In 2000, New York Times columnist David Brooks published a sociological study of the United States that now reads like science fiction. Bobos in Paradise chronicled how a new upper class of “Bobos” – bourgeois bohemians – struggled to navigate life’s dazzling options in a time of unparalleled prosperity. As presidential candidates Al Gore and George W Bush debated how to spend the projected $5trn government surplus, Brooks took on the micro crisis: How would baby boomers handle the psychic strain of making money at fulfilling jobs?
“This is the age of discretionary income,” Brooks declared, noting that liberal arts majors were “at top income brackets” and journalists made “six-figure salaries”. The WASP aristocracy that had long ruled the US had been replaced with a meritocracy based on hard work and creative prowess. Anyone could join – provided he or she had the right education.
Therein lay the hidden anxiety. According to Brooks, baby boomers had surmounted class and ethnic barriers through the accumulation of credentials. A degree from Harvard now carried more prestige – and provided more opportunity – than the bloodlines that had propelled the Protestant elite.
But the appeal of a college degree was also its fatal flaw: Anyone could get it. The formula could only work once. The same educational system that created new elites now threatened the prospects of their heirs.
“Members of the educated class can never be secure about their children’s future,” Brooks wrote. “Compared to past elites, little is guaranteed.”
He claimed the burden of maintaining success fell on the children themselves, who would have to “work through school” just like their parents.
As it turned out, there was another way.
Cronyism blamed for half of Univ. of Texas law school grads’ inability to pass the bar
A mushrooming scandal at the University of Texas has exposed rampant favoritism in the admissions process of its nationally-respected School of Law.
According to Watchdog.org, Democratic and Republican elected officials stand accused of calling in favors and using their clout to obtain admission to the law school for less-than-qualified but well-connected applicants.
US Spent $595,000,000,000 on K-12 Education in 2012, down .08% from 2012
Funding for U.S. public elementary and secondary schools decreased by $4.9 billion in fiscal year 2012, the first recorded drop since the U.S. Census Bureau began collecting the data in 1977, according to a report released by the bureau Thursday. Total funding of nearly $595 billion was down 0.8% from the previous year.
An approximate 19% downturn in federal dollars from the previous year—to about $60 billion in 2012 from about $74 billion in 2011—explains the shortfall for schools, according the Census Bureau. Revenue from state and local sources went slightly higher—about $270 billion and almost $265 billion respectively—in the same time frame.
Fiscal year 2012 represents roughly the same time period as the 2011-2012 school year.
The decrease in school funding reflects changes in revenue patterns during and after the recession, according to Mike Griffith, a school finance consultant for the Education Commission of the States, a nonpartisan research group.
“What we saw was the phase out of the additional federal dollars in stimulus funding,” said Mr. Griffith. “Those dollars had helped prop up state budgets during the recession. We saw state budgets recuperate in 2011-2012 at same time as federal money was disappearing…but states hadn’t recovered enough to make up for the federal dollars lost, so overall funding dropped.”
The largest slice of 2012 spending was for instructional salaries, which totaled about $207 billion, or nearly 35% of total spending.
“Expenses grow every year,” said Mr. Griffith, referring in part to teacher salaries and benefits. “The decrease in revenue is a problem for school districts because they will have to make cuts.”
Student Debtors Slide Deeper into Peonage
On May 7, the federal government conducted its regularly scheduled auction of new Treasury bills, a monthly ritual in which investors compete to lend the state money. This, however, was no ordinary auction. Last year, after much debate, Congress tied federal student loan interest rates to the 10-year Treasury note’s each year’s pre-June rate at auction, finally linking student and government borrowing costs.
The results of May’s auction have serious and possibly lifelong consequences for the students on the other end of this year’s 20 million government higher education loans. When all the paddles were down, the Treasury sold $24 billion in 10-year notes at a yield of 2.61 percent — good news for bond traders, bad news for student borrowers.
Last year, an unusually low Treasury yield of 1.81 percent pushed down student loan interest rates — which Congress retroactively included in the 2013 deal — to their lowest levels, but this year’s 0.8 percentage point increase directly affects the linked loans, pushing them back up. This 0.8 percentage point represents a 20 percent increase in the rate charged to undergraduate borrowers, boosting it from 3.9 to 4.7 percent. Six years after the government nationalized the student loan industry, when so many Americans are rightly worried about the escalating costs of higher education, why is the government raising the cost of borrowing money to go to college?
There were three main issues at play in the 2013 Bipartisan Student Loan Certainty Act: How to anchor the interest rates, how much add-on for each category (undergraduate, graduate and parent loans) and where (or if) to cap the rates. After a long game of chicken with other people’s children, Congress ended up attaching the interest rates to the 10-year Treasury notes, with 2.05, 3.60 and 4.60 percentage point markups and 8.25, 9.5 and 10.5 percent caps, respectively. The bill looked most like the proposals from Rep. John Kline, R-Texas, and Sens. Richard Burr, R-N.C., and Tom Coburn, R-Okla., whose ideas weren’t that far off from President Barack Obama’s plan. Kline’s proposal (attached to 10-year rates, with 2.5, 2.5 and 4.5 point markups and 8.5, 8.5 and 10.5 percent caps) was found by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) to generate more new revenue on the backs of students: $3.7 billion. That the final bill’s interest schedule was even harsher than Kline’s proposal points to how little daylight there is between the major parties on this issue.
University of California Bait and Switch Part Two
In my last post, I discussed how UC was fulfilling its obligation to accept every eligible Californian student by admitting them to Merced instead of Berkeley and UCLA. I also pointed out that some campuses are cashing in on the new policy that allows schools to keep all of the tuition dollars they generate. The end result of this system is that some campuses have a huge incentive to accept a high number of non-resident and international students and reject a great number of students from California.
During recent meetings with state officials, I warned that we will see a backlash from Californian residents who feel that their deserving children are being shut out of an institution the parents have helped to support, and in fact, there has been a constant stream of editorials and letters voicing this concern. In one recent article, we are told the following: “As more California high school seniors fight for spaces at popular UC campuses, the universities have flung open their doors to students from other states and countries, more than tripling the ranks of out-of-state freshmen in the past five years. Freshmen from outside the Golden State now make up almost 30 percent of their class at UC Berkeley and UCLA, up from just over 10 percent four years earlier.”
When I presented these statistics to state officials, I was told that the implicit arrangement was that UC had to maintain its current number of in-state students even though the governor has removed enrollment targets from his recent budgets. However, recent statistics so that it is unclear if this deal is being upheld: “The UC system enrolled about 700 more California freshmen in 2013 than in 2009, a 2 percent increase, and nearly 5,000 more freshmen from other states and countries — a 273 percent increase. About 57 percent of the added spots went to international students, and 30 percent to students from other states, while about 12 percent went to Californians. UC Berkeley enrolled 800 fewer California freshmen this academic year than in 2009, but it accepted about 580 more from other states and about 500 more from other countries.” Although we still do not know about actual enrollments, it should be clear that UC has changed its admission priorities.
On Robert Birgeneau and free speech
The day after a November 9 “Day of Action” on which police arrested seven Occupy activists, the atmosphere was tense. A video of police armed with batons and riot gear beating students had gone viral. This prompted a now infamous press release from the administration, calling the actions of the student protesters (“linking arms and forming a human chain”) “not non-violent civil disobedience.”
The incident would later be rehashed on national news, The Colbert Report, and elsewhere. Former U.S. Poet Laureate and Berkeley professor Robert Hass wrote a moving op-ed for The New York Times. For more details on the whole saga, The Daily Californian has since put together a great post aggregating their coverage.
At the time of the November 9 protests, then-Chancellor Robert Birgeneau was traveling in Asia. He later claimed to be in “limited contact” with campus officials while the police were drawing their batons. The ACLU submitted a Freedom of Information Act request, and learned a couple months later that Birgeneau had in fact lied. Birgeneau “was told that campus police had used batons, and … he did not call for a more passive approach” in dealing with the protestors, the majority of whom were students.
Scathing report could shut UK Muslim school for promoting Salafi beliefs
Ofsted inspectors have harshly criticised an independent Muslim school for promoting Salafi fundamentalist beliefs and rated the school as inadequate, in a possible prelude to it being closed or taken over by the Department for Education.
In their unpublished draft report, the inspectors said the school – the Olive Tree primary school in Luton – fails to prepare its pupils “for life in modern Britain, as opposed to life in a Muslim state”, and that its library contains books that are “abhorrent to British society” in their depiction of punishments under sharia law.
“Some books in the children’s library contain fundamentalist Islamic beliefs (Salafi) or are set firmly within a Saudi Arabian socio-religious context. Some of the views promoted by these books, for example about stoning women, have no place in British society,” the report argues.
Congratulations, class of 2014: You’re totally screwed. College costs more and more, even as it gets objectively worse. Only people worse off than indebted grads: adjuncts
Welcome to the wide world, Class of 2014. You have by now noticed the tremendous consignment of debt that the authorities at your college have spent the last four years loading on your shoulders. It may interest you to know that the average student-loan borrower among you is now $33,000 in debt, the largest of any graduating class ever. According to a new study by the Pew Research Center, carrying that kind of debt will have certain predictable effects. It will impede your ability to accumulate wealth, for example. You will also borrow more for other things than people without debt, and naturally you will find your debt level growing, not shrinking, as the years pass.
As you probably know, neither your parents nor your grandparents were required to take on this kind of burden in order to go to college. Neither are the people of your own generation in France and Germany and Argentina and Mexico.
But in our country, as your commencement speaker will no doubt tell you, the universities are “excellent.” They are “world-class.” Indeed, they are all that stands between us and economic defeat by the savagely competitive peoples of Europe and Asia. So a word of thanks is in order, Class of 2014: By borrowing those colossal amounts and turning the proceeds over to the people who run our higher ed system, you have done your part to maintain American exceptionalism, to keep our competitive advantage alive.
Here’s a question I bet you won’t hear broached on the commencement stage: Why must college be so expensive? The obvious answer, which I’m sure has been suggested to you a thousand times, is because college is so good. A 2014 Cadillac costs more than did a 1980 Cadillac, adjusting for inflation, because it is a better car. And because you paid attention in economics class, you know the same thing must be true of education. When tuition goes up and up every year, far outpacing inflation, this indicates that the quality of education in this country is also, constantly, going up and up. You know that the only way education can cost more is if it is worth more.
Why do people persist in believing things that just aren’t true
Last month, Brendan Nyhan, a professor of political science at Dartmouth, published the results of a study that he and a team of pediatricians and political scientists had been working on for three years. They had followed a group of almost two thousand parents, all of whom had at least one child under the age of seventeen, to test a simple relationship: Could various pro-vaccination campaigns change parental attitudes toward vaccines? Each household received one of four messages: a leaflet from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stating that there had been no evidence linking the measles, mumps, and rubella (M.M.R.) vaccine and autism; a leaflet from the Vaccine Information Statement on the dangers of the diseases that the M.M.R. vaccine prevents; photographs of children who had suffered from the diseases; and a dramatic story from a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention about an infant who almost died of measles. A control group did not receive any information at all. The goal was to test whether facts, science, emotions, or stories could make people change their minds.
The result was dramatic: a whole lot of nothing. None of the interventions worked. The first leaflet—focussed on a lack of evidence connecting vaccines and autism—seemed to reduce misperceptions about the link, but it did nothing to affect intentions to vaccinate. It even decreased intent among parents who held the most negative attitudes toward vaccines, a phenomenon known as the backfire effect. The other two interventions fared even worse: the images of sick children increased the belief that vaccines cause autism, while the dramatic narrative somehow managed to increase beliefs about the dangers of vaccines. “It’s depressing,” Nyhan said. “We were definitely depressed,” he repeated, after a pause.
Race, Disability and the School-to-Prison Pipeline
Editor’s note: Our series “Life Cycles of Inequity” explores the ways in which inequity impacts the lives of black men. Each month, we focus on a life stage or event in which that impact has been shown to be particularly profound. This article is part of a package focused on implicit bias in schools.
Enikia Ford-Morthel speaks of Amo (a pseudonym) with the fondness of an auntie talking about a beloved nephew. She recalls watching Amo at his fifth-grade graduation from Cox Academy in Oakland two years ago. The memory of him walking across the stage still fills her with emotion. “He looked so cute in his little white suit, with his jewelry on,” Ford-Morthel says of his graduation. “I just cried.”
