Archive for the 'Higher Education' Category

“And Thank You for Choosing Harvard University!”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 3, 2009 in Higher Education and Humor. 4 Comments

In most sectors of our economy, customer focus is paramount, as it should be in education, too. Customer focus could yield a more student-centric system through the development and dissemination of user-friendly “truth-in-education” information that helps students make “best-fit” choices regarding which education provider to select based on customer preferences such as: academic quality, price, convenience, learning style, beginning education level and the anticipated return on their investment in education.”  — Putting the Customer First in College: Why We Need an Office of Consumer Protection in Higher Education,” a report released today by the Center for American Progress

Hi, my name is Bruce and I’ll be your professor today!  We’re thrilled you’ve chosen to matriculate with us this Fall.  May I tell you about some of the special features of your college?

We’re committed to being the low-price leader in higher education.  This semester, we have a special Buy One, Get One Free promotion.  When you register for a class with us, choose a second class of equal or lesser challenge and get the second course absolutely free!  And remember, if you find a lower price for this course at any nationally advertised college or university, simply bring us the ad and we will beat their price.  Guaranteed!

I’d also like to tell you about out Frequent Learner program.  Sign up today, to earn class credits and education rewards.  You can use your frequent learner points to purchase clothing, housewares, books, and just about anything–even term papers!  Earn even more rewards when you put your tuition on your Phi Beta Kappa Gold Visa card.  In fact, you’re pre-approved just for registering for this class.

If at the end of this semester, you’re not happy with your grade for any reason, simply return it within 90 days for a full refund or a replacement grade.  In this class–and every class–customer satisfaction is Job Number One! 

I’m also happy to announce that starting with the 2009-2010 academic year, your undergraduate degree comes with a standard 10-year, 100-thousand dollar future earnings warranty.  If you’re not earning six figures within ten years of graduation, we’ll make up the difference no questions asked!

On behalf of the entire faculty, administration, support staff and our nationwide network of alumni, we’d like to thank you for letting us educate you.  We understand that you have a choice in colleges.  Our goal is to be your preferred provider of education and career services whenever and wherever you choose to be educated.

Thank you, and have a great day!

What Teacher Ed Should Look Like

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 2, 2009 in Higher Education, Teacher Training and Teaching. 14 Comments

Teacher education programs should be selective, rigorous….and free, argues Susan Engel.  In a New York Times op-ed the psychologist and director of the teaching program at Williams College writes that admission to teacher ed programs should include “a stipend for the first three years of teaching in a public school.” 

Once we have a better pool of graduate students, we need to train them differently from how we have in the past. Too often, teaching students spend their time studying specific instructional programs and learning how to handle mechanics like making lesson plans. These skills, while useful, are not what will transform a promising student into a good teacher.  First, future teachers should continue studying the subject they hope to teach, with outstanding professors. It makes no sense at all to stop studying the thing you want to teach at the very moment you begin to learn how.

Hear, hear.  I’m all for organizing teacher training around subject matter, rather than what Leon Botstein once termed “the pseudoscience of pedagogy.”  But Engel’s not done yet.

Meanwhile, students should learn their craft the way a surgeon learns to operate: by intense supervision in a real setting with expert mentors. Student-teachers are usually observed only twice during a semester and then given a written evaluation. But young teachers, like young doctors, should work side by side with skilled mentors, getting plenty of feedback, having plenty of opportunities to observe and taking on greater and greater responsibility as they improve.

The key word is that paragraph is “craft.”  It’s common to hear teaching described as an art, a science, or a profession, but seldom as a craft, which has always struck me as exactly the right word.  Like becoming a writer, you become successful when you find your voice. That’s craftwork.  Toward that end, Engel also suggests that teacher ed steal a page from family therapy programs, whose students, she observes, “spend a great deal of time watching videotapes of themselves in action, reflecting on their sessions and discussing the most difficult moments with senior therapists to explore other ways they might have responded.”

“Reverse Engineering Academic Upbringing”

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 19, 2009 in Assessment and Testing, Higher Education and accountability. 1 Comment

The University of Nevada, Las Vegas is launching an ambitious research project to figure out why so many of its freshmen need remediation in reading and math.  Every incoming student will be evaluated “to reverse-engineer his academic upbringing,” UNLV president Neal Smatresk tells the Las Vegas Sun.  Since eighty percent of UNLV’s undergrads come from a single source, the state’s own Clark County School District, Smatresk hopes to gain particularly vivid insights.

Data gathered from the academic assessments would be shared with school districts and could help educators identify and correct patterns of weakness, whether it be general flaws in teaching philosophies or student study habits.  Clark County Schools Superintendent Walt Rulffes said the research findings could offer important insight into the root causes of the problems requiring remediation.

“The possibility that the district will be able to identify clusters of underachieving students, and trace them to not only individual campuses but individual classrooms, has Clark County’s teachers union on edge,” the paper notes. 

Last year, more than a third of Nevada’s high school graduates who enrolled at the state’s universities and colleges required remedial classes in English and mathematics, at a cost of over $2 million.

