Links for 05/27/10

Sara Goldrick-Rab:

Faculty members are used to being consulted on which courses they will and will not accept. Professors like to sign off on what courses can count to "replace" theirs—seemingly because they want to ensure educational quality, but let's face it, it's also because it helps to protect their jobs. The more courses deemed transferrable, the more it will become clear that the current system is inefficient—if many courses equate with each other, why have so many different people in different places teaching them?

But undergraduate education isn't meant to serve faculty; it's meant to serve students. This is something people seem too ready to forget.

Harris Miller comments on the inspector general's report on the Higher Learning Commission:

[it] was "silly" and missed the point...whether or not the accreditor's actions actually forced change at the institution.

That's what the department and Congress and taxpayers should be worried about

Chad Aldeman:

In 1990-1, public school districts employed one teacher for every 17.4 students. By 2007-8, that ratio had fallen to 15.7 to one, the lowest on record.

This change alone is responsible for more than 300,000 full-time teaching jobs. To estimate how much this costs annually, let’s assume each of these teachers costs $75,000 a year after salaries, health care, and retirement benefits...Three hundred thousand teachers times $75,000 a year would put the cost of these teachers at $23 billion.

To put these numbers in perspective, consider the current proposed teacher jobs bill. The National Education Association and Secretary Duncan spent yesterday lobbying Congress to spend $23 billion to save the jobs of 300,000 teachers.

It’s hard to argue the investments in more teachers has paid off.

In any profession, especially one as large as teaching, there’s going to be a tension between quantity and quality. For the last two decades, we’ve chosen quantity. Let’s hope the coming decades focus more on quality.

Miley Cyrus is:

passing up a shot at higher education to focus on her flourishing career.

(CCAP Note: You can vote whether Miley should go to college in the above link. Thus far, 57% of voters replied "I couldn't possibly care less")

Links for 04/19/10

Rick Hess on Rep. Harkin's proposal to inject "emergency spending" for education:

Harkin imagines, I presume, that our kids and grandkids will one day thank us profusely for putting them even deeper in debt so that districts can avoid trimming unaffordable benefits, taking a hard look at operations, closing underutilized facilities, or seeking more cost-effective ways to deploy staff.

Ben Miller:

universities matter in student outcomes. Schools’ financial aid allocation and state’s subsidy decisions have a real and dramatic effect on how quickly their students are able to degrees

Association for Career and Technical Education attempts to define career readiness:

three areas of strength that students need if they are to be ready for the various demands of a 21st-century workplace.

One is a strong core of academic skills that would launch them into good jobs or entry-level college work without remedial classes...to be “truly career-ready,” students also must know how to apply those academic skills in the context of the jobs they do

Special attention should be given to skills that employers often cite as deficient,

“employability” skills, such as adaptability, collaboration, and critical thinking, and “technical” skills that are specific to particular fields, such as those required for industry licensure or certification.

David Bunting, executive director of the Iowa Association for Career and Technical Education, as quoted in an IHE article:

We always tell career teachers to integrate reading, writing and mathematics into their curriculum, but we never tell, say, English teachers to integrate work skills

The college-level biology teacher, for instance, should be inspiring students to careers in biology and telling them what’s out there for them. When we talk integration, we only think the career-tech [instructors] should do it; the academics should do it, too. Maybe what we need to do is put much more emphasis on what’s going to be used

Links for 04/16/10

Forrest Hinton

if our society wants to cultivate outstanding teachers from the achiever class, it has to begin to put the right incentives in place for these smart, ambitious people to join the profession. This involves increased compensation that is based on achievement, changed images and demographics of teachers, opportunities to advance while in the classroom, and, yes, some much-needed, healthy competition.

Today, the public policy decisions our society has made force our schools to recruit too many teachers who, frankly, want stability, do not take risks, and aren’t interested in improving their profession. This doesn’t mean that there aren’t terrific teachers out there; it means that there aren’t nearly enough

Louise Tickle

a new breed of high-achieving students who have looked hard at what higher education has to offer and decided that the innovative new courses available at their local further education college are plenty good enough.

if high-achieving non-graduates are now able to get the same type of job as those who have a degree, why is higher education still seen as the be-all and end-all?

Chad Aldeman:

The chances of any one student getting into any one school will become smaller and smaller, even as the number of spaces at those schools keeps pace with demographic changes. The spaces themselves are not becoming more scarce; it’s the admissions craze that’s making them look that way.

they would have to accept that the admissions process is no longer about crafting the perfect freshman class as if each student was a Lego piece in a giant, fragile sculpture that would collapse without the perfect amount of Florida students, or oboists, or whatever else.

