長官們:辦校要看全校而不只是"博雅".....
love your job, be patient, with passion,
Steve Jobs' Advice for Entrepreneurs
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gxo2rGr7Yfg
Some of the News Fit to Print
ABOUT K-12
WALTON FOUNDATION FUNDS NEW TEACHERS
The Arkansas-based Walton Family Foundation announced
Wednesday
that it was donating $20 million to a nonprofit that recruits talented
college graduates to teach in public schools for two years. The largest
number of instructors, more than 700, is slated for Los Angeles. The
gift is a continuation of support that has totaled more than $100
million to New York City-based Teach for America over its 24 years.
Walton's cumulative contribution to the group in Los Angeles is more
than $10 million, according to the foundation. The article is in the
L.A. Times.
RACE COMPLICATES A TRANSFER TO BETTER SCHOOLS
Public schools in the St. Louis region, as in many other metropolitan
areas across the country, have struggled for decades to bridge a wide
achievement gap between school districts — a divide that often runs
along racial and socioeconomic lines. By affirming the right to transfer
students out of failing school districts, the Missouri State Supreme
Court opened the doors for hundreds of families to cross the lines and
move their children into better schools. But the process remains a
tricky one, complicated by class, race, geography and social
perceptions. The article is in
The New York Times.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
MOOC BILL DEAD FOR NOW
A controversial California bill to pass off untold thousands of state
college students to nontraditional providers of instruction, some of
them for-profit or unaccredited, is dead for now. The bill, unveiled in
March by a powerful California lawmaker, initially would have required
the state’s 145 public colleges and universities to grant credit for
low-cost online courses offered by outside groups, including for-profits
companies, among them the providers of massive open online courses, or
MOOCs. The legislation was the subject of massive media coverage, with
many citing it as evidence that traditional higher ed models were
doomed. The article is in
Inside Higher Ed.
INPUTS TRUMP OUTPUTS
The easiest way for colleges to improve their graduation rates is to
serve fewer disadvantaged students, according to two new studies
released this week. The new research found that the characteristics of
incoming students largely predict their likelihood of completing
college. The papers arrive at a time when many politicians have
been endorsing ideas for rewarding institutions that perform well on
graduation rates. That concept, however, has been questioned by many at
colleges that educate non-wealthy, less-prepared students. The article
is in
Inside Higher Ed.
UNIVERSITY LEADERS CALL FOR MORE INVESTMENTS TO CLOSE THE ‘INNOVATION DEFICIT’
A group of more than 160 university presidents and chancellors
on Wednesday
sent a letter to President Obama and Congress urging them to increase
investments in research and higher education in order to close what they
called an “innovation deficit” that they said was harming the economy.
The effort was guided by the Association of American Universities, the
Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, and the leaders of
their member institutions. Their letter appears as an advertisement in
Politico, a newspaper in Washington, D.C. The article is in
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
ABOUT K-12
ARNE DUNCAN: SEQUESTRATION STILL ‘HEARTBREAKING’
Back in February, U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan went on CBS'
"Face the Nation" and warned that school districts could be forced to
cut 40,000 teacher jobs, thanks to a series of across-the-board federal
budget cuts known as sequestration. It is nearly August and students
around the country are starting their back-to-school shopping. Most
school districts have finished their budgets for the 2013-14 school
year—and there still aren't many stories of massive layoffs or even
major programmatic cuts due to the sequestration. Now that Congress is
set to revisit sequestration in the fights over raising the debt ceiling
and the fiscal year 2014 spending bills, will Duncan's initial
predictions come back to haunt him? He doesn't think so. "We are going
to continue to be extraordinarily vocal," he said. "Reversing the
sequester is extraordinarily high on my priority list. ... It's
heartbreaking to me that somehow politicians here in Washington think
those kinds of cuts are okay." The post is from
Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog.
CHIEF INNOVATION OFFICERS MAKE THEIR WAY INTO SCHOOLS
Chief innovation officers are slowly popping up in districts around the
country. Some say they fill a gap in leadership that's preventing
education from moving forward. Large urban school systems including
Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee have created this position. The officers
might provide visionary leadership, assist with communications, or help
prepare students for college. The article is in
Governing magazine.
NEGATIVE IMPACT OF TEACHER TURNOVER
Student achievement in mathematics and English language arts frays when
teachers leave. Turnover is particularly harmful to students in schools
with large populations of low-performing and black students, this
research shows. Teachers who stay also are hurt by turnover because they
bear the responsibility of mentoring new teachers, carry more of the
instructional burden, and have fewer opportunities for professional
development. The report is from the Education Commission of the States.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
THE OLD COMMUNITY COLLEGE TRY
President Obama may have strong words for colleges about tuition
prices, but he continues to push for more federal funding for community
colleges. In a major speech
Tuesday
on job creation Obama repackaged a February budget proposal for an $8
billion “Community College to Career Fund.” The address follows the
president’s vow six days ago to “shake up” higher education to ensure
better value for middle-class students and their families. The article
is in
Inside Higher Ed.
