the clinton university problem...,

jonathanturley |  While largely ignored by the media, the Clintons have their own university scandal. Donald Trump has been rightfully criticized and sued over his defunct Trump University. There is ample support for claiming that the Trump University was fraudulent in its advertisements and operations. However, the national media has been accused of again sidestepping a scandal involving the Clintons that involves the same type of fraud allegations. The scandal involves a dubious Laureate Education for-profit online college (Walden) and entails many of the common elements with other Clinton scandals: huge sums given to the Clintons and questions of conflicts with Hillary Clinton during her time as Secretary of State. There are distinctions to draw between the two stories, but the virtual radio silence on the Clinton/Laureate story is surprising. [I have updated the original column with some additional thoughts, links, and clarifications for readers).

I have long been a critic of many online courses, though I am increasingly in the minority even on my faculty. However, the rise of online courses has allowed for an increase in dubious pitches and practices that prey upon people who cannot afford or attend a traditional academic institution.  I should also reveal a general opposition to for-profit universities, a view shared by many teachers and experts.  While there are some good for-profit programs from student camps to specialized training courses, Laureate is a massive, mega-corporation that is often criticized for its impact on education.  As companies maximize profits, students often become a mere cost of doing business.  The rate of default has been higher at such for-profit universities and less than half of students at for-profit schools actually finish such programs accordingly to Brookings.  Laureate is often cited as the leader in reducing education to a commodity in a mass for-profit enterprise.  The company has made huge profits and is worth over $4 billion.

Laureate Education was sued over its Walden University Online offering, which some alleged worked like a scam designed to bilk students of tens of thousands of dollars for degrees. Students alleged that they were repeatedly delayed and given added costs as they tried to secure degrees, leaving them deeply in debt.  Laureate itself has been criticized for “turbocharging” admissions while allowing standards to fall and shortchanging education.

The respected Inside Higher Education reported that Laureate Education paid Bill Clinton an obscene $16.5 million between 2010 and 2014 to serve as an honorary chancellor for Laureate International Universities.  Various news outlets said that neither Clinton nor Laureate were forthcoming on how much he was paid for the controversial association.

Bill Clinton worked as the “honorary chancellor” which sounds a bit like the group’s pitchman. He gave speeches in various countries and was heavily touted by the for-profit company to attract students.  The size of this payment (which has been widely reported) raises obvious concerns as to what the company was seeking to achieve and whether Laureate received any benefit from the association with the State Department given its massive international operations.

u.s colleges put low priority on student learning

aera-l | Norman Stahl of the LrnAsst-L list pointed to Julie Mack's report "U.S. colleges put low priority on student learning, say authors of 'We're Losing Our Minds' ". Mack writes that Richard Hersh, co-author with Richard Keeling of "We're Losing Our Minds" commented at a recent Educational Writers Association convention: "Higher education really needs to question its priorities, rewards, structures, principles and values. Learning itself must become a primary touchstone for decision-making."

Among other recent books critical of higher education are: (a) "Higher Education?: How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids - and What We Can Do About It" (Hacker & Dreifus, 2010); (b) "Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses" (Arum & Roksa, 2011), and (c) "College: What It Was, Is, and Should Be" (Delbanco, 2012).

Richard Wolin, in his insightful review of Delbanco's book, has this to say about the current state of higher education: "America's most prominent philosopher of democracy, John Dewey, devoted a considerable portion of his oeuvre to reflecting on the methods and goals of public education. . . . . In his view, the pedagogical key to cultivating the virtues of active citizenship lay with the antiauthoritarian, dialogic approach of the Socratic method: Dewey believed that democratic education, instead of acquiescing to the mind-numbing requirements of rote instruction, should focus on honing critical thinking, thereby nurturing autonomy. . . . ...although contemporary educators might agree about the indispensable value of liberal learning, if directly challenged to define its content and purport, they become stricken with paralysis. . . . THE END RESULT HAS BEEN THE CONFUSED INTELLECTUAL SMORGASBORD THAT DEFINES UNDERGRADUATE STUDY TODAY. . .[My CAPS]. . . Regrettably, one of the major casualties of the restructuring of undergraduate education along vocational and pre-professional lines has been Dewey's ideal of liberal study as training for democratic citizenship."

goodbye faculty

Education is the means of propagating knowledge from one generation to the next. Education has grown exponentially, both in terms of its own food-powered/make-work employment base, and, in terms of the numbers of these humans receiving it. Sadly, for the most part, education methods and results have not improved.

Education is commonly regarded as a good. It is seen as being a means of ensuring the continuing development of society. Ironically, one of its continuing deficiencies is that as currently configured, it fosters the fallacious belief that society can continue to grow without paying ecological costs.

That hallucination is coming to an end, even though few currently understand that fact. Various forms of human growth - population, economies, affluence, information and misunderstanding are unsustainable and coming to an end. There will continue to be a place for various forms of education as society seeks to power down with as little pain as possible.

Knowledge of science and engineering principles will make primary contributions given increasing demand for frugal operation and maintenance of the vast infrastructure of civilization. However, economics based on unsound and fallacious principles must soon die.

Relearning how to use only natural forces to produce and distribute food will take curricular center stage. Research will cease to advance the frontiers of knowledge about extraneous issues as it seeks to make best use of what natural capital is still available. The redirection of education is bound to head the agenda as society slowly wakes up to what civilization has done wrong.

prosperouswaydown | Goodbye faculty, hello neoliberal MOOCs. I read a NY Times article last week and was clued into a recent ‘innovation’ in education which may soon be sweeping the globe. Massively Open Online Courses or MOOCs are being produced and promoted by some of the most prestigious universities in the world, such as a just announced MIT-Harvard ‘nonprofit’ partnership, and another with Stanford, Princeton, UPenn, and Michigan. MOOC courses include video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback and student-paced learning, and most so far have been produced in the areas of engineering, computers, software, etc, but courses in all fields are clearly coming. Most of the article is techy and upbeat, but they let this quote slip in. George Siemens, a MOOC pioneer ominously said, “But if I were president of a mid-tier university, I would be looking over my shoulder very nervously right now, because if a leading university offers a free circuits course, it becomes a real question whether other universities need to develop a circuits course.” Get it? This is the end of universities as we know them. A few top universities produce coursework for the world and there’s no need for any of the rest of you out there. Still, the reporter tries to keep it positive and ends with this quote, “What’s still missing is an online platform that gives faculty the capacity to customize the content of their own highly interactive courses.” That’s right, we’ll still need you to ‘customize’ the MOOC course for your classrooms.

