Investigating UNC System Academic Journals | Hour 3

What's going on. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. It is heard live every day from noon to three on WBT Radio in Charlotte. And if you want exclusive content like invitations to events, the weekly live stream, my daily show prep with all of the links, become a patron, go to thepeakclendarshow dot com. Make sure you hit the subscribe button. Get every episode for free right to your smartphone or tablet. And again, thank you so much for your support. I'm Donna King from Carolina Journal filling in for Pete Calendar today on the Pete Calendar Show. So we've all been talking about North Carolina's do state budget at length, six hundred pages of just new policy, lots of funding, but there is a central piece in this piece of legislation that addresses something that's very near and dear to the town of Charlotte and Mecklenburg County. The provisions follow the death of Dominique Moody, six year old Mecklenberg County girl who died in December after alleged abuse and neglect. Joining us now with the details on what the state budget does toward the Dominic Moody Safety Act. Andrew Pomerantz from Carolina Journal, our legislative reporter, Andrew, tell me about this provision and the state budget. Hey, Donna, thank you so much for having me today, looking back all the way to a case that happened in Mecklenburg County back in December of twenty twenty five, where this little girl, six years old, Dominique Moody, was found passed away in her family home where she had been kept in a dog create at six years old, only weighed twenty seven pounds when officials found her. And so a sad case out of Meckliburg County earlier this year, ar late last year that really drew the attention of state lawmakers throughout the legislative session here in Raleigh this past a couple of months. And so the state budget includes about six hundred and fifty thousand dollars worth of funding proposals that were put forward in a package proposed earlier in session and passed by the House on unanimous grounds by Representatives Alan Chester and Independent represented Carl Cunningham to representatives who were on the forefront of really driving this literally package forward. And so this took one hundred and fifty thousand dollars including the state budget will include the largest chunk to fund some full time positions for a child welfare case escalation team that will take a look into more of these cases. But failures were revealed throughout this process by the Mecklenburg Department Social Services over and over again. And I think this is maybe the last step in a sad story here that came out of the general submits here. You know, you mentioned failures, missed opportunities. What does this report saying happened in the case of Dominic Moody. Yeah, so, back in May, the House Oversight Committee summoned both Mecklenburg County and state welfare officials to testify in front of them, and when they did, the results were quite quite graphic, quite disappointing, too much of the legislative stacks here in Raleigh. They found that four out of five cases or reports in this case should have been further screened, but were actually screened out due to lack of whether they said, credibility or a concern and so, but those cases should have been screened in right, it's about an eighty percent failure rate in terms of those cases by the Mechnberg Department of Social Services and in Mechlenburg Department Social Services. More general sense, n c d h HS, the Department of Health and Human Services found failures across board in similar cases when cases were screened out. Both the Sheriff's office, the police office, police officers and DSS were informed of this case multiple times to four Dominiq's merits death all made appearances at the place of domicile for the little girl and her adopted parents. But the system failed in this case, right, and so this legulation really aimed to kind of close a lot of those gaps and understand why why that failure took place in the first place. Sure, tell me about the team that this budget, that the funding and this budget creates this escalation team. Yes, this escalation team will be really in charge of identifying those cases that they feel are worthy of an additional look. You know, VSS official said, you know, we don't have time to really spend on going in depth in so many cases, and when we pass those up, those supervisors you know, have this one kind of all over power on whether to follow up. And so this takes that responsibility out of their hands and put them with a specialized training excalation team that is trained in this, and so they will be able to do a number of things, including, you know, removing children from poster care situations. They'll be able to notify as officials about further concerns, and they'll be able to do a number of additional things like collateral contacts and creating safety plans and doing interviews with the family, So identifying some of those gaps that existed in staffing and filling those with people who may be better accustomed to fill those natural gaps. Sure, what kind of factors would mean would cause this to raise a red flag and make a case be sent to this escalation team? What kind of things are they going to be looking for? Yeah? Right, And in a case similar to Domnique Moody's, you know where there are multiple previous reports, including those reports that were screened out right, So if officials have made multiple contacts with one family about a case, that will first you know, raise those red flag. Same thing with