Students would apply to this third-party unit and list their preferences in order, and then a calculation would be run that would place students and fill school slots

Links for 04/13/10

Kevin Carey:

Overall, I think we’d be better off thinking about credits in more explicitly economic terms. They are a funny kind of currency, one whose value basis is not verifiable evidence of what you’ve learned but rather how long you’ve been taught (thus, credit hours adding up to two and four year degrees). You can only exchange them for a few classes of assets (degrees) that were established a long time ago and are rigidly applied to a huge array of disparate disciplines and academic programs. They’re also inflexible: there’s little difference in the job market between having 1 college credit and 119; both add up to “no bachelor’s degree.” The same is true for 120 and 200; you don’t get to keep the change if you earn more credits than you need. Tariffs, i.e. the inter-institutional credit tax imposed when colleges refuse to accept another college’s credits in transfer, are simultaneously large and non-transparent; oftentimes students aren’t told how many credits they can import until after they move from one school to another.

In the long run we’d be better off with more separation between the education and credentialing functions and more transparency all around

Anya Kamenetz:

In 2008, the average four-year public university cost more than one-quarter of the median American household income, making college the great unaffordable necessity of middle-class life

In the absence of any sort of useful metric about what college students are learning and which factors are most important in ensuring that students go on to lead productive lives, competitive-minded parents get distracted by a perks war

the increasingly resortlike facilities are costly consumer enticements that have nothing to do with why the kids are there in the first place

The larger question could be whether it’s possible to reunite frugality with prestige in a new breed of higher education—one that relies on achievement, not new geranium beds.

Joel I. Klein, Michael Lomax and Janet Murguía

Teacher quality is the single most important school factor in student success

we must attract teachers who performed well in college. Countries that do best on international tests draw teachers from the top third of college graduates. In the United States, however, most teachers come from the bottom third. Moreover, the bottom of that group is vastly overrepresented in our highest-needs communities.

we must create systems that reward excellence rather than seniority by creating sophisticated evaluation systems that include student performance and merit-based tenure and compensation. We must make it easier to remove teachers who are shown to be ineffective.

call for a reevaluation of seniority -- the staple of most collective bargaining agreements -- in the context of what actually serves children. But right now, one bad teacher with seniority earns as much as two great young teachers. Who really thinks this is best for our kids?

We will never eradicate poverty until we fix education. The question is whether we have the political courage to take on those who defend a status quo that serves many adults but fails many children.

Links for 04/08/10

Thomas Frey:

Overhead costs are far too high, state support is dropping, and college tuition is far too expensive. Colleges are pricing themselves out of existence.

Online education can take place at a fraction of the cost. Many of the courses can be packaged and commoditized, and as courseware aggregators begin to sell courses online, there will invariably be course wars where each will try to undercut the price of their competition.

Majors tend to be a label that is both defining and restrictive at the same time. Majors represent a top-down approach to sorting out what skills are important for a given career path. But over time the major tends to lose its relevance. Employers use majors to help prioritize candidates, but they all know that the major alone is a poor indicator of the skills and talents an individual will bring to the table. Is there a better system? None that I'm aware of yet, but it is clearly an old system long overdue for an infusion of disruptive new approaches.

classroom-centric education is not necessary for learning

Colleges are like slow moving whales about to get attacked by saltwater piranhas. While department heads in colleges are off studying the mating rituals of Komodo Dragons in Indonesia, corporate managers are working day and night, ruthlessly focused on opening new markets and uncovering new revenue streams. The pace and intensity of the work is radically different.

Colleges have huge operating budgets and the corporate world is seeing this as fertile territory to make money. The vultures are already circling.

Congressman Howard "Buck" McKeon:

It is just plain common sense that putting 100 percent of borrowing risk and responsibility on the U.S. Treasury — in other words, on taxpayers — would be a costly proposition...Yet because of congressional accounting rules, Democrats were able to claim ‘savings’ by driving out the private sector and transforming the U.S. Department of Education into one of the nation’s largest banks. This new analysis has a simple message: Taxpayers beware

Nancy Cook

But there's no denying that the fight between the cerebral B.A. vs. the practical B.S. is heating up. For now, practicality is the frontrunner, especially as the recession continues to hack into the budgets of both students and the schools they attend

[Anthony Carnevale]: Students want something they can sell

Links for 3/24/10

Keith Hampson

it is common for universities to have three versions of strategic plans: a published, publicly available version that tends to avoid provocative issues, a more detailed version with relatively sensitive information – made available to staff on a “need-to-know” basis, and an even more “sensitive and confidential” that “might never be committed to paper”, but that resides in the heads of the senior university administration…