So I started to search for articles on MOOCs. It’s all tech hype and whiz-bang. I could find nary a discouraging word. And I certainly could not find what I was really looking for, which is the corporate strategy behind all of this. Why are the big boys interested? I have some of my own ideas that I will try to relate and that refer particularly to issues of peak and descent.

inquiry science rocks, or does it?

aps | Although "inquiry teaching" has been a hot topic in science education for many years, it may be useful to reflect on some unresolved issues associated with it. The main point of this essay is that the relative effectiveness of different types of instructional "approaches" is not always investigated with the same rigor that permeates all strong scientific disciplines–clear definitions, well-defined empirical procedures, and data-driven conclusions. The second–and more contentious–point is that for many aspects of science instruction, "discovery learning" is often a less effective way to teach than a direct, didactic, and explicit type of instruction. Some in the physics education community may view this assertion as a foolhardy heresy, while for others it may be a dark secret that they have been reluctant to share with their colleagues. But heresies and secrets are hardly the way to discover and implement maximally effective instructional methods for teaching science.

I am not alone in suggesting that common practices in physics education may have scant empirical support. Several years ago Handelsman, et al.¹ asked: " … why do outstanding scientists who demand rigorous proof for scientific assertions in their research continue to use and, indeed, defend on the basis of their intuition alone, teaching methods that are not the most effective?" (p. 521) The specific lament in Handelsman et al. is the claim that much science education is based on a traditional form of didactic lecturing. However, one could just as well use that very same critique about the lack of "rigorous proof" to challenge the current enthusiasm for "inquiry approaches" to science education.

For example, an influential report from the NAS on inquiry approaches to science education² states that "…studies of inquiry-oriented curriculum programs … demonstrated significant positive effects on various quantitative measures, including cognitive achievement, process skills, and attitudes toward science." This would seem to be clear evidence in support of inquiry-approaches to science instruction, except that the report goes on to note, parenthetically, that "there was essentially no correlation between positive results and expert ratings of the degree of inquiry in the materials (p. 125)." Thus we have an argument for the benefits of a particular pedagogy, but no consensus from experts about the "dose response", i.e., the extent to which different "degrees of inquiry" lead to different types or amounts of learning.

One wonders about the evidential basis for the wide-spread enthusiasm for inquiry science, given the lack of operational definitions of what constitutes an "inquiry-based" lesson–or entire curriculum–and what specific features distinguish it from other types of instruction. There is a particular irony here in that the very field that has developed extraordinarily clear norms and conventions for talking about methods, theories, instrumentation, measurement, underlying mechanisms, etc. often abandons them when engaging in research on science education.

Barriers to Better K-12 Math Education: Poverty and the Inadequate Undergraduate Education of Prospective K-12 Teachers

aera-l | ". . . . .why do we as mathematics educators - I'm talking about the research community and us higher education types - focus so much our attention on the secondary years? If I was building a fourteen story high rise and skimped on the first six floors, things would be problematic indeed. Is it because we think secondary teachers can fix students who struggle through those six years? Is it because we don't really care and it is survival of the 'fittest'? Is it because we have, in a sense, dumbed down the elementary school mathematics education curriculum to the extent that elementary school teachers, in their collegiate years, come away unsure and ill prepared and we, in effectively a vicious cycle, write them off?"

Ed Wall's complaint about the "dumbed down the elementary school mathematics education curriculum" is on target, but not IMHO because "the research community and us higher education types - focus so much our attention on the secondary years." Instead it's primarily because of poverty in the U.S. - see e.g. "The Overriding Influence of Poverty on Children's Educational Achievement" [Hake (2011a)]; and secondarily because U.S. Mathematics Education Researchers (MER's) have not devoted enough attention to the postsecondary years

3 major publishers sue open-education textbook startup

Chronicle | Open-education resources have been hailed as a trove of freely available information that can be used to build textbooks at virtually no cost. But a copyright lawsuit filed last month presents a potential roadblock for the burgeoning movement.

A group of three large academic publishers has sued the start-up Boundless Learning in federal court, alleging that the young company, which produces open-education alternatives to printed textbooks, has stolen the creative expression of their authors and editors, violating their intellectual-property rights. The publishers Pearson, Cengage Learning, and Macmillan Higher Education filed their joint complaint last month in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.

The publishers’ complaint takes issue with the way the upstart produces its open-education textbooks, which Boundless bills as free substitutes for expensive printed material. To gain access to the digital alternatives, students select the traditional books assigned in their classes, and Boundless pulls content from an array of open-education sources to knit together a text that the company claims is as good as the designated book. The company calls this mapping of printed book to open material “alignment”—a tactic the complaint said creates a finished product that violates the publishers’ copyrights.

“Notwithstanding whatever use it claims to make of ‘open source educational content,’ Defendant distributes ‘replacement textbooks’ that are created from, based upon, and overwhelmingly similar to Plaintiffs’ textbooks,” the complaint reads.

The complaint attempts to distance itself from attacking the legitimacy of open-education resources, but goes on to argue that Boundless is building its business model by stealing.

“Whether in the lecture hall or in a textbook, anyone is obviously free to teach the subjects biology, economics, or psychology, and can do so using, creating, and refining the pedagogical materials they think best, whether consisting of ‘open source educational content’ or otherwise,” it reads. “But by making unauthorized ‘shadow-versions’ of Plaintiffs’ copyrighted works, Defendant teaches only the age-old business model of theft.” Fist tap Dale.

Why The West Is So Weak And Russia Is So Strong

gaiusbaltar  |  The main thing to understand is that western societies and economies have been put on an ideological footing. Productivity, competitiveness, technology and science are simply not priorities anymore in the West. Explaining the consequences of this process for the West would take many articles, or a book of several hundred pages. Still, let’s mention a few examples.

