Remaking the University: Quality Public Higher Ed: From Udacity to Theory Y. Those who have long claimed that public funding cuts do lower the educational quality of public universities are finally seeing the connection go mainstream. The New York Times made it explicit again in the title of last week's coverage of the ongoing crisis in Caifornia higher ed: "California Cuts Threaten the Status of Universities. " The story's accompanying photo is an image of the kind of factory-style higher ed that everyone from commercial e-learning companies to small-seminar advocates agrees will no longer do.
Simultaneous news came last week that "S.F. City College can't afford all its campuses" suggesting that even the cheapest public ed factories are facing closure. We dreamed the Cities of Intellect that Ansel Adams photographed (UC Irvine mid-1960s, courtesy of UC Berkeley's On the Same Page project). We were given, the great majority of us, the factory of commodity skills. But now what? We do know how to make pretty much everybody smarter and more creative. Mr. Why Is College So Expensive? - To the Point on KCRW. College students and graduates have racked up more than a trillion dollars in student loan debt, as the cost of a higher education is rising fast. Why are colleges and universities increasing tuition instead of cutting expenses? Is online learning on the verge of changing the way Americans prepare themselves for employment in the so-called "knowledge economy?
" Also, the G8 Summit convenes at Camp David. On Reporter's Notebook, this weekend, six playoff games will be played in both hockey and basketball — in one single arena. Crews will have 80 hours to change a wood floor into an ice rink and back again. It all happens at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. Banner image: Students walk across the campus of the University of California. Making News The G8 Summit Convenes at Camp David (12:00PM) President Obama today welcomed the new French President, François Hollande, to the White House for the first time. Guests: Michael Hirsh: National Journal, @michaelphirsh Main Topic. U.S. Subsidies to Profit-Making Colleges Keep Growing. I got interested in ITT Tech after I watched one of its commercials, full of promise of bright career opportunities for students who sign up. At the end of the commercial, the following words flashed on the screen, in small type and for only a few seconds: “Credits earned are unlikely to transfer.”
If you enroll in a public community college and get a two-year associate degree, you can almost certainly transfer to a four-year college and complete your bachelor’s degree in two more years. If you drop out, as many do, you can return to the same or another college years later and complete a degree. But it appears that ITT Tech students are stuck. ITT Tech will award degrees to students who complete enough classes, but any student who wants to transfer will probably have to start over. How many students who enroll at ITT Tech go on to get a degree? That sounds like a simple question, but it is not one that ITT Educational wants to answer. The company does disclose a lot of numbers. Best content in ATL Future Visions. Democratic mayors challenge teachers unions in urban political shift. Villaraigosa is one of several Democratic mayors in cities across the country — Chicago, Cleveland, Newark and Boston, among them — who are challenging teachers unions in ways that seemed inconceivable just a decade ago.
“This is a very, very interesting political situation that is way counterintuitive,” said Charles Taylor Kerchner, who has written two books about teachers unions. At at time when most Americans believe that U.S. education is imperiled, and cities are especially struggling to improve schools, the tension between the mayors and the unions is causing a fundamental realignment of two powerful forces in urban politics. In the clash over what is best for children, adults on both sides are gambling.
The mayors risk turning labor friends into enemies, a lesson then-D.C. Mayor Adrian Fenty learned in 2010 when he lost his seat in part because teachers were enraged by his school reforms. The mayors want a raft of changes. “We have made mistakes,” she said. What Ails Us. Forgive American consumers if they feel a bit perplexed. Policymakers and pundits have been warning them about the prospect of deflation (a prolonged and widespread decline in prices), but there’s no sign of any decline in many of the prices that people pay every day.
Car-insurance premiums jumped more than nine per cent last year. Health-insurance costs are soaring, to say nothing of the cost of a haircut. Cable-TV prices have risen sixteen per cent since 2000. And then there’s college: tuitions at private colleges have jumped 5.6 per cent annually over the past three years, according to the College Board, and public colleges are even worse. In times like these, it’s hard to get worked up about deflation. Why the divergence? An economist would say that the productivity of classical musicians has not improved over time, and in this regard the musicians aren’t alone. The rest of the American economy functions differently. Cost disease isn’t anyone’s fault. How, and How Not, to Improve the Schools by Diane Ravitch. In his 2012 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama proposed that teachers should “stop teaching to the test” and that the nation should “reward the best ones” and “replace teachers who just aren’t helping kids learn.”
This all sounds sensible, but it is in fact a contradictory message. The president’s signature education program, called Race to the Top, encourages states to award bonuses to teachers whose students get higher test scores (they are, presumably “the best ones”) and to fire teachers if their students get lower test scores (presumably the teachers “who just aren’t helping kids”). If teachers want to stay employed, they must “teach to the test.” The president recommends that teachers stop doing what his own policies make necessary and prudent. Like George W. In Finland, the subject of the first part of this article, Finland’s success confounds the GERM theorists, because almost every teacher and principal in Finland belongs to the same union. View Offers. Schools We Can Envy by Diane Ravitch. Finnish Lessons: What Can the World Learn from Educational Change in Finland?
By Pasi Sahlberg, with a foreword by Andy Hargreaves Teachers College Press, 167 pp., $34.95 (paper) In recent years, elected officials and policymakers such as former president George W. Bush, former schools chancellor Joel Klein in New York City, former schools chancellor Michelle Rhee in Washington, D.C., and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan have agreed that there should be “no excuses” for schools with low test scores. The “no excuses” reformers maintain that all children can attain academic proficiency without regard to poverty, disability, or other conditions, and that someone must be held accountable if they do not. Nothing is said about holding accountable the district leadership or the elected officials who determine such crucial issues as funding, class size, and resource allocation.
