Snake Oil

In late 2012—though it feels like just yesterday—I featured Dallas edu-preneur Randy Best, whose outfit Academic Partnerships is helping public universities take their degree programs online.

Best’s first foray into the business of public education was a well-timed tutoring firm just as George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law began funneling money to private tutors, and in 2007 he got into the online college business to help his alma mater, Lamar University, recover from a big enrollment drop after Hurricane Rita. Over the years as his business has grown, Best’s model hasn’t changed much: Best helps recruit students and provides a pre-fab online platform to deliver the classes; universities provide the course material and lend their good name to the cause. The public schools collect tuition from the students, and turn over around half of it to Best.

In 2011, Best held a coming-out party of sorts at the Four Seasons in Las Colinas, inviting top officers from public universities nationwide to a comfy summit on “The Future of Higher Education.” Best never appeared onstage, nor did he hard-sell the crowd on hiring Academic Partnerships, but big names like Jeb Bush and thought leaders like Harvard’s Clayton Christensen and Khan Academy founder Salman Khan described a digitized, globalized future of learning that fit neatly with Best’s ambitions. Best closed a few big contracts just after the conference, including one with the entire University of Texas System.

Now Best is back, hosting another invitation-only thinkfest next week at the Four Seasons, this one covering the “Globalization of Higher Education.”

And as impressive as Best’s last lineup was, he’s outdone himself this time. Jeb Bush is back on board, but so are Hillary Clinton and U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Dunan—it’d make for some amazing photo ops, except the conference is apparently closed to the press (reporters can sign up for access to a video feed instead). Speaking of journalists, Thomas Friedman’s on the bill too, along with CNN’s Fareed Zakariah.

The “globalization” theme makes a lot of sense as a follow-up to Best’s last shindig.

Even before he started Academic Partnerships (first known as Higher Ed Holdings), Best was thinking globally—he’d bought a number of universities in Latin America and was working on building their online programs. In just the last few months now, Academic Partnerships has been busy contracting with private universities outside the U.S. Using the same model they apply to public schools in the U.S., they’ve partnered with two schools in Mexico, and one each in Peru, Colombia and the Philippines.

But Best ambitions for a “globalized” higher ed scene reach into America’s public universities too. When he and I spoke in 2012, he described a happy future in which students from all over the world had access to prestigious degrees from America’s state schools, without the mess and cost of getting a visa or moving to the U.S.

Foreign students, paying full out-of-state tuition, are a key income driver for America’s public universities while states cut back on public higher ed funding. And online degree programs are a pretty low-impact way for schools to grow their enrollment, especially in Best’s model, where Academic Partnerships does the logistical work and a spinoff firm—Instructional Connections—hires low-cost teaching assistants to answer students’ questions. Best-backed online degrees have been a key to UT-Arlington’s enrollment explosion over the last few years, driving big improvements on the physical campus too.

The drawbacks to all this are a little tougher to quantify, like the worry that faculty are forced to cede control when the courses they teach turn into pre-fab products with indefinite digital lives. Or the concern that a school trading on its good name might lose some prestige if it’s branded as an online degree mill.

“I don’t think online is the future–it’s simply a money scheme,” is how William Rowe, an Arkansas State University art professor, put it to Forbes in a long profile this month. But most of that story is glowing—there’s even a sweet sidebar about the Neanderthal and the Siberian cave bear in Best’s natural history collection. “The Stanfords, the Harvards, oh my gosh, those schools are remarkable,” Best tells Forbes. “But they’re irrelevant to the market.”

In honor of next week’s conference, I’ve updated our map of public universities that have contracted with Academic Partnerships for their online degree programs. Though it’s surely not a complete list, I’ve cobbled together details on deals with 33 public schools. (Without naming them, Forbes pegs the total at 40 in the U.S.) New additions to the map don’t include copies of the contracts (yet!), but I’ve linked instead to stories or press releases about those recent deals. Most of the new additions are in AP’s most common degree areas like business, education and nursing—though the University of Miami made a novel addition last month, with an online master’s in music.

