As I write, the NCAA basketball championship game is upon us, and there is no bigger spectacle in college athletics than the Final Four.  And I’m a big fan, but I continue to worry about the imbalances in the way we measure and reward success for these young athletes and the schools they represent.  I have mentioned on several occasions the report of the Knight Commission which highlights these imbalanced priorities and I wonder who is paying attention to the perverse incentives that are being cultivated and the resulting corruption of the mission of higher education.  On the eve of Final Four weekend Secretary of Education Arne Duncan wrote a compelling op/ed in which he reminds us of the Commission’s analysis which shows a revenue formula badly skewed to reward success on the court despite a total absence of success off the court by players at many participating schools in terms of progress toward graduation.  In fact, over the past five tournaments, 44% of the total payout of more than $400 million went to teams that were not on track to graduate at least half of their players!

Several schools have good records in this regard, and the women’s programs have much better records than the men’s programs even on the same campuses.  For example, the Connecticut women’s team has a graduation rate of over 90% vs. the men’s average of 50% and only 25% for its black players.  Need I add the obvious conclusion that the difference is almost surely the fact that the men’s game has been more corrupted by the monetary incentives of the professional leagues?

It has been suggested to me that these imbalances as well as those that plague college football can only be cured when we find a way to alter human nature.  Well, maybe so, but I have a few suggestions to change the incentive structure:  One is to change the weighting of the criteria in the revenue distribution formula to reward schools that have an acceptable percentage of their players on track to graduate; two is to disqualify from the playoffs those teams that do not have a three-year trailing percentage of on-track players of at least 50% or maybe higher; and three, which applies to football as well, is to adopt the same recruiting rules as with college baseball, which provide that once a recruit signs to attend and play for a school, he isn’t eligible for the professional draft until age 21 or completion of eligibility.  There are other changes I would make as well, such as requiring that the NFL and NBA reimburse the colleges for the total cost of the scholarships for players drafted each year on the grounds that they now are providing a cost-free farm system for the professional leagues.  And there is one change I wouldn’t make, which is to compensate the college players, but these are debates for another day.

I am resigned to the reality that we will never achieve the purity of the student-athlete myth in the major sports in the top division of intercollegiate athletics except in the rarest of cases, but we must halt this slide toward the corruption of the mission of higher education that is manifest in the perverse incentive system in college athletics.

I don’t have any particular insights on our mission in Libya.  Granted, this is a difficult call.  We are in uncharted territory here.  But I have at least come to some preliminary conclusions in my thinking:

* Libya is our business, we have interests there, and they are not all about oil.

* We shouldn’t intervene everywhere, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t intervene anywhere.

* Gadhafi is evil incarnate, has been a U. S. enemy for over 40 years, and his overthrow should be an objective.

* What follows Gadhafi is important, but not decisive in terms of our involvement, however much we want to control the succession.

* Freedom is messy–it took eleven years to form our government after declaring our independence from tyranny and we still had to fight a civil war to preserve it.

* Despite pains to deny it, the legacy of the Bush Doctrine is inexorably working its way through the Middle East, and we should be pleased.  As Bernard Lewis has said, “the tyrannies are doomed”.

* Democracy as we understand it is not the end game.  The important outcomes are the rule of law and a reasonably open and tolerant society.

No question that the Obama administration botched the first couple of weeks of the uprising in Libya, when more assertive support of the rebels could possibly have been decisive; his pronouncements have been confusing; and I don’t like the idea of NATO command of U. S. forces and being somewhat beholden to the Arab League in our terms of engagement.  But we are appropriately there, we have committed allies,  and we should finish the job.

The current Texas legislative session is largely about the budget crisis, and the media reports have particularly sensationalized the potential cuts in public education funding, but if one looks more closely, there is a larger threat in public education policy, one that would undermine much of the progress we have made in standards and accountability.

Before getting into the specifics of the threats to accountability, I will briefly retrace why the recent Texas public education reforms were necessary and why the Legislature spent so much time and effort crafting them (not to mention how much money the state has already spent preparing for the reforms to take effect).

Prior to the adoption of education reforms like the landmark HB 3 in 2009, we needed more rigorous high school curriculum with serious and focused assessment and accountability.  Among many other provisions, these reforms called for the end of the dreaded TAKS exit exam in high school to be replaced with end-of-course exams in the 12 core high school subjects.

This was a big step forward because these exams could be used as finals, total testing time could be reduced by the elimination of TAKS, and instruction could be devoted entirely to the curriculum instead of teaching to an unrelated test.  Educators, parents, and students would take these courses and exams seriously because the exams would count as 15% of course grades.

All of this means that for the first time, after HB 3 is fully implemented, postsecondary readiness, meaning college and 21st century workplace readiness, would be the organizing principle of the Texas school accountability system, the bottom line of which is that when a student walks across the stage and receives a Texas high school diploma it will mean that he or she is prepared for college and the 21^st century workplace without the need for remediation.   What this new organizing principle further means is that we have adopted a postsecondary ramp, with benchmarks for achievement at every grade level and vertically aligned assessments that tell us where every child is on that ramp leading to the postsecondary readiness standard as the exit.

