2012年5月31日 星期四

台灣的學術地下經濟: 解放高等教育


我的看法是  根本之道要解放高等教育  為什麼有一些無事不管的機構 如教育部和國科會
為什麼包辦這樣多的公立學校



http://host.cc.ntu.edu.tw/sec/schinfo/schinfo_asp/ShowContent.asp?num=1094&sn=10938

中央研究院 臺灣大學 清華大學 聯合聲明


媒體報導,學界用假發票報領研究經費的涉案教授,人數可能高達五百人,其
中知名大學甚至超過一百人。對於這樣的發展,我們感到非常的痛心,也感到
相當焦慮。

我們相信,這數百位教授中,有少數的確把研究經費不實報銷後中飽私囊,或
用於與研究無關之事項。這樣的行為確實違法,我們也認為應依法追究。但是
我們也相信,絕大多數教授的報帳事情,均是交給助理處理。有這麼多助理便
宜行事,以品項不合之發票從事報帳,背後恐怕也有制度上可檢討之處。如果
我們不檢討制度,只是就「有無違反現行法律」予以追究結案,則對於涉案教
授的士氣是嚴重的打擊,也沒有觸及可能的興革。這是讓我們焦慮之所在。在
理念上,當一個國家地下經濟太過普遍,往往是因為地上經濟之管制法規並不
合理。因此我們要藉此事件,建議政府檢討科研會計與出納制度之合理性。

學術與公務在本質上有極大的不同。學術研究本身就在探討未知,但公共事務
多是對已知事務的管理。學術研究方向有其不確定性,而公務體系卻多為確定
政策的貫徹與執行。正因學術研究與公務體系邏輯如此不同,所有先進國家都
希望對學研經費的採買、流用與報銷,給予種種彈性與便利。由公務體系的角
度來看,我國的採購法相當完整,諸多特殊情況都能以特殊方法予以處理。但
科研採購畢竟與公務採購不同,經過多年努力溝通,我們國家終於了解到:
將科研採購併入公務採購處理極為困難
。就因為如此,立法院容許在科技基本
法中,跳脫「將科研視為公務特例」的框架,而能從法律上替科研的常態採購
另立一軌。

同樣的,在會計與出納方面,若要套用公務體系的制度,科研支出與報銷也會
有種種困難。舉例而言:某教授若在環保署、大學與國科會各請了一個子計
畫,同屬某大主題研究。若在期末發現,需集合三個計畫的業務費採買一項儀
器設備,依現有會計制度,要經歷極為繁瑣的公文與會計流程。這就凸顯出研
究常態被視為公務例外所遭遇的扞格。

我們認為,科研報銷制度需要檢討的,並不是國科會或教育部,而是整個科研
會計與出納的彈性。我們呼籲政府成立專案小組,由主計處、教育部與國科會
共同研商,比照科研採購與公務採購分流之思考,研議科研與公務體系經費報
銷的差異管理。若能藉此次事件痛定思痛,完成正面的改善,不但可減少對學
界士氣之衝擊,也能對台灣科研發展做出正面貢獻。

中央研究院 翁啟惠
臺灣大學  李嗣涔
清華大學  陳力俊

2012年5月28日 星期一

Leave the ivory tower for a life of enterprise





上週,倫敦最成功的一位餐廳老闆向我講述了他最初是如何進入餐飲業的。與很多故事一樣,這是一個機緣巧合的故事。他是師範畢業,但他不喜歡這種工作,於是當起了酒吧招待,從那裡他學會瞭如何招待客人,接著管理一家餐廳。如今,他擁有6家餐廳,生意很​​是興隆。
所有企業傳記最吸引人的章節是我所說的“成長階段”(formative phase),也就是一名企業家決定進入哪個行業以及最初獲得機會之時。很多時候完全屬於機緣巧合,沒有任何遠大的計劃,沒有任何職業規劃。更多的是一次偶然的失足,然後開始看到一線機會,而那些注定成為企業家的人抓住了這個機會。
很多職業的正規教育由一系列有序的步驟構成,按部就班。我承認,對於很多行業而言,這都是完全必要的。但對於創業而言,沒有教學大綱,也沒有學位。這是自學成才的旅程。
學者不太理解企業家的原因是,企業家的生活與多數教授們的不同。知識分子和企業創始人之間幾乎完全沒有關聯。
這種疏離是一種雙重悲劇。首先,這意味著,我們不能充分​​了解財富創造者的心理和個性,這讓人們較難制定出培育企業家的政策。
其次,我們很多最優秀的人才有意避開初創企業,他們認為,他們更適合大學校園的寧靜生活,而非市場的忙碌。我確定,這種看法是錯誤的。在矽谷的發展歷程中,來自斯坦福大學(Stanford University)和麻省理工(MIT)等院校的優秀人才作出了大量重要貢獻。
另外,在某些例子裡,上述規律並不適用。在我擔任倫敦藝術大學(University of the Arts London)董事時,我得知該校有數百名教職員工都是個人創業,因此他們對那些希望擁有自己的時裝公司或數碼設計工作室(比方說)的畢業生更有好感。創業才能即使在學術環境中也能培養出來,這二者不應是互相排斥的。
但我覺得,我們的高等教育機構往往不能發現創業人才。就算它們注意到了這類人才,也幾乎不會給他們提供任何幫助。
或許,大學只是不適合指導這種特立獨行的人才。我記得,我的醫學導師曾對我追求建立各種不同的企業感到困惑,不過我想他現在應該明白了。
我堅信,有許多具有創業才能的人被主流工作“困住”了手腳,如果他們受到推動、鼓勵並得到指點,他們也會去創業。他們可能是律師、建築師、公務員或醫生。這些職業都很重要,但在所有領域,發明創造總是多多益善,而在大型機構,實施這些開創性舉措極其困難。創新者最好是置身於這種等級制度之外,並在合適時與這些制度合作。
人們可能辯稱,培養教師、醫生、牙醫和護士與資本主義無關,因為幾乎所有人都在公共部門工作,至少在英國如此。但未來幾年,教育和醫療領域將進行改革。傳統的教室和醫院的創造性不夠,私營部門的技術和投入在這方面會起到作用。我們需要更多醫學和教育領域的企業家。
在我們的學生時代和20多歲時,我們的方向就確定了,成見也形成了。趁他們年輕時引導這些人才,儘早釋放出他們的創業精神,他們可能會有更大的作為。所有的大學都應勸說身為企業家的校友們為大學生提供指導。大學應在捐贈者中尋找天使投資者來支持學生的創意。大學應鼓勵導師創建衍生企業。為什麼不建立“孵化室”培育初創企業呢?
企業家永遠會自己開拓道路。發現偶然機遇的能力並不是在一個規定的框架下就能輕易教會的。但營造一個讓剛剛萌生的想法和計劃得以良好發展的環境能夠有所幫助。教育學家應注意到這些可能性。
注:本文作者管理著一家名為Risk Capital Partners的私人股本公司,同時還擔任英國皇家藝術學會(Royal Society of Arts)的主席。
譯者/梁艷裳


