Some of the News Fit to Print Ads Say the 'A' in U.C.L.A. Is for 'Achievement'

Some of the News Fit to Print

Some of the News Fit to Print

ABOUT HIGHER ED

CONNECT THE DOTS
Nancy L. Zimpher, chancellor of the State University of New York, writes in Inside Higher Ed: A plan in Connecticut to legislate the end of most remedial education courses in public higher education has once again raised questions about why so many incoming students are not prepared for college-level work and what can be done about it. To fully comprehend and effectively address the nation’s reliance on remediation, it is important to look at some basic facts surrounding the issue. We do not have a system of public education in this country. As a nation, we have yet to connect the dots between early childhood programming, kindergarten learning, elementary and secondary education coursework, and college curriculums. Until we do, the issue of remediation – and the excessive costs associated with it in every state – will carry on.

FOR-PROFIT ISN'T A MODEL FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGES
Daniel LaVista provides this commentary in the Los Angeles Times: Mark Schneider and Lu Michelle Yin, proponents of for-profit higher education, go on the offensive in their April 11 Times Op-Ed article and criticize public community colleges for our graduation rates, which do need to improve. I have no quarrel with that fundamental truth.  However, I do take issue with those who advocate for for-profit colleges, which have been publicly exposed for their own inadequate graduation rates. I hate to use the old cliche about glass houses, but Schneider and Yin are clearly throwing stones, particularly at those of us in the California community college system. As Schneider and Yin point out, for-profit colleges have come under much negative scrutiny in the last few years. But the authors' attempt to redirect it is not persuasive. Quite simply, it's important to consider the facts.

ABOUT K-12

SCHOOL TURNAROUND PUSH STILL A WORK IN PROGRESS
The federal program providing billions of dollars to help states and districts close or remake some of their worst-performing schools remains a work in progress after two years, with more than 1,200 turnaround efforts under way but still no definitive verdict on its effectiveness. The School Improvement Grant program, supercharged by a windfall of $3 billion under the federal economic-stimulus package in 2009, has jump-started aggressive moves by states and districts. To get their share of the SIG money, they had to quickly identify some of their most academically troubled schools, craft new teacher-evaluation systems, and carve out more time for instruction, among other steps. The article is in Education Week.

REFOCUS ON CLASSROOM INSTRUCTION, BROOKINGS URGES
John Thompson blogs in This Week in Education: The contemporary data-driven "reform" movement, fundamentally, is a theoretical bank shot, where in the name of "output-based" accountability non-educators'  change the subject away from teaching and learning in order to somehow improve teaching and learning.  "Choosing Blindly," by the Brookings Foundation's Grover Whitehurst and Matthew Chingos, is a reminder that the best way to improve classroom outcomes is to concentrate on the real interactions in the classroom and not some statistical models.  The better approach, all along, would have been to target the interactions between flesh and blood students, teachers, and the learning materials that they actually use.

ABOUT K-12
WE DON'T JUDGE TEACHERS BY NUMBERS ALONE; THE SAME SHOULD GO FOR SCHOOLS
Michael J. Petrilli writes in the the Fordham Institute’s Flypaper blog: When it comes to evaluating teachers, there’s wide agreement that we need to look at student achievement results—but not exclusively. Teaching is a very human act; evaluating good teaching takes human judgment—and the teacher’s role in the school’s life, and her students’ lives, goes beyond measurable academic gains. Thus the interest in regular observations by principals and/or master teachers. So why do we assume, when it comes to evaluating schools, that we must look at numbers alone?
THE CRISIS IN AMERICAN EDUCATION IS A MYTH
Joplin, Missouri English teacher Randy Turner writes in the Huffington Post: One of the most frustrating things teachers have to deal with every day is this myth that our profession is filled with lazy, undermotivated educators who arrive just in time for the first bell and leave immediately at the end of the school day. We watch as, year after year, politicians devise radical plans that totally revamp our "failed" system. Many times these plans involve taking public money and putting it into private schools, relying more and more on standardized tests, and tearing down the teachers who are the key to the success that public education has always been and hopefully, after the fallout of this well-organized attack, will continue to be.

ABOUT HIGHER ED
A MARKET FOR SUCCESS: HOW A ROBUST SERVICE PROVIDER MARKET CAN HELP COMMUNITY COLLEGES IMPROVE STUDENT COMPLETION
A new report by the nonprofit consulting firm FSG draws on the perspectives of hundreds of community college leaders and field experts to explore how external service providers can best help colleges improve student completion. The research highlights what community colleges most need to improve student success rates, explores the landscape of service providers who can meet those needs, and offers recommendations on how to build a robust market for external services that helps colleges deliver stronger results.
FOR STUDENT SUCCESS, STOP DEBATING AND START IMPROVING
Hilary Pennington, director of education, postsecondary success, and special initiatives at the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Historically, higher education has fueled social and economic mobility in America. But today that contribution is at risk. Attainment gaps between high- and low-income students have doubled over the past 10 years. Only 9 percent of students from low-income households have earned any postsecondary credentials by the time they are 26, compared with more than 50 percent of students from higher-income households. We must do far more, and with far more speed, than we are doing now to close this gap. If we can ensure that the majority of today's low-income young adults earn credentials beyond high school, they will qualify for family-supporting jobs and set their children on a path of upward mobility­—a powerful way to break the intergenerational cycle of poverty.

posted Apr 10, 2012 11:43 am

What’s the best way to evaluate teachers? [In the News]

Good teachers are crucial to student learning, but just how do you measure a teacher’s effectiveness? That’s something many districts in Illinois and around the country are grappling with as new laws prompted by Race to the Top go into effect. Last week, Chicago Public Schools released its new plan for evaluating teachers after months of unsuccessful negotiations between the district and the Chicago Teachers Union. The new system will factor in improvements in student test scores to rate teachers, a move that doesn't sit well with the Chicago Teachers Union. So what do we know about what makes a good teacher, and what’s the best way to gauge a teacher’s skills? Carnegie Foundation Senior Fellow Thomas Toch and Sara Ray Stoelinga from the University of Chicago’s Urban Education Institute discuss these questions and more on Chicago Public Media’s Afternoon Shift.
Listen to the show »

ABOUT K-12
LA. SCHOOL CHOICE OPTIONS EXPAND AFTER SWEEPING EDUCATION OVERHAUL
Over the objections of teachers’ unions and many Democrats, Louisiana’s Republican governor and GOP-controlled legislature have crafted one of the most exhaustive education overhauls of any state in the country, through measures that will dramatically expand families’ access to public money to cover the costs of both private school tuition and individual courses offered by a menu of providers. A pair of bills championed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, which he is expected to sign into law, will expand a state-run private-school-voucher program beyond New Orleans to other academically struggling schools around the state, give superintendents and principals direct control over personnel decisions, and set much higher standards for awarding teachers tenure. The article is in Education Week.
IMPROVE STUDENT TEST SCORES, AND TEACHERS MIGHT GET A $1,600 BONUS
By the end of this school year, teachers at Romulus Middle School could see a big payoff for their work in the last two years: bonuses of up to $1,600 each for raising student test scores, volunteering to tutor kids or developing training sessions for staff. The incentives are part of a broad approach to improve teaching -- a key focus of the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program that has invested more than $4.6 billion into the nation's lowest-performing schools since 2009, including $83 million for 28 Michigan schools in 2010. The article is in the Detroit Free Press.

