New York Times

New Higher Education Bill Rolls Back Obama-Era Safeguards

By Erica L. Green         December 12, 2017 

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Representative Virginia Foxx, Republican of North Carolina and the chairwoman of the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, in March outside the White House. CreditAl Drago/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — Congressional Republicans began work Tuesday on an extensive rewrite of the law that governs the nation’s system of higher education, seeking to dismantle landmark Obama administration regulations designed to protect students from predatory for-profit colleges and to repay the loans of those who earned worthless degrees from scam universities.

But in its systematic effort to erase President Barack Obama’s fingerprints from higher education, the measure before the House Committee on Education and the Workforce could undermine bedrock elements that have guided university education for decades. One provision could do away with the system of “credit hours” that college students earn to complete their degrees, which could help for-profit colleges inflate the value of their degrees.

The bill “addresses many of the ill-conceived mandates handed down by the Obama administration in favor of policies that will allow higher education to meet the current needs of students,” said Representative Virginia Foxx of North Carolina, the committee chairwoman and the chief author of the Promoting Real Opportunity, Success and Prosperity Through Education Reform (PROSPER) Act.

Many elements of the bill pursue bipartisan goals: simplifying the federal financial aid process, cutting down on student debt and expanding programs like federal work-study programs.

But the bill’s efforts to roll back the Obama legacy will divide Congress and the education community along partisan lines — and bolster efforts already underway by Education Secretary Betsy DeVos to boost the fortunes of for-profit colleges and universities. Two of the Obama-era regulations of for-profit colleges and universities — called “gainful employment” and “borrower defense” — are being rewritten by Ms. DeVos’s Education Department. Under the House bill, they would be repealed and blocked from readoption.

A lesser-known, more complex “credit hour” rule also completed by the Obama administration would suffer the same fate. Policy experts say the undermining of university credits would be among the most consequential provisions in the 542-page bill, illustrating how in their haste to erase Obama’s regulatory legacy, Republicans could disrupt a higher education system that is considered the best in the world.

“The credit hour is the bedrock of the entire higher education system, so it could be catastrophic,” said Amy Laitinen, a former Obama administration staff member and the director of higher education at New America, a research group. “This could do things we can’t even imagine yet — like open up the door to a whole new breed of for-profit institution, without any safeguards.”

The coveted “credit” has become the standard measure for virtually every element of higher education, from schedules to degree requirements to financial aid qualifications. In 2011, the Obama administration issued rules that set minimum requirements for awarding college credits after finding that lax oversight allowed for-profit institutions to inflate credit hours for each class, speeding up degrees and bringing in more financial aid dollars guaranteed by federal taxpayers.

A 2010 Education Department inspector general’s investigation found that one for-profit school awarded nine credits for a 10-week course, significantly more than the traditional program’s average of three credits for a 15-week course.

Under the Obama-era rules, colleges can choose from a menu of options to define a credit hour, including hours of instruction, evidence of student achievement or amount of work represented in outcomes. The Obama Education Department maintained that the definition still gave institutions plenty of room to run higher education institutions.

Still, several college and university groups opposed the rules for being intrusive and burdensome.

The American Council on Education wrote a letter to Arne Duncan, the former education secretary, on behalf of 70 institutions that opposed the definition. The council said that the inspector general’s findings should not spur a one-size-fits-all definition, and the department had “federalized a basic academic concept and, at the same time, developed a complex, ambiguous and unworkable definition.”

Ms. Foxx agreed.

“The creation of a federal definition of a credit hour was part of the Obama administration’s ‘Washington knows best’ approach to higher education, and it only created barriers to innovation for students and institutions,” she said.

But where Republicans see deregulation, others see potential chaos.

Committee Democrats called the bill a “war on students.” House Democrats said Republicans refused for months to engage in talks about reauthorizing the bill, which they characterized as a giveaway to the for-profit industry.

In addition to the gainful employment, borrower defense, and the credit-hour rules, the bill calls for repealing a requirement that for-profit institutions get at least 10 percent of their revenue from nonfinancial-aid sources.