Leave the ivory tower for a life of enterprise


 
Last week one of London’s most successful restaurateurs described to me how he started in the catering trade. Like so many, it is a tale of chance. He trained to become a teacher, but hated it, and so fell into bartending – and from there graduated to waiting tables, and then managing a restaurant. Now he has half a dozen, and his business is booming.
The most fascinating chapter of every business biography is what I call the “formative phase”: the moment when an entrepreneur decides which industry to enter and gets the early breaks. So often it is pure serendipity – there is no grand plan, no career map. It is more of a haphazard stumble, and then a dawning sense of opportunity that is seized upon by those destined to become entrepreneurs.
A formal education for so many professions means an ordered sequence of steps. I accept that this is entirely necessary for many walks of life. But for entrepreneurship there is no syllabus, no degree. It is a journey in self-education.
The reason academics understand entrepreneurs so poorly is that they lead lives so removed from those of most professors. There is an almost complete disconnect between the intellectual class and business founders.
This alienation is a double tragedy. First, it means we don’t know enough about the psychology and character of wealth creators, which makes it harder to frame policy so as to foster more of them.
Second, many of our brightest minds shun the world of start-ups, believing that they are more suited to the serenity of the university campus than the hustle of the market place. I am sure this perception is false – the history of Silicon Valley is crowded with the vital contributions of highly qualified staffers migrating from institutions such as Stanford University and MIT.
Moreover, this rule doesn’t apply in certain cases. When I was governor of the University of the Arts London, I learnt that hundreds of their faculty staff were self-employed, and so were more empathetic to graduates who wanted to own fashion houses, say, or digital design studios. Entrepreneurial instincts can be cultivated even in scholarly surroundings – the two should not be mutually exclusive.
But my sense is that too many of our higher educational establishments often fail to spot entrepreneurial talent. And if they do notice them, they have almost nothing to offer.
Perhaps colleges are simply unsuited to guide such independent, unconventional minds. I recall that my medical tutor was baffled by my pursuit of various early enterprises, although I think he sees the point nowadays.
I firmly believe there are more entrepreneurs out there, stuck in mainstream jobs, who, if pushed, encouraged and advised, could build new businesses. They might be lawyers, architects, civil servants or doctors. These professions all matter greatly, but every field of endeavour could always benefit from more invention – and carrying out such pioneering stuff is incredibly hard within large organisations. Better that innovators work outside the hierarchies and partner with them when it makes sense.
It might be argued that training teachers, doctors, dentists and nurses is nothing to do with capitalism, since almost all toil within the public sector, at least in Britain. But education and healthcare will be transformed in the coming years. Traditional classrooms and hospitals are not productive enough, and private sector technology and input can help this process. We need more entrepreneurs in medicine and learning.
Directions are taken and prejudices formed in our student years and 20s. Grab people young and unleash those enterprising spirits early, and they are likely to have more impact. All universities should be persuading entrepreneur alumni to mentor undergraduates. They should seek angel investors among their donors to back student ideas. Tutors should be encouraged to create spinout companies. And why not found incubators to nurture early-stage businesses?
Entrepreneurs will always carve their own paths. An ability to identify a fortuitous opening is not something that can be easily taught within a prescribed structure. But surroundings that allow those stirrings and initiatives to flourish can help. Educationalists should be alive to the possibilities.
The writer runs Risk Capital Partners, a private equity firm, and is chairman of the Royal Society of Arts

2012年5月20日 星期日

大学冬の時代~/ 日本文部大臣的電視天文教育Some of the News Fit to Print


東京女学館大学閉校の波紋~大学冬の時代~

写真:東京女学館大学閉校の波紋~大学冬の時代~
東京女学館大学のキャンパス=同大ホームページより
2012年5月21日
 東京女学館大学(東京都町田市)が学生募集を来年度から停止する。現在の1年生が卒業する2016年3月で閉校する方針。学生の定員割れ が続き、約25億円の累積赤字があるという。同大の理事会は4月下旬、教職員や文部科学省に大学閉校の方針を伝え、学生らに通知文を発送した。同大は、 1956年に開設された短大が前身。02年に国際教養学部のみの4年制大学となったが、定員割れが続いていた。少子化が進むなか、大学経営はいよいよ厳し さを増している。今回の事例が示していることは――。




Millions in Asia and the western United States watched as a rare "ring of fire" eclipse crossed their skies.
The annular eclipse, in which the moon passes in front of the sun leaving only a golden ring around its edges, was visible to wide areas across Asia early Monday. It then moved across the Pacific and was also seen in parts of the western United States Sunday afternoon.
Viewing parties were held in Reno, Nev., Oakland, Calif., and elsewhere. In some parts of the U.S., special camera filters for taking photographs have been sold out for weeks in anticipation of the big event.
People from Colorado, Oklahoma and as far away as Canada traveled to Albuquerque to enjoy one of the best vantage points.
Members of the crowd smiled and cheered and children yelled with excitement as the moon crossed the sun and the blazing halo of light began to form. Eventually, the moon centered and covered 96 percent of the sun.
"That's got to be the prettiest thing I've ever seen," said Brent Veltri of Salida, Colo.
Albuquerque city officials had urged residents to go to organized events or watch one of the many live webcasts to avoid damaging their eyes.
The eclipse cannot be viewed with the naked eye or even sunglasses. And solar glasses, which make the sun look like a huge orange disc, are a rare commodity in communities along the eclipse's path.
In Japan, "eclipse tours" were arranged at schools and parks, on pleasure boats and even private airplanes. Similar events were held in China and Taiwan as well, with skywatchers warned to protect their eyes.
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AP
An annular solar eclipse is seen in the sky... View Full Caption
The eclipse was broadcast live on TV in Tokyo, where such an eclipse hasn't been visible since 1839. Japanese TV crews watched from the top of Mount Fuji and even staked out a zoo south of Tokyo to capture the reaction of the chimpanzees — who didn't seem to notice.
A light rain fell on Tokyo as the eclipse began, but the clouds thinned as it reached its peak, providing near perfect conditions.
"It was a very mysterious sight," said Kaori Sasaki, who joined a crowd in downtown Tokyo to watch event. "I've never seen anything like it."
At the Taipei Astronomical Museum in Taiwan, the spectacle emerged from dark clouds for only about 30 seconds. But the view was nearly perfect against Manila's orange skies.
"It's amazing. We do this for the awe (and) it has not disappointed. I am awed, literally floored," said astronomical hobbyist Garry Andreassen, whose long camera lenses were lined up with those of about 10 other gazers in a downtown Manila park.
Hong Kong skywatchers weren't so lucky.
Several hundred people gathered along the Kowloon waterfront on Hong Kong's famed Victoria Harbor, most of them students or commuters on their way to work. The eclipse was already underway as the sun began to rise, but heavy clouds obstructed the view.
The eclipse followed a narrow 8,500-mile path for 3 1/2 hours. The ring phenomenon lasted about five minutes, depending on location. People outside the narrow band for prime viewing saw a partial eclipse.
"Ring of Fire" eclipses are not as dramatic as a total eclipse, when the disk of the sun is entirely blocked by the moon. The moon is too far from Earth and appears too small in the sky to blot out the sun completely.
Doctors and education officials have warned of eye injuries from improper viewing. Before the event started, Japan's Education Minister Hirofumi Hirano demonstrated how to use eclipse glasses in a televised news conference.
Police also cautioned against traffic accidents — warning drivers to keep their eyes on the road.






Some of the News Fit to Print


ABOUT HIGHER ED
HOW COMPETITION IS KILLING HIGHER EDUCATION
Mark C. Taylor writes in Bloomberg: Competition, we are constantly told, encourages individuals, institutions and companies to take the risks necessary for innovation and efficiency. But in higher education, competition often discourages risk taking, leads to overly cautious short-term decisions, produces a mediocre product for the price, and promotes excessive spending on physical plants and bureaucracies. While overestimating the value of competition can lead to less, not more, innovation, underestimating the value of cooperation tends to discourage the exploration of possibilities for creative interaction. With escalating costs, limited resources and growing political concern about student debt, institutions should be developing innovative ways to cooperate that will prove to be mutually beneficial, in the same way that companies merge and become more efficient.
WHAT WE DON'T KNOW ABOUT DEBT
Student debt has been a hot topic lately, both in the 2012 presidential race and in national news media, most recently in a high-profile (and hotly contested) New York Times article that highlighted colleges with high levels of debt nationwide. But pieces of information crucial to understanding the problem fully, especially how much students borrow at each college, are unavailable — and that's not likely to change anytime soon. The lack of readily accessible, accurate information about borrowing at specific colleges means that prospective students can’t use the information in their decisions about whether or not to apply. It also makes it more difficult for colleges to compare their own students' indebtedness with that of students at other institutions — a process that some say might lead to changes in financial aid policy at colleges where students carry an abnormally high debt load. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

ABOUT K-12
EDUCATION REFORMERS SIT DOWN: WE NEED A REVOLUTION
High school teacher Larry Strauss writes in the Huffington Post: For years educators, politicians, and the public have debated to what extent quality teaching is a function of talent, intelligence, training, and hard work and to what extent it is a reflection of institutional factors, students and their circumstances, and other factors beyond the control of teachers. We have heard endless calls for increased teacher accountability and little sensible talk about how to accomplish it without destroying the autonomy of our best teachers and eroding the quality of their instruction. What ought to be clear to all of us by now is that the institutional structure of schools and school systems is ill-conceived. It is a failure. And this failure is at the root of all other educational failures.
HOW STANDARDIZED TESTS ARE AFFECTING PUBLIC SCHOOLS IN FLORIDA
Florida’s standardized testing program is being misused and has “severely impacted student learning,” according to a new white paper that says that school districts in the state are required to give as many as 62 tests a year to some students. The white paper, called “The Ramifications of Standardized Testing on our Public Schools,” was just released by the Central Florida School Board Coalition, a group of top officials from 10 school districts. While the specifics are about Florida, the general conclusions about the negative impact of state standardized programs are relevant across the country — not only because other states have their own version but because some looked to Florida as a model as they developed their own school accountability systems. The article is in the Washington Post’s The Answer Sheet blog.
FLIP THIS: BLOOM’S TAXONOMY SHOULD START WITH CREATING
Teacher/education blogger Shelley Wright writes in the MindShift blog: I think the revised Bloom’s Taxonomy is wrong. I know this statement sounds heretical in the realms of education, but I think this is something we should rethink, especially since it is so widely taught to pre-service teachers. I agree that the taxonomy accurately classifies various types of cognitive thinking skills. It certainly identifies the different levels of complexity. But its organizing framework is dead wrong. Here’s why. The pyramid creates the impression that there is a scarcity of creativity — only those who can traverse the bottom levels and reach the summit can be creative. And while this may be how it plays out in many schools, it’s not due to any shortage of creative potential on the part of our students.

