $1 million annual prize to honor a top-performing community college or “rising star.” The prize, to be awarded for the first time next fall, is funded by several charitable organizations, including the non-profit Aspen Institute.

Over the next decade, nearly eight in 10 new jobs will require higher education and workforce training, economists project. As part of his goal for the USA to have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world by 2020, Obama last year challenged the nation’s 1,200 community colleges to produce an additional 5 million graduates.

He also has acknowledged that many community colleges — and the more than 8 million students enrolled in them — face significant challenges. Just 25% of students at two-year schools earn a credential or transfer to a four-year college within three years.

Presiding over much of today’s summit will be Jill Biden, a community college instructor and wife of Vice President Biden. She said Monday the Obama administration will in coming months open a competition to award $500 million in federal dollars over the next year as part of a four-year program to fund a community college and career training initiative.

Congress last year approved $2 billion for that initiative — less than the $12 billion Obama had proposed to spend over 10 years. White House Domestic Policy Council Director Melody Barnes said Monday the initiatives rolling out this week are designed to build on administration efforts “in a smart and innovative way. Resources are important but not by themselves. We have to have reforms.”

Katherine Boswell, executive director of the Community College Policy Center at the non-profit Academy for Educational Development, said the summit is an important sign of commitment but acknowledged disappointment that Obama’s initial proposal wasn’t fully funded.

“I know there was a lot of anticipation, but politics are real and they intervened,” she says.

Jamie Merisotis, president of the Lumina Foundation, which is among organizations supporting the $1 million prize, said public-private partnerships are essential.

Obama “helped put a marker out there to say a major investment in change is required,” Merisotis says. “These are all pieces of the puzzle.”

Obama seeks to partner businesses, 2-year colleges

Education reformers have long called for U.S. kids to log more time in the classroom so they can catch up with their peers elsewhere in the world, but resistance from leisure-loving teenagers isn’t the only reason there is no mass movement to keep schoolchildren in their seats.

Such a change could cost cash-strapped state governments and local school districts billions of dollars, strip teachers of a time-honored perk of their profession, and irk officials in states that already bridle at federal intrusion into their traditional control over education.

“If you extend the school year for, say, five days, you’re paying for another week of salaries, another week of utilities and another week of fuel for, in South Carolina, 5,700 school buses,” said Jim Foster, a spokesman for the South Carolina Department of Education.

Obama told NBC‘s Matt Lauer on the Today show Monday that the U.S. school year is too short.

“The idea of a longer school year, I think, makes sense,” he said. He did not specify how long that school year should be, but said U.S. students attend classes, on average, about a month less than children in most other advanced countries.

U.S. schools through high school offer an average of 180 instruction days per year, according to the Education Commission of the States. That compares to an average of 197 days for lower grades and 196 days for upper grades in countries with the best student achievement levels, including Japan, South Korea, Germany and New Zealand.

Many education experts say American kids should spend more time in school.

“There’s a growing awareness that American kids are being shortchanged academically by the short school day and the short school year,” said Pedro Noguera, a professor of education at New York University.

Today’s American kids have a long summer vacation because previous generations needed the summer off to work on family farms.

Now researchers say the tradition causes a “summer learning loss” as kids put aside the books for the summer. The problem hits low-income students especially hard. A Johns Hopkins University study found that disadvantaged kids fall back during the summer break, while better-off kids hold steady or continue to learn.

Charter schools that aim to bring low-income students up to grade level, such as the KIPP academies and the Harlem Children’s Zone in New York City, generally offer a longer school year and a longer school day.

In most cases the charter schools have leeway to set their own schedules, in part because their teachers are not covered by union contracts.

At traditional public schools where teachers and other employees are usually represented by unions, lengthening the school day or the school year would be subject to collective bargaining, and more hours would cost more money.

“It has to be negotiated, and it takes money,” said Janet Bass, a spokeswoman for the American Federation of Teachers. “Right now teachers and all other school staff are compensated based on the number of hours they work.”

Some states embrace the idea. In Massachusetts, the state issues grants to districts with plans to constructively lengthen instructional class time, said Kathy Christie, chief of staff at the Education Commission of the States. Obama’s Education Department already is using competitions among states for curriculum grant money through its “Race to the Top” initiative.

