Billionaire Bill Gates will invest more than $1 billion in U.S. public schools

• Bill and Melinda Gates have pledged to commit $1.7 billion over the next five years to bolstering public education in the US.
• The money will get divided into three buckets: public school curriculum, "big bets," and charter schools.
• The investment is the largest the Gateses have made since entering the education space 17 years ago.
• Gates wants schools and educators to drive the process.

In a speech delivered to the Council of the Great City Schools, the former CEO of Microsoft outlined his foundation's plan to standardize public school curricula, 

improve teaching quality, assist charter schools, and and collect better data to guide future changes.
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"Education is, without a doubt, one of the most challenging areas we invest in as a foundation," Gates said in the speech, which was transcribed in a Gates Notes blog 

post. "But I'm excited about the shift in our work and the focus on partnering with networks of schools."

“Every student should get a great public education and graduate with skills to succeed in the marketplace,” said Gates, who delivered the keynote address before about 

1,000 school officials at the Council of the Great City Schools conference in Cleveland. “The role of philanthropy here is not to be the primary funder, but rather to 

fund pilots, to fund new ideas, to let people — it’s always the educators coming up with the ideas — to let them try them out and see what really works super well and 

get those to scale.”

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation has spent at least $3.4 billion on public education in the United States, most notably to develop the Common Core State Standards 

and to persuade state education leaders to implement them. His money also went to support charter schools, teacher preparation programs and an array of other 

improvement initiatives, including one to break up large high schools into smaller ones.

His investments have had mixed results, some of which he outlined in his address Thursday. The initiative to break up large high schools was not one that could be 

easily replicated elsewhere, he acknowledged. He also said he would no longer directly invest in developing models to evaluate teachers. His other models — which 

pushed districts to use test scores to size up teacher performance — were often controversial among educators.
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Gates outlined his new investment in broad terms, saying that 60 percent would go to traditional public schools — an announcement that elicited applause in the 

audience of big city school superintendents — and that he wants to let schools and educators drive the process.

“The actual tactics about great teaching, about how to reform the schedule, how to get students who are off track on track — those will be driven by the schools 

themselves,” Gates said. “We will let people come to us with the set of approaches they think will work for them in their local context.”

The foundation will serve as a catalyst for change, Gates said, investing in new methods of instruction and then rigorously tracking student outcomes so that other 

districts can learn from the classrooms that serve as testing grounds.

Rick Hess, the director of education policy at the conservative-leaning American Enterprise Institute, said Gates’s propositions have been all over the map and the 

foundation’s latest pitch seems to represent another change in direction. Hess noted that a dozen years ago, the billionaire declared U.S. high schools to be 

“obsolete.” Now, Gates is relying on educators to come up with the ideas to improve student achievement.

“It feels like they have pivoted through a number of strategies over the last decade or two,” Hess said.

Another 15 percent of the money will go to help charter schools better support the needs of students with disabilities. The remainder of the money “will be focused on 

big bets,” Gates said — research and development in education.

The Gates Foundation plans to issue a “request for information” on Monday, asking schools and other education organizations to submit ideas for how they might spend 

the money. It will issue an official request for proposals next early next year.

Hess said it was difficult to determine how the money would make a difference in schools. But he lauded Gates’s intentions to improve education.

“We do have to experiment. We do have to learn things,” Hess said. “We want to have people put their time and energy and resources into making schools better.”
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Bitter or not? New tool predicts which compounds taste Bitter

Everything from coffee to beer to dark chocolate to medicines contain a diverse array of bitter compounds.                                        Image: Shutterstock/AndreyCherkasov

Humans have 25 different taste receptors that register a range of bitter chemical compounds in everything from coffee and beer to dark chocolate and medicine. And yet, while humans can easily recognize bitterness, predicting whether a chemical compound will taste bitter is no simple task. Now, researchers have developed BitterPredict, a machine learning tool that predicts whether a chemical tastes bitter. The approach, described in Scientific Reports, could help food scientists and pharmaceutical developers pick up on the bitter drivers in their products.
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Bitter compounds are incredibly diverse, notes chemosensory scientist and co-author Masha Niv of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. They can be ions, peptides, glucosinolates, and more. So the researchers began by compiling a set of known non bitter compounds drawn from the scientific literature, as well as a set of known bitter ones drawn primarily from BitterDB, a database that Niv curates. They then used these compounds to build BitterPredict, which evaluates the relationship between bitterness and physical and chemical characters like molecular mass, bond number, and electric charge. And because bitterness is sometimes linked to poisons, BitterPredict also considers indicators of toxicity, such as possessing a similar structure to a molecule known to cross the blood-brain barrier. By associating particular combinations of characters with bitterness, the model can then predict whether a new compound is bitter.
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The team tested the model using the sets of known bitter and non bitter chemicals and found that it could correctly classified a compound as bitter or not around 80 percent of the time. Compounds with positive charges were more likely to be bitter while water soluble ones were more likely not to be. But no single trait could predict bitterness alone. Indeed, the team’s approach is interesting because it shows how multiple chemical properties can combine to make a compound taste bitter, says chemist Matthew Hartings of American University.

Niv also used BitterPredict to explore a random set of around 30,000 molecules, as well as additional sets of molecules found in food, drugs, and natural products (primarily derived from plants). The tool predicted that around 40 percent of the random and food sets were bitter, as well as 66 percent of the drug and 77 percent of the natural product sets.