Alan Ruby

What can we glean from the failures of branch campuses in Japan? The basic lesson is that location, demand, and brand determine enrollment and revenue…

Donald Marron

Congressional budget procedures are biased in favor of direct student loans over guaranteed loans. As a result, the budget case against guaranteed loans is overstated. It isn’t wrong — we are still talking tens of billions of dollars over the next ten years — but it isn’t as strong as the official numbers suggest. One implication is that eliminating the guarantee program may not save as much money as lawmakers think. That’s important, particularly if lawmakers want to spend those savings on other programs…

1. The administrative costs of the two programs show up in different budget categories…
2. The congressional scoring process does not appropriately measure the cost of bearing financial risk, such as that from extending loans or loan guarantees…

Bottom Line: Eliminating the guarantee program would reduce government spending, but not as much as traditional budget measures indicate…

Rob Manwaring

For the entire NCLB era, the federal government has provided funding (although a lot less) to states on a formula basis to support school improvement activities. The use of the funding has generally been left to the discretion of schools districts who invested in incremental reforms, and at best have seen incremental gains. Now the federal government is playing hardball, forcing dramatic changes at schools that are either dropout factories or the very lowest performing elementary and middle schools. Kudos to the federal government for going after high schools for the first time. (Generally high schools have not been impacted much by NCLB accountability because three-quarter of them don’t receive Title I funds and are therefore not held to AYP accountability requirements.) But, I fear that the timing of these new turnaround efforts and funding may fail to have the desired impact because of the rushed timing of the grant process...

Links for 3/23/10

George F. Will

Doubling down on dubious bets is characteristic of compulsive gamblers and federal education policy…

Donald Marron

Opponents have denounced this change as a government takeover of the student loan market. That makes for a great soundbite, but overlooks one key fact: the federal government took over this part of the student loan business a long time ago.

In a private lending market, you would expect lenders to make decisions about whom to lend to and what interest rates to charge. And in return, you would expect those lenders to bear the risks of borrowers defaulting. None of that happens in the market for guaranteed student loans. Instead, the federal government establishes who can qualify for these loans, what interest rates they will pay, and what interest rates the lenders will receive. And the government guarantees the lenders against almost all default risks.

In short, the government already controls all of the most important aspects of this part of the student loan business. The legislation just takes this a step further and cuts back on the role of private firms in the origination of these loans…

Rick Hess

Anybody out there want to take a stab at what will happen to a scholar who pens a piece that doesn't start from a presumption that cognition, policy, and practice are indelibly racist? Or that offers a less than conspiratorial take on U.S. schooling or "privatization"? I'll venture a guess: they will be rejected out of hand. Mind you, the editors would tell any who asked that this did not reflect bias or an assault on free inquiry; it would simply reflect the failure of authors to conform to the criteria for the special issue of an influential journal. Such is the invidious, largely invisible, groupthink that promotes narrow orthodoxy under the guise of academic routine.

Doug Lederman

when all the shouting and the horse trading and, finally, the voting was done, Congress's Democratic majority had indeed given approval to what supporters, without engaging in hyperbole, characterized as a dramatic reshaping of the federal student loan programs…

Links for 3/22/10 Education Sector Edition

Erin Dillon

The Kindle illustrates how demand can be created by better, innovative products, and how it can snowball. It’s not hard to imagine a technology that changes when, how and where people learn in the same way the Kindle has changed book reading: making it cost effective, broadly available, convenient. After that, demand could snowball to the point where students guffaw at being told they must sit in a chair for a certain number of hours to officially have learned something…

Elena Silva

Brookings released a report calling for a national corps of teachers—a new federal program estimated to cost about $200 million per year to support about 19,000 teachers. The idea behind “America’s Teacher Corps” is to give recognition, more money ($10,000 annually) and a portable credential to teachers who have shown strong performance based on a strong evaluation system and accept teaching positions in high-poverty Title I schools (they would not need to take any more coursework or any additional exams).What’s different is that the goal of the ATC is not to reward good teaching and attract more teachers to teaching, although these are hoped for and expected outcomes, but to improve evaluation systems. The theory is that teachers who are not eligible for ATC, those who can’t show the requisite “sustained superior performance” because they work in districts without established evaluation systems, will push for better teacher evaluation systems in their own districts...

