CSCOPE.us

A social studies lesson synopsis from 2010 drew harsh criticism from parents and activists who said it labeled the Boston Tea Party a terrorist act. Program administrators said the lesson was outdated and had been withdrawn. Click the image for the full .pdf, which administrators posted as part of their response to the criticism.

Texas authorities are beginning a sweeping review this week of the state's dominant public school curriculum under pressure from critics who charge that it indoctrinates the children of Texas with communist, pro-terrorist propaganda from behind a shield of secrecy.

The State Board of Education will hold the first of a series of public meetings to organize the review in Dallas on Friday, three days after the state attorney general's office told NBC News that it has been looking into "potential improprieties" that raise "significant legal concerns about the program's operations."

It didn't specify those concerns, but legislative hearings have questioned the program's nonprofit status and the locking of some materials behind passwords accessible only to teachers and other "authorized users."

The designers of the curriculum — which is used in 875 of the state's 1,028 districts — say the program is closely aligned with standards mandated by the State Board of Education and is based on educational principles proven over decades. Critics, they say, are taking isolated parts of lessons out of context, equating simply teaching a controversial issue with endorsing it.

Even so, the parent organization of the program, called CSCOPE, has agreed to several demands by opponents, including opening its board meetings to the public, allowing teachers to post curriculum materials online, dropping its nonprofit status and creating a new website so parents can learn about the lessons from home.

CSCOPE — it's not an abbreviation for anything — is a Web-only repository of 1,600 lesson plans, study materials and other curriculum components. It's supposed to help teachers make sure pupils are taught what they need to know for the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills test.

"We live in a very mobile society," said Anne Poplin, chairwoman of the board of the Texas Education Service Center Curriculum Collaborative, or TESCCC, which administers CSCOPE.

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CSCOPE means children who move from one school or district to another can be confident they'll pick up where they left off in their old classrooms, she told NBC News.

But since it began in the 2006-07 school year, CSCOPE has been a target for activists and conservative websites. Pressure has grown in recent months as critics have published details of its lesson plans.

"CSCOPE Teaches ALLAH is God" and "CSCOPE Promotes Communism," proclaim two of several dozen articles on Texas CSCOPE Review.

Glenn Beck's TheBlaze has run at least five "exposés" this year with headlines like "CSCOPE: Exposing the Nation's Most Controversial Public School Curriculum System," while Tucker Carlson's Daily Caller last month ran a story listing "egregious examples of the curriculum's inadequacies and absurdities."

'Design a flag for a new socialist nation'
Critics fall into two camps.

The first is teachers who say the curriculum is flawed in general and that their districts require them to rigidly follow the program, even though CSCOPE says it's meant to be revised and "refocused" to serve local needs. 

As part of a transparency agreement it worked out last month with Dan Patrick, the Republican chairman of the state Senate Education Committee, TESCCC said it would remind districts that lessons are simply resources for teachers, not meant to be taught verbatim.

The second group is larger and more vocal: parents, activists and lawmakers who say CSCOPE is a Trojan horse sneaking liberal ideals of socialism and cultural relativism into the classroom.

Several examples have circulated around Texas in the past few months. One asks pupils to design a flag for a new socialist nation, using "symbolism to represent aspects of socialism/communism." Texas Conservative News called that an "attempt at secretly indoctrinating Texas children."

Another unit depicts a hiker walking up a staircase of money. "Free enterprise (capitalism)" is the bottom step; "Communism" is at the top. Ginger Russell of the widely read blog Red Hot Conservative wrote that the graphic was "all about portraying communism in a positive light."

Perhaps the most controversial lesson asks pupils to discuss this news report (PDF):

A local militia, believed to be a terrorist organization, attacked the property of private citizens today at our nation's busiest port. Although no one was injured in the attack, a large quantity of merchandise, considered to be valuable to its owners and loathsome to the perpetrators, was destroyed. The terrorists, dressed in disguise and apparently intoxicated, were able to escape into the night with the help of local citizens who harbor these fugitives and conceal their identities from the authorities.

Not until later, during a discussion period, do teachers reveal that the report describes the Boston Tea Party.

"Like our Founding Fathers at Concord, that was pretty much the opening shot that started this," Patrick said.

Critical thinking and perspective
Poplin said lessons like those under scrutiny are meant to challenge students to critically examine the world from others' perspectives — not to adopt the beliefs the lessons describe. With the Boston Tea Party unit — which has since been removed as "outdated" — the point was to teach sophisticated thinking and the existence of multiple viewpoints, she said.

"It might have been an act of terrorism in King George's mind, but it wasn't an act of terrorism in the minds of Americans," she said. "The lesson wasn't teaching the Boston Tea Party. The lesson was teaching perspective."

Mason Moses, a spokesman for 20 regional public school agencies that created TESCCC, said: "Down here in Texas, we're pretty patriotic. There is absolutely no way we would ever teach" that the Boston Tea Party was an act of terrorism.

That may be true, Patrick said, but "what all of this underscores is how our education system is changing rapidly because of technology."

"In the old days, which weren't all that long ago, textbooks were reviewed by boards of education," he said, but "today, as we move to this online learning, there are no checks and balances."

Keeping 'strategic decisions' private
And that is a big part of the problem, critics say — CSCOPE has been secret, making it hard to get a clear picture of what it's really teaching. Before the transparency agreement, parents could see materials, but only by visiting their children's school; anyone else was barred unless they were cleared as an "authorized user."