Niv doesn’t know why bitterness is so abundant in nature. But one possibility stems from an arms race between plants and herbivores. “The evolutionary idea is that plants evolved toxic compounds to not be eaten,” she explains. “Then we evolved the ability to identify toxic compounds by bitter taste receptors. Then maybe some of these compounds are no longer toxic because being bitter is enough to not be eaten.”

The ability to predict bitterness could be powerful. Pharmaceutical companies have already contacted Niv about her new tool. If a medication tastes bad, a patient might resist taking it. An HIV drug was recalled in Uganda, for example, because the pills were so bitter that many patients stopped treatment. Pharmaceutical companies would like to know early on if the drugs they’re developing are bitter pills to swallow. “In food, it’s also really important to understand which component is responsible for a bitter taste, especially in cases where you get bitterness that is undesirable in milk and soy products,” says Niv.
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Hartings sees other applications. “These types of studies speak more broadly to questions about how our nervous system works, how we experience flavor, how our cells interact with the molecules that come in contact with them,” he says. “It’s a much more interesting question than ‘Is it bitter or not?’” Still, he’s excited about Niv’s next question: How bitter is it? Niv’s group is collecting more data so they can begin to predict the intensity of bitterness.

For researchers who want to test their own compounds, the team shares the BitterPredict code and they plan to make the tool available on a publicly accessible server in the near future.
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Students Created Solar Powered CAR | Students building and racing solar-powered miniature cars

A group of university students have created a car that runs on solar power.

A team from the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia are working hard to perfect the vehicle, which is able to travel more than 100 km/h.

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They wrote on their website: "For 2017, the Sunswift team is ready to tackle greater challenges through the manufacture of our new car VIolet. With Violet, the Sunswift team has promeinntly focused on showcasing the potential of solar technology through the manufacture of a much larger, yet practical four-seater vehicle.

"In comparison to our previous vehicles, the design of Violet is intended to enhance much greater levels of comfort and practicality through features such as four doors and seats, front and rear boot space, reverse camera and parking sensors, interactive interior display screen with GPS, air conditioning and many more features."

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The team were originally building their solar vehicle to complete in the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge.

They added: "Since the founding, knowledge and experience from past Sunswift members have been passed onto the newer recruits year by year, resulting in improved design, manufacturing techniques, as well as material efficiency. In addition, team management structures have also vastly improved through those experiences. This has resulted in the continuous development of our vehicles, with the next generation surpassing the previous one in all aspects, whether it be in cost, technical performance, practicality or aesthetics.

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"Originally, Sunswift vehicles were performance oriented, built to compete in the Bridgestone World Solar Challenge challenger class in addition to only seating one or two individuals. Whilst this allowed the team to break multiple world records with Sunswift III and IVy and push the boundaries on efficiency and performance, these vehicles did not have the potential to be commercialised and used as an everyday vehicles."

Students building and racing solar-powered miniature cars

West Australian school children are learning about science, technology, engineering, and mathematics by building and racing miniature solar cars.

Power retailer Synergy provided more than 60 schools with solar panel kits to create race cars to compete on a custom-made, 20-metre race track at Kings Parks in Perth.

The Science Teachers' Association of WA and Synergy teamed up with schools across the state to engage students in science and technology through the competition.

STAWA CEO John Clarke said the aim was to encourage students to think about science, technology, and renewable energies.

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"We're really excited, we are really about encouraging kids to think about the practical applications of science and technology — this is the future and we want these guys to be at the front of that," he said.

The competition involved more than 500 students from 60 schools competing in heats held last month, with the finals being held this week.

Year 8 student Kayla Gent from Duncraig Senior High School said building the solar panels encouraged students to think differently about science.

"I think it's really cool learning about this in our society with our non-renewable resources running out — this could be our future — I think it's really good that kids are getting to learn about this," she said.

"We're really excited, we won the last heat and it is really great to learn more about science and technology and renewable energy sources — we should be learning a lot more about it; it's all about the future," Kayla said.

 Students from Duncraig Senior High holding their cars

PHOTO: Students from Duncraig Senior High working on their miniature solar panel cars

"It's nice to get our hands on these kits and it's definitely been a good learning exercise."

George Pankhurst, a Year 8 student at Mazenod College, said building the race car had some tricky moments.

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"It was a lot of work to get a good car — we had to get a corflute, you need an engine, four tires, a solar panel and some wires and you have to wire them up to make the best and the fastest car, but we got through it, with a bit of help from my teacher," he said.

Mr Clarke said the aim of the project is to promote the STEM subjects as an engaging and exciting area for students.

"What we're trying to do is engage students in science, technology, engineering and mathematics subjects and this was a perfect match," he said.

"The students are extremely excited and they're demonstrating that this type of activity is something that re-engages them in their schooling.

"We started planning last year after Synergy approached us with the concept — we designed what we wanted to do and then Synergy car challenge evolved from that process and we had schools commit and then had all the gear out so they could participate."

Synergy spokesman Allan Gerber said the project was about the future and getting students excited about the next frontier of science.

"Renewable energy is where it's at. We are seeing a big change and the innovation that's happening at the moment is really exciting — and we want to get kids excited about it [science and technology]."

"We are really excited for the intelligent energy future and what's happening in the energy industry.

