Links for 10/27/10

Rick Hess

New York City teachers are also eligible for a voluntary tax-deferred annuity retirement program. That plan for many years guaranteed teachers at least an 8.25% rate of return on investments, with the city committed to fully honoring the rate if the market didn't deliver...

he major difference from Madoff's scheme is that the UFT can always count on NYC to raid the schools in order to make good on its unaffordable promises...

It'll be fascinating to see if the NEA and AFT leaders so eager to declare that they're just fighting "for the kids" will continue to press for "victories" that reduce instructional time, teacher preparation days, and school budgets as the price for trimming their supersized, industrial-era benefits.

DAVE MARCUS

I secretly hoped my son would go to one of those Ivy campuses. Maybe I saw that as the seal of approval for my parenting…

Tim Ranzetta

The total disbursements for Stafford, Parent PLUS and GradPLUS loans for the 2009-10 academic year came to almost $96 billion… a 12.5% increase…

Linda Suskie

The arguments against doing assessment — and the hope of some that this is a fad that will go away soon — are fading…

Too many of us are separating work on assessment from work on improving teaching and learning, when they should be two sides of the same coin…
Much of the higher education community has no real incentive to change how we help students learn. And if there's little incentive to change or be innovative, there’s little reason to assess how well we're keeping our promises…

Big chunks of society no longer trust government, financial institutions, charities. So it shouldn’t be surprising that some government policymakers and employers don’t trust us to provide an appropriately rigorous education. And we don’t always trust one another, such as when students are transferring between colleges.

So the days of saying student work is good or bad based solely on our own private judgment are over. Today we need externally informed targets or standards that we can justify as appropriately rigorous…