Poplin said CSCOPE was tailored for teachers, which means it includes performance assessments, tests and answers, which shouldn't get into students' hands. As part of the agreement with Patrick, TESCCC is removing that information and hopes to have the instructional material online by the middle of April, she said.

More clarity could emerge from administrators' decision to relinquish nonprofit status.

As recently as December, TESCCC asserted that some of its records should be exempt from disclosure under state open records laws, both because it's an independent nonprofit entity and because it competes with for-profit curriculum companies.

In addition to proprietary business information like bidding data from vendors, the materials TESCCC wanted to keep private included "how strategic decisions are made with respect to the development of the CSCOPE product" itself.

Poplin said TESCCC has begun discussions to dissolve the nonprofit corporation, and she said she was eager to hear from the State Board of Education. Because the state school board has no formal connection to CSCOPE, however, the coming review is non-binding.

Patrick has an answer for that: His committee is holding a hearing next week on legislation that would give the school board oversight of CSCOPE.

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Once a year, a line of briefcase-wielding accountants in business suits files into an office at Texas Christian University.

They’re not there to check on income or expenditures. They’re auditing the admissions statistics.

Texas Christian’s dean of admissions says it is the nation’s only university to voluntarily have its admissions data — the number of applicants and their SAT scores, class rank, grade-point averages, and other measures — audited for accuracy. It has done so for the last dozen years -- and not just for show.

As consumers and the federal government push for greater transparency about such things as cost, average debt, and job-placement rates, major universities have been caught misrepresenting those and other numbers to improve the way they look to prospective students.

“We on the inside have a pretty good idea of who is reporting accurately and who is not. And quite a few schools appear to be cooking the books,” said Texas Christian Dean of Admission Raymond Brown.

That dirty little secret has started to slip out as competition intensifies to attract top students and scale the all-important college rankings. In an admissions battleground on which universities grapple for any advantage, rising by just one number in the U.S. News & World Report rankings leads to a nearly 1 percent increase in applications, a 2011 study at the Harvard Business School found.

Falsified data

In the past year alone, six top colleges and universities have admitted falsifying information sent to the U.S. Department of Education, their own accrediting agencies, and U.S. News, whose college rankings remain the nation’s most prominent. Another was caught the year before. For many of the schools, the misrepresentations had gone on for years.

A senior administrator at Claremont McKenna College resigned after admitting that he falsified admissions test scores submitted to U.S. News and the U.S. Department of Education. For years Bucknell inflated the mean SAT scores of entering students by an average of 16 points, the university’s president has admitted. Tulane’s business school gave U.S. News false data about its number of applicants and inflated their average scores on admissions tests by 35 points.

Emory University misreported student data to U.S. News and other organizations that rank universities and colleges, school officials said, providing the much-higher SAT averages of students who applied and were admitted, rather than those who enrolled. It also inflated entering students’ class ranks. Two former admissions deans and other administrators were aware of the practice, according to the university.

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George Washington University overstated the proportion of its entering freshmen who were in the top 10 percent of their high school classes. And the law school at the University of Illinois was caught providing inaccurate admissions information to the American Bar Association, or ABA, which accredits law schools; the same thing happened in 2011 at the Villanova University School of Law.

Illinois’s law school was publicly censured and fined $250,000 by the ABA, and Villanova’s was placed on probation for two years.  Meanwhile, 15 other law schools have faced lawsuits for fraud, unfair competition, and false advertising for allegedly misreporting graduates’ job-placement rates by including part-time and temporary work and employment unrelated to law.

“These educational institutions have lost the benefit of the doubt, and I think that’s sad,” says Kyle McEntee, co-founder and director of Law School Transparency, which pushes law schools to provide accurate admissions and job-placement statistics.

Legal groups intervene

So wide has the credibility gap become for law schools that the ABA and the Law School Admission Council responded this year by stepping in to check and certify law schools’ reported entrance-test scores and undergraduate grade-point averages.

But students and their families applying to other kinds of colleges and universities will have to rely on internal whistle-blowers, who exposed all the other instances of falsifications over the last year. Except at Texas Christian, and, now law schools, admissions statistics are not independently audited or certified. And besides bad publicity, the only penalty has been that schools discovered by U.S. News to have misreported data are “unranked” until the accuracy of their information can be confirmed in the following year.

Now the federal government has unveiled a new college-selection tool for families called the College Scorecard, lauded by President Barack Obama in his State of the Union address last month and launched the next day, which streamlines and expands information about cost, graduation rates, average debt of graduates, and loan-default rates in a centralized, searchable government website. In spite of its government cachet, that information, too, is provided directly by universities and colleges themselves, and is not certified or audited, and there’s no penalty for misreporting it, said Daren Briscoe, spokesman for the Education Department.

“It is a voluntary reporting system, and like most voluntary reporting systems, it’s not penalty-driven,” said Briscoe, who adds that because the College Scorecard doesn’t rank competing schools, they shouldn’t have any incentive to fudge the numbers.

“I suppose if you’re super cynical you can think that a school might be nefarious enough to pump up their data,” he said. “We’re not taking a position that this is a perfect system. There are always opportunities for us to look at how things are working or not.”