"We are seeing solar, battery being part of the mix."

Use of Open Educational Resources Turning Point?

New York State's decision to invest $8 million to spread the development and use of open educational resources represents the latest move by a state to try to spur the adoption of low-cost digital textbooks. Another piece of significant news about the mainstreaming of OER was announced Monday by start-up Lumen Learning, which said it had teamed up with Follett  to create a new channel for its course content to reach more faculty members. Follett operates 1,200 physical and 1,600 virtual bookstores.

There have been other moments in recent years (think California's 2012 legislation to create 50 free digital textbooks) that some people believed represented a "breakthrough" or "turning point" for the use of OER, and yet surveys and statistics show that adoption remains limited.
So Inside Digital Learning asked experts if this moment different? Is OER poised to truly transform the publishing landscape in a more significant way?
We'd love to hear what you think, too, so please leave a comment at the bottom of this article.
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Nicole Allen, director of open education, Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition
New York State’s effort to make college free recognizes several important facts. First, that tuition is not the only reason higher education is expensive, textbook costs are also a significant burden for students. Second, we have a solution to the problem directly at our fingertips in the form of open educational resources (OER) -- freely available materials that can be legally downloaded, edited and shared to better serve all students.
OER has proven to be one of the rare opportunities in public policy to generate a return on investment. Programs in other states have shown that for every dollar invested in OER, students save many times that amount on course materials. In Georgia, the public university system’s Affordable Learning Georgia program has awarded $2.1 million in “textbook transformation” grants, which by the end of this academic year will have saved students an estimated $26.4 million. Similarly in North Dakota, a program funded with a $110,000 state appropriation has saved students an estimated $2 million. In both cases, the savings are more than 15 times the original investment. While some might quibble over the exact calculations, the trend is clear: investing in OER significantly reduces higher education costs for students.
This is the genius behind New York State's approach. Making tuition free is important, but the impact of funding is one-to-one: for each dollar saved, you need to find another dollar from somewhere else. The Affordable Learning Georgia program run by the state's public university system has awarded $2.1 million in “textbook transformation” grants, which by the end of this academic year will have saved students an estimated $26.4 million in textbook costs -- more than 12 times the amount invested.
About half of all states now have some kind of OER effort, and New York’s is perhaps the largest single investment to date. Does this mark a turning point for OER? I would say that’s not the right question.
OER isn't a goal, it is a solution that can be leveraged to address problems across higher education. There are many signs that OER is gaining momentum. Adoption of quality resources such as the OpenStax textbooks is on the rise, with a recent survey finding that their books have gained a 10-percent market share in their respective courses. Similarly, the proliferation of OER degree programs at 38 community colleges announced last summer will reduce costs on an even larger scale. And we have only begun to scratch the surface of how OER can help improve student outcomes, create opportunities for new pedagogies, and give institutions ownership over their course content.
Ultimately, OER is about what you do with it. As New York has recognized, OER can take funding and effort to implement at scale, but solutions to important problems typically do. If there is a turning point for OER, it will be when all of the problems with the affordability, accessibility and quality shortcomings in the traditional course materials market are solved.
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David E. Anderson, executive director of higher education, Association of American Publishers
It’s hard to say whether New York’s investment in digital OER will be a “breakthrough” in the publishing industry. But by embracing OER, the State of New York is showing its commitment to helping students graduate on time while reducing student debt. Education publishers agree that digital learning has great potential to help students.
As it has done in so many different industries, digital technology has changed the way students learn and professors teach in higher education. Digital materials help students earn higher exam scores, get better grades and ensure students are less likely to drop out of class.  The digital materials of today from commercial educational publishers are no longer simply a PDF of a textbook. They include features like adaptive quizzes, practice activities and gradebooks. With these digital course materials, professors can customize lectures based on class progress, and materials can be quickly updated when new information is found or new discoveries are made. They provide students with immediate feedback and offer guidance in the areas they struggle with at any hour.
When it comes to course materials, education publishers believe it’s not an “either/or” choice of using commercial or open source material. OER are just one of many models that professors can use as they decide what works best for their class. In fact, many commercial publishers integrate OER within their own products and supplemental materials while making sure the material aligns with a course’s objectives and include engaging, relevant and current information as well as student support and assessment. They also make sure the material can help improve learning outcomes and increase retention while seamlessly integrating with a learning management system. While there is a vast amount of free educational content available at our fingertips online, there is still a need for professionally researched and vetted materials produced by learning companies.
Educational publishers collaborate with colleges and universities to help make these digital learning materials and platforms even more affordable. Education companies can help deliver accessible, interactive and personalized digital content by the first day of class, the cost of which are far lower than traditional hardbound print textbooks. This model can help facilitate the transition from print to digital, making it easier for students to access their course materials at a discounted price.
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Rick Anderson, associate dean for Collections & Scholarly Communication, Marriott Library, University of Utah
There’s no question that seeing a state put $8 million aside in order to make textbooks more affordable is a welcome development. However, if there’s one thing the recent history of education technology and scholarly communication has taught me, it’s to be very wary of proclaiming any development a “turning point” or a “transformational moment” -- even if (or especially if) it seems very exciting at the time.
So while I welcome New York State’s appropriation of funds for the development of open textbooks, my excitement is tempered by questions. In this case, I’m less interested in that total figure of $8 million than I would be in knowing how the money is going to be spent. Will it be used to seed the creation of an OER enterprise? Will it be parceled out to state higher-ed institutions with an instruction to create local development programs? Will it be offered to individual authors in the form of grants? (Given the limited success we’ve seen so far with the latter approach, I hope the administrators of the program will do robust due diligence before implementing it.)
Moving forward, it will be essential that the administrators of this program make sure they aren’t trying to solve the wrong problem. Many observers find it baffling that professors are slow to adopt (let alone write) open textbooks, and my experience suggests that whenever someone insists on doing something you find baffling, that suggests that you might not know as much as you think you do about the phenomenon in question.