EFFORTS TO RECRUIT POOR STUDENTS LAG AT SOME ELITE COLLEGES
With affirmative action under attack and economic mobility feared to be
stagnating, top colleges profess a growing commitment to recruiting
poor students. But
a comparison of low-income enrollment shows wide disparities among the most competitive private colleges. The article is in
The New York Times.
STATES OFFER STUDENTS AN INCENTIVE TO GRADUATE: MONEY
WASHINGTON — Every year states hand out more than $11 billion in
financial aid to college students with no certainty as to whether
they’ll ever graduate. Many states don’t track the money. They simply
hand it over and hope for the best, as one educational consultant put
it. It’s a “one-sided partnership,” according to Stan Jones, the
president of the advocacy organization Complete College America. “The
states provide the funds, but the expectations states have of students
are really pretty low. The article is in
The Hechinger Report.
ABOUT K-12
NORTH CAROLINA ENDS TEACHER TENURE
North Carolina became the latest state to overhaul its teacher tenure
rules, directing school administrators to offer four-year contracts to
top performers but one- or two-year contracts to everybody else.
Longer-term job security will be limited to the 25% of teachers who are
ranked most effective. ECS' Kathy Christie offered examples of states
that have made changes to tenure laws. Check ECS' tenure brief and
policy database. Note: Idaho voters repealed the state's tenure reforms
in 2012. The article is in
Stateline.org.
SCHOOLS NEED MORE MONEY, RESOURCES TO IMPLEMENT COMMON CORE
Many K-12 schools are worried about meeting the requirements of new
Common Core State Standards. The schools are in need of adequate IT
infrastructures to successfully meet the standards, and both
implementation and cost present serious challenges to districts.
According to Debra Donston-Miller of Information Week, schools are
struggling to implement new standards as they need more and updated IT
resources. Schools and districts have found it difficult to meet
standards faithfully using out of date technology and skills. The
article is at EducationNews.org.
MATH TEACHERS FIND COMMON CORE MORE RIGOROUS
A large majority of middle school math teachers say the common core is
more rigorous than their state's prior mathematics standards. At the
same time, most teachers reported receiving fewer than 20 hours of
professional development over the past year related to the common core,
according to the
new study.
These and other findings come from a joint project among researchers at
several universities supported by a grant from the National Science
Foundation. The article is in
Education Week.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
WHAT ONLINE EDUCATION CANNOT TEACH
CUNY philosophy professor Jennifer Morton writes in
The Chronicle of Higher Education:
For students from low-income families who manage to overcome the tough
odds, college is the first place where they will be asked to defend a
position and to engage in vigorous intellectual debate. It is also
likely to be the first place where they have to consistently engage with
middle-class students and professors and navigate middle-class social
norms. Yet more and more colleges are adopting MOOCs (massive open
online courses), consisting of recorded lectures and online assignments.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
MAKEOVER FOR TECHNICAL COLLEGES, BASED ON GRADUATE’S EARNINGS
SWEETWATER — Striking a tone that has become increasingly fashionable
among Texas politicians, House Speaker Joe Straus urged his fellow
lawmakers at the outset of this year’s legislative session to “expand
opportunity in Texas this session by improving coordination among high
schools, community and technical colleges and the private sector so that
no young person feels destined to spend life drifting from one
low-skilled, minimum-wage job to the next. The article is in
The New York Times.
AN ONLINE REVOLUTION IS COMING
Danielle Allen from the Institute for Advanced Study writes in
The Washington Post:
Whether for good or ill, MOOCs augur a disruption of the relationships
among students, colleges and trade schools, and the credentials those
schools offer — a relationship that has stabilized higher education for
at least a century. Yet if done right — a big if, as recent events at
San Jose State and Colorado State universities have shown — they may
help address the quality and cost of higher education.
WHY 'FISHER' MEANS MORE WORK FOR COLLEGES
In
Fisher v. University of Texas, the U.S. Supreme Court
affirmed a decades-old principle that colleges and universities may use
race-conscious affirmative-action plans in order to enroll a diverse
student body. To consider race in admissions, however, institutions must
prove to courts that race-neutral alternatives—such as relying on
socioeconomic status or where students live—will not work. In the
court's words, colleges must prove that "no workable race-neutral
alternatives would produce the educational benefits of diversity." The
commentary, by Thomas Kane and James Ryan with the Harvard Graduate
School of Education, is in
The Chronicle of Higher Education.
ABOUT K-12
THE MOST BACKWARD LEGISLATURE IN AMERICA
John Wilson blogs for
Education Week: Once known for having
the most innovative and progressive public school system in America,
North Carolina is now a trajectory of backwardness. This legislature has
put North Carolina in a race to the bottom on per pupil expenditures.
This legislature chose to cut education by a half a billion
dollars--even though the state had more resources available than in
previous years. North Carolina will lose over 5,000 teachers,
counselors, and school psychologists. A reading program that provided
teaching assistants for K-3 classrooms was decimated by the elimination
of almost 4,000 positions. Cuts to textbooks and instructional supplies
exceeded $120 million. This is backward.