The inverse competence crisis – The goal of this entire project has been to place the ideologically pure in all positions of power at all levels of society. These positions are, in a normal and competitive society, occupied by the highly competent 1.5/8 group. The process has now reached near-completion with most positions of power occupied by the ideologically pure. Some of those people have high IQs but they are neither objective nor independent thinkers. The Ideology they must subscribe to is simply incompatible with those qualities. This has some serious consequences.

Remember that positions of power and influence are more likely to demand general competence than other positions (as opposed to specific competence). The greater the power, the more the position demands general competence. The people in these positions now are selected by ideological fervor and reliability – so the higher you go, the more ideologically enthusiastic the people who hold them. This means that the least objective and independent thinking people hold the positions which require the greatest objectivity and independent thinking. Therefore, in the West incompetence becomes greater and more common the higher you go. As someone said - “a general is an incompetent colonel.” This can be seen absolutely everywhere except in some holdout private companies. Those exceptions are of course being addressed as we speak.

The second problem is that many of the irrational/subjective people holding all the power have reasonably high IQs. That may seem to be a positive thing but it has a major disadvantage. Moderate to high IQ irrational/subjective people are the easiest to brainwash of all people. The reasons for that are complicated and need to be addressed in another article – but what this means is that the top tier in the West is not only the most incompetent it can possibly be in comparison to what their jobs require – but are also the most malleable and delusional.

The cost and debt crisis – The migration of the ideologically pure into the ideological power base and positions of influence has created millions of jobs in western societies which create no value. These jobs are much more numerous and more widespread than most people realize, and I wouldn’t be surprised if something like 20%-30% of the entire labor force of the West could be fired without any adverse effect. In fact, the effect would be positive, especially if those people could be made to work the (mostly menial) real-economy jobs they are suitable for.

Deindustrialization has been blamed for the extreme debt levels and tax burdens of the West. That is, as far as it goes, true – but maintaining this giant group of incompetents in their fake jobs is also placing an extreme burden on the West. Western societies are now completely unsustainable and cannot be run without constant debt increase.

The competition crisis – This crisis can be explained by the following example: Let’s say there are three companies with combined 100% market share in some sector. There is no real competition between them and everybody can just relax because the customers can’t go anywhere else. These companies can get away with absolute incompetence on most levels, including in management. They don’t need to think about efficiency, safety, productivity or costs, except on their websites and in annual reports. However, if a competitor with competent employees manages to infiltrate the sector, those three companies will hit a wall. There will be an enormous crisis and one or more of them will most likely go under.

This is exactly the situation in the western economies now. Monopoly and oligopoly is the rule and the main objective of most large western companies is to prevent anyone from infiltrating their sector – usually by bribing regulators or by buying the competition. This is a necessity because a huge number of western companies are now run by incompetent management and staffed by incompetent people, particularly in support and management functions. The immortal words of the nameless Boeing employee about the 737 MAX apply to most large western companies; “this airplane is designed by clowns who in turn are supervised by monkeys.” Western companies are no longer competitive. They cannot compete with Chinese companies now and soon they won’t be able to compete with companies in general outside the West. They simply can’t function except inside an economic safe-space. In fact, the situation is such that the Chinese already do the real work for many of them and reshoring the work is problematic because of (surprise!) the human capital degradation in the West caused by the repurposing of its education system.

This also applies to western societies as a whole. The entire leadership and diplomatic classes of the West are no longer competitive against the rest of the world for exactly these reasons. They are being outmaneuvered by the Chinese, the Russians, the Indians, and everybody else at every turn. Even African leaders are now more competent than western leaders. They have consistently made decisions that are better for their people than leaders in the West - for the last few years anyway.

The complexity crisis – Earlier in this article I stated that the 1.5/8 group is extremely valuable for modern societies and without it complicated modern societies cannot be managed. In the West this group has been successfully sidelined to a great degree and a good part of it doesn’t even bother with university education anymore. The situation, however, is even worse than that. The reconfiguration of the education system and the break between competence and reward in the job market has fundamentally changed the decision making process behind the selection of university education. Why study engineering (which is hard) when you can get an even better paying job with a degree in psychology (which is easy nowadays)? The reconfiguration of the western education system has changed the reward structure, encouraging young people to pursue easy and useless education – simply because the “system” will provide them with jobs.

This has already caused a major crisis in western societies, particularly in the US. The “maintenance” of complex aspects of US society needs a large group of engineers and people with related education. This maintenance is faltering now, and significantly relies on foreign engineers educated in US universities. You see, why would Americans study engineering in a system which doesn’t reward it? If China and India could somehow recall their engineers and others with hard education from the US, the US system could probably not be maintained, let alone advanced. This will get progressively worse and we will soon reach a point where complex systems which underpin society cannot be kept running. That will require some kind of “reset” to a less complex society, with less prosperity of course.

There are far more crises than those four, but I wouldn’t want to sound like a doomsayer by listing more.

jaw-jacking, navel-gazing, oxygen-thieves - wrangling over the quality of oranges....,

NYTimes | There is a great progressive tradition in American thought that urges us not to look for the aims of education beyond education itself. Teaching and learning should not be conceived as merely instrumental affairs; the goal of education is rather to awaken individuals’ capacities for independent thought. Or, in the words of the great progressivist John Dewey, the goal of education “is to enable individuals to continue their education.”

This vision of the educational enterprise is a noble one. It doesn’t follow, however, that it is always clear how to make use of its insights. If we are to apply progressive ideals appropriately to a given discipline, we need to equip ourselves with a good understanding of what thinking in that discipline is like. This is often a surprisingly difficult task. For a vivid illustration of the challenges, we can turn to raging debates about K-12 mathematics education that get referred to as the “math wars” and that seem particularly pertinent now that most of the United States is making a transition to Common Core State Standards in mathematics.

At stake in the math wars is the value of a “reform” strategy for teaching math that, over the past 25 years, has taken American schools by storm. Today the emphasis of most math instruction is on — to use the new lingo — numerical reasoning. This is in contrast with a more traditional focus on understanding and mastery of the most efficient mathematical algorithms.

How About Schools Teach Every Student To Read, Write, And Calculate At Grade Level?