The Babson Group’s recent faculty surveys have turned up interesting data in this regard, finding that by far the greatest barrier to faculty adoption of OERs is not concern about quality, or lack of institutional support, or the difficulty of integrating OERs into existing teaching platforms, but rather the belief (sometimes accurate, and sometimes not) that open resources simply don’t exist in the relevant fields. The top three reasons that faculty gave for not adopting  OERs were variations on “they don’t exist for my discipline” and “I can’t find them.” If these survey results are accurate, then making currently existing OERs more findable may be as important a goal as simply creating more of them.
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TJ Bliss, program officer, William and Flora Hewlett Foundation
The new announcement from New York is further evidence of the growing trend of OER adoption across higher ed and K-12. We already know from 16 peer-reviewed studies that students perform as well or better when using OER, and that both faculty and students perceive OER to be as good or better quality than traditional textbooks – and now it’s clear that the State of New York is willing to join the growing list of nations, states, colleges, and schools banking on that. It’s absolutely a win-win: student costs decrease dramatically, there’s no trade-off in educational quality, and faculty and students alike have the opportunity to engage with knowledge in a much deeper way than is possible with traditional textbooks.
At the Hewlett Foundation, we have been making strategic investments for years in the infrastructure and connective tissue necessary to bring OER to scale, and we continue to see demand grow for the incredible number of high-quality OER textbooks and materials available through sources like OpenStax College and the Open Textbook Library. Any major paradigm shift like this one requires this level of investment, and we’re pleased to see more funders stepping up to support the development of infrastructure, research and openly licensed materials themselves. All of these signs tell us that OER are not going away; rather, the adoption of OER is only accelerating.
As in any paradigm shift, we expect to encounter bumps in the road and unexpected obstacles, and implementing OER is no exception. However, we continue to be pleased at how nimbly the OER field tackles each challenge that comes along, embracing the notion of continuous improvement whole-heartedly, and always working to ensure that students get the best education possible with the outcomes they deserve.
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Thomas Carey, research professor, Center for Research in Math & Science Education, San Diego State University
Two recent articles in Inside Higher Ed have featured advances in the adoption of Open Education Resources: the announcement from New York State about a new state-wide Open Textbook investment and a new partnership to “bring open course content to faculty members through the campus bookstore."
Welcome as these new announcements are, and as much as we hope they represent a breakthrough on OER adoption…we’ve been predicting an imminent ‘tipping point’ for OER usage long enough to be a bit cautious. Instead, I’d like to highlight a value proposition for Open Textbooks that’s often overlooked: making visible the way faculty work with knowledge in our teaching, as a model for students’ engagement with knowledge practices in their own work.
We know we need to prepare students for a future in which they will work with knowledge that doesn’t yet exist, using knowledge practices that don’t exist, in jobs that don’t yet exist. Building capability for such a dynamic knowledge environment includes a conceptual perspective on knowledge as evolving rather than fixed, a skill set for extending knowledge and knowledge practices in innovative ways, and above all a sense of agency and self-efficacy for this kind of knowledge-building as part of contemporary professional and vocational workloads. Some researchers are framing this kind of capability as ‘the Deliberate Practitioner’, encompassing the more familiar ‘Reflective Practitioner’ goal but with a much strong forward-looking view of practice (rather than just reflecting in retrospect).
With this goal in mind, an open textbook can become more than an exposition of the subject matter content – it can also be a demonstration of the process by which the pedagogical content knowledge has evolved over time within the professional community. That process demonstrates how the knowledge can be – and must be – adapted for particular contexts, how new research evidence can be applied to improve outcomes, and reveal instructional challenges that remain as open questions being actively addressed.
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Cheryl Costantini, vice president of content Strategy, Cengage
It’s too soon to say if the announcement from New York State or Lumen Learning and Follett will really change the publishing landscape. What’s really interesting in New York is the change in mindset to take a more holistic view of college affordability. It’s not just about the cost of textbooks or the cost of tuition. The idea that we need to address these two items together, not separately, really represents a new, smart way of thinking.
The announcement in New York is not a surprise, as the state has always been a leader when it comes to OER initiatives. In 2012, they launched SUNY Open Textbooks and have operated their own OER publisher. There is still a lot that remains to be seen about how the program will work and how OER resources will scale across the SUNY and CUNY campuses. Regardless of the amount of the investment, the same barriers exist when it comes to discoverability of OER sources, durability and sustainability of the materials created and winning professor buy-in.
Many don’t realize that about a third of all US states already have some OER initiative in development. Cleary, the OER movement has come far, but Cengage research indicates that the next 5 years will be a real tipping point for OER use, which could triple from 4 percent to 12 percent of the primary courseware market and 19 percent of the supplemental adoption market.
Overall, these most recent advancements in affordability are win for all of us. The more we can do to increase access to education and remove barriers for learners, the better off we are.
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Joseph Esposito, management consultant working in scholarly communications
I have  been involved with OER projects for about a decade and am currently working on two such projects. Some things have changed over the last ten years, and some have not. There is greater energy in the OER movement now, but the core problems affecting the uptake of OER in higher education remain unchanged. The first of these is that the overall quality of the materials is all over the place. It takes a truly industrious instructor to find things that can be used. There is a place in the marketplace (or the ecosystem) for a demanding review publication of OER products so that instructors can separate the useful from the half-baked.
The second point is that many instructors simply don't have the time to put into OER. One of the great advantages of the traditional textbook is that it makes life easy for the instructor. An instructor whose tenure decision will mostly be based on his or her publications and not on skills in the classroom has little incentive to adopt OER. Finally, OER is "open" in two ways: "open" as in free to the user, and "open" as in configurable to the user. The second meaning (configurability) is by far the more important, but most discussion of OER is about cost. This is myopic. The problem with OER is that it has been conflated with the Open Access movement, but its real virtues lie in the capability to tailor instruction to different classroom contexts and very different students.
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Cable Green, director of Open Education, Creative Commons
Free college tuition is fundamentally about equitable access to a higher education for everyone. But once students are admitted to college, even with free tuition, they are still faced with other expenses including housing, food, transportation, child care and textbooks. Textbook costs are significant and continue to rise, by more than three times the rate of inflation according to the latest data. For students in two-year college, that typically adds an additional 40 percent on top of their tuition costs.