That rule was issued because some for-profit colleges were signing up students who did not have the means or ability to complete a degree or find gainful employment. They would then secure the students loans guaranteed by the federal government, knowing that the inevitable default would be covered by taxpayers. The legislation also weakens rules that required states to take a bigger role in authorizing institutions of higher education

During Tuesday’s drafting session, Democrats offered amendments that would have restored some of the accountability measures, but all were defeated.

Representative Raja Krishnamoorthi, Democrat of Illinois, said the wholesale regulatory repeal “makes it more likely students would pursue worthless degrees.”

But Representative Paul Mitchell, Republican of Michigan, said Democratic attempts to restore the rules unfairly targeted the for-profit sector and represented a “false dichotomy that continues to devalue career and technical education which is wrong in this economy.”

Ms. Laitinen for years has advocated “cracking the credit hour,” after finding that it was never intended to be used as a measure of learning, as colleges use credits now. The credit hour was originally a narrow gauge of how much time professors needed to spend in class to qualify for pensions.

Andrew Carnegie first established the modern-day credit hour in the early 1900s, allowing colleges to participate in a free pension system if they adopted the use of a “standard unit,” also known as a “Carnegie unit,” for college admissions. Faculty members who taught 12 credit units qualified for pensions, and 120 credits came to equal a bachelor’s degree.

Ms. Laitinen is among those who believe that the credit hour has become a faulty proxy for what a student knows, when really it only measures how much time they spent in a seat.

But throwing out the credit system without a replacement would reopen the system to hucksters preying on students and bilking the federal loan guarantee, she said.

“In no way are we prepared to just throw out the credit hour,” Ms. Laitinen said. “It’s hard for me to see a world where we don’t see massive fraud and abuse if this bill were passed.”

Ms. Foxx said that higher education accrediting agencies would be a line of defense for regulating colleges and universities. Her aides said that the bill contains several accountability measures, including the creation of a “data dashboard” that would provide students with information like average salaries and the debt levels of graduates from college programs. One provision would revoke federal funding for institutions that have high percentages of borrowers who are at least 90 days delinquent on loan payments.

After the credit rule began, nontraditional higher education institutions took advantage of it to be more creative in how they deliver education, for instance, offering more self-paced degree programs, online classes and experience-based assessments of learning. The number of so-called competency-based education programs, which award credits based on demonstrated mastery versus how long students spend in class, rose from 20 the year the rule went into effect to 500 in 2015, according to a New America estimate.

Paul J. LeBlanc, the president of Southern New Hampshire University, said he fears that programs like his would suffer without accountability. Mr. Obama praised his private, nonprofit college for its flexibility and affordability. The university has a program that allows students to earn a business degree in three years without attending summer classes, and another program that emphasizes career readiness through projects and real-world experiences instead of class time.

Mr. LeBlanc said the Republican higher education bill may open up opportunities for more innovation, but, he said, “It doesn’t answer the question: How do we know?”

HuffPost

White Evangelicals Voted En Masse For Roy Moore In Alabama, To No One’s Surprise

Carol Kuruvilla, HuffPost        December 13, 2017 

Doug Jones’ victory in Alabama’s special Senate election Tuesday night upset the status quo in his state in many ways ― it put a Democrat from Alabama in the U.S. Senate for the first time in 25 years, and it showed off the political clout of Alabama’s black voters.

But amid the tumult of the special election, one thing did not change. White evangelical Christians, longtime supporters of Jones’ Republican opponent Roy Moore, decided en masse to stand by their man.

According to exit polling conducted by Edison Research, 80 percent of white voters who self-identified as born-again or evangelical Christians voted for the former judge. About 18 percent voted for Jones, while another 2 percent chose to write in a candidate.

About 76 percent of everyone else ― those who didn’t identify as white evangelical Christian ― voted for Jones.