WaPo  |  This week at the Oklahoma State Department of Education building, I was schooled in how the stealthy, well-orchestrated movement against teaching honestly about America’s racist history operates. It is fast and furious and determined to steamroll over truth in education.

But Monday morning, one Black woman and a Black high school student tried to hold the line. Though they were on the losing side of that steamroll — this is Oklahoma, after all — their courage and resistance in the face of white supremacy deserve to be celebrated.

The occasion was consideration of item 8(b) on the Oklahoma Board of Education’s meeting agenda: emergency rules for implementing a bill passed in May by the Republican-controlled state legislature limiting what students in the state can be taught on race and gender. Notice of the item was publicly posted only last Friday, giving educators and advocates next to no time to organize a response. The actual rules, too, were made available just minutes before the meeting. They included chillingly harsh penalties, such as teacher suspensions and district defunding, for instruction that makes any individual feel “discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex.”

Carlisha Williams Bradley arrived knowing she would cast one of the most consequential votes of her professional life. The only Black member of the board, she wondered whether she would be removed from her position for pushing back. But the education advocate and former executive director of Tulsa Legacy Charter School spoke truth: that the right-wing’s current bête noire, “critical race theory” — which the legislature claimed to be responding to — means merely the examination of laws and legislation that uphold racism and oppression. Oklahoma’s new education law and harsh punishment, she said, would serve only to generate fear in teaching an accurate history of the United States.

“We are robbing students of the opportunity to have a high-quality education,” Williams Bradley said.

when did reading, writing, and arithmetic become rocket science?

Video - Tavis Smiley with Canada and Guggenheim.

WaPo | Reform must be guided by community empowerment and strong evidence, not by ideological warriors or romanticized images of leaders acting like they’re doing something, anything. Waiting for Superman has ignored deep historical and systemic problems in education such as segregation, property-tax based funding formulas, centralized textbook production, lack of local autonomy and shared governance, de-professionalization, inadequate special education supports, differential discipline patterns, and the list goes on and on.

People seeing Waiting for Superman should be mobilized to improve education. They just need to be willing to think outside of the narrow box that the film-makers have constructed to define what needs to be done. While the education film Waiting For Superman has moving profiles of students struggling to succeed under difficult circumstances, it puts forward a sometimes misleading and other times dishonest account of the roots of the problem and possible solutions.

The amped-up rhetoric of crisis and failure everywhere is being used to promote business-model reforms that are destabilizing even in successful schools and districts. A panel at NBC’s Education Nation Summit, taking place in New York today and tomorrow, was originally titled "Does Education Need a Katrina?" Such disgraceful rhetoric undermines reasonable debate.

Let’s examine these issues, one by one:

useful, reliable, and non-obvious predictions from the social science of physics education research...,

aera-l | Rick Froman of the TIPS discussion list has pointed to a New York Times Opinion Piece "How Reliable Are the Social Sciences?" by Gary Gutting at <http://nyti.ms/K0xVQL>. Gutting wrote that Obama, in his State of the Union address <http://wapo.st/JnuBCO> cited "The Long-Term Impacts of Teachers: Teacher Value-Added and Student Outcomes in Adulthood" (Chetty et al., 2011 at <http://bit.ly/KkanoU>) to support his emphasis on evaluating teachers by their students' test scores. That study purportedly shows that students with teachers who raise their standardized test scores are "more likely to attend college, earn higher salaries, live in better neighborhoods, and save more for retirement."

After comparing the reliability of social-science research unfavorably with that of physical-science research, Getting wrote [my CAPS): "IS THERE ANY WORK ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF TEACHING THAT IS SOLIDLY ENOUGH ESTABLISHED TO SUPPORT MAJOR POLICY DECISIONS?" THE CASE FOR A NEGATIVE ANSWER lies in the [superior] predictive power of the core natural sciences compared with even the most highly developed social sciences."

Most education experts would probably agree with Getting's negative answer. Even economist Eric Hanushek, as reported by Lowery <http://nyti.ms/KnRvDh>, states: "Very few people suggest that you should use value-added scores alone to make personnel decisions."

But then Getting goes on to write (slightly edited): "While the physical sciences produce many detailed and precise predictions, the social sciences do not. The reason is that such predictions almost always require randomized controlled trials (RCT's) which are seldom possible when people are involved. . . . . . Jim Manzi. . . .[[according to Wikipedia <http://bit.ly/KqMf1M>, a senior fellow at the conservative Manhattan Institute <http://bit.ly/JvwKG1>]]. . . . in his recent book "Uncontrolled" <http://amzn.to/JFalMD> offers a careful and informed survey of the problems of research in the social sciences and concludes that non-RCT social science is not capable of making useful, reliable, and nonobvious predictions for the effects of most proposed policy interventions." BUT:

(1) Randomized controlled trails may be the "gold standard" for medical research, but they are not such for the social science of educational research - see e.g., "Seventeen Statements by Gold-Standard Skeptics #2" (Hake, 2010) at <http://bit.ly/oRGnBp>.

(2) Unknown to most of academia, and probably to Getting and Manzi, ever since the pioneering work of Halloun & Hestenes (1985a) at <http://bit.ly/fDdJHm>, physicists have been engaged in the social science of Physics Education Research that IS "capable of making useful, reliable, and nonobvious predictions," e.g., that "interactive engagement" courses can achieve average normalized pre-to-posttest gains which are about two-standard deviations above *comparison* courses subjected to "traditional" passive-student lecture courses. This work employs pre/post testing with Concept Inventories <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Concept_inventory> - see e.g., (a) "The Impact of Concept Inventories on Physics Education and It's Relevance For Engineering Education" (Hake, 2011) at <http://bit.ly/nmPY8F>, and (b) "Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Science Education?" (Wieman, 2007) at <http://bit.ly/anTMfF>.

american political science: a generational divide over education delivery models

Prof. Joyce M. | I saw the video. Is this the new bright shiny object obscuring a real problem with promises of a magic fix? It disparages textbooks and lectures. I see this as the rote learning model that has been pushed by Rupert Murdock(wants to make money from it), the Walmart family and Bill Gates. Teaching children to have short attention spans has no long term benefit. These programs teach to a test that they help to create. You learn to write well by reading. No textbooks, huh? This is a photo of a "flipped classroom" http://www.flickr.com/photos/2... and this is a photo of a Harvard University classroom http://www.johnhopebryant.com/... Rote learning does not foster creativity, independent thought or increased attention spans. Textbooks and lectures are still widely in use at our universities. http://webcast.berkeley.edu/se... Good luck passing the AP and CLEP with that type of education. http://clep.collegeboard.org/ & http://apcentral.collegeboard....