Last week, with the primary elections behind us at last, Chris turned the tables for some real talk about just WTF we were all doing at the polls. But now comes the horrifying realization that the campaigns have only just begun. Still nearly eight more months of news like…

I AM VERY PROUD TO HAVE THE SUPPORT OF BUC-EE and his owners. Meet the men behind Buc-cees.

Like so many Texans I love Buc-ees. The service is great, the food is great, especially my favorite, the Pastrami sandwich, and of course my wife loves the clean bathrooms.

That’s leading Republican lite guv candidate Dan Patrick, two months from a runoff against David Dewhurst, posting on his Facebook page last Sunday. Kolten Parker at the San Antonio Express-News picked up the story the next day, and from there it was off to the freak-out races…

Won’t gas up there anymore since they support a fear mongering immigrant basher. “@KoltenParker: Buc-ee’s endorses Dan Patrick for Lt. Gov.

— Joaquin Castro (@Castro4Congress) March 10, 2014

 

The Harris County GOP chair devoted a talk radio segment to what it all means, the Express-News wagged a finger at Castro for his Twitter outrage, and this lady punched a metal Buc-ee’s beaver statue, after buying stuff in the store:

 

Yep.This pic sums up my feelings toward @bucees & their recent support of Dan Patrick. Disappointed. #BoycottBucees pic.twitter.com/AiJJwXLRoA

— Melessa C. Rodriguez (@MelessaRdz) March 10, 2014

More jumped aboard the #BoycottBucees train and the company either backpedaled, flip-flopped or clarified that its owners, not the store, had endorsed Patrick, hoping the cartoon beaver might dam the political divide they’d stepped in. Please, let’s preserve the dignity of our beloved Texas chain, one that’s so well mastered the art of roadside poop jokes. As a company lawyer told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram‘s Bud Kennedy:

“We believe Beaver Nuggets and beef jerky taste good regardless of political affiliation.”

Glad we settled that. And speaking of scientific consensus:

Gohmert: “Climate change is real. It happens four times a year in most places.” #zing

— daveweigel (@daveweigel) March 12, 2014

At least Congressman Louie Gohmert is done campaigning for now, so he can get back to what passes for work in Congress. Congressman Ralph Hall, 90 years young and gamely heading into a runoff to keep his seat, is still campaigning and still managed to keep doing what Texas’ congressional delegation does best:

Apropos of nothing, Rep. Ralph Hall (R-Texas) at a House Science hearing says Obama “can’t even call a terrorist a terrorist.”

— Corbin Hiar (@CorbinHiar) March 12, 2014

Last this week, good news for anyone who loves freedom, trash bags, and defending the American way:

We have all been asked the question, “paper or plastic?” Regardless of one’s preference, embedded in the age-old question, and consistent with the consumer’s expectation, is the unstated premise that, as an integral part of the consumer transaction, the retailer will be providing the consumer a bag—a means for the consumer to transport the goods purchased from the retailer.

So begins the Texas Retailers Association’s stirring challenge to the City of Austin’s ban on plastic grocery bags. The trade group filed the suit last week, suggesting local bag bans violate state law and increasing the chance that the #freedombags cause—which Republican state Rep. Drew Springer so unceremoniously disposed of a few months ago—might be recycled into a whole new political dust-up.

In fact, state Rep. Dan Flynn isn’t even waiting—he’s already stepped up to treat these national treasures with the reverence they deserve. He’s asked Attorney General Greg Abbott whether Texas law protects our right to tote our groceries in a single-use plastic menace. As he told the Texas Tribune, the stakes couldn’t be higher in this epic fight:

“I can’t begin to tell you how many phone calls we received about the legality of the bans,” said Flynn, whose district does not have any communities that have imposed bag bans. Even though it doesn’t affect him directly, “there are a lot of people who are really inconvenienced by it,” he said.

Austin has been a staging ground this week for two movements advocating very different visions for the future of America’s public schools.

On one side, better known and better outfitted, there are the tech and data evangelists who imagine a reinvented school experience with computer games, tablets and other innovative models, gathered for the fourth year of the SXSWedu conference.