chronic abuse or neglect, some of these unsubstantiated allegations, but that are continuing, right, and so outside of that, you know, previous removals into or out of foster care systems, repeated medical or mental health neglect, domestic violence, drug activity, or prior child fatalities or near fatalities. Right, so some of these more serious cases that may throw a red flag for a lot of us. But yes, that's you know, sees on a regular basis and just so needing another set of eyes to go ahead and you tackle a lot of cases. Sure, sure, I mean this is a big deal. That they put this in the budget. That tells you, I think, how important it is. It didn't pass separately, it was in the budget to make sure it got through anything from the original Dominant Moody Acts that they decided not to include. And do you anticipate this case or this issue coming up again in the next session. Yeah. So when the initial Dominique Moody Act passed out of the House, it has several position uh positions and different pieces of the bill that would talk about things like creating a public dashboard for child county welfare performance or expanding disclosure requirements after child FATA. These. One of the frustrations here in the legislature was they weren't there were a lot of limits on what information they could get and how they could get it. Representive Alan Chester out of Nash County spent days and weeks looking for this information, trying to understand what actually took place here, and so some of those provisions were left out at this point. And then on top of that, some of the provisions around making sure people hold accountable about doing some of these assessments and these welfare checks. So the requirement for photo video documentation or maybe a predictive risk modeling, some of those things that they look to increase accountability amongst these local DSS systems as they continue to show failures. Now, I do think this maybe an issue we see in legislative sessions going forward. Represented Chester spoke with us earlier saying that he does intend to continue to pursue some of these changes. I think it'll be interesting to see when they come back here at the end of July whether some of these provisions find their ways and some conference reports, and so we'll expect to see that here as we as we weave the leg's fature come back here at the end of July, but a lot left and I think you know, this is an issue that will continue to see a highlighted in Leslie's Legsley's suessions going forward, and so thank. You so much. Andrew Palmerenz from Carolina Journal. Great to talk to you. Yeah, thank you so much for having. Me all right for over a year now you've heard me talking about create a video. Great local company in mint Hill that has helped more than two million families preserve their memories by turning old photos, VHS tapes, film reels and slides into lasting keepsakes. Now creative videos helping families and groups create brand new memories while they're traveling. Introducing group travel videos perfect for family reunions, church mission trips, group vacations, destination weddings, student trips, senior adult groups, sports teams, I mean, really, any gathering of people that you care about that's traveling together. 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You can email Katie Katie at group travel videos dot com. Group travel videos from old memories to new adventures, preserving life's moments for lifetime. I'm Donna King from the Carolina Journal filling in for Pete Calendar today on the Pete Calendar Show. So if you're spending much time on college campuses, you know that college professors need to publish. And that's something that a lot of them do. They do research, they publish. There is a series of investigative reports on Carolina Journal dot com and on WBT dot com. Head over there and take a look and see what you think. But joining me now, investigative reporter for Carolina Journal, David Bass welcome David. This has been a heavy lift and this investigative work, isn't it. Yeah for sure? Thank you Donna. Good to join you today. Yeah, it sure has been. I could give kind of some background on how we yeah, if you would landed on the story. So this kind of came to our attention originally through a whistleblower lawsuit that was filed against unc Asheville, and the plaintive in that case is a gentleman named Aidan Setman. He was a former research assistant at the Center for Health and Wellness, which is part of unc Asheville. It's kind of an academic center there focused on health issue related issues, and essentially in his lawsuit, he had alleged that he was improperly terminated. There's some issues with whether he was considered a contractor or an employee, all that sort of thing. That's kind of the basis of the lawsuit. But the more interesting relevant part that was in it was he alleged some pretty serious accusations regarding the integrity of some of the academic writing that was done at the center when he was there. There was some data manipulation that he had alleged, and a lot of This matters because some of these academic papers that were published were actually funded by some federal funds through CARES Act back during COVID when all that federal money was flowing, there was also some state level funding from North Carolina Collaboratory that was in there, as well as some private funding. And so that was kind of the beginning of what got Carolina Journal interested in on the trail. And as we started pulling on some of these threads with the quality of academic publishing and some of the ethical