ABOUT HIGHER ED
COUNTING ALL STUDENTS
Rachel Fishman writes in Education Sector’s The Quick and the Ed blog: On Wednesday, the Department of Education released an action plan to enhance postsecondary graduation rate data. If you’re not excited about this, you should be. For years, we’ve been using incomplete—woefully incomplete—completion data. And yet policymakers and researchers have had no choice but to use this untrustworthy data. But now that’s about to change. Given the inadequate picture we have about postsecondary attainment, the Department of Education’s announcement to improve graduation data is momentous. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “Better data across institutions is the basis for finding sound solutions to help students stay in school and complete their postsecondary studies. It is critical to their success and our nation’s economic prosperity.”
THE GOVERNMENT'S NEW WAY OF MEASURING STUDENT SUCCESS: IMPLICATIONS FOR BLACK COLLEGES
The federal government recently announced that it plans to change the way it measures student success. Instead of measuring graduation rates using first-time, full-time students, the new measurements will take into account part-time and transfer students. The Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System (IPEDS) has been outdated for several decades now and fails to take into account the changing landscape of students in the United States. This new change is good news for many of the nation's colleges and universities. Although community college leaders are the main force behind this change in measurement, the new strategy will also have a significant impact on the measuring of student success at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as well. The article is in The Huffington Post.


ABOUT K-12
LA. SCHOOL CHOICE OPTIONS EXPAND AFTER SWEEPING EDUCATION OVERHAUL
Over the objections of teachers’ unions and many Democrats, Louisiana’s Republican governor and GOP-controlled legislature have crafted one of the most exhaustive education overhauls of any state in the country, through measures that will dramatically expand families’ access to public money to cover the costs of both private school tuition and individual courses offered by a menu of providers. A pair of bills championed by Gov. Bobby Jindal, which he is expected to sign into law, will expand a state-run private-school-voucher program beyond New Orleans to other academically struggling schools around the state, give superintendents and principals direct control over personnel decisions, and set much higher standards for awarding teachers tenure. The article is in Education Week.
IMPROVE STUDENT TEST SCORES, AND TEACHERS MIGHT GET A $1,600 BONUS
By the end of this school year, teachers at Romulus Middle School could see a big payoff for their work in the last two years: bonuses of up to $1,600 each for raising student test scores, volunteering to tutor kids or developing training sessions for staff. The incentives are part of a broad approach to improve teaching -- a key focus of the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program that has invested more than $4.6 billion into the nation's lowest-performing schools since 2009, including $83 million for 28 Michigan schools in 2010. The article is in the Detroit Free Press.

ABOUT HIGHER ED
COUNTING ALL STUDENTS
Rachel Fishman writes in Education Sector’s The Quick and the Ed blog: On Wednesday, the Department of Education released an action plan to enhance postsecondary graduation rate data. If you’re not excited about this, you should be. For years, we’ve been using incomplete—woefully incomplete—completion data. And yet policymakers and researchers have had no choice but to use this untrustworthy data. But now that’s about to change. Given the inadequate picture we have about postsecondary attainment, the Department of Education’s announcement to improve graduation data is momentous. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said, “Better data across institutions is the basis for finding sound solutions to help students stay in school and complete their postsecondary studies. It is critical to their success and our nation’s economic prosperity.”
THE GOVERNMENT'S NEW WAY OF MEASURING STUDENT SUCCESS: IMPLICATIONS FOR BLACK COLLEGES
The federal government recently announced that it plans to change the way it measures student success. Instead of measuring graduation rates using first-time, full-time students, the new measurements will take into account part-time and transfer students. The Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System (IPEDS) has been outdated for several decades now and fails to take into account the changing landscape of students in the United States. This new change is good news for many of the nation's colleges and universities. Although community college leaders are the main force behind this change in measurement, the new strategy will also have a significant impact on the measuring of student success at Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) as well. The article is in The Huffington Post.


ABOUT K-12
BILL GATES: MAKING TEACHER EVALUATIONS PUBLIC 'NOT CONDUCIVE TO OPENNESS'
Through his foundation, The Bill And Melinda Gates Foundation, Bill Gates is known for pouring millions into education reform. So when he came out in February against making Teacher Data Reports — or evaluations — public in New York City, Gates made a splash. This is a big deal, because his foundation has advocated for tougher accountability standards for teachers, something teachers unions haven't fully embraced. In an interview with NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday's host Scott Simon, Gates explained himself.
CALIFORNIA TEACHER RATINGS SHOULD BE RELEASED PUBLICLY, PARENTS SAY IN NEW SURVEY
While teachers and most education reformers remain highly uncomfortable with having test-based teacher evaluations aired in public, one survey suggests parents take a different view. In a new SurveyUSA news poll that asked 500 California adults about "releasing performance ratings of California public school teachers," 65 percent responded that they supported the idea. Sixty-six percent indicated they believed releasing teacher data would improve their performance, while 32 percent said they thought it would discourage teachers from working in California. The article is in The Huffington Post.
QUESTIONS ABOUND AS DISTRICTS SHIFT TO MERIT PAY FOR TEACHERS
Education reforms now going into effect in Indiana, and similar ones sweeping the nation, are targeting something many Americans consider to be strictly off-limits: their paychecks. The laws passed in 2011 and being implemented over the next two or three years were partly based on the principle of merit pay. Under Indiana’s new law, the state will ask that test performance of students be factored into pay raises for the first time. That is a major shift away from the rigid pay tables in most school districts that awarded raises primarily based on a teacher’s years of experience and the academic degrees they earned. The article is in The Hechinger Report.
        
ABOUT HIGHER ED
CONNECTICUT MAY LET COLLEGE STUDENTS SKIP REMEDIAL CLASSES
Remedial classes could be slashed in Connecticut—but not because students are prepared to do college-level work. Under a bill approved by the state's Senate higher education committee, all community college and state university students could take college-level, credit-bearing courses with "embedded" remedial help for those who need it. That could mean an additional skills class, a lab, or tutoring. The article is in U.S. News & World Report.
TRYING TO FIND A MEASURE FOR HOW WELL COLLEGES DO
How well does a college teach, and what do its students learn? Rankings based on the credentials of entering freshmen are not hard to find, but how can students, parents and policy makers assess how well a college builds on that foundation? What information exists has often been hidden from public view. But that may be changing. In the wake of the No Child Left Behind federal education law, students in elementary, middle and high schools take standardized tests whose results are made public, inviting anyone to assess, however imperfectly, a school’s performance. There is no comparable trove of public data for judging and comparing colleges. Pieces of such a system may be taking shape, however, with several kinds of national assessments — including, most controversially, standardized tests — gaining traction in recent years. More than 1,000 colleges may be using at least one of them. The article is in The New York Times.

