background preloader

Teaching & Education

Facebook Twitter

Schoolhouse Live. Mike Klonsky's SmallTalk Blog. FinnishEd. The Network For Public Education | NPE 2014 National Conference: Diane Ravitch Keynote Address (Video) The subprime education crisis. The NY Federal Reserve’s Household Debt & Credit Report shows that student debt is rising fast and is now at an all-time high: Household Debt and Credit Developments as of Q4 2013: That’s a good thing, isn’t it? It shows that lots of young people are signing up for college instead of sitting around at home doing nothing or doing dead-end jobs. But all is not well. 90+ day delinquency rates: So, more than one-tenth of people with student loans are in arrears. The Wall Street Journal says that the rise in student credit has been concentrated most among those with poor credit records (my emphasis): “Of the 12% overall rise in student debt, a third—or four percentage points—came from borrowers with the worst credit history, or those with credit scores of 620 or lower.

And the eventual delinquency rate may well be higher: “….the official delinquency rate likely understates the problem, since many borrowers are still in school and thus don’t have to make payments yet. Oh dear. I am not convinced. Times Higher Education - Education news and university jobs. Here Comes Efficacy! I'm not sure who injected "rigor" into the education conversation in this country, but there can be no doubt who decided that we will now be talking about "efficacy"-- Pearson has made the term the centerpiece of their newest corporate initiative. And they've put a ton of their corporate information about the efficacy initiative on line where we all can get a look.

It's fascinating and rather involved reading. Michael Feldstein at e-literate has a great examination of the whole package; it's lengthy but worth the read. Feldstein breaks down much of the impetus behind the movement and encourages us not to jump to conclusions that Pearson is Darth Vadering things up, the better to see what they've really gotten right and wrong with this.

I went into the site looking for one simple answer-- what exactly does Pearson (and therefor, eventually everyone who deals with them) mean by "efficacy"? They go on to explain. And then, charmingly, they confess to the hopelessness of their vision. Goals. Research Fundermentals. With A Brooklyn Accent. Scrap the MAP: How to Boycott a Standardized Test.

Reclaiming and Renewing Our Public Education. Reclaiming and Renewing Our Public Education. COMMON CORE | Education Without Representation. Philly's Ultimatum: Adequately Fund Our Schools or Face City-Wide Boycott. Shunning a claim by Philadelphia school officials that the city only needs $50 million to open school doors on September 9th, parents, students and community leaders are threatening a district-wide boycott of the city's public schools if the city does not secure the full amount of funding necessary to ensure safe, effective schools. Rev. Kevin Johnson stands with parents and students in a rally against short-changing Phildelphia's public school budget. (Photo: Abdul Sulayman/ Philadelphia Tribune)"Unless the schools get what's needed for them to educate children and not open buildings, we don't think school should open either," said Helen Gym, a public school parent and founder of the activist group Parents United for Public Education.

“These cuts are destroying my future. They’re destroying all of our futures. It’s not right. It’s not fair,” said student Sharron Snyder, who is going into her senior year at Benjamin Franklin High School. CBS Philly has this report: Noam Chomsky (July, 2013) "The Corporatization of the University" Henry A. Giroux - videos. United Opt Out National. Bologna Process. System for compatibility of higher education qualifications in the European region The Bologna Process is a series of ministerial meetings and agreements between European countries to ensure comparability in the standards and quality of higher-education qualifications.[1] The process has created the European Higher Education Area under the Lisbon Recognition Convention. It is named after the University of Bologna, where the Bologna declaration was signed by education ministers from 29 European countries in 1999.

The process was opened to other countries in the European Cultural Convention[2] of the Council of Europe, and government meetings have been held in Prague (2001), Berlin (2003), Bergen (2005), London (2007), Leuven (2009), Budapest-Vienna (2010), Bucharest (2012), Yerevan (2015), Paris (2018), and Rome (2020). Signatories[edit] Signatories of the Bologna Accord,[5] members of the European Higher Education Area, are:[6] Rejected countries[edit] Qualifications framework[edit] Glen Ford: Corporate Assault on Public Education. Throw a Few Million American Teachers on the Barbie. American public school educators have been insulted, mocked, punished, shamed, blamed and threatened by politicians, Bill Gates, corporations and the media for a decade. Their professionalism has been reduced by name-calling, scripted curricula, “common core” standards and the publication of standardized test scores. Their schools have become the playthings of billionaire bullies and hedge fund managers with public school treasure being surrendered to shady privatizers and charter school conglomerates.

American public school teachers have watched more of their students come to school hungry and without proper medical care. They’ve watched public education be dismantled by unqualified clowns in NY, Louisiana, Chicago, Michigan and Wisconsin. American teachers have seen their benefits cut, right to organize eliminated, working conditions deteriorate, supplies dwindle and pensions disappear. And what have American educators done about this? Click above for news coverage of the strike. Glen Ford: Corporate Assault on Public Education. Articles. The Biggest Student Uprising You've Never Heard Of - Brainstorm. We must hate our children. Next time you’re watching a college graduation, as you look out over the sea of caps and gowns, make sure you notice the ball and chain most graduates are wearing as they march onstage to receive their diplomas. That’s student loan debt, which at over $1 trillion tops credit card debt in the U.S. today.