ENu | I think the film has pretty much got the idea. In my opinion education in the U.S. is a huge fail. On one side you have kids who simply dgaf(don't give a f___) and on the other you have kids killing themselves trying to "learn." Unfortunately, neither side is benefitting or actually learning or being educated and there doesn't seem to be a middle ground. Things are just going to continue spiraling with incompetence increasing.

What's truly sad is that the kids who work hard and try to actually understand are being beaten out by those who are good at guessing - because everything seems to be based on tests. The trick is no longer to understand what you're learning in high school and at some colleges, it's simply to regurgitate facts. I was honestly shocked the first time I wrote a paper at _______ and my teacher didn't like it because it didn't incorporate my opinion. Shoot, I didn't even know if I knew how to have my own opinion in an academic setting. And in biology, when they asked for extrapolations on tests, you could almost see the steam coming out of people's heads trying to figure out what to do with those! It became more of a guessing game than an understanding challenge, and less than 2% of the class had a clue as to what was going on.

If the education system were improved and students were actually given the chance to learn and understand, the opportunities would be endless. I don't know what it'll take to get us there, but something must be done ASAP.

CNu | ENu is my 19 year old daughter. She weighed in on the topic with me last night with the trailer video for the documentary Race to Nowhere. A product/result of exceptional heredity, parental investment, the finest private/independent education available in the midwest, and matriculating at one of the highly selective colleges and universities that still matters - I was delighted to receive the benefit of her opinion on this topic. Education is fundamental. It's a subject we ponder at great length and hopefully at some depth hereabouts. We have a significant divergence of opinion wrt prospective remedies. Frankly, however, I'm at a complete loss to understand what a credible and objective criticism of flipped classrooms looks like. Mebbe I'll hear one before everything is said and done, but I'm not holding my breath.

Pearson Giving Obamas $65 Million Payout For Helping Them Leech U.S. Public School Systems

nakedcapitalism |  Seeking to make sense of the $65 million figure, some have pointed to the former President’s prior book sales and Clintonesque celebrity status. Since 2001, 1995’s Dreams from My Father and 2006’s The Audacity of Hope—both of which were published by Crown, a division of Random House (now PRH) owned by the German multimedia conglomerate Bertelsmann—have sold roughly 4.7 million copies, undoubtedly yielding substantial profits.

But according to industry insiders the former First Lady’s contribution is a far greater gamble. And despite the President’s successful publishing record the size of the contract remains something of a mystery. At $20 per book, sales of the two books combined would have to exceed 3.25 million copies to match the cost of the advance, and that doesn’t include necessary overhead such as the costs of materials, distribution, and marketing. As one insider stated, “no one expected it to go this high, [with the books selling for] almost double what we might have imagined…”

At this point, a brief review of the relationship between the Obama administration and the companies behind the deal may shed light on the logic underlying this extraordinary bid.

Since the merger of Penguin and Random House in 2013, PRH has been owned jointly by Bertelsmann and the British education and publishing multinational Pearson, PLC. A leading producer of education and testing materials, Pearson has profited substantially from one of President Obama’s major legislative initiatives—Race to the Top (RTTT).

Much like its Bush-era predecessor, No Child Left Behind, RTTT provides competitive funding to K-12 schools based on a range of criteria intended to stimulate higher teacher and student performance. Among the standards for receiving funding under RTTT is the adoption of Common Core (CC) testing, which, in effect, incentivized school districts to hand federal grant money over to private firms that create CC tests.

Backed by the powerful Gates Foundation and pushed heavily by President Obama and then Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, RTTT was met with widespread criticism among parents, teachers, and education scholars for its punitive and test-centric approach to education reform. In July of 2011, outrage over the initiative culminated in a widely publicized march held outside the White House, attendees of which included some of the country’s leading educators, such as Jonathan Kozol and Diane Ravitch.

Despite extensive outcry, including calls for Duncan’s resignation in 2014 from the National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, two groups that many regard as traditional Democratic constituencies, President Obama continued to voice support for Duncan and RTTT. When Duncan finally resigned in late-2015, Obama praised Duncan’s record, while not-so-subtly infantilizing his critics: “Arne has done more to bring our educational system—sometimes kicking and screaming—into the 21^st century than anybody else.”

But if RTTT was a failure in the eyes of the country’s educators, it was a remarkable success for the testing companies. Between 2010, when RTTT first took effect, and 2014 demand for tests in the U.S. grew from $1.6 to $2.5 billion. Few firms benefitted from the rise of standardized testing in the United States as much as Pearson. According to an analysis by CNBC from 2010 to 2014 Pearson received more contracts than any other company in the industry—27 out of 128 in total.

"boko" is writing 999 words and still not saying what you mean...,

christiansciencemonitor |  Newman writes that "boko" has a variety of meanings focused around denoting "things or actions having to do with fraudulence, sham, or inauthenticity" or deception. He says the false linkage to the English word "book" was first made in a 1934 Hausa dictionary by a Western scholar that listed 11 meanings for the word – ten of them about fraudulent things and the final one asserting the connection to "book." An incorrect assertion, says Newman.

A big deal? Not a huge one, but a good example of how received "facts" are often far from the truth.

I'm more interested in the current claims that Boko can be translated as "Western education." Does it? Sort of, but not really.

Let's go back to the British colonialists in northern Nigeria. In their aggressive push for modern secular schooling – and the resistance from Muslims – lies the spark for Boko Haram's murderous rampages against "Western" education.

Newman writes about the history of the word's use in this context:

    The correct answer was implicitly presented by Liman Muhammad, a Hausa scholar from northern Nigeria, some 45 years ago. In his study of neologisms and lexical enrichment in Hausa, Muhammad (pp. 8-10) gives a list of somewhat over 200 loanwords borrowed from English into Hausa in the area of “Western Education and Culture”. Significantly, boko is not included. Rather one finds boko in his category for western concepts expressed in Hausa by SEMANTIC EXTENSION of pre-existent Hausa words.