Kevin Carey

The letter is proof that accreditation standards do exist; despite the wide latitude institutions receive to define and evaluate their own success, it is possible to be bad enough long enough to lose accreditation. But Southeastern also illustrates just how low those standards are and how long they can be defied. Given the university’s multidecade history of loan defaults, financial struggles, and scandal, it’s fair to assume that similar letters could have been written years before.

Kevin Carey

In justifying its decision to allow Southeastern to stay open for so long, Middle States said: "Ever since Southeastern University’s initial accreditation … in 1977, the Commission has recognized the University’s mission of serving diverse and underserved student populations. It is largely as a consequence of this recognition that the Commission has been so forbearing in its actions to date."

This is nonsensical. It's the equivalent of the Food and Drug Administration loosening toxicity standards for drugs taken by pregnant women. Diverse and underserved students are the most vulnerable to poor instruction, the most at-risk of dropping out of college, the most devastated when saddled with un-repayable student loans. Colleges that serve these students should be held to the highest standards, not allowed to skate by for decades on end…

Links for 3/19/10

Brad DeLong

There is a great tension at the heart of American public higher education. On the one hand, the people who benefit from public and publicly-funded higher education are primarily people who are or will be relatively rich… Publicly-funded higher education is thus, on average, a transfer of wealth from taxpayers in general to the upper-middle class of America today.

On the other hand, the fact that education is as expensive as it is appears to be keeping a great many people from acquiring more… The returns to college are much greater than they were a decade ago? So why aren’t more people attending.

The answer is that lots of people fear college because it is expensive: they would have to go into debt to attend, and they fear to do so.

So our dilemma: if we don’t keep college cheap–and publicly-funded–we find it next to impossible to increase educational opportunity; if we subsidize college with public money, we are transferring from the not-so-rich to the relatively rich.

Tony Judt

On another occasion, a student complained that I “discriminated” against her because she did not offer sexual favors. When the department ombudswoman—a sensible lady of impeccable radical credentials—investigated, it emerged that the complainant resented not being invited to join my seminar: she assumed that women who took part must be getting (and offering) favorable treatment. I explained that it was because they were smarter. The young woman was flabbergasted: the only form of discrimination she could imagine was sexual. It had never occurred to her that I might just be an elitist…

Doug Lederman

the U.S. Education Department and the Department of Health and Human Services have been unable to reach agreement on the former's use of a database managed by the latter that allows student loan guarantee agencies and others to track student loan borrowers who aren't repaying their debt. The forgone revenue from the lack of a "matching agreement" between the two agencies for more than a year now is $1.2 billion…

Scott Jaschik

Those doing the hiring at community colleges were frank that they really need these composition master's programs to work because they aren't content to hire literature doctorates who are applying for composition jobs at community colleges because of the tough job market for new humanities Ph.D.'s.

"We get these cover letters and they are so out of touch with what we need," one community college faculty member said of those seeking to teach writing. "We're looking for someone who has actually been in a community college classroom, and they are writing letters about their dissertations in literature."…

Links for 3/18/10

Thomas Bartlett

The U.S. Department of Education publishes an online directory of organizations that can "provide information and assistance on a broad range of education-related topics." But how trustworthy is that directory?

A recent search of the Education Resource Organizations Directory revealed a number of organizations that might raise eyebrows. Among them was Victorville International University…
Victorville is on the State of Oregon's list of "unaccredited degree suppliers."

Also listed was the American Association for Higher Education & Accreditation, which is not a recognized accreditation body…

Joshua B. Powers and Eric G. Campbell

We think both sides are wrong in their embrace of the profit motive as a stimulator for university research innovation…

what our research evidenced was the level of investment needed to realize a particular odds-for-success gain and that the marginal benefits of investment fall off noticeably at the above inflection points. Furthermore, our research also revealed that the longer a university subsidized its technology transfer program (i.e., costs exceeding revenues), the less likely it was that the program would ever realize financial success…

David Glenn

Last October, Madhukar Vable said farewell to two teaching prizes that he had won a decade earlier. He packed the plaques in envelopes and shipped them back to the university and state offices that had awarded them.

His packages included long letters about the condition of higher education. Too many colleges, Mr. Vable wrote, chase prestige and research grants at the expense of undergraduate instruction—and his own institution had penalized him because he had not done the same. "A dedicated teacher is becoming THE SUCKER in the system," he wrote. "I will continue to do my best in teaching and scholarship, but I am no longer willing to perpetuate the hypocrisy that excellent teaching ... is still valued at Tech."…

"Is High-Risk Drinking at College on the Way Out?" is the headline to a piece by Brandon Busteed, and this sentence from the piece is why I don’t think the answer is yes:

Students who abstain or drink moderately see college as a precious opportunity to prepare for the real world, as opposed to a four-year vacation from it.