A small number of evangelicals appeared to sit out the election. Evangelicals claimed 44 percent of the total vote in Alabama, The Washington Post reports, even though they made up 47 percent of voters in the 2012 and 2008 presidential elections.

Overall, white evangelical support for Moore in Alabama stayed strong ― despite sexual assault allegations that threatened to damage his reputation in national evangelical circles. The exit poll results echoed the overwhelming loyalty that white evangelical Christians across the nation showed the Republican Party during the 2016 election, when about 81 percent voted for President Donald Trump.

 Moore has been a favorite of white evangelicals in his state for quite some time. He’s earned a reputation of being a Christian nationalist, someone who believes that America is a Christian nation favored by God, and that the government should advocate Christian, or more specifically, conservative Christian, values. Moore’s belief that God’s law trumps secular law fuels his approach toward governing, and has gotten him in legal trouble multiple times in the past. He was booted from his post as Alabama’s chief justice twice for refusing to follow federal laws that he believed contradicted his religious beliefs.

Rev. Carolyn Foster, a deacon at St. Mark’s Episcopal Church in Birmingham, was one of dozens of progressive Christian ministers in Alabama who signed a letter in November opposing Moore’s candidacy.

On Wednesday, Foster told HuffPost that she believed the white evangelical voters who supported Moore during the election were “blind and deaf” to their own unconscious bias.

“Roy Moore represented to them a time long past ― when blacks and women knew their place and Latinos and Muslims were not even in their sphere of existence,” Foster told HuffPost in an email. “This type of exclusionary and oppressive form of Christianity distorts the witness of the Church to love neighbor as self. Faith is about attaining love, peace and justice together and never at the expense of another.”

Adam Mixon, pastor of the Zion Spring Baptist Church in Birmingham, signed the letter opposing Moore. He said he believed Republicans were compromising their claim of being the party of “family values.”

“Family values seem not to matter as much as the present conservative agenda. Deep spirituality and faithfulness seem to have been set aside for a pragmatic, ‘win-at-all-cost’ approach,” Mixon told HuffPost in an email. “Whatever leverage white evangelicals may have waged with their appeal to ‘family values’ has been damaged and their witness is bereft of any real consistency.”

The unwavering support of Alabama’s white evangelicals, particularly after the emergence of sexual assault allegations against Moore, has troubled some national leaders.

In an editorial written before the election, Mark Galli, editor-in-chief of the faith-based publication Christianity Today, stated that no matter the outcome, the biggest loser in the race would be the Christian faith itself.

“When it comes to either matters of life and death or personal commitments of the human heart, no one will believe a word we say, perhaps for a generation. Christianity’s integrity is severely tarnished,” Galli wrote.

Christian commentator Peter Wehner wrote that the support many Republicans and white evangelicals were giving to Trump and Moore has caused him to rethink his identification with both groups.

“Not because my attachment to conservatism and Christianity has weakened, but rather the opposite,” he wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times. “I consider Mr. Trump’s Republican Party to be a threat to conservatism, and I have concluded that the term evangelical — despite its rich history of proclaiming the ‘good news’ of Christ to a broken world — has been so distorted that it is now undermining the Christian witness.”

Although polls demonstrated white evangelical Christians’ loyalty to Moore and to the Republican Party, black Christians had a decidedly different take.

Exit polls found that black evangelical Christians voted similarly to black Alabamians overall. About 95 percent of black evangelicals voted for Jones, while 98 percent of black non-evangelicals did the same, according to The Washington Post. 

Mixon said that black Baptists in his state tended to be very conservative morally and religiously, but progressive on political issues. He compared black Christians in his state to prophets in the Bible who, because of their position at the margins of society, had a better and clearer view of its ills.

“I believe this is the gift and the burden that black Christians and other Christians of color have been forced to bear for the duration of our national past,” he wrote. “Our suffering has proven redemptive for a nation that has often failed to live up to its creed ― that all people are created equal! We are the canaries in the mines.”

Foster said that black voters’ presence at the polls on Tuesday should be a “wake up call” for Alabama.