issues there, we actually uncovered some pretty interesting facts. So for listeners who may not be familiar with academic published publishing, how important is the journal where the researcher is published when they evaluate the credibility of the research. Yeah, it's a very interesting question because you know, they're obviously the top tier journals, you know four or five that are just you know, the gold standard for this, and then there are a lot of probably middle tier. But then there are some of these lower tier journals that maybe that by the title of them, you wouldn't think that they were lower tier, but they definitely are with some of the ways that they handle the publishing process. So, for example, in this case with unc Asheville and what mister Setment had been alleging in his lawsuit. One of the papers at this center was published in a journal called Journal of Higher Education Theory and Practice. And this specific journal is actually part of a larger publisher called North American Business Press, So this is one of their individual journals. But if you dig into what this journal is actually what their practices are actually like, you really discover that there are some quality issues there. They were in twenty twenty four they were dropped from a Scopus rankings, which is kind of a ranking of the quality of these different journals. They were dropped from that. Also, interestingly, we found out that in these cases, the authors who publish in this journal actually have to pay to publish in it. The emails we were reviewing were showing that it was a price essentially of six hundred and twenty five dollars to have their paper published. Now, it was under the auspices of being a subscription to the journal, so it wasn't, you know, directly a pay to play thing, but it was kind of a back door way to do that, and that was invoice through PayPal as well, which those are the kind of practices that just raise eyebrows and kind of you know, put a dent in the credibility of the journal. And another issue that we'd uncovered was their peer review process is a matter of weeks instead of at a reputable journal would be probably months in many cases. So the peer review process was just lacking. And one other element that we had found with this journal was a lot of the people that they had listed on as being part of their editorial board, we had reached out to them and a lot of them had said either they were never asked and they never approved to be on the editorial board, or in some cases, they weren't even really aware of the publication. So it's it's issues like that that obviously just raise a lot of questions about how high the quality market is for that particular journal. Sure, and these are the professors in the research and their work does is taxpayer funded? This is all through UNC system schools, correct? Yeah, So we had we broadened out the look, you know, when we when we saw the issue that you und see the alleged issues that UNC Asheville, We're curious about, well, what about the entire you know, UNC system, what other what other schools might have academics who have published in some of these journals. And in a lot of these cases we found, you know, there were academics at numerous UNC System schools who would publish in these journals, and a lot of times, again there is federal or state grant money involved in some cases, you know, the publication in one of these journals might be used even as a justification at least, you know, partially for a tenure decision with some of these academics as well well. So there are a lot of factors that go in here, and one of the things that perhaps would be a little surprising is there's really no uniform standard of what makes a good or a bad academic journal in this sense. We actually asked the UNC system about on that question, is there any kind of you know, standard that's said, and they said, it's pushed down to the school level, even down to the department level, and there really is no benchmark necessarily of what qualifies or what doesn't qualify. And of course that might start to matter a little bit more when public money is involved. Of course, these are all at public higher education institutions as well, so there's taxpayer money involved, and you know, there's already been in the last few years some questions raised about the value proposition within higher education as tuition has been you know, ballooning and in the post COVID world, what all this looks like. So I think it's just an other another indication of where things could be headed with some of these questions. Sure, sure, this is really alarming. I mean, you know, you've got a four part series on Carolina Journal dot com and WBT dot com. But it's not just small schools, remote schools. Some of these are big ones. We're gonna be talking more about that if you don't mind sticking around for just a minute. We've been talking about UNC system research and publishing. We've heard often that that professor's researchers have to publish as part of the UNC system, our taxpayer paid public university system. Joining me now, David Larson is back investigative reporter who's been focused on a series investigating what does that look like and what are some of these journals and research that's been published. David, thanks for sticking around with us and filling us in a little bit more information you've been Your recent story also focused on a UNC system office associated vice president, you know, talk about the math Pathways program and what you found in this investigation. Yeah, absolutely, so in continuing to pull