German Fascination With Degrees Claims Latest Victim: Education Minister
By NICHOLAS KULISH and CHRIS COTTRELL
Annette Schavan
resigned on Saturday, the second time a minister has quit the government
of Chancellor Angela Merkel for plagiarism in less than two years. 紐約時報
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歐洲特派記者胡蕙寧／倫敦—柏林十日報導〕繼前國防部長谷登柏格因論文抄襲而被迫下台後，當時全力撻伐他的教育部長夏凡（Annette
Schavan）居然重蹈覆轍。就在杜塞道夫的母校決議摘除她的博士頭銜四天後，九日晚間夏凡終於和總理梅克爾共同宣布，辭去教長職務。此舉讓梅克爾在今
秋大選前痛失一名心腹戰友，也對聯合執政的基督教民主黨造成極大信任衝擊。 一本以「個人和良知」為題、躺在圖書館三十多年從未有人給予特別 關注的博士論文，近一週來卻在德國政壇掀起風暴。夏凡去職是繼前國防部長谷登柏格丟官後，對梅克爾政權的再度衝擊，顯示她用人不當。德國媒體比較梅克爾對 谷登柏格和夏凡辭職的反應，一致認為這位女總理對夏凡去職流露更多不捨與抱歉的表情。 去年初，一個稱為「夏凡剽竊」 （schavanplag）的網站，列舉夏凡博士論文中沒有標出引註的許多段落，因而開始面對各界質疑。五十七歲的她為了避嫌，主動請求母校審查這份獲評 為優等的論文。結果，杜塞道夫大學一個十五人博士論文委員會經過調查，有十二人認為該文因大量未標示出處的原文挪用，不當取得優秀成績，五日晚間宣布取消 她的博士頭銜。夏凡僅承認論文中有一些「疏忽之誤」，但否認惡意抄襲。 事發後，幾乎所有媒體的民調都一面倒地認為她應下台。夏凡與梅克爾長 談後決定去職，但再度強調不服校方作法，並將採取法律手段爭取到底。她說，辭職是為了不讓教長職務和整個聯合政府繼續受到負面影響。教長遺缺將由現任下薩 克森州科學部長王卡（Johanna Wanka）接任。 網路興起獵殺造假論文行業 事實上，在谷登柏格因博士論文抄襲案而下 台後，整個德國政界有博士頭銜者，幾乎都成為被獵殺的目標，網路上甚至誕生一種獵殺造假論文的行業，專審學術與博士論文，行情以三十歐元（約一千兩百台 幣）起跳，頁數過多可能得花上千歐元。一旦真的發現抄襲內容，核對並註明抄襲來源的要價更高，因為這一關才是上法庭提證的最重要關鍵。 |
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卡內基基金會的一些新聞摘要
Some of the News Fit to PrintABOUT HIGHER ED
RE-THINKING THE COMPLETION AGENDA
Valencia College President Sanford C. Shugart with help from his colleague Richard Rhodes, who is a Carnegie Board member and president of Austin Community College District, provide us with principles that can move the needle on student completion. Shugart writes: “Given that the national goal of increasing the percentage of working Americans with a degree depends very heavily on enrolling and graduating many more nontraditional students, we might draw special attention to the challenges of the community colleges, where more than half of all college students begin their educations, and where 80 percent of the underrepresented, the poor, and the first-generation students are served. If they are to be enfranchised at all (and we need them to be, since, as was once said, demographics is destiny), we need them to experience pathways to deep learning, progression, graduation, and further education. Everyone, from the White House to the major foundations, to the associations and the policy mavens around Dupont Circle, is talking about this. So here is the challenge we face as an industry: We are being asked to achieve much better results with fewer resources to engage a needier student population in an atmosphere of serious skepticism where all journalism is yellow and our larger society no longer exempts our institutions (nor us) from the deep distrust that has grown toward all institutions.”
With input from Rhodes, Shugart offers some themes to consider and concrete suggestions for improvement. The commentary is in Inside Higher Ed.
WHY HIGHER EDUCATION MUST BE PART OF IMMIGRATION REFORM
CEO of Teach for All Wendy Kopp writes in Time magazine: Last week, President Obama and a bipartisan group of senators outlined a plan for comprehensive immigration reform. Like the DREAM Act that has stalled for years in Congress, the proposal’s outline hints at an expedited pathway to citizenship for young people who came to the U.S. as children if they attend college or serve in the military. As the details are worked out in the coming weeks, it is critical that legislation include provisions that make it easier for undocumented high schoolers to go to college. Education is the gateway to the American Dream. But today our immigration laws make higher education — a virtual requirement for financial security — out of reach for more than one million undocumented students.
