The median base salary of senior administrators at American public universities rose by 2.5 percent in the 2014 fiscal year, a rate slightly higher than that at private universities, according to a report being released this week that’s based on a survey by the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources. The report marked the first time in four years that the rate of salary growth for administrators at public colleges outpaced that of their peers at private ones.
Administrators’ salaries climbed by 2.3 percent at private universities and by 2.4 percent over all, comfortably outpacing the 1.5-percent rate of inflation in 2013. The increases signal that more institutions seem to be rebounding from the recession, at least enough to be able to carve out pay raises for senior officials.
Monthly Archives: March 2014
Higher Education: Well Endowed
WE RECENTLY examined university business models and the value of them of their endowments. Endowments, which stretch into the billions of dollars for elite institutions, deserve a bit more scrutiny. These cash piles have grown at a fair clip over the last two decades thanks to savvier investments by those that manage these funds. Payouts are an increasingly critical component of university revenue, too. Endowment income supports a wide range of activities from hiring, to facility upgrades and even need-based scholarships. They are generally viewed, not least by donors, as a university’s rainy day fund. Scholars at the University of Illinois and Nanyang Technological University, in Singapore, wondered how endowments have been helping universities to cope with recent economic difficulties. Do they smooth the income universities receive during financial shocks as expected, and are they treated just as another form of income for the university?
When the team looked at how endowments had responded to negative financial shocks during the technology bubble of 2001-2, and the financial crisis in 2008-9, the picture was different than they expected: endowments do not behave as rainy day funds at all. In a forthcoming paper for the American Economic Review (earlier version here), the authors propose that what they see in spending is more consistent with a hypothesis the team terms “endowment hoarding”. When times are bad, leadership is quick to cut the payouts from the endowment to reduce the size of any decline in the overall size of the fund—even though this tends to be contrary to what such funds are expected to do. When times are good payouts do increase, although there is often a slight lag between a bullish turn and increased flow from the tap.
College, the Great Unleveler
When the G.I. Bill of Rights of 1944 made colleges accessible to veterans regardless of socioeconomic background, Robert Maynard Hutchins, the president of the University of Chicago, worried that it would transform elite institutions into “educational hobo jungles.” But the G.I. Bill was only the first of several federal student aid laws that, along with increasing state investment in public universities and colleges, transformed American higher education over the course of three decades from a bastion of privilege into a path toward the American dream.
Something else began to happen around 1980. College graduation rates kept soaring for the affluent, but for those in the bottom half, a four-year degree is scarcely more attainable today than it was in the 1970s. And because some colleges actually hinder social mobility, what increasingly matters is not just whether you go to college but where.
Obama has ignored the fundamental collapse of the black American family
What a wonderful realization for the nation’s first black President to acknowledge! And with the parents of Trayvon Martin and Jordan Davis behind him, no less!
Sadly, the message to minorities – and blacks in particular – is that we blacks can’t be expected to take individual responsibility for our lives like our white counterparts … so the government has to do it for us. Blacks should find Obama’s assumptions more than disturbing. Young black men wouldn’t be wrong to find My Brother’s Keeper downright offensive. And everyone should realize that the first black president is not holding blacks accountable to the same standards as whites when it comes to parenting.
And parenting is the real problem here – not the often repeated media narrative of The Troubled Black Teenager upon which society inflicts so many ills , but the long overlooked and systemic problem of the broken black family.
The president knows the grim facts. “If you’re African American, there’s about a one in two chance you grow up without a father in your house – one in two,” he said in his announcement. “We know that boys who grow up without a father are more likely to be poor, more likely to underperform in school.” He went on:
UK Free schools will stumble – the test is how well they recover
Nothing tempts fate more than adding the word “flagship” to a government project. When Britain’s first profit-seeking state school opened in Suffolk 18 months ago, it perhaps had a little too much going in its favour. The blessing of the local MP, the skills minister Matthew Hancock. The backing of Sweden’s most successful education company, International English Schools (IES). A young, charismatic headmistress who seemed to embody the Tory ideal of a school entrepreneur. If the many enemies of reform wanted any school to be damned by the inspectors, IES Breckland would be it.
They may soon get their wish. Late last year, the IES managers in Stockholm felt their new flagship British school was not on the right track and they dealt with it in the Swedish way. This meant immediate, decisive action. The company’s operations manager, a former head teacher from Lancashire, flew over from Stockholm to take personal control. A replacement was found for the head teacher, a search started to replace six other teachers, and a detailed recovery plan was put in place with the aim of sorting out the problems by Easter.
Teenage angst in a digital world
It’s Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens, by Danah Boyd, Yale, RRP£17.99/RRP$25, 296 pages
The App Generation: How Today’s Youth Navigate Identity, Intimacy, and Imagination in a Digital World, by Howard Gardner and Katie Davis, Yale, RRP£16.99/$25, 256 pages
The Naked Future: What Happens in a World That Anticipates Your Every Move?, by Patrick Tucker, Current, RRP$27.95, 288 pages
Before social media platforms became the most public chronicles of teenage angst, that honour belonged to The Catcher in the Rye.