ABOUT K-12
HOW TO REBUILD NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND
Congressman Rob Andrews writes in The Atlantic: When President Obama addressed the nation in his State of the Union speech last year, he challenged Congress to put aside its political differences and work together to strengthen our education system. Over a year later, Congress has failed to rise to the president's challenge. As a result, our nation's educational performance continues to linger around the middle of the pack among industrialized countries. As American corporations continue to send quality jobs overseas, a mediocre education system will not solve our economic crisis. Fixing our schools must be a national priority. But to get there, we must overcome the gridlock in Washington and reauthorize No Child Left Behind (NCLB).
THE TROUBLE WITH PAY FOR PERFORMANCE
Gerald Tirozzi, Marian Hermie, and Wayne Schmidt provide this commentary in Education Week: Virtually everyone agrees that educators should be held accountable for student achievement, and pay for performance is often suggested as a method for rewarding those teachers whose students demonstrate adequate yearly progress, or AYP. The question is how to adequately and fairly evaluate a teacher’s performance relative to how it affects student achievement, and then to determine how to compensate those teachers whose students demonstrate AYP or beyond. There is a dearth of research that supports paying teachers beyond their base salaries to improve student achievement, but there is a broad body of research that indicates that pay for performance might actually do damage as teachers feel a threat to their livelihoods because of this narrow method of measuring their efficacy. Pay for performance has been documented as compromising the good will and cooperation among teachers since it creates competition for a small amount of money, which can result in an “I’m out for myself only” attitude. Such a tone can hurt the necessary collaboration and communication found to nurture student achievement and success.
MATH EDUCATION IN AMERICA: EDUCATORS AND ENTREPRENEURS HAVE IDEAS TO MAKE IT FUN
In the American drive to boost science and math education, it's science that has all the kid-friendly sizzle: Robots and roller coasters, foaming chemical reactions, marshmallow air cannons. Math has... well, numbers.
"America has a cultural problem with math. It's the subject, more than any other, that we as a country love to hate," said Glen Whitney, a passionate mathematician who worked for years developing algorithms for hedge funds. "We don't see it as dynamic. It's rote and boring and done by dead Greek guys a thousand years ago." A brave group of educators and entrepreneurs think they can change that. With games and competitions, museums and traveling road shows - and a strategic sprinkling of celebrities - they aim to make math engaging, exciting and even fun. The article is in The Huffington Post.

ABOUT HIGHER ED
LAST RITES FOR GRADUATION RATE
A long-held wish of many community colleges is on the verge of becoming reality: the Education Department has announced its plans to change how student success is measured in higher education, taking into account students who transfer, part-time students and students who are not attending college for the first time. The department outlined its plans Wednesday to carry out the recommendations of the Committee on Measures of Student Success, a federal panel that called for changing how data on completion rates and other measures at community colleges is reported in the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System, or IPEDS. While the recommendations are still several steps away from becoming reality -- the department’s "action plan" talked about “taking steps” and “examining the feasibility” of broadening the measures of success -- they are a victory for community colleges and their advocates, who have complained for years that the federal data reporting system doesn’t reflect the reality on their campuses. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

 
ABOUT K-12
BACK TO THE BASICS, INDEED: A BRIEF OVERVIEW OF EDUCATION RESEARCH
Elaine Weiss writes in The Huffington Post: At a recent event in New York City, Pedro Noguera, a sociologist at New York University, bemoaned the political maneuvering and bickering over details that has come to dominate education policy discussions. In all the arguing over whether to open more charter schools or publicize teacher test scores, he correctly noted that we often seem to ignore what is best for students. What would clearly serve the country's children better is putting our limited education dollars into what the evidence says works. There is more than enough heated rhetoric about "evidence-based" initiatives. Turn down the burners, however, and the research appears quite a bit clearer.
WE DON’T JUDGE TEACHERS BY NUMBERS ALONE – THE SAME SHOULD GO FOR (SOME?) SCHOOLS
Anne Hyslop responds to yesterday’s post by Mike Petrilli on school accountability: I completely agree that numbers – specifically test scores alone – cannot paint a complete picture of school quality. There are numerous other pieces of information – whether they are quantitative measures like AP success, postsecondary enrollment, and college remediation rates, or qualitative observations made by professional inspectors – that could inform our perceptions of school performance. Given these practical concerns, I think it makes sense to focus on where school inspections can add the most value. And to me, that means focusing less on their use in accountability and more on how they can inform school improvement. The article is in the Quick and the Ed.

ABOUT HIGHER ED
COMMUNITY COLLEGES' LEARNING DISABILITY
Mark Schneider and Lu Michelle Yin provide this commentary in the Los Angeles Times:  Community colleges are central to the nation's higher education system, enrolling almost 30% of all postsecondary students. But their record of success is spotty. Nationally, only about a quarter of full-time community college students complete their studies within three years (the official measure of a school's graduation rate). This happens year after year after year, and it's not only the dropouts who are harmed. When students fail to complete their degrees, taxpayers also lose. The question is: What can be done to make this happen?
2-YEAR COLLEGE RETIREMENT WAVE?
California's community colleges may be just a few years away from "a retirement wave" for faculty members, a transition that could create much better jobs for the part timers on whom campuses depend, according to a survey being presented at the American Educational Research Association's annual meeting, which starts this week. The study, based on a survey of full-time and part-time faculty members throughout California's mammoth community college system (the largest in the United States), also points to the potential for campuses to more actively engage prospective faculty members in their careers. While the survey found great pride from many faculty members in their work and in the community college mission, it found that many developed those ideas "after the fact," with many instructors taking their first jobs without any intention of making a career of it, or fully understanding the nature of community college teaching. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

 
VOTERS VALUE EDUCATION
Calling education a “top-tier issue” in this year’s election, a new College Board report shows that swing state voters emphasize education as much as health care despite a comparative lack of attention from candidates. In a representative sample of about 200 registered voters surveyed in each of nine swing states, 67 percent of respondents called education an extremely important issue for this year’s election. Only jobs and the economy (82 percent) and government spending (69 percent) scored higher. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
ABOUT K-12
BRAIN-IMAGING PERSPECTIVE ON TEACHER EVALUATION
Findings from a recent social neuroscience study  reveal the profound role status cues play in shaping our cognitive performance and suggest that the sharp distinction between the social and cognitive brain is artificial. These findings have implications for how and why rankings matter in all human social endeavors and provide a new empirical perspective to inform the current debate about whether and how to rank teachers. The commentary is in Education Week.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
TEACHER PREP ACCOUNTABILITY IS COMING
Sara Mead writes in Education Week’s Policy Notebook blog: Even as states and school districts at the K-12 level are moving to adopt evaluations that hold teachers accountable for their impacts on student learning, these efforts have largely ignored the need to improve teacher preparation programs so that their graduates are actually prepared to improve student learning. And the poor quality of most existing teacher evaluation programs is one the few things that folks on both sides of the increasingly polarized ed reform debates can agree upon. If we want to move the teacher effectiveness debate beyond deselection, we've got to get serious about how to make teacher prep way more effective.
HIGHER EDUCATION VANISHING BEFORE OUR EYES
Even with top grades and extracurricular activities, students may find it difficult to gain acceptance to or graduate from a four-year university after recent cuts to higher education budgets. The month of March has been particularly bad for colleges and universities nationwide, as budget negotiations have left many institutions of higher education in the red. The article is in USA Today.
 