LUMINA CEO ANSWERS QUESTIONS ON COLLEGE COMPLETION
The Lumina Foundation is committed to enrolling and graduating more students from college. CEO Jamie Merisotis takes that message around the country. Last week, he spoke to the Economic Club of Florida. The Foundation’s goal is for 60 percent of Americans to earn a high-quality post secondary credential or degree by 2025. Merisotis took questions from the audience about how to reach that goal. The interview was on several NPR stations.
ABOUT K-12
WAIVERS AND ESEA RENEWAL GET HARD LOOK FROM SENATORS
The Obama administration has issued more than 30 waivers to help states get relief from parts of No Child Left Behind. The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held a hearing on the waivers yesterday. Committee members debated whether Congress should move forward on the long-overdue reauthorization of the law, or step back and allow waivers to take hold in states, and then learn from them. So what's happens next? In an interview after the hearing, Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, head of the Committee said it was too early to say. He's not sure just yet if he wants to have more hearings, or get going on a bill. And he said that while elements of the committee's 2011 ESEA renewal bill are likely to inform the new version, the panel also will likely take into account concerns it heard about that bill. (He didn't say this, but many in the disability community, which is close with Harkin, didn't like that legislation one bit.) "It's a new Congress," he said. "I think we need to make a fresh start on it," possibly incorporating some of the ideas states have put into the waivers. The post is from Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog.
OREGON BILL WOULD REQUIRE COLLEGE CREDIT IN HIGH SCHOOL
A proposed Oregon bill, would require college credit for six of the 24 high-school classes necessary to earn a diploma, starting with the class of 2020. The move would increase the number of students going to college, make their degrees more affordable, and encourage students not considering college to continue in higher education, said the sponsor. The article is in Diverse Issues in Higher Education.
EDUCATION TECH NON-PROFIT LAUNCHES WITH CARNEGIE CORP, GATES SUPPORT
With some major names behind it as funders and advisors, the new non-profit inBloom aims “to make personalized learning a reality for every U.S. student by improving the effectiveness, variety and affordability of education technology.” The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation of New York have provided startup funding. The announcement was in the Non-Profit Quarterly.
BILL GATES BETS BIG ON BIG DATA SAVING SCHOOLS
Bill Gates trumpeted his numbers-driven approach to philanthropy at a Manhattan meeting with six reporters and writers recently where he laid out his wish list for how to improve data-gathering efforts to address social, health, and economic problems around the world. The world's most generous donor also launched a few missives aimed at fellow philanthropists -- who, he says, devote too much funding to disaster-relief in the wake of floods and earthquakes, and too little to sustained improvements that prevent disasters from wreaking such havoc. He also took aim at the federal government, which he said should spend more money on research and development on innovative policy reforms, particularly in public education. The article is in The National Journal.
CALIFORNIA ABANDONS ALGEBRA REQUIREMENT FOR EIGHTH-GRADERS
By falling in line with other states, California's state board voted last month to shift away from a 15-year policy of expecting 8th-graders to take Algebra I. The state will allow them to take either Algebra I or an alternate course that includes some algebra. New state standardized tests will focus on the alternate course -- the same one adopted under the Common Core. The article is in the San Jose Mercury News.
STATES LACK DATA ON PRINCIPALS, STUDY SAYS
While principals increasingly are moving to center stage in national debates over school improvement, a new study finds most states have little or no information about how their principals are prepared, licensed, supported, and evaluated. The article is in Education Week.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
MOOCS AND TABLET COMPUTING ARE TOP TRENDS
MOOCs and tablet computers top the list of emerging higher-education technologies in this year’s “Horizon Report,” by the New Media Consortium. The report, which has been released each year since 2004, describes six technologies that are expected to influence learning and teaching during the next five years. The technologies are divided into three tiers of varying time horizons: near term, midterm, and far term. The post is from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired blog.