“Black Christians rose up and said, ‘No more.’ They made the difference in this election,” Foster wrote. “Blacks have always found strength in the church. That strength showed up at the polls and I believe will continue to move out into the community in the days ahead.”

This article has been updated with comments from Adam Mixon.

Chicago Sun Times

Steinberg: Trump and Moore lose, Jones — and America — win

U.S. Senate candidate Roy Moore rides a horse to vote during the Alabama senatorial election, Tuesday, Dec. 12, 2017, in Gallant, Ala. (AP Photo/Brynn Anderson)

Neil Steinberg       December 13, 2017

Whew!

That’s the short version.

At least the country hasn’t gone completely crazy. Any loss for Donald Trump is a win for America.

Close, but enough. Thank you, God, Jesus and Alabama. Roll Tide!

The long version is more complicated.

Put it this way:

Shame and pride had a wrestling match in Alabama on Tuesday.

Shame won.

Even in a solid Southern red state that hadn’t elected a Democratic Senator in a quarter century, the idea of electing Roy S. Moore — a  Republican, yes, but also credibly accused of groping several young women and girls — to the United States Senate was simply too much for voters to bear.

Even Republican voters. Even Alabama voters. Even in the debased, tawdry Era of Trump.

Or as NBA legend and Alabama native Charles Barkley succinctly put it, campaigning for the victor, Doug Jones: “At some point we got to stop looking like idiots to the nation.”

That point is now.

Okay, not now. It’s not as if the state had a communal change of heart since Nov. 2016, when Alabamans voted for Trump almost 2-to-1 over Hillary Clinton.

They just didn’t want to be embarrassed by electing an alleged child molester. It’s a start.

That Moore was a bad judge, is a bad man, and would certainly be a bad senator, assuming the Senate didn’t expel him immediately upon being sworn in, was not so much a factor as that electing him would look bad. Few Alabama voters seemed to care that he was dismissed from the bench, twice, for refusing to obey the law. They liked that. They’re proud of that defiant attachment to faith, a Duke of Hazzard flipping off of the man.

Doug Jones won. Even though his good qualities were eclipsed by his being a Democrat, and on the wrong side of the only moral issue that matters down there: abortion. His victory is still a reflection of the polarized, poisonous political atmosphere that this election does not change so much as ratify. Almost half the state still voted for Moore.

Jones won. But his election won’t change anything, not yet. The Senate will still be in Republican hands. And there is no defeat that Trump can’t spin into supposed victory.

Is Jones’ win a reason to be glad? Sure. But a cause for celebration? Not really.

People in Chicago only care about who represents Alabama in the Senate because that contest was seen as a bellwether for the 2018 midterm elections, a test to see if the Trump Rebellion is played out.

Does Jones’ win mean that Trumpism has reached his high water mark and will now begin to recede? Or is Jones’ victory just a pause in the rainstorm?

Celebration feels premature. Trump has suffered setback after setback since being finessed into office with — I believe — a boost from his friends the Russians. Obamacare withstood his onslaught, the military recently shrugged off his attempt to ban transgender troops. Everything bothers Trump, but nothing fazes him. He’s like that metal man in “Terminator 2.”

Jones’ victory is important because it nibbles away at Trump’s thin majority in the Senate. It also reminds us of the power of shame. Doing the right thing because people are watching you isn’t the best reason, but it will do.

This is not the beginning of the end. Maybe, to quote Winston Churchill, it’s the end of the beginning.

There is no question that the Trump administration will eventually fall apart, because it is a house built on sand. You can only get by on lies and bluster so long. Facts are facts. Climate change is real. Muslims and Hispanics make good, hard-working, tax-paying, law-abiding American citizens as well as anyone else. Gays make excellent partners, if you are so inclined and responsible parents.

The question is when.

The answer: not yet.

The election of Doug Jones does not mean that the historic intolerance and fierce partisanship of the Southland has been overcome. They have an enormous burden still.