If students can’t afford their textbooks, they can’t learn as effectively – imagine trying to learn Chemistry and complete your assignments without the required textbook. And this is not a theoretical problem. A recent study found that two-thirds of students surveyed did not purchase one or more required textbooks due to cost despite knowing it could harm their grade. Another study in Florida found that a third of students took fewer courses because of the high cost of textbooks.
We will continue to see more universities shifting to OER because they like the cost savings for students with no downside in terms of student outcomes. And we’ll continue to see the OER field innovating to meet the challenges inherent in any major shift in education.
What can New York do to maximize the impact of this $8 million OER investment?
Eliminate textbook costs for the SUNY and CUNY 100 highest enrolled courses.
Shift entire degree programs to OER. See Achieving the Dream’s national OER Degree Initiative.
Don’t recreate the wheel. Reuse and revise existing OER. There are a host of quality OER available from reputable sources including MIT, OpenStax and University of Minnesota, just to name a few.
Join existing OER communities and learn from other States, faculty and librarians (e.g., OER Commons Hubs, MERLOT communities, SPARC Libraries & OER Forum, Open Education Consortium).
Share what they build. To the extent New York builds new OER with $8 million of public funding, the resources created with these funds should be openly licensed by default – preferably with a Creative Commons Attribution license.
Ask for help. For profit companies (e.g., Lumen Learning) exist to help colleges and universities shift to OER.
Avoid so-called “inclusive access” textbook publisher programs that lease (not sell) students short-term access to closed, non-editable educational resources
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Michael Hale, vice president of education, VitalSource
New York state is right to consider the cost of course materials as a part of the program to eliminate tuition at CUNY and SUNY for almost a million needy students. However, doing so by trying to “eliminate textbook costs for more than 100,000 students” by moving the courses to OER content is neither the best nor easiest answer to lower the cost of course materials. OER can certainly be part of the answer, but first we need to reframe the goal as ensuring that all students get quality materials, be they OER or commercially produced, at the most affordable prices.  Emphasis on ensuring they actually get the materials, since most do not.
Fortunately, there is an easier answer and one that has saved students between 40 percent to 70 percent on the cost of course materials. Before outlining this solution, I want to outline the economics of textbook costs.
OER is a reaction to the massive increase in textbook costs, an 82 percent increase over the last 10 years. Education publishers invest tremendous resources into the creation of textbooks working with experts in the field – often leading professors – to author, curate, organize and deliver content and assessments in a package designed to facilitate learning. They then sell this print book through a variety of channels, including student bookstores and online sellers.
This textbook, for which the publisher received revenue one time, may then be resold, or rented, another six times without the publisher receiving any revenue.  As a result, publishers have to maximize the price of their initial sale to cover the lost sales. It also reduces the number of years between new editions, since a new edition represents another opportunity make a sale again before that title enters the used and rental markets.
The result is our current state in which 65 percent of students say they have chosen not to purchase a “required” textbook due to cost even though 95 percent of them feel this decision negatively impacted their grades (US PIRG).  When the average graduation rates for students at four-year universities hovers around 60 percent and less than 40 percent at community colleges, we have to first ensure that students get the materials professors have “required” for success.
When publishers sell new textbooks at absurdly high prices, it is easy to make them out to be the greedy villain in this story. However, publishers are just responding to the economic realities and they are ready to participate in this solution.
The irony is that by providing all students with the content through Inclusive Access programs students are able to get their books on day one. In these programs, students are billed for the content at a greatly reduced price since publishers are getting paid on every delivery.  The federal government has responded to the rise of these programs by publishing new rules that allow any institution to include learning materials in a course provided students are given the option to opt-out on a per course basis.
The rise of these Inclusive Access programs has led most major education publishers to develop new pricing that reduces the costs to students by as much as 70 percent.  For example, one small community college in TN saved students $860K in the first semester of their school-wide Inclusive-Access program.
Full disclosure: VitalSource is the leading provider of Inclusive Access technologies and is also now the distributor for the largest collection of curated OER, https://goo.gl/ldVluK.
One final point: I find the discussion around OER to be analogous to the many conversations about MOOCs that churned about a few years back.  At that time, many were asking questions about the impact of MOOCs on traditional higher education.  Will MOOCs affect traditional college enrollments?  Will some student forego tuition-based education for MOOCs?  Many in the higher education community were genuinely concerned, and even threatened, by this thought.
While the history is still being written, you don’t hear many concerns about losing students to MOOCs anymore.  MOOCs have absolutely had a significant impact on higher education (the rise of micro-creditentialing, for example); however, they have not been the highly disruptive force that many thought, and even feared, they might be.
What will be the impact of OER? My guess is that they will help drive more rational pricing with course materials and pioneer a few new and better forms of content that will mostly be co-opted by the companies, some of them new, in the business of creating high quality course materials.
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Quill West, open education project manager, Pierce College
I’m very excited about the announcement that New York’s governor and legislature are investing in college affordability, and that they are considering textbook costs as well as tuition, as an issue for families investing in their students’ futures. It’s heartening that the leadership in New York recognized that an initial investment in open education will go a long way toward improving educational goals for people all over the state. Every investment in open education, especially at the governmental level, is a positive move toward transitioning the burden of education costs away from individual students and to a more equitable and sustainable approach for delivering curricular materials.
This investment comes at a perfect time in the open education landscape, because it comes at a time when the focus has shifted from creation of new educational materials, to adoption of educational practices that support openness. All of the efforts on open education up to this point have moved us forward incrementally in building a set of proven practices for adoption of open materials in a wider scale.
Increasingly institutions who invest in open education are considering scale, wide adoption practices, and cross-institutional collaboration as they embark on open education efforts. In essence states like New York, and my own state Washington, have invested in infrastructure such as professional development, assessment of student experiences in classes, and institutional policies that support the ongoing growth of OER. The next steps that the open education movement will take, using investments like this one, is developing a body of literature that discusses both proven practices for open education adoption and how open education helps students to meet their goals.