WHY THE ONLINE ED MOOC DIDN’T WORK
When word spread this weekend that a massive open online course about online education had to be suspended due to technology problems that left many students angry, officials from Coursera and the Georgia Institute of Technology were not available for comment. In interviews Monday, however, officials of both Coursera and Georgia Tech confirmed that the major issue concerned the ability of the 41,000 students to discuss topics in small groups, and that the technology for that feature indeed was not working. The officials also said that they were confident that fixes would be made in a short time period, and that the course would then continue. The article is in Inside Higher Ed’s Quick Takes.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
CARE, CAUTION AND THE ‘CREDIT HOUR’ CONVERSATION
Council for Higher Education Accreditation President Judith Eaton writes in University World News: Federal regulations that place authority for student learning outcomes in the hands of government officials and not academics are undesirable and, frankly, likely to be less than effective. If the government now defines the credit hour, decides the data that are to be used for student learning outcomes, and leads experiments in alternative approaches for using an outcomes-based approach to the credit hour, what is left for the academy to do?
GIVING CREDIT, BUT IS IT DUE?
Kevin Carey writes in The New York Times: The college internship as we know it today has evolved into an awkward marriage between organizations with very different missions. Both sides are offering something of legitimate value — from the workplace, experience and connections; from colleges, credits that lead to degrees — even as they also help their bottom lines. Students, meanwhile, are faced with a system whose rules vary widely among different colleges, or even departments within colleges, as they try to reach a goal that can be all too elusive: a good job that pays a good wage.
FREE COURSE, INEXPENSIVE EXAM
Free online courses don’t lead to college credit, at least not directly. But students can use free course content from providers like the Saylor Foundation and Education Portal to study for “challenge exams,” which may be the fastest and most inexpensive way to earn credits. The examinations, like those offered by Excelsior College and the College Board’s College Level Examination Program (CLEP), are designed to test whether students grasp the concepts that would be taught in a conventional classroom version of general education courses. In that sense, they combine elements of both competency-based education and prior-learning assessment. Last year, about 18,000 people took Excelsior exams. And 76,000 passed CLEP exams, with 98,000 taking the tests. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
ABOUT K-12
HOLDING EDUCATION HOSTAGE
Diane Ravitch writes in The New York Review of Books: Many researchers and testing experts have cautioned that evaluating teachers by the test scores of their students—called value-added assessment—is fraught with problems. Linda Darling-Hammond, a prominent scholar at Stanford University and one of the nation’s leading authorities on issues of teacher quality, has written that the measures say more about which students are in the classroom than about the competence of the teacher. The National Academy of Education and the American Educational Research Association issued a joint statement saying the same thing. Those who teach students with disabilities, English-language learners, and low-performing students are likely to get smaller gains in test scores than those who teach students from affluent homes in well-funded schools. Using test scores to rate teachers will penalize those who teach the students in greatest need. Over time, teachers will avoid the students who jeopardize their jobs and their reputations. This will be harmful to the students who need talented and experienced teachers most urgently. Across the nation, as districts put into effect the “reform” that Secretary Duncan wants, the consequences have been counterproductive.
PRESSURE MOUNTS IN SOME STATES AGAINST COMMON CORE
Opponents of the Common Core State Standards are ramping up legislative pressure and public relations efforts aimed at getting states to scale back—or even abandon—the high-profile initiative, even as implementation proceeds and tests aligned with the standards loom. The article is in Education Week.
TEACHERS EMBRACE ‘DEEP LEARNING’
Special PBS correspondent John Tulenko looks at some schools that institute real world applications into lesson plans and emphasize the importance of improvement over intelligence. The schools are less interested in testing but rather making sure students have the life skills they need once they leave the classroom. The piece was on NewsHour.
RE-THINKING THE NOTION OF 'NON-COGNITIVE'
David T. Conley suggests that in elevating content-cognitive knowledge above noncognitive attitudes and beliefs we miss a richer, more nuanced view of learning that includes all learning processes and behaviors. Gaining insight into noncognitive issues "would enable educators to teach students how to learn, as well as what to learn," he writes, advocating for the term metacognition instead of noncognitive. The commentary is in Education Week.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
CAN FUNDING BE FAIR?