Even if universities and colleges do correctly report the average loan debt of their students, there’s already a loophole in the College Scorecard they can take advantage of, university administrators say privately: It doesn’t require them to disclose the average debt of parents who also borrow to help their children pay tuition.

A loss of 'reverence'

The bottom line is that students and their parents should resist the inclination to blindly believe information provided by even well-regarded universities and colleges, said Jane Shaw, president of the John W. Pope Center for Higher Education Policy.
“We do tend to revere professors and we revere the institutions where they teach, and I think that reverence is probably changing,” Shaw said.

A spinoff of the private education company Hobsons cashes in on this growing mistrust by providing an alternative to college and university admissions statistics. Called Naviance, it collects information from high schools about the qualifications of students admitted to particular colleges, allowing other applicants to measure themselves against those standards rather than relying on the data that admissions offices provide.

While Brown concedes that the number of universities and colleges caught misreporting data remains a tiny fraction of the total, he says the problem is considerably more widespread than that.

“This is illustrative of a broader issue, which is the pressure that is on these admissions offices,” he said. “People talk about how college football coaches are under the gun constantly. They’re under no more pressure than an admissions officer.”

This story was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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WXIA / NBC via Reuters

A 14-year-old pupil and a teacher were shot Thursday, Jan. 31, at Price Middle School in Atlanta. Another student at the school was arrested.

The case of a Virginia second-grader caught with a gun on his school bus this week may be shocking but it's by no means uncommon.

Across the country, children are being suspended or arrested for having weapons on campus or buses on a daily basis.

Police in Henrico, Va., were waiting at school for the little boy Monday morning after he allegedly threatened another pupil on their ride to Ratcliffe Elementary School. They found a handgun in his backpack, NBC station WWBT of Richmond, Va. reported.

The incident made national headlines Monday, as did a similar incident when a loaded gun was found in a pupil's book bag last month at P.S. 215 in Queens, N.Y.

However, these incidents aren't as isolated as they may appear. An NBC News survey of crime dockets and news reports across all 50 states reveals that, since Jan. 1, there have been at least 48 incidents in which guns have been discovered on students, in their bags or in their lockers.

There were at least five last Thursday alone: in Atlanta; Augusta, Kan.; Chicago; Raleigh, N.C.; and Winston-Salem, N.C.

There have been 23 class days since some districts resumed school Jan. 2 — not including Jan. 21, the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. That works out to more than two gun reports a day this school year. (The survey excluded incidents in which pupils were caught with toy guns; all of the weapons were handguns, rifles, BB guns or air rifles.)

And those are just the cases that have been made public: Juveniles' police records are generally protected, so an untold number of other such incidents are likely to have occurred.

While it's impossible to determine whether such potentially deadly show-and-tells are happening more frequently, the public data do indicate just how hard it is to clamp down on guns on campus since the issue became a national concern in December in the wake of the fatal shootings of 20 pupils at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.

Most of the time, the weapons are brought along for protection or as items of curiosity, with the pupil more interested in showing off than in shooting. And usually, they're intercepted before anyone can get hurt, with the student's being suspended or charged for a weapons violation, depending on his or her age. Often, a parent or guardian is charged with failing to secure the weapon.

But when they're not intercepted, tragedy is often the result.

Last week, a 14-year-old boy was shot and wounded by a student at Price Middle School in Atlanta, police said.

"Gun violence in and around our schools is simply unconscionable and must end," Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said. "Too many young people are being harmed and too many families are suffering from unimaginable and unnecessary grief."

And on Jan. 10, a student was wounded by a classmate who shot him at Taft Union High School in Taft, Calif., police said The boy targeted a second classmate but missed, authorities said.

While many lawmakers have introduced legislation that would put armed police or security guards in schools, that may not be the answer, according to a state task force reviewing campus safety in Virginia.

The task force last week stressed the need to fund anti-bullying programs and school resource officers, but it stopped short of calling for more officers in schools.

"If we were to put 1,000 new police officers in our schools, those police officers would have to come from somewhere, and we might inadvertently make things less safe in our communities," Dewey G. Cornell, a law professor at the University of Virginia who's a member of the task force, told WWBT.

The boy who opened fire last week in California was one of those who carried a weapon because he said he had been bullied, Kern County Sheriff Donny Youngblood said.

But that's not a good enough excuse, parents say.

"That just doesn't make sense," said Jeremy Massey, the parent of a student at Daly Elementary School in Inskter, Mich., near Detroit, where a third-grader was found to have taken a loaded gun to class two days in a row last month. The boy told police he carried the gun for his own protection.

"If you are 10 years old, the only protection you need is to go tell an adult," Massey told NBC station WDIV of Detroit.

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Steve Cannon / AP file

Fla. Gov. Jeb Bush looks at a chart showing Florida's Comprehensive Assessment Test results in Tallahassee on May 10, 2004.

Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush soared to rock star status in the education world on the strength of a chart.

A simple graph, it tracked fourth-grade reading scores. In 1998, when Bush was elected governor, Florida kids scored far below the national average. By the end of his second term, in 2007, they were far ahead, with especially impressive gains for low-income and minority students.

Those results earned Bush bipartisan acclaim. As he convenes a star-studded policy summit this week in Washington, he is widely regarded as one of the most influential education reformers in the U.S. Elements of his agenda have been adopted in 36 states, from Maine to Mississippi, North Carolina to New Mexico.