ABOUT K-12
‘CHRONICALLY ABSENT’ STUDENTS SKEW SCHOOL DATA, STUDY FINDS, CITING PARENTS’ ROLE
Up to 15 percent of American children are chronically absent from school, missing at least one day in 10 and doing long-term harm to their academic progress, according to a new study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University. They argue that policy makers tend to look at absenteeism in the wrong way, requiring districts and states to measure average daily attendance rates, but — with the exception of a few states — not focusing on the relatively small number of students who account for most absences. They found that some schools report an average of more than 90 percent daily attendance, masking the fact that 40 percent of their students are chronically missing. The article is in The New York Times.
THE HIGH STAKES OF STANDARDIZED TESTS
Standardized tests are nothing new in public schools. Chances are you filled out bubbles on an answer form at some point during your schooling. But for the past few years, scores from statewide tests in English and math have been used to determine which schools are doing a good job of educating students and which are “failing.” Today, the test results count for more than just a letter grade for a school. Teachers in some states are now being labeled good or bad based on their students’ scores. Welcome to the world of high-stakes standardized testing. The article is in CNN’s Schools of Thought blog.
TEST SCORES ADD VALUE TO TEACHER REVIEW
Research over the last two decades has confirmed what most parents already knew: Teacher quality is any public school’s most important asset. Taking that simple and obvious premise seriously means working to identify and remove ineffective teachers. A bipartisan group of lawmakers in New Jersey and nationwide is pursuing this path. Students are harmed when they are taught by bad teachers. Research shows that being assigned to an ineffective teacher can reduce a student’s learning during the school year by as much as a grade level. Anyone who understands the importance of education won’t be surprised to learn a recent study by economists at Harvard and Columbia universities showed that assignment to one or another teacher is related to later life outcomes, such as the likelihood of early pregnancy, the chances of college attendance and lifetime earnings. The commentary is in The Star-Ledger’s NJ Voices Guest blog.

ABOUT HIGHER ED
SILICON VALLEY NEEDS HUMANITIES STUDENTS
Vivek Wadhwa writes in the Washington Post: Quit your technology job. Get a PhD in the humanities. That’s the way to get ahead in the technology sector. That, at least, is what philosopher Damon Horowitz told a crowd of attendees at the BiblioTech Conference at Stanford University in 2011. Horowitz is also a serial entrepreneur who co-founded a company, Aardvark, which sold to Google for $50 million. He is presently the In-House Philosopher / Director of Engineering at Google. Wait, you say, that’s insane. At a time when record numbers of people, among them those with high-level degrees, are receiving public assistance, what kind of fool would get a degree in a subject with no clear job prospects beyond higher education or teaching?
WITH CHOICE OF NEW LEADER, COLLEGE BOARD HOPES TO EXTEND ITS REACH
David Coleman has read a ton of Chaucer, Milton, and Shakespeare. He has earned degrees from Yale, Oxford, and Cambridge. As a lead writer of the common core curriculum standards adopted by all but a handful of states, he has become known as a dynamic—and controversial—reformer. Now, Mr. Coleman is poised to lead the College Board, one of the most powerful forces in American education. His appointment could bring further changes to the nonprofit organization's best-known product—the SAT—and its wide blanket of other programs. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
STUDENT LOANS: IS THERE REALLY A CRISIS?
Student debt is completely out of control, right? The more than $1 trillion in outstanding college loans is front-page news and is pretty much the only educational issue the presidential candidates are talking about. Yes, ballooning student debt is causing real hardship for some Americans. But as with many educational flare-ups, the public debate is giving us more noise than signal. So before you decide to skip college based on the hysteria, here are a few things to keep in mind. The article is in Time.
posted May 17, 2012 10:47 am

Daily News Roundup, May 16, 2012


Some of the News Fit to Print
ABOUT K-12
LAWSUIT TAKES AIM AT CALIFORNIA'S LEGAL PROTECTIONS FOR TEACHERS
A Bay Area nonprofit backed partly by groups known for battling teachers unions has filed a lawsuit seeking to overturn five California laws that, they say, make it too difficult to dismiss ineffective teachers. The suit, filed on behalf of eight students, takes aim at California laws that govern teacher tenure rules, seniority protections and the teacher dismissal process. The group behind the legal action is the newly formed Students Matter. The founder is Silicon Valley entrepreneur David F. Welch and the group's funders include the foundation of L.A. philanthropist Eli Broad. The article is in the Los Angeles Times.
GETTING TEACHER EVALUATION RIGHT
Math teacher Kyle Hunsberger writes in The Hechinger Report: In Los Angeles, where I teach seventh-grade math, our current teacher evaluation system is undeniably broken. Initially designed to be a robust observation protocol and rubric, our system has degenerated into a 10-minute checklist. A well-intentioned but often overspent administrator comes into my room, fills out the requisite paperwork and signs on the dotted line. The actual outcomes of my students—both tangibles (test scores, GPAs, future college attendance rates) and intangibles (increased love of learning, increased desire to achieve)—are never factored in. Our teacher evaluation system may have been intended to capture such nuances of teaching and learning, but ineffective implementation has rendered it meaningless. The success of even the most well-intentioned evaluation system remains dependent upon the time, energy and full effort of both administrators and district officials to see it fully implemented.

ABOUT HIGHER ED
PAYING FOR COLLEGE: MORE TOUGH DECISIONS
Middle age is prime time for saving money. From your late 40s through early 60s, you're supposed to squirrel away cash to cope with health care costs in your old age. But for millions of Americans, middle age also is the time when children are seeking help with higher-education bills, and elderly parents may be needing assistance with daily care. Scott and Kelley Hawkins, both 46, are in that middle position. As they brace for paying rising college expenses for two daughters in school at once, they know they will have many tough financial decisions to make. "A lot of extra stuff we used to have money for, we don't have the money for" now that the hefty-tuition years are looming, Scott Hawkins said. The article is from NPR’s Family Matters series.
OUR VIEW: EDUCATIONAL ACHIEVEMENT MUST COME FIRST
One of the glaring embarrassments of our educational system is that we also fail our successes. These are the students who graduate high school and go on to a state university or community college but are forced to take remedial classes because they are ill-prepared to handle the challenges at the next educational level. Upward of 70 percent of those students need remedial classes — a costly alternative for students. But instead of focusing attention on the cause of the problems, the effort to “fix” it is to further erode the educational quality. The editorial is in The Bulletin (Norwich, CT).

2012年5月8日 星期二

Harvard Hops on the MITx Bandwagon

Harvard Hops on the MITx Bandwagon

People have been very excited about MITx, the upcoming first instance of a prestigious brand-name university offering an online open enrollment class that comes with a branded credit. To be sure, they won't say you passed an "MIT" class, but the classes will have the same content as the MIT courses and the label says "MITx" which is really very similar to "MIT".
And now Harvard's hopping on the bandwagon:
The EdX platform will be open-source, “so it can be used by other universities and organizations who wish to host the platform themselves,” according to the release. While EdX will initially host adapted versions of courses from MIT and Harvard, the institutions expect it to become a clearinghouse for open courses offered by various institutions.
“MIT and Harvard expect that over time other universities will join them in offering courses on the edX platform,” the universities said. “The gathering of many universities’ educational content together on one site will enable learners worldwide to access the course content of any participating university from a single website, and to use a set of online educational tools shared by all participating universities.”
I think it really can't be emphasized enough that names and brands matter here. Harvard sells a bundle of goods to undergraduates. Some of that is actual classroom learning and education. Some of it is a college experience. And some of it is a branded credential from America's oldest and most famous university. You can potentially do a lot of teaching over the internet, but it's really when the brands come into play that you start to make a difference to the overall structure of the industry.

