Why Innovation Can't Fix America's Classrooms - Marc Tucker - National. Forget charter schools and grade-by-grade testing. It's time to look at the best-performing countries and pragmatically adapt their solutions. Reuters Most Atlantic readers know that, although the U.S. spends more per student on K-12 education than any other nation except Luxembourg, students in a growing number of nations outperform our own. But think about this: Among the consistent top performers are not only developed nations (Japan, Finland, Canada), but developing countries and mega-cities such as South Korea, Hong Kong, and Shanghai.
Even if we find a way to educate our future work force to the same standards as this latter group -- and we are a very long way from that now -- wages in the United States will continue to decline unless we outperform those countries enough to justify our higher wages. That is a very tall order. You would think that, being far behind our competitors, we would be looking hard at how they are managing to outperform us. Politics and Education Don't Mix - P.L. Thomas - National. Governors and presidents are no better suited to run schools than they are to run construction sites, and it's time our education system reflected that fact. A central flaw of corporate paradigms, as is often noted in popular culture, is the mind-numbing and dehumanizing effect of bureaucracy. Sometimes we are horrified and sometimes we laugh, but arguments for or against the free market may be misguided if we fail to address bureaucracy's corrosive role in the business model.
Current claims about private, public, or charter schools in the education reform movement, which has its roots in the mid-nineteenth century, may also be masking a much more important call to confront and even dismantle the bureaucracy that currently cripples universal public education in the U.S. "Successful teaching and good school cultures don't have a formula," argued legal reformer Philip K. As government policy and practice, bureaucracy is unavoidable, of course. Poverty is, in fact, the issue. Texas Science – News from the College of Natural Sciences » Freshman Research Initiative. Everything You Know About Education Is Wrong - Jordan Weissmann - Business. A groundbreaking study of New York schools by a MacArthur "genius" challenges the typical understanding of what makes a good school Shutterstock / Sandra Cunnigham Think of the ingredients that make for a good school.
Small classes. Well-educated teachers. Plenty of funding. Turns out, your recipe would be horribly wrong, at least according to a new working paper out of Harvard. The study comes courtesy of economist Roland Fryer, an academic heavyweight who was handed a MacArthur Foundation "genius award" earlier this year for his research into the driving forces behind student achievement. His findings could add some new fire to the debate about what makes a good school. In fact, schools that poured in more resources actually got worse results. What did make a difference? If small classes, credentialed teachers, and plush budgets aren't adding up to successful students, then what is? The findings all get summed up in a group of handy tables. There's an obvious caveat to all this. Our Universities: Why Are They Failing? by Anthony Grafton. The Faculty Lounges: And Other Reasons Why You Won’t Get The College Education You Paid For by Naomi Schaefer Riley Ivan R.
Dee, 195 pp., $22.95 The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters by Benjamin Ginsberg Oxford University Press, 248 pp., $29.95 The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton by Jerome Karabel Mariner, 711 pp., $36.95 (paper) Unmaking the Public University: The Forty-Year Assault on the Middle Class by Christopher Newfield Harvard University Press, 395 pp., $21.95 (paper) Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities by William G. Princeton University Press, 389 pp., $27.95; $19.95 (paper) Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa University of Chicago Press, 259 pp., $70.00; $25.00 (paper) Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life by Anthony T.
By Nancy Folbre. The Forgotten Student: Has Higher Education Stiffed Its Most Important Client? - Laura McKenna - Business. How the prestige game costs students more money for a lower-quality education Wikimedia Commons In a much discussed op-ed in the New York Times, an executive director at Goldman Sachs, Greg Smith, skewered his company for rewarding traders who sold bad products to their clients, whom they nicknamed "muppets. " It struck a chord because it played on our stereotypes of investment bankers putting profit before people. But investment banking isn't the only institution with a client problem. Universities should provide their most important clients, students, with a quality liberal arts or professional education at a reasonable cost for a finite period of time.
Not Trained To Teach The system's flaws are apparent from the first day a newly hired professor walks into a classroom. After finishing their dissertations, PhDs are hired by a college, based on publication records, the reputations of their references, and the name of their graduate programs. Good Teachers are Not Rewarded. The Paradox of College: The Rising Cost of Going (and Not Going!) to School - Derek Thompson - Business. The most important issue in higher education might not be cost control. It might be advertising. Have you heard about the dangerous, rising cost of not going to college? In the last 30 years, the typical college tuition has tripled. But over the exact same period, the earnings gap between college-educated adults and high school graduates has also tripled.