Ford-Morthel and Amo are not actually each other’s family. Ford-Morthel was Amo’s principal at Cox Academy, a charter school in a particularly rough section of East Oakland. Nor did they always share such closeness. Amo, an African-American boy, arrived at Cox as a fourth-grade terror. “He was hell on wheels,” Ford-Morthel says of those early days. On his very first day Amo was in class for just 10 minutes before he got sent to Ford-Morthel’s office for starting some kind of trouble, and for the month after that he was never in class for longer than half an hour before he started swearing at his teacher or otherwise interrupting instruction.
He was headed for the discipline track, Ford-Morthel says, and even as a fourth grader, he would easily have been suspended for his behavior in many other schools. “But we sat with him and we had to figure out how to learn him,” she says. It turned out that Amo’s parents had split up and his dad had a new girlfriend with whom Amo’s mom didn’t get along. “Most of his experience with adults was them not working together, so he didn’t respect very many adults,” Ford-Morthel says. “He had huge trust issues, and his academics were horrible—which of course they were, because he was never in class.”
Empty classrooms expose flaws in UK private colleges boom
Shiv Malik, Andrew McGettigan and John Domokos:
A private college in north London is offering government-funded places to people who “blatantly” don’t have the skills, recruiting candidates off the street and from countries in eastern Europe – and in at least one case lecturing to a class with no students.
So serious are the problems that the London School of Science and Technology (LSST) in Wembley has been called the “cashpoint college” or “the ATM” by students who believe they can obtain loans and grants of up to £11,000 a year and then not show up to learn.
The higher education institution has taken £6.5m in public money in the last three years, and has tripled in size since ministers relaxed controls over student loans in 2012. Even if these full-time students take out the loans and do no work, LSST benefits from the increased numbers paying £6,000 a year in tuition fees.
The chaotic organisation of LSST demonstrates serious flaws in the planned expansion of privately run higher education colleges that was unveiled by David Willetts, the higher education minister, in 2011. Little-known private colleges were allowed to recruit unlimited amounts of students so they could compete with established universities.
Taxing a Professor’s Privilege
I’ve been reading Thomas Piketty’s “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.” You’ll have to wait on my thoughts on the book until they’re a bit more fully formed. As I’ve been reading, though, I keep returning to a question I heard at an economics conference a couple of months back: If we did implement a wealth tax, should it tax tenure?
Professorial tenure is, after all, a valuable asset. As long as you show up and teach your classes, and you don’t make passes at your students or steal from the department’s petty cash drawer, you can draw a paycheck for the rest of your working life. And since the abolition of mandatory retirement ages, that working life can be as long as you like.
Ah, you will say, there are risks: Your school could go out of business, or you might get ill and be unable to work, or inflation could eat away at the value of that paycheck. Just so. All assets are risky. That doesn’t make them worthless; it just means that the price has to take the potential downsides into account.
Why single out professors? you ask. Isn’t this just more academic-bashing? You’re quite right: We shouldn’t single out professors. Everyone with civil-service protections or similar employment guarantees should probably have that asset taxed.
“We don’t have too many seats for students but too many seats for administrators.”
To avoid enrollment shortfalls heading into the summer, some tuition-dependent private colleges are changing how they package financial aid for students.
Some colleges are offering more aid upfront to try to avoid shortfalls altogether. Others adjusted swaths of aid packages as it became clear they were unlikely to enroll as many students as they had planned by May 1, the traditional but decreasingly relevant decision day for students going to selective colleges.
Even colleges that have successfully met their enrollment goals are worried about poaching by others still looking to meet their goals, and are beginning to offer more tuition discounts to lure students.
All are signs of the continued challenges faced especially by tuition-dependent and smaller private colleges, some of which remain under the weather for a variety of reasons, including the rebound of public university budget and the wariness of some students to graduate with liberal arts degrees that don’t seem to offer a clear career path.
How Academia and Publishing are Destroying Scientific Innovation: A Conversation with Sydney Brenner
I recently had the privilege of speaking with Professor Sydney Brenner, a professor of Genetic medicine at the University of Cambridge and Nobel Laureate in Physiology or Medicine in 2002. My original intention was to ask him about Professor Frederick Sanger, the two-time Nobel Prize winner famous for his discovery of the structure of proteins and his development of DNA sequencing methods, who passed away in November. I wanted to do the classic tribute by exploring his scientific contributions and getting a first hand account of what it was like to work with him at Cambridge’s Medical Research Council’s (MRC) Laboratory for Molecular Biology (LMB) and at King’s College where they were both fellows. What transpired instead was a fascinating account of the LMB’s quest to unlock the genetic code and a critical commentary on why our current scientific research environment makes this kind of breakthrough unlikely today.
It is difficult to exaggerate the significance of Professor Brenner and his colleagues’ contributions to biology. Brenner won the Nobel Prize for establishing Caenorhabditis elegans, a type of roundworm, as the model organism for cellular and developmental biological research, which led to discoveries in organ development and programmed cell death. He made his breakthroughs at the LMB, where beginning in the 1950s, an extraordinary number of successive innovations elucidated our understanding of the genetic code. This code is the process by which cells in our body translate information stored in our DNA into proteins, vital molecules important to the structure and functioning of cells. It was here that James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double-helical structure of DNA. Brenner was one of the first scientists to see this ground-breaking model, driving from Oxford, where he was working at the time in the Department of Chemistry, to Cambridge to witness this breakthrough. This young group of scientists, considered renegades at the time, made a series of successive revolutionary discoveries that ultimately led to the creation of a new field called molecular biology.
To begin our interview, I asked Professor Brenner to speak about Professor Sanger and what led him to his Nobel Prize winning discoveries.
Madison School District proposes using screening test to predict teachers’ impact on student success
The Madison School Board is considering spending $273,000 on a screening program its creators say can better predict whether prospective teachers will improve student achievement.
The proposed three-year contract with Chicago-based TeacherMatch would provide the district with a system to track and recruit applicants, ask teacher candidates a timed series of questions and assign each applicant a professional development profile to show principals or human resources staff what kind of help applicants may need once hired based on their answers, said Ron Huberman, executive chairman of TeacherMatch.
One board member is concerned that the program puts too much emphasis on the impact candidates may have on student test scores and that the public won’t be able to scrutinize how the screening program judges prospective teachers. And the leader of the local teachers union says computer-based screening tools don’t work as well as personal interviews.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Jersey pension system beyond saving at any reasonable cost
For three years now PSI has been warning (see here and here ) that New Jersey had neglected its government employee pension system for so long that the state’s 2010 and 2011 reforms were inadequate to save the system. At some point we said (numerous times) the state would have to admit it could not possibly keep to the refunding schedule it had set for itself.
Yesterday Gov. Christie declared as much when he announced he would help erase the state’s current budget deficit by paring back its pension contributions. But even the payments that Christie announced he couldn’t afford to make amount to about half of what it would cost the state every year to adequately fund its pension system. The numbers, quite frankly, are staggering.
Christie said he would make a nearly $700 million pension payment this year, instead of the $1.6 billion the state originally committed to, and he’s planning to cut next year’s payment to $681 million, from a projected $2.25 billion. The lower figures are what the state estimates it costs to pay for pension benefits that state workers are earning this year; the additional costs are to pay back what Christie describes as the sins of past neglect.
Here Is What I Would Tell the Rutgers Graduating Class of 2014…
I hear Condoleezza Rice stood you up. You may think it was because about 50 students—.09 percent of your student body—held a “sit-in” at the university president’s office to protest the selection of Secretary Rice as commencement speaker. You may think it was because a few of your faculty—stale flakes from the crust of the turkey pot pie that was the New Left—threatened a “teach-in” to protest the selection of Secretary Rice.
“Sit-in”? “Teach-in”? What century is this?
I think Secretary Rice forgot she had a yoga session scheduled for today.
It’s shame she was busy. You might have heard something useful from a person who grew up poor in Jim Crow Alabama. Who lost a friend and playmate in 1963 when white supremacists bombed Birmingham’s Sixteenth Street Baptist Church. Who became an accomplished concert pianist before she tuned her ear to the more dissonant chords of international relations.
Secretary Rice was Phi Beta Kappa at the University of Denver and received a B.A. cum laude in political science—back before the worst grade a student had ever heard of was a B-.
6 Disturbing Things I Learned Writing Your Textbooks
J.F. Sargent, T.K. Pennywhistle:
Academic textbooks are wildly overpriced. We can pretty much all agree on that. If you’ve ever spent rent money on the required reading materials for your class on the socioeconomic impact of ALF, you know the pain of which I speak. But what most of you probably never imagined is how misinformed, lazy, and opportunist many textbook companies are. I’ve written textbooks for two years. I’ve covered every subject, and I’m here to tell you that …
#6. The Writers Are Unqualified and Probably Have No Interest in the Topic
Ahh, academia — the land of rigorous research standards and carefully thought-out conclusions. Surely this is where our knowledge comes from, handed down on high from those who have spent countless hours with their noses buried in books instead of coke and the genitals of strippers, and who have thus achieved the highest academic accolades. Right?
What HBO Can Teach Colleges About ‘Trigger Warnings’
Collegians all over the country are calling for “trigger warnings,” or “explicit alerts that the material they are about to read or see in a classroom might upset them,” the N.Y. Times reports. The wisest activists favor narrowly drawn alerts intended to spare veterans and sexual assault victims from post-traumatic stress. Others want students warned about any content that might stoke anxiety or trauma. Critics of the “trigger warning” movement include academics who worry that requiring alerts in the classroom would chill speech and erode academic freedom. Others argue that the alerts are condescending, showy, or useless.
Strange as it may seem, reflecting on The Sopranos can help us here. The HBO series was as graphically violent as you’d expect of a mob drama: arms and legs are broken to extort protection money; gamblers who can’t cover debts are brutally pummeled; a couple seasons in, I’d seen aggravated assaults, extreme domestic abuse, and more murderous gunshots to heads, chests, and guts than I can recall. Hence my surprise that Season 3, episode four was preceded by a warning I’d never seen. HBO uses standard Pay TV Content Descriptors. I’d been tipped off countless times about “adult content” and “graphic violence.” What I hadn’t known till just prior to that episode is that there’s a special designation for rape:
The Class of 2014 Just Made History in the Worst Imaginable Way
The news: Congratulations, class of 2014!
Not for graduating — though that’s nice, too — but for earning one of the more dubious distinctions in recent memory: You’ve officially been named “the most indebted class ever.”
According to the Wall Street Journal and data compiled by analyst Mark Kantrowitz, the average loan-holding 2014 college graduate will have to pay back $33,000. That’s up from around $31,000 in 2013 and under $10,000 in 1993:
Digital education could make Americans more competitive, close achievement gap
To technology advocates, these are visions of how technology could transform U.S. classrooms. With a desktop or portable computer, a tablet or even a smartphone available to every student and every teacher, the idea is that school will be better tailored to students’ needs and also better able to prepare them for the sorts of high-skilled, technology-centric jobs that will dominate in the future. It could even help close the achievement gap for disadvantaged students.
“If a teacher has class of 30 students and they don’t have technology, the very best teachers are bouncing from student to student,” said Karen Cator, president of Digital Promise, a nonprofit working with individual school systems that are going high tech. “When students have technology they can be helping themselves in some sense, and the teacher can come in when they’re most needed.”
Fresh Thinking On Public Education: 100 SF School Principals Heading To Deloitte University For Leadership Boost
Deloitte, the giant audit and consulting group, is planning to send as many as 100 principals of San Francisco public schools to its Deloitte University in early June, for a three-day leadership program in a bid to help struggling public schools create a generation of highly motivated and college-bound students.
I spoke with Teresa Briggs, vice chair of Deloitte and head of its Western Region, about the venture and what it hopes to achieve. Here are some notes from our conversation:
– Deloitte wanted to help public schools create a college-bound culture as part of its philanthropic activities in giving back to communities. There are studies that show student performance is influenced and connected to the leadership abilities of school principals. Deloitte knew that its leadership courses were very effective for business leaders, why not offer the same to public school principals.
Indicting Education Crimes
Michelle Renee Matisons. & Seth Sandronsky:
You act like we’re in a state of martial law. You act like you deployed the army on us…
–Natasha Allen, mother of a Newark high school junior, to Newark School Superintendent Cami Anderson
It is exciting, and rare, to see politicians who really represent people triumph over corporate sponsored sycophants who only represent their backers’ bank accounts. Democrat Ras Baraka’s May 13, 2014 mayoral victory over Democrat Shavar Jeffries in Newark, New Jersey is especially important because one major issue emerged to dominate the election: local control over public education. While corporate education reformers unabashedly push their anti-democratic agenda nationally, Baraka’s victory is a reminder that participatory democratic values and common sense principles (such as local control and economic justice) can win over education reformers’ criminal activities.