This is a first step. Change is possible, yes. But change hasn’t happened yet or Roy S. Moore would never have been the Republican candidate. Jones’ win is merely one dry day in a season of flooding. That said, it is a welcome relief.

Tomorrow’s New York Daily News Headline

Welcome to the U.S. Senate Doug Jones and………

Esquire

What I Saw Inside Roy Moore’s Barn Burner

The message made zero sense. People lapped it up.

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By Charles P. Pierce        December 12, 2017

“One of our attorneys is a Jew.”

—Kayla Moore, for the defense

MIDLAND CITY, ALABAMA—Down here, they call this southern part of the state “the Wiregrass,” Alabama’s slice of an ecological anomaly that also covers parts of the Florida Panhandle and southern Georgia. Up off County Road 59 is a lovely little facility called Jordan’s Activity Barn. It is the venue of choice for high-end functions for people from all over Dale County. Its pale brown pine walls have appeared in hundreds of local wedding albums. On Monday night, however, it played host of one of the most incredible displays of weaponized absurdity that it has been my privilege to witness. On the other hand, the fiddle player was quite good.

You try. Seriously, you do. You give the benefit of the doubt to people because, what the hell, they’re the same species as you are, and they have the right to their opinions, and they can certainly vote into office whomever the hell they want. But sometimes, there is absolutely no way to keep faith with the truth and with your readers without pointing out that circumstances have led you into a hall of funhouse mirrors.

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On Monday night, in Jordan’s Activity Barn, they had the last rally on behalf of Judge Roy Moore, the Republican candidate in Tuesday’s special election to replace Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III in the United States Senate. The whole event was lousy with pestiferous Bible-banging. Both reality and American history were fed into individual woodchippers. The theme of the night’s devotions was that Nobody Comes Into Alabama And Tells Us How To Vote. This theme was emphasized by the night’s roster of speakers, which included: a carbuncled vandal from Virginia (Steve Bannon); a failed congressional candidate from Wisconsin (Paul Nehlen); a disgraced sheriff from Wisconsin (David Clarke, Jr.), and a sitting congressman from Texas (Louie Gohmert). They all took turns bashing all the rank outsiders who came into Alabama to campaign for Doug Jones, the Democratic nominee.

Up was down. Down was up. Thomas Paine, of all people, was enlisted in the cause of an out-and-out theocrat, and the person who did so quoted him from the wrong pamphlet anyway. Abraham Lincoln was invoked repeatedly on behalf of a neo-Confederate who speculated that the Constitution might be improved by removing the amendments passed immediately after the Civil War. Moore was defended against the allegations of child molestation by an old Army buddy who told a story about how they all were taken to a brothel in Vietnam one night and Moore refused to pay for sex with prostitutes who may have been underage. Res ipse loquitur, y’all, and the adoring crowd drank it all down like so much apple brandy.

Lord, as the late Guy Clark once put it, you’d think there’s less fools in this world.

IT WAS THE ROSE PARADE OF EMPOWERED IGNORANCE. IT WAS THE ROYAL WEDDING OF STUPID AND MEAN.

At the risk of sounding like every liberal Yankee bogeyman flitting through the minds of the assembled, this event was completely nuts. It was a naked appeal to unreason. It was the Rose Parade of empowered ignorance. It was the Royal Wedding of Stupid and Mean. It was the Celebration of the Lizard Brain. The Id was in the saddle, and it was riding the crowd, and the barker at this particular carnival of fools was quite happy to bring all the suckers in out of the Alabama dark and into the freak show he’d created.

This was the first time I’d ever seen the Steve Bannon Show in person, and I was struck by how completely full of painfully obvious horseshit he is. A rootless cosmopolitan, a former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, a former producer who worked in godless Hollywood, a man who wouldn’t have a public career at all had he not latched onto a lunatic wingnut zillionaire from the proletarian enclaves of the Hamptons, Bannon came down to Midland City like a combination of Elmer Gantry and an aluminum siding salesman, unspooling angry banalities about the contempt other people have for the “working class,” about how he is one with all the old white folks gathered in the activity barn because they all share a fealty to a pussy-grabbing casino bankrupt who’s coherent for about 20 minutes in the morning. This is the oldest scam in American politics. I thought better of Bannon, at least in terms of his material.

