Next-Big-Thing.doc. The Truth About Tenure in Higher Education. Published by the Higher Education Departments of the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers. You may well have heard about attacks on tenure and college faculty. After all, people write books and get quoted in the press grinding this ax. The argument is not hard to believe, either; we've all seen people in authority, private and public, who care more about protecting themselves than serving their customers. You may have memories of a teacher who didn't seem to keep up with his or her subject or care very much about his or her students. But there's a big problem with the negative polemics about tenure: They are not true. Tenure is a lifetime job guarantee. Tenure is simply a right to due process; it means that a college or university cannot fire a tenured professor without presenting evidence that the professor is incompetent or behaves unprofessionally or that an academic department needs to be closed or the school is in serious financial difficulty.
Why Education Needs an Occupy the Classroom Revolution - Education. Over the last few months, the Occupy Wall Street movement has grown from a small collection of hardcore activists to a groundswell of everyday Americans frustrated with the lack of opportunity afforded them in the United States. Of course, the irony of society having 24/7 coverage of our country’s ills is that some members of the media portray those same news consumers as uninformed and lacking a clear, concise message. For those of us who've gone to Zuccotti Park, "We're mad as hell and we’re not going to take it anymore" sounds rather convincing. These protestors have regained the spirit of democracy despite the majority of their elected officials failing them. Through budget cuts and draconian policies that punish instead of support, our elected officials have also failed education, specifically K-12 teachers.
Teachers hold our nation’s future right in front of them, as they serve 30—or at the high school level, 150—students per day. Thus, teachers must occupy the classroom. News: Where Universities Can Be Cut. What a group of management consultants found when they analyzed several research universities in 2008 and 2009 to identify potential savings probably didn’t come as a surprise to most people in higher education. The key findings section of Bain & Company’s report on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill summarizes the issue: “UNC has a complex [organizational] structure,” the slide states. “Multiple layers of management can exacerbate complexity. Complexity and related operating issues lead to inefficiency.” The report on the University of California at Berkeley sounds similar. “The organic growth of our operations over decades has led to many redundancies, complexities, and inefficiencies which will be challenging to unwind,” the report states.
In other words, universities are complex, decentralized institutions. The fact that the discussions are taking place at all, however, is notable, says Jane Wellman, executive director of the Delta Project. Why Changes Are Necessary. Macropathy vs. The Swarm. The current fight between the old and the new -- characterized by file sharing, the Arabian Spring, the Occupy swarm, the success of the Pirate Parties, etc -- goes way beyond a few laws on the surface. It goes right down to the heart of our views on what kind of society we desire. We have seen this phenomenon many times: an organization that has been set up to accomplish a specific purpose or drive a certain development, once it becomes big enough, gains a sense of self-preservation. Once it has reached this stage, given the choice between fulfilling its ultimate goals or sabotaging that development to survive as a power factor in society, it will choose the latter.
A concrete example is that the companies who sell quit-smoking aids don’t have any incentive for tobacco use to stop altogether. If it did, they wouldn’t sell any more quit-smoking aids. There are many more subtle examples of this happening as we speak. This strikes a chord in every activist’s heart. I challenge this notion. Essay on the push for radical changes in higher education. I read with great interest Kevin Kiley’s October 10 Inside Higher Ed piece -- "Starting to Worry" -- which uses Smith College’s very interesting and valuable "Futures Initiative" planning process as a "take-off" to rehearse again a narrative about what's wrong with higher education in America.
While that article focused on elite residential liberal arts colleges, there is a push across all sectors of higher education to consider a radical shift away from proven modes of teaching and learning, with arguably the greatest pressure coming on institutions without the resources of Smith and others discussed in that piece. I agree that these are very challenging times for American higher education. I agree that getting our strategy right for the future is urgent. I agree that higher education is expensive and becoming more so. 1. You must begin with aims and objectives. 2. 3.