As Newark voters just reminded us, educational sovereignty is not an abstraction–but a concrete necessity. Parents know when their children are being denied, neglected, and abused. Teachers know when they are being used and discarded: their jobs are reduced to rote mouthpieces for profiteering edu-speak. Children feel their futures being stolen from them. They feel more alienated from schools, teachers, lesson plans, and standardized tests. Baraka’s victory is about creating the educational climate–supported by larger goals of racial/ economic justice–that are required for thriving students.
The Teacher Evaluation Test
A lot of arguments in public education revolve around how to marry the measurable and the unmeasurable. Teachers have seniority provisions in their contracts – a measurable factor – because they don’t trust administrators to use unmeasurable and subjective means to evaluate them.
On the other hand, teachers also distrust a host of measurable factors that might be used to evaluate them, most notably student test scores.
They have a point. No one wants to be judged on the performance of others. Still, they’re not teaching in a vacuum. If quality teaching doesn’t result in quality learning, what good is it?
The problem for teachers’ unions is to enunciate a viable means to evaluate teaching that doesn’t sound like a dodge. Ted Nesi, a political reporter for WPRI in Providence, Rhode Island, interviewed the three candidates for president of the Providence Teachers Union and asked them the same simple question: “ Should teacher evaluations be tied to student performance? If no, how would you like to measure a teacher’s success? ”
All three had serious reservations – to varying degrees – about judging teachers on student performance. But it was the second question that elicited the most illuminating answers.
Chile President Sends Education Reform to Congress
The bill heading to Congress on Tuesday would cut subsidies to for-profit schools and forbid government-backed primary schools and kindergartens from rejecting students on the basis of tests or interviews.
Funds now used for the subsidies would go instead to lower or eliminate the fees that parents pay at other institutions.
Still to come is a proposal that would make university education free in Chile. That measure is to be sent to Congress later this year.
Many teachers face a retirement savings penalty when leaving the profession
Andy Rotherham & Chad Aldeman:
Americans are struggling to save for retirement at a time of still-high unemployment rates, rising college costs and stagnant wages. For many workers, individual circumstances lead to inadequate savings. But for public school teachers, poorly structured retirement policies hinder their future security.
At more than 3 million, teachers are the largest class of U.S. workers with a bachelor’s degree or higher. Unfortunately, policymakers are undermining the future retirement security of this large and important group of workers. In our recent paper, “Friends Without Benefits: How States Systematically Shortchange Teachers’ Retirement and Threaten Their Retirement Security,” we used pension-plan assumptions for all 50 states and the District of Columbia to estimate that, in the median state, more than half of all teachers won’t qualify for even a minimal pension. Fewer than one in five teachers will work a full career and reach the pension plan’s “normal retirement age.” Most will leave their public service with little retirement savings.
This story doesn’t fit with the popular perception of teacher pensions as more generous than private-sector retirement benefits. That’s because the real story of teacher pensions today involves a small number of relatively big winners and a much larger group of losers.
A Math App That Offers an Unusual Human Touch
Tabtor is an expensive iPad math-teaching app for kindergartners through sixth graders. Although free to download and try for two weeks, thereafter it costs $50 a month per child.
At first glance, Tabtor — the name is “tablet tutor” mashed together — does not look particularly different from the hundreds of other math offerings in Apple’s app store and the gazillion math-drill software programs on personal computers.
For each problem, there is space on the touch screen to scribble calculations with a finger or a stylus before punching in the answer on an on-screen keypad. A green check mark and a pleasing clanging sword sound greet a correct answer; a wrong one gets a red “X” and a less pleasing clang. There is a second chance to get the problem right.
So what does the $50 a month buy? Unlike any other math teaching app I’ve encountered, it comes with a human being.
Review of the First Three Johns Hopkins Coursera Data Science Courses
I am currently working towards the Johns Hopkins Data Science Specialization at Coursera. I am now complete with the first three courses. I posted my initial, and very positive, impressions when I was about half-way through the first four-week block. My impressions are still very favorable at completion. Now that the course is complete, I can post my complete thoughts for the first three courses.
There are a total of nine courses, and a capstone. After completing all 10 requirements you earn the “specialization”. After you complete a course you are given an “online certificate”. You can link this to your Linked In page, or other social media. You can see my first three certificates here.
Big bucks: Up to $80m for technology upgrades and free computers for kids in Santa Fe
As a result, the Santa Fe school board recently passed a $55 million Digital Learning Plan that promises to integrate technology for students and teachers, upgrade computer infrastructure and eventually give personal computers to each of the 14,000 students in the district.
Just two years ago, Santa Fe voters approved a bond to provide $12.7 million per year for six years to fund construction and technological enhancements. That comes to $76.2 million. Included in that amount was $2.4 million to buy Apple computers and technology for students in the summer of 2012.
Carl Gruenler, the SFPS chief business officer, told New Mexico Watchdog the majority of the $76.2 million is going to building maintenance, and “approximately 25-33 percent has been spent for technology infrastructure and equipment since 2012.?
So what happened to the $2.4 million for Apple computers?
Report: Achievement gaps smaller among Florida charter school students
Achievement gaps are smaller for Florida’s charter school students than for their peers in traditional public schools, according to the state Department of Education’s latest state-mandated report comparing their student achievement.
Like previous years’ reports, the latest results show charter schools outperforming their district-run counterparts on a range of measures, scoring higher and making larger gains in most of the department’s comparisons. Of the 177 comparisons in the report, more than 150 gave charter schools an edge.
But the report shows school districts gaining ground in some areas. For example, unlike in previous years, traditional public schools matched the learning gains charter schools achieved in math for the student population as a whole.
Why can’t we solve poverty, or solve it through schools?
I’m not that old, and I’ve already seen a lot of proposals for solving “poverty” come and go. Many—think Head Start—are tied up in education. The current debate around education tends to run in two directions: one group wants to improve parenting, or ameliorate poverty, or something along those lines, having seen innumerable correlative studies demonstrating that rich kids on average do better than poor kids at school. The other group—the one I belong to—tends to think that we could do a lot for schools, and especially big urban schools, through some combination of charters, vouchers, and/or weakening the power of teachers’s unions. For more on why the latter group thinks as we do, see the many links in this post.
This has a lot to do with education because, as I noted in the first paragraph, people who are relatively okay with the educational status quo tend to want to address things outside of school first. Diane Ravitch is a great leader for this group. I’ve read two of Ravitch’s books on education—Left Back: A Century of Battles over School Reform and The Death and Life of the Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education—and to read her work is to respect her knowledge and erudition. She moved from a strong educational reformer who favored charter schools to someone who… I don’t know how to characterize her current position other than to say she doesn’t favor charters or vouchers. She does observe the many ways particular charter schools haven’t done very well, but in my view they haven’t been worse than the urban schools they competed with, and some have done much better.
Overall, Ravitch wants to reduce poverty, but as noted above I’m skeptical of social or government forces to do so. In Reign of Error, her most recent book—I’m not all the way through it—she says that public schools are better than they’re commonly depicted. She’s somewhat right: relatively wealthy suburban schools are okay. But that pretty much leaves urban schools (L.A., Chicago, New York, Newark) to languish, and those are the areas and schools that are most promising for vouchers.
The final thing I’ll note is that a lot of people favor “more” money for schools. Overall, inflation-adjusted funding has roughly doubled on a per-pupil basis, per the New Yorker article, and overall funding is quite high—including in screwed up districts like Washington D.C.’s. The Great Stagnation also discusses this dynamic. So while “more” money for school districts may or may not be a good thing, it’s apparent that more money does not automatically lead to better results.
A Mississippi School Striving for Excellence
One warm and misty May morning in Columbus, Mississippi, the lobby of the classroom building at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS) (more) was full of teen-agers milling about, waiting for morning classes to begin.
In one corner of the glassy space was a grandfather clock, probably about 8 feet tall, constructed by one of the students out of brightly colored plastic pieces. (Right.) On the hour, a little white ball would roll down a chute, tripping levers to ring a small chime. Upstairs in one of the science rooms was a 3-D printer, a rough-and-ready contraption that, with a little more luck, is approaching the final stages of actually printing something. Another of the students, a senior, had made it himself. I recognized several other students whom I had seen performing in an after-school stage production, one dressed as Eco-Man in blue and green tights, cape, and mask.
MSMS is a public boarding school in Columbus, occupying a few of the more modest buildings on the grounds of the elegant Mississippi University for Women, is called “The W”. The men who have enrolled at The W since it became co-ed, say they always have a time explaining themselves to those not in the know.
What ‘Hard Work U’ Can Teach Elite Schools
Looking for the biggest bargain in higher education? I think I found it in this rural Missouri town, 40 miles south of Springfield, nestled in the foothills of the Ozark Mountains. The school is College of the Ozarks, and it operates on an education model that could overturn the perverse method of financing college education that is turning this generation of young adults into a permanent debtor class.
At this college the tuition is nowhere near the $150,000 to $200,000 for a four-year degree that the elite top-tier universities are charging. At College of the Ozarks, tuition is free. That’s right. The school’s nearly 1,400 students don’t pay a dime in tuition during their time there.
So what’s the catch? All the college’s students—without exception—pay for their education by working 15 hours a week on campus. The jobs are plentiful because this school—just a few miles from Branson, a popular tourist destination—operates its own mill, a power plant, fire station, four-star restaurant and lodge, museum and dairy farm.
Some students from low-income homes also spend 12 weeks of summer on campus working to cover their room and board. Part of the students’ grade point average is determined by how they do on the job and those who shirk their work duties are tossed out. The jobs range from campus security to cooking and cleaning hotel rooms, tending the hundreds of cattle, building new dorms and buildings, to operating the power plant.
Spot on. Related: Financial Aid Leveraging (or, leveraging students).
Student Debt Grows Faster at Universities with Highest Paid Administrators
At the 25 public universities with the highest-paid presidents, both student debt and the use of part-time adjunct faculty grew far faster than at the average state university from 2005 to 2012, according to a new study by the Institute for Policy Studies, a left-leaning Washington research group.
The study, “The One Percent at State U: How University Presidents Profit from Rising Student Debt and Low-Wage Faculty Labor,” examined the relationship between executive pay, student debt and low-wage faculty labor at the 25 top-paying public universities.
The co-authors, Andrew Erwin and Marjorie Wood, found that administrative expenditures at the highest-paying universities outpaced spending on scholarships by more than two to one. And while adjunct faculty members became more numerous at the 25 universities, the share of permanent faculty declined drastically.
New Jersey Per Student $pending up 5% in the past year, Average is $18,891!
“New Jersey schools spent an average of $18,891 to educate each student last year, an increase of $866, or almost 5 percent, from 2012,” says the Star Ledger, according to the State’s annual “Taxpayer’s Guide to Education Spending.” On average, costs are up 5% from last year. The highest cost per pupil district is Avalon School District at $43,775 per student and the lowest spending district is Rockaway Borough at $12,587 per student. Also see coverage from The Record, The Press of Atlantic City, and NJ Spotlight.
Children of parents in technical jobs at higher risk for autism
Children of fathers who are in technical occupations are more likely to have an autism spectrum disorder, according to researchers at The University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston (UTHealth).
The findings will be presented Friday at the International Meeting for Autism Research in Atlanta.
During participation in the LoneStar LEND program, first author Aisha S. Dickerson, Ph.D., a researcher at UTHealth’s Center for Clinical and Translational Sciences, used the United States government’s Standard Occupational Classification system. Parents were divided into those who had more non-people-oriented jobs (technical) or more people-oriented jobs (non-technical).
Fathers who worked in engineering were two times as likely to have a child with an autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Those who worked in finance were four times more likely and those who worked in health care occupations were six times more likely to have a child on the autism spectrum.
On Education Reform: Spending & Structure
The law school reform movement gets a boost from an unexpected source:
It is no mystery what has prompted the current calls for a two-year law degree. It is, quite simply, the constantly increasing cost of legal education . . . If I may advert to my own experience at Harvard, once again: In the year I graduated, tuition at Harvard was $1,000. To describe developments since then, in the words of a recent article:
Over the past 60 years, tuition at Harvard Law School has increased ten-fold in constant, inflation-adjusted dollars. In the early 1950s, a year’s tuition at the school cost approximately $5,100 in 2011 dollars. Over the next two decades this figure more than doubled, so that by 1971 tuition was $11,664 in 2011 dollars. Tuition grew at a (relatively) modest pace over the course of the 1970s, so that by 1981 it was $14,476 in 2011 dollars. Then it climbed rapidly again, rising to $25,698 in 1991, $34,484 in 2001, and nearly $50,000 in 2011, again all in constant dollars.