ABOUT K-12
ACCESS TO TEACHER EVALUATIONS DIVIDES ADVOCATES
As the movement to overhaul teacher evaluation marches onward, an emerging question is splitting the swath of advocates who support the new tools used to gauge teacher performance: Who should get access to the resulting information? As evidenced in recently published opinion pieces, the contours of the debate are rapidly being drawn. Some proponents of using student-achievement data as a component of teacher evaluations, including the philanthropist Bill Gates and Teach For America founder Wendy Kopp, nevertheless believe that such information should not be made widely public. Other figures, like New York City Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, champion the broad dissemination of such data. The article is in Education Week.
CUOMO BACKS RELEASE OF TEACHER EVALUATIONS
ALBANY —  Weighing in on the fight over releasing teachers’ evaluations to the public, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday he’s inclined to preserve open access for parents but willing to explore of shielding the records in some way. “I believe in the case of teachers, the parents’ right to know outweighs the teachers’ right to privacy,” the governor said. “After that, it’s less clear to me. And that’s why I think it warrants conversation.” The article is in the Wall Street Journal.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
WHAT’S MORE EXPENSIVE THAN GOING TO COLLEGE? NOT GOING TO COLLEGE
There are 1.2 billion people between 15 and 24 in the world, according to the International  Youth Foundation’s new Opportunity for Action paper. Although many of their prospects are rising, they are emerging from conditions of widespread poverty and lack of access to the most important means of economic mobility: education. In the Middle East and North Africa, youth unemployment has been stuck above 20 percent for the last two decades. And in the parts of the world where youth unemployment has been low, such as south and east Asia, young people are overwhelmingly employed in the agriculture sector, which leaves them vulnerable to poverty. The article is in The Atlantic.
ENROLLMENTS GROW, BUT MORE SLOWLY
As the recession took hold of the U.S. economy in late 2008, Americans did what they often do in bad economic times: went back for more schooling. That's why the last report from the federal government about college and university enrollments showed a sharp increase (of 7.1 percent) in the number of students in postsecondary institutions in fall 2009. The upturn -- and the accompanying tuition dollars -- helped soften the economic downturn's impact for many colleges. On Tuesday, the Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics reported initial data on the number of students who enrolled the following fall, in 2010. The data show enrollments growing yet again, but at a somewhat slower pace, with about 21.6 million students enrolled in fall 2010, up 2.8 percent from a shade under 21 million in 2009. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
A SURGE IN LEARNING THE LANGUAGE OF THE INTERNET
Parlez-vous Python? What about Rails or JavaScript? Foreign languages tend to wax and wane in popularity, but the language du jour is computer code. The market for night classes and online instruction in programming and Web construction, as well as for iPhone apps that teach, is booming. Those jumping on board say they are preparing for a future in which the Internet is the foundation for entertainment, education and nearly everything else. Knowing how the digital pieces fit together, they say, will be crucial to ensuring that they are not left in the dark ages.  The article is in The New York Times.



ABOUT HIGHER ED
COLLEGE COSTS ARE SOARING
Education is the great equalizer in this country.  It is the facilitator of the American Dream.  People can grow up poor, in an urban or rural setting, but can hope to pull themselves up out of poverty with education.  Unlike many other areas of the world, America mostly is a meritocracy facilitated by education.  As a society we have recognized this and require elementary and high school education to be provided “free” (paid by tax dollars) to all young people and most states require attendance to age eighteen.  Still, 15% of the U.S. population does not have a high school diploma.  College, on the other hand, is voluntary and requires payment by the individual.  Unfortunately, only 17% of the U.S. population has earned an undergraduate degree.. The article is in Forbes magazine.
WATCHING THE IVORY TOWER TOPPLE
It is education's time to change. At the high-school level, interactive study sites are increasingly ingenious: Look at Piazza, Blackboard and Quizlet, founded by a 17-year-old. TED-Ed just launched a channel on You Tube, with three- to 10-minute lessons for kids. YouTube's EDU Portal has been viewed 22 billion times. Khan Academy, a favorite of Bill Gates, has four million unique users a month and thousands of educational videos, from "Napoleon's Peninsular Campaigns" to "Python Lists." If you think that last one is about snakes, please download Khan's new iPad app immediately. The next big thing, though, is college-level MOOCs and MOOSes: Massive Open Online Courses and Seminars. Harvard already showcases coursework like professor Michael Sandel's "Justice" lectures online, gratis. Now Georgia Institute of Technology, MIT, Stanford and others are offering advanced online courses, some with accreditation. The article is in The Wall Street Journal.
FOR-PROFIT EDUCATION SCAMS
Attorneys general from more than 20 states have joined forces to investigate for-profit colleges that too often saddle students with crippling debt while furnishing them valueless degrees. The investigations have just begun. But it is already clear from testimony before a Senate committee that Congress must do more to rein in the schools and protect students. The commentary is in The New York Times.
STRONG MAJORITY BACKS BROWN’S TAX HIKE
California voters strongly support Gov. Jerry Brown's new proposal to increase the sales tax and raise levies on upper incomes to help raise money for schools and balance the state's budget, according to a new USC Dornsife/Los Angeles Times poll. Sixty-four percent of those surveyed said they supported the governor's measure, which he hopes to place on the November ballot. It would hike the state sales tax by a quarter-cent per dollar for the next four years and create a graduated surcharge on incomes of more than $250,000 that would last seven years. A third of respondents opposed the measure. The article is in the L.A. Times.
ABOUT K-12
MATH ANXIETY CHANGES BRAIN FUNCTION IN KIDS
Those of us who aren't that confident when it comes to math know well that feeling of anxiety when faced with a problem requiring complex calculations. That anxiety, it turns out, is more than just a case of jitters. A new study by a team of scientists at Stanford University's School of Medicine shows that the brain function of young elementary school kids who suffer from math anxiety differs from those who don't, according to a report on the university's website. The study led by Vinod Menon, a Stanford professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, was published online this week in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. The article is in Education Week.
CALIFORNIA URGED TO CONSIDER NON-SENIORITY BASED TEACHER LAYOFFS
California school districts issue more pink slips than necessary and the state should consider alternatives to seniority-based layoffs, according to a report from the state legislative analyst's office. In the report, released last week, the nonpartisan analyst said that because state and local budget information is available only after the initial deadline for districts to send out layoff notices, more pink slips are issued than may be needed. The article is in the L.A. Times.
MISPLACED OPTIMISM AND WEIGHTED FUNDING
The Hoover Institute’s Eric Hanushek writes in Education Week: Liberals and conservatives alike have made "weighted student funding" a core idea of their reform prescriptions. Both groups see such weighted funding as providing more dollars to the specific schools they tend to focus upon, and both see it as inspiring improved achievement through newfound political pressures. Unfortunately, both groups are very likely wrong.


ABOUT HIGHER ED
CAL STATE TRUSTEES HEAR GRIM FINANCIAL REPORT
The California State University Board of Trustees received a grim report Tuesday on the consequences of more state funding cuts, including slashing enrollment, losing thousands of faculty and staff positions, and eliminating some academic and athletic programs. All of those are possible if a tax measure on the November ballot fails and the system is faced with a $200-million cut that would occur in the middle of the 2012-13 academic year, officials said. The article is in the L.A. Times.
ABOUT K-12
TEACHER TURNOVER AFFECTS ALL STUDENTS’ ACHIEVEMENT, STUDY INDICATES
When teachers leave schools, overall morale appears to suffer enough that student achievement declines—both for those taught by the departed teachers and by students whose teachers stayed put, concludes a study recently presented at a conference held by the Center for Longitudinal Data in Education Research. The impact of teacher turnover is one of the teacher-quality topics that's been hard for researchers to get their arms around. The phenomenon of high rates of teacher turnover has certainly been proven to occur in high-poverty schools more than low-poverty ones. The eminently logical assumption has been that such turnover harms student achievement. The post is in Education Week’s Teacher Beat blog.
VENTURE CAPITALISTS ON FUTURE OF TECH IN EDUCATION
A venture capitalist panel at SXSW interactive conference has discussed the future of education technology. The panelists, Mitch Kapor, Phillip Bronner and Rob Hutter claimed to have a broad vision of investing that looked for technology to be more than just successful but that also created social value. The article is from EdNews.org.
PANEL ENDORSES MAINE TEACHER EVALUATION BILL
AUGUSTA, Maine—A bill requiring rigorous performance evaluations for Maine teachers and principals has been unanimously endorsed by a legislative committee. The Education and Cultural Affairs Committee on Wednesday voted 12-0 to send it to the full Legislature with an "ought to pass" recommendation. The AP article is in the Boston Globe.
MAYBE IT’S TIME TO ASK THE TEACHERS
Stanford professor Linda Darling-Hammond writes in the Huffington Post: American teachers deal with a lot: low pay, growing class sizes and escalating teacher-bashing from politicians and pundits. Federal testing and accountability mandates under No Child Left Behind and, more recently, Race to the Top, have added layers of bureaucracy while eliminating much of the creativity and authentic learning that makes teaching enjoyable. Tack on the recession's massive teacher layoffs and other school cuts, plus the challenges of trying to compensate for increasing child poverty, homelessness, and food insecurity, and you get a trifecta of disincentives to become, or remain, a teacher.



