Archive for the 'Higher Education' Category

Basketball? How About Academics?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 19, 2009 in Higher Education and accountability. 3 Comments

Teams in the NCAA basketball tournament kicking off tonight put very different numbers on the board when it comes to graduation rates. A study by the University of Central Florida shows among the four No. 1 seeds, North Carolina has the highest graduation rate for its players (86%), while Connecticut is the laggard (33%). Louisville graduates 42% of its athletes; Pitt 69%.

“The study also found that fewer tournament teams have failing Academic Progress Rates than last year,” the AP reports. “Twenty-one of the 65 tournament teams have APR scores under 925, the cutoff below which the NCAA can penalize schools. Last year, 35 teams had APR scores below 925.” Forty of the 65 teams in the tourney have graduation rates of at least 50 percent, based on the number of freshmen who entered school between the 1998-99 and 2001-02 school years earned diplomas within six years.

Seven teams had a 100 percent graduation rate: Binghamton, Florida State, Marquette, Robert Morris, Utah State, Wake Forest and Western Kentucky.

On the women’s side, the picture is much different – and brighter. Fourteen women’s basketball teams in the NCAA tournament have perfect graduation rates, including top-seeded Connecticut. The other schools with 100 percent graduation rates are DePaul, Evansville, Florida, Lehigh, Marist, Notre Dame, Ohio State, Sacred Heart, Stanford, Tennessee, Texas, Vanderbilt and Villanova.

The Boston Globe says the graduation rates for somee schools are so bad — especially for black athletes — that they shouldn’t be in the tournament at all.

On paper, the top 16 seeds have an average graduation rate of 53 percent for black players. But eight of those 16 are so bad, their average graduation rate for black players is 32 percent. Those teams include five of the top eight seeds: UConn, Louisville, Oklahoma, Michigan State, and Memphis.

“We will know the world is truly changing,” the paper notes ”when politicians write letters and make statements that embarrassing graduation rates for their flagship university basketball team are unacceptable.”

Reading Between the Lies

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 10, 2009 in Education News and Higher Education. 5 Comments

I’ve been carrying this guilty burden for 25 years and now it’s time to set it down:  I never read Middlemarch or Thackeray’s Vanity Fair for my Victorian literature class in college. 

I’m not the only one. An anonymous questionnaire for Britain’s World Book Day shows two-thirds of people in Britain admitted to lying about having read a book.  George Orwell’s 1984 is the most lied about book, according to the poll, followed by War and Peace, and Ulysses.  Also gathering dust on a high shelf: The Bible, Madame Bovary Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time.

The results show the lengths to which people will go to appear intelligent and well-read, Jonathan Douglas, director of Britain’s National Literacy Trust tells the London Telegraph.  “Research that we have done suggests that the reason people lied was to make themselves appear more sexually attractive,” he said.

Yup.  Middlemarch, the ultimate babe magnet.

A Flexner Report for Education?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on March 9, 2009 in Higher Education and Teacher Training. 7 Comments

Patrick “Eduflack” Riccards suggests teacher training needs its own version of the Flexner Report — a 1910 report on the wildly uneven quality of medical education in the U.S. that changed the face of the medical profession and led to the closing of half of all the medical schools in the U.S.  “Those that remained bolstered their quality,” Riccards writes, ”turning out a better doctor to meet the growing medical needs of our industrialized nation.”

Isn’t it time for such an approach in teacher education?  Don’t we need a comprehensive study of our teacher training programs, one that focuses on how we crosswalk the latest in teacher educator research with current curricula, ensure that teacher training programs are empowering our teachers with research-based instructional strategies, require clinical hours, build mentoring and support networks, use data in both instruction and intervention, and ensure graduates align with both the content and skill needs of the communities and states they are serving?  Of course we do.  

Riccards suggestion comes in the wake of news that the University of the District of Columbia plans to shut down its undergraduate education department, which has managed to graduate less that ten percent of its students.

Teaching For High Expectations

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 23, 2009 in Curriculum, Higher Education, Teacher Training and Teaching. 2 Comments

Why go to high school when you can go to school high?  In an anonymous piece on the Radio Free Exile website “Bob Smith,” a 59-year old former science teacher, describes how years of getting high while planning his lessons provided him with “insights into the educational process” and other “truly important things about teaching.”  Take, for example, his solution to the problem of how to explain the concept of density to middle schoolers.

Suddenly, a flash of the legendary insight: I just won’t teach density. Not at all. Never again. Now, as first year teachers learn, you teach what they tell you to teach. But as some teachers soon learn, you can teach what you like if everything you do works. I had been pretty successful in all the other areas of science I was teaching, and I realized that I would be doing everyone a favor if I unilaterally declared that piece of the pie dispensable, which I did, and I’m sure that no one ever missed it.

