Ed Reform
Anything that offers an alternative to the current education system (public or private, tech or traditional teaching) Jul 13
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Robert Scheer: Elizabeth Warren, a Great Investment - Robert Scheer's Columns
Elizabeth Warren, a Great Investment Posted on May 14, 2013 By Robert Scheer
What's the general economic consensus on the impact of student loans on the household finances of those who hold them? Here's "Student Loans: Do College Students Borrow Too Much—Or Not Enough?" (Christopher Avery and Sarah Turner, 2012), which argues, "[t]here is little evidence to suggest that the average burden of loan repayment relative to income has increased in recent years."
Are Student Loans Becoming a Macroeconomic Issue?
Need a Job? Invent It
This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.
Randolph, by contrast, comes across as an iconoclast, a disrupter, even a bit of an eccentric.
What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?
Barack Obama is a champion of education reform. So is Mitt Romney. Even in the midst of an extremely polarized political season, the former Massachusetts governor has offered praise for Arne Duncan, President Obama’s secretary of education, and for the Obama administration’s Race to the Top initiative. The same is true of Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor, who has emerged as the GOP’s leading point person on fixing America’s schools. To those who lament partisan rancor, this might look like very good news.
Moving beyond our vacuous education reform discussions | Reihan Salam
“You never want a serious crisis to go to waste,” has become a popular mantra of the ruling class. Of course, these are not the people who usually experience the brunt of a crisis. But a pervasive narrative in the mainstream media is that Americans are a people beset by near-continuous crisis, whether it’s the fake crisis of a looming “fiscal cliff” or a real crisis like Frankenstorm Sandy that still has many Northeasterners inexplicably living in the dark in unheated homes. Arguably no sector of American society has been cast with the narrative of crisis as much as public education.
Get Ready For America’s Next ‘Education Crisis’ - Jeff Bryant
The End of Education As We Know It
By Scott Barry Kaufman Imagine being 6 or 7 years old again, learning about addition and subtraction for the first time. How wonderful would it be, while taking a quiz, to be able to rub a genie’s bottle and choose from a number of on-the-spot metaphors for mathematical concepts, like what a fraction really means? Or picture this: Rather than working through equations in daunting rows on a sheet of paper, your task is to play a game on a tablet computer in which you share a dinner table with aliens. There’s a bowl of apples in the center of the table.Elite education for the masses
They included Patrycja Jablonska in Poland, Ephraim Baron in California, Mohammad Hijazi in Lebanon and many others far from Baltimore who ordinarily would not have a chance to study at the elite Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. They logged on to a Web site called Coursera and signed up. They paid nothing for it. These students, a sliver of the more than 1.7 million who have registered with Coursera since April, reflect a surge of interest this year in free online learning that could reshape higher education. The phenomenon puts big issues on the table: the growth of tuition, the role of a professor, the definition of a student, the value of a degree and even the mission of universities.
AP Classes Are a Scam - John Tierney
The College Board earns over half of all its revenues from the courses -- and, in an uncertain environment, students keep being suckered. Fraudulent schemes come in all shapes and sizes. To work, they typically wear a patina of respectability.
In 1960, when Albert Shanker and other members of New York City’s teachers union sought collective bargaining rights, they set a strike date for Monday November 7, the day prior to the presidential election between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon. The timing would provide maximum leverage, they reasoned, because the Democratic mayor, Robert Wagner, would not want to come down hard on striking teachers the day before the election. This strategy was vindicated when teachers won an agreement that led to bargaining rights after just a single day on strike. The same logic surely crossed the mind of the shrewd president of the Chicago Teachers Union, Karen Lewis, who knew that calling a strike this week would be highly disruptive to President Barack Obama’s reelection campaign.
Can The Chicago Teachers’ Strike Fix Democratic Education Reform?
Eric Sheninger: An Idea Whose Time Has Come
As we continue to move even further into the 21st century, technology becomes more embedded in all aspects of society.Nowadays, the passion of design educators seems to be technology; they fear that computer illiteracy will handicap their graduates. But it’s the broader kind of illiteracy that’s more profoundly troubling. Until educators find a way to expose their students to a meaningful range of culture, graduates will continue to speak in languages that only their classmates understand.
Design in Education
As you read this, students all over the country are sitting for state standardized exams. Schools spend up to 40% of the year on test prep, so that, shall we say, no child is left behind. Schools’ futures and funding depend on the number of students who fall into performance bands like “Advanced," “Proficient,” and “Approaching Basic” based on bubble sheets and number two pencils.