What’s Your Major? 4 Decades Of College Degrees, In 1 Graph
In honor of college graduation season, we made a graph. It answers a few questions we had: What is the mix of bachelor’s degrees awarded today, and how has the mix changed over the past several decades?
A few notes:
The persistence of business. Business majors, which include accounting, marketing, operations and real estate, grew even more popular over the past several decades. One in 5 college grads now gets a degree in the field.
The decline of the education major. The education degree saw a dramatic decline, falling from 21 percent of all graduates in 1970 to just 6 percent in 2011. Does this mean there’s a huge shortage of teachers? Not necessarily — it just means that far fewer students who go on to be teachers actually graduate with an education degree. According to the Department of Education, as recently as 1999 roughly two-thirds of new teachers graduated with an undergraduate degree in education. By 2009, that figure fell to just half.
Student Perspectives on Race and Education in Tuscaloosa
“Skin color doesn’t define your intelligence.”
“I am not what society thinks.”
“Looking forward, not to the past.”
These are just a few of the six-word essays written by high school students in Tuscaloosa, Ala., when asked to describe their perspectives on race and education in America today.
The essays are all the more poignant when paired with photographs by the same students documenting everyday life at two schools on very different sides of the resegregation equation. Sixty years after the Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education ruling outlawed official segregation, nearly one in three black students in Tuscaloosa now attends a school more reminiscent of the Jim Crow South.
When my colleague Nikole Hannah-Jones set out to report the story of the dismantling of court orders, closed-room deals and school district decisions that paved the way for resegregation in Tuscaloosa, she knew some of the most important voices would be from students living the consequences of those decisions. So we hatched a plan to enlist them in telling their own stories. As the engagement editor at ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative newsroom, my job is to help build an audience for our work and get the community to participate in our journalism. We wanted the students’ stories to be a vital part of this story from the start.
Intervention with low achieving students: who gets to graduate?
For as long as she could remember, Vanessa Brewer had her mind set on going to college. The image of herself as a college student appealed to her — independent, intelligent, a young woman full of potential — but it was more than that; it was a chance to rewrite the ending to a family story that went off track 18 years earlier, when Vanessa’s mother, then a high-achieving high-school senior in a small town in Arkansas, became pregnant with Vanessa.
Vanessa’s mom did better than most teenage mothers. She married her high-school boyfriend, and when Vanessa was 9, they moved to Mesquite, a working-class suburb of Dallas, where she worked for a mortgage company. Vanessa’s parents divorced when she was 12, and money was always tight, but they raised her and her younger brother to believe they could accomplish anything. Like her mother, Vanessa shone in school, and as she grew up, her parents and her grandparents would often tell her that she would be the one to reach the prize that had slipped away from her mother: a four-year college degree.
There were plenty of decent colleges in and around Dallas that Vanessa could have chosen, but she made up her mind back in middle school that she wanted to attend the University of Texas at Austin, the most prestigious public university in the state. By the time she was in high school, she had it all planned out: She would make her way through the nursing program at U.T., then get a master’s in anesthesiology, then move back to Dallas, get a good job at a hospital, then help out her parents and start her own family. In her head, she saw it like a checklist, and in March 2013, when she received her acceptance letter from U.T., it felt as if she were checking off the first item.
Five months later, Vanessa’s parents dropped her off at her dorm in Austin. She was nervous, a little intimidated by the size of the place, but she was also confident that she was finally where she was meant to be. People had warned her that U.T. was hard. “But I thought: Oh, I got this far,” Vanessa told me. “I’m smart. I’ll be fine.”
Thousands of Toddlers Are Medicated for A.D.H.D., Report Finds, Raising Worries
ATLANTA — More than 10,000 American toddlers 2 or 3 years old are being medicated for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder outside established pediatric guidelines, according to data presented on Friday by an official at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The report, which found that toddlers covered by Medicaid are particularly prone to be put on medication such as Ritalin and Adderall, is among the first efforts to gauge the diagnosis of A.D.H.D. in children below age 4. Doctors at the Georgia Mental Health Forum at the Carter Center in Atlanta, where the data was presented, as well as several outside experts strongly criticized the use of medication in so many children that young.
Reflections on the Future of the Legal Academy: Increased Faculty Workload & Less Pay
The Honorable Antonin Scalia: Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States:
What I want to discuss with you briefly—and I promise to be brief—is whether (to be blunt about it) you have essentially wasted one of your three years here, and could have done the job in two.
It is a current proposal for reform that law students should be permitted to sit for the bar exam and otherwise be eligible to practice law after only two years of study. To be sure, this is not a new idea. In New York, for example, between 1882 and 1911, college graduates needed to complete only two years of law school to sit for the New York bar; only non-graduates had to do the extra year.1 But then, in 1911, the New York Court of Appeals changed the rule to three years—which remains the rule today in almost all jurisdictions. But, now and again, it has been a source of controversy. In the 1970s prominent educators from President Derek C. Bok of Harvard University to President Edward H. Levi of the University of Chicago said publicly that switching to two years was at least worth a try.2 Then in 1999 Judge Richard Posner embraced the idea.3 As did the President of the United States just last year, saying that third-year students would be “better off clerking or practicing in a firm.”4 Finally, joining the chorus—and this was a surprise, at least to me—was the American Bar Association’s Task Force on the Future of Legal Education, which suggested in January of this year that “bar admitting authorities could create paths to licensure with fewer hours than the [current] Standards require by devices such as: (1) accepting applicants who . . . have fewer hours of law-school training than the Standards require; or (2) accepting applicants with two-years of law school credits plus a year of carefully-structured skills-based experience, inside a law school or elsewhere.”5
I vigorously dissent. It seems to me that the law-school-in-two-years proposal rests on the premise that law school is—or ought to be—a trade school. It is not that. It is a school preparing men and women not for a trade but for a profession—- the profession of law. One can practice various aspects of law without knowing much about the whole field. I expect that someone could be taught to be an expert real- estate conveyancer in six weeks, or a tax advisor in six months. And maybe we should train such people—but we should not call them lawyers. Just as someone might become expert in hand surgery without knowing much about the rest of the human body, so also one can become expert in various segments of the law without knowing much about the rest. We should call the former a hand surgeon rather than a doctor; and the latter a real-estate conveyancer, or H&R Block—but not a lawyer. Those of you who have walked the streets of Paris may have noticed (as I have) signs here and there—“Jurisconsult,” for example—advertising the services of people who give legal advice but are not avocats (lawyers). I am not even sure whether one must pass an exam or have any special training to work in such a capacity.
Education Automation, Freeing the Scholar to Return to His Studies
My feeling about today’s meeting with you is first, that it is a tremendous privilege as a human being to stand with other human beings who are concerned fundamentally and deeply, as you are, with the process and further implementation of education and to be allowed to disclose to you what I think I have discovered regarding education’s trending evolutionary needs. I am quite confident that the Southern Illinois University’s new Edwardsville Campus studies are uniquely important.
Because President Morris has mentioned it in his introduction of me to this meeting, let me begin with some of my own student experiences at Harvard, for what I have to offer to you today springs from my several educational experiences. I am a New Englander, and I entered Harvard immaturely. I was too puerilely in love with a special, romantic, mythical Harvard of my own conjuring‹an Olympian world of super athletes and alluring, grown-up, worldly heroes. I was the fifth generation of a direct line of fathers and their sons attending Harvard College. I arrived there in 1913 before World War I and found myself primarily involved in phases of Harvard that were completely irrelevant to Harvard’s educational system. For instance, because I had been quarterback on a preparatory school team whose quarterbacks before me had frequently become quarterbacks of the Harvard football team, I had hoped that I too might follow that precedent, but I broke my knee, and that ambition was frustrated. Just before entering college I was painfully jilted in my first schoolboy into-love-falling. Though I had entered Harvard with honor grades I obtained only “good” to “passing” marks in my college work, which I adolescently looked upon as a chore done only to earn the right to live in the Harvard community. But above all, I was confronted with social problems of clubs and so forth. The Harvard clubs played a role in those days very different from today. The problems they generated were solved by the great House system that was inaugurated after World War I. My father died when I was quite young, and though my family was relatively poor I had come to Harvard from a preparatory school for quite well-to-do families. I soon saw that I wasn’t going to be included in the clubs as I might have been if I had been very wealthy or had a father looking out for me, for much of the clubs’ membership was prearranged by the clubs’ graduate committees. I was shockingly surprised by the looming situation. I hadn’t anticipated these social developments. I suddenly saw a class system existing in Harvard of which I had never dreamed. I was not aware up to that moment that there was a social class system and that there were different grades of citizens. My thoughts had been idealistically democratic. Some people had good luck and others bad, but not because they were not equal. I considered myself about to be ostracized or compassionately tolerated by the boys I had grown up with. I felt that my social degradation would bring disgrace to my family. If I had gone to another college where I knew no one, it would not have mattered at all to me whether or not I was taken into some society. It was being dropped by all those who had been my friends that hurt, even though I knew that they had almost nothing to do with the selecting. I became panicky about that disintegration of my idealistic Harvard world, went on a pretended “lark,” cut classes, and was “fired.”
Are affirmative action preferences “worse” than other sorts of admissions preferences?
My article on the Schuette case was written before the Supreme Court decided the case, but it will still be useful to those interested in the constitutional and policy debate over affirmative action preferences. Careful readers will note that some of my criticisms of the Sixth Circuit decision also apply to Justice Sotomayor’s dissent. Here’s the abstract:
The question presented to the Supreme Court in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action is, “Whether a state violates the Equal Protection Clause by amending its constitution to prohibit race- and sex-based discrimination or preferential treatment in public-university admissions decisions.” Given that the Supreme Court barely tolerates affirmative action preferences, it is exceedingly unlikely to endorse a lower court ruling that overturns a state ban on them.Nevertheless, it is worth examining the reasoning of the Sixth Circuit’s decision in Schuette, because it exemplifies many interesting nuances regarding the debate over the constitutionality of affirmative action preferences, nuances that were mostly ignored in the dissenting opinions. Judge Cole’s opinion demonstrates (1) that despite decades of jurisprudence permitting state university affirmative action preferences only if used for “diversity” purposes, its legal advocates, including federal judges, still act under the assumption that the purpose of preferences is to benefit students who are members of underrepresented minority groups; (2) some affirmative action advocates cling to an obsolete model of American politics that posits that African Americans and members of other minority groups lack any substantial political power; (3) some affirmative action advocates tend to discuss the issue as if the only groups affected are African Americans and whites, neglecting both that Asian Americans tend to be harmed by university admissions’ preferences, and that African Americans are a shrinking minority of those eligible for preferences, with Hispanics a significantly larger and faster-growing demographic group; and (4) affirmative action advocates tend to be dismissive of the claim that race is different and more problematic than other criteria that university officials may consider in admissions, for moral, historical, and practical reasons. While not unassailable, these reasons seem to provide a significant non-arbitrary rationale for state voters to ban official reliance on race and ethnicity.
Commentary & Votes on The Madison School Board’s Collective Bargaining Plans
Maybe the formal deliberations on strategy don’t start until a closed session of the Madison School Board on Thursday, May 15, but engagement over a proposed extension of the teachers contract already has begun.
School board member Ed Hughes is stirring the pot with his remarks that the contract should not be extended without reconsidering hiring preferences for members of Madison Teachers, Inc., extended under the current contract.
John Matthews, executive director of MTI, replies that Hughes probably didn’t mind preference being given to internal transfers over external hires when he was in a union.
“When Ed was in the union at the Department of Justice, I doubt he would find considering outsiders to have preference over an internal transfer to be satisfactory,” Matthews said in an email.
Members of MTI are planning to offer their arguments for extending the contract when the school board meets at 5:30 p.m. Thursday at the Doyle Administration Building, 545 W. Dayton St.
Mary Burke votes for labor talks with Madison teachers. Matthew DeFour weighs in as well.
Congratulations to Class of 2014, the Most Indebted Ever
As college graduates in the Class of 2014 prepare to shift their tassels and accept their diplomas, they leave school with one discouraging distinction: they’re the most indebted class ever.
The average Class of 2014 graduate with student-loan debt has to pay back some $33,000, according to an analysis of government data by Mark Kantrowitz, publisher at student-marketing company Edvisors. Even after adjusting for inflation that’s nearly double the amount borrowers had to pay back 20 years ago.
Public Education Battles: WORT Conversation with Timothy Slekar, Dean, Edgewood School of Education
Do we have a public education crisis in this country? Is standardized testing ruining our kids’ chances at a meaningful and productive education? What are the downfalls of privatizing education? Listen to this addition of AP to find out more!
Much more on Timothy Slekar, here.
UCLA prof says stats prove school’s admissions illegally favor blacks
Public universities in California are barred from using race as a factor in admitting students, but a UCLA professor who once served on its admissions oversight team says he has proof they do it anyway.
