Daily News Roundup, May 8, 2013
Some of the News Fit to Print
ABOUT HIGHER ED
IN CALIFORNIA, PUSH FOR COLLEGE DIVERSITY STARTS EARLIER
California was one of the first states to abolish affirmative action, after voters approved Proposition 209 in 1996. Across the University of California system, Latinos fell to 12 percent of newly enrolled state residents in the mid-1990s from more than 15 percent, and blacks declined to 3 percent from 4 percent. At the most competitive campuses, at Berkeley and Los Angeles, the decline was much steeper. Eventually, the numbers rebounded. Until last fall, 25 percent of new students were Latino, reflecting the booming Hispanic population, and 4 percent were black. A similar pattern of decline and recovery followed at other state universities that eliminated race as a factor in admissions. The article is in The New York Times.
TOUGH WORDS FOR TRIO
WASHINGTON -- A report from the Brookings Institution released Tuesday makes a harsh judgment about the federal government’s college preparation programs for low-income students: After four decades, the programs have little to show in return for the Education Department’s $1 billion annual investment. The policy brief, which appears in the journal The Future of Children, a joint project of Brookings and Princeton University, calls for a major overhaul of federally funded college preparation programs. Under the authors’ proposal, funding for all federal preparation programs -- including TRIO Programs, such as Upward Bound and Student Support Services, as well as GEAR UP -- would be consolidated, creating $1 billion in federal grants. Colleges, school districts and for-profit and nonprofit agencies could apply for the grants, which would be awarded to applicants using “evidence-based interventions.” The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
LOW-INCOME STUDENTS PAY HIGH NET PRICES
At hundreds of colleges, low-income students pay high prices, even after grant aid. That's one key finding of an analysis of federal data released on Wednesday by the New America Foundation. In the paper, "Undermining Pell: How Colleges Compete for Wealthy Students and Leave the Low-Income Behind," Stephen Burd, a senior policy analyst at the foundation, evaluates how well individual colleges with varying resources serve low-income students. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
THE ‘DARK SIDE’ OF TECH INNOVATION
Companies, colleges, and columnists gush about the utopian possibilities of technology. But digital life has a bleaker side, too. Over the weekend, a cross-disciplinary group of scholars convened here to focus attention on the lesser-noticed consequences of innovation. Surveillance. Racism. Drones. Those were some of the issues discussed at the conference, which was called "The Dark Side of the Digital" and hosted by the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee's Center for 21st Century Studies. (One speaker even flew a small drone as a visual aid; it hit the classroom ceiling and crashed.) The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.
ABOUT K-12
ARE TEACHER EVALUATIONS PUBLIC?
Stephen Sawchuk writes in Education Week: In the wake of several states releasing large sets of "value added" data on individual teachers to media outlets last year, I wrote a widely read story for Education Week on whether formal teacher-evaluation records are publicly accessible. We found quite a lot of variation in the scope of states' open-records laws. A lot has changed since 2012, with at least four states altering their laws since the story ran. So we wanted to give you a sense of where things stand now.
EARLY COLLEGE READINESS ASSESSMENTS GROWING
Concern over high school graduates being unprepared for college-level work has educators and policymakers looking for ways to identify learning gaps earlier. A new review by the Community College Research Center finds some form of early-college-readiness assessments are offered in 38 states, and 29 states have structured interventions to help reduce the need for remedial coursework for incoming college freshman. The paper, Reshaping the College Transition by Elisabeth A. Barnett, Maggie P. Fay, Rachel Hare Bork, Madeline Joy Weiss of Columbia University suggests that the number of state and local initiatives employing these tactics is widespread and growing. The post is from Education Week’s College Bound blog.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
LOW BAR, HIGH FAILURE
Community colleges set a low bar for students during their first year of enrollment, with lax academic standards in literacy and mathematics, according to a new study from the National Center on Education and the Economy. And many students fail to meet even those minimal expectations. The study released today uncovered “disturbingly low standards among community college instructors,” said Marc S. Tucker, president of the center, a nonprofit group that focuses on academic assessment and standards across systems of education. “It’s clear that we’re cheating our students.” The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
COULD THE BEST VALUE IN EDUCATION BE COMMUNITY COLLEGES?
The Wall Street Journal reports that while going to college remains a profitable proposition in the long run, value is steadily shifting from four-year degrees to programs offered in community colleges. Although it has been the received wisdom that any four-year degree is valuable, new research shows that unilaterally investing in a bachelor’s – without consideration for the merits of the school granting the degree – no longer provides the return on investment it once did. Choosing a school has become a little easier for students and families now that a number of states publish first-year earnings of graduates from state schools. In some cases, the states publish a breakdown by major as well, and those looking at the data can gain some surprising insights. The article is from EducationNews.org.
ABOUT K-12
RIFTS DEEPEN OVER DIRECTION OF ED POLICY IN U.S.
In statehouses and cities across the country, battles are raging over the direction of education policy—from the standards that will shape what students learn to how test results will be used to judge a teacher's performance. Students and teachers, in passive resistance, are refusing to take and give standardized tests. Protesters have marched to the White House over what they see as the privatization of the nation's schools. Professional and citizen lobbyists are packing hearings in state capitols to argue that the federal government is trying to dictate curricula through the use of common standards. The article is in Education Week.