天下事最重要的: 把你自己這塊材料鑄成器。

天下事最重要的: 把你自己這塊材料鑄成器。


何先生師大畢業旅行在屏東某學校看到類似"把你自己這塊材料鑄成器。"標語
何懷碩的自我完成 (何先生慨嘆這種真理的世代早已不復存在)
這句胡適之先生多次引用 譬如說 《一個人生觀》1959/1/7 台北國際學舍:



 十九世紀的易卜生,他晚年曾給一位年輕的朋友寫信說:"最期望於你的只有一句話,希望你能做到真正的、純粹的為我主義,要你有時覺得天下事只有自己最重要,別人不足想,你要想有益於社會最好的辦法,就是把你自己這塊材料鑄成器。"

2012年5月7日 星期一

呂惠美幫助東海工作營

東海沒有工友我們親自整理我們的校園
我們的東海工作營幫忙那需要我們幫忙的人


 http://labor.thu.edu.tw/newsb.php?id=29
憶懷工作營精神 10萬美金助傳承 2012-05-07
   
  2011年10月30日呂惠美校友(1961級-第三屆外文系)專程自美國回台灣到
東海大學,參加畢業50年同學會暨母校創校56週年校慶活動。呂學姊感念大三暑假時-1960年7月赴日本參加美國公誼會舉辦的國際工作營及當年在校參與 東海工作營活動,受到【工作營】對社會熱心服務、犧牲奉獻之精神薰陶,同時於日後也影響她赴美國朝向「社會工作」方面深造,遂捐贈10萬美元成立基金,以 期未來母校能持續發揚工作營優良的精神。
活動當日,勞作教育處亦邀請呂惠美校友、賈培源校友(第三屆經濟系.1958年7月赴日本參加貴格教會舉辦的國際工作營,1960年2月參與創辦全國各大 學中第一個服務性社團-東海工作營),聯合工作營一同舉辦小型座談會,由現任勞教長,生科系林惠真教授,簡報本校目前服務學習整體概況外,亦由工作營現任 社長,社會三朱昱穎同學,簡報社團的運作概況、組織架構及活動成果;同時兩位傑出校友也與學弟妹們分享當年在東海的回憶,及參與工作營的過程,給了學弟妹 們寶貴的經驗交流。
    未來此筆經費每年的孳息與部分金額,將會適當用於工作營每年暑假所辦之長工活動;另外,也會用於補助其他校內社團有關於社會服務之計畫、及各科系老師所開 設之專業服務學習課程。目前相關的經費使用辦法及申請流程正在擬定研討中,未來也將會定期的編寫成果報告,並作計畫檢核,以期能激起東海校內師生服務社會 之熱忱,吸引師生主動大力投入社會服務,使工作營精神永續流傳。

2012年5月5日 星期六

Some of the News Fit to Print, Carnegie Pathways

 


Carnegie Foundation News





Carnegie Pathways Mean Success for Developmental Math Students

Recognizing the grave consequences for individual opportunity and more generally for our economy and society if we do not accept our responsibility as educators to prepare mathematically literate citizens, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has engaged networks of faculty members, researchers, designers, and students in the creation of two new mathematics pathways, one in statistics (Statway) and the other in quantitative literacy (Quantway).

These Networked Improvement Communities (NICs), as Carnegie calls them, have embraced an audacious goal — to dramatically increase from 5 percent to 50 percent the percentage of students to achieve transferable college math credit within one year of continuous enrollment. The students Carnegie is working with have been placed into developmental mathematics classes.

These pathways are designed to replace a sequence of courses that can take as long as two years once students are placed into developmental math at entry to community college. Recent studies report that between 60 and 70 percent of students either do not successfully complete the sequence of required courses or avoid taking math altogether and therefore never graduate.

Early results from the Statway™ NIC with a largely high-risk student population are very promising. Nearly half the students in network colleges are from households with incomes below $40,000 a year. And only 10 percent have mothers with at least a bachelor’s degree (a factor with a strong relationship to student success). Yet 89 percent remained enrolled for the full fall term (the program rolled out in the network’s colleges at the beginning of the 2011-12 school year) and 68 percent finished the first semester with a grade of C or better (required for college credit). This is nearly double the success rate (36 percent) for students in the less-demanding courses taught previously in the network's schools.

The students who completed the new courses scored comparable on an independent end-of-semester exam to a national sample of community college and university students who had completed college-level statistics coursework. And 88 percent of the students earning C's or better moved on to the second half of the two-semester, college-credit-yielding sequence. That's more than triple the rate of student progress previously experienced in network colleges. Carnegie found from conducting student surveys that the program’s confidence-building components increase students’ enthusiasm for math, and make students less anxious about the subject and more likely to believe that with hard work they could master it — a complete turnaround from the typical perspectives of students in traditional developmental math classes.

Carnegie’s two pathways are not just new lessons and course materials. Carnegie provides:
  • A comprehensive Instructional System co-designed by faculty, instructional designers, and educational researchers focused on ambitious academic goals and organized around math that matters for students’ work, personal, and civic lives;
  • Online technologies for interactive textbooks and supplemental student learning activities plus faculty access to online activity data to identify and support at-risk students;
  • Rapid real-time analytics for guiding improvement efforts, both local and network-wide, for student learning, faculty teaching, and quality;
  • Resources for advancing quality teaching embedded in the Instructional System, plus ongoing faculty engagement in network-wide efforts to improve them;
  • Open educational resources for use at scale by network college members that are cost effective for both colleges and students; and
  • An improvement research hub for performance analytics and field-based experiments to strengthen local efforts at contextualizing effective practices and outcomes.
Carnegie now has 30 colleges participating in the two NICs — 22 in Statway™ and eight in Quantway™. Carnegie networks are testing and refining the materials and the faculty and student supports embedded in them. They are discovering what works and what doesn’t and are taking that information and quickly revising what goes back into the classrooms. This continuous improvement process, using the tools of improvement science that have worked in other industries like technology, manufacturing, and healthcare, has gotten Carnegie to Version 2.0, and the plan is to keep improving based on information from the network.

Plans are to scale from 1,600 students today to a target of over 60,000 a year by 2017-18.

Media Contact
Gay Clyburn
Associate Vice President, Public Affairs
Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
clyburn@carnegiefoundation.org
650-566-5162

 