Links for 3/17/10

Llyod Armstrong

Essentially everyone in higher education would say – and brag- that we provide a social good. We are, however, also quite fond of telling society that we know what it needs better than it does… And we then say that we already are doing what needs to be done quite effectively, and that everyone should just trust us…

In general, however, there is little actual data to show how well we achieve the desired learning outcomes. Where data exists, more often than not they seriously call into question the effectiveness of our approaches.

I imagine that if Drucker were to look at this situation, he would warn us that unless we can demonstrate that we are in fact doing things that society needs as we move into globalization, we risk suffering some of those political and financial outcomes that he had envisaged only for aberrant corporations…

Tim Ranzetta

Sallie Mae captured almost 3/4 of the total growth in the industry…

Eduwonk

In much of our field for profit is synonymous with bad, non-profit and school district is synonymous with good. Yet in practice there is wide variance in quality within all three sectors and the highest performing ventures across all three sectors have much more in common with each other than they do with their low-performing peers. In other words, tax status doesn’t necessarily tell us much. And to the extent this is ideological, anyone arguing that for-profit ventures shouldn’t be involved in education has no idea how school districts operate or procure a variety of goods and services…

Adam B. Schaeffer on obscuring costs in edu.

Links for 3/16/10

James Mulholland

We—adjuncts, full-time professors, researchers, administrators, politicians, and parents—must retool how we talk about graduate school in the humanities. We can no longer present it as a professional school or as career training, with the assumption that more education and advanced degrees always lead to better lives, more income, increased happiness. Instead, we must think of graduate school as more like choosing to go to New York to become a painter or deciding to travel to Hollywood to become an actor. Those arts-based careers have always married hope and desperation into a tense relationship. We must admit that the humanities, now, is that way, too…

In that sense, then, graduate school in the humanities is not a trap. It's a choice. But it is incumbent on us to make sure it is not a lie. We should not romanticize it…

Peter Schmidt

a jury has ruled that an associate professor of sociology at Iowa State University brought false charges of gender discrimination against two colleagues he had viewed as obstacles to his gaining tenure…

The two professors, Terry L. Besser and Betty A. Dobratz, alleged in their lawsuit that Mr. Krier had filed administrative complaints of bias and discrimination against them in March 2008 because they had been critical of his academic work, and he wanted to keep them off the panel that would be weighing his tenure bid and to intimidate other faculty members who might oppose promoting him…

Mr. Krier's letter accused Ms. Stewart, his former spouse, of contributing to the hostile work environment he faced…

All of the sociology faculty members might face challenging days ahead. Last week, the department learned that it faces a budget cut of 52 percent…

Paul Basken

Congressional Democrats are making plans to trim a proposed increase in Pell Grants, and to cut out other anticipated education-spending programs, in a rush to craft a final version of their long-awaited student-loan legislation.

Kevin Carey

Southeastern finally lost accreditation and shut its doors in August 2009. In researching the article I wanted to learn more about the historical back-and-forth with Middle States... I couldn’t ask Southeastern for the documents, because it didn’t exist anymore. So I asked Middle States, which said I couldn’t see the documents because…wait for it…Southeastern didn’t exist any more. Middle States only publishes documents about accredited colleges and universities, you see, and even then they only make their correspondence available, not the reports and responses that colleges send in return. Now that Southeastern is kaput, the whole sorry history is under lock and key (or through a shredder, who knows.) I replied by saying that I understood (albeit don’t agree with) the notion of concealing accreditation documents about colleges that actually exist, but whose interest was being served by hiding all the information now? I received no reply. Keep this in mind next time you’re told that the accreditation process is “transparent.”

Links for 3/15/10 Protest Edition

WSJ

In the last decade, government worker pension costs (not including health care) have risen to $3 billion from $150 million, a 2,000% jump, while state revenues have increased by 24%. Because the stock market didn't grow the way the legislature predicted in 1999, the only way to cover the skyrocketing costs of these defined-benefit pension plans has been to cut other programs (and increase taxes).

This year alone $3 billion was diverted from other programs to fund pensions, including more than $800 million from the UC system…

EduBubble

there is indeed money, but it’s flowing into the hands of former state retirees. One police chief is said to take home $284,000 a year! He could pay the inflated tuition of a number of students himself.