    According to Muhammad, boko originally meant “Something (an idea or object) that involves a fraud or any form of deception” and, by extension, the noun denoted “Any reading or writing which is not connected with Islam. The word is usually preceded with ‘Karatun’ [lit. writing/studying of]. ‘Karatun Boko’ therefore means the Western type of Education."

Newman explains that when Britain's colonial government began introducing its education system into Nigeria, seeking to replace traditional Islamic education (including replacing the Arabic script traditionally used to write Hausa with a Roman-based script that they also quickly called "boko") , this was seen as a "fraudulent deception being imposed upon the Hausa by a conquering European force."

    Rather than send their own children to the British government schools, as demanded by the British, Hausa emirs and other elites often shifted the obligation onto their slaves and other subservients. The elite had no desire to send their children to school where the values and traditions of Hausa and Islamic traditional culture would be undermined and their children would be turned into ’yan boko,’ i.e., “(would-be) westerners”.

Are We More Than Ripples In The Fine Structure Of SpaceTime Geometry?

PCOTG | The other day, at a meeting here, the following lines were read: "Let us take the Sermon on the Mount and try to understand what it means. As was said before, in the last talk, "religion"—as it is called—that is, as the psychological ideas taught by Christ about the individual evolution of man and his transformation into a new man are usually called—is concerned with the development of essence after personality has been formed. A man in whom a rich personality has been formed by experience, education and interests, is a "rich man" in personality. But essence remains poor. For it to develop, personality must become passive." This was not understood, but it is very important that everyone in the work should understand what this paragraph means. It means that religion in the real sense—and we only know Christianity  ourselves—refers to the third stage of a man, the making of personality passive so that essence can grow. I must repeat again that the inner meaning of the Gospels has nothing to do with life. Their teaching starts at the point where personality has been formed already in a man and refers to this third stage of possible development. A man must first of all become developed as regards personality by the action of life.

This work is sometimes called a second education. It is for those who are looking for a second education. The first education is an education that life gives us; and this is absolutely necessary. The better a person is educated by means of life, the more he learns, the more intelligent he is, the more experienced he is, the more he knows about people, and about affairs, the more he knows about manners, the better he can express himself, the more he is able to use the different sides of life, the
better for him. This is the first education. This forms personality. We have said before that man consists of different centres and each of these has different parts; these centres and parts should be well furnished and the better furnished they are with inscriptions on rolls, the better forhim.

But a point comes in a man's development where, as was said before, he feels empty, and it is at this stage that the teaching of the Gospels and all this work comes in. I do not know whether any of you have ever thought about this very deeply. But it is quite possible that some of you who have done your duty in life often wonder what it is exactly you are doing, what the meaning of it all is. Speaking in this personal way for a moment I would like to ask you this question: Do you think that life and the meanings that it affords us are enough and have you felt that in some way life does not quite give you what you expected?

I am not saying that life is meaningless; it has obviously many meanings. But have any of you come to the point of feeling a certain meaninglessness even in those interests that you follow and try to hold on to? Why I am saying this is because if life afforded us our full meaning then there would be no point, in fact, no meaning, either in what the Gospels talk about or in what this system talks about. If you are quite content with the meanings that life affords, quite selfsatisfied, then there is no point in trying to understand what this system teaches, and, let me add, there is no point in your trying to understand what Christ's teaching really means. Now, if man were nothing but a well-formed personality and this were his end, then we might very well believe in all those doctrines of humanitarianism and other scientific ideas that say that man is nothing but a creature turned towards external life and having to adapt himself as intelligently as possible towards it. But if you have followed what has been said in this letter about the idea of man in this system you will see that the development of personality is merely a stage, and an absolutely necessary stage, towards a further stage.

It is directly comparable with the formation of a mass of food round a seed, as in the case of a nut. The nut has an essential part in it—namely, the seed itself that can grow—but it cannot grow until it is surrounded by a mass of nourishing material, just as an egg has a seed in it surrounded by a mass of yolk, and so on. Take the latter example: how can a chicken grow unless it has all the substances surrounding it for it to feed on? And remember that it grows inside the egg-shell and finally emerges a complete chicken and this complete chicken has been made out of the substances that the living germ has attacked and eaten. Now the fate of acorns is one thing, but the fate of oak-trees is a different thing, and, as was said, man surrounded by personality resembles an acorn and suffers, as it were, the same fate as the acorn, unless he begins to grow, and growth in a man corresponds to what we are calling the third stage in a man after personality has been formed round essence. If we take man at this second stage where essence is surrounded by personality he is just like an acorn, maybe a larger or a smaller acorn, but nothing but an acorn. He is perhaps very important; he has learnt many things; he feels he knows; he is, in short, full of personality, and that is his level, and at that level he suffers, not really a proper human fate, but the fate of an undeveloped organism, the fate of a person who is not yet fully-grown, just as an acorn is not a fully-grown tree. And unless we understand very clearly about this third stage—namely, the development of an acorn into a tree by its living essence or seed feeding on the substances formed round it—we shall never understand, as I said before, what this work is about, nor shall we understand what the Gospels are about.

iCue Testing: big beauracracy's bad business model but correct approach to education reform

technology review | Two iconic institutions. Six capital letters. One bittersweet tale. A new book from MIT Press recounts how MIT and NBC partnered up to revolutionize education and ended up learning some lessons of their own.

The More We Know: NBC News, Educational Innovation, and Learning from Failure describes the life and (slow) death of a product called iCue. The book is written by two people who worked on iCue, Eric ­Klopfer and Jason Haas. Klopfer is a professor of science education at MIT and director of the Scheller Teacher Education Program. Haas is a graduate student in the Media Lab. iCue was a—well, it defies easy description, and that was maybe part of the problem.

Simply, iCue was an attempt, born in 2005, to teach history, politics, literature, and more online through archival material. The main unit of content was a short video—typically a broadcast news clip—that appeared on a flippable "CueCard." The back of this virtual card held data and room for the user’s notes. The site featured course syllabi, test questions, games, and social networking.