The average burden is $28,000, but add in their credit cards and they’re graduating with an average of $35,000 in debt. It’s no wonder that people who’ve paid off their student loan debt are 36 percent more likely to own homes than those who haven’t, according to new research by the One Wisconsin Now Institute and Progress Now. What kind of society sends its young people from higher education into adulthood this way? I’m aware I’m only talking about those lucky enough to go to college, when roughly one-third of high school graduates don’t – but if this is the way we treat our relatively lucky kids, the rest of them don’t have a prayer.

It wasn’t always this way. Diane Ravitch: School privatization is a hoax, “reformers” aim to destroy public schools. As long as anyone can remember, critics have been saying that the schools are in decline. They used to be the best in the world, they say, but no longer. They used to have real standards, but no longer. They used to have discipline, but no longer. What the critics seldom acknowledge is that our schools have changed as our society has changed. Some who look longingly to a golden age in the past remember a time when the schools educated only a small fraction of the population. But the students in the college-bound track of fifty years ago did not get the high quality of education that is now typical in public schools with Advanced Placement courses or International Baccalaureate programs or even in the regular courses offered in our top city and suburban schools. There are more remedial classes today, but there are also more public school students with special needs, more students who don’t read English, more students from troubled families, and fewer students dropping out.

Average student loan debt tops $25,000 - Nov. 3. NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Students graduating from college last year walked away with more than a diploma, they also left with a record level of student loan debt. College seniors who took out loans to fund their college education owed an average of $25,250, 5% more than the class of 2009 owed, according to a report from the Institute for College Access & Success' Project on Student Debt.

Thanks to rising tuition and the weak economy, students were forced to rely more heavily on loans to pay for their college education. If it weren't for a significant increase in federal grant aid, however, the increase in student loan debt could have been even higher, the Project on Student Debt said. "Most students in the Class of 2010 started college before the recent economic downturn, but the economy soured while they were still in school, widening the gap between rising college costs and what students and their parents could afford," the report stated. What you get with a degree: A better shot at the 1% Confessions of a ‘Bad’ Teacher. Canary in the coal mine. Why has the idea of publicly funded higher education crumbled so quickly in England?

James Vernon explores the origins of an academic culture that has internalised market rationalities and traces the concept of education as a personal investment back to the playing fields of Eton Never before has the idea of the university been so feverishly debated in England, and for good reason. The restructuring of the country's higher education sector around a student-debt-financed, fee-driven model is a fundamental recasting of the university's place and purpose in society. But this process did not begin with the government's higher education White Paper or even with the Browne Report that laid the ground for it.

And neither is it confined to the UK. The neoliberal transformation of higher education is a global phenomenon. That story begins with the Robbins Report of 1963, which is often assumed to have ushered in the golden age of the publicly funded university. I was one of them. NPE News Briefs ← from The Network for Public Education. City school principals spend $830G to ‘buy out’ teachers from grading state exams | NY Daily News You’ve got to pay to grade. The principals of 278 city elementary and middle schools spent $830,000 out of their budgets to keep teachers in their classrooms rather than send them to grade controversial state-mandated English Language Arts exams this month, according to the Department of Education. Under the head-scratching policy, principals are damned if ... Breaking News: NC Judge Blocks Anti-Tenure Law | Diane Ravitch’s blog A judge in Guilford County, North Carolina, ruled that the district and Wake County do not have to comply with a state law intended to take away tenure.

Opinion: Why Common Core tests are bad | CNN.com By Nicholas Tampio Editor’s note: Nicholas Tampio is assistant professor of political science at Fordham University. CTU’s Karen Lewis on today’s decision by the CPS board to wage war on African-American students, teachers and parents. | Fred Klonsky. Public School Shakedown. The Ominous Future of Education Debt. The bad news on student loans just keeps coming.

Within the past few months, federal student loan debt has surpassed the $1.2 trillion mark, Congress raised interest rates for incoming students and tied them to market swings and the average graduate from the class of 2013 left college with a record $30,000 of debt. Last week, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB) released a jarring report on outstanding student loan debt and its hazardous effects on our economy. The CFPB found that nearly one-fifth of the millions of Americans with federal student loan debt are unable to pay back their loans.

A total of 3.4 million people in America are in forbearance, accruing interest while unemployed or suffering financial hardship, while more than 7 million of those former students are in default. This is incredibly problematic. Congress has legislated that, like child support, alimony and criminal fines, student debt is inescapable in bankruptcy.

This issue is not going away. Diane Ravitch. EduShyster | Keeping an eye on the corporate education agenda, in Massachusetts and beyond. Deutsch29 | Mercedes Schneider's EduBlog. Diane Ravitch's blog | A site to discuss better education for all. The Assault on Public Education. Timothy White, chancellor at University of California, Riverside, at his office in Riverside, California, July 5, 2011. Sharp tuition increases, coupled with cutbacks in services, threaten to erode a much-admired state college and university system. (Photo: Monica Almeida / The New York Times) Public education is under attack around the world, and in response, student protests have recently been held in Britain, Canada, Chile, Taiwan and elsewhere. California is also a battleground.

The Los Angeles Times reports on another chapter in the campaign to destroy what had been the greatest public higher education system in the world: "California State University officials announced plans to freeze enrollment next spring at most campuses and to wait-list all applicants the following fall pending the outcome of a proposed tax initiative on the November ballot. " Similar defunding is under way nationwide. The EPI study observes that the "Failure of Design" is class-based. Deborah Meier on Education. Curmudgucation.