A Primer on the Arnold Ventures-funded Coalition

You can't understand today's EdTech regulatory news without connecting the dots

Author

Phil Hill
August 08, 2024

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Yesterday Inside Higher Ed covered the proposed rules by the US Department of Education (ED) that will require online attendance taking. Not just for online programs but for all online courses. The title captures the sentiment well - “Colleges Balk at Federal Plan to Require Attendance Taking in Online Courses.”

Taking attendance would not be as simple as students logging into the learning management system or stating “here” at the beginning of each class session. Every 14 days, students would be expected to turn in an assignment or interact with a professor or fellow students during lectures and course discussions, although the department has yet to define exactly what mechanism or standard it would require colleges to use to align with the new policy.

Repeating Pattern

You get a repeating pattern with this new rule. Think tanks and foundations claim it’s no big deal.

Carolyn Fast, director of higher education and senior fellow at the Century Foundation, served on the negotiating committee for the rule making that developed the proposed regulations. She believes taking attendance is a “completely reasonable” thing to ask.

“A concern is if a school isn’t taking attendance—how do they know when a student withdraws?” she said. “I think it’s just a common-sense thing. If you’re calculating it based on a date and don’t know when they’re attending, how could it be accurate?”

But institutional administration and associations representing institutions call out the new burdens on almost all schools, including faculty. Further, they point out that ED has provided no basis to justify the new rules, just claimed concerns by advocates.

David Baime, senior vice president for government relations at the American Association of Community Colleges, said he asked the Education Department for data showcasing how widespread an issue the lack of attendance taking is. He said the department did not respond.

“Despite what the department has said, it can ultimately be quite complicated and difficult and furthermore costly for institutions to provide documentation that the department appears to be requiring as a result of the attendance requirement for online courses,” he said.

Not to mention that ED rejected the input provided during negotiated rulemaking pointing out the the 14-day requirement will be problematic for military on deployment, who often have to do coursework in bursts and might not be active during every 14-day period.

For anyone paying attention, the pattern is that the advocates behind most of the new ED rules targeting online education are the same. New America, Center for American Progress, Century Foundation, Third Way, TICAS, Veterans for Education Success, etc, etc. Always the same groups, and very few people who actually have meaningful experience working at institutions, dealing with faculty, administering programs. But they know better, and online needs their aggressive oversight.

The Coalition Described

For me, this is old hat, and I covered last year how this whole coalition is held together with common funding from a billionaire couple who made their initial fortune from Enron. John and Laura Arnold through Arnold Ventures. I wrote about this last year, but I think the topic needs to be reprised, partially because we have 30-40% new subscribers to this newsletter who might not have read the initial coverage, but also because we are likely to see a big revolving door in action over the next 6 - 9 months.

Before I summarize last year’s posts, this chart should give a sense of the coalition and how AV funds so much of the regulatory activity we’re seeing in US higher education. Note that AV no longer shares their funding information publicly, meaning that I can no longer do this type of analysis. Correlation, causation . . . ?

Recap of On EdTech Coverage

  • Arnold Ventures Influence on ED Policy - Last year’s regulatory activity was heavy on targeting revenue-sharing Online Program Management (OPM) companies, and the initial post from May 2023 looked at the groups pushing the failed Third-Party Services expansion guidance. (TPS is not dead, however, as ED has promised to revive it in negotiated rulemaking in the next month or two).

  • Arnold Ventures Influence Beyond Regulation - In the second post, I described the patterns of behavior from the AV-funded coalition, particularly on how actual regulations are but one thrust. Class action lawsuits, public letters covered by media, and the modus operandi of flooding the zone with advocacy in the form of research that pushes one particular perspective rather than exploring an issue. All of this in coordinated campaigns where the specific organizations writing the research, articles, letters, and filing the lawsuits make no attempt to acknowledge the Arnold Ventures funding source.

  • It’s Much Broader Than Lobbying Against OPMs - In the third post I showed how the activities of the AV-funded coalition are much broader than just targeting OPMs. Financial Value Transparency & Gainful Employment (FVT & GE) and the proposed gutting of State Authorization Reciprocity are also part of this campaign.

  • Filling the Ranks - In the fourth post on the AV-funded coalition, I showed the massive and active revolving door between these same think tanks / foundations and ED.

  • ED's Policy-Based Evidence Making - In a related post, I looked at the official documents behind FVT & GE and noted the common approach that was becoming very clear. That post also looked at the enormous influence of research by Stepanie Cellini, who is funded through George Washington University, Brookings, and the PEER project - all sharing AV funding.

  • Online is the Target - And in a seminal post by Glenda Morgan, she pointed out that Online is the Target. That post and a follow-on I wrote show how most of the activity we’re seeing in 2024 is specifically aimed at reining in online education in general.

About the Revolving Door

This door is going to be very active in 2024 and early 2025. Consider one person I didn’t even put in that list.

Mr. Whistle was the lead ED staff pushing the Cash Management proposed regulations that would eliminate Inclusive and Equitable Access (IA & EA) textbook models. After a few years at higher education institutions (one of the few people at ED with this experience), he has had quite the illustrative bio.

Third Way → Biden advisor → New America → US Senate advisor → New America → Department of Education → New America.

And all of this just since 2017. That, my friends, is the epitome of a revolving door.

And in a new twist this year, New America hired former Education Dive reporter Jeremy Bauer-Wolf, who is now the “investigations manager on higher ed.” Read the posts - pure advocacy, no actual investigations. I am fine with them hiring a reporter, but I also think it fits in the pattern and is noteworthy.

Recap

Hopefully this recap of last year’s coverage will help bring new readers up to speed on the forces behind so much of today’s regulatory news. And you will not read about these connections in any trade press.

Update Aug 8-9: Added reference to Mr. Whistle’s prior work at higher education institutions. Likewise, changed “no one” to “very few” in the repeating pattern paragraph.

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