1/ A 🧵on Chris Whittle, the notorious flim-flam artist who came to Washington, DC a few years ago in the twilight of his career, looking for one last score.

The Post reported this week that Whittle's for-profit private school is running out of money.

washingtonpost.com/education/2022… 2/ It was incredibly obvious that this would happen and any investor who gets hosed deserves it.

To understand why, let's go back to Whittle's home of Tennessee, where he attended the state university and fell under the thrall of a fellow student named Phillip Moffitt.

1/ Pre-K is great. The federal government should give all families access to free public Pre-K.

But wait, wasn't there a big study recently that said otherwise?

No. At @voxdotcom I explain why the real problem is how we talk about education research.

vox.com/22992259/pre-k… 2/ There's a great deal of evidence on the benefits of Pre-K linked to in the piece so I won't summarize it here.

Instead, let's start by talking about how research findings in education and elsewhere are described as "significant."

1/ You may have seen that Marilyn Flynn, former Dean of the USC School of Social Work, was indicted by the Justice Department for bribery, and wondered "Why would a respected academic (allegedly) do such a thing?"

Here's the story, based on my conversations with Dean Flynn. 2/ The indictment does not allege Flynn profited personally from the bribes. Rather, they say she did a bunch of shady stuff involving jobs and light money laundering for the son of a prominent politician in exchange for public contracts that benefitted the School of Social Work.

1/ A long, detailed Friday thread about what's happening with the Biden Free Community College plan and the tricky choices Democrats are going to have to make.

Keep reading: billions of dollars are at stake! 2/ As I wrote a few months ago, there are two ways to make community college free. The first is to give states enough money to replace all the tuition they're charging now.

nytimes.com/2021/04/28/ups…

1/ I wrote about long-term trends in male college enrollment and how women are forced to spend more time and money to get jobs that pay less.
nytimes.com/2021/09/09/ups… 2/ Most of the change in the male/female college enrollment ratio happened a *long time ago*, in the 1970s. It was .79 in 1995 and twenty years later in 2015 it was...still exactly .79. It has dropped a small amount since.

1/ On @WNYC this week I talked about why we'll never have a truly equitable K-12 school system without three changes:

1. National funding
2. Decennial redistricting
3. Decriminalizing district borders

wnycstudios.org/podcasts/anxie… 2/ National funding would cost ~ $250 billion/yr, which is a lot, but you know what's enormous and incredibly important? Public schools! We're kidding ourselves if we think we can provide equal opportunity with state and local money. There's no alternative to national funding.

1/ I wrote a long piece for the 2021 @monthly College Guide about class, justice, and higher education.

One point: The whole thing where students are supposedly indoctrinated in esoteric majors is nonsense.
washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septe… 2/ Also, the problem with "free college" i.e. "replace current tuition revenue with federal subsidies" is that takes the existing grossly unequal distribution of resources as a given.

1/ Some thoughts on @melissakorn and @anfuller's excellent investigation of high-priced Ivy League master's degrees that leave students with enormous debts they can't repay.

First, while the focus is on elite schools, this dirty business is widespread.

wsj.com/articles/finan… 2/ The market for master's degrees from public and non-profit universities is completely unregulated. An accredited university can invent a master's degree in literally anything, charge any price they like, and the feds will lend students that amount, no questions asked.

1/ Another interesting question about 2U buying edX is what happens in cases where their respective course offerings overlap, at wildly different prices?

Take, for example, the popular subject of cryptocurrency.

https://twitter.com/kevincarey1/status/1409934114187264007

2/ Back in 2007, 2U paid $107 million for a South African company called GetSmarter, which partners with many of the very same universities currently on the edX platform.

For $2,600, you can take a six-week crypto basics class from the MIT Media Lab.

getsmarter.com/products/mit-m…

1/ There's a lot to unpack in today's announcement that 2U, a publicly-traded corporation, is purchasing edX, a non-profit founded by Harvard and MIT, for $800 million.

To start, why would 2U pay so much for a site that lost $17.4 million on $84.7 million in revenue last year? 2/ The answer is in the slide deck 2U presented to investors this morning: It's all about the cost of marketing.