We’re at the beginning of a battle between the geezers and the twerps…

Mark Bauerlein

Robinson's conclusion: "Yet what did the protesters demand? Peace? Human rights? No. Money. And for whom? For the downtrodden and oppressed? No. For themselves."…

the target shouldn't be racism or exploitation or any other ideological sounding from the Left. It should be the gross mismanagement of public funds by the State of California's leadership in the last decade…

John Ellis

In 1964 there was focus and clarity. This one was brain-dead. The former idealism and sense of purpose had degenerated into a self-serving demand for more money at a time when both state and university are broke, and one in eight California workers is unemployed. The elite intellectuals of the university community might have been expected to offer us insight into how this problem arose, and realistic measures for dealing with it. But all that was on offer was this: get more money and give it to us…

Links for 3/12/10

Lloyd Armstrong

The old ABA accreditation, based on such inputs as faculty size and library holdings, has been one of the major levers used by law school deans against their administrations in their efforts to inflate their budgets.

Goldie Blumenstyk

Colleges rightly argue that endowments are not simply rainy-day funds. But this apparent reluctance to use them during an undeniably rainy period, either to stave off cuts or to make strategic investments, can only add weight to the questions that so many already have.

David R. Henderson

In a story Friday about the student protests of budget cuts, The Herald reported, "Some professors took students from their classrooms to the rally."

As an educator, taxpayer and citizen, I find these professors' actions appalling. The classroom is supposed to be a place of safety, where the professors don't indoctrinate students with their views. Discussing the issue in class, and letting those who might disagree do so without attacking them, is a good idea. But leading their students out of their classrooms to a rally on a particular issue, whatever the issue, is a fundamental breach of trust.

Whatever these professors think about budget cuts, they should not be leading their students in protest. These professors should be letting the students think for themselves. Whatever else happened last Thursday, this was not education.

NYT

many of China’s best and brightest, its college graduates, are facing a long stretch of unemployment.

In 1999, the government began a push to expand college education — once considered a golden ticket — to produce more professionals to meet the demands of globalization. This year, more than 6.3 million graduates will enter the job market, up from one million in 1999. But the number of high-skilled, high-paying jobs has not kept pace.

Yasheng Huang:
The Chinese educational system is terrible at producing workers with innovative skills for Chinese economy. It produces people who memorize existing facts rather than discovering new facts; who fish for existing solutions rather than coming up with new ones; who execute orders rather than inventing new ways of doing things. In other words they do not solve problems for their employers…

Although Chinese universities are not without pockets of excellence, they are churning out people with high expectations and low skills. That combination cannot be good for any country…

Loren Brandt:
The problem facing new college graduates is neither the economy nor the migrants. Instead, it is the result of a rapid of expansion in higher education and a serious mismatch in the labor market…

Links for 3/11/10

DIANE RAVITCH

the states responded to NCLB by dumbing down their standards so that they could claim to be making progress. Some states declared that between 80%-90% of their students were proficient, but on the federal test only a third or less were. Because the law demanded progress only in reading and math, schools were incentivized to show gains only on those subjects... Meanwhile, there was no incentive to teach the arts, science, history, literature, geography, civics, foreign languages or physical education.

In short, accountability turned into a nightmare for American schools, producing graduates who were drilled regularly on the basic skills but were often ignorant about almost everything else…

Given the weight of studies, evaluations and federal test data, I concluded that deregulation and privately managed charter schools were not the answer to the deep-seated problems of American education…

The current emphasis on accountability has created a punitive atmosphere in the schools…

On our present course, we are disrupting communities, dumbing down our schools, giving students false reports of their progress, and creating a private sector that will undermine public education without improving it. Most significantly, we are not producing a generation of students who are more knowledgable, and better prepared for the responsibilities of citizenship. That is why I changed my mind about the current direction of school reform.

David Glenn

"When the English 130 sections moved above 22 students, it really didn't seem to be working well," says Kim D. Jaxon, a lecturer in composition. "So I thought, Fine. Let's blow it up. Let's try 90."

Scott Jaschik

Not only does Ohio State want to end the all-out dominance of research considerations in reviews for full professor, but the university wants to explore options where some academics might earn promotions based largely on research (and have their subsequent careers reshaped with that focus) while others might earn promotions based largely on teaching (and similarly have career expectations adjusted). Both could earn the title of full professor.

Jeffrey R. Young

An associate professor who focuses on digital media, Mr. Vaidhyanathan regularly teaches and writes enthusiastically about movements to make music, movies, and other creative works free online. I thought he'd be one of the first people to advocate open access to lectures.

But no. "I find myself playing devil's advocate all the time" in class, he said. "I don't want to be on the record saying something I don't even believe" if the lectures go out on the Web. He considers the classroom a "sacred space" that may need to stay private to preserve academic freedom...