“The federal carrots of additional money would help more states do it or schools do it in states where they don’t have a state grant process,” Christie said.

But the federal budget is hard-up, too. And while many educators and parents believe students would benefit from more quality learning time, the idea is not universally popular.

Texas already forbids school from starting before the fourth Monday of August, a provision designed to save money on utility bills and increase business for tourist destinations and other summer attractions.

“Ultimately the states, not the federal government, should have the final word on this and other public school decisions,” said Lucy Nashed, a spokeswoman for Gov. Rick Perry.

In Kansas, sporadic efforts by local districts to extend the school year at even a few schools have been met by parental resistance, said state education commissioner Diane DeBacker.

“The community was just not ready for kids to be in school all summer long,” DeBacker said. “Kids wanted to go swimming. Their families wanted to go on vacation.”

In some states, the school year already starts well before Labor Day and in others nearly stretches to the Fourth of July.

Parents are similarly divided.

Parent Irene Facciolo in Montpelier, Vt., said kids need the summer break and learn while they’re away from school.

“I really feel like they need the time to regenerate,” she said.

But Laura Spencer of Orlando, says she would rather have her 10-year-old daughter learning than hanging out.

“Summer is a lost opportunity,” said Spencer, who believes having kids out of school for three to four months makes an already flawed education system worse.

Associated Press reporters Erica Werner in Washington; Tom Breen in Raleigh, N.C.; Donna Gordon Blankinship in Seattle; April Castro in Austin, Texas; Alan Scher Zagier in Columbia, Mo.; and Lisa Rathke in Montpelier, Vt., contributed to this story.

Goodbye summer? Not as cost muffles calls for more school

Addressing a small group in an Albuquerque family’s front yard, Obama shifted from his recent focus on the economy, which has run headlong into the grim reality of continued high unemployment. Instead, five weeks ahead of midterm elections that could turn into a Democratic bloodletting, the president told voters to think about education when they head to the polls.

“Who’s going to prioritize our young people to make sure they’ve got the skills they need to succeed?” the president said.

“Nothing’s going to be more important in terms of our long-term success.” Obama argued that Republicans would cut education spending to pay for tax cuts for the rich.

Later in the day, Obama was heading to a big rally at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he hopes to replicate the raucous, youthful, big-stage events for which he became famous in the 2008 presidential campaign. Democrats will host hundreds of watch parties nationwide, and Obama will hold other campus rallies before Nov. 2 to warn young voters that the “hope and change” they embraced two years ago is at risk if Republicans sweep the midterm elections.

The president is aiming to close the enthusiasm gap that pollsters say separates discouraged liberal voters from energized conservatives who might lift Republicans to huge gains in congressional and gubernatorial races.

But Obama got a quick reminder from his audience of about 40 in Albuquerque that education might not be at the top of the agenda for recession-weary voters.

“If we don’t have homes to go to, what good is education?” one man asked.

A high school principal read a letter that he said was from a class in his school.

“What assurance will we have that we will be rewarded for good work?” the students asked. “There seems to be less money that banks lend our families, and most of all no jobs.”

The president acknowledged the anxiety of the younger generation.

“They’re growing up in the shadow of a financial crisis that we hadn’t seen in our lifetime,” he said, arguing his administration has sought to save jobs for teachers and others by closing tax loopholes, and is working to making it easier for kids to attend college.

Republican leaders, Obama said, “fought us tooth and nail … That’s the choice that we’ve got in this election.”

The event at the stucco home of Andy and Etta Cavalier in a small farming community south of Albuquerque comes as Obama tests out a relatively new format of backyard visits that give him time to explain his policies in cozy, unhurried settings. He’s coupling those with college campus rallies in four states Tuesday and Wednesday, trying to tackle Democrats’ two biggest needs: to pump enthusiasm into young supporters who may stay at home this fall, and to persuade undecided voters that Republican alternatives are unacceptable.

In a magazine interview, Obama admonished Democratic voters, saying it would be “inexcusable” and “irresponsible” for unenthusiastic Democrats to sit out the elections because the consequences could be a squandered agenda for years.