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Will Trump Use Tax Reform to Create a Scholarship Tax Credit?

With the Trump administration readying to tackle tax reform, education policy experts are gearing up for what many predict will be the vehicle for the president making good on his campaign promise to steer $20 billion in federal funding to school choice: a scholarship tax credit.

“A lot of people expect that the proposal you’ll hear from the administration directly will likely be for a tax credit for people who donate to organizations that give scholarships,” says Neal McCluskey, the director of Cato's Center for Educational Freedom.

Republicans in the House and Senate have already penned a scholarship tax credit proposal that fits the bill. And by hitching a ride on a larger tax overhaul, a scholarship tax credit plan would avoid having to go it alone the way a private school voucher bill would, or a bill to make federal pots of money for poor students or students with disabilities portable – two other legislative proposals that lawmakers have floated.

“A tax credit would get a lot less political pushback,” McCluskey says. “The interesting part of that is, I don’t know if the Department of Education itself would have to be all that involved in it because it’s working through the tax code. But I think what you’d see is Secretary [Betsy] DeVos being the public spokesperson for administration’s proposal to have a scholarship tax credit.”

Scholarship tax credit programs allow individuals or corporations to write off a percentage of their owed state taxes by making donations to non-profit scholarship-granting organizations that issue the private school scholarships to students. Students can then use that voucher to cover tuition and fees at a private school that’s approved by the scholarship-granting organization.

Currently 17 states offer residents some type scholarship tax credit, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Each differs slightly in the amount and types of taxes an individual or corporation can write-off, as well as eligibility requirements for students.

It’s unclear exactly how a federal scholarship tax credit program would be structured. The White House has offered few details on its private school choice agenda, including the $250 million proposal included in the president’s fiscal 2018 spending plan.

That being said, President Trump and Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos have spent a lot of political capital touting Florida’s scholarship tax credit program: Trump called out Denisha Merriweather in his joint address to Congress last month, applauding the young woman who received a school voucher from the Sunshine State’s program to attend a private school and eventually became the first member of her family to graduate from high school and college. Days later, Trump and DeVos visited a Catholic school in Orlando, where hundreds of students attend the school using a voucher from the state's tax credit scholarship program.

Florida’s program, which was first implemented in 2001 under former Gov. Jeb Bush, allows corporations to apply for a tax credit to be applied to income tax, sales tax, some excise taxes, insurance premium tax or severance tax. The most common credit, provided for income tax, can be worth up to 75 percent of a corporation’s total income liability. The scholarships are disbursed to low-income students who are entering kindergarten or first grade, or who attended a public school the previous school year.

In other states, like Arizona, the program allows both individuals and corporations to claim a tax credit on income, with scholarship funds from individuals going to any student the scholarship-granting organization chooses and scholarship funds from corporations going specifically to low-income students.

In Louisiana and Rhode Island, students’ household income must be no more than 250 percent of the federal poverty level, or $60,750 for a family of four, and in Iowa and Virginia it must be no more than 300 percent, or $72,900 for a family of four. Students in Pennsylvania qualify if their family income is $60,000 or less. Many states peg eligibility to whether a student qualifies for free or reduced-priced lunch.