Improvement Research: the Carnegie Way


Why are we at Carnegie interested in improvement research? What does the work of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement (IHI) have to do with education?
The answer to these questions is related. In both sectors, there is a gap between what is known and what happens daily in practice. Both sectors are made up of a dedicated workforce whose best efforts do not consistently add up to improvement. And both healthcare and education face the challenge of effectively and efficiently affecting improvement at scale. Improvement research holds promise for addressing these challenges and IHI has decades of experience of using these methodologies to foster change. We knew we could learn from them.
Improvement research is based on simple but powerful questions, coined as the Model for Improvement by Associates in Process Improvement (API): (1) What are we trying to accomplish? (2) How will we know that a change is an improvement? (3) What changes can we make that will result in an improvement? Together these questions structure an active and disciplined way of pursuing change.  As we begin to apply improvement research to education, we have found it useful to begin conversations around improvement using a fourth question: (4) How do we understand the problems and systems in which they’re embedded? We have a tendency in education to jump to solutions and not think deeply about the problems we are trying to solve. A more productive approach starts with a problem and taking a careful look across the system to better understand the causes that influence current outcomes.
It is these four improvement research questions that have structured the strand of our Statway and Quantway Community College Pathways program of work that we have come to call Productive Persistence. Since we took on the problem of the extraordinarily high failure rates of community college students in developmental math, we have known that we could not get movement on the kinds of outcomes we were looking for by changing the curriculum or course structure alone. There was a common notion that it was important to attend to what can be referred to as student success factors, student motivation and engagement or non-cognitive factors. There was also a lot of activity in this area and many innovations to draw on. Lack of innovation was certainly not the problem.
Many financial and human resources are already dedicated to student success activity in community colleges. Community colleges offer students a variety and mixture of initiatives and services designed to help them succeed in college, some of them quite innovative. But if you walk from one institution to another, there is very little agreement as to what makes a good student success program. And there is a weak evidence base suggesting that these efforts are accumulating into real improvements in the college lives of students. We also know that there are a lot of exciting new research theories—particularly from social psychology—about specific practices that could be powerful levers of change. However, it is not really clear how these theories would be made to work in practice, specifically applied to developmental math and with community college students. A lot of exciting ideas, but the translation in how to make them work, reliably in real contexts is not there.
As we tried to structure this strand of work into the Pathways, we experienced a time of flailing at Carnegie as well.  We knew we needed to work on it, we had people assigned to the task, everybody believed it was important, but from conversation to conversation no one could really tell you the same thing about what we were doing or what specifically we were trying to accomplish. To focus the work and halt the flailing, we launched a 90-day cycle in the fall of 2010. A 90-day cycle is an improvement research tool developed by IHI to accomplish deep-dive, quick turn-around research.
We began this R&D process to build a theory of change and a measurement model to go along with it. We were attempting to answer two of the improvement questions for this strand of work: what specifically are we trying to accomplish and how will we know if a change is an improvement? We put together a team with the relevant expertise in social psychology, improvement research and the on-the ground experience supporting developmental math students. We scanned the field, talked to many people that understood the problem from different angles and identified five areas that were most important to focus on to get to the outcome that we cared about. We “tested” these drivers with a diverse set of experts and built a measurement model that would enable us to refine this theory over time.
One of the unique things about improvement science that separates it from other education research approaches is that it is not about being comprehensive. The goal is not to develop a conceptual framework that tries to organize every possible influence and include everything we could work on. Instead, we asked what are the big drivers for improvement? And what measurement will we need to learn from our efforts at change and to improve our theory over time? Since this initial 90-day cycle, the Productive Persistence team has refined our measurement model to make it more practical and embedded in the daily lives of the community college students with minimal interruption. They have collected these measures in our networks and convened additional experts, improving the theory over time. And they have started to develop and test changes, focusing on the critical first three weeks of the course.
In the process, we have become increasingly convinced that improvement methodologies hold promise for productively integrating diverse kinds of expertise to solve important problems. We often talk about notions of bridging research and practice. Normally we mean just that, building a thin thing between two land masses that stay firmly planted. Research stays firmly on one side of a line, practice stays firmly on the other and we have a tiny space in which they talk to each other. Improvement research brings these two sides together in a collective process aimed at solving concrete problems of practice. It pairs action with discipline, moving some people into action more quickly than they are comfortable and requiring others to be a little more patient and disciplined. It also carries with it the excitement of bringing ideas into action, helping our best efforts lead to visible improvements in the lives of students.
________
This post was adapted from a presentation to the Executive Committee of the Carnegie Board of Trustees.

Some of the News Fit to Print

 
GAINS IN ACCESS, LESS IN SUCCESS
In 2007 -- long before President Obama pushed to make college attainment a national priority and three years before the phrase "completion agenda" first appeared in these pages -- a group of public university systems put themselves on the spot. Working with (and to some extent prodded by) Education Trust, which promotes the educational success of low-income and minority students, the 22 systems of two-year and four-year colleges and universities committed to increasing their attainment levels, in large part by closing the gaps in performance between underrepresented students and their peers within a decade. And they committed, too, to documenting their progress by collecting and publicly reporting detailed (and in some cases, previously unreported) data on student access and success. A report, released this week, provides a look mid-point.  The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
COMMUNITY COLLEGES AND THE AMERICAN DREAM
Richard Kahlenberg writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education about the recently released AACC report, Reclaiming the American Dream. He said: The report does three important things in my view: First, the report frankly acknowledges the shortcomings of community colleges in stark language.  “What we find today are student success rates that are unacceptably low, employment preparation that is inadequately connected to job market needs, and disconnects in transitions between high schools, community colleges, and baccalaureate institutions.”  The report concedes that “developmental education as traditionally practiced is dysfunctional, that barriers to transfer inhibit student progress, that degree and certificate completion rates are too low, and that attainment gaps across groups of students are unacceptably wide.”  These problems may seem obvious to the casual observer, but for a commission of the AACC, a group which describes itself as “the primary advocacy organization for the nation’s community colleges,” to openly admit such failures is remarkable.
THE CAMPUS TSUNAMI
David Brooks writes in The New York Times: What happened to the newspaper and magazine business is about to happen to higher education: a rescrambling around the Web. Many of us view the coming change with trepidation. Will online learning diminish the face-to-face community that is the heart of the college experience? Will it elevate functional courses in business and marginalize subjects that are harder to digest in an online format, like philosophy? Will fast online browsing replace deep reading? If a few star professors can lecture to millions, what happens to the rest of the faculty? Will academic standards be as rigorous? What happens to the students who don’t have enough intrinsic motivation to stay glued to their laptop hour after hour? How much communication is lost — gesture, mood, eye contact — when you are not actually in a room with a passionate teacher and students?
ABOUT K-12
RESEARCHERS SEE POTENTIAL FOR COMMON CORE TO BOOST LEARNING
A new research paper offers a defense of the Common Core State Standards in math, making the case that the standards are consistent with those in high-achieving countries and suggesting their faithful implementation holds considerable promise to improve student learning. The paper looked at the achievement of states whose prior math standards most closely aligned to the common core. The article is in Education Week.
WHAT ABOUT PARENT INVOLVEMENT?
Parent coordinator Taneesha Crawford writes in The New York Times: We talk constantly about teacher accountability, publicizing teacher data reports and test scores, even though they are controversial. Well, what about parent accountability? What carrot or stick are we using to encourage parent involvement? That seems to be the elephant in the room that no one is trying to move.

HOW THE FEDERAL GOVERNMENT CAN PROMOTE INNOVATION
Carnegie Board member and Wireless Generation co- founder Larry Berger; Patrick McGuinn, associate professor of political science and education at Drew University, in Madison, N. J.; and  David Stevenson, vice president for business development and government affairs at Wireless Generation, write for Education Week:  The key question for federal policymakers is how to promote and sustain effective innovations and how to bring them to scale to generate systemic improvement. As federal policymakers attempt this, they face a compliance conundrum: A lack of program specificity and oversight can undermine the impact of federal efforts to force change, but too much specificity and oversight can lead to compliance-driven behavior that undermines the idiosyncratic insights and individual convictions that spark innovation. In thinking about the best orientation for the federal government regarding innovation, it is useful to recognize that innovation at the state, district, and school levels depends on various capacities: political, financial, organizational, and technical. As a result of these different capacity needs, the federal government may take a range of possible roles.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
PUBLIC POLICY AND FOUNDATION FUNDING SHOULD SUPPORT INTERSECTION OF COLLEGE COMPLETION AND QUALITY
Governors State University President Elaine Maimon blogs for the AAC&U blog, Liberal Education Nation: I support Alexander Astin’s comment: “As it happens, a thoughtful and well-informed approach to completion will clearly tend to promote quality”. He points to three barriers to completion—preparation, part-time attendance, lack of community—which are also road-blocks to quality. An example of a program designed to overcome these road-blocks is the Dual Degree Program (DDP)—not to be confused with dual enrollment—a partnership, supported by the Kresge Foundation, connecting Governors State University and eight local community colleges. The university provides substantial financial incentives for community college students to attend full-time, requires that students achieve the associate’s degree before transferring, and promotes a sense of community among DDP students and with the faculty and staff at both the community college and university.
THE NEW POLITICS OF STUDENT DEBT
To political observers, the convulsion of national concern about student debt, and by extension the cost of college, has a precedent: health care. “It’s a sector of the economy that seems to be growing inexorably in cost and much faster than the rest of the economy, and much faster than family income,” says William Galston, a former policy adviser to President Bill Clinton and a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “In the same way that we’ve had a huge public policy debate about health care, it doesn’t take a prophet to see that some of the same forces are generating a pretty significant political debate about college.” The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
ABOUT K-12
MICHIGAN LAWMAKERS SAY TEACHER EVALUATION RECOMMENDATION IS EXPENSIVE, BUT MIGHT BE NEEDED
Some Michigan lawmakers said they might have to spend a recommended $6 million to sample teacher evaluation systems to get the job done right. The Michigan Council on Educator Effectiveness is calling for a year of a pilot program that looks at several ways of evaluating teachers in rural and urban districts before settling on a plan that could be used statewide.  The article is from Michiganlive.com.