In among all the angsting, the narrator of JD Salinger’s classic coming-of-age novel frets over a once-common dilemma involving telephones and parents: “I couldn’t take a chance on giving [my sister] a buzz, because she was only a little kid and she wouldn’t have been up, let alone anywhere near the phone. I thought of maybe hanging up if my parents answered, but that wouldn’t’ve worked, either. They’d know it was me. My mother always knows it’s me. She’s psychic.”
How our 1,000-year-old math curriculum cheats America’s kids
Imagine you had to take an art class in which you were taught how to paint a fence or a wall, but you were never shown the paintings of the great masters, and you weren’t even told that such paintings existed. Pretty soon you’d be asking, why study art?
That’s absurd, of course, but it’s surprisingly close to the way we teach children mathematics. In elementary and middle school and even into high school, we hide math’s great masterpieces from students’ view. The arithmetic, algebraic equations and geometric proofs we do teach are important, but they are to mathematics what whitewashing a fence is to Picasso — so reductive it’s almost a lie.
Most of us never get to see the real mathematics because our current math curriculum is more than 1,000 years old. For example, the formula for solutions of quadratic equations was in al-Khwarizmi’s book published in 830, and Euclid laid the foundations of Euclidean geometry around 300 BC. If the same time warp were true in physics or biology, we wouldn’t know about the solar system, the atom and DNA. This creates an extraordinary educational gap for our kids, schools and society.
25 Years of Declining State Support for Public Colleges
Chronicle of Higher Education:
Explore how state and federal support has declined as a share of overall revenue—putting a greater burden on students—at more than 600 four-year public colleges and universities since 1987.
Are the robots about to rise? Google’s new director of engineering thinks so…
It’s hard to know where to start with Ray Kurzweil. With the fact that he takes 150 pills a day and is intravenously injected on a weekly basis with a dizzying list of vitamins, dietary supplements, and substances that sound about as scientifically effective as face cream: coenzyme Q10, phosphatidycholine, glutathione?
With the fact that he believes that he has a good chance of living for ever? He just has to stay alive “long enough” to be around for when the great life-extending technologies kick in (he’s 66 and he believes that “some of the baby-boomers will make it through”). Or with the fact that he’s predicted that in 15 years’ time, computers are going to trump people. That they will be smarter than we are. Not just better at doing sums than us and knowing what the best route is to Basildon. They already do that. But that they will be able to understand what we say, learn from experience, crack jokes, tell stories, flirt. Ray Kurzweil believes that, by 2029, computers will be able to do all the things that humans do. Only better.
But then everyone’s allowed their theories. It’s just that Kurzweil’s theories have a habit of coming true. And, while he’s been a successful technologist and entrepreneur and invented devices that have changed our world – the first flatbed scanner, the first computer program that could recognise a typeface, the first text-to-speech synthesizer and dozens more – and has been an important and influential advocate of artificial intelligence and what it will mean, he has also always been a lone voice in, if not quite a wilderness, then in something other than the mainstream
I Was Born For This: Breaking My Silence on Black Colleges
I have a few writing rules.
I do not write when I am angry and I do not write about HBCUs.
The former may go without saying the but the latter really flummoxes people. I am a graduate of an HBCU. I’m a third generation HBCU graduate. I study higher education. I study race and inequality. And I do not talk about HBCUs.
There became a point when the scope of my readership meant that what I write is often read through me. Intellectually, I go for the truth as close as I can approximate it and ethically, rigorously argue it. I fear that those two things may be in conflict. And I care too much to let that happen. So, I do not talk about HBCUs.
Except today I am talking at an HBCU. It is my HBCU. I am delivering the annual Mason-Sekora lecture. I am an oddball choice. I don’t really “do” anything of note. I’m not much accomplished if we’re still measuring that by having a job (I ain’t got no job, Craig). But, here I am. And I am happy to be here. There’s something about a moment in your life when you come full circle, only with new eyes and a greater capacity for appreciation.
Twelve Fixed, Eternal Commandments for Academic Job Candidates
In my too many years on the academic job market which culminated miraculously in my current position, I received a great deal of advice about how to navigate job application and interview protocols. I thought I would pass along some of this received wisdom in the form of these twelve fixed, eternal commandments that reflect a universal consensus about the proper guidelines for would-be scholars. Here they are:
1. Make sure to use last names and formal titles when addressing your interviewers. You don’t want to seem disrespectful.
1. Use first names. You want to seem like a colleague, not a grad student.
2. Make sure to thoroughly research the department to which you are applying before an interview. Learn the research interests of your interviewers and highlight in detail how your own work will complement the existing strengths of the program.
2. It will creep out the search committee if they learn you are googling them. You’ll seem like a stalker.
3. Highlight your scholarly breadth and interdisciplinary interests. Hiring committees want to know you are flexible and able to teach a variety of courses outside of your area of specialization.