Links for 3/10/10

Lloyd Armstrong

Learning outcomes risk changing the rules of the game by actually looking at learning itself, rather than using the surrogates of wealth, history, and research. Since we have considerable data that show that these surrogates do not correlate particularly well with learning outcomes (see e.g. Derek Bok’s Our Underachieving Colleges), this is not a rule change that the winners want to see. Since most institutions are ranked below some institutions, but above many others, this means almost everyone can worry that they would be worse off if the rules changed...

the model of the researcher/teacher is very expensive. The market price of such people is defined almost exclusively by their research capabilities… In addition, because the researcher/teachers must spend considerable time doing research, they spend relatively little time teaching, thus running up the cost per student greatly…

Doug Lederman

These have not been times of peace, love and understanding between the federal government and higher education accreditors. For several years now, spanning two presidential administrations, the agencies charged with assuring that colleges meet an acceptable level of quality have felt buffeted by shifting, escalating and, in their view, sometimes inappropriate demands from federal policy makers…

department officials have gotten an earful from accreditors complaining that the 76-page draft "Guide to the Accrediting Agency Recognition Process" that the department published last month was too prescriptive and, in some places, seemed to impose specific requirements on accreditors that go beyond current federal law and regulation. Some accrediting officials said they feared that the department were issuing the guidelines as a backdoor way to avoid Congressional limitations on the government's ability to regulate accreditors…

Henry Adams

When I was a graduate student, I participated in academic fraud. I didn't plagiarize to get an article published or inflate my CV to get a job. I did something worse. I accepted a teaching assistantship as a doctoral student at Elite National University.
By becoming a TA there, I took on a responsibility for which I had no qualifications: teaching first-year composition courses…

What Dr. Cathcart didn't say, but that I realized afterward, was that Elite National U. did not want me to teach first-year students as much as sort them according to the abilities they brought with them to my classroom…

Greg Lukianoff

I believe the most important factor interfering with the success and credibility of higher education is the continuing maintenance of campus speech codes and other policies and practices designed to discourage and even punish free speech and meaningful dissent...

Links for 3/9/10

Paul Basken

A new analysis by Congressional budget analysts shows that President Obama's proposal to end the bank-based system of distributing student loans would save $67-billion over 10 years, more than 20 percent less than the previous year's estimate…

For now, Congress could adopt the $67-billion figure immediately as the bill's score, or continue to use the old $87-billion estimate, but it must use the new figure once it passes a budget outline for 2011, which is expected to occur in the next month or two.

Megan McArdle

I have been struggling mightily to find some sensible arguments in the movement of students protesting budget cuts at their campuses...

I'm not sure what they think is supposed to happen. There's no money. This is not some question of reallocating resources from bad uses to good--everything is being cut because their institutions are under serious financial duress...

they might protest the core business model, in which so many employees are effectively unfireable, meaning that everyone else has to take a disproportionate share of the cuts. But other than that, what is all this protesting going to accomplish?...

Kevin Carey

The higher-education lobby's zealous resistance to any form of disclosure benefits only the elite institutions that already have plenty of money and receive the lion's share of federal financing. The hundreds of rank-and-file colleges and universities that would gladly provide more information about their successes in exchange for new federal support in a time of draconian state budget cuts are being left out in the cold.

Jennifer Epstein

Since the 1960s, the national mean G.P.A. at the institutions from which he’s collected grades has risen by about 0.1 each decade – other than in the 1970s, when G.P.A.s stagnated or fell slightly. In the 1950s, according to Rojstaczer’s data, the mean G.P.A. at U.S. colleges and universities was 2.52. By 2006-07, it was 3.11.

Links for 3/8/10

Peter P. Smith interviewed by IHE

We had to work very hard to keep first-generation Latino students in school because cultural norms called for them to live at home and work rather than attending college.

The metaphor that I would use to describe this challenge is swimming under water. The longer you are under water, the more it hurts. And, if your goal is to swim to the other end of the pool, but you have never known anyone who did it, it is easier to simply climb out of the water and walk away…

In the book, I devoted a chapter to the “End of Scarcity” and its impact on higher education. It is difficult to overestimate the significance of this trend. Colleges are built and organized around scarcity – the expertise of faculty is in short supply, classrooms and labs are limited because they are expensive, and the authority to offer a course of study is limited. Additionally, reputation is built around who you exclude as much as it is who you include and who succeeds. In fact, the whole concept of meritocracy is built on the notion of scarcity because there is not enough room “at the top” for everyone.