ABOUT HIGHER ED
EVERYONE SHOULD LEARN STATISTICS
Kevin Carey writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education: The percentage of questions you get right on an algebra quiz and the statistical likelihood of one thing being correlated to another thing are two very different things. Carey believes that there is a "terrible statistical illiteracy in the general populace. Which is not surprising, given that statistics isn’t part of the standard curriculum schools require students to complete in order to get a high-school or college diploma. Math education is still largely interpreted as a progression through algebra and geometry to calculus."
"And I’m not against working harder to improve math education," he writes. "But in terms of things you really need in order to make your way in modern society, statistics is way, way up there, above a lot of things that are currently lodged in the curriculum."
ANDREW DELBANCO’S ‘COLLEGE’
This much we all can agree on: The past several years have been difficult ones for American higher education; in every sector, major changes are afoot -- or are already under way. After that, things start to get murky quickly. Who should go to college? What should they be taught? Who should pay the bill, and how? On these issues, among many others, the only consensus seems to be that there is no consensus. In College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be (Princeton University Press), Columbia University professor Andrew Delbanco tries his hand at answering some of the most fundamental questions about college in America: What is college for? What should college -- as distinct from university -- look like? And what on earth is to be done about it? The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
HARVARD AND M.I.T. TEAM UP TO OFFER ONLINE COURSES
In what is shaping up as an academic Battle of the Titans — one that offers vast new learning opportunities for students around the world — Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on Wednesday announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities. The article is in The New York Times.
WAGING A WAR ON EDUCATION
Anthropologist Paul Stoller writes in the Huffington Post: Higher education is currently under assault in America. Even in the recent past you could count on bi-partisan support of systems of higher education that have long been considered the foundation of American prosperity. We used to think that a robust system of public education was the wellspring of social innovation and scientific invention. Recent debate in the public sphere, however, has questioned these previously taken for granted assumptions about higher education in America. Indeed, powerful politicians and influential pundits are making suggestions that could undermine higher education, especially public higher education, for years to come.
ABOUT K-12
FREE INTERNET LESSONS CHALLENGE TEXTBOOK MARKET
Enterprising teachers have long scoured the Internet for ways to improve on their textbooks or local curricula. Now, though, lessons accessed via the Web are proliferating in the classroom as never before and are challenging the position of the powerful education-publishing industry in public schools. The article is in The Washington Post.

posted May 02, 2012 10:16 am

Community College Students Finding Success in Math through Statway™ [In the News™]


REFORMS WITH PROMISE
Carnegie President Anthony Bryk and Senior Fellow Thomas Toch write in Inside Higher Ed: With the support of five national philanthropies, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching has launched a national network of 27 community colleges and three universities dedicated to helping students at the greatest risk of failure in math. The approach uses a comprehensive strategy of support for students and faculty members in a "networked improvement community."
The network’s early results are promising, even with a largely high-risk student population. Nearly half the students in network colleges are from households with incomes below $40,000 a year. And only 10 percent have mothers with at least a bachelor’s degree. Yet 89 percent remained enrolled for the full fall term (the program rolled out in the network’s colleges at the beginning of the 2011-12 school year) and 68 percent finished the first semester with a grade of C or better (required for college credit), nearly double the 36 percent of students earning the same grades in the less-demanding courses taught previously in the network's schools.
The students who completed the new courses scored nearly as high on an independent end-of-semester exam as a national sample of community college and university students who had completed college-level statistics coursework. And 88 percent of the students earning C's or better moved on to the second half of the two-semester, credit-yielding course. That's more than triple the proportion of students in the network's colleges who successfully navigated a first term of remedial math and signed up for a second before the network's creation.
 


ABOUT K-12
PARENTS HOLD BAKE SALES TO PAY TEACHERS
After years of cuts to public school budgets across the country, many districts are relying on parents to pay for classroom supplies, extracurricular activities and even teacher salaries. But some worry that uneven distribution of funds will widen disparities between schools and between districts. NPR’s Neal Conan, host of Talk of the Nation, talks with New York Times reporter Kyle Spencer and Susan Sweeney, executive director of California Consortium of Education Foundations.
PRESSURE TO PERFORM
National school reform leader Kevin Chavous writes for the Huffington Post: When many of us attended school, standardized testing didn't bear such importance.  This practice of "high stakes testing" skyrocketed after No Child Left Behind (NCLB) mandated annual statewide testing in 2001. Since this act passed, testing has put a burden on our students to perform under pressure. There are many valuable purposes that can be served by student testing and assessment. Kids don't get self-esteem without a sense of personal achievement, but they also don't build self-esteem by being pressured to perform for all the wrong reasons. Andres Alonso, CEO of Baltimore City Public Schools, said it best when he said, "too often, we celebrate movement on test scores and forget that the movement has to be for all students." We must not forget every child can learn, just not on the same day or in the same way. Alonso is a Carnegie Board member.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
TWO PARTIES FIND A WAY TO AGREE, DISAGREE ON STUDENT LOAN RATES
Iowa City — As President Obama wrapped up a barnstorming tour of college campuses in swing states on Wednesday, Democrats and Republicans agreed that they wanted to avoid a steep increase in the student loan interest rate this summer. But the chief issue remained unsettled: how to pay the cost of doing so. In a second day of campaign-style rallies, Mr. Obama pressed his attack on Republicans, depicting them as unsympathetic to college students in need. Republicans countered by accusing the president and his Democratic allies of playing politics with the issue and trying to raise taxes on small businesses to pay for the subsidized rate. Caught in the middle were seven million college students who will see the interest rate on their federally subsidized loans double to 6.8 percent on July 1 unless Congress and the White House come together on a plan to prevent that, at a cost of $6 billion. For a typical student, the White House said the higher rate could mean as much as $1,000 in additional debt per year at a time of high unemployment among recent graduates. The article is in The New York Times.
FREE-RANGE LEARNERS
Milwaukee — Digital natives? The idea that students are super engaged finders of online learning materials once struck Glenda Morgan, e-learning strategist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, as “a load of hooey.” Students, she figured, probably stick with the textbooks and other content they’re assigned in class. Not quite. The preliminary results of a multiyear study of undergraduates’ online study habits, presented by Ms. Morgan at a conference on blended learning here this week, show that most students shop around for digital texts and videos beyond the boundaries of what professors assign them in class. The post is from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog.

ABOUT K-12
SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURS TRY TO OFFER SOLUTIONS TO K-12 PROBLEMS
With roots in the nonprofit teaching corps Teach For America and the early charter school movement of the 1990s, social entrepreneurship in education, whether for profit or not, has been drawing more and more attention lately. Bill Drayton, the founder and chief executive officer of the Arlington, Va.-based entrepreneurs' association Ashoka: Innovators for the Public, is credited with coining the term "social entrepreneur" to describe change agents who combine a pragmatic business sense with a desire for social justice. "They want to bring about lasting change in a sector that they care deeply about, as well as build a thriving venture in its own right," said John J-H Kim, a senior lecturer and William Henry Bloomberg fellow at the Harvard Business School, who teaches a course called Entrepreneurship in Education Reform. The article is in Education Week.
IN NEW FEDERAL PROGRAM TO REWARD TEACHERS, FLAWED ASSUMPTIONS
Brooklyn teacher Stephen Lazar writes in The New York Times: Establishing a variety of advanced teacher roles, with appropriately high compensation, is a necessary move toward professionalizing teaching in America, and I applaud this move.  Giving highly effective teachers more time to serve in roles other than classroom teachers is an important step toward improving our system. However, it is imperative to remember that the qualities that make me a highly effective teacher are not necessarily those that would make me an effective teacher-leader.
READY, SET, GO
A new report from the Annenberg Institute for School Reform examines the burgeoning field of college readiness, with models to help districts, schools, and other interested stakeholders prepare students for college success. The report is part of the College Readiness Indicator System initiative funded by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The report defines college-readiness through three dimensions -- academic preparedness, academic tenacity, and college knowledge. The report finds that common strategies to help students gain content-area knowledge and key cognitive skills for success in college include aligning standards, curricula, and assessments to college-ready expectations; using data to drive college-readiness policies; and intervening early to keep students on a college-ready track. This information is from the PEN NewsBlast.
THE ALLURE OF TEACHER QUALITY
A focus on "teacher quality" has been a dominant reform paradigm over the past few years, and its allure as the key ingredient to student success is powerful but reductive, writes Matthew Di Carlo on the Shanker Blog. Its appeal has been fueled by the availability of datasets that link teachers to students, as research on test-based effectiveness has grown in size and sophistication. And it is true, Di Carlo says: Analysis after analysis finds that all else equal, the effect of "top" versus "bottom" teachers is large. Even when some variation is attributable to confounding factors, discrepancies are still larger than with any other measured input. But the essential question, Di Carlo writes, is whether and how we can measure teacher performance at the individual level and thereby (more importantly) enhance teacher performance. This information is from the PEN NewsBlast.
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FIRST THINGS FIRST
Dean Dad blogs for Inside Higher Ed: We have a grant-funded program designed to get students with severe educational deficits into basic skills programs, and then into “contextualized” remediation that leads into short-term employable certificates. The idea is to help folks who would normally be consigned to the economic margins to become employable at higher, if still fairly modest, levels. The concept is good, broadly speaking. And it’s easy enough to measure success: did students wind up with better-paying jobs, or not? If students get jobs, the theory goes, then we’re doing something right; if they don’t, we aren’t. But we’ve hit a snag. And it’s not just the economy and the general lack of hiring, as relevant as those are. How do you measure the success of a job training program when many of the students aren’t legally eligible to work in America?