Saving a Library Remnant
You see, I was asked last week by our university Librarian to review books that she wants to withdraw from the collection.
I teach at a small university with about 2800 students, most of whom are in the health sciences and business, with only a few in the humanities and social sciences. The reason the Librarian gave for the purge was that the books selected for elimination had not been checked out in thirty or more years, and that they needed to move them to make room. But it does not seem that that is the case that they will buy as many books to replace them – that the stacks are being culled to make room for electronic resources, or other non-textual uses.Still, I agree that some books reluctantly need to go. If a book goes thirty, forty or even fifty years without being checked out, it may need to relinquish its place to something more relevant. A number of volumes were actually collections of primary source documents, most of which have now merged onto online formats, making them far easier for students to access. In these cases, the convenience of document collections compiled in the 1960s are really just like our internet accessibility now. One could easily imagine the editors of such physical books now just putting the docs and links on a website, and getting far more student use out of it. Same with multiple editions of works, often textbooks, which do not really need to be in a small university library.
Student Loans Entice Borrowers More for Cash Than a Degree
Some Americans caught in the weak job market are lining up for federal student aid, not for education that boosts their employment prospects but for the chance to take out low-cost loans, sometimes with little intention of getting a degree.
Take Ray Selent, a 30-year-old former retail clerk in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. He was unemployed in 2012 when he enrolled as a part-time student at Broward County’s community college. That allowed him to borrow thousands of dollars to pay rent to his mother, cover his cellphone bill and catch the occasional movie.
“The only way I feel I can survive financially is by going back to school and putting myself in more student debt,” says Mr. Selent, who has since added $8,000 in student debt from living expenses. Returning to school also gave Mr. Selent a reprieve on the $400 a month he owed from previous student debt because the federal government doesn’t require payments while borrowers are in school.
On Academic Labor
On hiring faculty off the tenure track
That’s part of the business model. It’s the same as hiring temps in industry or what they call “associates” at Wal-Mart, employees that aren’t owed benefits. It’s a part of a corporate business model designed to reduce labor costs and to increase labor servility. When universities become corporatized, as has been happening quite systematically over the last generation as part of the general neoliberal assault on the population, their business model means that what matters is the bottom line. The effective owners are the trustees (or the legislature, in the case of state universities), and they want to keep costs down and make sure that labor is docile and obedient. The way to do that is, essentially, temps. Just as the hiring of temps has gone way up in the neoliberal period, you’re getting the same phenomenon in the universities. The idea is to divide society into two groups. One group is sometimes called the “plutonomy” (a term used by Citibank when they were advising their investors on where to invest their funds), the top sector of wealth, globally but concentrated mostly in places like the United States. The other group, the rest of the population, is a “precariat,” living a precarious existence.
This idea is sometimes made quite overt. So when Alan Greenspan was testifying before Congress in 1997 on the marvels of the economy he was running, he said straight out that one of the bases for its economic success was imposing what he called “greater worker insecurity.” If workers are more insecure, that’s very “healthy” for the society, because if workers are insecure they won’t ask for wages, they won’t go on strike, they won’t call for benefits; they’ll serve the masters gladly and passively. And that’s optimal for corporations’ economic health. At the time, everyone regarded Greenspan’s comment as very reasonable, judging by the lack of reaction and the great acclaim he enjoyed. Well, transfer that to the universities: how do you ensure “greater worker insecurity”? Crucially, by not guaranteeing employment, by keeping people hanging on a limb than can be sawed off at any time, so that they’d better shut up, take tiny salaries, and do their work; and if they get the gift of being allowed to serve under miserable conditions for another year, they should welcome it and not ask for any more. That’s the way you keep societies efficient and healthy from the point of view of the corporations. And as universities move towards a corporate business model, precarity is exactly what is being imposed. And we’ll see more and more of it.
Commentary on the K-12 Education Model’s Structure
Ryan Krohn stopped as we walked down a middle school hallway to point out what was in a classroom we were passing: rows of traditional student desks, neatly lined up.
That’s what we’re getting away from, he said. Those desks — and the kind of approach to teaching and learning that comes with them. We’re all in our places with (sometimes not so) bright, shiny faces and, if this is third hour, we’ll sit and listen to the teacher instruct us in math or social studies or whatever the schedule calls for during those 50 minutes.
Krohn, assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction for the Waukesha School District, had just left an entirely different atmosphere about 100 feet away: Flight Academy, where 60 sixth- and seventh-graders this year have much different furniture and, more importantly, an approach to their school work and school days you would probably find hard to recognize.
I figure that at least once a year I ought to check up on how the revolution is going. So I get in touch with Jim Rickabaugh, who heads what is called the Institute at CESA 1, a state agency that assists school districts throughout southeastern Wisconsin.
A Conversation with Leigh Turner
Jim Zellmer: Good afternoon, Leigh Let’s begin with your education.