While the first round of admissions consideration is handled fairly, African-American students are nearly three times as likely to make it out of the “maybe” pile than equally-qualified white students, and more than twice as likely as Asians, according to Tim Groseclose, a political science professor at the school and author of a new book titled, “Cheating: An Insider’s Report on the Use of Race in Admissions at UCLA.”
“UCLA is using racial preferences in admissions,” Groseclose, who made his case using data from 2006-2009, told FoxNews.com.
After a first look results in most applications being either accepted or rejected, a handful of senior university staff sift through those marked for further consideration, according to Groseclose. That’s where the alleged bias happens. He found black applicants were accepted at a 43 percent rate in the second round, while whites were accepted at a 15 percent rate and Asians at an 18 percent rate.
Common App: Admissions Collusion?
Colleges may soon have a new reason — an antitrust lawsuit — to think twice about their relationship with the Common Application.
CollegeNET, which provides a variety of admissions-related services to college, some in direct competition with the Common Application, sued Common App last week in federal court, charging antitrust violations. And while the suit is only against Common App, it states that some of the 500 colleges that are members have been “co-conspirators” in some of the alleged violations.
When CollegeNET issued a news release last week about having sued Common Application, some admissions leaders were scratching their heads about how a service to process applications could violate antitrust law. The press release provided few details.
Related: Financial Aid Leveraging.
Confessions of a Grade Inflator Between the grubbing and the blubbering, grading fairly is just not worth the fight.
n the classroom, I can be formidable: I’ve been known to drill-sergeant lethargic students out of their chairs and demand burpees; I am a master of the I’m Not Mad, I’m Just Disappointed scowl. And yet, when it comes to assigning an end-of-semester letter value to their results, I am a grade-A milquetoast. It’s grading time once again, and I’m a softie as usual: Of my current 33 students, 20 are getting either A’s or A-minuses.
It’s not that I just “give” students good grades. Each course I teach has a meticulous assessment breakdown, taking into account participation, homework, quizzes, and essays—and for the latter, I grade with a rubric, which both minimizes griping and allows me to be slightly fair. But even with all of these “hard-ass” measures, the ugly truth is that to get below a B+ in my class, you have to be a total screw-up. I’m still strict with my scale—it’s just that said scale now goes from “great” to “awesome.” It’s pathetic, I know. But when you see what professors today are up against, maybe you’ll understand.
If I graded truly fairly—as in, a C means actual average work—the “customers” would do their level best to ruin my life. Granted, there exist professors whose will to power out-powers grade-gripers. There are stalwarts who remain impervious to students’ tenacious complaints, which can be so single-minded that one wonders what would happen if they had applied one-fifteenth of that focus to their coursework. I admire and cherish those professors, but I am not one of them. You know why? Because otherwise, at the end of every semester, my life would become a 24-hour brigade of this:
2+2=What? Parents rail against Common Core math
What could be so horrible? Grade-school math.
As schools around the U.S. implement national Common Core learning standards, parents trying to help their kids with math homework say that adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing has become as complicated as calculus.
They’re stumped by unfamiliar terms like “rectangular array” and “area model.” They wrestle with division that requires the use of squares, slashes and dots. They rage over impenetrable word problems.
Related: Math Forum audio & video.
Bonfire of the Humanities Christine Lagarde is the latest ritualistic burning of a college-commencement heretic
It’s been a long time coming, but America’s colleges and universities have finally descended into lunacy.
Last month, Brandeis University banned Somali-born feminist Ayaan Hirsi Ali as its commencement speaker, purporting that “Ms. Hirsi Ali’s record of anti-Islam statements” violates Brandeis’s “core values.”
This week higher education’s ritualistic burning of college-commencement heretics spread to Smith College and Haverford College.
On Monday, Smith announced the withdrawal of Christine Lagarde, the French head of the International Monetary Fund. And what might the problem be with Madame Lagarde, considered one of the world’s most accomplished women? An online petition signed by some 480 offended Smithies said the IMF is associated with “imperialistic and patriarchal systems that oppress and abuse women worldwide.” With unmistakable French irony, Ms. Lagarde withdrew “to preserve the celebratory spirit” of Smith’s commencement.
The students are revolting, and this time they have the gizmos to get their message across
If you are a capitalist, you should be worried right now. The children of Facebook and American Idol are rebelling in the US – and that spells trouble for many of you later on.
The uprisings have taken the form of protests against big-name guests invited to attend university graduation ceremonies. Those who have been rebuffed include such well-known people as Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund; Condoleezza Rice, the former US secretary of state; and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the human rights activist.
It’s not the end of the world. There’s no reason to shed dollar-denominated assets, diversify into Bitcoin or identify escape routes to the nearest hills. Our graduates aren’t really revolutionaries.
They are hard to please. Socially networked and sure of themselves, they can turn quickly on anyone or anything – and dealing with them as consumers is going to be tricky for businesses of various kinds.
Inside UK’s Park View academy: Religion row school ‘is victim of its success’
asan Sajad is a year-11 student at Park View academy in Birmingham. He should be thinking about sitting his GCSEs shortly, but his school’s emergence at the centre of a political furore about alleged Islamist takeovers has given him something else to worry about: his future.
“There’s a chance we may be sidelined due to what’s come up in the news. People may say, oh they are from Park View, they’ve been part of the whole Trojan horse scandal, so let’s not give them a place in a sixth form or university later on. That could be a possibility,” Sajad said.
A few months ago that would not have been a concern for Sajad or his classmates. Park View was warmly praised by Ofsted’s head, Sir Michael Wilshaw, and its inspectors for achieving academic results well above the national average, all the more remarkable given its location in Alum Rock, a deprived mini-suburb of Birmingham and its high proportion – 70% – of pupils eligible for free school meals.
But that changed in February with the emergence of the now-infamous Trojan horse document alleging a citywide Islamist plot to hijack state schools in the area, catapulting it into the media glare. Claims of outside meddling, indoctrination and bullying of non-Muslim staff have engulfed it and other schools in Birmingham, and different parts of the country including Bradford and Manchester.
For Sale: Student Profiles
Each year, more than 2 million middle school and high school students fill out comprehensive surveys for the National Research Center for College & University Admissions detailing their academic records, their athletic skills, their religious leanings, their aspirations.
In short, it’s “their hopes and dreams,” said Ryan Munce, the group’s vice president. He compiles profiles on each child.Playbook: Brock launches Koch unit
Poll: Clinton sweeps GOP in Ohio
Report: Sterling calls Obama ‘flippant’
For sale: Student ‘hopes and dreams’
Are student files private? It depends.
Fannie, Freddie reform to get harder
Then he sells them.The recent flurry of interest in updating federal privacy law focuses on preventing children’s personal information from being sold without parental consent. Left unnoticed: The huge and lucrative market of peddling profiles with student consent — even when that consent may not be entirely informed.
U.S. Students from Educated Families Lag in International Tests
Eric A. Hanushek, Paul E. Peterson and Ludger Woessmann:
“The big picture of U.S. performance on the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) is straightforward and stark: It is a picture of educational stagnation…. Fifteen-year olds in the U.S. today are average in science and reading literacy, and below average in mathematics, compared to their counterparts in [other industrialized] countries.”
U.S. secretary of education Arne Duncan spoke these grim words on the bleak December day in late 2013 when the international tests in math, science, and literacy were released. No less disconcerting was the secretary’s warning that the nation’s educational problems are not limited to certain groups or specific places. The “educational challenge in America is not just about poor kids in poor neighborhoods,” he said. “It’s about many kids in many neighborhoods. The [test] results underscore that educational shortcomings in the United States are not just the problems of other people’s children.”
In making his comments, Secretary Duncan challenged those who cling to an old belief that the nation’s educational challenges are confined to its inner cities. Most affluent Americans remain optimistic about the schools in their local community. In 2011, Education Next asked a representative sample to evaluate both the nation’s schools and those in their own community. The affluent were especially dubious about the nation’s schools—only 15 percent conceded them an A or a B. Yet 54 percent gave their local schools one of the two top ratings.
Public opinion is split on how well the nation’s schools educate students of different abilities. In 2013 Education Next asked the public whether local schools did a good job of teaching talented students. Seventy-three percent said the local schools did “somewhat” or “extremely” well at the task, as compared to only 45 percent who thought that was true of their capacity to teach the less-talented.
Related: www.wisconsin2.org.
Commentary on Madison’s K-12 Governance Scene
Hughes deserves credit for even raising this possibility. @CapTimes http://t.co/yfBEsLkDdC
— Chris Rickert (@ChrisRickertWSJ) May 15, 2014
More. Vis a vis Pat Schneider’s recent article.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: States Grapple With Unpopular Property Taxes; Madison Seeks Continue Annual Increases; Chicago to Fund Pension Deficits
State Sen. David Argall thinks Pennsylvania’s law to fund schools with property taxes, which dates from the 1830s, has outlived its usefulness. He is pushing a bill that would eliminate property taxes levied by school districts and replace the revenue with higher state income and sales taxes.
For the first time, his idea is gaining some traction.
Argall, a Republican, has tried before to scrap the property tax collected by school districts, but this year he got more than half the state senators to co-sponsor his bill. He said the problem with property taxes is that “the tax has very little connection to the ability to pay.”
Poll results make Emanuel’s Chicago property tax hike a tougher sell.
Judge halts Illinois pension reform law.
Additional charts & data on Madison’s tax & spending growth, here.
How Teacher Quality Became a top Tier Issue
A decade ago, Joyce decided to fund research and advocacy on the importance of placing a highly effective teacher in each classroom, the best ways to identify and reward excellent teachers, and ways to support those who need additional help improving their work.
Coinciding with our ten-year focus on teacher quality, Bellwether has released Genuine Progress, Great Challenges, a report that documents how the teacher quality movement took hold and propelled policy changes in dozens of states. Along with the report, the interactive narrative above tells the story of progress to date and priorities ahead.
In the next ten years to implement and improve upon the policies we know work best for students and teachers. Children need this. Parents demand this. Teachers deserve this.
This Legislation Would Allow Companies to Offer Credentialed College Courses
Rep. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., has introduced a proposal to fundamentally restructure higher education accreditation. The proposal would allow states to establish flexible accreditation models that would infuse a level of customization in higher education that is currently impossible under the existing accreditation system. The Higher Education Reform and Opportunity Act—or HERO Act—would empower states to allow any entity to credential courses and pave the way for a more flexible college experience for students and make possible a dramatic reduction in college costs.
Currently, accreditation is a de facto federal enterprise, with federally sanctioned regional and national accrediting agencies now the sole purveyors of accreditation.
The result has been a system that has created barriers to entry for innovative start-ups—insulating traditional brick-and-mortar schools from market forces that could reduce costs—yet has made it difficult for students to customize their higher education experience to fully reach their earnings and career potential. And because entire institutions are accredited instead of individual courses, accreditation is a poor measure of course quality and a poor indicator of the skills acquired by students.
Google Apps for Schools – Eric Schmidt Has an Interest. Is It a Conflict?
Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York last month appointed a three-person commission to offer thoughts on the use of technology in schools.
The group, the governor’s office said in a statement, will be “charged with advising the state on how to best invest” the $2 billion the governor plans to raise in a “Smart Schools” bond issue in the fall.
Eric E. Schmidt, executive chairman of Google, is one of the three, but his appointment raised some eyebrows. Mr. Schmidt’s company has a commercial interest in seeing more Chromebook computers, which run Google’s Chrome web software, and the company’s productivity applications, Google Apps, being used in schools.
And Mr. Schmidt’s appointment struck Consumer Watchdog, a nonprofit advocacy group with a history of pursuing Google, mostly on privacy issues, as a conflict of interest. Last month, it sent a letter of protest to Mr. Cuomo’s office, and got no reply.
Higher Education Spending & Tuition Growth Climate: Jobless in Two Days
Like so many institutions, Quinnipiac University has struggled at times to maintain its financial footing since the recession. And like their counterparts elsewhere, Quinnipiac professors have borne the brunt of that struggle, seeing a salary freeze and stalled hiring along the way. But faculty members say that no one saw last week’s rapid-fire round of full-time faculty cuts coming, and they’re still “reeling” from the news.
Beyond the unusually quick timeline for the cuts – deans and department chairs were given just two days to decide whom to lay off – the matter has raised concerns about shared governance. Faculty members say they have no idea whether such cuts are really necessary, given their lack of involvement in the decision and the fact that Quinnipiac simultaneously announced it will hire additional faculty members next year in other “growth” programs.
