Politics

How Obama Reversed Course on Federal College Ratings

Published

9 years ago

July 3, 2015

President Barack Obama speaks at the University of Wisconsin at La Crosse, in La Crosse, Wis., Thursday, July 2, 2015, about the economy and to promote a proposed Labor Department rule that would make more workers eligible for overtime. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)

JOSH LEDERMAN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama dearly wanted to get the government in the business of rating colleges and universities based on value and affordability, promising a new system by 2015. Now that goal is shriveling under the weight of a concerted opposition from universities, lawmakers and bureaucrats in Obama’s own administration.

Nearly two years after the president, standing before a crowd of 7,000 at the University at Buffalo, unveiled the bold proposal as a way to curb soaring college costs, his administration has quietly but drastically scaled back the initiative. No longer does the federal government intend to use a formula to score schools based on factors like price, average student debt and graduation rates, as Obama had envisioned.

Instead, the new tool will allow prospective students to decide which factors are important to them, then draw their own conclusions from the statistics. But the Education Department declined to say which new statistics the tool will offer that aren’t already available on existing government websites.

Abandoning the original plan marked the latest in a series of stumbles for Obama’s education priorities. In his 2013 State of the Union address, Obama called for expanding access to pre-kindergarten to all American children, and in his 2015 address, he pushed a $60 billion plan to offer two years of free community college. Neither proposal has gained any traction.

The Education Department said it’s still determining what the revised college tool will look like, but that it’s still on track to roll it out by the start of the 2015-2016 academic year, roughly two months from now.

“It is anything but a retreat,” Education Department Undersecretary Ted Mitchell said in an interview. “It’s a retooling and, we think, an advance on the original concept.”

Yet Obama’s goal, as he described when he announced the plan in August 2013, was to create an alternative to private rankings like U.S. News and World Report whose formulas incentivize schools to “game the numbers” and even raise costs. Instead, Obama sought a system that prioritized whether schools are enrolling and graduating poorer students and whether their graduates succeed in the workforce.

“I think we should rate colleges based on opportunity — are they helping students from all kinds of backgrounds succeed — and on outcomes, on their value to students and parents,” Obama said. He took it a step further by proposing that Congress eventually tie a school’s eligibility for federal financial aid to its score in the new ratings system.

Resistance to Obama’s plan was swift, vehement and nearly universal.

Associations representing colleges with traditionally conflicting interests — such as community colleges and private universities — all lined up in opposition, warning the project was too complex, too subjective and too dependent on shoddy data to ever work fairly. As the Education Department mounted an extensive, lengthy listening tour across the country, college presidents warned of dire unintended consequences and implored the government to reconsider.

On Capitol Hill, the proposal drew pushback not only from the president’s traditional Republican foes, but also some Democrats. Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a former education secretary and chair of the Senate’s education panel, took to the Senate floor to threaten an amendment blocking the ratings system. And in the House, Republican Rep. Bob Goodlatte of Virginia and Democratic Rep. Michael Capuano of Massachusetts — two states with large numbers of colleges — joined forces to sponsor a resolution opposing Obama’s plan.

“Do I think they would have continued if no one had pushed back? Of course I do,” Capuano said.

But for nearly two years, the administration stuck to the original plan. In a blog post in December 2014, the Education Department said it was considering rating schools as high-performing, medium-performing or low-performing and outlined a few potential metrics, but disappointed many by failing to flesh out the formula it would use to assign ratings.

Driving the decision to stick with a ratings system was Obama, who was dead-set on carrying out his original vision for the project, according to interviews with nearly a dozen congressional aides, administration officials and college association leaders. Many of them spoke on condition of anonymity to avoid criticizing the president publicly.

From the start, career bureaucrats and data experts at the Education Department said the idea wasn’t feasible, but met continued White House resistance, those officials said. Technical experts in the education industry that the administration consulted offered similar warnings. Eventually, higher-level Education Department officials grew convinced the plan was unworkable, and persuaded the White House to allow a scaled-back approach devoid of hard-and-fast ratings.

“We are right where the president wanted us to be in terms of making progress toward his vision,” said James Kvaal, deputy director of the White House’s Domestic Policy Council.

University associations that had fought the proposal praised the Obama administration for taking their concerns seriously and eventually agreeing to abandon the initial plan, calling it a rare example of the government acknowledging its own missteps.

“They really did listen on this,” said Sarah Flanagan, the top lobbyist for the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities. “The more they looked into it, they realized it wasn’t doable.”