Many of his admirers cite Bush's success in Florida as reason enough to get behind him.

But a close examination raises questions about the depth and durability of the gains in Florida. After the dramatic jump of the Bush years, Florida test scores edged up in 2009 and then dropped, with low-income students falling further behind. State data shows huge numbers of high school graduates still needing remedial help in math and reading.

And some of the policies Bush now pushes, such as vouchers and mandatory online classes, have no clear links to the test-score bump in Florida. Bush has been particularly vigorous about promoting online education, urging states to adopt policies written with input from companies that stand to profit from expanded cyber-schooling.

Many of those companies also donate to Bush's Foundation for Excellence in Education, which has raised $19 million in recent years to promote his agenda nationwide.

Sherman Dorn, a professor of education at the University of South Florida, says some of Bush's policies as governor, such as an intense focus on teaching reading, made a real difference to Florida students.

 "It's pretty clear Governor Bush should get credit for giving a damn," he said. But by teaming with for-profit corporations to push cyber-schools, which have produced dismally low test scores in many states, Bush is "throwing away whatever credibility he had coming out of Florida," Dorn said.

Bush's allies disagree. For them, the former governor -- widely considered a top contender for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination -- is a visionary striving to build on his record of success.

"I've been very impressed with the thoughtfulness of his policies," said Joel Klein, who ran New York City schools for eight years and now heads News Corp's education division, Amplify, which donates to the Bush foundation.

Klein and officials at several other education companies that support Bush's foundation say they do so not for their own financial interest but to promote a broad policy debate.

Any implication "that corporate donors give to us for us to advance their agenda" is simply false, said Patricia Levesque, the foundation's executive director.

The Florida formula
Bush, who declined to comment for this story, says often that he has one abiding goal: to give all students the chance to reach their "God-given potential."

His "Florida formula" rests on the principles of increasing accountability and expanding parental choice. Among its tenets:

* Grade schools on an A-to-F scale, based mostly on student scores and growth on standardized tests. Give students in poorly ranked schools vouchers to attend private and religious schools.

* Hold back 8-year-olds who can't pass a state reading test rather than promote them to fourth grade.

* Expand access to online classes and charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately managed, sometimes for profit.

In Florida, Bush paired his tough-love measures with generous support. Schools that improved their grade or got an "A" received extra funding. Teachers got bonuses for successes like getting more kids to pass Advanced Placement tests. And students required to repeat third grade got intensive help at free summer reading camps.

States adopting the policies now, in a time of austerity, tend to leave out the costly support systems. That has stirred protests from school superintendents, school board members, teachers unions and parents who see the policies as punitive, humiliating and too narrowly focused on a single test as a measure of success.

Voters have spoken loudly, too. In this month's election, overwhelmingly Republican electorates overturned Bush-style reforms in Idaho and South Dakota and ousted the Indiana state schools chief, who had enacted much of the Florida formula.

In Florida, meanwhile, the durability of the Bush-era gains has come into question.

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High school graduation rates rose during Bush's tenure but remain substantially lower than in other large and diverse states, including California, New York and Ohio, according to new federal data. Students' average score on the ACT college entrance exam has not improved and remains well below states such as Missouri and Ohio, where a comparable percentage of students take the test.

Florida's scores on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, widely considered the most reliable metric, dropped on all four key tests last year --  fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math. On all four tests, low-income students fell further behind their wealthier peers.

Jaryn Emhof, a spokeswoman for the Bush foundation, said the slipping scores are an indication that "schools were getting complacent" and need to be pushed with higher standards.

Opponents contend Bush's reforms never deserved much credit for the gains in the first place.

Other factors were at play, they argue. Florida voters passed a constitutional amendment to limit class size in 2002, for instance. And Bush's tenure coincided with soaring property tax receipts, thanks to the housing boom, which led to more local funding for schools. Per-pupil spending in Florida jumped 22 percent from 2001 to 2007, after accounting for inflation. It has since fallen sharply.

"There's this single-minded notion that only the program has supported yield improvements," said Ruth Melton, director of legislative relations for the Florida School Boards Association. "There's more to this than meets the eye."

Some recent research has cast doubt on the long-term effectiveness of the Bush policies.

A Harvard education research group reported this summer that Florida students who were held back in third grade notched a big boost in test scores initially, but the effects faded to insignificance before they entered high school. And annual studies commissioned by the state have found no evidence that low-income students who receive vouchers to attend private schools do any better at reading or math than their peers.

As for Florida's charter schools, a recent report found their students consistently outscore kids in traditional schools on state tests. The charters, however, serve fewer poor and special-needs students and fewer students still learning English.

Meanwhile, researchers have found that other states, such as Massachusetts, have boosted achievement without Florida-style reforms, using more old-fashioned remedies such as increasing spending and imposing rigorous curricular standards.

After an exhaustive study of state-by-state academic gains, the Harvard researchers concluded in a July report that "the connection between reforms and gains ... thus far is only anecdotal, not definitive."

Emhof, the Bush foundation spokeswoman, said that while "there is no silver bullet" to improve schools, the Florida formula "is the path with the most proven results." The state's size and diversity mean "if something works in Florida, it can work anywhere," she said.

Meet and greet
Indeed, the Bush foundation touts the Florida test gains as "perhaps the greatest public policy success story of the past decade" and aggressively presses its formula on other states.

