Janet Napolitano – U. of California President Says Online Education is Not a Silver Bullet!

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has an article today on an interview with Janet Napolitano, the new president of the University of California. She states that online education is not the answer to the fundamental challenges facing her system.   The article states:

“Ms. Napolitano, who took office last fall after serving four years as U.S. secretary of homeland security, sat for an interview this week with Mark Baldassare, president of the Public Policy Institute of California. Mr. Baldassare noted that online education did not figure in her stated initiatives. Here is how Ms. Napolitano responded:

I think there’s a developing consensus that online learning is a tool for the tool box, where higher education is concerned; that it is not a silver bullet the way it was originally portrayed to be. It’s a lot harder than it looks. And, by the way, if you do it right, it doesn’t save all that much money, because you still have to have an opportunity for students to interact with either a teaching assistant or an assistant professor or professor at some level. And preparing the courses, if they’re really going to be top-quality, is an investment as well.

Ms. Napolitano’s remarks contrasted with the attitude of Gov. Jerry Brown, who last year promoted a pilot partnership with the upstart online-education company Udacity as a possible way to increase the capacity of California’s public universities while lowering costs. That experiment didn’t pan out, however.

And while campuses in the University of California system do offer many online courses, the university’s centralized online initiative, UC Online, has not quite lived up to expectations.

The new president continued:

Early on, the notion was you could use online learning to help students who were getting started, for remedial English or math, to be up to speed. I think that’s false. I think those students need the teacher in the classroom working with them. I think where online learning will turn out to be the most useful is to complement the upper-division coursework that we have.”

The entire interview is below.  The online-education part begins at 31:00.

Tony

 

 

Resignation Letter of Suzi Sluyter, a Former Teacher in Cambridge (Mass) Public Schools!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35X8g-_Ypso

Dear Commons Community,

Below is the resignation letter of a former teacher, Suzi Sluyter.  It says it all about the sorry state of education in this country brought on by the federal government mandates in No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top.

Tony

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February 12, 2014

I am writing today to let you know that I am resigning my position as PreK and Kindergarten teacher in the Cambridge Public Schools.  It is with deep sadness that I have reached this decision, as I have loved my job, my school community, and the families and amazing and dedicated faculty I have been connected with throughout the district for the past eighteen years.  I have always seen myself as a public school teacher, and fully intended to work until retirement in the public school system.  Further, I am the product of public schools, and my son attended Cambridge Public Schools from PreK through Grade 12.  I am and always have been a firm believer in quality public education.

In this disturbing era of testing and data collection in the public schools, I have seen my career transformed into a job that no longer fits my understanding of how children learn and what a teacher ought to do in the classroom to build a healthy, safe, developmentally appropriate environment for learning for each of our children.  I have experienced, over the past few years, the same mandates that all teachers in the district have experienced.   I have watched as my job requirements swung away from a focus on the children, their individual learning styles, emotional needs, and their individual families, interests and strengths to a focus on testing, assessing, and scoring young children, thereby ramping up the academic demands and pressures on them.  Each year, I have been required to spend more time attending classes and workshops to learn about new academic demands that smack of 1st and 2nd grade, instead of Kindergarten and PreK.  I have needed to schedule and attend more and more meetings about increasingly extreme behaviors and emotional needs of children in my classroom; I recognize many of these behaviors as children shouting out to the adults in their world, “I can’t do this!  Look at me!  Know me!  Help me!  See me!”  I have changed my practice over the years to allow the necessary time and focus for all the demands coming down from above.  Each year there are more.  Each year I have had less and less time to teach the children I love in the way I know best—and in the way child development experts recommend.  I reached the place last year where I began to feel I was part of a broken system that was causing damage to those very children I was there to serve.

I was trying to survive in a community of colleagues who were struggling to do the same:  to adapt and survive, to continue to hold onto what we could, and to affirm what we believe to be quality teaching for an early childhood classroom.  I began to feel a deep sense of loss of integrity.  I felt my spirit, my passion as a teacher, slip away.  I felt anger rise inside me.  I felt I needed to survive by looking elsewhere and leaving the community I love so dearly.  I did not feel I was leaving my job.  I felt then and feel now that my job left me.

It is with deep love and a broken heart that I write this letter.

Sincerely,

Suzi Sluyter