Breaking the ELA Skills vs. Content Logjam

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 5, 2009 in Curriculum, Educational Policy and Higher Education. 15 Comments

If the authors of the draft national standards are unwilling to name specific works of literature children should read, they should at least name specific literary movements, writes Dan Willingham.

The draft ELA standards floated by the Common Core State Standards Initiative focus almost exclusively on skills–what students should be able to glean from written texts, for example–but remain silent on content.  Dan Willingham floats an intriguing way to split the difference in his latest post at the Washington Post’s Answer Sheet blog.  He points out  it’s not a problem to specify what kids should learn in other subjects.  “In science, for example, we expect that students will acquire certain skills– methods of scientific analysis–but we also believe that there is a body of scientific knowledge that students will learn,” he notes. “The same is true of history and mathematics.”  Why, he wonders, should literature be any different? 

Perhaps a better method would be to select literary movements based on their influence.  Specifying literary movements (e.g., Modernism, The Lost Generation, Harlem Renaissance) rather than specific authors would better parallel standards in other disciplines.We might expect a national body to recommend that students study Colonial American History in 3rd grade. We would not expect that national body to specify the particular events that must be studied (and by inference, what ought to be excluded).

“Influence is likely a less arbitrary criterion than aesthetic value, and it is more useful to students. Influential movements changed how future authors wrote, their subject matter, how they thought about literature, and so on,” writes Willingham, who argues understanding something of various literary movements is a key to understanding individual works of literature.

Is it really impossible for literature experts to agree on a set of major literary movements with which American high school graduates ought to be familiar? It would not be an easy task, surely, but I think that, if given the chance, a group of literature experts (teachers, editors, professors, writers, and critics) could rise to the occasion, especially if the criterion—literary influence—were made clear.

There is more at stake in getting the balance between process and content correct if the national standards movement is to succeed.  “A stated goal of the common core standards is to prepare students for college,” Willingham concludes.  ”If the standards leave the selection of literary works utterly to chance, they are unlikely to meet that goal.”

Raise the Age for Compulsory Ed?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on June 8, 2009 in Higher Education and Opinion. 7 Comments

Memory fades, but there were New York City schools chancellors before Joel Klein, and the guy who had the job most recently takes to the New York Times op-ed page with five ways to fix education.  The first suggestion on Harold Levy’s list, however, is an eyebrow-raiser. He wants to raise the age of compulsory education.

Twenty-six states require children to attend school until age 16, the rest until 17 or 18, but we should ensure that all children stay in school until age 19. Simply completing high school no longer provides students with an education sufficient for them to compete in the 21st-century economy. So every child should receive a year of post-secondary education.

College entrance is still something largely driven by interest and merit.  Might that have something to do with the generally sound state of U.S. higher ed and the relatively poor state of our K-12 system?   Curiously, Levy’s fifth fix is to produce more qualified applicants to college.  “Half of the freshmen at community colleges and a third of freshmen at four-year colleges matriculate with academic skills in at least one subject too weak to allow them to do college work,” he complains. ”Unsurprisingly, the average college graduation rates even at four-year institutions are less than 60 percent.”  Surely, compelling college attendance will only exacerbate this issue, and make remediating the failures of K-12 education the problem of our colleges and universities. 

Levy’s piece is a good example of what might be termed credentialism–favoring the prize over the accomplishment it represents.  While high school graduates may earn more and enjoy better health than dropouts, the diploma does not magically confer these benefits.  The person who has reached this level of achievement is also more likely to live a productive, stable life.  People with health club memberships might be in better shape than those without.  But it doesn’t follow that the key to health and longevity is to give every American a health club membership.  You have to be inclined to work out.  Likewise, married people live longer, healthier lives.  Where’s the op-ed in favor of compelling marriages? 

It’s hard to see how flooding colleges with unprepared and unwilling students will do anything other than damage a productive higher ed system.  Levy favors the federal government paying for the extra year, noting it would be a turning point at least as important as “the 1944 G.I. Bill that made college affordable to our returning service personnel after World War II.”  Fine, but the G.I. Bill created the opportunity for veterans to attend college.  It didn’t conscript them to go.

In Defense of the Liberal Arts

Published by Robert Pondiscio on May 21, 2009 in Higher Education. 16 Comments

Less than 10% of college degrees are now being awarded in the Humanities, but former Semiotics major Lane Wallace, a writer and editor for Flying magazine, passionately disagrees with those who would deride a liberal arts education as impractical.  Writing in The Atlantic, she describes an epiphany that came when she took a leave of absence from Brown to travel, and found herself working in a corrugated cardboard factory in New Zealand.

In a flash, I grasped the true value of a college degree. It didn’t matter what I majored in. It didn’t even matter all that much what my grades were. What mattered was that I got that rectangular piece of paper that said, “Lane Wallace never has to work in a corrugated cardboard factory again.” A piece of paper that was proof to any potential future employer that I could stick with a project and complete it successfully, even if parts of it weren’t all that much fun. A piece of paper that said I had learned how to process an overload of information, prioritize, sort through it intelligently, and distill all that into a coherent end product … all while coping with stress and deadlines without imploding. 