TEACHER PAY HURT BY RECESSION, REPORT SAYS
During the recession and its aftermath, public schools took a hit as both state coffers and local property taxes shriveled. That showed up in shrinking employment, but also in teacher salaries. According to a new report, the vast majority of teachers in the nation’s largest school districts took a pay cut or saw their pay frozen at least one year between 2008 and 2012. The report by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a nonprofit group that advocates for tougher teacher standards, looked at salary data across 41 of the country’s 50 largest school districts. Average annual teacher pay increases, which included cost-of-living and contractually negotiated raises as well as increases awarded for extra years of experience, dropped from 3.6 percent in the 2008-09 school year to 1.3 percent in the 2011-12 year.
Daily News Roundup, May 6, 2013
Some of the News Fit to Print
ABOUT K-12
REWARDS FOR SCHOOLS KEY FACET OF NCLB WAIVERS
One of the chief complaints about the No Child Left Behind Act has been that districts and schools that fail to meet achievement targets face serious sanctions, while schools that do a good job of closing the gaps between traditionally overlooked groups of students and their peers essentially get little in return. To help alleviate those concerns, the U.S. Department of Education asked states to identify so-called "reward schools" in their applications for waivers easing demands of the NCLB law, the current version of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which Congress has yet to revise. States had to include not only high fliers—schools with consistently high student achievement—but also schools making significant progress with groups of students who had often struggled in the past. The article is in Education Week.
TED TEAMS WITH PBS
Television viewers — even those who watch the more sober-minded PBS — are generally not keen on sitting through long speeches. But TED, the nonprofit group that sponsors conferences on ideas, thinks it has found a way to bring its signature 18-minute talks to a TV audience that may not have found them on the Web or through mobile apps. In its first television foray, TED has joined forces with the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the New York public broadcaster WNET for a one-hour special, “TED Talks Education,” to be broadcast on PBS on Tuesday. If it is successful, the program could become a template for future joint projects, said Juliet Blake, one of the show’s executive producers and the TED official charged with bringing the conferences to television. The article is in The New York Times.
STATE BOARD OF EDUCATION SETS GRADUATION STANDARDS
High school graduates in North Carolina will have seals on their diplomas in a few years showing whether they are ready for work or college under new criteria the State Board of Education adopted Thursday. The new standards follow a state law and Gov. Pat McCrory’s campaign promise to boost student interest in post-high school jobs. Students starting their junior year in the fall would be the first to earn the designations. The board set out three paths for students earning seals on their diplomas: career, community college and four-year university. High school graduates who have GPAs of 2.6 or better and have completed Algebra II or integrated math III among their four high school math courses will be considered ready for college-level courses in community colleges. The article is in the Raleigh News and Observer.
NEA PREPARES NEW STATEMENT ON DIGITAL LEARNING
The board of the National Education Association, which represents college faculty members in addition to elementary and secondary school teachers, on Friday approved a new statement on digital learning that is likely to be adopted as official policy for the union by its Representative Assembly in July. The policy, which applies to both K-12 and higher education:
Endorses "hybrid" teaching -- involving both technology and teachers -- as the best approach.
Calls for teachers to be centrally involved in decisions about how to use technology in classrooms.
Says that "education employees should own the copyright to materials that they create in the course of their employment.
Urges policy makers to consider the extent to which increased reliance on technology for learning may exacerbate inequities in the education system.
The information is from Inside Higher Ed’s Quick Takes.Calls for teachers to be centrally involved in decisions about how to use technology in classrooms.
Says that "education employees should own the copyright to materials that they create in the course of their employment.
Urges policy makers to consider the extent to which increased reliance on technology for learning may exacerbate inequities in the education system.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
IS COLLEGE WORTH IT?
The unemployment rate for college graduates in April was a mere 3.9 percent, compared with 7.5 percent for the work force as a whole, according to a Labor Department report released Friday. Even when the jobless rate for college graduates was at its very worst in this business cycle, in November 2010, it was still just 5.1 percent. That is close to the jobless rate the rest of the work force experiences when the economy is good. Among all segments of workers sorted by educational attainment, college graduates are the only group that has more people employed today than when the recession started. The article is in The New York Times.
RECIPROCITY IS ESSENTIAL FOR REGULATING DISTANCE EDUCATION
Former Secretary of Education Richard Riley writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education: Unfortunately, the rapid growth of distance-education programs has outpaced the ability of states and the federal government to provide a coherent and comprehensive system of regulation. One result is that education providers face a patchwork of individual state regulations with different requirements and varying degrees of complexity and costs. This drains institutional resources and threatens to deprive students of educational opportunities. But complexity, confusion, and costs of compliance can be reduced if states work together to develop laws and regulations that embody common principles and rules, while also assuring appropriate consumer protection and quality of service.
朱敬一說，高中公民與社會課本，不同冊由不同人編寫，法律、政治、經濟與社會學硬被切割成不同領域，「但社會是一個整體，高中生對於社會運作的法則必須要有整體的了解，所以一定要由一個人去寫、一個人去教，才能授予通盤的整體觀。」
（圖文︰記者湯佳玲）
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