In New Hampshire, any student attending a public school qualifies for a voucher from the program, so long as 40 percent of the vouchers are targeted to students who qualify for free and reduced-priced lunch.

Most scholarship tax credit programs have a cap on the total amount of tax credits awarded so that policymakers know and can plan for state revenue that’s lost as a result.

The legislative proposal floated by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., and Rep. Todd Rokita, R-Ind., would allow for a maximum tax credit of $4,500 for students whose household incomes do not exceed 250 percent of the federal poverty level. It would allow corporations a tax credit up to $100,000 for contributions to scholarship granting organizations, which would be required to distribute 90 percent of their total donations.

The administration’s private school choice agenda is a major part of making good on promises by Trump and DeVos to give students in chronically failing schools additional education options.

But Democrats have been quick to criticize scholarship tax credit programs, as well as other private school choice proposals, and are likely to put up a fight over any private school choice proposal contained in a tax reform bill. Just last week Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., and top Democrat on the Senate education committee, sent a memo to her caucus outlining a case against private school choice policies.

“These programs rely on non-profits and are often used to skirt state constitutional requirements that prohibit funds from being used to subsidize religious entities,” she wrote of scholarship tax credit programs specifically.

A proposal could under come under fire by Republicans who represents rural areas, as students there typically have no other educational options outside the public school system. That issue was at the heart of DeVos’ contentious confirmation process, as Republican senators from Maine and Alaska refused to support her nomination.

While it’s unclear how quickly the administration and Congress will move on an admittedly ambitious overhaul, policy experts expect to have a better sense of the proposal in the coming weeks.

How Schools Are Like Uber, Trump U Settlement

Education Secretary Betsy DeVos talks with Grover "Russ" Whitehurst, senior fellow in the Center on Children and Families in the Economic Studies program at the Brookings Institution on Wednesday in Washington.

Welcome to another weekly roundup from the NPR Ed Team, where we lasso the latest news on student aid, school choice, and more.

Trump University settlement finalized

Thousands of students are set to get money back now that U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel has finalized the $25 million fraud settlement against Trump University.

The nonaccredited series of seminars, which shut down in 2010, was advertised as a way to share Donald Trump's expertise in real estate. Several lawsuits argued that the focus instead was on participants' wallets.

One playbook for staff members instructed them to target the financially vulnerable. "[f]or example: are they a single parent of three children that may need money for food?" Solution: encourage them to put the expensive course on a credit card or even multiple cards.

A holdout member of the class covered in the lawsuit, Sherri Simpson of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., sought to sue Trump individually. The judge dismissed her objection on Friday.

DeVos on choice: like taxis vs. Uber?

At the Brookings Institution, a centrist, Washington D.C.-based think tank, Education Secretary Betsy DeVos criticized her predecessor, Arne Duncan, for spending $7 billion on school turnaround programs with no discernible result.

She also compared charter and private schools to startups Uber and Lyft:

"Just as the traditional taxi system revolted against ridesharing, so too does the education establishment feel threatened by the rise of school choice."

Some on Twitter seized on the remark, pointing out that Uber has been in a whirlwind of scandal lately and that her analogy left out any public options, including the bus, train or bikeshare.

During a Q-and-A with Grover "Russ" Whitehurst, a Brookings senior fellow, DeVos raised eyebrows again. Asked whether school choice could inadvertently harm public schools, she responded, "I'm not sure how they could get a lot worse on a nationwide basis."

DeVos cited scores on the Nation's Report Card, or NAEP test, that she said were "stagnant" and on the international PISA test, which she said were "deteriorating."

She was swiftly fact-checked by Whitehurst. In most subjects, he pointed out, U.S. performance on PISA is on par with international averages, although we're worse in math. On the NAEP, scores have actually been rising.

Student aid data tool down for the count

In a surprise announcement Thursday, the IRS warned students who need help paying for college that they're on their own filling out the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, or FAFSA.

This year, because of several key changes made by the Obama administration, most students should have been able to use the IRS' Data-Retrieval Tool to quickly answer some of the financial aid form's toughest tax questions. Emphasis on "should have been."

Last month, the IRS suddenly announced it had suspended the tool "following concerns that information from the tool could potentially be misused by identity thieves."

Thursday, the IRS made clear there will be no simple fix, saying in a statement that "students and families should plan for the tool to be offline until the start of the next FAFSA season."

As in, October.

Justin Draeger, president and CEO of the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators (NASFAA), said his group was "disappointed" by the news. He worried that, in referring to the tool as a "convenience," the IRS Commissioner had betrayed "a disheartening lack of understanding about how vital this tool has become in streamlining the financial aid application process."

Interestingly, in this week's statement, the IRS elaborated on its security concerns, suggesting that identity thieves may have already compromised the system to file fraudulent tax returns: "The IRS is working to identify the number of taxpayers affected by questionable use of the Data Retrieval Tool."

Until the DRT is back online, students will need to manually fill out their tax information, which can be a challenge for many English language learners and first-generation college students.

Trump administration defends accountability for for-profit colleges

In a rare instance of upholding an Obama-era rule, Trump administration lawyers defended "gainful employment" in federal court this week.

If too many former students struggle to pay back their student loans over time, the rule cuts the for-profit school off from federal student aid dollars.