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At bottom, Bannon’s entire spiel is an endless bluff against his own barely concealed hypocrisy. He came down here, he maintained, to defend Moore, who lost his job as chief justice of the Alabama supreme court twice for attempting to nullify decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, against what Bannon referred to as The Nullification Project. But at no point was Bannon, the last heir to House Harkonnen, more transparently lacking in shame as when he identified himself with the military families in the audience. The man sells tinhorn empathy like a payday lender. He told the crowd that the “elites,” who are not Steve Bannon, start wars because “they know that it won’t be their kids who die.”

It’s your sons and daughters who are over there. Our most precious resource, squandered by the elites in this country. You know why? It’s not their sons and daughters over there. They want you to pay for it. They want your kids to enforce it. Under Donald Trump, that deal’s changed.

This, of course, in the service of a president* who skipped Vietnam because his feet hurt. Nobody in that president*’s family ever has served in the military, although the Klan-curious paterfamilias once fought bravely in the battle against black people living in his buildings. Eventually, you grow tired of this grubby hucksterism. You grow tired of the people who cheer for it. You grow tired of it all, and exhausted in the attempt to make sense of human beings so obviously jonesing for the kind of illusions in which a former investment banker in a camo jacket and 31 dress shirts is really one of them, and in which a judge who has been credibly accused of sexual misconduct with teenage girls is really as close a friend to Jesus as they are.

Make no mistake. Bannon had his work cut out for him with Roy Moore, a grim, nasty, Bible-banging old crank with the stage presence of an end table and the rhetorical style of an Old Testament prophet whose ravings didn’t make the cut for the Bible. He is stiff and unpleasant. He couldn’t keep the pages of his prepared text together; occasionally, a sheet or three would fall to his feet, and he would fill the void with long quotations from Samuel Adams, selections from the Breitbart Hymnal for the Permanently Aggrieved, and some of his original work.

Our children cannot pray, as they are taught evolution

Will they learn the fear of god is the only true solution?

And so on.

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His speech rambled. He was utterly lost when he strayed a syllable distant from the devotional. He wants to repeal Obamacare, but plainly has no idea what it is. He wants the federal government out of Alabama schools, but plainly has no education policy beyond the early chapters of Leviticus. But once he found his way back to his safe space and readjusted his halo, Moore was so emboldened that he had the audacity to quote FDR, and then to recite extensively from the Gettysburg Address, leaving the shades of Roosevelt and Lincoln to spin swiftly under the sod before they both threw up.

I’ll tell you something. In this country, we have explored the temples built by the Democrat and Republican parties and found that they have idols that do not see us and do not hear us. We need to move forward with a vision to recognize God, to recognize he’s on his throne, and he is, and cares for this country.

You grow exhausted from the effort it takes to keep mockery at bay long enough to explain that what Moore and Bannon are selling is a dangerous blend of religious extremism and McCarthyite bombast, Roy Cohn in Torquemada drag. You grow exhausted by the effort it takes, over and over again, to remind yourself that there are good people in the crowd cheering this river of sludge and nonsense.

Finally, you give up. Roy Moore is a vehicle for collecting suckers, for liberating them from their responsibility as citizens in a self-governing republic, and anybody who thinks this waterheaded theocrat belongs in the United States Senate is a dupe and a fool. Finally, you don’t care if the people behind Roy Moore, and the people in the crowd in front of him, believe you are a member of the coastal elite or an agent of Lucifer. Finally, you grow weary of the smug condescension of religious bigots. Finally, you decide to put down the twin burdens of excusing deliberate ignorance and respecting the opinions of people who want to light the world on fire to kill their imaginary enemies. And you give up and tell the truth.

These people deserve what they get.

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