Hundreds of emails obtained under a public records request by the nonprofit advocacy group In the Public Interest, which opposes privatization of schools, show the foundation working closely with allies in Maine, New Mexico, Florida and elsewhere to craft public policy.

Foundation employees write legislation and edit proposed bills line by line, then send in experts to testify on their behalf, the emails show.

The Bush foundation also funds trips and events to introduce Bush's donors to policy makers. At last year's national summit in San Francisco, the foundation set aside two hours for several state superintendents of education, dubbed "Chiefs for Change," to meet the foundation's sponsors.

In an email forwarded to Executive Director Levesque, an official from Apple Inc. also requested access to the chiefs to tout the company's products.

"This is a great opportunity. ... But there are a dozen other companies that want access," Levesque responded. She couldn't accommodate Apple, she wrote, unless the chiefs first found time to meet with "all the other companies including those actually funding" the Chiefs for Change network.

Apple declined to comment.

Bush foundation donors include family philanthropies, such as those established by Microsoft founder Bill Gates and New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Corporate donors include Connections Education, a division of global publishing giant Pearson; Amplify, the education division of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp.; and K12, a publicly traded company that runs online schools.

Many of these donors sit on a Digital Learning Council that helped draft the Bush foundation's policy agenda. Key planks call for states to require online course work in high school and to lift restrictions that hinder cyber-school growth, such as limits on class size.

Studies in several states including Pennsylvania and Colorado have found that online students fare far worse than their peers in reading and math. Bush has said bad programs should be shut down, but he believes online schools have great potential to offer personalized, self-paced education.

"This is not about our commercial success," said Sari Factor, chief executive officer of E2020 Inc., which develops online curricula and recently signed up as a foundation sponsor. "We're focused on what's right for kids."

Still, Factor acknowledged that E2020 has "absolutely" benefited from Bush's advocacy.

In particular, Bush often talks up an Arizona charter school called Carpe Diem, which uses the E2020 online curriculum, employing just four teachers for 225 students because the kids do so much work online. Bush has flown policy makers from across the country to admire the school's innovation and cost cutting. That has brought more clients to E2020, Factor said.

Arizona data shows Carpe Diem test scores have fallen sharply over the past two years, a drop founder Rick Ogston attributes to a new curriculum and the sudden death of the principal.

That has not slowed its momentum; after visiting Carpe Diem on a trip paid for by the Bush foundation, Indiana officials urged Ogston to apply to open a branch there. The head of the state charter school board, Claire Fiddian-Green, says the school's "fairly strong track record" impressed her despite the recent slip in test scores. The new Carpe Diem campus in Indianapolis opened this fall.

Ogston said he and other charter and online school operators count on Bush's foundation to remove obstacles to their growth, such as state laws that require students to put in time in a physical classroom.

"We come to them to say, 'These policies are in the way, and it would be great if you could change them,'" Ogston said. "That's what they do better than anyone." 

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University of the South

At a time when students and families are fed with up with rising college costs, University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., cut tuition 10 percent last year and is promising to keep costs unchanged for entering freshmen for the next four years.

As an undergraduate at the University of California–Irvine, Christopher Campbell was almost forced to drop out by repeated double-digit increases in tuition — some in the middle of the academic year — to compensate for massive state budget cuts.

Campbell ultimately made it through and is starting law school at UCI this fall. But he watched classmates driven out of college by the unpredictable mid-year price hikes.

Now he’s pushing an amendment to the California constitution that would ban public universities from raising tuition for students after they’ve enrolled.

“Students and families are fed up,” Campbell says. “And that’s only going to get worse. As more and more students have to deal with these problems, it’s just going to keep building until the problem is fixed.”

After three decades of tuition hikes that have outpaced inflation and increases in family income, students, families, legislators and governing boards are demanding a halt.

“Enough is enough,” says Anne Mariucci, a member of the Arizona Board of Regents, which for the first time in 20 years has frozen in-state tuition at the University of Arizona and Arizona State University after increases over the last five years of 84 and 96 percent, respectively.

Some private universities, too, have agreed to stop raising their tuition, or even cut it, after being alarmed to discover their enrollments starting to slip.

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“The pushback is beginning,” says John McCardell Jr., president of the University of the South in Sewanee, Tenn., which last year cut tuition 10 percent and this year is promising to keep the cost unchanged for entering freshmen for four years.

Sewanee, as the university is known, was losing students to the University of Tennessee, the University of Georgia and other cheaper public institutions, McCardell says, and the size of the entering class was beginning to slide.

“Price probably has more than nothing to do with that,” he says. Students and their families “are voting with their feet.”

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Or with their votes. The Arizona regents were reportedly being pressed to get a handle on tuition by the governor and legislators. They, in turn, were hearing from increasingly angry constituents. “About time,” read the headline on an editorial in the ASU State Press, the student newspaper, when the tuition freeze was finally proposed. “As prices continue to go up, you have people saying, you can’t keep doing that,” says Rick Myers, chairman of the Arizona Board of Regents.

The 10-campus University of California system also froze undergraduate tuition for this fall after the governor and legislature there made doing so a condition of a $125 million budget increase — though there’s a hitch: Tuition will increase more than 20 percent in the middle of the year if voters fail to approve a tax increase in November to raise $8.5 billion for public education and other services, a quid pro quo that some critics say is blackmail.