On the other, teachers, parents and education researchers who have, over the last four years or so, built a community of advocates for less flashy solutions like better school funding and more freedom for teachers, and a resistance to privatization and “corporate” reformers. For a long time this group has been only informally organized around a handful of blogs and education historian Diane Ravitch.

This year Ravitch and a few top lieutenants organized their movement into the Network for Public Education, and the group held its first conference last weekend, on the UT-Austin campus.

UT researcher Julian Vasquez Heilig warmed up the crowd Saturday morning, by helping to articulate what the new group is about. “The powers that be have decided that poor kids … we want to do education for them on the cheap,” he said. Anthony Cody, one of the group’s co-founders, laid into “hedge fund managers who have recently discovered their passion for the poor.” He lamented “the cycle of corruption has invaded what should be sacred places for learning.”

Patrick Michels

The movement is most commonly described by its opposition to school choice reforms like charter school chains, online schools and private school vouchers. They’re often criticized for pooh-poohing reformers without offering better suggestions of their own.

“[Network for Public Education] has a very positive message,” Vasquez Heilig said. “I’m not ‘anti-reformer,’ I just disagree with your form of reform.” As Chicago Teachers Union leader Karen Lewis put it: “What we have in common are the values that made this country great.”

Patrick Michels

Presentations were full of epic language and battle imagery—politically popular education reforms were often described as a “scam” or a “hoax” perpetrated by the “corporate elite”; the reform debate as “war.” None amped up the drama more than John Kuhn, (Tyrant’s Foe, Feb. 2013) superintendent of North Texas’ Perrin-Whitt CISD, who lambasted the “new generation of robber barons” meddling in public schools. “The whole setup is a scam and it benefits people in power suits, not the children of America.”

Beyond the rhetoric—there are articulate evangelists on both sides of this debate—were academics who were frustrated by the outsize power wielded by players like Eli Broad and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, even for policies without a solid research base. Teach for America’s five-week teacher preparation program was a popular target, along with new ways to rate teachers based on test scores (and then pay them accordingly).

Kevin Welner, a researcher at the University of Colorado-Boulder, whose National Education Policy Center regularly turns out work skewering reform research from think tanks and foundations, urged academics to “advocate for social justice, not simply for something that improves test scores.”

The next day, Monday, marked the beginning of SXSWedu, a bigger education conference in downtown Austin that has, over the last three years, established itself as a playground for just the sort of private-sector reformers who’d been pilloried at NPE’s gathering. Festival programmers softened that contrast a little this year, including more talks on things like equity and community building, and a presentation by… Diane Ravitch.

On Monday afternoon, Ravitch took the stage in one of the festival’s many rooms, before a crowd almost as big as the one she addressed the day before at NPE. She lambasted “$1,500 conferences where you can cash in on education,” and warned about fetishizing games, apps and online learning. “[They] will harm children, they will destroy the teaching profession,” she said. The targets of her remarks were probably ensconced in another ballroom for a workshop on startup funding, but it was a significant statement with the big orange SXSWedu banner behind her.

A few minutes after Ravitch left the stage, it was occupied by a conversation on “Analytics and Student Success.”

“I am a little nervous,” joked John Wilson, a former Obama administration education official, “being up on the stage right after Diane Ravitch. … Gosh, everything was a hoax, I guess.”

It’s a simplification to sort every player into one side of this debate or the other. If there is a war over public schools, there’s plenty of back-and-forth between the rival camps. Plenty of people at NPE attended SXSWedu (the place and timing of NPE’s first conference was no accident), and SXSWedu—which continues through Thursday—is much more than a product pitch meeting.

But Monday night offered a perfect distillation of the gleeful product boosterism Ravitch decried. SXSWedu’s kickoff party, with drinks, snacks and a performance by Ben Kweller, doubled as a product launch for Amplify, the education tech brand owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The company made a big show of unveiling a tablet computer for students at last year’s SXSWedu, only to have school districts cancel multi-million-dollar contracts for the devices after they started melting.