Alex Chisholm and colleagues from MIT’s Department of Comparative Media Studies outlined the project and eventually partnered with NBC, which had the content, the money, and the audience. "It was a chance to try to get out into the world some of the ideas we had around games and media and education," ­Klopfer says. They wanted to influence learning and collect data on student behavior. Meanwhile, NBC wanted an in with a younger generation, and it eventually came to share the researchers’ passion for education as an end in itself.

The team realized it couldn’t capture much of the home test-prep market, and schools were a hard sell, too. Teachers couldn’t easily fit this collaborative and self-directed educational tool into their top-down teaching methods. NBC also watered down or eliminated games, social networking, and user-generated content, in part because of privacy concerns. Released free on the Web in 2008, iCue was shut down in 2011 after attracting only a few thousand users, mostly adults. Tens of millions of dollars had been spent. "This was a product to be proud of," Klopfer and Haas write, "but ultimately not the product that anyone at NBC News or MIT would have preferred to see make it to market."

The book offers lessons for academics, educational entrepreneurs, and established media companies eager to participate in massive open online course (MOOC) initiatives such as edX. One takeaway is that the educational system is built on strict standards that need to change before it can accommodate new models of interaction. Another is that media companies have a lot to offer but benefit from the guidance of academia. A third is that new educational products require patient incubation.

"Our goal," Haas says, "was to provide an accessible narrative as a way into the things we really care about."

having peeped the power game on think tanks - we shift our gaze to schools with students...,

bnarchives |  Building on the definition of critical education residing in the crossroads of cultural politics and political economy, this theoretical article offers an inquiry into the intersection between critical education research and the central ritual of contemporary capitalism – capitalisation. This article outlines four current approaches in education research literature to the corporatisation of education. This article argues that the approaches must rely implicitly on one of the two major theories of capitalism: modern neoclassical economics or Marxist political economy, even when the approaches are built on cultural and sociological arguments. Without an explicit engagement with the concept of capital and capitalisation, the approaches risk appearing theoretically weak and reliant on moral assumptions. In this sense, critical education literature would be strengthened by engagement with international political economy (IPE) literature. This article proposes to redress this lacuna in the literature by mobilising Jonathan Nitzan's and Shimson Bichler's theory of capital as power to better understand the corporatisation of education.

most instructional technology sucks...,

NYTimes | The Web site of Carnegie Learning, a company started by scientists at Carnegie Mellon University that sells classroom software, trumpets this promise: “Revolutionary Math Curricula. Revolutionary Results.”

The pitch has sounded seductive to thousands of schools across the country for more than a decade. But a review by the United States Department of Education last year would suggest a much less alluring come-on: Undistinguished math curricula. Unproven results.

The federal review of Carnegie Learning’s flagship software, Cognitive Tutor, said the program had “no discernible effects” on the standardized test scores of high school students. A separate 2009 federal look at 10 major software products for teaching algebra as well as elementary and middle school math and reading found that nine of them, including Cognitive Tutor, “did not have statistically significant effects on test scores.”

Amid a classroom-based software boom estimated at $2.2 billion a year, debate continues to rage over the effectiveness of technology on learning and how best to measure it. But it is hard to tell that from technology companies’ promotional materials.

Many companies ignore well-regarded independent studies that test their products’ effectiveness. Carnegie’s Web site, for example, makes no mention of the 2010 review, by the Education Department’s What Works Clearinghouse, which analyzed 24 studies of Cognitive Tutor’s effectiveness but found that only four of those met high research standards. Some firms misrepresent research by cherry-picking results and promote surveys or limited case studies that lack the scientific rigor required by the clearinghouse and other authorities.

“The advertising from the companies is tremendous oversell compared to what they can actually demonstrate,” said Grover J. Whitehurst, a former director of the Institute of Education Sciences, the federal agency that includes What Works.

School officials, confronted with a morass of complicated and sometimes conflicting research, often buy products based on personal impressions, marketing hype or faith in technology for its own sake.

“They want the shiny new one,” said Peter Cohen, chief executive of Pearson School, a leading publisher of classroom texts and software. “They always want the latest, when other things have been proven the longest and demonstrated to get results.”

Carnegie, one of the most respected of the educational software firms, is hardly alone in overpromising or misleading. The Web site of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt says that “based on scientific research, Destination Reading is a powerful early literacy and adolescent literacy program,” but it fails to mention that it was one of the products the Department of Education found in 2009 not to have statistically significant effects on test scores.

Similarly, Pearson’s Web site cites several studies of its own to support its claim that Waterford Early Learning improves literacy, without acknowledging the same 2009 study’s conclusion that it had little impact.

And Intel, in a Web document urging schools to buy computers for every student, acknowledges that “there are no longitudinal, randomized trials linking eLearning to positive learning outcomes.” Yet it nonetheless argues that research shows that technology can lead to more engaged and economically successful students, happier teachers and more involved parents.

“To compare this public relations analysis to a carefully constructed research study is laughable,” said Alex Molnar, professor of education at the National Education Policy Center at the University of Colorado. “They are selling their wares.”

internet bully stopped and frisked in tahnussy's comment section

So, feeling "in the know" about this particular subject, I opted to stick my toe into the supremely shallow and very heavily policed waters over at what passes for black public intellectual output over at the atlantic. It didn't take long for me to piss off the extremely partisan toddlers and get put in check. My question, did I "argue" in bad faith - as I was accused of doing by the hyperactive moderator Sandy - who also happens to profess to be a "master teacher" in various and sundry of the humanities and whose primary instrumentality is chalk?

In my estimation, the severe and excessive levels of thought policing that take place in the cathedral's "safe places" has nothing whatsoever to do with trolling, but are instead hallmarks of the profound discursive and political weakness of feminized progressive politics. Emotions prevail in these contexts, and if your position is unpopular - no matter how it's presented - you will be ostracized because they are incapable of a fact-based or reasoned counter-argument.  You're either with us, or you're against us - is.all.they've.got.  This is why I believe nobody will step up and overcome the malicious narrative mischief being worked by Nicholas Wade and amplified by the Establishment.

trickydonut KlugerRD • 2 days ago

I actually don't think tenure is the biggest issue, I think supervision is. In most schools, the principal or other administrator might only stop by a classroom 4 or 5 times a year, with maybe only two of those being actual evaluations. What rarely happens: observation, identification of issues teachers need help with (#1: classroom management), and then sustained support until the issue is resolved. Yes, there are bad teachers out there, but usually problems just fester because no one knows about them or takes the time to fix them.