Leigh Turner: Like increasing numbers of people in today’s modern world, I grew up in several countries, in Nigeria, in Britain, then again in Lesotho, in southern Africa, and then again in Britain.
I went to several different, as we would say in English, schools and then to university. I was at a school in Swaziland called Waterford Kamhlaba School, a boarding school, for a year and a half, a very fascinating and interesting time.
Then, I was in a school in Manchester called Manchester Grammar School for most of my secondary education, as we would say in Britain. Then, from there, I went to the University of Cambridge and did a three-year bachelor’s degree in Geography. That was it. After that, I was 21. I went off and started work.
Jim: Do you have a perspective on how that movement, let’s say, improved or hindered your education as you grew up? What’s your take on that?
Leigh: It all depends on your degree of family stability and the degree to which you are fortunate in having good schools, good teachers, and good classmates. It’s very difficult to be deterministic about what makes a good education.
I was extremely fortunate in having a peripatetic childhood and going to primary school in Lesotho with a bunch of kids of all different nationalities, African children, European children, American children, different people.
Then, going to a school in Waterford Kamhlaba School in Swaziland which was very much a place which was set up in the years of apartheid in South Africa as a place where children from all different ethnic backgrounds could go to a high-quality school together and learn the British educational exams.
That gave me a great deal of insight into different people, the size of the world, and the fact that one country is not it. It’s very easy to forget that if you’ve not had the good fortune to travel widely. It’s easy to think that you’re in your city, and that’s the world, or you’re in your country, and that’s the world.
When you travel around the world as a child, you see that there are many countries, there are many different ways of living, there are many different outlooks on life. That’s a very important part of anyone’s education.
I then was very fortunate in having five or six years of continuous education in one school, in Manchester. I do think that for many young people, stability of education is a positive.
I grew up moving around the world. With my kids, we made a real effort to try to arrange our postings in such a way that the children could stay in a limited number of schools, for as long as possible.
In fact, I even arranged postings so that we could stay in Berlin in eight years in a row so the children could stay in the same school. That seems to have served them very well.
Jim: What languages did you pick up along the way? What about your kids? Obviously, when I look at your postings and your tweets, you’ve taken the time to learn the local language. What are your thoughts on that?
Leigh: I was lucky enough to study German and French when I was at school in Manchester, at high school, as you would say in America. I found the grammar extremely difficult.
I have a famous story about trying to learn my German grammar as I moved up towards a certain public exam. At each stage, I got 0 out of 30 for my grammar, 3 times in a row.
After the final occasion where I got 0 out of 30, with a public exam looming, my teacher said to me, “Leigh, if you make just a few less mistakes, you might be able to get a mark in this part of the exam.”
Even though that happened, I was able to pass those exams and indeed score reasonably well in those exams because I spent time doing what we would call an “exchange,” which is where a child, usually between 11 and 16, is sent off from their own family to stay with a family in a foreign country, to live with that family for three weeks, to speak only the language of that country for three weeks, and to socialize, maybe to go to school with the child that they’re staying with.
There’s always an exchange child at the other end, who, ideally, is somebody of similar age to you. Then, that child comes back to your country, and the reverse situation takes place.
I did this when I was 12. I went to Paris, at age 12, and stayed with a family who lived within eyesight of the Arc de Triomphe. I remember well waking up on my first morning and trying to think of something that I could say in French.
My mind was blank. Eventually, I managed to say, “Le soleil brille.” The sun is shining. From that start, after three weeks of staying with a family, I came back speaking simple, fluent French, after three weeks.
Similarly, German, I did a German exchange. I went out there with only the most simple grasp of German. I found after three weeks of German exchange, I was speaking much better. Indeed, I did repeated German exchanges.
By the time I took my final public school exams, when I was 17, I was actually reasonably fluent in French and German. Those were my first two languages. They were learned partly by school study and partly by these home stays in the countries concerned.
Subsequently, when I joined the Foreign Office, I was posted to Russia. I needed to speak Russian for that job. On that occasion, we had a different approach.
The British Foreign Service is very keen on teaching its officers foreign languages. We think that’s an important part of the training and an important part of doing the job.
I was sent on a nine-month, full-time Russian course, which was pretty mind-bending. I should say, in the Foreign Office, when you join, they give you a test to measure your aptitude to learn foreign languages.
True to my history of my German experience from doing my [inaudible 07:51] , my initial public school exams, I scored very badly on this language aptitude test and was told I should go off maybe and learn Afrikaans and some easy languages.
In fact, for a series of reasons, I was going to Moscow. I spent nine months learning Russian full-time, including a seven-week stay in Moscow, in 1992.
By the time I finished the course, I was able to pass the relevant exam. In my subsequent three-year posting in Moscow, I was able to use Russian a great deal. By that time, I spoke it really quite fluently and could read Russian as well.
[crosstalk]
Leigh: Go on.
Jim: This is something that our friends have discussed over the years, the ability of children to learn and pick up those languages much faster than when you were posted in Moscow.