This week, Amplify was back promising an even bigger announcement, which turned out to be a new tablet, an Intel processor, and a suite of educational software packaged together for $199 per student, per year. Joel Klein, the former New York City schools chief and Ravitch foil who now heads Amplify, looked the part of the ed-tech rock star, navigating the drum kit and guitar stands onstage in a sport coat and black jeans.

He recalled the “rave reviews” for last year’s Amplify tablet, and promised nothing short of a transformation in schools thanks to this new gadget. “We’re gonna change the way that teachers teach and kids learn,” he said. “I think we’re gonna change the world here.”

The frantic last week before Tuesday’s primary election has been a truly rich pageant of WTF in Texas politics.

Why, just this morning Barry Smitherman promised to fight border crime by cracking down on jaywalking in South Texas. As he explained to KUT (skip to 20:53):

“It will send a signal south of the border that if you come here and break the law, there will be consequences.”

All across the state, nasty intra-party fights got nastier, candidates for small-time office dialed up big-time promises to Fight Obama, and, speaking to the Dallas Morning News, Texas House candidate Sandra Crenshaw got way candid about why she’s running for a South Dallas seat:

“I want to go to the Legislature for eight years and get a pension so I can take care of myself in my old age.”

This week, the Morning News also dredged up an amazing story that’s pretty much WTF from start to finish, about a four-man North Texas Republican brain trust getting scammed by a man who claimed to have found Noah’s Ark (really) buried in Iran.

Attorney general candidate Ken Paxton, Railroad Commission hopeful Wayne Christian and state Reps. Phil King and Bill Zedler, fresh off their last great success managing to screw in a lightbulb together, moved on to high-dollar electricity trading, only to lose hundreds of thousands in what became a Ponzi scheme. Speaking to reporter Gromer Jeffers, Christian was circumspect about the whole thing:

“There were some of us that he hooked. Sometimes you get took, sometimes you don’t. You hate to say you were a sucker, but he took us for a sucker and made off with the money.”

The Morning News judiciously describes one way the scheme’s architect, Archer Bonnema, managed to get in with the conservative Christian lawmaker crowd:

He had been closely linked with the community for years, often distributing video accounts of a 2006 expedition to Iran, led by Dr. Bob Cornuke, that he participated in. Bonnema said they discovered Noah’s Ark, though experts have disputed the claim.

Speaking of electricity markets, here’s Democratic Senate candidate (with a massive lead in recent polls) Kesha Rogers, quoted by the Observer‘s Emily DePrang this week:

Another policy priority is planetary defense, which is “how we are going to defend the planet from asteroids which are very seriously threatening the planet.” The same technology push will help with the “development of a successful industrialization of the moon,” she says, “[for] the mining of raw materials and resources such as helium-3 on the moon, which is a productive resource for developing fusion. I am a very strong supporter and proponent of fusion development as a source of energy.”

Whether it’s her space mining policy, her insistence on impeaching President Obama, or positive associations with the recording artist Ke$ha, Rogers had a 12-point lead in the Texas Tribune and UT poll released this week. It’s been enough to scare the Texas Democratic Party into blasting an email with the hard-to-mistake subject line, “Don’t Vote for Kesha Rogers.” The email includes the phrase “Do not vote for Kesha Rogers” twice, and party chair Gilberto Hinojosa explains:

Rogers believes that the U.S. economy is secretly controlled by London financial institutions and she has advocated for colonizing Mars. That’s not what real Democrats stand for.

Austin Democratic consultant Jason Stanford might quibble with that last point.

And finally, This Week in Xenophobia, state Rep. Debbie Riddle responds to her Lebanese-born challenger Tony Noun’s claim that Riddle told him to “go back to your country and run a campaign” after a Noun volunteer planted a campaign sign next to Riddle’s. Speaking to the Observer‘s Chris Hooks, Riddle wouldn’t deny making the remarks, but stressed that “there’s context missing”:

“All he spoke was Arabic.”

By way of proving her love of all cultures, Riddle—the woman who popularized the term “terror babies”—added that “half of my volunteers, quite frankly, are minority.”

