Links for 12/15/09

Tim Ranzetta and here

the three-year cohort default figures … sees an increase in the overall rate from 6.7% to 11.8%.

• 4-Year Private: 6.3%
• 4-Year Public: 7.1%
• 2-Year Public: 16.2%
- Proprietary: 21.2%

Andrew Trounson

UNIVERSITY students could be made to sit a generic skills test to assess what value has been added by their tutors as part of Education Minister Julia Gillard's plans to link university funding to performance targets from 2012.

Kevin Carey

The problem is that the study and the practice of education aren't the same thing... Inevitably, education schools evolved in response to institutional incentives and the research-university culture. Faculty members focused on developing specialized knowledge … with titles like "Complicating Swedish Feminist Pedagogy" and "The Hermeneutic Process Pertaining to Laozi."

At the same time, studies examining the relationship between having a master's degree in education and being effective in the classroom (most conducted in departments of economics, not education) nearly always find that no such relationship exists—despite the fact that states pay teachers an extra $8.6-billion in salary per year for acquiring those degrees.

Edububble

Shirley Ann Jackson. Being the highest paid president of any university wasn’t enough for her. Nor were seven bedrooms and 4800+ square feet. So the Trustees of this fair university decided to spend the extra cash from last year’s layoffs on a big, new manse for her. Oh wait. That’s not exactly correct. The letter from the Trustees somehow suggest that the money arrived with conditions that it could only be spent on a bigger, better, more impressive house for Ms. Jackson.