The amount of time you discussed was obviously extensive. (Presumably) the depth of your language understanding and learning, I assume, was much deeper with Russian.
What was your experience as you were older? Today, learning Turkish , how long does it take? If you took about three weeks when you’re 12 years old in Paris, to have some level of fluency, how long did it take you to have that similar level when you arrived in Istanbul?
Leigh: When I knew I was coming to Turkey, I was, at that stage, still living and working in Ukraine. I was Ambassador, in Kiev, from 2008 to 2012. In Kiev, I made a big effort to learn Ukrainian. Both Ukrainian and Russian are widely spoken.
I had a couple of weeks of immersion there. I didn’t pick it up as quickly as I did French when I was 12. That’s for sure. I did pick up a reasonable level of Ukrainian.
Then, when I heard I was coming to Istanbul, I immediately got out a self-study, computer-based Turkish course and spent five or six months really working hard on that. I actually kept a record of the 127 hours I spent by myself with the computer language course learning Turkish.
By the time I arrived in Turkey, August 2012, I was able, thanks to this course, to speak a little bit of straightforward Turkish. I then had five weeks [inaudible 10:35] staying with someone here in Turkey, going to lessons four hours every day of the week, except weekends.
By the end of that, I could speak very simple Turkish, but by no means as well as I could speak French after three weeks staying with a family in France in 1970-71.
Jim: Well, we’re all getting older there. As you think of all these experiences you’ve had, both as a parent, professionally, and then obviously traveling, what do you think it means to be educated today and tomorrow? What does that mean in the age of Google, smart phones, and digital electronic [inaudible 11:21] ?
Leigh: I am no great educational expert, but I think that there are, in education, two things which you have to balance, one is what I might call learning by route or drilling, where you accumulate facts that you know and clearly there has been a move away from this.
This is the traditional way of learning things, people reciting their timetables and so on in schools in Victorian England [inaudible 11:58] images, and as life has gone on, people have focused more on having the ability to find things out, which clearly is the way to go these days.
You need to be able to know where to acquire information, know how to assimilate and organize information, know how to manage the almost infinite amount of information that is rightly available there on your smart phone in your pocket.
I think there are those two elements to education, one is knowing stuff and the other thing is knowing how to find out and organize stuff.
I think you have to have a certain amount of both in order to have a successful education. If we look at some countries in Far East which have a traditional route learning, they have really effective educational systems.
On the other hand, if you look at some countries like UK or the US, where there is more of a tradition of learning how to find things out, they don’t score so highly at least the far East countries, for example, mathematical ability, but on the other hand, they are very good at creative industries.
Clearly, it might be unique to have a judicious balance of both. You simply cannot learn a language without learning vocabulary and without learning a bit of grammar. It’s never going to work. At the same time, if you don’t know how to use a dictionary and don’t know how to use the Internet, you’re going to make learning a language much more difficult for yourself.
Jim: Again, [inaudible 13:38] all this, what should young people know today? Obviously, you’ve tried [inaudible 13:42] to your children. (Talking) about parents, what should young people know today?
Leigh: I’m a big fan of that balance I was talking about just now. The hardest thing for me as a parent is the balance between giving your children the space they need to develop their own views on who they are as individuals and being able to make informed decisions about how to live their lives.
If parents don’t give their children that and they miss to take the important opportunities, that’s on the one side, giving them freedom, allowing them to develop as individuals, on the other hand, providing them with the framework within which they can establish that identity.
I think the framework part is important too. If you don’t have any rules in the house about when you go to bed, when you get up, when you eat your meals together, how you should behave in the family home, then the child is going to find it hard to adjust to a world which is based on certain norms of behavior in any society.
It’s balancing those two between your [inaudible 15:09] approach to do anything you want to do, finding themselves, and the kind of [inaudible 15:17] the new millennium of people really need to have the skill they need to get a job and the discipline they need to be able to hold down the job in an area where we have increasing global competition between countries.
If your kid from a rich country isn’t able to compete with the hungry, dynamic, well-trained kids from countries, which have not been so blessed by history as your country, then they’re going to find it hard to compete in the global markets.
Jim: Speaking of that, you’re a keen observer of the world as it is. It’s remarkable I have to say, I have very much enjoyed your tweets and writing.
Taking those observations, how might you compare and contrast the education system, let’s say the software, the raw materials that the different countries you’ve been in provide their kids from UK to France, Germany, Russia, Ukraine, and now Turkey?
Leigh: Well, you risk getting very political when you [inaudible 16:40] one education system is different from or better than another. I would just say that what really is [inaudible 16:49] is that I think being to high school in Britain, France, or Germany, they run very different.
Similarly, having been a diplomat in Britain, having seen the systems that operate in France and in Germany, it is striking how utterly different the training given to diplomats from France, Germany, Britain is.
For example, in Germany, you have to have studied quite often law, ideally international law, then you join the foreign ministry and you have a two-year training course with a group of people who joined at the same time as you.