Make no such mistake about lieutenant governor hopeful Dan Patrick, though, who came under fire from a rival campaign for a letter (which Patrick denies writing) vouching for an undocumented immigrant who once worked for him. Responding to a story about the “former illegal alien” in Breitbart Texas:

“Sen. Patrick stated that the worker in question provided false documents and a social security number, that the allegation he was kind to the illegal alien are not true…”

That was, of course, not the last time this week Patrick had to defend himself against the appearance of a bleeding heart. Even fits of campaign posturing can use an editor:

Two weeks after hearing oral arguments in an attempt to overturn Texas’ ban on same-sex marriage, U.S. District Judge Orlando Garcia offered an early sign that he agrees the ban is unconstitutional.

On Wednesday, Garcia granted a preliminary injunction against further enforcement of Texas’ same-sex marriage ban, saying the two couples—two men from Plano and two Austin women—were likely to prevail at a trial. That would have allowed the two men to marry here, and let the two women to have their Massachusetts marriage recognized in Texas—except that Garcia also stayed his injunction pending a decision in the ultra-conservative U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Today’s ruling doesn’t change much in practical terms—as the lawyers noted in court, because the suit isn’t a class action, the injunction would only have applied to the four plaintiffs anyway—but it’s being heralded as another small step in a nationwide march toward same-sex marriage that’s become more of a sprint in the last few months.

Garcia’s order, and the stay, recognized this lawsuit’s place as just one in a complex and fast-changing world of court rulings on same-sex marriage around the country, all leading to a likely resolution with the U.S. Supreme Court. But it also armed opponents of Texas’ 2005 ban with some powerful language. (You can read the whole thing below.)

Texas’ ban, Garcia wrote, “causes needless stigmatization and humiliation for children being raised by the loving same-sex couples being targeted.” That’s a direct response to the state’s main argument that Texas has an interest in kids growing up in healthy, loving families, which it argued couldn’t include those with same-sex parents. Anyway, as Garcia observes, “procreation is not and has never been a qualification for marriage.”

Garcia said the state never backed up its claim that letting gay and lesbian couples marry somehow harms heterosexual marriage. Texas’ ban, he writes, is unconstitutional because it violates the couples’ rights to equal protection, later adding, “this court does not find justification for the disparate treatment of homosexuals.”

“Today’s Court decision,” he writes, “is not made in defiance of the great people of Texas or the Texas Legislature, but in compliance with the United States Constitution and Supreme Court precedent.”

Responses to the ruling from politicians and activists came fast. The national group Freedom to Marry recognized that Garcia’s decision put Texas in league with Utah, Ohio, Oklahoma, Kentucky and Virginia, where judges have all recently tossed same-sex marriage bans. “With 47 marriage cases in 25 states now moving forward, and the possibility that a freedom to marry case will again reach the Supreme Court as soon as 2015, we must continue the conversations and progress—Texan to Texan, American to American—that show that all of America is ready for the freedom to marry,” said the group’s founder Evan Wolfson.

Republican lieutenant governor candidate Dan Patrick seemed momentarily swayed by Garcia’s reasoning this afternoon, tweeting, “MARRIAGE= ONE MAN & ONE MAN,” before copping to his own “oops” moment.

Like many Texas Republicans, Gov. Rick Perry largely stuck to a state’s rights argument.

“Texans spoke loud and clear by overwhelmingly voting to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman in our Constitution,” he said in a statement, “and it is not the role of the federal government to overturn the will of our citizens. The 10th Amendment guarantees Texas voters the freedom to make these decisions.”

Notably, Perry did not spend a lot of time moralizing about how banning same-sex marriage is for the “eternal benefit of our children,” as he did in 2005 when he signed legislation that put the ban in front of voters. Instead, marriage equality is now consigned to the same status as other “10th Amendment” issues—gun rights, environmental regulation and healthcare. And perhaps that’s a tacit reflection of how much things have changed since 2005, when Texas voters approved amending the state constitution to include a ban on same-sex marriage. The vote wasn’t even close: 76 percent to 24 percent. Of Texas’ 254 counties, the only one with a majority voting “no” was Travis County. Good old Republic of Austin.

