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This morning, the UW System Board of Regents heard from a prominent speaker: Molly Corbett Broad , President of the American Council of Education.   Then, around noon, she joined a group on the UW-Madison campus to share a similar talk , but this time with an audience of faculty, staff, and students. Both talks focused on the theme of "higher education at a crossroads." I had the honor of introducing President Broad to the second audience, in my role as Senior Scholar at the Wisconsin Center for the Advancement of Postsecondary Education .  I also moderated the discussion portion of the conversation. As I'm grateful to Broad for joining us, I feel it's among the most respectful acts to fully engage with her comments and offer my thoughts and questions here.  Simply receiving information from a talk without vigorously considering and debating the ideas is inconsistent with the spirit of the Wisconsin Idea.  So, with that in mind, here are my thoughts. First, let'...

The following is a guest posting by Robin Rogers, associate professor of sociology at Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York (CUNY). Robin's last post was the popular " Billionaire Education Policy ." She can be reached via email at robinrogers99@gmail.com Follow her on Twitter: @Robin_Rogers   Earlier this week I was a guest panelist for Al Jazeera English’s news program Inside Story . The half-hour feature – provocatively entitled “Should U.S. schools be run like businesses?” – focused on the Chicago teachers’ strike that had begun that morning. The two other guests were Joanne Barkan , who writes on economic, labor and education issues, and her clear foil Matthew Chingo s, a fellow at the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C. – and, I should note, currently in a heated debate with Sara Goldrick-Rab . Barkan and Chingos are formidable thinkers and articulate advocates for their positions o...

I'm no Diane Ravitch.  If I were, I'd use this blog to bravely state my concerns about the direction the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is heading with educational policy. I'd follow her lead and ask hard, pointed questions about the role that people with money play in driving major decisions in a democracy. But I won't.  Because while I'm tenured, I am still fearful.  I have receiving more than $1 million in support from the Gates Foundation for my research on financial aid, and I am grateful for it-- and in need of much more.  That's the honest truth.  It's harder and harder to find funding for research these days, and while my salary doesn't depend on it, getting the work done does. So I won't say all that Diane just did.  Yet I have to say something, and as I wrote recently, I always attempt to do so. Her questions deserve answers.  And they should be asked of the higher education agenda as well.  Why the huge investment in Complete Colle...

Liam and I were out enjoying an evening of dinner and a movie, when some astonishing news came over Twitter : the Gates Foundation just made a grant to ALEC . Yes, more than $375,000 to the American Legislative Exchange Council, an organization my husband has called a self-proclaimed "free market, limited government" non-profit, which is really just a spout of Republican policy ideas . They push an agenda "focused on pet approaches to privatizing education, firing teachers and enabling home schooling that likely have little bearing on student outcomes and that have little basis in research." As a fellow Gates grantee, colored me disconcerted. As a professor in public higher education in Wisconsin, where ALEC has worked to intimidate the scholarship of faculty like Bill Cronon , color me outraged. Tomorrow, watch this blog for what my colleague Robin Rogers of Queens College and the Graduate Center at the City University of New York has to say about the educationa...