Links for 5/210/10

Goldie Blumenstyk and Kelly Field

In the five months since the department offered its controversial "gainful employment proposal," for-profit colleges and their chief association have spent at least $620,000 lobbying members of Congress, the Education Department, and the Office of Management and Budget…

One senior Republican aide says that the Education Department has failed to make a case for its proposal. Education Department officials have so far refused to provide opponents of the rule with the data they say they used in drafting the rules…

Meanwhile, on the House side, Rep. Robert E. Andrews, Democrat of New Jersey, is preparing to offer legislation that would substitute the debt-to-income ratio for a "matrix" of variables used to measure the value that for-profit colleges add. The matrix, he said in an interview, would apply to all colleges, nonprofit and for-profit, and assess four things: job placement in the advertised field, graduation rates, default rates, and success in serving low-income, high-need populations. His goal, he said, is to measure students' "actual outcomes," rather than their "projected incomes."…

Scott McLemee

They are a masterpiece of evasion. The paragraph is, in its way, quite impressive. Every word of it is misleading, including “and” and “the.”

Bellesiles has a certain claim to fame, certainly, but not as “the target of an infamous ‘swiftboating’ campaign.” He is, and will be forever remembered as, a historian whose colleagues found him to have violated his profession's standards of scholarly integrity. Arming America won the Bancroft Prize -- the highest honor for a book on American history. But far more salient is the fact that the Bancroft committee took the unprecedented step of withdrawing the prize…

gun nuts did not force Bellesiles to do sloppy research or to falsify sources…

Chandru Rajam via Keith Hampson

Most traditional institutions take in higher-quality students and then add very little value (relative to resources used). So, they end up looking a lot better than their for-profit counterparts. So, the Feds should insist on VALUE-ADDED measures of student achievement, so as to account for the differences in demographics and incoming student-quality that institutions get to work with.

The Economist

Sweden’s system is more sweeping than most. In 1991 a rare right-wing government passed a law allowing not only charities, religious organisations and groups of parents but also businesses to open schools and get as much state money per student as state-run ones. When the law was passed, private education was almost unknown in Sweden; since then more than a thousand of these “free schools” have opened, and 12.5% of 11-16-year-olds attend one…

a study finding that, though free schools pushed up standards in neighbouring state-run ones, the competition effect faded over time. The researchers speculated that this was because few state schools closed when independent schools opened…