Texas legislators have long pushed for a tuition freeze at that state’s public universities. When Gov. Rick Perry added his voice to the chorus this year, his appointees on the board of regents agreed — over university officials’ objections — to forgo a planned 5 percent increase over two years at the flagship University of Texas–Austin, where tuition now will be unchanged. Tuition also will be frozen at the Arlington campus. “It isn’t in the interest of most Texans for universities to be continually raising their tuition rates,” Perry was quoted as saying.

Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick also announced that he opposed a 5 percent tuition increase at University of Massachusetts campuses, though the system’s board of trustees imposed it anyway.

The only exception is the University of Massachusetts School of Law, which will hold tuition level. So will the law schools at the University of New Hampshire. Last year, the University of Maryland's Francis King Carey School of Law froze its tuition. Not coincidentally, the number of law-school applicants plummeted by more than 15 percent for the academic year that begins this fall — on top of declines of 10 percent in each of the previous two years — according to the Law School Admission Council. The number of students taking the Law School Admission Test this year suggests the trend will continue. Meanwhile, one third of law-school graduates in 2010 did not have jobs nine months later, and starting pay for those who did was down 13 percent. Phoebe Haddon, dean of the University of Maryland’s law school, cited “the impact of the economic downturn on the legal employment market” as one of her reasons for freezing tuition.

Equating price with prestige
Colleges and universities have long been reluctant to lower or cap their prices, McCardell says, because — as with new cars and fine wines — they believe students and their families equate price with prestige. That, he says, is why elite private colleges all magically end up within a few hundred dollars of one another each year.

In his 25 years as a higher-education administrator, “I was reared to believe that what you charge is a reflection of your position in the marketplace,” McCardell says. “And I was reared to believe that no matter what happens, the American people will pay the sticker price. But all that changed fundamentally in 2008,” at the start of the economic downturn.

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Supply and demand have not traditionally affected the price of higher education. That’s because supply largely remained unchanged, while demand was ever-rising. But the number of high-school graduates, which peaked in 2009, is starting to decline. Enrollment fell at more than 40 percent of colleges and universities last year, according to the credit-rating firm Moody’s. At least 375 institutions still had space available for this fall when the admissions period was over, the largest number in a decade, the National Association for College Admission Counseling reports. The percentage of accepted students who actually enroll is also falling. A recent analysis of public and private nonprofit colleges by Bain & Company found that one third were on an “unsustainable financial path.”

Colleges that are especially feeling the squeeze are those with small enrollments and endowments — and those are also the kinds of private colleges and universities that are maintaining their tuition levels to remain competitive.

Private Oklahoma City University, for instance, competes with more than 25 public institutions — most of them cheaper — in a state of fewer than four million. “Access to higher education is broad here,” says Susan Barber, provost at the university, which froze tuition this year. “We had discussions that we hoped this would help retention of students and in our recruitment efforts. It wasn’t completely an altruistic decision.”

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Other schools that have frozen their tuition this fall include Burlington College in Vermont, which has about 200 undergraduates; Ancilla College, a Catholic, two-year liberal-arts college in Indiana with about 530 students; the 730-student Tabor College, a Mennonite school in Kansas; liberal-arts Urbana University in Ohio, which has 1,270 students; Franklin Pierce University in New Hampshire, which has 1,300 undergraduates; and Pacific Union College, a Seventh-Day Adventist college in California with an enrollment of 1,530.

“The question is, how much can you charge for your product? And that is a reflection of the laws of supply and demand and your sense of your own position in the marketplace,” McCardell says. “Why are people shopping at Costco and Sam’s Club? That’s a terrible analogy, but I can get a really good box of cherries at Costco for a whole lot less than I can get them at the Piggly Wiggly.”

Slashing prices
This fall, a few private colleges and universities — trying to compete with cheaper public institutions — are offering Costco-style markdowns. In New Jersey, for instance, private Seton Hall is matching the price of public Rutgers University for freshmen with top grades and SAT scores. That comes to about a 60 percent discount. Cabrini College, near Philadelphia, cut its tuition 12.5 percent and promised not to raise it above $30,000 through at least 2015.

Lincoln College, a private two-year college in Illinois, lowered its tuition 24 percent and the University of Charleston in West Virginia 22 percent, both in response to declining enrollments. William Peace University, a women’s college with 700 students in North Carolina, slashed tuition nearly 8 percent to attract men as it becomes co-educational, and to increase its enrollment by 50 percent. And Duquesne University, in Pittsburgh, is responding to a big drop in applications to its school of education by giving 50 percent discounts to incoming freshmen.

If students and their families are straying from expensive institutions, a few schools that are freezing or reducing what they charge seem to be winning them back. At Sewanee, applications have risen 17 percent, and the number of entering freshmen is up more than 12 percent. Oklahoma City University has 30 more freshmen enrolled this fall than last, and the number of students dropping out is down.

Back in California, Christopher Campbell is juggling law school and his referendum campaign to keep tuition flat for students who enroll at the state’s public universities.

“Whoever I tell,” he says, “is always, ‘Yeah, hey, let’s put this through.’ ”

This story, "Colleges freeze, reduce tuition as public balks at further price hikes," was produced by The Hechinger Report, a nonprofit, nonpartisan education-news outlet based at Teachers College, Columbia University.