In an increasingly global economy, Wallace writes, more than just technical skill is required. “Far more challenging is the ability to work with a multitude of viewpoints and cultures. And the liberal arts are particularly good at teaching how different arguments on the same point can be equally valid, depending on what presumptions or values you bring to the subject,” she concludes.

Wallace’s biggest accomplishment, however, is to have mounted a smart and spirited defense of liberal arts education without once using the words “skills,” “century,” or “21st,” or combining them in the same sentence. 

A grateful nation thanks her.  Liberally.

Unaccountable Cash Cows?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 13, 2009 in Higher Education and Teacher Training. 11 Comments

“The dirty little secret about schools of education is that they have been the cash cows of universities for many, many years, and it’s time to say, ‘Show us what you can do, or get out of the business.’”  Nothing terribly controversial about those words, unless you consider the source:  Katherine Merseth, director of the teacher education program at Harvard University.

Merseth was not bad-mouthing her own program, according to U.S. News’ Eddy Ramirez, who quoted her in a recent blog post.  However, Merseth said that of the 1,300 graduate teacher training programs in the country, about 100 or so are adequately preparing teachers and “the others could be shut down tomorrow.”

“It’s high time that we broke up the cartel,” said Merseth. “We need to hold graduate schools of education more accountable.”

Goodbye, Columbus Day

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 13, 2009 in Education News, Higher Education and Humor. 2 Comments

Brown University has decided Christopher Columbus no longer warrants a holiday.  But the faculty still wants a long weekend, so it’s Goodbye, Columbus Day.  Hello, Fall Weekend.  “Hundreds of Brown students had asked the Providence school to stop observing Columbus Day,” the AP reports, ”citing the explorer’s violent treatment of Native Americans he encountered.” 

Let’s not stop there, writes Providence Journal columnist Mark Patinkin.  Since Hannukah is based on a celebration of carbon-based fuels during a time of global warming, it should be renamed “Alternative Fuels-Day.”  Mother’s and Father’s Day “assumes a rigid, traditional family structure no longer in keeping with society’s changes.”   Thus it would be better to combine the two into a single new holiday called “Guardian’s Day.”  And President’s Day, he notes, discriminates against the other two branches of government.  It’s gotta go, he writes.

Because of the importance of Christmas, I for one would be willing to see it go forward, but only if the elves are allowed to join the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, which may well be possible if the Obama administration follows through on promises to make it easier for unions to organize in the workplace.

Patinkin is joking.  Brown isn’t.

 

 

21st Century Skills 101

Published by Robert Pondiscio on April 2, 2009 in Education News and Higher Education. 2 Comments

A university in the U.K. is offering a masters degree in social networking – and catching flak for doing so. “Students on the £4,000 (approx. $6,000 U.S.) one-year Social Media degree, offered by Birmingham City University, will explore how we communicate on the websites and how they can be used for marketing,” the Guardian newspaper reports.

Sounds like an easy A, but not even students are buying it.”A complete waste of university resources,” says a 20-year old at the college. “It’s of no interest to me whatsoever. Virtually all of the content of this course is so basic it can be self-taught.”

Want to Improve Education? Put Your Best Lessons on YouTube

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 31, 2009 in Education Theory, Higher Education and Teaching. 11 Comments

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, Kevin Carey looks at the collapse of newspapers and sees higher education on the same trajectory.  I’ll defer to Carey on what the Internet might do to higher ed, but I suspect that as long as there is market value in the credential of a name-brand university degree in addition to the actual product of education, elite colleges needn’t worry about filling their freshmen class.  You can only take the newspaper analogy so far: nobody ever got an interview at a job fair merely by being a reader of The New York Times.

It seems to me there is a bigger opportunity, however, to use technology to radically improve K-12 education.  While not every child goes to a great school or has a great teacher, it seems reasonable to suggest that it’s easier–and faster–to get every child in front of a great teacher online than to get a great teacher in every classroom.  

YouTube, which is owned by Google, has just launched YouTube EDU, a service that puts college lectures online.  Great idea.  But how about K-12, Google?  Why not incentivize teachers to create first-rate videos by splitting advertising revenue from each viewing?  This could create a new source of income for low-paid teachers, and a rich trove of material for students.  While it obviously wouldn’t be a substitute for good classroom instruction, it could certainly supplement bad classroom instruction.  Such a resource would also be a boon for differentiated instruction and enrichment during school, homework help or tutoring after school–and a great resource for homeschoolers or parents whose children are trapped in failing schools. 

When you think about the enormous waste of teaching capacity that takes place every day — millions of teachers preparing lessons for audiences of two dozen kids — it seems a shame not to have a mechanism to capture great teaching and distribute it broadly for all students.  Tomorrow, thousands of teachers will teach their kids how to add unlike fractions.  Undoubtedly there are some real gems among them, some that could produce an “aha” in tens of thousands of kids.  In YouTube, the free distribution channel already exists.  Why not take full advantage of it?