Links for 3/2/11

Michael Finnegan and Gale Holland

In one respect, trouble was inevitable: Voters had put $2.2 billion under the control of seven of the region's most obscure elected officials. They would be spending it with almost no public scrutiny — despite their promise of "strict oversight"

[P.S. You won’t believe what they did.]

Erin O’Connor and Maurice Black

This is not the profile of a profession that deserves the public trust. And yet academe has far fewer checks and balances than other peer review professions. Doctors can lose their licenses. Lawyers can be disbarred. But incompetent or dishonest professors are often forever...

Joanne Jacobs

Many districts turn merit pay into a small across-the-board pay boost, write Green and Buck. In Houston, 88 percent of teachers qualified for a small “merit” bonus. That’s nothing compared to Minnesota, where 22 school districts gave Q Comp bonuses to more than 99 percent of teachers…

Terry Ryan

The New Teacher Project (TNTP) reports that 14 states actually have laws on the books that force quality-blind layoffs…

Lloyd Armstrong

The rhetoric generally tells us that the crisis in American higher education is a financial one, not an educational one. However, it seems increasingly clear that the educational goals we have set for ourselves and our students are the goals appropriate to 20th century United States that had few real economic competitors. Much of our education has assumed that our graduates would go into a profession, and work in that profession for one, or at most a few, companies during their lifetime. That assumption is increasingly incorrect. Many of the professions for which we train students are in a decline as their functions move overseas. Graduates are increasingly required to change the focus of their work (not just jobs) several times in their working lifetime. As has been noted before, the offshoring phenomenon continues to move up the educational scale. Consequently, more traditional education - which was the answer to many problems in the 20th century - is not necessarily the correct answer in the 21st century…