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WE NEED EXPERIENCED TEACHERS
Stanford education professor Pam Grossman writes in the Huffington Post: If we want to build an education system built to last, we need to prepare teachers for the long haul and support them in staying in the classroom. By treating teaching as a revolving door occupation, we shortchange both our students and our society.
CONCERN ABOUNDS OVER TEACHERS PREPAREDNESS FOR STANDARDS
A quiet, sub-rosa fear is brewing among supporters of the Common Core State Standards Initiative: that the standards will die the slow death of poor implementation in K-12 classrooms. "I predict the common-core standards will fail, unless we can do massive professional development for teachers," said Hung-Hsi Wu, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, who has written extensively about the common-core math standards. "There's no fast track to this." The article is in Education Week.
HOW TESTING IS HURTING TEACHING
Schools, have always been high stakes for students, particularly in fourth and seventh grades, when their scores determine whether they end up in the very awful school they are zoned for or the very attractive magnet school that draws from a larger and more competitive pool. But the stakes have recently become equally high for teachers, whose ability to teach is being determined by their ability to improve students’ test scores.  Many people think it’s about time. Teachers need to be held accountable for the work they are being paid to do, and many, many teachers need to get better at teaching. But tying teacher performance to student test scores is having an opposite effect: It’s producing worse teachers. The post is from The New York Times Schoolbook blog.
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COLLEGE BOARD CASHING IN ON PUSH FOR MORE DEGREES
The national push to increase the number of Americans with college degrees is enriching at least one key beneficiary: the College Board, the nonprofit organization best known for administering the SAT. Eleven states and the District of Columbia have each agreed to pay the College Board anywhere from several hundred thousand dollars to more than $1 million a year to test students in hopes of boosting their college-enrollment numbers, and the College Board is actively promoting its products in other states. The article is from the Hechinger Report.
REWARDING COMPLETION, STATES STEP UP
The national spotlight on improving college completion has never been stronger. The United States needs more college graduates to keep the economy healthy and expand opportunity for those struggling in America today, as nearly any educator and lawmaker will tell you. Campaigns to improve student completion are particularly concerned about the performance of our nation’s community colleges, which paradoxically serve as a major pathway to upward mobility in our society, while simultaneously generating stubbornly low graduation rates. Seeking to test policy levers that can change individual and institutional behaviors, a growing number of states are turning to the power of the purse. The article is from Jobs for the Future.
PROTO-MOOCS STAYS THE COURSE
The most provocative aspect of massively open online courses, or MOOCs, is how massive they can be. Last fall, several Stanford professors drew nearly 200,000 students to a series of free computer science courses, an experiment that spawned two companies. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology opened its first massive online engineering course this spring to the tune of 120,000 registrations. But for Jim Groom, an instructional technologist and adjunct professor at the University of Mary Washington, open online courses are not about scale and efficiency. They are about imagination and anarchy. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

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THREE START-UP ANNOUNCEMENTS FROM EDUCATION INNOVATION SUMMIT
The theme of disrupting higher education was buzzing among hundreds of conference attendees this week at the Education Innovation Summit at Arizona State University. The event offered start-up companies a captive audience for pitching their products.  For example, Altius Education introduced Helix,  a “learning environment” that uses personalized narratives to engage students and explain why learning is important. OpenStudy introduced SmartScore, a measurement of “soft skills” including teamwork, problem-solving, and engagement. Sophia, a social platform for teaching and learning, was purchased this week by Capella Education Company, the parent of the for-profit Capella University. The partnership means Sophia will roll out low-cost college courses online, beginning with a college-algebra course in June. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
CALL TO STATES: REVOLUTIONIZE TEACHER PREPARATION
States must recognize that they have some heavy-duty work to do before they can put the Common Core State Standards into practice. But they hold key powers that could prove pivotal in making the necessary changes: the authority to regulate teacher preparation and licensing and the ability to collect and publicize data that show how well those programs are doing. That was the bracing message delivered today by Gene Wilhoit, the executive director of the Council of Chief State School Officers, at a gathering of states that are meeting in Atlanta to share ideas on how best to implement the common standards. The post is from Education Week’s Curriculum Matters blog.
CALIFORNIA COMMUNITY COLLEGE OFFICE: TWO-TIER TUITION IS ILLEGAL
The office of the chancellor of the California Community College has announced that its review of two-tiered tuition at community colleges in the state has found that the practice would be illegal. The office has been studying the issue since Santa Monica College announced a plan -- since abandoned -- to charge more for some high-demand courses. The chancellor's office consulted with the state attorney general's office on the issue, but a spokeswoman for the chancellor's office said that no formal opinion was requested or provided. But she said that, based on the review and the consultations, the chancellor's office is "comfortable" feeling that two-tiered tuition "is not permissible and is therefore illegal" under California's education code. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
COLLEGES TO PROVE WORTH FOR STATE FUNDS
First their budgets came under the knife. And now the nation's colleges and universities are facing new scrutiny from legislators and governors who want assurances that scarce tax dollars aren't being wasted. The message to higher education leaders is simple: "If you want more money, prove you deserve it." In the jargon of policymakers, it's called performance funding. And little by little, it's making its way into higher education budgets across the nation, with schools getting more or less money based on their graduation rates and a host of other variables. Missouri recently laid the groundwork for its version of performance funding, while Illinois is in the first year of its fledgling initiative. The article is in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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STUDY LINKS ZONING TO EDUCATION DISPARITIES
This mantra of real estate agents and their clients alike is now the target of a new report from the Brookings Institution linking housing prices and zoning practices to effectively depriving low-income students of high-quality schools. Using test scores from schools in the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country, senior research analyst Jonathan Rothwell found that housing costs an average of 2.4 times more—close to $11,000 more per year—near a high-scoring public school than near a low-scoring one. The article is in Education Week.
MICROMANAGING EDUCATORS STIFLES REFORM
Teach for America’s Wendy Kopp writes in The Atlantic: First, the good news. Over the past 10 years, our country has experienced a sea change in the way we talk about education. We've embraced the need for accountability and high expectations as the true magnitude of educational inequality and its devastating effects have become clear. To close the vast gap in achievement between rich and poor students, political leaders have called for standards, assessments, and holding educators responsible for their students' performance. For all its flaws, No Child Left Behind, which was passed in 2002, shifted the conversation about education to focus on demonstrable student achievement rather than on inputs like class size and spending on technology. Now the bad news. We've tried to hold educators accountable for student performance without addressing the morass of process requirements that prevents them from doing what it takes to get great results for kids. We're asking educators to deliver better outcomes, but we haven't given them the flexibility and authority they need to meet high standards.
 