“There’s shock, disbelief, confusion – we’re really just still reeling from this,” said a faculty member who did not want to be named, citing concerns about job security. “I don’t know how to express to you, in terms of information, how little we got [about the cuts].”
Madison school board’s Ed Hughes: Don’t extend Teacher Union contract without rethinking hiring process
It’s not a good idea for the Madison School District to extend its labor contract with teachers through the 2015-2016 school year without renegotiating it, says school board member Ed Hughes.
Hughes wants Madison School District administrators — especially school principals — to have the ability to offer jobs to the best teacher candidates before they are snapped up by other districts.
One way to accomplish that would be to drop a labor contract provision giving Madison teachers the opportunity to transfer into open positions before external candidates can be offered those jobs, Hughes says.
“To take the collective bargaining agreement in its current form and just change the date without any discussion, to my mind, is creating a potential impediment to our important efforts to attract a highly qualified and diverse workforce,” Hughes said Tuesday.
Hughes said that a labor contract that includes a “last hired, first fired” provision also hampers efforts to hire teachers with experience in racially and ethnically diverse classrooms.
“Why would someone with 15 years experience in Janesville come to Madison and be the first one on the chopping block if there are layoffs?” he asked. “I’m not proposing a specific solution, but we need to address these issues in a collaborative way so we’re not handcuffing ourselves from bringing in the best teachers.”
Related: Act 10, Madison Teachers, Inc and Ed Hughes.
Emphasizing adult employment: Newark School Reform and retired Ripon Superintendent Richard Zimman.
Mr Hughes wrote one of the more forthright quotes on local school matters in 2005:
This points up one of the frustrating aspects of trying to follow school issues in Madison: the recurring feeling that a quoted speaker – and it can be someone from the administration, or MTI, or the occasional school board member – believes that the audience for an assertion is composed entirely of idiots.
Tea leaves: Mr. Hughes was just replaced as President of the Madison School Board. Interestingly, he ran unopposed in three (!) elections. The candor is appreciated, but were there similar comments during the past few years?
Lectures Aren’t Just Boring, They’re Ineffective, Too, Study Finds
Are your lectures droning on? Change it up every 10 minutes with more active teaching techniques and more students will succeed, researchers say. A new study finds that undergraduate students in classes with traditional stand-and-deliver lectures are 1.5 times more likely to fail than students in classes that use more stimulating, so-called active learning methods.
“Universities were founded in Western Europe in 1050 and lecturing has been the predominant form of teaching ever since,” says biologist Scott Freeman of the University of Washington, Seattle. But many scholars have challenged the “sage on a stage” approach to teaching science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) courses, arguing that engaging students with questions or group activities is more effective.
To weigh the evidence, Freeman and a group of colleagues analyzed 225 studies of undergraduate STEM teaching methods. The meta-analysis, published online today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, concluded that teaching approaches that turned students into active participants rather than passive listeners reduced failure rates and boosted scores on exams by almost one-half a standard deviation. “The change in the failure rates is whopping,” Freeman says. And the exam improvement—about 6%—could, for example, “bump [a student’s] grades from a B– to a B.”
“This is a really important article—the impression I get is that it’s almost unethical to be lecturing if you have this data,” says Eric Mazur, a physicist at Harvard University who has campaigned against stale lecturing techniques for 27 years and was not involved in the work. “It’s good to see such a cohesive picture emerge from their meta-analysis—an abundance of proof that lecturing is outmoded, outdated, and inefficient.”
Although there is no single definition of active learning approaches, they include asking students to answer questions by using handheld clickers, calling on individuals or groups randomly, or having students clarify concepts to each other and reach a consensus on an issue.
Brown at 60: An American Success Story
In conventional liberal circles, there is never any good news about race. Thus, as the 60th anniversary of the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Brown v. Board of Education school-desegregation case nears, mainstream media outlets lately have been depicting American schools as resegregated.
Thus we read that in New York City “children trundle from segregated neighborhoods to segregated schools, living a hermetic reality,” the New York Times NYT -2.65% reports. The Los Angeles Times describes more Latino children increasingly attending segregated schools, while the segregation of black students is virtually unchanged from the early 1970s. That conclusion is drawn from the work of a research team led by UCLA professor Gary Orfield, the left’s go-to man on race and schooling. For decades Prof. Orfield has been successfully peddling a story of dashed hopes for school desegregation.
On May 17, 1954, the Supreme Court declared in its unanimous Brown decision that state-imposed, single-race public schools violated the 14th Amendment. Separating children on the basis of race, the justices said, denied black pupils “equal educational opportunities” and hence deprived them of the “equal protection” of the laws, Chief Justice Earl Warren wrote. The watershed decision marked the beginning of the end of the Jim Crow South, applying to more than 10 million children who were enrolled in color-coded schools in 21 states and the District of Columbia. They made up roughly 40% of the nation’s public-school students, and more than two-thirds of all African-American pupils.
The Problem for Sports Parents: Overspending
When sports psychologist Travis Dorsch set about studying the effect of parental spending on young athletes, he expected to find a positive correlation. After all, recent research suggests that young athletes benefit from parental support.
But his study, just completed, found that greater parental spending is associated with lower levels of young-athlete enjoyment and motivation. “When parental sports spending goes up, it increases the likelihood either that the child will feel pressure or that the parent will exert it,” says Dr. Dorsch, a Utah State University professor and former professional football player.
The study adds to a small but growing body of research suggesting that parents ought to temper their investments in youth athletics. The problem, at root, isn’t financial: It is that big expenditures tend to elevate parental expectations. “The more parents do, the more they expect a return on their investment,” possibly reducing their chances of a favorable outcome, says Daniel Gould, director of Michigan State University’s Institute for the Study of Youth Sports.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Just Released: Young Student Loan Borrowers Remained on the Sidelines of the Housing Market in 2013
Meta Brown, Sydnee Caldwell, and Sarah Sutherland:
Last year, our blog presented results from the FRBNY Consumer Credit Panel (CCP) indicating that, at a time of unprecedented growth in student debt, student borrowers were collectively retreating from housing and auto markets. In this post, we compare our 2012 findings to the news for 2013.
Between 2012 and 2013, U.S. auto and housing markets recovered substantially. The CoreLogic national house price index rose by 11 percent from December 2012 to December 2013. According to the Los Angeles Times, “It was the [auto] industry’s best year since 2007.” Last summer, this blog post discussed the sources of the ongoing auto recovery. Here we pose two questions: What part have young borrowers, with and without student debt, played in the recent housing and auto market recoveries? And, have the housing and auto purchases of young student borrowers at last accelerated past those of nonstudent borrowers, to once again reflect their skill and earnings advantages?
The share of twenty-five-year-olds with student debt continued to increase in 2013, as the group’s average student loan balance reached $20,926. For those twenty-five-year-olds with student loans, student debt now comprises 69 percent of the debt side of their balance sheets. Given the increased popularity of student loans, some have questioned how taking on extensive debt early in life has affected young workers’ post-schooling economic activity.
Continuing to grow K-12 spending on top of property taxes is not a good long term strategy.
Schooled: Cory Booker, Chris Christie, and Mark Zuckerberg had a plan to reform Newark’s schools. They got an education.
Late one night in December, 2009, a black Chevy Tahoe in a caravan of cops and residents moved slowly through some of the most dangerous neighborhoods of Newark. In the back sat the Democratic mayor, Cory Booker, and the Republican governor-elect of New Jersey, Chris Christie. They had become friendly almost a decade earlier, during Christie’s years as United States Attorney in Newark, and Booker had invited him to join one of his periodic patrols of the city’s busiest drug corridors.
The ostensible purpose of the tour was to show Christie one of Booker’s methods of combatting crime. But Booker had another agenda that night. Christie, during his campaign, had made an issue of urban schools. “We’re paying caviar prices for failure,” he’d said, referring to the billion-dollar annual budget of the Newark public schools, three-quarters of which came from the state. “We have to grab this system by the roots and yank it out and start over. It’s outrageous.”
U.S. children read, but not well or often: report
Although American children still spend part of their days reading, they are spending less time doing it for pleasure than decades ago, with significant gaps in proficiency, according to a report released on Monday.
The San Francisco-based nonprofit Common Sense Media, which focuses on the effects of media and technology on children, published the report, which brings together information from several national studies and databases.
“It raises an alarm,” said Vicky Rideout, the lead author of the report. “We’re witnessing a really large drop in reading among teenagers and the pace of that drop is getting faster and faster.”
The report found that the percentage of nine-year-old children reading for pleasure once or more per week had dropped from 81 percent in 1984 to 76 percent in 2013, based on government studies. There were even larger decreases among older children.
High School Seniors in U.S. Fail to Show Reading, Math Progress
U.S. high school seniors, whose school years have encompassed the sweeping education initiatives of two presidents, failed to demonstrate improvement in math or reading on a national exam.
Only 38 percent of those tested in 2013 scored as proficient readers on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the “Nation’s Report Card,” released today by the Education Department. Three-quarters failed to show math proficiency. The scores were little changed from 2009, when the test was last given.
“Stagnation is unacceptable,” David Driscoll, chairman of the board that administers the test, said in a statement. “Achievement at this very critical point in a student’s life must be improved to ensure success after high school.”
The seniors were in the first grade when President George W. Bush signed No Child Left Behind into law. The program called for schools to demonstrate yearly progress and to show that all students are proficient on state standardized tests by 2014. Most states have received waivers under President Barack Obama, whose Race to the Top program has pledged $4.35 billion in state grants in four years to boost education standards.
The Nation’s Report Card shows what students know in various subject areas and compares achievement data among states and demographic groups. Tests are also given in science, history and other subjects. Just 12 percent of 12th-graders were proficient in American history, according to a 2011 report.
Related: wisconsin2.org.
K-12 Tax & Spending Climate: Food Stamp Growth, including Wisconsin
Why exactly has there been such a sharp rise in food stamp usage? Is it general economic weakness? Failed economic policies? What do the data say?
The USDA provides state-level information on food stamp usage, so we can see exactly where food stamp program enrollment increased the most. Here is the growth in food stamp usage from 2006 to 2009, with darker red states those that had the largest increase:
Lessons From the World’s Best Public School
Jinjing Liu, a 15-year-old ninth-grader at Meilong Intermediate in central Shanghai—and part of the best education system in the world’s most populous country—is ticking off her normal class schedule: “Physics, chemistry, math, Chinese, English, Chinese literature, geography…the usual stuff,” she says in impeccable English.
That’s not Jinjing’s school day schedule; that’s her workload each and every Sunday. The Lord may have rested on the seventh day, but Jinjing studies, from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. She relates this over lunch on a Saturday afternoon, “the only day,” she acknowledges, that she has “any free time to relax.” And lest you think she is some whiz-bang academic geek on the fast track to Tsinghua, China’s M.I.T., think again. Ask who else in her high school has that Sunday routine and she says, “Pretty much everyone.”
Over the past several years, the Shanghai public school system has drawn global envy—and stirred controversy—by acing an international test given every few years by the Paris-based Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) that seeks to measure the quality of school systems globally. In 2009 (the first time the city participated in the test) and again in 2012, Shanghai finished first out of 66 locations surveyed in the so-called PISA exams (Program for International Student Assessment) in the three key disciplines: reading, science and mathematics. At the same time, the test showed the United States dropping lower in the global standings in all three disciplines, most precipitously in math.
Sallie Mae Spin-Off Expects $103 Million Hit From Probes
Navient, the loan-servicing company formerly known as Sallie Mae, disclosed to investors Friday that it expects to pay an additional $103 million to settle two federal investigations, on top of the $70 million it already set aside last year for that purpose. The company is facing investigations from the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, the Department of Justice, and other federal and state agencies over how it managed and processed the payments of student loan borrowers, including active-duty servicemembers.
The spin-off of Sallie Mae’s loan-servicing business into its own independent company, Navient, was officially completed at the end of April. Navient now inherits all liability stemming from the federal and state investigations of Sallie Mae’s loan-servicing business, the company said. The FDIC has cited Sallie Mae for unfair or deceptive acts involving the way it made disclosures to borrowers and assessed certain late fees.
Navient said Friday that, based on its discussions with the FDIC, the company believes it will be required to refund $30 million worth of certain late fees to borrowers of Sallie Mae loans dating back to November 2005. In addition, in an effort to “treat all customers in a similar manner,” Naveint said it also expected to “voluntarily” reimburse $42 million in late fees for borrowers whose loans were not owned by Sallie Mae but were serviced by them.
Frustrated Parents Turn to Picky-Eater Coaches
Mention you’ve got a picky eater to a fellow parent, and the choruses of “me too!” come quick. Some fed-up parents—embarrassed, at their wits’ end or worried about their children’s nutrition—are hiring picky-eater coaches to expand their kids’ palates.