1/ This essay is what happens when someone of middling intellect with an axe to grind writes about a subject -- community colleges -- that they know absolutely nothing about. It's an embarrassment for the author and @NRO.

https://twitter.com/rkylesmith/status/1339912941441839104

2/ Smith begins by critiquing Dr. Biden as "not scholarly" for not considering whether money spent on student retention would be better spent on...anything else. That's idiotic. All research has context!

1/ A thread about pandemic-induced K-12 virtual schooling, based mostly on my experience as the parent of a 5th grader in public school.

Summary: It's been really difficult and definitely has limitations, but it's also working in significant ways. 2/ To start, some context that should absolutely influence how much you think these observations are generalizable.

Arlington Public Schools is somewhat diverse (46% white, 29% free/reduced lunch) in an unusually wealthy and highly-educated close-in suburb of Washington, DC.

1/ Higher education is in enormous financial trouble.

You might think "free college" is the solution.

In the 2020 @Monthly College Guide, I argue that's wrong -- and propose what to do instead.

washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/septe… 2/ To explain why, let's compare two institutions with similar (30,000+) numbers of students: East Los Angeles College, a large community college in California, and Auburn University in Alabama.

1/ Let's talk some more about why the so-called "purchase" of for-profit Ashford University by the University of Arizona is exactly the opposite of what it appears to be.

https://twitter.com/kevincarey1/status/1290412977556992000?s=20

2/ In a press release yesterday, @UArizona said it will "acquire the assets of Ashford University."

Last week, the stock market valued those assets at about $120 million, give or take.

news.arizona.edu/story/universi…

1/ You may have read today that the University of Arizona "purchased" online for-profit Ashford University.

That's not actually what happened.

Let me explain why. 2/ Ashford is technically owned by the publicly-traded company "Zovio," until last year known as Bridgepoint Education. Nearly all of Zovio's revenue comes from Ashford. They are essentially the same thing.

1/ One thing to consider about Cal State's decision to go online is that because so many students there transfer from the community college system, Cal State is primarily a system of upperclassmen. 2/3rds of undergrads are juniors or seniors, who tend to live off campus. 2/ At Cal State Long Beach, for example, 4% of students live on campus. At UCLA, by contrast, 97% of freshmen live in dorms.

1/ I wrote about how many public higher education systems are on the precipice of de facto privatization.

It's conventional wisdom that states disinvested in higher education after the Great Recession, and that was true until the mid 2010's. BUT...

nytimes.com/2020/05/05/ups… 2/ As the article shows, some states used the back half of the long slow recovery to restore higher education funding and even increase above 2008 levels.

Other states didn't. They left the deep cuts in place.

1/ If you want to understand the growing conflict between students and colleges over pandemic-era tuition, this quote from University System of Maryland chancellor Jay Perman is a good place to start. washingtonpost.com/local/educatio… 2/ Perman is offering an economic view of higher education from inside the industry. He understands that colleges get tuition and public subsidies for one overwhelming reason: only colleges can grant degrees that lead to good jobs.

1/ Now that Virginia has officially closed public schools for the rest of the 2019-20 academic year, with other states sure to follow, it's worth taking stock of what an enormous challenge this will be for educational equity. 2/ It's well-established that "summer learning loss" affects students differently based on socioeconomic status.

Pandemic learning loss could be much worse, particularly since it will directly precede the summer.

1/ In @DemJournal I make the case against K-12 school districts.

School districts are tools of segregation and permanent inequality. To change that, we should adopt three policies:

1) Redistricting
2) National Funding
3) Decriminalization

democracyjournal.org/magazine/no-mo… 2/ REDISTRICTING means redrawing school district boundaries every 10 years with an eye toward administrative efficiency and racial and economic integration. Thurgood Marshall suggested as much in his Milliken v. Bradley dissent.

1/ Let's talk about how wealthy businessman Jack Zhou is currently in the process of getting away with bribing his two sons into Harvard -- with crucial assistance from Harvard itself. 2/ The bribing first came to light back in April, when the Boston Globe reported that Zhao had given Harvard fencing coach Peter Brand $440,000 by paying him $989,000 for a $549,000 house. Brand then helped Zhao's son, a fencer, get into Harvard.

bostonglobe.com/metro/2019/04/…