Before you even sit down, there’s day’s full work.
In France, you have to go to a “grande école”, which will get you into the upper reaches of civil service. Often, you have to go to another specialized school to give you a chance to get into the grande école in the first place. They are that highly [inaudible 17:47] exams are that difficult.
In Britain, you get into the Foreign Service by taking the public exam, which is pretty difficult and which involves written exams and assessment centers. Then, on your first day, usually you sit down and start work. No training at all.
Why am I saying this? Because nobody would say that French, or British, or German diplomats were better than each other. I know many great brilliant diplomats from France, Germany, and Britain. They have had completely different training, yet they are all excellent diplomats.
I think the point of what I’m saying is that very different educational systems can be successful. It’s all really about having a good basic structure, a good concept of what kind of education you are trying to deliver. Then, having assiduous, well-trained teachers who know what they’re talking about, and having of course children who would be supported by parents to help them to learn.
Jim: It’s struck me because I have dealt with some very talented software developers in the old Soviet Bloc. Is it the long emphasis on science, technology and math [inaudible 19:24] in that space?
Did you have any observations on their system, the Russian system, the Ukrainian? Did you interact with the education systems in those places at all?
Leigh: I must say that I have many Russian friends and colleagues, many Ukrainian friends and colleagues. I have often been struck by the excellence of their educational systems, their knowledge. Many people from Russia and Ukraine, who go off to the UK to study there, are very high achievers.
Although, I would say that on the whole their system are more based on root learning, repetition and, what some in the West might think, a rather old-fashioned educational system. But mind you, they work very well.
I remember the first time when I was learning Russian, coming face to face with a gentleman who introduced himself as a soviet, a naval interpreter in the Soviet Navy who turned up in the UK for some reason. This was in 1991.
He spoke English not only with complete fluency, but with a beautiful English accent, and he’d never been outside the Soviet Union. I had to take my hat off to that level of educational attainment in the elite systems of the former Soviet Union.
Similarly, here in Turkey there are many excellent quality educational establishments. You can always look at a system and think of a better way to organize it and to improve it, but I think we should always be very careful to assuming that we have the answer that some other people don’t.
Jim: I completely agree with that. [laughs] It’s interesting because, as a student pointed out earlier regarding the learn-by-rote [inaudible 21:26] versus the (discovery method), it is striking to observe how successful that approach was in some of those countries.
As you traveled, do you have a sense that some of these countries there is a more egalitarian state or do you see (a wide range of experiences & quality)?
Leigh: I do think that there is a role for central government in any country in maintaining educational standards.
On the one hand, I grew up in the ’70s and ’80s and I’d find intellectually stimulating the idea that we should let the best schools to slug it out, work out who has the best system and let the marketplace decide. But I’m not sure that we’ve got time for that, when it comes to education.
I think some role for central government in setting standards, and deciding curricula, and helping educational systems to provide the education that business and society need in that country is essential. They say fair is great, but we haven’t got time to leave that to operate through the educational systems. We can’t afford to have kids who are failed by educational systems.
Jim: I have a last question. Let’s take the time machine, Dr. Who, back, to when you were 18 or coming out of Manchester. What would you study today if you were 18…? The same thing? What would you do?
Leigh: I tend to think that I’ve been an exceptional fortunate individual in my life.
I’ve had a rich and privileged range of experiences. From hitchhiking around the United States for seven weeks when I was 21, starting in White Plains, New York and making it as far as North Carolina, and San Francisco, and British Columbia or Canada, and all the way back to White Plains, one of the great experiences of my life, to visiting the Island of Saint Helena in the South Atlantic with my job, to having all kinds of terrific friends and relationships.
Having visited many countries and seen many different ways of doing things, I would in no way claim that my life is perfect, but it’s been terrific so far. I certainly wouldn’t want to change a thing.
Having said all that, my advice to anybody who is just beginning their university education would be to really take the education seriously. You’ve only got one chance to accumulate the best possible set of skills at the university. If you don’t do it now, you are going to find it very difficult to do it later.
As I said earlier on, you need to balance that inquisitive and applied approach to learning with, at the same time, having some fun and getting out in the air and exploring things, meeting people, trying some things that maybe your parents wouldn’t be all that crazy about, and exploring life a little bit.
It’s the balance between those two, the yin and yang of educational development if you like, that I think young people need to explore.
Jim: That’s wonderful. Is there anything else you want to add? We really appreciate your time today.
Leigh: Not really, except that I would encourage all of your readers or listeners to check out my Twitter account which is @LeighTurnerFCO, and also my work blog which has my thoughts about life in Turkey, and finally my personal writing blog where you have the journalism that I’ve done over the years, four years as a journalist working in Berlin when I was there, and also some of my fiction writing, which I’m very proud of.
Jim: Yes. I will include links to that, definitely.