Leslie Springer was tired of acting like a short-order cook for her twin girls in second grade and daughter in preschool. Day-Glo orange mac and cheese was a staple. Snacks consisted of Goldfish crackers, Cheez-Its, potato chips and Oreos. Her girls devoured french fries but wouldn’t touch other kinds of potatoes. She would offer cauliflower and carrots only to get rebuffed.
Ms. Springer sought help from food coach Tara Roscioli, who had recently begun a Fit Moms group in New Jersey geared at encouraging healthier choices for mothers. Ms. Roscioli suggested some initial substitutions: steel-cut oats with a pinch of brown sugar and raisins instead of heavily presweetened oatmeal packets. Brown rice instead of white rice. Apple chips instead of potato chips.
“When Tara suggested this, I thought, ‘This is never going to happen,’ ” says Ms. Springer, a clinical social worker in Maplewood, N.J.
Elite Colleges Don’t Buy Happiness for Graduates
A word to high-school seniors rejected by their first choice: A degree from that shiny, elite college on the hill may not matter nearly as much as you think.
A new Gallup survey of 30,000 college graduates of all ages in all 50 states has found that highly selective schools don’t produce better workers or happier people, but inspiring professors—no matter where they teach—just might.
The poll, undertaken this spring, is part of a growing effort to measure how well colleges do their jobs. This survey adds an interesting twist, because it looked not only at graduates after college; it tried to determine what happens during college that leads to well-being and workplace engagement later in life.
The poll didn’t measure graduates’ earnings. Rather, it was rooted in 30 years of Gallup research that shows that people who feel happy and engaged in their jobs are the most productive. That relatively small group at the top didn’t disproportionately attend the prestigious schools that Americans have long believed provided a golden ticket to success. Instead, they forged meaningful connections with professors or mentors, and made significant investments in long-term academic projects and extracurricular activities.
“It matters very little where you go; it’s how you do it” that counts, said Brandon Busteed, executive director of Gallup Education. “Having a teacher who believes in a student makes a lifetime of difference.”
Charter, public schools and the chasm between
When Neil J. McNeill Jr., principal of the Middle School for Art and Philosophy in Brooklyn, learned that fewer than 4 percent of his students had passed state exams in math last year, he was frustrated.
It so happened that he shared a building with one of the top-performing schools in the Brownsville neighborhood, Kings Collegiate Charter School, where 37 percent of the students had passed, well above the New York City middle-school average of 27 percent.Mr. McNeill had long been curious about the charter school’s strategies: It, too, served large numbers of low-income black students, many from the same neighborhoods. But the two schools operated in their own bubbles, with separate public-address systems and different textbooks. And as a matter of practice, they did not talk about academics.
MTI, AFSCME and Building Trades Petition for 2015-16 Contracts
Madison Teachers, Inc. Solidarity Newsletter via a kind Jeannie Kamholtz email (PDF):
The value of positive employer-employee relationships being highly valued in Madison and the surrounding area has moved the County of Dane and the City of Madison to continue to negotiate contracts with their employee unions. While the 2011 legislated Act 10 was designed to strip employees of their contractual rights and benefits, Judge Colas’ ruling that much of Act 10 is unconstitutional enables bargaining to continue.
Given the value placed on positive employer-employee relationships by Mayor Soglin and the County Board, MTI, AFSCME and the Building Trades Council, all of which represent bargaining units of District employees, have petitioned the Board of Education to enter Contracts for 2015-16. The Board will consider these requests at a special meeting this Thursday, May 15.
MTI – 7, State of Wisconsin – 0
MTI representation has resulted in the dismissal of charges against all MTI members who were issued citations by the State for participating in the Solidarity Sing Along, with one case still pending. MTI provided representation because of the State depriving members of their Constitutional right to freedom of speech in protesting Act 10’s impairment of collective bargaining.
The DOJ and Wisconsin’s private-school choice program: a storm is brewing
Last week, the Wisconsin Reporter reported that the United States Department of Justice is still conducting an “ongoing investigation” into whether Wisconsin’s private-school choice program discriminates against children with disabilities and, as a result, violates federal disability law.
In 2011, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed a complaint with the Justice Department accusing the Wisconsin school-choice program—as well as two private schools in the program—of discriminating against children with disabilities. In April 2013, the Civil Rights Division of the Justice Department sent a letter and legal memo to the state of Wisconsin accusing the school-choice program of violating the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). They concluded that unless Wisconsin drastically changes its choice program, the United States will take legal action.
Among its numerous demands, the Justice Department wants private choice schools to be forced to adjust their programming to accommodate all children with disabilities, so long as the accommodation does not “fundamentally alter” the school (an extremely onerous legal standard). Federal disability law, as traditionally interpreted by the U.S. Department of Education, applies a different, less exacting standard to private schools in the choice program. Private schools must only make “minor adjustments” to accommodate students with disabilities. Given that private schools do not receive the same government funding for special education as public schools and may wish to take distinctive approaches to students with behavioral problems, this is perfectly appropriate.
Via Alan Borsuk.
Much more on vouchers, here.
Advocating Additional Collective Bargaining in Madison
Madison Teachers, Inc. members fill the school board work group room, and the hallway outside. pic.twitter.com/UaIN004Pf7
— Molly Beck (@MollyBeckWSJ) May 12, 2014
Related: Collective Bargainain, Act 10 and Retired Ripon Superintendent’s 2009 speech to the Madison Rotary Club.
Illinois: Different standards for different students
Under a dramatic new approach to rating public schools, Illinois students of different backgrounds no longer will be held to the same standards — with Latinos and blacks, low-income children and other groups having lower targets than whites for passing state exams, the Tribune has found.
In reading, for example, 85 percent of white third- through eighth-grade students statewide will be expected to pass state tests by 2019, compared with about 73 percent for Latinos and 70 percent for black students, an analysis of state and federal records shows.
The concept is part of a fundamental and, according to critics, troubling shift in how public schools and students will be judged after the federal government recently allowed Illinois to abandon unpopular requirements of the No Child Left Behind Act of 2001.
A key NCLB measure long considered unreachable — that 100 percent of students must pass state exams — will be eliminated.
But the complex new approach of different standards for different groups is troubling to civil rights activists, who are not convinced that school districts will be held accountable for failing to educate minority students, and to some local educators, who say the lowered expectations will send a negative message to students.
“You’re potentially sending a message that it’s OK for some kids to not do as well,” said Timothy Truesdale, assistant superintendent in Cicero’s Morton High School District 201, where almost all students are Latino and low-income, and test scores have been dismal for years.
Via: Kaleem Caire.
School outside school: No English spoken here
Monday through Friday, Maya Reinfeldt is an eighth-grader at Savanna Oaks Middle School in Fitchburg.
But on Saturdays, while her classmates are at soccer practice or gymnastics lessons, the 13-year-old is back at a desk studying literature in her mother’s native Russian.Maya is one of more than 50 students enrolled at the Madison Russian School, a weekly immersion program where students can take classes in math, language, literature and drama, often using the same texts as their counterparts in Russian schools.
It’s not all academics. Students also do many performance events, sing together in a choir and participate in cultural gatherings with their families. And because they spend years together in the same classroom, they often develop deep friendships linked by a faraway culture.
“Sometimes I get more out of it than normal school,” said Maya, whose mother helped co-found the Russian School in 2003 so that her daughter, then 2, could master the language. “It’s a pretty good way to spend a Saturday morning. Otherwise I’d just be wasting my time.”
Advocating School District’s Review their Programs for Effectiveness
So what’s it going to take to move the needle around here?
The wealth of data that has come out in recent weeks on educational achievement hasn’t justified much celebration. For Wisconsin as a whole, the picture was not bad. The high school graduation rate has gone up a bit and is tied for second highest in the nation, but the percentages of kids rated as proficient in reading and math at all grades remain concerning.
As for Milwaukee, what can you say?
So much has been done and so little has changed. The percentage of kids graduating in the conventional time frame of four years actually went down. Other achievement measures have barely budged.
But we keep trying. In itself, that may be the best thing going for us. I’d like to think some of the things underway now are better thought out, more realistic, and ultimately more promising than things that haven’t borne fruit.
I’d like to use this space for the last few weeks of the school year to check in on what is happening with several improvement efforts underway here.
Are they accomplishing anything?
What has been learned about what it takes to have positive impact?
I’ll start with the GE Foundation grant of $20.4 million to Milwaukee Public Schools. It was announced with great hoopla on Jan. 19, 2011, at Morse-Marshall Junior and Senior High School. Superintendent Gregory Thornton called it an investment “that will make a huge difference in the academic lives of our children.”
Cincinnati’s achievement gap initiatives
When educators nationwide want to look at proven ways to turn around a struggling urban school system, this is the city they visit.
Over a decade, Cincinnati Public Schools’ graduation rate has jumped from 50 to 80 percent. And in the past five years, the reading and math proficiency of its elementary students has climbed in many schools.
Those gains have been fueled by big improvements in the performance of black students, who make up more than half of the district’s 30,000 students. In 2006, 2007 and 2010, black students’ graduation rates surpassed those of whites.
Via Molly Beck.
Cincinnati spent $602,605,253 during 2013 [PDF] for 33,000 students or $18,261/student.
Madison plans to spend $402,265,253 for 25,107 full time and 2,079 pre-k students (about 14,800/student) during the 2014-2015 school year [detailed budget package 2.5mb pdf]
US college system is no model for students
We’ve seen it over and over in Hollywood movies – American youngsters arriving at college for the first time, invariably with Mom shedding a few tears, Dad hovering awkwardly and siblings hauling cartons filled with home comforts to the freshman student’s new digs.
It’s a right of passage towards an as yet unformed career. It’s been an emotional roller coaster to get this far, committing to spend tens of thousands of dollars to study at one of the ‘best’ colleges – to attend Mom or Dad’s alma mater or to strike out for something more experimental.
But increasingly, it all defies economic good sense. And if critics of higher education in the US are to be believed, it also defies educational good sense.
Lest we be seen to be throwing the baby out with the bathwater in Australia, an analysis by The Economist declares American higher education, ‘on the face of it’, to be still in rude health. More than 50 of its colleges are in the top 100 in the world; eight of them in the top 10; they are unparalleled in scientific output – they produce most of the world’s Nobel laureates and scientific papers; and American college graduates, on average, still earn far more and receive better benefits than those who do not have a degree.
Then came a big ‘BUT’. It was in the vein of a critique last year by Richard Vedder, director of the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, whose key points in a reason.com forum are cause for wonder about an education system that Australia might attempt to emulate. Here are the eyes plucked from the Vedder piece:
How Bad Is the Job Market for the College Class of 2014?
College graduation season is approaching fast, which means we’re also heading for the annual round of horror stories about the job market for young B.A.s. At least, I expect we are, because said market is still a mess.
You can spend a long, long time arguing about precisely how bad freshly minted grads have it these days and why. But for now, let’s stick to broad strokes. In its recent chartbook on youth joblessness, the Economic Policy Institute reported that roughly 8.5 percent of college graduates between the ages of 21 and 24 were unemployed. That figure is based on a 12-month average between April 2013 and March 2014, so it’s not a perfect snapshot of the here and now. Still, it tells us that the post-collegiate job market, just like the rest of the labor market, certainly isn’t nearly back to normal. (For comparison, the unemployment rate for all college grads over the age of 25 is 3.3 percent, which is also still higher than normal.) More worrisomely, the EPI finds that a total of 16.8 percent of new grads are “underemployed,” meaning they’re either jobless and hunting for work; working part-time because they can’t find a full-time job; or want a job, have looked within the past year, but have now given up on searching.
Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Lately, Coding
The event was part of a national educational movement in computer coding instruction that is growing at Internet speeds. Since December, 20,000 teachers from kindergarten through 12th grade have introduced coding lessons, according to Code.org, a group backed by the tech industry that offers free curriculums. In addition, some 30 school districts, including New York City and Chicago, have agreed to add coding classes in the fall, mainly in high schools but in lower grades, too. And policy makers in nine states have begun awarding the same credits for computer science classes that they do for basic math and science courses, rather than treating them as electives.
There are after-school events, too, like the one in Mill Valley, where 70 parents and 90 children, from kindergartners to fifth graders, huddled over computers solving animated puzzles to learn the basics of computer logic.
College Grads Have Diplomas — and Lots of Optimism
College graduates are wearing caps and gowns–and rose-colored glasses.
A new survey of college grads shows a high level of optimism about job prospects. What the Class of 2014 may not realize is that their predecessors were also upbeat about their job prospects, only to have their expectations dashed on the rocks of a weak recovery.