We have been on a journey leading to this standard and these expectations for our students and our educators for over a decade.  With the adoption of HB 3 in 2009, we are there.

These reforms increased focus on quality instruction, eliminated time spent teaching to an unrelated test, and the end-of-course exams tests mattered in students’ grades.  All of this gave great hope to getting students more prepared for college or a meaningful career.  This was a very big deal, a “stop the presses” moment in reform.  In fact, Achieve, Inc., a national consortium of business and education leaders, named Texas as the only state that met all of its criteria for college and career readiness graduation standards.

Now, a series of proposals in the current session threaten to roll back all of that progress and return to the pre-HB 3 days, to delay implementation of these provisions, to revisit the old HB 3 debates, the old TAKS complaints, in short, to refight the last war.

If these proposals become law:

* End-of-course high school exams will not count as part of the student’s grade in the course.

* Graduation standards will be lowered so that students will be able to fail miserably as many as eight of the twelve end of  course exams and still receive a high school diploma.  This means a student would have no motivation whatsoever to take seriously English I or II, Geometry, two of the science exams, and two of the social studies exams.  As far as the critical matter of math and science, students won’t have any motivation to take geometry or chemistry and physics seriously.

* Yet another proposal calls for a moratorium on end-of-course-exams and suggests taking the savings and giving those funds to teachers.  Talk about shortchanging students’ education to pay adults more money!

All of the promise of our existing reforms to prepare our students for the future is wiped away by this series of proposals.  If they pass, we risk failing our students just as we are on the brink of great promise.

Those who would like to do away with testing or delay implementing end-of-course exams are focusing on a hollow argument about costs.  And in the current budget environment, we expected that.  But if reliability of funding for instructional and curriculum materials is the issue here, we should have that discussion, and you will find that our organization, TIER and its allies, fully support the necessary funding for the implementation of HB 3 on schedule, including the end of course exams, and I cannot conceive of legislators leaving town in June without fully funding the textbooks and other instructional materials our students need to begin the next school year.

You will also find that we aggressively support the maintenance of funding that provides much-needed intervention to support remedial initiatives in the schools for those students who need it.  But we shouldn’t allow the budget crunch to be a red herring in delaying the full implementation of these enhanced standards and altering the ultimate mission of public education.  We shouldn’t fight the last war and we shouldn’t reopen the provisions of the legislation that has put Texas back at the top in our expectations for our educators and our kids.

For more information on this issue and how you can help, go to www.texaseducationreform.org.

Hats off to Congressman Peter King for conducting hearings on the risks of domestic infiltration of radical Muslim jihadists.  We have for too long deferred this conversation, and it shouldn’t be and isn’t about intolerance or discrimination, for Americans of all people do not need to be lectured about tolerance–our very creed is grounded in it, however imperfectly we have sometimes practiced it.  But this discussion should also be broadened to include the insidious concept of multiculturalism and how it has undermined our creed and our commitment to assimilation of  foreign cultures as policy.

And we should also have another discussion, or rather we should encourage our Muslim intellectual class to have it, and that is a discussion about the core philosophical underpinnings of the Muslim faith.  For as I have previously noted in my review of The Closing of the Muslim Mind by Robert Reilly, Islam must return to the ideological choices it made in the period from the ninth to the twelfth century that began its divergence with the West.  These ideas are not a radical perversion of Islam, they are part and parcel of Islam itself, have been embedded for a millennium, and are inimical to reason.  We’re talking about a reformation here and, like it or not, we cannot avoid being in the middle of it.

Recently there has been a flurry of concern, mainly in the administration and faculty lounges and among some influential alumni of The University of Texas and Texas A&M, about initiatives for accountability in higher education developed by the Texas Public Policy Foundation (TPPF) and  supported by Gov. Rick Perry.   The initiatives primarily consist of a list of seven “breakthrough solutions” for higher education in Texas, the implementation of some of which are already underway at Texas A&M.  (Full disclosure:  I was a founding Director of the TPPF 20 years ago and served on its board for five years.)   They are available at www.texashighered.com, and some of them I find to be pretty reasonable attempts at crafting an agenda for accountability.  The more threatening of them evidently involve the separation of the accountability for research from that of teaching, which I can understand, but which is a debate we should at least engage.

There is little doubt that more accountability for higher education outcomes is long overdue and we should have no fear of the process.  Both basic and applied research have value and should be pursued for their own sake as well as their contribution to student learning, but we should have well developed criteria in place that objectively measures this value to the extent possible and we should also have objective criteria in place that assesses teaching.

I remember a conversation I had with the President of Stephen F. Austin State University when I was a member of its Board of Regents many years ago.  I suggested that we should develop an evaluation system for faculty and he asked what we should use as criteria, to which I responded that we could start by surveying our customers.  His response was, “who are our customers?”  I was initially shocked but have since come to realize that this concept mystifies many in the education establishment.  Incidentally, we fired this man within several months of this conversation.