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In the field of climate science, when someone — especially skeptics — did something ethically questionable or misrepresented facts, scientist Peter Gleick was usually among the first and loudest to cry foul. He chaired a prominent scientific society's ethics committee. He created an award for what he considered lies about global warming.

Now Gleick admits that he posed as a board member to get and then distribute to the media sensitive documents from a conservative think tank that is a leader in questioning mainstream climate change science.

And ethicists are criticizing the man who took others to task for what they say was stepping way over the ethical line. The think tank, the Chicago-based Heartland Institute, said it is considering legal action against him.

Gleick, who won a MacArthur genius award and is co-founder of the Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security, was chairman of the American Geophysical Union's ethics committee. He also had a column at Forbes.com where he criticized climate skeptics and trumpeted the resignation of a scientific journal editor who published a disputed study. He admitted Monday night that he solicited and leaked the Heartland documents, writing in a blog post on The Huffington Post.

Gleick resigned from the chairmanship of the ethics panel last week.

"What a mess," said Mark Frankel, head of scientific responsibility for the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the world's leading scientific society, which also had Gleick as a panel member on some committees. "It's compounded by the fact that he was chairman of the ethics committee of a professional society. ... It's an ethical morass that he finds himself in."

And Gleick's actions cast unwarranted doubt on the work of other scientists, Frankel said.

Last week, someone identifying himself as "Heartland insider" sent 15 media members and others six documents, purportedly from Heartland. They included a fundraising document, a budget and a two-page "climate strategy." They showed the think tank receiving millions of dollars — more than $14 million over six years from one anonymous man — in big contributions with plans to teach school children to question mainstream climate science. It also showed funding of scientists who are climate-change skeptics.

Heartland said the two-page strategy document was a fake and the others were stolen. The Associated Press, which received the documents along with other news organizations, was able to verify the accuracy of several of the most sensational parts with the individuals named. The documents caused a stir, mirroring the hacking of climate scientists' emails two years earlier from a British research center.

"My judgment was blinded by my frustration with the ongoing efforts — often anonymous well-funded and coordinated — to attack climate science and scientists," Gleick wrote. "Nevertheless, I deeply regret my own actions in this case."

Not good enough, Heartland president Joseph Bast said in a press release: "It has caused major and permanent damage to the reputations of The Heartland Institute and many of the scientists, policy experts and organizations we work with."

The issue is about deception and there are only a few things that could possibly warrant that — and embarrassing Heartland isn't one of them, said Dani Elliott, who teaches ethics at the University of South Florida.

The geophysical union, a scientific society, said in a statement that Gleick's actions are "inconsistent with our organization's values."

Copyright 2011 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Updated: 4:40 p.m. ET on Feb. 15: The Heartland Institute says the documents referred to below were obtained through "pretexting," in which a person posing as a board member sent an e-mail asking a staffer to "resend" documents from board meetings. The Institute says one of the documents, a "climate strategy" memo, "is a total fake," and the institute says it has not had a chance to reach its president, who is traveling, to determine whether any of the other documents were altered. See the full statement from Heartland below. The group later said that the president had returned, that one document is definitely faked, and that it would not comment on the rest.

Internal documents have been leaked from the Heartland Institute, a Chicago nonprofit think tank, showing its funding of leading skeptics of global warming and a plan to teach climate change skepticism in schools. An anonymous person leaked the documents to several publications and activists supporting the science of climate change. 

"The heart of the climate denial machine relies on huge corporate and foundation funding from U.S. businesses, including Microsoft, Koch Industries, Altria (parent company of Philip Morris) RJR Tobacco and more," reports the DeSmogBlog, which published the documents on Tuesday. The blog opposes what it calls the "climate denial machine." (Disclosure: msnbc.com is a joint venture of Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

The first batch of documents is here on the DeSmogBlog, and a second batch dealing with fundraising.

Many people lament the absence of educational material suitable for K-12 students on global warming that isn’t alarmist or overtly political. Heartland has tried to make material available to teachers, but has had only limited success. Principals and teachers are heavily biased toward the alarmist perspective. Moreover, material for classroom use must be carefully written to meet curriculum guidelines, and the amount of time teachers have for supplemental material is steadily shrinking due to the spread of standardized tests in K-12 education.

Dr. David Wojick has presented Heartland a proposal to produce a global warming curriculum or K-12 schools that appears to have great potential for success. Dr. Wojick is a consultant with the Office of Scientific and Technical Information at the U.S. Department of Energy in the area of information and communication science. He has a Ph.D. in the philosophy of science and mathematical logic from the University of Pittsburgh and a B.S. in civil engineering from Carnegie Tech. He has been on the faculty of Carnegie Mellon and the staffs of the U.S. Office of Naval Research and the Naval Research Lab.

Dr. Wojick has conducted extensive research on environmental and science education for the Department of Energy. In the course of this research, he has identified what subjects and concepts teachers must teach, and in what order (year by year), in order to harmonize with national test requirements. He has contacts at virtually all the national organizations involved in producing, certifying, and promoting science curricula.

Dr. Wojick proposes to begin work on “modules” for grades 10-12 on climate change (“whether humans are changing the climate is a major scientific controversy”), climate models (“models are used to explore various hypotheses about how climate works. Their reliability is controversial”), and air pollution (“whether CO2 is a pollutant is controversial. It is the global food supply and natural emissions are 20 times higher than human emissions”).

