The Education Trust issued a press release about their new report Tough Love: Bottom-Line Quality Standards for Colleges. Quoting the press release the report,
“lays out a comprehensive plan for the federal government to leverage existing resources, in the form of student aid and tax benefits, to protect students and taxpayer dollars from going to chronically underperforming schools. The plan also encourages elite colleges to open their gates to many more talented, working class, and low-income students.
“The federal government writes a $180 billon check annually to thousands of colleges and universities using taxpayer dollars to fund schools from the highest performing to the lowest, with virtually no consideration of institutional performance on access, success, or student loan repayment measures,” said Michael Dannenberg, director of higher education and education finance policy and a co-author of the report.
“Students who are receiving federal financial aid to get a college education should, at the very least, be guaranteed that their school meets minimum performance standards. And taxpayers providing generous financial aid and tax benefits to elite institutions, ranging from Yale to the University of Virginia, should be guaranteed that these institutions are working to correct socioeconomic inequities, rather than calcify them.”
Translation: Under the guise of helping students and taxpayers we want to use the full power of the federal treasury to control higher education to make colleges and universities do exactly what we want them to do. The “College Core” is born.
I warned about this last fall in my post, Constructing the P-20 Education Pathway.
“The P-20 education system has been in the making for over a decade. Common national standards for K-12 was the first component but getting colleges to surrender to federal oversight and control was always part of the plan….
Starting with the student loan takeover in 2009, President Obama bulldozed his way into higher education. In 2010, with federal incentives the Common Core was passed and the K-12 graduation standards of 45 states were nationalized with assessments under federal oversight. It’s now 2013, Obama is binding the seam between high school and higher education with the use of financial aid money.”
Common Core + College Core = P-20w. A cradle-to-career pathway of top down control.
They’re not even hiding it anymore. Here is a screen shot of the graphic on the Holland Public School website.
Despite the push-back on Common Core, reformers are pushing full steam ahead with the “College Core.” Along with a college quality standards, Bill Gates is lobbying Congress to harness higher-ed student data in Student Unit Recording System. Currently there is a law that prevents it. Sadly, in this political climate what Bill Gates wants he seems to get; and he want’s a cradle-to-career pathway from P-20w.
We must defeat Common Core or resign ourselves to a centralized federal system of education from cradle to life long labor.