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TESTING THE TEACHERS
David Brooks writes in The New York Times: At some point, parents are going to decide that $160,000 is too high a price to pay for college if all you get is an empty credential and a fancy car-window sticker. One part of the solution is found in three little words: value-added assessments. Colleges have to test more to find out how they’re doing. It’s not enough to just measure inputs, the way the U.S. News-style rankings mostly do. Colleges and universities have to be able to provide prospective parents with data that will give them some sense of how much their students learn. There has to be some way to reward schools that actually do provide learning and punish schools that don’t. There has to be a better way to get data so schools themselves can figure out how they’re doing in comparison with their peers.
A BETTER GAUGE OF COMMUNITY COLLEGE SUCCESS
Until now, the graduation rate for community colleges has been based on the proportion of first-time, full-time, degree-seeking students who graduate within three or four years of enrolling. For many reasons, though, this rate has presented an incomplete and distorted picture of community college success. The majority of community-college students attend part-time, and many transfer in from other colleges. Both of these sizeable populations have been excluded in traditional graduation rate calculations. In addition, many students transfer to four-year colleges without first obtaining a community-college credential — and current measures make it appear as if these students haven’t been successful. A new approach will provide a more complete and accurate measure of community college success by including part-time students, as well as improving the reporting of transfer students and developing methods to measure the success of those who transfer in from other colleges. The post is from The Washington Post’s College Inc. blog.
BANKING ON SUCCESS
Technical colleges in Texas are poised to up the ante on performance-based state funding, linking 45 percent of their operating budget to the employment rates and salaries of alumni. State lawmakers have provided legislative encouragement to the Texas State Technical College System as it works on the still-developing proposal; the Legislature last year mandated that the system devise a funding formula that rewards “job placement and graduate earnings projections, not time in training.” The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
PREACHING TO THE CHOIR
Scottsdale, Ariz. — Michael Crow, the ubiquitous president of Arizona State University, opened the Education Innovation Summit here this week by giving his views of what ails higher ed. He called it “filiopietism,” or the excessive veneration of tradition. Not enough students are coming into the system, he said, and not enough are completing a credential to reach national goals. Quoting his father, Crow called this a “piss-poor performance.” The post is from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Next blog.
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HOW TRANSFER INCENTIVES ARE WORKING OUT
An interim report from the U.S. Department of Education's Institute of Education Sciences (IES) looks at its Talent Transfer Initiative (TTI), which offers $20,000 to high-performing teachers within certain categories if they transfer and remain for at least two years in selected low-achieving schools in a district. Teachers are recruited based on value-added measures using at least two years of student-achievement data. Teacher-applicants then must interview with and be accepted by the principal of the receiving school. The main interim findings were that filling vacancies through transfer incentives was feasible, although a large pool of candidates was needed to yield the desired number of successful transfers. The information is from PEN Newsblast.

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FROM SILICON VALLEY, A NEW APPROACH TO EDUCATION
Andrew Ng, a computer science professor at Stanford University, and Daphne Koller, a Stanford colleague, are launching a company called Coursera to bring more classes from elite universities to students around the world for free online."By providing what is a truly high-quality educational experience to so many students for free, I think we can really change many, many people's lives," Koller says. Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan will join Stanford. Two Venture capitalists are investing more than $15 million in the company. The piece ran on NPR’s All Things Considered.
REMEDIATION: BRIDGE TO NOWHERE
Developmental education is a dead end for the nearly two million students who enroll in remedial courses every year, says a report released today by Complete College America. The report, “Remediation: Higher Education’s Bridge to Nowhere,” says that less than one in 10 students enrolled at a community college graduate within three years, and just a little more than a third complete a bachelor’s degree in six years. However, the report says, the one-third to one-half of academically unprepared students could succeed in college-level courses if their remedial coursework were provided more as a “co-requisite” rather than a prerequisite to their full-credit classes. This information is from The Chronicle of Higher Education.
PUBLIC HIGHER EDUCATION: TOO BIG TO FAIL
UCLA Chancellor Gene Block writes in the Huffington Post: President Obama recently called on the nation's governors to invest more in education, including public higher education. "Countries that out-educate us today," he told the assembled governors at the White House, "will out-compete us tomorrow." The president also observed that budgets at the state and federal levels are about making tough choices. I agree. In late October 2008, for instance, when it looked as if our financial system might collapse, President Bush and the Congress made a choice: They authorized a massive infusion of federal dollars to rescue many of the largest financial institutions in the United States that were deemed to be "too big to fail."
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STUDY IDENTIFIED OPPORTUNITY GAP FOR STUDENTS
Educators have long studied the achievement gap, in which black and Hispanic pupils and low-income students of all races perform at much lower levels than their white, Asian and better-off peers. A new study released on Tuesday by a group that supported efforts to attain for more money for city schools looked at the educational opportunities available to poor and minority students and found the choices lacking. The report by the Schott Foundation for Public Education found that poor and minority students have fewer opportunities to attend the city’s best public schools largely because of where they live. The post is in The New York Times Schoolbook blog.
LAUSD CONSIDERS LOWERING BAR FOR GRADUATION
Eight years ago, the Los Angeles Board of Education adopted an ambitious plan to have all students take college-prep classes to raise academic standards in the nation's second-largest school district. Now, that plan is about to take effect: Beginning this fall, incoming freshmen will have to pass those classes to graduate. On Tuesday, district officials backtracked, offering details of a proposal to reduce overall graduation requirements and allow students to pass those classes with a D grade. The article is in the L.A. Times.

posted Apr 18, 2012 10:08 am

Daily News Roundup, April 17, 2012


Some of the News Fit to Print
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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.

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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.


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STUDIES GIVE NUANCED LOOK AT TEACHER EFFECTIVENESS
The massive Measures of Effective Teaching Project is finding that teacher effectiveness assessments similar to those used in some district value-added systems aren't good at showing which differences are important between the most and least effective educators, and often totally misunderstand the "messy middle" that most teachers occupy. Yet the project's latest findings suggest more nuanced teacher tests, multiple classroom observations and even student feedback can all create a better picture of what effective teaching looks like. The article is in Education Week.
NEW YORK TEACHER RATINGS RENEW EVALUATION DEBATE
How do you measure who is an effective teacher? More states are wrestling with that question, now that the Obama administration is encouraging schools to evaluate teachers with a combination of student test scores and classroom observations. The question of whether teacher evaluations are reliable indicators for teacher effectiveness has long been controversial. But New York City reignited the debate when it rated thousands of teachers with test scores alone — and then released those ratings to the public. The story is from NPR’s All Things Considered.
FEDERAL TEACHER EVALUATION REQUIREMENT HAS WIDE IMPACT
Elliott Elementary in Lincoln, Ne., struck off on its own last year when it became the only school in the city to win money through the federal School Improvement Grant (SIG) program. Winning wasn’t something to be proud of, though: It meant the school qualified as one of the worst in the nation. About a third of fifth-graders at Elliott were proficient on state reading tests when the reforms began, compared to 80 percent in Lincoln as a whole. Winning also meant a lot of work for teachers and administrators. One of the biggest tasks was overhauling the way teachers at the school are evaluated. In the Obama administration’s new push to turn around the bottom 5 percent of schools nationwide, the vast majority of districts chose the reform option that seemed the least invasive: Instead of closing schools or firing at least half of the teaching staff, schools could undergo less aggressive interventions, such as overhauling how teacher performance is measured and rewarding teachers who do well. The article is in The Hechinger Report.

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OPENING UP A PATH TO FOUR-YEAR DEGREES
At the end of his first year at the Community College of Philadelphia, Christopher Thomas decided that his goal — to go back to school and get a degree — was no longer worth it. He was in debt from thousands of dollars in student loans. After class, he rode a bus an hour and a half to a suburban restaurant where he worked as a waiter. When the shift ended at midnight, it took him three buses to get home. He couldn’t afford a computer, so in the middle of the night, he walked to his aunt’s house and used hers to finish his class work. He got seven A’s and a C, but the plan was for eight. The article is in The New York Times.
RESPONSE TO TUITION PLAN VEXES SANTA MONICA COLLEGE LEADERS
Nearing midnight and with the sting of pepper spray in the air, Santa Monica College trustees wondered how their plan to offer a selection of higher cost classes this summer had come to be so misunderstood. For many on the eight-member panel, which includes a humanities professor, an ACLU board member and a college counselor, the plan was conceived as a progressive response to drastic state funding cuts and was intended to increase access and allow more students to graduate and transfer. "It's an opportunity to make a very progressive policy, an opportunity to be Robin Hood," said trustee Rob Rader, who summed up the frustrations of many of his colleagues near the end of the April 3 meeting. The frustration of Rader and other college leaders has intensified as the campus plan has become a symbol of the desperate quest to increase access for students, while sparking a national debate on the mission of public colleges. The article is in the Los Angeles Times.