Wojick would produce modules for Grades 7-9 on environmental impact (“environmental impact is often difficult to determine. For example there is a major controversy over whether or not humans are changing the weather”), for Grade 6 on water resources and weather systems, and so on.

We tentatively plan to pay Dr. Wojick $5,000 per module, about $25,000 a quarter, starting in the second quarter of 2012, for this work. The Anonymous Donor has pledged the first $100,000 for this project, and we will circulate a proposal to match and then expand upon that investment.

Here's a copy of the group's fundraising plan, with a list of donors.

The documents also show funding of leading voices among the opponents of the idea of global warming: "At the moment, this funding goes primarily to Craig Idso ($11,600 per month), Fred Singer ($5,000 per month, plus expenses), Robert Carter ($1,667 per month), and a number of other individuals, but we will consider expanding it, if funding can be found."

About its funders, the group refers to a single anonymous donor: "Our climate work is attractive to funders, especially our key Anonymous Donor (whose contribution dropped from $1,664,150 in 2010 to $979,000 in 2011 - about 20% of our total 2011 revenue). He has promised an increase in 2012…"

Other donors are named: "We will also pursue additional support from the Charles G. Koch Foundation. They returned as a Heartland donor in 2011 with a contribution of $200,000. We expect to push up their level of support in 2012 and gain access to their network of philanthropists, if our focus continues to align with their interests. Other contributions will be pursued for this work, especially from corporations whose interests are threatened by climate policies."

Statement from the Heartland Institute

Heartland Institute Responds to Stolen and Fake Documents

FEBRUARY 15, 2012 – The following statement from The Heartland Institute – a free-market think tank – may be used for attribution. For more information, contact Communications Director Jim Lakely at jlakely@heartland.org and 312/377-4000.

Yesterday afternoon, two advocacy groups posted online several documents they claimed were The Heartland Institute’s 2012 budget, fundraising, and strategy plans. Some of these documents were stolen from Heartland, at least one is a fake, and some may have been altered.

The stolen documents appear to have been written by Heartland’s president for a board meeting that took place on January 17. He was traveling at the time this story broke yesterday afternoon and still has not had the opportunity to read them all to see if they were altered. Therefore, the authenticity of those documents has not been confirmed.

Since then, the documents have been widely reposted on the Internet, again with no effort to confirm their authenticity.

One document, titled “Confidential Memo: 2012 Heartland Climate Strategy,” is a total fake apparently intended to defame and discredit The Heartland Institute. It was not written by anyone associated with The Heartland Institute. It does not express Heartland’s goals, plans, or tactics. It contains several obvious and gross misstatements of fact.

We respectfully ask all activists, bloggers, and other journalists to immediately remove all of these documents and any quotations taken from them, especially the fake “climate strategy” memo and any quotations from the same, from their blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

The individuals who have commented so far on these documents did not wait for Heartland to confirm or deny the authenticity of the documents. We believe their actions constitute civil and possibly criminal offenses for which we plan to pursue charges and collect payment for damages, including damages to our reputation. We ask them in particular to immediately remove these documents and all statements about them from the blogs, Web sites, and publications, and to publish retractions.

How did this happen? The stolen documents were obtained by an unknown person who fraudulently assumed the identity of a Heartland board member and persuaded a staff member here to “re-send” board materials to a new email address. Identity theft and computer fraud are criminal offenses subject to imprisonment. We intend to find this person and see him or her put in prison for these crimes.

Apologies: The Heartland Institute apologizes to the donors whose identities were revealed by this theft. We promise anonymity to many of our donors, and we realize that the major reason these documents were stolen and faked was to make it more difficult for donors to support our work. We also apologize to Heartland staff, directors, and our allies in the fight to bring sound science to the global warming debate, who have had their privacy violated and their integrity impugned.

Lessons: Disagreement over the causes, consequences, and best policy responses to climate change runs deep. We understand that.

But honest disagreement should never be used to justify the criminal acts and fraud that occurred in the past 24 hours. As a matter of common decency and journalistic ethics, we ask everyone in the climate change debate to sit back and think about what just happened.

Those persons who posted these documents and wrote about them before we had a chance to comment on their authenticity should be ashamed of their deeds, and their bad behavior should be taken into account when judging their credibility now and in the future.

---

The document that Heartland says is a fake is this one titled "2012 Heartland Climate Strategy." The spokesman, Lakely, said it was defamatory to suggest that Heartland did not want science to be taught in schools, or that it would try to keep opposing views out of the press, or would think that it could.

The DeSmogBlog says about the "faked document":

The DeSmogBlog has reviewed that Strategy document and compared its content to other material we have in hand. It addresses five elements:

The Increased Climate Project Fundraising material is reproduced in and confirmed by Heartland's own budget.

The "Global Warming Curriculum for K-12 Classrooms" is also a Heartland budget item and has been confirmed independently by the author, Dr. David Wojick.

The Funding for Parallel Organizations; Funding for Selected Individuals Outside Heartland are both reproduced and confirmed in the Heartland budget. And Anthony Watts has confirmed independently the payments in Expanded Climate Communications.

The DeSmogBlog has received no direct communications from the Heartland Institute identifying any misstatement of fact in the "Climate Strategy" document and is therefore leaving the material available to those who may judge their content and veracity based on these and other sources.