ABOUT K-12
ARNE DUNCAN: NEWSPAPERS SHOULDN’T PUBLISH TEACHER RATINGS
Publishing teachers' ratings in the newspaper in the way The New York Times and other outlets have done recently is not a good use of performance data, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said in an interview yesterday.  "Do you need to publish every single teacher's rating in the paper? I don't think you do," he said. "There's not much of an upside there, and there's a tremendous downside for teachers. We're at a time where morale is at a record low. ... We need to be sort of strengthening teachers, and elevating and supporting them. The post is from Education Week’s Teacher Beat blog.
CAREER MAPPING EYED TO PREPARE STUDENTS FOR COLLEGE
About half of all states mandate that schools help create individual or student learning plans, and most others have optional programs. Enabling students to make their own plans puts them in the driver’s seat and encourages a long-term look at their course selection so their choices match their career goals, experts say. Often, districts give students online accounts with passwords to track classes; create an electronic portfolio of grades, test scores, and work; research careers; and organize their college search. The practice is picking up momentum with the increased emphasis on college completion, which research shows is more likely when students take rigorous courses and have a career goal. The article is in Education Week.
BAY AREA GETS POOR GRADES ON ABILITY TO EDUCATE MINORITIES, LOW-INCOME STUDENTS
Bay Area school districts barely get passing grades for how well they teach minority and low-income students, according to a report released by an education advocacy group Thursday. Of the 147 unified school districts statewide that were ranked, Palo Alto Unified scored next to last, earning a grade-point average of 1.0 -- a D. The report did not award any A's. Palo Alto's low grade was one of many startling findings in the 2011 California District Report Cards put out by the Oakland-based Education Trust-West. The article is in the San Jose Mercury News.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
THE PUZZLE OF STUDENT RESPONSIBILITY FOR LEARNING
Stanford professor Larry Cuban writes: In higher education, professors give lectures and conduct seminars. While there is some talk of holding professors accountable for what their students learn, that rhetoric has yet to move beyond words. Undergraduate and graduate students are expected to learn what professors teach. Yet in K-12 public schools, for teachers, another helping profession, the reverse is true. For the past quarter-century, responsibility for student learning for been put completely on the shoulders of teachers (much less so in parochial and independent private schools, however). And that is the puzzle. How come K-12 public school teachers are expected to take full responsibility for student learning and in the other helping professions that responsibility is either shared with clients and patients or absent? (Thanks to Alexander Russo’s This Week in Education blog for pointing me to this post.) This post is from Cuban’s School Reform blog.
HIGHER EDUCATION’S KODAK MOMENT
Lumina President Jamie Merisotis writes in The Washington Times: The recent bankruptcy declaration by Kodak, one of the nation’s most trusted brands for consumers, which once held a market share in excess of 90 percent, is stunning. Kodak mistook America’s century-long love affair with its products as a sign of market permanency, missing the fact that camera phones, flip cameras and online sharing would erode its brand and render it irrelevant. American higher education should take heed because it is facing a similar challenge, with implications far more important than the loss of a major corporation.

ABOUT HIGHER ED
COMMUNITY COLLEGE ASSOCIATION REBUKES REPORT THAT CRITICIZES THE SECTOR’S LOW GRADUATION RATES
The American Association of Community Colleges posted a blistering statement on its Web site Wednesday in response to a report released by the American Enterprise Institute earlier this week that criticized the low graduation rates of community-college students. The report went on to say that those low rates affect the lifetime earnings of students and the coffers of state governments. The association called the report a piece of “shoddy work” and its analysis a “pseudo-academic attack on community colleges.” In particular, it questioned the methodology used to arrive at the report’s graduation rates. The association also said it “begs to differ” with the report’s suggestion that community colleges emulate for-profit colleges. This information is from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
CHANCELLOR ASKS COMMUNITY COLLEGES TO HOLD OFF ON TWO-TIER TUITION PLAN
LOS ANGELES — The chancellor of the California community college system has requested that Santa Monica College hold off on its plan to begin offering popular courses for a higher price  this summer, saying that the legality of the program is still in question.  The request, made on Wednesday, came a day after a campus police officer sprayed more than two dozen people with pepper spray as students tried to enter a trustees meeting; several suffered minor injuries. Many students and advocates have criticized the tuition plan, saying it violates the long tradition of community colleges as havens for those who cannot afford four-year colleges. The article is in The New York Times.
NO AGREEMENT ON NEW RULES
WASHINGTON -- As a deadline approached for the federal panel charged with recommending new rules for teacher education programs, negotiators had a message for the Education Department: It’s not over 'til (we say) it’s over. The panel is considering controversial proposals that could change how teacher education programs are evaluated, including taking graduates’ job placement rates and classroom performance into account when deciding whether programs are eligible for students to receive federal financial aid. But as discussions unfolded, the panel was far from agreement on many key issues, despite a deadline of noon Thursday -- and it eventually persuaded federal negotiators to agree to another meeting next week. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
HAS HIGHER EDUCATION STIFFED ITS MOST IMPORTANT CLIENT?
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. If they happen to have picked up a little classroom experience through a temporary position, it is rarely considered by hiring committees. Unlike other educators, college professors receive no formal instruction on how to teach. Newly minted PhDs are expected to teach Introduction to Political Science or Macroeconomics to 35-200 students without training in classroom management, pedagogy, and assessment. They have had no mentorships or student teacher training. Would you go to a dentist who never learned how to drill teeth? In addition, their graduate education forced them specialize to such an extent that many find it difficult to convey the wide breadth of knowledge that is required in lower level, undergraduate classes, the very meat of a college education. The article is in The Atlantic.
ABOUT K-12
A COLLECTION OF ESSAYS ON EDUCATION REFORM
To complement Education Sector’s “Getting to 2014” event, and more specifically to generate thoughtful ideas for discussion, they asked several experts to share their thoughts on the challenges of implementing so many reforms, including new assessments, accountability and data systems, teacher evaluations, and Common Core standards, all at once.The contributors, including Michael Cohen, Robert Balfanz of Johns Hopkins University, Public Impact’s Bryan and Emily Hassel, Allan Odden, and Education Sector’s Bill Tucker, discuss five of these dilemmas:
•    How do we successfully implement new accountability systems and interventions during the transition to new standards and assessments?
•    How do we maintain the rigor of college- and career-ready standards without pushing more students out of the system?
•    How do we adopt fair teacher evaluation systems based on student assessments when those assessments are set to change?
•    How do we move toward more standardization while also promoting innovation?
•    How can we execute multiple, complex reforms in a time of limited resources?
GETTING (STUDENT-) CENTERED
A new report from the Students at the Center project by Jobs for the Future examines what districts will need to implement student-centered learning to improve student achievement. To understand the current state of the work, the authors reviewed research on high-performing districts and examined the scope of commonly defined student-centered practices in districts and charter schools. The authors observed that although districts are essential actors in these reforms, they are not deeply involved in implementing student-centered practices. Most examples of district engagement are programmatic, tailored to serve particular student groups rather than all of a system's students. Before implementing student-centered approaches, districts will need to assess policy and administrative requirements and state accountability measures that can impede or support these approaches. A strong, district-wide student-centered agenda would likely include implementing special programs and/or schools, as well as working simultaneously to change practice in all schools and for all students. Expanding student-centered approaches will require district leadership, as it is not easy to change teacher practice and classroom culture. Knowledge about how other districts support reforms can inform implementation, and districts must be strategic and deliberative in reform efforts, considering a full range of student-centered options and evidence. This comes from the PEN NewsBlast.