___

Reach Josh Lederman on Twitter at http://twitter.com/joshledermanAP

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Activism

‘Jim Crow Was and Remains Real in Alameda County (and) It Is What We Are Challenging and Trying to Fix Every Day,’ Says D.A. Pamela Price

“The legacy of Jim Crow is not just a legacy in Alameda County. It’s real. It is what is happening and how (the system is) operating, and that is what we are challenging and trying to fix every day,” said D.A. Price, speaking to the Oakland Post by telephone for over an hour last Saturday. “Racial disparities in this county have never been effectively eliminated, and we are applying and training our lawyers on the (state’s) Racial Justice Act, and we’re implementing it in Alameda County every day,” she said.

Published

5 hours ago

November 2, 2024

Oakland Post

Exclusive interview with County D.A. Price days before recall election. Photo by Ken Epstein.

By Ken Epstein

Part One

Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price gave an exclusive in-depth interview, speaking with the Oakland Post about the continuing legacy of Jim Crow injustice that she is working to overturn and her major achievements, including:

restoring and expanding services for victims of crime,
finding funding for an alternative to incarceration and/or prosecution for substance use and mental health-related misdemeanors and
aggressively prosecuting corporations for toxic pollution and consumer violations.

“Racial disparities in this county have never been effectively eliminated, and we are applying and training our lawyers on the (state’s) Racial Justice Act, and we’re implementing it in Alameda County every day,” she said.

Passed by the State Legislature, this law “is an extremely helpful tool for us to address the racial disparities that continue to exist in our system,” she said.

(The law addresses) “the racial disparities that we find in our juvenile justice system, where 86% of all felony juvenile arrests in the county are Black or Brown children.

“We trained the entire workforce on the Racial Justice Act. We are creating a data system that will allow us to look at the trends and to clearly identify where racism has infected the process. We know that where law enforcement is still engaging in racial profiling and unfair targeting and arresting, we’re trying to make sure we’re catching that.”

Many people do not know much about the magnitude of Alameda County District Attorney’s job. Her office is a sprawling organization with 10 offices serving 1.6 million people living in 14 cities and six unincorporated areas, with a budget this year of about $104 million.

Asked about her major achievements since she took office last year, she is especially proud of the expanded and renewed victims’ services division in the DA’s Office, she said.

“We have expanded and reorganized the entire claims division so that we are now expediting as much as possible the benefits that victims are entitled to. Under my predecessor, they were having to wait anywhere, sometimes as long as a year, to 400 days to get benefits.

“Claims had been denied that should not have been denied. So, we’re helping people file appeals on claims that were denied under her tenure,” D.A. Price said.

“Under my predecessor, (the victims’ service office) was staffed by people who were not trained to provide trauma-informed services to victims, and yet they were the only people that the victims were in contact with. We immediately stopped that practice,” she continued.

“We had to expand the advocate workforce to include people who speak Hmong, the indigenous language of so many people in this county who are victims of crime.”

More African Americans advocates were hired because they represent the largest percentage of crime victims and we hired a transgender advocate and advocates who speak Cantonese and Mandarin. “The predominantly Chinese American community in Oakland was not being served by advocates who speak the language,” said D Price

“We reduced the lag time from the delivery of benefits to victims from 300 to 400 days down to less than 60 days.”

She increased victim advocacy by 38%, providing critical support to over 22,500 victims, a key component of community safety.

Other major achievements:

She recently filed 12 felony charges against a man accused of multiple armed robberies, demonstrating her seriousness about prosecuting violent crimes
In October, a jury delivered a guilty verdict in the double murder trial of former Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputy Devin Williams, showing DA Price’s commitment to holding law enforcement accountable.
She recently charged a man and woman in unincorporated San Leandro with murder, felony unlawful firearm activity, and felony carrying a loaded firearm in public.
A. Price’s office was awarded a $6 million grant by the state for its CARES Navigation Center diversion program. In partnership with the UnCuffed Project at a Seventh Day Adventist Church in Oakland, the program provides resources and referrals for services to residents as an alternative to incarceration and/or prosecution for substance use and mental health-related misdemeanors.

“This is the largest grant investment in the history of the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office,” said D.A. Price.

She explained that the program now has a mobile unit. “We have washers and dryers. We have a living room. We have a television. It’s a place where people can decompress, get themselves stabilized,” she said.

The project has “the ability to refer people to housing, to more long-term mental health services, to social services, and to assist them in other ways.”