In 1979, the wage difference was 75%. Over the last three decades, the cost of going to college has increased at nearly the exact same rate as the cost not going to college. That is the paradox of college costs. In the fight to put low-income kids on the college track, one of the simplest weapons is also one of the most controversial. There are all sorts of problems with measuring the impact of reward programs for successful students. But maybe cash rewards for college prep programs tell us something valuable about the college paradox. The results were striking. We know the rising costs of college, because we can see them. Why Do So Many Americans Drop Out of College? - Jordan Weissmann - Business. Unprepared students sign up for school because they think a degree is their passport to the middle class.
They should have other options. A student yawns during a late night algebra class at Bunker Hill Community College. Reuters The phrase "dropout factory" is ordinarily applied to America's failing high schools -- the ones where students are expected to fall through the cracks, where those who make it past graduation and on to college are considered the exceptions, the lucky survivors. But by that definition, another level of U.S. education counts as a "dropout factory": our entire higher education system. That's the basic message of a recent article by Reuters' Lou Carlozo, which digs into the reasons why so many American college students fail to finish their educations. We're behind Slovakia. There's no single reason why America's dropout rate is so abominable, but here are some factors. But once they get to class, not every student is prepared. The system is incredibly wasteful. America’s worst colleges. In the fall of 2010, three former students at Everest College, a for-profit career school in Salt Lake City, sued their school’s parent company, Corinthian Colleges, alleging that admissions officers had misrepresented both the costs of the school and whether class credits earned at Everest could be transferred to other educational institutions.
A 13-page affidavit filed in the case by a former admissions officer, Shayler White, described a high-pressure recruitment process in which prospective students were barraged by phone calls multiple times a day and hustled through financial aid paperwork. With his employment contingent on meeting a strict enrollment quota, White made as many as 600 calls a month, and was, he said, instructed by his superiors to use bullying psychological tactics, to ask questions “designed at putting down the prospective student” and “making them feel hopeless.”
Representatives of Corinthian Colleges dispute White’s assertions. MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency - Commentary. By Kevin Carey The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has invented or improved many world-changing things—radar, information theory, and synthetic self-replicating molecules, to name a few. Last month the university announced, to mild fanfare, an invention that could be similarly transformative, this time for higher education itself. It's called MITx. In that small lowercase letter, a great deal is contained. MITx is the next big step in the open-educational-resources movement that MIT helped start in 2001, when it began putting its course lecture notes, videos, and exams online, where anyone in the world could use them at no cost. The project exceeded all expectations—more than 100 million unique visitors have accessed the courses so far.
Meanwhile, the university experimented with using online tools to help improve the learning experience for its own students in Cambridge, Mass. MIT is particularly well suited to manage that dilemma. The Internet has ripped those barriers away. Why Are Finland's Schools Successful? | People & Places. It was the end of term at Kirkkojarvi Comprehensive School in Espoo, a sprawling suburb west of Helsinki, when Kari Louhivuori, a veteran teacher and the school’s principal, decided to try something extreme—by Finnish standards. One of his sixth-grade students, a Kosovo-Albanian boy, had drifted far off the learning grid, resisting his teacher’s best efforts. The school’s team of special educators—including a social worker, a nurse and a psychologist—convinced Louhivuori that laziness was not to blame.
So he decided to hold the boy back a year, a measure so rare in Finland it’s practically obsolete. Finland has vastly improved in reading, math and science literacy over the past decade in large part because its teachers are trusted to do whatever it takes to turn young lives around. This 13-year-old, Besart Kabashi, received something akin to royal tutoring. Years later, a 20-year-old Besart showed up at Kirkkojarvi’s Christmas party with a bottle of Cognac and a big grin. Carlos Fraenkel: Citizen Philosophers. Getting out of the cave and seeing things as they really are: that’s what philosophy is about, according to Almira Ribeiro. Ribeiro teaches the subject in a high school in Itapuã, a beautiful, poor, violent neighborhood on the periphery of Salvador, capital of the state of Bahia in Brazil’s northeast.