 
ABOUT HIGHER ED
EXPLOSION IN STUDENT DEBT REACHING CRISIS PROPORTIONS
Surging above $1 trillion, U.S. student loan debt has surpassed credit card and auto-loan debt. This debt explosion jeopardizes the fragile recovery, increases the burden on taxpayers and possibly sets the stage for a new economic crisis. With a still-wobbly jobs market, these loans are increasingly hard to pay off. Unable to find work, many students have returned to school, further driving up their indebtedness. Average student loan debt recently topped $25,000, up 25 percent in 10 years. And the mushrooming debt has direct implications for taxpayers, since 8 in 10 of these loans are government-issued or guaranteed. The article, which takes the opposite view of a piece yesterday from CNN, is in The Washington Post.
PRO-AFFIRMATIVE ACTION SUIT REJECTED
WASHINGTON -- A federal appeals court on Monday rejected a suit that sought to lift California's ban on the consideration of race or ethnicity in the admissions decisions of public colleges and universities. Of late, supporters and critics of affirmative action have been focused on a case before the U.S. Supreme Court dealing with the consideration of race and ethnicity by the University of Texas at Austin. The Texas case will decide  whether a public university that has achieved some level of diversity through race-neutral means can consider race and ethnicity to achieve a greater level of diversity. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
ABOUT K-12
STATES MOVE TO CLOSE OFF TEACHER EVALUATIONS
Tennessee is poised to pass a law exempting teachers’ evaluations from broad disclosure under the state's open-records laws. And next up could be the state of New York, where a similar proposal is under discussion, according to the Wall Street Journal. The post is from the Politics K-12 blog in Education Week.
UNFLATTENING THE TEACHING PROFESSION
One of the chief challenges to the teaching profession's status as a profession is its flatness. A first-year teacher has the same duties and working conditions as a 30-year veteran, and while the latter may be higher on the pay scale, not much else changes as a teacher (or a principal, for that matter) gains experience and expertise. The post is from Teacher Beat blog in Education Week.
STATE SEEKS STILL MORE TESTS FOR STUDENTS
Like a luxury hotel or a swanky restaurant, your neighborhood school could soon get an elite five-star rating. Then again, it could also get four, three or two stars — or even hit bottom as a one-star school with poor test scores and other big problems. Joining a wave of states embarking on controversial reforms, Illinois is moving to overhaul how students are tested and schools judged, with the proposed "star" rating system just one element of a dramatic plan aimed at shaking up a decade of status quo. The article is in the Chicago Tribune.
STATES GIRD TO REPORT REVISED GRADUATION RATES
States are grappling with a federal requirement that is forcing them to use a new, more uniform method of calculating high school graduation rates—a method that, in some states, is yielding rates that are 20 percentage points lower than those states have reported in the past. Under a 2008 update federal education rules, the states were required to replace their patchwork of graduation-rate formulas with a four-year "cohort" rate, beginning in the 2010-11 school year, and to use that number this school year to determine whether schools are making adequate progress under the No Child Left Behind Act. The article is in Education Week.
 