on some of these threads, we actually were able to track some of it to the UNC system office itself, and so there was a there's a leader there in academic who had co authored what ended up being a very favorable evaluation of this math path Pathways initiative. And there again there was a federal grant tie in with five million in CARES money again tied into that, and that was published in the same journal, the journal Higher Education that I mentioned before, that was tied to UNC Asheville. And interesting part on that was usually with these sorts of academic papers, there have to be disclosures of you know, the author's relationship to the in this case that was being evaluated, but that was actually not disclosed for this paper. The fact that the authors were in fact, you know, leads on this initiative, so that evaluation point itself is not a problem necessarily, but it has to be disclosed. And I think that that just is another indication that this academic journal was you know, lower quality and not to the perhaps of the bar that would need to be especially to justify a federal grant or a state grant, that sort of thing. And again going back to the UNC system has no policy on what makes a good academic journal what's not. It's all kicked down to the school and department level, so there's really not a clear benchmark of what we could operate from here. Sure, I mean you mentioned that the disclosure issue, it's it's a big part of this story. Why does disclosure matter when we talk about researchers and a value waiting programs that they are also helping to operate. Well, I think you it's easy to end up in that circular system, and especially if, obviously, if the the conclusion of the paper is a glowing report on the initiative and it's an initiative that you yourself operate, it's easy to see the circular nature of that. So disclosing it in advance is very important so that there's you know, honesty and integrity with some of these evaluations. Again to the broader point, though, it does I think you'd mentioned this on it that the beginning here was there is this culture of publish or perish in academia, so there's a lot of pressure for academics to get their research published, and in a lot of cases there are these you know, low quality and or even predatory journals that can try to take advantage of that. But it's it's kind of quietly the case in academia. It's not you know, perhaps it's not talked about publicly a whole lot, but I think some of that is beginning to become evident, even with reporting and research in from other publications and in other states, just to make the public fully aware of what this world of academic publishing actually looks like. Sure, I mean when we talk about these system wide standards that you mentioned, when research is supported by taxpayer dollars, federal grants, you know, all of that kind of thing. Should what do you think the public should expect in transparency about funding sources, publication venues. How do we do that or what are your thoughts on it? How do you maintain best practices and improve transparency but not interfere with academic freedom. I think that's the line, the very difficult line to walk, and I do think it could make sense that a broad unc system policy you know, would not make sense. But there it seems like, you know, and in every other discipline. You know, even in the world journalism or other professions, there is a standard, acceptable, kind of ethical threshold for these types of things. In the academic publishing world, it's very it's very you know, tenuous, and you know, there might be an academic who looks at a paper that was published in a certain journal and they could say, well, that's a lower quality publication, so I'm not going to take that as seriously. But beyond that, there's no kind of real strong sense of things. I think some of these there are some like online rankings of these journals, and you know, anecdotally there are people who will share about this is probably one to avoid, or this is a better one. But there's not really a set standard. So walking that line between academic freedom, but also especially when it's tied to federal state grants, when there needs to be an accountability mechanism there does seem like some sort of standard should be in place, just so the public knows that the tax payer money that's being spent on this research is funding research that is legitimate in a publication that is legitimate. Absolutely. David Bass, investigative reporter for Carolina Journal, Thanks so much for your time, this afternoon. Absolutely good to chat. I'm Donna King from Carolina Journal. I'm filling in for Pete Calendar this week on the Pete Calendar Show. Really enjoyed spending some time with you, bringing you all the stories that we've been following in North Carolina, particularly what's going on with your state government in Raleigh and the state legislature. There are a few bills and pieces of legislation that we've been following, particularly the state budget. There's one piece of the state budget that is something that's near and dear to my heart, of course, and certainly an important one. In Mecklenburg County, North Carolina, lawmakers have a proof funding for a series of child welfare reforms inspired by the tragic death of six year old Dominique Moody, whose case exposed some repeated failures in Mecklenburg County's child protective services system. So the new state budget that's now been signed by Governor Josh Stein was passed by the Republican legislature. That budget provides money to implement the Dominique Moody Safety