But that is not all. 4. In my view, Archibald and Feldman’s Why Does College Cost So Much? 5. This is unacceptable. Moneycollege. If you’ve seen “Moneyball,” the new baseball film about the unlikely success of the Oakland A’s and their out-of-the-box-thinking general manager, Billy Beane, you may have already drawn parallels to the current state of higher education. If not, we’re pleased to do it for you. Early in "Moneyball" there’s a funny scene of Billy sitting around a table with his scouts, wise old men of America’s pastime. The scouts jaw on about players’ arms, legs and bodies and their potential.
One scout insists that an ugly girlfriend means that a player doesn’t have confidence. The scouts are entranced by the obvious. And when it comes to metrics, the scouts focus on what’s easy to measure. But Billy isn’t fooled. It turns out that high school pitchers are much less likely to go on to successful major league careers than are comparable pitchers who have attended college. “My only question is if he’s that good a hitter, why doesn’t he hit better?” -- Billy Beane -- Billy Beane -- Michael Lewis, Moneyball. What Bubble? According to Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal and sponsor of fellowships that pay entrepreneurial minded students to drop out of college, higher education is the next bubble that will burst in the U.S. economy. The Economist's Schumpeter blog summarizes his argument this way: "tuition costs are too high, debts loads are too onerous, and there is mounting evidence that the rewards are over-rated.
Add to this the fact that politicians are doing everything they can to expand the supply of higher education … much as they did everything that they could to expand the supply of 'affordable' housing, and it is hard to see how we can escape disaster. " Bubble talk of this sort -- and Thiel is hardly alone in his theory -- is a great example of abusing the evidence to support a hyperventilated hypothesis. This may sell magazines, but it does not make for good public policy. Any meaningful discussion of an economic bubble has to start with a definition.
In Hiring Joel Klein, News Corporation Signals Interest in Education. 4:39 p.m. | Updated Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, signaling an interest in education, has hired Joel Klein, the New York City schools chancellor, as an executive vice president. Chad Batka for The New York TimesJoel I. Klein, former New York City schools chancellor, has joined News Corporation.
Mr. Murdoch said in a news release on Tuesday that education “has long been in need of innovation.” The News Corporation announced Mr. Klein’s hiring shortly after it was reported that he was stepping down from the public school system. Mr. The company said Mr. It was not immediately clear what the News Corporation’s intentions were in the education arena, though other media companies, including The Washington Post Company, have benefited in the past by having educational businesses. A person familiar with the negotiations to hire Mr. The person said the News Corporation was especially interested in education given “the advent of digital technologies.” In a statement, Mr. Mr. Mr. Mr. Why No One Company Will Ever Monopolize the Internet. Jonathan Rick is a social media strategist in Arlington, VA. You can follow him on Twitter @jrick and read his blog at JonathanRick.com. The pace and power of web-fueled innovation is stunning.
One day we’re swearing by Outlook, the next, we can’t live without Gmail. These changes exemplify the beauty of the Internet — the possibility that greener pastures are but a click away. On the other hand, the list of tech innovations that could have been is quite long. Before we get into those, a few caveats: Some of the companies below may not have missed the boat so much as skipped the ride. So, how did tech companies miss the boat? 1. 2. 3. 4. iTunes missed the Spotify boat. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. So why do these examples matter? The beauty of the web is that it dramatically lowers the traditional barriers to entry, so an entrepreneur can penetrate an already saturated market.
Sure, tech giants are somewhat limited. Internet innovation comes in tidal waves, big and bold. Reading Rainbow: The Next Generation. LeVar Burton, a children's literacy advocate and a former star of Star Trek: The Next Generation, plans to make an ambitious comeback, giving the once-loved Reading Rainbow brand a 21st-century upgrade. Burton’s for-profit venture, RRKidz, plans to launch an educational iPad app that lets children explore topics of interest--such as, say space--in a multimedia-rich environment, with voice-over-enhanced children's books, familiar videos of Burton at real-life places (like NASA), and, of course, games.
Burton tells Fast Company he’s on a mission to "get kids hooked on books," and says his company is "going to where kids are today; those devices that they love to spend time on. " Burton aims to distinguish himself in the crowded educational space as the company's "Curator in Chief," who will personally curate top-notch educational books, apps, and games, to help parents navigate through the growing jungle of digital products.
"I'm the curator," he says.