The Accenture 2014 College Graduate Employment Survey, released Wednesday, shows 69% of this year’s class think they will have a job within six months of graduating. Another 11% have already accepted a job.
Proposed changes to storied IB program roil Denver high school
When the Saturday morning meeting about proposed changes to George Washington High School’s International Baccalaureate program got off to a raucous, even unruly start in the school library, a mixed group of IB and non-IB students decided to take matters into their own hands.
As angry parents who had expected an open forum but found themselves in a less interactive session tried to shout down Denver Public Schools administrators, a group of about 20 students calmly retreated to a computer lab and spent 90 minutes devising their own list of recommendations.
The student gathering was impassioned but calm and when two students started talking at once, one of their peers chimed in with “C’mon, guys, let’s not be like the parents.”For their part, parents said they had legitimate reasons to be angry. They cited a letter penned last week by GW Principal Micheal Johnson that promised the meeting would “address any questions or concerns that may arise about our future direction.” Instead, DPS officials made it clear from the outset that they were not going to answer questions but rather would hold “breakout sessions” on “becoming a destination high school,” “improving communications and school culture,” and ensuring academic excellence for all students.”
Parents said they felt impending changes to one of DPS’ most academically successful programs were sprung on them with little notice and no opportunity for them to provide input. “This was all done sub rosa,” said Leslie Lilly, whose son is an IB program 10th-grader.
Related: Denver spends $1,581,688,230 for 84,000 students or $18,830 per student (Page 89 of the 469 page 2013-2014 budget document [PDF]. Interestingly, prominence is given to “general fund” spending on page 25, not total spending) Madison seems to have done this in its most recent budget documents as well. I fail to understand how ignoring total spending vis a vis “general fund” makes sense. The mission of public school districts is to educate their students. End of statement.
Madison spends about $15,000/student – see the 2014-2015 budget documents, here.
Young Minds in Critical Condition
It happens every semester. A student triumphantly points out that Jean-Jacques Rousseau is undermining himself when he claims “the man who reflects is a depraved animal,” or that Ralph Waldo Emerson’s call for self-reliance is in effect a call for reliance on Emerson himself. Trying not to sound too weary, I ask the student to imagine that the authors had already considered these issues.
Instead of trying to find mistakes in the texts, I suggest we take the point of view that our authors created these apparent “contradictions” in order to get readers like us to ponder more interesting questions. How do we think about inequality and learning, for example, or how can we stand on our own feet while being open to inspiration from the world around us? Yes, there’s a certain satisfaction in being critical of our authors, but isn’t it more interesting to put ourselves in a frame of mind to find inspiration in them?
Our best college students are very good at being critical. In fact being smart, for many, means being critical. Having strong critical skills shows that you will not be easily fooled. It is a sign of sophistication, especially when coupled with an acknowledgment of one’s own “privilege.”
Our Generous Uncle Sam: Lenient College Debt Rules Encourage Students To Keep Borrowing And Hunt For “Public Service” Jobs
Our Generous Uncle Sam: Lenient College Debt Rules Encourage Students To Keep Borrowing And Hunt For “Public Service” Jobs
People keep talking about the high burden of college debt, which now surpasses credit card debt. And the federal government is doing something to help.
Unfortunately, what it is doing makes the problem worse.
Student loan debt has risen more than any other category, according to a February report by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. That’s surprising because college enrollments (and also enrollments in many graduate and professional schools) have been declining.
So why is that student debt mountain still growing?
Instead of paying their debts down, many graduates are either keeping their loan balances steady or even allowing them to increase. About 17 percent of student borrowers are currently delinquent, but many more who aren’t officially delinquent have avoided that only by taking advantage of Uncle Sam’s generosity with taxpayer money.
One of the “generous” features of federal loans permits students to defer their payments. They can simply claim that they impose “economic hardship” or they can return to school. Just by enrolling half-time, the student can qualify for more loans and can use the money not just to pay for tuition, but to help cover living expenses.
Princeton president: Graduating college with $100k debt? ‘Something’s gone wrong in your financial planning’
PLAINSBORO — If you’re an undergraduate leaving a four-year institution owing $100,000 or more in debt, “something’s gone wrong in your financial planning,” according to Princeton University President Christopher Eisgruber.
“It’s highly atypical of what you see coming out of colleges,” said Eisgruber, speaking before about 150 business officials today at a Princeton Regional Chamber of Commerce luncheon.
After serving as Princeton’s provost for nine years, Eisgruber was named the university’s 20th president in July after Shirley Tilghman stepped down. In his remarks today, Eisgruber stressed the necessity of obtaining an undergraduate degree to compete in the current job market, debunking claims in news media, he said, that four-year degrees are no longer worth the increasing costs.
“If you talk to labor economists who study higher education about those kinds of topics, they are baffled by that kind of coverage in the press, because the case economically for the value of higher education is extraordinary,” Eisgruber said. “The premium from a college education today is higher than it has been at any point in our history.”
To justify this, Eisgruber referenced economists’ figures for the value of an undergraduate degree: between 7.5 percent and 15.2 percent annually in return on investment, he said.
“Think about that: How many investments can you make where the anticipated return is about 10 percent compounding?” Eisgruber asked.
The College Bottleneck in the American Opportunity Structure
Richard V. Reeves and Quentin Karpilow:
Note: Part of a two-week series devoted to exploring what we can learn about social mobility from Joseph Fishkin’s new book, Bottlenecks.
Bottlenecks control the flow of future opportunities, according to Fishkin, and they can take the form of developmental opportunities, instrumental goods (like money), or a qualifications. In the U.S. today, one qualification acts a quintessential bottleneck: the college degree.
Qualification bottlenecks
Simply put, qualification bottlenecks are:
“Educational credentials, test scores, and other requirements that one must fulfill in order to pursue some path or range of paths to valued ends.” (Fishkin, Bottlenecks, p. 156)
While developmental bottlenecks are concerned with skills-building opportunities, qualification bottlenecks relate to the requirements for pursuing a particular life path.
Of course, in many cases, developmental and qualification bottlenecks are interrelated. Scoring well on the SAT is often a pre-requisite for going to an elite college, making it a qualification bottleneck. Elite colleges, however, offer educational and skills-building opportunities that are often hard to find in other post-secondary institutions.
Competency and Affordability
The $10,000 bachelor’s degree remains elusive. But Southern New Hampshire University’s College for America has unveiled self-paced, competency-based degrees that students should be able to complete for that price, or less.
The private university’s regional accreditor, the New England Association of Schools and Colleges, last week gave a green light to online bachelor’s degrees in health care management and communications from College for America, which is a nonprofit subsidiary of the university.
The college first began enrolling students last year. Until this week its sole option was an associate degree in general studies.
Tuition and fees at College for America are $1,250 per six-month term. The college uses a subscription-style model in which students can complete assessments at their own speed. The associate degree is designed for students to complete in an average of two years — at a cost of $5,000.
The new bachelor’s degrees will be stacked on top of associate degrees, college officials said. That means students must first complete the associate degree — or transfer in with one from elsewhere — with the bachelor’s being the second half of the curriculum.
10 Hour Jet Cards | College Tours
We know that this is a very hectic time of the year for clients with children deciding on which college to attend, and everyone knows that the best way to learn about a college is to visit the campus!
That is why for a limited time we are offering 10 Hour Jet Cards starting at $43,500 to help you and your child see their prospective campus before making their decision! Let us take care of the headaches so you can concentrate on what is important…Your child’s future!
How to Fill the Skills Gap: Bring Back Apprenticeships
Manufacturing is growing in the United States, but many companies claim that they face a “skills gap.” These companies have unfilled vacancies, but say that unemployed workers and recent high school graduates do not have the technical knowledge needed to fill them. Apprenticeships have historically taught students the necessary skills for a career in manufacturing. However, there has been a sharp decline in apprenticeships across the United States, some 40 percent over the past decade, and cash-strapped state budgets have forced schools to cut technical education in favor of four-year college preparatory curricula.
Harvard to adopt student honesty pledge
Harvard University is going to introduce an “honour code” in which students will promise not to cheat.
It will be the first time the prestigious US university has asked students to make a public commitment not to plagiarise or cheat in their coursework and exams.
In 2012 the university faced its biggest-ever cheating scandal.
The proposals will mean students at Harvard from 2015 agreeing to an “affirmation of integrity”.
“Honour codes” – or “honor codes” in the American spelling – are used by a number of US universities as a way of discouraging students from cheating in exams or submitting material that has been copied from the internet.
Poll: Prestigious Colleges Won’t Make You Happier In Life Or Work
There’s plenty of anxiety in the U.S. over getting into a top college. But a new Gallup poll suggests that, later in life, it doesn’t matter nearly as much as we think. In fact, when you ask college graduates whether they’re “engaged” with their work or “thriving” in all aspects of their lives, their responses don’t vary one bit whether they went to a prestigious college or not.
The surprising findings come in a survey of 29,650 college graduates of all ages by Gallup pollsters working with researchers at Purdue University. The poll asked graduates a range of questions designed to measure how well they are doing in life across factors such as income and “engagement” in their jobs and careers.
The survey set a high bar. It found that 39 percent of college grads overall say they’re “engaged” at work (which is 10 points higher than the population at large). And, while almost 5 in 6 self-report doing great in at least one sphere — whether sense of purpose, financial security, physical health, close relationships or community pride — only 11 percent are “thriving” in all five areas of well-being.
And here’s the kicker.
Get a College-Level Computer Science Education with These Free Courses
We’re lucky to have access to so many excellent free online courses for just about anything you want to study, including computer science. Here’s a curriculum list that strings various free computing courses into the equivalent of a college bachelor’s degree.
aGupieWare, an independent app developer, surveyed the curricular requirements for computer science programs at several of the US’s top universities. It then developed a similar program using 15 free online courses from MIT, Berkeley, Stanford, and other sources. Like formal college programs, the courses are broken into introductory classes, core classes, and electives.
While this won’t get you an actual college degree, you can save tens of thousands of dollars rolling your own education. (And you might also be able to get formal college credit through exams.)
UK Free schools project put in peril by soaring costs – MPs
The government has spent £240m on free schools in areas that don’t need them and the programme risks blowing out its budget due to lax financial management and rising costs, MPs report today.
In a damning evaluation the public accounts committee’s report cites poor value for money in the planning and oversight of free schools, the state-funded institutions introduced by Michael Gove as education secretary since 2010.
It has calculated that the government has spent at least £240m on building 42 schools in areas that had no shortage of school places, while receiving no applications to open primary free schools in half of the areas with a high forecast of need for extra school places.
Emancipation Day Commemoration in Eastern Mississippi School
Over the months Deb Fallows has reported on a variety of impressive and innovative public schools around the country. For instance: the Sustainability Academy in Burlington, Vermont; the Grove School in Redlands California; the Shead School in Eastport, Maine; several English immersion schools in Sioux Falls, South Dakota; the Governor’s School for the Arts and Humanities in Greenville, South Carolina; the A.J. Whittenberg Elementary School for Engineering, also in Greenville; and the Camden County High School near St. Marys, Georgia.
Recently she has spent a lot of time at the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science (MSMS), in Columbus, Mississippi. MSMS is a public, residential high school for students from across the state, about which Deb will be reporting in detail soon. But before the day ends, we wanted to note a moving presentation by MSMS students this evening in a historic cemetery in Columbus.
Scaling a University
Regular readers will probably appreciate that I occasionally write to exorcise my managerial angst. This may not make for enthralling reading, but needs must. So, I have been giving thought to the problem of universities and scale.
The problem here is that many of the mechanisms, both formal and informal, by which universities conventionally operate, do not scale. They are built upon institutions that are physically, more or less, in one place. These institutions are constituted of a small number of departments, perhaps loosely clustered in coherent faculties, where the departments are small enough for all the members of staff to know each other and for the Head to be able to both run the department and be a peer to the senior staff. The departments are the primary locus of student engagement and hold the main responsibilties in respect of day-to-day management. The universities are dependent upon broad participation in collective governance and on a shared understanding of a common operating model. They depend too on a straightforward and transparent allocation of financial responsibilities and schemes of delegation.
There are very few universities for which these operational conditions hold. Put simply most research intensive institutions outgrew the established mechanisms and associated organisational models perhaps ten or more years ago. Much of the recent story of university management has been a process of catch-up in which we have sought to transition from a scheme of working that could no longer be sustained to an approach that respects the realities of increased scale. This is the genesis of ‘faculties’ with executive responsibilities, coordinating ‘schools’, ‘research institutes’, ‘clusters’, ‘hubs’, ‘programmes’ and all the varied organisational forms that have emerged.