Twitter @leighturnerFCO
Official blog: http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/leighturner/
Personal writing blog (short stories, novels, journalism): rleighturner.com
Madison Schools’ Student Assessment Plan Proposed Changes
Madison School District 500K PDF Slideware:
Phase Out: WKCE, Explore, and Plan
Phase In: PALS 2, Smarter Balanced, Aspire, Work Keys
Required State Assessments
PALS (4K-2)
WKCE Science & Social Studies (3-8) ACCESS for English Language Learners Aspire (9, 10)
ACT + Writing (11)
Work Keys (12)
Related: Madison Schools’ MAP results
Publishers withdraw more than 120 gibberish papers
The publishers Springer and IEEE are removing more than 120 papers from their subscription services after a French researcher discovered that the works were computer-generated nonsense.
Over the past two years, computer scientist Cyril Labbé of Joseph Fourier University in Grenoble, France, has catalogued computer-generated papers that made it into more than 30 published conference proceedings between 2008 and 2013. Sixteen appeared in publications by Springer, which is headquartered in Heidelberg, Germany, and more than 100 were published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), based in New York. Both publishers, which were privately informed by Labbé, say that they are now removing the papers.
Among the works were, for example, a paper published as a proceeding from the 2013 International Conference on Quality, Reliability, Risk, Maintenance, and Safety Engineering, held in Chengdu, China. (The conference website says that all manuscripts are “reviewed for merits and contents”.) The authors of the paper, entitled ‘TIC: a methodology for the construction of e-commerce’, write in the abstract that they “concentrate our efforts on disproving that spreadsheets can be made knowledge-based, empathic, and compact”. (Nature News has attempted to contact the conference organizers and named authors of the paper but received no reply*; however at least some of the names belong to real people. The IEEE has now removed the paper).
Ten map meditations on economic mobility
Andy Smarick, via a kind reader:
The map shows, by small geographic areas, the likelihood that a child born into the lowest-income quintile ended up (as an adult) in the highest-income quintile.
This isn’t the necessarily the best indicator of economic mobility, but it is still edifying. (The fantastic interactive map from the Times allows you to look at mobility from a number of other angles, as well).
A whole lot of staring at this map and some additional research has produced ten thoughts—most of them gloomy.
The miniscule chance of a rags-to-riches rise in some locations takes my breath away. In Memphis, the chance of this “lowest-to-highest” movement is only 2.6 percent. Atlanta, at 4 percent, is barely better.
The stickiness of poverty in some locations is heartrending. In most of the red areas in the Mississippi Delta, a child born into a family at the tenth percentile of earnings has a 75 percent chance of having an adulthood in one of the bottom two economic quintiles.This is a catastrophic distortion of the American Dream.
The belt of red in the Southeast is absolutely shameful. An entire swath of our nation is constricting the opportunities of low-income kids. The “Rust Belt,” once the nation’s manufacturing hub, consisting of cities like Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and St. Louis, is almost as sad.
Kill the bill that would let politicians muck around with Common Core standards, says education dean
Tim Slekar, the dean of education at Edgewood College and outspoken critic of corporate-driven education “reform,” couldn’t read another word about Wisconsin GOP legislators’ plan to rewrite the state’s educational standards without saying something about it.
“Someone has to say it: Any bill that would allow politicians the ability to directly and/or indirectly write learning standards must be killed!” Slekar posted Friday on the At the Chalk Face blog.
Slekar was writing about a bill sponsored by Sen. Leah Vukmir, R-Wauwatosa, that would create a politically appointed board to write state-specific educational standards to replace the national Common Core standards that are drawing criticism from conservatives and progressives alike. The proposal has been swept up in political maneuvering and made headlines again when gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke said it would politicize education.
Too late, Slekar said in an interview. Politicians are talking about educational standards instead of the people most impacted by them.
“Politicians have proven themselves over the last 30 years to be wholly unqualified to make even remotely positive decisions about public education policy. In fact I propose a bill that would place an indefinite moratorium on politicians’ ability to even breathe too closely around public schools,” he wrote.
“Are we clear about what I just said? Kill the Bill! Got it? K-I-L-L the Bill!”
Fascinating.
Related: NCTQ Sues University of Wisconsin education schools over course syllabi and When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?
Lake Wobegon has nothing on the UW-Madison School of Education. All of the children in Garrison Keillor’s fictional Minnesota town are “above average.” Well, in the School of Education they’re all A students.
The 1,400 or so kids in the teacher-training department soared to a dizzying 3.91 grade point average on a four-point scale in the spring 2009 semester.
This was par for the course, so to speak. The eight departments in Education (see below) had an aggregate 3.69 grade point average, next to Pharmacy the highest among the UW’s schools. Scrolling through the Registrar’s online grade records is a discombobulating experience, if you hold to an old-school belief that average kids get C’s and only the really high performers score A’s.
Much like a modern-day middle school honors assembly, everybody’s a winner at the UW School of Education. In its Department of Curriculum and Instruction (that’s the teacher-training program), 96% of the undergraduates who received letter grades collected A’s and a handful of A/B’s. No fluke, another survey taken 12 years ago found almost exactly the same percentage.