Act. The reforms include creating a statewide child Welfare Escalation Team to review the highest risk abuse in the glect cases before they become tragedies. Child protective services workers will also be required to document home visits with photographs and verifiable records. The budget also funds predictive risk modeling, expanded training for child welfare workers, and a public dashboard to implement improved transparency and accountability. So the supporters say that the goal is pretty simple. They want to identify some warning signs earlier and prevent children from falling through the cracks. Lawmakers from both parties back the legislation after an emotional debate over Dominiq's death earlier this year, calling it one of the state's most important child protection reforms in years. Backers are hoping that the new funding system will ensure that reforms move quickly from legislation to action, with the goal of preventing another tragedy like Moody's. In other news, a former Gaston County teacher is suing the school district, claiming her free speech rights were violated when she was fired over her Facebook comment denigrating conservative activist Charlie Kirk following his assassination. Holly Ackerman's suit says that the comment was made on her personal account while she was off duty and that it did not interfere with her work as a teacher. Gaston County Schools suspended Ackerman and later fired her after an investigation into the post, saying that it caused significant disruption to the operation of the school. Ackerman's lawsuit names the district, members of the school board, and Superintendent Morgan Hochard. Ackerman is seeking damages for lost wages and emotional distress. So a new ruling from the North Carolina Court of Appeals could have some ramifications for cities, municipalities, counties around the state. So this new ruling from the Court of Appeals found that the City of Raleigh did not have the authority to charge more than sixteen million dollars in road impact fees to a developer, So the decision could mean a lot outside of Raleigh, even as more local governments across the state are increasingly looking to developers to help pay for roads and utilities and other infrastructure work needed for rapid growth. The unanimous three judge panel said the city lacked the authority under state law to require the payments as a condition of the development's approval. It was tied to a residential project, and the developer said that these fees really amounted to an unlawful tax, and it looks like the three judge panel was unanimous in agreeing with that developer. That ruling now raises questions about whether similar fees could face legal challenges across the state. Now, the city can ask the North Carolina Supreme Court to review the case. So there's also a new study about North Carolina's voucher system Opportunity Scholarship program. Critics of the Opportunity Scholarship program say that it just means more state money going to private schools and wealthy folks, but this new study says that the most expensive private schools in North Carolina receive little voucher funding. The new analysis finds that the state's elite private schools are taking very little money from the Opportunity Scholarship program. They reviewed one hundred schools receiving the most osp money and compared tuition levels of school affiliation. Several of the state's most expensive schools don't participate in the program at all, and of those who do, scholarship students typically account for less than five percent of enrollment. Instead, most Opportunities Scholarship dollars are going to smaller religious and community private schools across the state for contacts. The school year, more than six hundred private schools participated in the program. The maximum scholarship range is up to seven thousand, six hundred and eighty six dollars for students from lower income families, with smaller awards available for higher income households. No OSP does not come from the education budget in the North Carolina state Government's funded separately outside of the traditional public school budget. There's also a new report out that says one in five North Carolina households struggle with energy costs. A new report from the Locke Foundation Center for Food, Power in Life says twenty percent of North Carolina's households experience what they call energy poverty. What that means is a family spends a disproportionately large sale of their income just to keep the lights on and keep their house cooled in these hot July days. The report says that low income household senior's rural residents are most affected, and researchers are arguing that policymakers should really focus on keeping electricity reliable and affordable as demand continues to climb now, our state is expected to see some significant growth and electricity use over the next decade. We're getting a lot of new neighbors, a lot of people are moving here. There's a lot of manufacturing expansion, and of course new data centers. We've been talking a lot about that. The report warns that these higher utility costs hit the state's lowest income residents the hardest. All right, that'll do it for this episode. Thank you so much for listening. I could not do the show without your support and the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast, so if you'd like, please support them too and tell them you heard it here. You can also become a patron at my Patreon page or go to thepetcleanershow dot com. Again, thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything while I'm gone.