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  AptiDude trickydonut • 2 days ago

  
  

  Yes, and how many inner-city high administrators actually could advise a French teacher, music teacher, art teacher, special education teacher or an AP physics teacher effectively about how best to instruct their students? All they can do is make sure the teacher is in the room and the students are mostly paying attention and order is being maintained.

  
  
  
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  CNu trickydonut • 2 days ago

  
  

  Bingo!!! Education is not rocket science. Take attendance, perform instruction, issue grades. Supervise for consistency and quality in all of the above. Simple.
  Parental priorities in high-performing public school districts:
  1. Safety
  2. Children have fun in school
  3. Children served good food that they enjoy.
  4. Academics
  5. College/Vocational preparation
  In that order
  If you take care of the first three, four and five have a marvelous way of taking care of themselves. The first three are of course bellweathers of a competently managed school environment.
  The invisible 800lb gorilla that no one EVER explicitly articulates - is that the past three generations of urban public school graduates / attendees - a majority have had such an atrocious experience in school, such an abject failure and deviation from priorities one through three - that they not only have zero warm and fuzzy feelings about the enterprise, they actually have a deeply imprinted and visceral aversion to contact with the school of any kind.
  These are generations whose compulsory attendance at schools stripped of cultural enrichment and starved for resources at the business-end of education delivery - was miserable. Their experience was rendered miserable because bloated, overpaid, incompetent administrations were engaged in various and sundry modes of parasitic extraction and self-aggrandizement that had nothing whatsoever to do with the needs and wants of their core constituents.
  Until the 19th century education model is fully reformed (and it can't be due to deeply conflicting institutional interests) and urban public schools are remade predominantly safe, fun, and nourishing - then the problem of failed performance will persist.
  Off the top, somewhere between 50-70% of the existing teacher cadres have got to go. In addition, 10-12% of students who are irretrievably pre-jail and make life miserable for the other kids, teachers, and school leadership - they've also got to go. I believe they used to call it "reform" school.
  Finally, parents and grandparents have to be brought back into active communal engagement with the institution despite the ill-will they may bear toward it because of their own miserable experiences therein. Cultural enrichment activities are the path down which this bridge and community rebuilding can be achieved. Again, those programs require reallocation of resources away from the central office and out to the locations where education and community are delivered.
  The political will and audacity to effect these kinds of institutional changes is not present in sufficient quantity to make anything like this happen anywhere in the U.S.

  
  
  
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    Bruce S CNu • 2 days ago

    
    

    Yes, firing 50-70% of people who do the work is clearly the place to start if we want to improve education outcomes. Why didn't I think of that?

    
    
    

    
    
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      CNu Bruce S • 2 days ago

      
      

      Teachers get certified at the age of 21-22, and don't have to update that at regular intervals like most professionals. Consequently, we have 48 year old teachers who haven't updated their pedagogical methods since prior to the advent of the world wide web, facing kids with Googol in their pockets and the answer to nearly any question those kids want to pose. It's a grotesque understatement to call such an obsolete and out of touch skill set "doing the work". More like "occupying the position", "waiting on a pension" and "categorically failing to manage the classroom".
      There's a reason that kids don't want to listen to these out of date and irrelevant throwbacks.

      
      
      
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        monknomo CNu • 2 days ago

        
        

        It varies by state, but even in backwater Alaska teachers have to take a couple credits of continuing education courses every year to maintain their credentials. The courses general cover new pedagogical methods and is not dissimilar from what lawyers and other professionals with a certificate do.

        
        
        

        
        
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          CNu monknomo • 2 days ago

          
          

          They seem to have missed that in Missouri http://dese.mo.gov/governmenta...

          
          
          
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            Sandy Young (Corkingiron) Mod CNu • 2 days ago

            
            

            None of what you've posted contradicts the comment you are responding to - nor does it support your generalization that teachers aren't motivated and often required to update their credentials.
            You are simply not arguing in good faith. Don't post again.

            
            
            
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        Bruce S CNu • 2 days ago

        
        

        I'm not at all sure you know what your are talking about. I doubt that anyone has taught a quarter of a century without "updating" their pedagogical methods - at least not in any major school district. Teachers have been forced to cope with and adapt to curriculum changes. And I don't believe that their resistance is always because they are incompetent, but might be because they have experience that outside consultants and "reformers" don't value.

        
        
        
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          CNu Bruce S • 2 days ago

          
          

          I've watched it first hand for five years now and have been absolutely shocked and appalled at the lack of professional development, the lack of self-motivated continuing education, and the profound lack of basic operational technology skills. Technology is now a primary content and curriculum delivery modality in the classroom, part and parcel of what you do to boost both individual and collaborative student engagement - but an overwhelming percentage of teachers are technology illiterate.
          Concrete examples; in the large urban district it's been my privilege to observe, we rolled out a new student information system. Fewer than 15% of teachers participated in mandatory training for the SIS - with the consequent failures of basic data entry in the non rocket science aspects of school business, i.e., entering attendance and issuing grades.
          So also for training in the use of the short-throw projector systems and blue-tooth pens and controls for using these systems to interactively display their lessons.
          Finally, the actual computer classes for children have suffered from a 9 year old pathetic excuse for a curriculum focused on "digital citizenship" rather than actual functional skills.
          On their own, the children tend to be exponentially more technology literate and technology aware than the adults purported to function as their instructors.

          
          
          
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            Bruce S CNu • 2 days ago

            
            

            I don't believe that your experience with issues like short throw projectors comes close to supporting the suggestion that 2/3 or so of teachers are incompetent and should be terminated. Sorry. You come off like a wack job full of extreme opinions based on a pocket full of anecdotes.

            
            
            
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              CNu Bruce S • 2 days ago

              
              

              lol, the writing on the wall has you petrified. That's a very good thing indeed!