Believing he was at his most inventive and insightful while stoned, Saturdays became the day when Smith ruminated on his teaching, wrote curriculum, made plans, and got high.  “I sometimes laugh to myself when something I’ve designed has gone over well with the students. They would be amazed at the conditions under which the ideas were hatched,” Smith writes.

In fact, I should go so far as to confess that when discussing drugs with students – a requirement of science curriculum in those grades – I have presented to the students the positives as well as the negatives of marijuana use, including ‘reports’ that people often feel more creative and insightful, and that people smoke it because it’s fun. This is an important part of the drug education piece that is always omitted: telling kids why people use drugs.

If you’re concerned about having a teacher like “Bob Smith” giving his fair and balanced view of recreational drug use to kids, fear not.  He’s no longer teaching middle school.  He’s now an ed school professor. 

Higher ed, indeed.

Hell. Handbasket. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200

Published by Robert Pondiscio on February 12, 2009 in Higher Education, Teaching and accountability. 10 Comments

I know, I know.  You’ve heard it all before.  Go ahead and dismiss this as yet another greybeard nattering on about the way things used to be. J. Edward Ketz, a Penn State accounting professor has seen a lot of changes in students in the past 35 years, none of them good.  Students’ educational backgrounds, analytical thinking, quantitative skills, reading abilities, willingness to work, and their attitudes concerning the educational process have all gone south, he says.

Why are we in this mess?  K-12 explains a lot; we face a national disgrace in what takes place during these years. I still remember my daughter’s  science teacher stating that the sun revolved around the earth. And that is only one of several follies we encountered with the modern K-12 ensemble.

“We used to view education as a learning process that liberated the individual and created mature adults,” Ketz concludes.  “Today society tends to view education as a commodity to purchase and list on a résumé, not caring whether any learning occurs.”

(Via Joanne Jacobs)

Who’s To Blame for Bad Schools? Look in the Mirror

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 27, 2009 in Education Leadership, Education News, Higher Education and Parents. 16 Comments

<a href="http://youtube.com/watch?v=OXQs8ykQ0dg&amp;feature">http://youtube.com/watch?v=OXQs8ykQ0dg&amp;feature</a>

Nevada’s public education system is a “disaster” says the state’s university chancellor, and Nevadans have no one to blame but themselves.  In a remarkable and scathing “State of the System” speech ostensibly to rail against proposed cuts to the state’s education budget, James Rogers calls Nevada’s parents to account.

The state of K-16 education in Nevada is where the public–that is you out there–has allowed it to sink.  Your only relationship with the education system is to ship your unprepared kids to school not with the expectation of success, but with the demand that an education system, inadequately funded, develop and/or repair children that you as a parent did not prepare for school or support while your children attended school.  If you want a competent and productive education system, tell your Governor and legislators to fund it. They do what they think you want them to do.  That’s why they’re called public servants.  It is the public–that means you– that has created this disaster of a public education system. 

It’s a blistering Jeremiad.  Nevadans once hoped to see their kids go to college, but today are satisfied if their children graduate from eighth grade, Rogers says.  And don’t blame educators for the state’s poor schools.  The founder and owner of Sunbelt Communications Company, which owns and operates 16 NBC and FOX affiliate television stations in five western states, Rogers says when he became Nevada’s chancellor five years ago he came to the job with a sense that education was “an overweight, lazy, unproductive massive intellect, with no direction and little desire to get there fast.” 

Well I have looked at the alleged inefficiencies, not only in higher education but in K through 12.  The majority of educators work very hard, are much smarter than their critics, and are far more organized and efficient than their critics.  If they have a shortcoming it is that they are for the most part not aggressive, mean-spirited people, but are instead caring, concerned individuals who want to teach, not fight….and the success of your children is more important than their own success.

Neither are school administrators to blame, according to Rogers.  “I have looked at the administration of the education system,” he notes. ”I find them no less productive than the administrators of the television stations I own or the banks of which I have served as a board member over the last 28 years.”

The state’s Republican party has fired back saying Rogers “owes every caring parent in the state a public apology.  For Chancellor Rogers to blame the failure of the government-run education system on parents is nothing short of outrageous.”

Rogers aired his speech on his Nevada TV stations.  You can watch it in two parts on YouTube, Part I here, Part II here.

