2023 Education Reform Wish List

Martin Center:

Each January, the staff of the Martin Center share our higher-ed-reform dreams for the coming year. Will all of our wishes come true? Probably not. Nevertheless, we offer them here in a spirit of optimism, for the reader’s enjoyment and edification.

Commit to Institutional Neutrality … and Handle Enrollment Declines Wisely

My first hope for 2023 is for more universities to commit to the principle of institutional neutrality by adopting the Kalven Committee Report on the University’s Role in Political and Social Action. The report became a guiding policy document at the University of Chicago in 1967, “affirm[ing] the University’s commitment to the academic freedom of faculty and students in the face of suppression from internal and/or external entities while also insisting on institutional neutrality on political and social issues.”

Institutional neutrality safeguards dissenting opinions.

“including a race in which an Oakland school board candidate was wrongly declared the winner”

Jill Tucker:

More than 50 days after the November election and days before winners take office, Alameda County election officials announced that a programming error led to a miscount across all ranked-choice contests, including a race in which an Oakland school board candidate was wrongly declared the winner.

The revelation came well after the county certified the results and raised questions not only about what happens next, but whether the mistake could further erode faith in fair elections.

Universities, rich in data, struggle to capture its value, study finds

John McDonald:

Key takeaways

  • The nation’s colleges and universities produce a wealth of data from research, administrative operations and other sources.
  • A survey of higher ed administrators found that the institutions face major challenges in capturing that data and in making data from various sources work together.
  • The study’s authors contend that universities have been slower than organizations in other economic sectors to create senior-level positions focused on data quality, strategy, governance and privacy matters.

Universities are literally awash in data. From administrative data offering information about students, faculty and staff, to research data on professors’ scholarly activities and even telemetric signals — the functional administrative data gathered remotely from wireless networks, security cameras and sensors in the course of daily operations — that data can be an invaluable resource. 

But a new study by researchers at UCLA and the MIT Press, published Dec. 23 in the journal Science, finds that universities face significant challenges in capturing such data, and that they severely lag the private sector and government entities in using data to solve challenges and inform strategic planning.

“This new research shines a bright light on the ways in which universities are data rich and data poor — and sometimes intentionally data blind,” said Christine L. Borgman, distinguished research professor at the UCLA School of Education & Information Studies and one of the study’s authors. “They are struggling to capture and exploit the true value of their data resources and reluctant to initiate the conversations necessary to build consensus for data governance.”

Are Women Overinvesting in Education? Evidence from the Medical Profession

M. Keith Chen and Judith A. Chevalier

Recent literature finds that women earn significantly lower returns to professional degrees. Does this render these degrees poor investments for women? We compare physicians to physician assistants, a similar profession with lower wages and training costs, mitigating some selection issues. The median female (but not male) primary-care physician would have been financially better off becoming a physician assistant. While there is a wage gap, our result occurs primarily because most female physicians do not work enough hours to rationalize medical school whereas most men do. We discuss robustness issues and nonwage returns to education that may rationalize these investments by women.

Civics: The 1916 Arizona Governor’s Election Was Undecided for More Than a Year

Douglas Towne

Election craziness, it seems, is written into Arizona’s DNA. A mere four years after statehood in 1912, long before the days of Cyber Ninjas and QAnon shamans , voters awoke to a nightmare scenario. “Two Claimants Swear in as Governor of Arizona,” read the headline in what was then called The Arizona Republican. “Hints of fracas and riots were whispered about.”

Civics: a history of FBI cointelpro

James Bovard:

The history of the FBI provides perhaps the best guide to the abuses that may be now occurring. From 1956 to 1971, the FBI carried out “a secret war against those citizens it considers threats to the established order,” a 1976 Senate report noted. The FBI’s Operation COINTELPRO involved thousands of covert operations to incite street warfare between violent groups, to get people fired, to portray innocent people as government informants, to destroy activists’ marriages, and to cripple or destroy left-wing, black, communist, white racist, and anti-war organizations.  The FBI let no corner of American life escape its vigilance; it even worked to expose and discredit “communists who are secretly operating in legitimate organizations and employments, such as the Young Men’s Christian Association and Boy Scouts.”

While many people are aware of how the FBI hounded Martin Luther King, Jr., and pressured him to commit suicide, that was not even the tip of the iceberg of the FBI’s racial persecution. Almost any black organization could be targeted for illegal wiretaps. One black leader was monitored largely because he had “recommended the possession of firearms by members for their self-protection.” At that time, some southern police departments and sheriffs were notorious for attacking blacks who stood up for their civil rights.

The FBI office in San Diego instigated violence between the local Black Panthers and a rival black organization, US (United Slaves Inc.). Agents sent forged letters making accusations and threats to the groups purportedly from their rivals, along with crude cartoons and drawings meant to enrage the recipients. Three Black Panthers and one member of the rival group were killed during the time the FBI was fanning the flames. A few days after shootings in which two Panthers were wounded and one was killed, and in which the U.S. headquarters was bombed, the FBI office reported to headquarters: “Efforts are being made to determine how this situation can be capitalized upon for the benefit of the Counterintelligence Program.” The FBI office bragged shortly thereafter: “Shootings, beatings, and a high degree of unrest continues to prevail in the ghetto area of southeast San Diego…. it is felt that a substantial amount of the unrest is directly attributable to this [FBI] program.”

Hawick High: The school that produced two Nobel Prize winners

David Knox

Sir Angus Deaton from Princeton University and Cambridge University’s Richard Henderson visited the classrooms at Hawick High School.

They met pupils and teachers to discuss their academic journeys.

Head teacher Vicky Porteous said: “For me, meeting my favourite scientists is an absolute thrill.”

Both men were born in Edinburgh but moved to the Borders during their childhoods, attending primary in Newtown St Boswells and Newcastleton, before going to Hawick High.

Sir Angus was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2015 for his work in economic sciences.