It is not unusual for Americans to hold up another nation as a model for school reform. Privatizing Public Education, Higher Ed Policy, and Teachers - Alec Exposed. Undermining Protections for Students With Disabilities The ALEC Special Needs Scholarship Act has been introduced in Wisconsin as AB 110 by Rep. Michelle Litjens, and co-sponsored in the Senate by Leah Vukmir, who was an ALEC "Legislator of the Year" in 2009. The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction said: This bill strips special education students of due process rights and rights to services. It allows for the segregation of students based on disability. It will devastate funding for public education in select districts. To read more about this story, click here or here or here. The "Voucher" Strategy and Requiring Tax Subsidies for Private For-Profit Schools For almost 20 years, a top priority item for ALEC has been the privatization of public schools through school vouchers.
Have any of these bills been introduced or enacted in YOUR state? This information is available for download as a one-page fact sheet here. ALEC Exposed: The Koch Connection. Untold sums of cash poured into ALEC by Charles and David Koch have been an effective investment in advancing their worldview. This article is part of a Nation series exposing the American Legislative Exchange Council, in collaboration with the Center For Media and Democracy. John Nichols introduces the series. Hundreds of ALEC’s model bills and resolutions bear traces of Koch DNA: raw ideas that were once at the fringes but that have been carved into “mainstream” policy through the wealth and will of Charles and David Koch. Of all the Kochs’ investments in right-wing organizations, ALEC provides some of the best returns: it gives the Kochs a way to make their brand of free-market fundamentalism legally binding.
About the Author Lisa Graves Lisa Graves, a former deputy assistant attorney general at the Justice Department, is the executive director of the... Also by the Author Take environmental protections. ALEC and the Kochs often pursue parallel tracks. Duncan Calls for Urgency in Lowering College Costs. The characterized Mr. Duncan’s remarks, at a Las Vegas conference of college financial aid workers, as the start of a “national conversation” about high costs, which have prompted raucous protests across the country and ignited an angry push among some borrowers demanding debt forgiveness, federal grants and interest-free loans. The department used the opportunity to call attention to steps the Obama administration had taken to reduce the net price that students and families pay for higher education and make it easier to repay . But it was clear that the administration was taking heed of the rising furor over tuition increases, and a growing online debate about how much a college degree is worth at a time when few jobs are available for graduates.
“Three in four Americans now say that college is too expensive for most people to afford,” Mr. Duncan said. College seniors with loans now graduate with an average debt load of more than $25,000. Even as college has become more expensive, Mr. Steven Brill's Class Warfare: What's wrong with the education reformers' diagnosis and cures. If you saw Waiting for "Superman," Steven Brill's tale in Class Warfare will be familiar. The founder of Court TV offers another polemic against teacher unions and a paean to self-styled "education reformers. " But even for those who follow education policy, he offers an eye-opening read that should not be missed.
Where the movie evoked valiant underdogs waging an uphill battle against an ossified behemoth, Brill's briskly written book exposes what critics of the reformers have long suspected but could never before prove: just how insular, coordinated, well-connected, and well-financed the reformers are. Class Warfare reveals their single-minded efforts to suppress any evidence that might challenge their mission to undermine the esteem in which most Americans held their public schools and teachers. These crusaders now are the establishment, as arrogant as any that preceded them. Brill's heroes make a high-profile gallery. Big Philanthropy's Role in Higher Education - The Chronicle Review.
By Stanley N. Katz In a January speech at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, laying out his policy for higher education, President Obama opened by noting his agenda: "How can we make sure that everybody is getting the kind of education they need to personally succeed but also to build up this nation—because in this economy, there is no greater predictor of individual success than a good education. " Although the United States still has "the best network of colleges and universities in the world," he said, "the challenge is it's getting tougher and tougher to afford it. " Thus his primary policy concerns were high tuition and student debt. At Ann Arbor, President Obama captured the spirit of the megafoundation program for higher education.
Should we be worried about that confluence? First, consider how the foundation world has changed. But what grabs my attention is the number with megaresources, almost all of which have emerged over the past two decades. Turn now to higher education. Essay: Washington college grant program favors vocational over liberal education. Last year, as Washington State faced a severe budget crisis, legislators embraced a novel way to fund student financial aid: a public-private partnership between the state and private corporations. Called the Opportunity Scholarship Fund, the fund attracts private donations and matches them with public money in order to support students in science, technology, and other “high demand” fields.
As Inside Higher Ed reporter Paul Fain wrote, “the thinking in Washington was that if corporations had more direct control of how their donations were used, they might be more inclined to give. “ This is exactly right -- Boeing and Microsoft quickly pledged $50 million -- but the creation of the fund must be placed in the broader context of state defunding of public higher education. The idea for the fund originated in a task force established in summer 2010 by Governor Christine Gregoire, a Democrat. Nowhere on the panel were the other interests of society represented. Policy-Making Billionaires. How Online Learning Companies Bought America's Schools. This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. If the national movement to “reform” public education through vouchers, charters and privatization has a laboratory, it is Florida. It was one of the first states to undertake a program of “virtual schools”—charters operated online, with teachers instructing students over the Internet—as well as one of the first to use vouchers to channel taxpayer money to charter schools run by for-profits.
About the Author Lee Fang Lee Fang is a reporting fellow with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute. Also by the Author They're using the Ukraine crisis to push for expedited approval of US natural gas exports. News reports and politicians lauding US gas exports as “best for Crimea” don’t disclose the US gas companies pushing the line, or their Russian connections. But as recently as last year, the radical change envisioned by school reformers still seemed far off, even there. For-Profit College Rules Scaled Back After Lobbying. Mitt Romney Offers Praise for a Donor’s Business.