The 10-campus University of California likes to style itself as one university. It has one governing board that sets the same tuition rates for all campuses, its campuses use the same admissions process and it has one line in the state budget. But it values students at its campuses differently. In 2009, the Santa Cruz campus received $6,723 in state funding per full-time student (both graduate and undergraduate), according to the Delta Cost Project. The Los Angeles campus received $14,736 per student. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
REPORT ON STUDENT-AID REFORM CALLS FOR MAKING PELL GRANTS AN ENTITLEMENT
Expanding the Pell Grant program, reducing student-loan debt, and eliminating tuition tax breaks are necessary steps toward improving the federal financial-aid system, according to a new report. The report proposes specific policy changes that would reorganize several hundreds of billions of dollars in spending to deal with what the authors say are inefficiencies in postsecondary financial aid. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
ABOUT K-12
CUOMO: STATE MIGHT IMPOSE EVALUATIONS
State officials will impose their own job evaluation system on New York City's teachers if a deal isn't reached soon between the union and the city, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Wednesday. Mr. Cuomo vowed to sign a new law empowering the state Education Department to act as a binding arbitrator in the negotiations unless an agreement was reached "shortly," he said. The failure to reach a deal by a deadline earlier this month already cost the city's school system about $240 million. The article is in the Wall Street Journal.
ABOUT K-12
GRADE OUR TEACHERS, HELP OUR STUDENTS
Bill Gates provides this commentary in CNN: Today I released my annual letter. Each year, I reflect on what I learned in the last year through our travels and work with the foundation and how that will shape my thinking over the coming months. This year, my letter focuses on how important it is to set clear goals and measure progress in order to accomplish the foundation's priorities, both here at home and around the world. Setting a clear goal lets you know what you're driving at: Picking the right interventions that will have the most impact on that final goal, using that information to understand what's working and what's not, and adapting your strategy as necessary. One of the clearest examples of the power of measurement was the work of our partners to support great teachers. In the past few years, the quest to understand great teaching has been at the center of the public discussion about how to improve education in America. But for the country's 3 million teachers and 50 million schoolchildren, great teaching isn't an abstract policy issue. For teachers, understanding great teaching means the opportunity to receive feedback on the skills and techniques that can help them excel in their careers. For students, it means a better chance of graduating from high school ready for success in life.
UNION BACKS 'BAR EXAM' FOR TEACHERS
The system for preparing and licensing teachers in the U.S. is in such disarray that the American Federation of Teachers is proposing a "bar exam" similar to the one lawyers have to pass before they can practice. Currently, there's a patchwork of different certification requirements that vary state by state. There's no single standard to determine who's fit and who's not fit to teach. It's an archaic system that Randi Weingarten, president of the teachers union, says must be replaced with one question in mind. Weingarten, who was a lawyer before she was a classroom teacher, is convinced that something akin to a bar exam for teachers is the answer. It would test a person's knowledge based on the subject he or she was hired to teach, and it would gauge one's understanding of how children learn. The story is on NPR.
DISTRICTS FACE ROADBLOCKS IN DEVELOPING TEACHER EVALUATIONS
School districts around the country are facing obstacles as they attempt to finalize new teacher evaluation systems in time for the 2013-14 school year. At least 30 states have passed laws requiring new evaluation systems, but many cities are experiencing pushback from teachers and unions, particularly on requirements to include student test scores as a part of a teacher’s rating. The article is in the HechingerEd blog.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
SPENDING MONEY TO MAKE MONEY
An associate degree is typically a cost-effective investment, for both students and state governments, yet community colleges continue to draw the short straw during budget season. That's the bottom line of a newly released report from the American Association of Community Colleges, which tries to bolster the sector’s case for its efficient use of state funding by estimating community college graduates' annual tax payments. The estimates show that workers earn bigger paychecks and pay more in taxes for each level of education they have completed, from high school graduates to bachelor’s degree-holders. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
EIGHT BRILLIANT MINDS ON THE FUTURE OF ONLINE EDUCATION
Eric Hellweg reports in Bloomberg: The advent of massively open online classes (MOOCs) is the single most important technological development of the millennium so far. I say this for two main reasons. First, for the enormously transformative impact MOOCs can have on literally billions of people in the world. Second, for the equally disruptive effect MOOCs will inevitably have on the global education industry. While at Davos, I was fortunate to attend an amazing panel — my favorite of the conference — with a murderer's row of speakers. Moderated by Thomas Friedman of The New York Times, the list of speakers: Larry Summers, former president of Harvard; Bill Gates; Peter Theil, a partner at Founder's Fund; Rafael Reif, president of MIT; Sebastian Thrun, CEO of Udacity; Daphne Koller, CEO of Coursera, and a 12-year-old Pakistani girl who has taken a number of Stanford physics classes through Udacity. Below is a collection of some of the highlighted comments from this remarkable panel as well as a couple from audience members who were given an opportunity to comment.
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