ABOUT K-12
GOVERNORS PUSH HARD ON K-12 AGENDAS
As legislators push to wrap up business for their current sessions, governors in Louisiana, Maryland, South Dakota, and other states have sunk significant political capital into signature legislative and policy initiatives on a range of education issues, including teacher tenure and evaluation, education funding, and charter schools. The article is in Education Week.
COLORADO TEST OF NEW TEACHER EVALUATION SYSTEM RAISES DOUBTS
Though Colorado is more than a year away from implementing its new teacher-evaluation system, doubts have surfaced about the state's ability to launch such a sweeping initiative on time and with adequate resources for professional development. Educators from some of the 27 districts piloting all or part of the new system say that effort has turned out to be a complex and time-consuming task heaped upon demands of other education reforms. The article is in the Denver Post.
STATE CHIEFS TO DUNCAN: DON’T UNDERMINE US WITH WAIVERS
It's unclear just how serious Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his top aides are when they talk about pursuing waivers for districts in states that choose not to take advantage of a broader waiver under the No Child Left Behind Act. But state chiefs have a message for Duncan nonetheless: Back off the idea of district-level waivers. (Okay, so they put it a little more nicely than that.) The post is from Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
U.S. WORKFORCE NEEDS MORE COLLEGE GRADS, LUMINA STUDY SHOWS
The number of adult Americans who have earned college degrees has been increasing, but not fast enough to keep up with workforce demands, according to a report released Monday. At the current rate, employers in 2025 will need about 23 million more degree-holders than the nation's colleges and universities will have produced."We are nowhere near at the pace that we need to be says," Jamie Merisotis, president of the non-profit Lumina Foundation, which released the report. "Look at it as an alarm, an urgent call to action." The AP story is from USA Today.
CUTTING THE DEGREE DOWN TO THREE
Would you sacrifice part of the proverbial best four years of your life to cut costs? Paying eight semesters' worth of tuition, room and board, textbooks and other fees can add up to tens of thousands of dollars, and that's if you finish college in four years. For about 60 percent of students, the college experience takes at least another semester before graduation. But some schools offer or are planning to debut new, fast-track bachelor’s degree programs that hit families' wallets for only three years. The article is in the Chicago Tribune.
BLACKBOARD’S OPEN SOURCE PIVOT
In a turn that shocked many in the higher ed tech world, the e-learning giant Blackboard on Monday announced that it has acquired two companies that provide support to Moodle, the leading open-source alternative to Blackboard’s proprietary online learning platform. As part of a raft of announcements, the company said it has bought Moodlerooms, a major open-source support provider in North America, and NetSpot, which serves a similar role for Moodle users in Australia. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.ABOUT HIGHER ED
HOW TO END REMEDIATION
A bill in Connecticut, which the General Assembly’s higher education committee passed last month, would require the state’s public institutions to eliminate non-credit stand-alone remedial classes by the fall of 2014. Under the policy, students who need remedial (or developmental) coursework would be placed into entry-level, credit-bearing courses and receive “embedded remedial support.” They would also be required to take an “intensive college readiness program” before the semester’s start. Currently an estimated 70 percent of students at the state’s 12 community colleges take at least one remedial class during their first year of enrollment. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
LOW GRADUATION RATES AT 2-YEAR COLLEGES AFFECT STUDENTS AND STATE GOVERNMENTS
Low graduation rates at community colleges have a negative effect on the lifetime earnings of students, and on the coffers of state governments, says a report released on Tuesday by the American Enterprise Institute. Halving the dropout rate would generate $30-billion more in lifetime incomes for 160,000 new graduates and would provide an additional $5.3-billion in taxpayer revenues to state governments, according to the report. The information is from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
STUDENT DEBT RISES AS POLITICAL ISSUE
The White House and Democratic lawmakers are scrambling to find funds to stop an expected doubling of student loan interest rates this summer, arguing that they’re heading off another potential blow to the economy. But the new House GOP budget doesn’t include the $6 billion needed. The article is in Politico.
ABOUT K-12
WHEN TEACHERS ARE REPLACEABLE WIDGETS, EDUCATION SUFFERS
Robert Boruch and Andrew C. Porter from the University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Education, and Joseph Merlino, president of the 21st Century Partnership for STEM Education, write in Education Week: We have become convinced that in our nation's struggling urban schools, teachers and would-be education reformers are battling through a hurricane that shows no signs of abating. We call this hurricane "churn."Churn is a remarkable instability among school personnel that makes it nearly impossible to build a professional community or develop long-term relationships with students. It happens when teachers are treated like interchangeable parts who can be moved around cavalierly to plug a hole in a school schedule. It happens when administrators repeatedly order teachers to switch to a different grade, teach a different subject, or move to a different school.
GOVERNOR SIGNS BILL TO SET RULES ON READING TESTS, TEACHER EVALUATIONS
Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker signed an education reform bill that creates the Read to Lead Development Council in the governor's office and includes provisions such as a new early literacy screening test for use in kindergarten and early grades. The bill also requires teacher performance evaluations be based half on student test scores. The article is in the Wausau Daily Herald.ABOUT K-12
FLUNKING THE TEST
The Washington Post’s Paul Farhi writes in the American Journalism Review: By many important measures – high school completion rates, college graduation, overall performance on standardized tests – America's educational attainment has never been higher. Moreover, when it comes to education, sweeping generalizations ("rigid and sclerotic") are more dangerous than usual. How could they not be? With nearly 100,000 public schools, 55 million elementary and secondary students and 2.5 million public school teachers currently at work in large, small, urban, suburban and rural districts, education may be the single most complex endeavor in America. The prevailing narrative – and let's be wary of our own sweeping generalizations here – is that the nation's educational system is in crisis, that schools are "failing," that teachers aren't up to the job and that America's economic competitiveness is threatened as a result. Have the nation's schools gotten noticeably lousier? Or has the coverage of them just made it seem that way?
MAYORS CHALLENGE TEACHERS UNIONS
As a young labor organizer in Los Angeles, Antonio Villaraigosa worked for the city’s teachers, honing his political skills in the fight for a good contract. The union loved him back, supporting the Democrat’s election to the State Assembly, City Council and, finally, the mayor’s office he occupies today. But now, Villaraigosa, a rising star in the national Democratic Party, has a different view. He calls the teachers union “the one, unwavering roadblock” to improving public education in Los Angeles. 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. The article is in The Washington Post.
TN SENATE OKS BILL TO CLOSE TEACHER EVALUATION DATA
The Tennessee Senate approved legislation to close teacher evaluation records to parents and other members of the public. The sponsor said access to the data should be limited to school officials. Under recent changes to state law, half of a teacher's assessment must derive from testing data, the rest from classroom observations. The article is in the Tennessean.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
COMPLETION AT WHAT PRICE?
Technology and cost-cutting won’t fix the capacity crisis at community colleges, which is freezing out hundreds of thousands of students, warned the first report from a new faculty think tank. The research center is affiliated with the Campaign for the Future of Higher Education, a national group of faculty leaders, which was formed last year with the support of unions, faculty senates and the Association of American Colleges and Universities. The center will attempt to inject a stronger voice from the professorate into the national debate over higher education, particularly around the campaign’s seven founding principles.. With its debut report, released today, the center takes on the “completion agenda” and its heavy emphasis on workforce development, a fixation that the report said threatens academic quality and student access, as well as social mobility.  The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
‘BADGES’ FILL CREDENTIAL GAPS WHERE HIGHER EDUCATION FAILS
The U.S. higher education system is looking suddenly and seriously ill in this economic revolution we're living through. The flash-mob restructuring of our entire economy and way of life (courtesy of the floods of information and connectivity flowing from the Internet and mobile technologies) is shining a harsh light on the punishing expense and brittle bureaucracy of our college and university education system. And now disruptive innovators are taking dead aim at the heart of the system. Using badges. Parents (a.k.a. college- funding sources): Take note. The article is in The Denver Post.
THERE IS NO STUDENT LOAN CRISIS
NEW YORK (CNNMoney) -- Total student loan debt has topped $1 trillion ... but there's no need to panic. Most borrowers have a reasonable amount of debt, and the total balance is not likely to cause major damage to the economy like the mortgage crisis did, experts say. "I don't think it's a bubble," said Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of Finaid.org, a financial aid website. "Most students who graduate college are able to repay their loans."
TO ENROLL MORE MINORITY STUDENTS, COLLEGES WORK AROUND THE COURTS
With its decision to take up racial preferences in admissions at public colleges, the Supreme Court has touched off a national guessing game about how far it might move against affirmative action and how profoundly colleges might change as a result.  But no matter how the court acts, recent history shows that when courts or new laws restrict affirmative action, colleges try to find other ways to increase minority admissions. The article is in The New York Times.