Still, the special constitutional election hardly represented the permanent, conclusive “will of our citizens.” Turnout was only 17 percent and almost certainly skewed older, white and conservative relative to the state’s population. (Leaving aside, of course, the wisdom of putting rights to a vote.)

And in sociopolitical terms 2005 is a long, long time ago.

In 2005, only 29 Democrats in the Texas House voted against the proposed same-sex marriage ban—and many of those said they were only doing so for technical reasons. Here’s what former state Rep. Jim Dunnam, who was Democratic caucus chair at the time, and state Rep. Pete Gallego (now a congressman) had to say at the time:

“I fully agree that the institution of marriage should be limited to one man and one woman. I supported the Defense of Marriage Act, which is current Texas law. If that were the issue before us today, I would vote the same way again.”

Just in the past few years, there has been a seismic shift in public opinion on same-sex marriage. Texas has not been immune to this trend. Roughly 70 percent of Texans now support either same-sex marriage or civil unions (39 percent and 30 percent, respectively) and pro-marriage equality is the plurality view among Texans. While that’s still not a majority expressing support for allowing gays and lesbians to marry, the trend is pushing inexorably in that direction, as the courts have clearly recognized.

Even if the Supreme Court leaves this decision up to states, would Rick Perry be willing to put same-sex marriage to a vote again today? Should we test the will of the people again? How about in five years? Or 10?

Remember CSCOPE, the state-produced curriculum tool used by the majority of Texas’ schools to plan out classroom lessons and ensure they’re covering the state’s education standards? Not ringing a bell?

What about CSCOPE, the stealth doomsday device planted by the socialists, Marxists, Muslims, anarchists, environmentalists, artists, Obama cronies and agents of the United Nations who secretly control what your children learn in Texas schools? Right, that CSCOPE.

The obscure curriculum tool that went overnight from, at worst, a frustrating tool of school bureaucracy, to a covert plot threatening our American freedoms is back in the news this week, thanks to the Austin American-Statesman‘s Kate Alexander.

The long-awaited independent review of CSCOPE’s lessons is finally complete, and the Statesman, in a Saturday story tucked behind its paywall, did the hard work of reading through them all and synthesizing the results.

“There is a war going on right now in this country for the heart and soul of who we are and who we will be. … There is a fear that that war has now gone down into the trenches of the classroom,” state Sen. Dan Patrick, R-Houston, told the American-Statesman last summer. “Is that the aim of CSCOPE? That’s still under investigation.”

Six months later, there is an answer to that question. It was met with a collective “meh.”

Of the 140-plus volunteers tasked by the State Board of Education with reviewing the lessons, Alexander writes, “fewer than 10 of the panelists found evidence of pervasive liberal bias.”

These volunteers are a self-selecting group of folks including many CSCOPE truthers, and not even 10 found evidence of some political or religious tilt to the lessons.

For months last year, state Sen. Dan Patrick and Lt. Gov. David Dewhurst jockeyed for the title of CSCOPE-buster-in-chief, hinting at the mighty reckoning they’d visit on CSCOPE’s architects someday. “I’m going to step all over their face on this,” Dewhurst famously said.

As a result of the controversy, the collaborative of regional education service centers that managed CSCOPE dissolved their nonprofit, changed the program’s name and quit selling licenses for the lessons. School board members ran, and won, on anti-CSCOPE platforms. Districts faced lawsuits, and activists swamped school board meetings. In its Saturday story, the Statesman points to a Dallas Morning News report that Irving ISD even “spent $1.3 million to design a replacement curriculum compared to the $190,000 it spent annually on CSCOPE.”

On Monday, the Texas Freedom Network’s Dan Quinn wondered whether teachers would get an apology from the folks who inflated the controversy. Dewhurst’s spokesman wouldn’t comment on the review for the Statesman.

The controversy began with a handful of now-infamous lessons such as an exercise asking kids to imagine the Boston Tea Party as an “act of terror” from the British perspective. The line from activists from the start was that they’d only gotten their hands on a few lessons; just imagine the horrors they’d find when all the lessons were public.