Online Education’s “1984″ Moment?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on January 15, 2009 in Higher Education, Students and Teaching. 4 Comments

People in the advertising industry still talk about a commercial for Apple Computers that aired once — and never again — during the 1984 Super Bowl.  Even if you weren’t alive then, you know it: Bald, colorless drones march in and sit listening to a projected image of Big Brother addressing them from a huge screen.  An athletic young woman chased by uniformed guards runs in carrying a large hammer.  She hurls it, and the projected image explodes in a blaze of light.  “On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh,” the ad concludes. “And you’ll see why 1984 won’t be like 1984.“ 

Have you seen the new ads for Kaplan University?  They may not be of the artistic calibre of “1984,” which was directed by Blade Runner director Ridley Scott, but they certainly stop you in your tracks.  A professor stands before his students in a college lecture hall and apologizes.  “The system has failed you. I have failed you,” he intones. “I have failed to help you share your talent with the world, and the world needs talent more than ever. Yet it’s being wasted by an educational system steeped in tradition and  old ideas.” He continues to speak, but now we’re watching his moving image on laptops and iPods. He is speaking to students who are seated at a kitchen table, on a living room couch and a rooftop.  “It’s time to use technology to rewrite the rules of education,” the professor says.  Like the 1984 ad, it’s not until the very last second that you find out the spot is for Kaplan. 

Kaplan University's "Desks" TV Ad

A second ad, called “Desks,” consists of a series of images of old-fashioned school desks, either alone or arrayed in visually arresting settings – on a beach, lined up on a subway platform, on the lanes of a bowling alley, on city streets, and winding their way up a mountain trail.   ”Where is it written that the old way is the right way? Where is it written that a traditional education is the only way to get an education? Where is it written that classes only take place in a classroom?” an unseen narrator asks.  ”That’s just the thing.  It isn’t written anywhere.” 

Whether these ads are successful or not for Kaplan may be beside the point.  What makes them interesting and compelling is what they say about education at large.  They challenge you to look at something familiar with fresh eyes:  Where does it say classes have to take place in a classroom?  Why can’t college come to me?  What’s the point of parking in a lecture hall for hours on end?  This may be familiar stuff for educators, but for consumers conditioned to having every itch scratched on demand, I suspect the message behind the ads will seem simple, compelling and new. Very new.

Are we seeing online education’s 1984?  It’s all but impossible to see watershed moments as they happen, but it’s sure easy with the hindsight of 25 years:  Trivia fans will be interested to learn the Apple spot was not the only commercial for computers to run during the 1984 Super Bowl.  Bill Bixby pitched RadioShack personal computers in one; Alan Alda  hawked Atari computers in the other.

White House Full of Teachers

Published by Robert Pondiscio on November 6, 2008 in Higher Education and Teaching. 3 Comments

It’s common knowledge that President-elect Barack Obama taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for over a decade.  We’ve also read quite about about the career of Jill Biden, the wife of the future V-P, who teaches community college English in Delaware.  But this almost certainly the first time that the President, his Vice-President, and their spouses all have direct experience working in education.  Michelle Obama works for University of Chicago Hospitals, while Joe Biden has also taught constitutional law for many years as an adjunct professor at Widener University School of Law.

It’s The Economy, Stupid. Right?

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 23, 2008 in Education Practice and Higher Education. 1 Comment

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice says failing public schools pose America’s greatest national security concern–undermining the United States’ ability to lead and to compete in a global economy.  Speaking at a conference in Long Beach, California, Rice said it breaks her heart to see “kids who might be the next Nobel Prize winner trapped in some public school that’s just basically warehousing them.”

As a secretary of state, it makes me terrified because if we cannot do better in educating all of our people, then we are not going to be competitive in a global economy…We’re going to become protectionist, we’re going to turn inward, the United States is not going to lead.

In an unrelated NY Times op-ed, the Berkeley professor of education and public policy Bruce Fuller takes exception to fusing “the fundamental purpose of schooling to the capitalist yearning for economic expansion.”

Sure, as parents we want our children to succeed economically. But we also worry about whether they are forming supportive friendships in school and becoming confident thinkers in the hands of nurturing teachers. While contemporary parents still subscribe to humanistic ideals when it comes to children’s well-rounded development, the new utilitarian approach is too quick to fuse schooling to dollar signs. Do we really need more college-educated workers or would we be better off with young people who are employed and engaged in their local communities?  

Blah, Blah, Blah

Published by Robert Pondiscio on October 22, 2008 in Higher Education. 1 Comment

Officials at a Massachusetts college are apologizing to their alumni for a fund-raising letter that attempted to sound irreverent by featuring long sections of “blah, blah, blah.”

“With the recent economic downturn and loan crisis, it has become even more important for Framingham State College to receive your support. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.”

“Our decision to send you a letter containing the words “blah blah” was a misguided and embarrassing attempt to connect with alumni in a different way,” Christopher P. Hendry, vice president of college advancement, said in an apology letter.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.