The American Association of Cosmetology Schools opposes the requirement and sued. The group argues that some of their graduates' income comes from cash tips that go unreported to the IRS, making a fair comparison of debt to earnings impossible.

Debt collectors pass on big penalties

Secretary DeVos recently changed Education Department guidance to allow student loan collectors to immediately charge fees on students in default.

After an outcry from Democrats and consumer groups, Bloomberg reported, the debt collectors said they would keep the two-month grace period originally instituted in 2015.

Loan forgiveness? Not so fast

In other student loan news, back in 2007, the Department of Education created a program called Public Service Loan Forgiveness. Borrowers with certain federal loans were supposed to be eligible to have their loans forgiven after ten years of continuous employment at a nonprofit, or for the government or military, after meeting income qualifications.

Soon that first group of loans is due to be erased. More than half a million people have already applied; up to 25 percent of the workforce is theoretically eligible. And according to the New York Times, the department suggested in a legal filing last week that thousands of would-be participants may have their approval revoked at any time, meaning they'll have to pay those loans back after all.

Four borrowers, all attorneys, sued the department alongside the American Bar Association after they were retroactively denied eligibility.

For-profit alternative school investigation

Officials in Philadelphia, Houston and Columbus, Ga. are rethinking their relationship with Camelot Education, a for-profit provider of second-chance or alternative schools.

That's after an investigation in Slate by the Teacher Project at Columbia University School of Journalism and ProPublica found multiple allegations of physical abuse and assault by staff members against students.

The week in higher education – 28 April 2016

The good, the bad and the offbeat: the academy through the lens of the world's media History PhD student Hannah Woods was the winning captain in last week’s University Challengefinal, but attention has bizarrely focused not on her quizzing prowess but on her naturally arched left eyebrow. Woods’ so-called Roger Moore eyebrow spawned two parody Twitter accounts, a Valentine Day’s card and an online marriage proposal during Peterhouse College, Cambridge's run to the final, The Daily Telegraph reported  on 18 April. Ms Woods explained that her face was naturally asymmetric, saying that her left brow “tends to float ever-higher up [her] face”, giving the appearance that she was “rather wry and challenging”. But she added that she was "slightly baffled by the level of eyebrow attention – I’ve found it all quite funny, though I tend to agree with the people who have asked ‘is this news?’”.

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Students from several universities have threatened to split from the National Union of Students after the election of Malia Bouattia as president. Harry Samuels, an NUS delegate from theUniversity of Oxford, told the BBC’s Newsnight on 21 April that Ms Bouattia’s appointment was undemocratic, as she was not elected under a system of “one member, one vote”. Ms Bouattia has been accused of making anti-Semitic remarks – including calling the University of Birmingham “something of a Zionist outpost” in 2011. While the move to disaffiliate was “not just about Malia in particular…her election enshrines the fact that the NUS no longer represents all students”, said Mr Samuels. Ms Bouattia has said that she is "extremely uncomfortable with insinuations of anti-Semitism", adding: “For me to take issue with Zionist politics is not me taking issue with being Jewish." She said that it was "a political argument, not one of faith”, adding that she had a “long track record of opposing racism and discrimination in all its forms and actively campaigning against it”.

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Students at an elite Paris university have been criticised for asking people to wear a Muslim headscarf for a day to help them understand Islamophobia. The event at Sciences Po follows comments by French prime minister Manuel Valls calling on universities to ban the hijab on campus, in line with France’s strict policy of state secularism, The Guardian reported on 20 April. Organisers of the Sciences Po initiative claimed that it would help “demystify” the headscarf, but the move was attacked by some staff and student groups as a “provocation”. “So when is there going to be a sharia day? Or stoning day? Or slavery day?”, tweeted Bernard-Henri Lévy, a writer and philosopher, while Bruno Le Maire, a former agriculture minister and Sciences Po professor, wrote of his disapproval at so-called Hijab Day. “In France, women are visible. No proselytising!” he said.

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The potential for a PhD to massively increase earning power was at the heart of a shocking court case that left a couple “devastated” and financially ruined, BBC News reported on 20 April. Frank and Marilyn Boardman agreed to support their daughter, Nicola, through a PhD at the University of Oxford after she told them that she would make £3 million from her subsequent career and pay them back. But Boardman, from Truro, Cornwall, who had a history of battling heroin addiction, had not been accepted for any study and cheated her parents out of £250,000 over the course of four years, in which they paid for “university trips” to Greece and Mongolia. “This was all made up,” said Philip Lee, prosecuting, shortly before Boardman was jailed for three years and four months, after pleading guilty to one count of fraud at Truro Crown Court. Tragically, the couple sold their home to support their daughter’s supposed studies, leaving them with no funds for their retirement.

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Jo Johnson, the universities and science minister, has warned that Brexit could create a “science and innovation crisis”. Mr Johnson, an enthusiastic advocate for the European Union in contrast to his brother Boris, spoke in London on 21 April to pose the question: “Are we going to preserve the factors that have created a great tech cluster, or succumb to fanciful Brexit bluster?” His speech added, with more bizarre rhymes: “Do we want to fuel our knowledge economy with science and innovation, or fill it up with piffle and ventilation?” The word “piffle” has an interesting Johnsonian heritage: Boris used it to criticise David Cameron’s “broken society” comments in 2008 and in his 2004 denial of allegations that he had an extramarital affair – a denial that eventually saw him sacked from the Conservative opposition front bench.