The reviews were posted online in late January, as a series of Microsoft Word files in which individual reviewers answer whether—using U.S. history as an example—the lessons “fairly and accurately” present things like “positive aspects of US heritage” and “males and females in various activities.” In free-form summary documents, reviewers were given a little more authorial freedom.

Bill Ames of Dallas, a longtime textbook reviewer for the state board, who devotes both his activism and his grooming to keeping the Founding Fathers’ legacy alive, penned a 12-pages “minority report” on the U.S. history lessons because he was outvoted by other reviewers. He begins with a point-by-point critique of lessons, then maneuvers into an anecdote about meeting “a group of disheveled young people, one of whom was [a] young lady in her early twenties.”

The girl’s distinguishing characteristic was a prominent nose ring.

The young lady, carrying a “Stop Fracking” sign, was adamant that fossil fuel exploration is destroying the Earth’s biodiversity.

The tragedy is that this young woman, due to her brainwashed, dogmatic behavior, is virtually unemployable as a professional in mainstream America.

CONCLUSION – CSCOPE IS THE OBAMACARE OF PUBLIC EDUCATION –IT CANNOT BE FIXED

As the Statesman notes, the most vocal anti-CSCOPE activists like Alice Linahan have already transitioned to new worries about the national Common Core standards ruining Texas schools (Texas has rejected the Common Core standards, but they’re the Next Big Conspiracy for tea party groups elsewhere).

Ginger Russell, the Houston tea party activist who helped launch the CSCOPE outrage, hasn’t mentioned the review’s conclusions on her Red Hot Conservative blog, but weighs in often on the more general specter of “transformation” or change. And Russell still blames the usual suspects for the latest looming disaster: superintendents, technology, Islam, Obama and the United Nations.

Three former professors filed a federal lawsuit late Thursday morning against the University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College, escalating a two-year battle over tenure rights between faculty members and the schools.

The two schools—one a state-funded university, the other a community college—are splitting after a 20-year partnership that’s become strained in recent years as the separate entities argued over budgets and other decisions.

As the Observer reported in May, the separation has left some faculty members without the jobs they’d been guaranteed years earlier. Others have been re-hired but without tenure. The schools announced their separation in November 2010, but aren’t scheduled to completely split until August 2015.

Last year, laid-off nursing professor Karen Fuss-Sommer told the Observer: “I’m a dedicated employee, have been a dedicated faculty member of our institution from the day I stepped on that campus, and this is how it ends for me.” Now, she’s one of three former faculty members suing to get their old jobs back, with tenure, at Texas Southmost College, along with back pay and benefits.

According to the terms of the schools’ original partnership, if the schools ever split, Texas Southmost could re-hire the faculty given a pink slip from UT Brownsville.-Tenured faculty who’d been with the schools since 1992 would be guaranteed similar jobs with tenure at Texas Southmost.

But that’s not what happened when the schools began their divorce.

Last year, UT-Brownsville President Juliet Garcia told the Observer her school had to cut staff to match a student body projected to shrink as the schools split. UT Brownsville has shed more than 360 of its 518 faculty members so far (the school is also in the midst of combining with UT-Pan American into the new UT-Rio Grande Valley).

This week’s lawsuit, filed with the help of the Texas Faculty Association and the Texas State Teachers Association, came after a U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission investigation resulted in a “right to sue” letter saying the schools refused to cooperate with the commission to mediate charges of discrimination.

A TSTA press release said Fuss-Sommer, Juan Antonio Gonzalez and Dorothy Boven were fired using a process that gave non-tenured faculty members priority over tenured faculty, and went against University of Texas System rules. The suit claims that process was especially hard on faculty members over age 40, and was an “artificial, arbitrary, and unnecessary barrier to employment.”

“All tenure is a right to due process and you can’t be let go without good cause,” Texas Faculty Association Executive Director Mary Aldridge told the Observer. “They didn’t do either. These people have been there for decades and they just washed them.”

Although Texas Southmost has hired Fuss-Sommer, Gonzalez and Boven according to the original partnership agreement, the professors no longer hold tenured positions and have taken a pay cut. The three have lost retirement benefits, including health and life insurance policies and, the suit claimed, suffered “damage to both their professional and personal reputation.”