And, MTEL arrives in Wisconsin via the Legislature and Governor, not the ed schools.
Finally, Madison’s long term disastrous reading scores.
New faith-based school aimed at niche market
You might say the Buffalo Chesterton Academy is going old school.
Local public school districts and the Catholic Diocese of Buffalo are moving to shut down schools throughout Erie County, because the area has fewer and fewer children.
But the demographic trends haven’t discouraged a small group of Catholics from planning a new faith-based high school in Cheektowaga that will emphasize classic subjects such as philosophy, Latin and literature and rely on the Socratic method to teach the humanities.
“We’re a boutique school. We’re going to do some things that no one else does. We’re going to teach four years of philosophy in high school,” said Deacon Michael P. McKeating, chairman of the board of trustees of Buffalo Chesterton Academy. “This is not for everybody. It’s for a niche market – both for students and faculty. They will look at this and say, ‘That’s what I’ve been waiting for.’ ”
The co-educational school is independent of the Diocese of Buffalo, although it will lease classroom space from St. Josaphat Catholic Church on William Street in Cheektowaga and each school day will start with a Mass inside the church.
Use It or Lose It – Class Covering Pay
Madison Teachers, Inc Solidarity Newsletter (PDF), via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email:
Section III-R of MTI’s Teacher Collective Bargaining Agreement ensures that teachers are compensated for covering another teacher’s class, when a substitute is unavailable. Nearly all members of MTI’s teacher collective bargaining unit are entitled to class coverage pay whether one volunteers or are assigned by a building administrator. This is also true whether one loses planning or not. The only exceptions are the following positions: learning coordinator, instructional resource teacher, PBS coaches, literacy coaches or dean of students, team teachers when the co-teacher is absent (unless coverage results in lost planning time). Follow up with the building administrator or administrative clerk to verify that this additional time is recorded for compensation purposes. Class coverage pay is $22 per hour. Contact MTI for additional details.
Tennessee State University Plans to Require Electronic Student ID’s
Tennessee State University (TSU) is implementing a new policy to keep students and staff safe. The changes come after a rash of vandalism and a shooting this school year on campus.
It’s already difficult for students to get around campus without identification.
“I use it going to the cafeteria, going in and out of my dorm and driving on campus,” freshman Xavier Johnson explained about the importance of his identification.
A new policy has students and staff lining the halls at the campus police department. Each one is required to get a new photo identification. Starting on March 1st it must be prominently displayed while on campus.
The current policy requires everyone to be able to present identification only when asked.
“It kind of reminds me of high school,” Johnson said. “I guess it’s okay. It’s a public University.”
Both the technology and design has changed on the new badges. A built in chip can now restrict access to certain areas and track who is entering different buildings.
“That gives us another arm to aide our students in identifying potential problems on the campus,” Dr. Curtis Johnson, Associate Vice President for Administration said.
US toddler obesity rate plummets
The obesity rate among young US children has fallen by 43% since 2003-2004, the first broad decline in years, a new national study has found.
Obesity among US children ages two to five dropped to 8.4% in 2011-2012 from 13.9%, the survey found.
Scientists have not identified an exact cause but say a decrease in sugary beverage consumption may contribute.
Childhood obesity has been shown to increase risk of obesity, cancer, heart disease and stroke later in life.
UK Primary school teachers work almost 60 hours a week, finds official survey
Primary state school teachers in England are working almost 60 hours a week, according to a survey by the Department for Education – a sharp increase on the previous survey.
The snapshot of their workload is a grim portrait of a profession plagued by long hours and “unnecessary and bureaucratic tasks”, according to the survey. Many of the 1,000 respondents cited preparations for Ofsted visits as well as form-filling and other paperwork as causing a burden outside the classroom.
The last similar exercise conducted by the DfE in 2010 found that full-time primary school teachers worked just over 50 hours a week – a figure that was little changed over the previous decade.
The latest survey found that teachers worked 59 hours and 20 minutes on average, while their secondary school counterparts worked almost 56 hours.
Martin Freedman, director of economic strategy at the Association of Teachers and Lecturers, said teachers were now fitting in the equivalent of an extra full day a week by working during evenings and weekends.
For Millennials, a bachelor’s degree continues to pay off, but a master’s earns even more
Millennials are the nation’s most educated generation in history in terms of finishing college. But despite the stereotype that today’s recent college graduates are largely underemployed, the data show that this generation of college grads earns more than ones that came before it.
In 2009 (the latest year available) the median monthly earnings of young adults with a bachelor’s degree and no further education was $3,836, a 13% increase from 1984 ($3,399), according to the Census Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP).
The economic payoffs for obtaining a bachelor’s degree vary widely by major field of study. It is certainly possible that earnings have declined since the early 1980s for specific major fields of study. But given what young adults choose to study, the typical or median young adult with a bachelor’s degree earns more than they used to.