Her office joined in a $49 million statewide settlement with Kaiser Health Plan and Hospitals, resolving allegations that the healthcare provider unlawfully disposed of hazardous waste, medical waste, and protected health information. The settlement, which involved the state and a half dozen counties, resulted in Alameda County receiving $7 million for its residents.
DA Price charged a former trucking company employee for embezzling over $4.3 million, showing her commitment to tackling white-collar crime.
For the first time, Alameda County won a criminal grand jury indictment of a major corporation with two corporate officers that have been sources of pollution. “They had a record of settlements and pollution in this community, and they had a fire that constituted a grave danger,” she said.

Attorney Walter Riley contributed to this article.

See Part Two

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Activism

‘Criminal Justice Reform Is the Signature Civil Rights Issue of Our Time,’ says D.A. Pamela Price

Speaking about the destructive impact of mass incarceration, Price asked people to consider “how many children have incarcerated parents, where the practice has always been to isolate and eliminate connections between people who are incarcerated and their children and their families and the community. So, when we bring people home, they have no more connection.”

Published

5 hours ago

November 2, 2024

Oakland Post

“People have no idea what the vision is for the next district attorney, or where the office will go if I am, in fact, recalled, she continued. “I'm just running against a billionaire,” who does not show his face in public, she said. Courtesy photo.

“As long as our criminal justice system is stuck in the mentality and practices of the 1950s, our country is not going to move forward,” she said.

By Ken Epstein

Part Two

District Attorney Pamela Price, facing a recall that began before she took office in January 2023, explained in an exclusive interview with the Oakland Post how she came to dedicate her life to transforming a deeply flawed criminal justice system into one that provides equal justice and public safety for all and ends mass incarceration for African Americans and other working-class people.

She summarized her life experiences as someone who was “traumatized and radicalized” by Dr. King’s murder, joining the Civil Rights Movement full force, getting arrested when she was 13 years old in a civil rights demonstration, being tracked into the juvenile justice and the foster care systems, and making it as a foster kid from the streets of Cincinnati to Yale College.”

“I understand a lot of things about struggle, about sacrifice, about trauma and fortunately survived all of that, and as a survivor learned some important lessons, and I brought all of that with me into the law and have been able to become a civil rights attorney in Alameda County,” she said.

“That’s been the joy of my life; I’ve lived every lawyer’s dream,” she said.

“Years ago, when I first decided to run for district attorney, I realized that mass incarceration was so destabilizing to our communities,” she said.

She saw that the “criminal justice system has so many impacts on our community, the safety of our community, the stability of our community, the growth of our community, the direction of our community.”

“As long as our criminal justice system is stuck in the mentality and the practices of the 1950s … our society is going to be mired in discord, and we will not have social justice, racial justice, economic justice, none of the things that actually make our communities worth living in.”

It is crucial to address the needs of “young people in the juvenile justice system when they are more likely and able to be rehabilitated and redirected,” she said. Young people are much more able to be rehabilitated before the age of 18, really before the age of 26, and before they end up in an adult prison.

D.A. Price’s predecessor, Nancy O’ Malley, joined the D.A.’s office in 1984, where she remained for 39 years. She was promoted to a leadership position after just six years in the office during the era of mass incarceration when there was an explosion of prison construction in California.

“Prosecutors like my predecessor were the ones who filled (those prisons) up. She became a leader in the office around 1990. And what is very important for the public to know is that prior to becoming the district attorney in 2009, she was the chief assistant district attorney for 10 years under Tom Orloff.

“O’Malley worked very closely, hand-in-hand with him for the period of time that included the illegal conduct or the unconstitutional exclusion of Jewish people and Black people from death penalty juries.”

Commenting on the recall campaign against her, she said that had not a handful of multimillionaires and billionaires “put millions of dollars into this, we would not be having this recall. It is not a grassroots movement. It’s a platinum movement.”

“People have no idea what the vision is for the next district attorney, or where the office will go if I am, in fact, recalled, she continued. “I’m just running against a billionaire,” who does not show his face in public, she said.

If they successfully paint Oakland as a failed city, then hedge fund billionaires and real estate developers can come in and buy up the property cheap, she said.

Though D.A. Price has been bombarded by a massive tsunami of lies, slanders, and misrepresentation, she remains strong and positive because she is a woman of faith, she said.

“I’ve been saved and guided by (a) higher power since I was 13 years old. So, I’m not a new person to faith, and I’m grounded in that,” she said.