ABOUT HIGHER ED
COMMUNITY COLLEGES AS FICTION FODDER
Forget campus appearances by President Obama and other politicians. A better sign that community colleges have arrived on the national scene may be their starring role in popular culture. A television show, a recent Hollywood movie and two novels are set at community colleges. Even better, they all include a healthy dollop of satire. So instead of just mocking the sector as an academic backwater of last resort – long a tactic of comedians – these satirical looks laugh along with community colleges, saying in essence: “we kid, because we love.” The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
EDUCATION COLLEGES CRY FOUL ON RATINGS
A nonprofit advocacy group is pushing colleges of education to participate in an effort to rate their teacher-preparation programs, but many of the schools are balking, arguing the project is flawed. The nation's 1,400 colleges of education have been criticized by the Obama administration and others for lax admission standards, unfocused curriculum and failure to provide enough real-life classroom training. States must evaluate teacher-prep programs, but standards are so weak that only 31 of 1,400 programs were rated subpar in 2010, the latest data available, according to the U.S. Department of Education. The article is in the Wall Street Journal.
FEEDBACK FROM STUDENTS BECOMES CAMPUS STAPLE
BOSTON — Every other Monday, right before class ends, Muhammad Zaman, A Boston University biomedical engineering professor, hands out a one-page form asking students to anonymously rate him and the course on a scale of one to five. Muhammad Zaman, who teaches biomedical engineering at Boston University, graphs the results of his evaluations and e-mails to explain how he will make changes. It asks more, too: “How can the professor improve your learning of the material?” “Has he improved his teaching since the last evaluation? In particular, has he incorporated your suggestions?” “How can the material be altered to improve your understanding of the material?” “Anything else you would like to convey to the professor? The article is in The New York Times.
ABOUT K-12
MATH MATTERS, EVEN FOR LITTLE KIDS
Everyone knows that children who are not reading at grade level by 3rd grade are fated to struggle academically throughout school. Concerns about early literacy skills are justified because reading skills at kindergarten entry predict later academic achievement. But guess what predicts later academic success better than early reading? Early math skills. In “School Readiness and Later Achievement,” a widely cited 2007 study of large longitudinal data sets, University of California, Irvine, education professor Greg Duncan and his colleagues found that in a comparison of math, literacy, and social-emotional skills at kindergarten entry, "early math concepts, such as knowledge of numbers and ordinality, were the most powerful predictors of later learning." The commentary, by former Stanford Education School Dean Deborah Stipek, UC Berkeley professsor Alan Schoenfeld, and Deanna Gomby, the vice president for education at the Heising-Simons Foundation in Palo Alto, is in Education Week.
BETTER LATE THAN GED
A new brief from the Center on Education Policy examines whether late graduation is worth the extra effort for students and their schools, finding the short answer to be yes. On-time graduation is preferable, but a recent study from the CEP using data from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 finds that late graduation pays off in academic outcomes and every aspect of life -- work, civic, and health. Late graduates do markedly better than GED recipients and dropouts, and when the data are controlled to compare students of equivalent socioeconomic status and achievement level, late graduates come close to on-time graduates in achievement. Late graduates are more likely to be minority or language minority students, live in a poorer household, and have two or more risk factors associated with dropping out. They end middle school and start high school with skills comparable to those who eventually drop out or receive a GED, and in the eighth grade are no more prepared for high school math or English. But in high school, late graduates start making better grades, though their achievement on standardized tests stays mainly the same as eventual dropouts and GED recipients, suggesting late graduates have more persistence. The brief therefore recommends that schools be encouraged through accountability systems to keep all students in school until they graduate, regardless of how long it takes. Accountability systems should also give schools credit for all students who graduate late, not just special education students and English language learners. This article is from the PEN NewsBlast.
ABOUT K-12
ESTHER WOJCICKI ON “WHY I TEACH”
An inspiring blog post from Palo Alto journalism teacher (and Carnegie friend) Esther Wojcicki for John Merrow’s Learning Matters blog series, “Why I Teach.” Esther writes: Why do I teach? I guess the best answer is — because I cannot resist. I love empowering kids. I try to create a classroom atmosphere in which students are not afraid of making mistakes. In fact, they are encouraged to take intellectual risks and occasionally fail, because that is the way they learn best. I promote collaborative learning, or working on projects in groups. Who wouldn’t have more fun working with their friends? They do. They love working with their peers, and I facilitate that interaction setting up projects that are both meaningful and educational.
DOWNGRADED BY EVALUATION REFORMS
Florida teacher and author Elizabeth Randall writes in Education Week Teacher: To evaluate teachers under the new (evaluation) requirements, all of the schools in our district found the money to purchase iPads equipped with iObservation software for administrators to use for documenting their "weekly" observations of teachers. (In my case, that amounted to a little more than an hour all year.) In addition, all of the schools are training veteran teachers how to teach from a book by education researcher Robert J. Marzano titled The Art and Science of Teaching. The new evaluation system, based on this book and implemented by the new software on the new iPads, consists of screens and screens of teaching strategies a teacher has to demonstrate during an evaluation (including the use of technology, which my school doesn't even have the financial resources to provide—for students, that is). The book is subtitled "A Comprehensive Framework for Effective Instruction" when, in my view, it reduces teaching to a series of artificial gestures.
DUNCAN DEFENDS WAIVERS, COMPETITIVE GRANTS
The clash between the Obama administration, which loves its signature Race to the Top and other grant programs, and folks in Congress who want to see a bigger investment in funding for special education and disadvantaged students, is clearly not going away anytime soon. The post is from Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog.
START UPS TRY TO CRACK EDUCATION MARKET
Silicon Valley is going back to school. Education, long a favorite cause among Bay Area philanthropists, is also starting to attract technologists who want to make money in it. That's generating a boom in start-ups trying to make education more efficient. In recent months, Bay Area education-tech companies such as Piazza Technologies Inc., a question-and-answer service for students and teachers, and Desmos Inc., which makes a Web-based graphing calculator, have received new funding. Overall, venture capitalists invested $429.1 million in 82 education-technology deals last year, up from $334.3 million and 58 deals the year before, according to Thomson Reuters. The article is in the Wall Street Journal.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
COMMUNITY COLLEGE TO CHARGE MORE FOR TOP COURSES
SANTA MONICA, Calif. — For years now, administrators at the community college here have been inundated with woeful tales from students unable to register for the courses they need. Classes they want for essential job training or to fulfill requirements to transfer to four-year universities fill up within hours. Hundreds of students resort to crying and begging to enroll in a class, lining up at the doors of instructors and academic counselors. Now, though, Santa Monica College is about to try something novel. This summer it will offer some courses for a higher price, so that students who are eager to get into a particular class can do so if they pay more. The article is in The New York Times.
WHY COLLEGE STUDENTS STOP SHORT OF A DEGREE
The "Pathways to Prosperity" study by the Harvard Graduate School of Education in 2011 shows that just 56 percent of college students complete four-year degrees within six years. Only 29 percent of those who start two-year degrees finish them within three years. The Harvard study's assertions are supported by data collected by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development for its report "Education at a Glance 2010." Among 18 countries tracked by the OECD, the United States finished last (46 percent) for the percentage of students who completed college once they started it. That puts the United States behind Japan (89 percent), and former Soviet-bloc states such as Slovakia (63 percent) and Poland (61 percent). The article is from Reuters.

posted Mar 29, 2012 10:27 am

Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate Featured [In the News]

ENDING THE FIRST ED.D PROGRAM
Harvard University this week announced its reform: eliminating the Ed.D. and replacing it with a Ph.D. program. The university's decision will close the first American Ed.D., a program Harvard has offered for 90 years. The Harvard Ed.D. has enjoyed more respect than most Ed.D. programs, so the decision to end the program is sure to rekindle an ongoing academic debate about the need for and relevance of the Ed.D degree.
The Ed.D. typically has traditionally been designed like a research degree, said Jill Perry, co-director of the Carnegie Project on the Education Doctorate, “but was delivered to teachers seeking to advance into administration positions as practitioners. This is where the confusion began,” she said. Many studies indicate that differences between Ed.D. and Ph.D. programs centered around differences in the number of credits and dissertation topics. “As a result, the Ed.D. was viewed as less rigorous than a Ph.D., and was labeled a ‘Ph.D. Lite.’ ”
Perry said that Harvard’s move was a validation of the need to differentiate between the two kinds of doctoral degrees and re-emphasize the role and purpose of each. She said the Carnegie project was doing just that, and had worked with more than 50 schools of education to create frameworks for Ed.D. programs, or professional practice doctorates. The goal, she said, was to equate such a degree with other professional degree programs rather than with a Ph.D. “It is an effort to restructure and rethink what has been the status quo as a means to end the debate,” she said. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

Stuart Elliott's

In Advertising

UCLA's new advertising campaign features Jackie Robinson, who attended the school from 1939 to 1941.

Campaign Spotlight

Ads Say the 'A' in U.C.L.A. Is for 'Achievement'

By STUART ELLIOTT

A campaign for the university spotlights people, many of them celebrities, who are graduates, received advanced degrees, or attended the school but did not graduate.

Video: The Optimists | UCLA (youtube.com)