“People need to shake off this lethargy. People need to buck up,” Obama told Rolling Stone magazine in an interview being published Friday. Making change happen is hard, he said, and “if people now want to take their ball and go home, that tells me folks weren’t serious in the first place.”

Obama wants Democratic loyalists to be less apologetic and more forceful in asserting that he and the Democratic-controlled Congress are trying to move the country forward and Republicans would return to the policies of former President George W. Bush.

Obama: Education key to economic success

This compelling projection by the Institute for Higher Education Policy is one of the primary reasons why it is working with the Lumina Foundation for Education to roll out the three-year, $1.3 million Project Win-Win. This initiative will financially support 35 community colleges and four-year institutions in six states —Louisiana, Missouri, New York, Ohio, Virginia and Wisconsin — so they can track down and retroactively award qualified students associate degrees who, for whatever reason, never received one. It also will help these institutions identify students who have recently dropped out who are “academically short” of an associate degree by nine credits or fewer and re-enroll them to finish a degree.

“Project Win-Win has the potential to make a considerable down payment on increased degree completion goals set by state governors and the Obama Administration,” said Michelle Asha Cooper, IHEP president, in a statement.

Last year, nine of the project’s institutions ran a pilot of this program during a seven-month period; they awarded nearly 600 associate degrees and identified almost 1,600 students who were just shy of earning one. The pilot, however, revealed a number of difficulties that institutions face when attempting to retroactively award degrees.

“It’s not as easy as it sounds,” said Stephanie Tarver, dean of enrollment management at McNeese State University, which awards associate degrees as well and was part of the pilot program. “We were kind of bumbling around in the dark a bit. When you pull data, it doesn’t always match up like you thought it would. You have to have a lot of staff to dedicate to a project like this to keep it going.”

Then, even when candidates for degrees and those just shy of them were identified, reaching them proved just as challenging.

“At that point, we don’t have as much control as we do in the other areas because these students have been out for a while,” Tarver said. “We didn’t know if the contact information we had for them was accurate. We didn’t know how to get accurate information without spending lots of money to find it. Also, when we finally did make contact, some of the students were leery of us. ‘You’re calling me out of the blue and saying I’m qualified for a degree and want to offer it to me? What’s the catch?’ ”

Eventually, though, McNeese awarded about 15 associate degrees, out of approximately 150 former students who met degree requirements. Officials also tracked down about 300 students who were just short of graduation and are in the process of helping those who wish to complete find a way to do so.

“A lot of the students who dropped out of school didn’t realize just how close they were to finishing,” Tarver said. “The success stories we’ve had are truly heartwarming, especially for those who didn’t realize they were qualified for a degree. We made an immediate impact on their lives. Rarely have I felt we’ve impacted students as we did through this project.”

Though many of the institutions participating in the project had never before made efforts to retroactively award degrees, a few of them have been doing it for a while and have found ways to integrate this into regular degree audits for current students.

Anna Flack, registrar at Suffolk County Community College, in New York, noted that her institution has made it a point to search for these “lost graduates” at least once every year for the past decade.

“We did this on a small scale,” Flack said. “It was really part of office procedure. {hellip} We made it part of the daily responsibilities of the degree audit staff.”

With students who are just a few credits short of earning an associate degree, Flack said, the college has adopted a no-pressure approach in approaching them.

“We’ve just sent letters to students, saying that can finish if they’d like to,” Flack said. ” ‘Here are the different ways you can reach that degree.’ There’s no convincing, no strong-arming, no sales pitch. ‘We just see this, and we’d like you to know about it.’ ”

Those pushing the project at the national level argue that, despite some of the challenges in the degree audit process, this is a relatively easy way to boost graduation rates around the country.

“This is an issue that hasn’t been raised,” said Cliff Adelman, senior associate at IHEP. “We’re saying to these institutions, ‘Hey, guys, you haven’t paid attention to people based on your criteria who’ve crossed the degree threshold. You’ve been asleep at the wheel.’ There’s all this talk about awarding these degrees, but they’re just making a lot of noise. This is low-hanging fruit.”

Retroactive degrees, for students who had credits