Put this set of assumptions, and the practices that are in place because of them, up against the current reality. Excellent content is increasingly commodified and available…

Shailaja Neelakantan

In the last decade or so, a rising stream of wealthy industrialists like Mr. Pawar and Mr. Thadani have started up a few of the of the 1,500 universities that education experts estimate India will need to fuel its economic growth.

The names of these educational entrepreneurs read like a Forbes magazine list of the world's richest people (see box).

With deep pockets and solid reputations, these business executives promise to revamp the reputation of private higher education in India by offering better pay to faculty members, setting high academic standards, and tailoring programs to industry needs.

They also hope to offer an alternative to what they see as a misguided public higher-education system, in which students are encouraged to think narrowly and learn passively…

Bill Sams

The main problem with the education system is that there are too many students and too few customers. A student is a person to whom something is done (the student is taught); a customer is a person for whom something is done (a customer is provided a learning experience)…

For as long as students continue to be the majority population in the educational system, the situation will continue to worsen. It will not be until students are transformed into customers that new forces, ideas, and methods will be developed that will improve the effectiveness of individual learning while lowering the cost. At that point the focus will shift from the zero-sum student perspective (how do I get more money for my education?) to the productivity-based customer perspective (how do I get more education for my money?).

Barbara Kiviat

one thing I do know about is the price-setting power of the enlightened consumer. I know about the effects of price transparency, and I know about what happens when you give Americans the tools to hunt for deals and value. Think about Wal-Mart. Think about going on Expedia to comparison shop airline tickets. Think about the first question you ask when you are considering buying a particular house.

Now think about health care [AG: Or colleges].

Links for 3/5/10 Diane Ravitch Edition

SAM DILLON

Once outspoken about the power of standardized testing, charter schools and free markets to improve schools, Dr. Ravitch is now caustically critical. She underwent an intellectual crisis, she says, discovering that these strategies, which she now calls faddish trends, were undermining public education…

These and other experiences left her increasingly disaffected from the choice and accountability movements. Charter schools, she concluded, were proving to be no better on average than regular schools, but in many cities were bleeding resources from the public system. Testing had become not just a way to measure student learning, but an end in itself…

Paul Peterson

“It is in the nature of markets that some succeed, some are middling, and others fail.” That is the primitive, static view of markets proposed by Diane Ravitch in her book-length, passionate diatribe against choice and accountability.

The great economist, Joseph Schumpeter, saw it another way. Markets “creatively” destroy middling performers by giving successful ones room to expand—until they themselves are “creatively” destroyed by still better producers. Because market destruction is creative, economies generally grow rapidly after recessions have taken their toll on the unproductive.
Ignoring basic economic principles, Ravitch asks us to keep intact our hopelessly disabled school system, now stagnant for half a century or more. She thinks she can get American schools to adopt her favored curricular reforms—even though they have refused to do so despite her multi-decade advocacy.

Tyler Cowen

Her bottom line is… “an agenda whose end result is entirely speculative and uncertain. The effort to upend American public education and replace it with something market-based began to feel too radical for me. I concluded that I could not countenance any reforms that might have the effect -- intended or unintended -- of undermining public education.”

Ravitch of course was once the number one advocate of these very ideas…

it is a serious book worth reading and it has some good arguments to establish the view -- as I interpret it -- that both vouchers and school accountability are overrated ideas by their proponents… But are they bad ideas outright? Ravitch doesn't do much to contest the quantitative evidence in their favor…

Is American public education such a huge success these days that it should be immune from significant restructuring? I don't think so…

Andrew Samwick

Once a proponent of school choice and testing, including the way they were supposed to be implemented in the No Child Left Behind Act, she now regards them as threats to our educational systems…

"There should not be an education marketplace, there should not be competition," Ravitch says. "Schools operate fundamentally — or should operate — like families. The fundamental principle by which education proceeds is collaboration…Competition and collaboration are not mutually exclusive. Far from it… But what does not occur in nature or society, because it is not viable over any reasonable length of time, is a strategy of making a "family" out of disparate actors just by placing them near each other…

It is in fact a mistake to think that choice and accountability by themselves will be enough to improve performance, without the other elements of a competitive marketplace…

Unless you break that monopoly, until you do in fact allow direct competition with "the school down the block," you should not expect to be treated to service that is any better than what you typically get as a member of a captive audience…

Transcripts from Last Week's Debate

Here's a copy of the transcripts from the debate on education and the economy that Dr. Vedder participating in last Friday, courtesy of Student Lending Analytics.

And, in case you missed it, here is a link to the video.