She is the most philosophically passionate person I’ve ever met. Most of the four million slaves shipped from Africa to Brazil were sold in Salvador, the first residence of Portugal’s colonial rulers. It’s still Brazil’s blackest city. In Ribeiro’s neighborhood, children play football or do capoeira, pray in Pentecostal Churches or worship African gods. Many are involved with drugs; “every year we lose students to crack,” she tells me. “But seeing things as they really are isn’t enough,” Ribeiro insists. To foster that discussion, Ribeiro must take on a deeply rooted political defeatism. “There are also other ways of political participation,” Ribeiro tells her students. Well, perhaps. It’s not just the truants bunking off education | Alka Sehgal Cuthbert. Last week’s announcement that the government is to strengthen the state’s powers to impose tougher fines on ‘naughty parents’, who condone their children truanting, represents another nail in the coffin for both adult autonomy and education as a liberal and liberating cultural project.
The practicalities, as suggested by government adviser Charlie Taylor - behaviour guru and ‘super-head’ of the Willows Special School in London - are as follows: parents of persistent absentees – that is, those who miss 15 per cent of school time per year – will be fined £60 (the previous rate was £50); if this is not paid within 28 days, the fine will double; if still unpaid, parents will either be taken to court or will have their child benefit docked. While children are indeed disengaged, Gibson’s depressing solution is that disengaged pupils need more practical skills. At stake in such discussions and measures is far more than the question of whether parents can or can’t afford the fines. What would Rousseau make of our selfish age? | Terry Eagleton.
Few thinkers have left their fingerprints on the modern age as indelibly as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the tricentenary of whose birth we celebrate on Thursday (28 June).. He was a philosopher who helped shape the destiny of nations, which is more than can be said for Pythagoras or AC Grayling. He was also a political visionary of stunning originality, a potent influence on the French revolution and a source of inspiration for the Romantics. Those who like their fiction drenched in lofty moral sentiment can also claim him as a great novelist.
Much of what one might call the modern sensibility was this thinker's creation. It is in Rousseau's writing above all that history begins to turn from upper-class honour to middle-class humanitarianism. Pity, sympathy and compassion lie at the centre of his moral vision. Values associated with the feminine begin to infiltrate social existence as a whole, rather than being confined to the domestic sphere. The Value of Teachers. Why School Principals Need More Authority - Chester E. Finn Jr. - National. Under the current system, educational leaders have all of the responsibility but none of the power. Allowing principals to act like CEOs may foster a more efficient system. ecastro/Flickr A venerable maxim of successful organizational management declares that an executive's authority should be commensurate with his or her responsibility. In plain English, if you are held to account for producing certain results, you need to be in charge of the essential means of production.
In American public education today, however, that equation is sorely unbalanced. A school principal in 2012 is accountable for student achievement, for discipline, for curriculum and instruction, and for leading (and supervising) the staff team, not to mention attracting students, satisfying parents, and collaborating with innumerable other agencies and organizations. In short, we give our school heads the responsibility of CEO's but the authority of middle-level bureaucrats. No wonder principals are retiring in droves. Why Inspiration Matters - Scott Barry Kaufman. Sources of illumination. Characterised by creativity and attuned to the needs of their age, the first European universities have important lessons for higher education today, says Miri Rubin As a historian of the Middle Ages, I am frequently asked about the links between universities then and now. Given the momentous changes that are affecting modern-day institutions of higher education and that touch the lives of so many people - students, parents, teachers, employers - such questions have become more frequent and more urgent, too.
All historians (especially those of us who focus on more ancient times) delight in pointing out parallels between "our" period and the present. An assessment of the role of medieval universities reveals some telling affinities between higher education then and now - and may hold lessons for today's turbulent times. The standards of written Latin still depended on the conventions that had developed in the Greco-Roman world, encoded in the liberal arts of rhetoric, logic and grammar.
Occupy Kindergarten: The Rich-Poor Divide Starts With Education - Jordan Weissmann - Business. Chomsky: How the Young Are Indoctrinated to Obey | Education. Democracy and Education: On Andrew Delbanco. The Stanford Education Experiment Could Change Higher Learning Forever | Wired Science. Can Online Education Be Both Successful and Good for Us? - Kanyi Maqubela - Technology. Business - Conor Friedersdorf - Selling the College Experience to Students Who Take Classes Online.
Professors without borders. 'The Single Biggest Change in Education Since the Printing Press' - Rebecca J. Rosen. Homeschooling and unschooling among liberals and progressives. Educating Through Play: The Future of American Education. The Roots of State Education Part 1: The Spartan Model | George H. Smith. Thomas Jefferson on Public Education Part 2 | George H. Smith. Received wisdom. Rediscovering Literacy.