New Report: Carnegie Credit-Hour Unit Here to Stay for the Foreseeable Future!

Dear Commons Community,

The Carnegie credit unit as a standard of college credit has been the subject of debate in recent years especially in light of developments such as competency-based education.  The issue is revisited in a new report as described in the The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“The Carnegie Unit has been around for more than a century, and unless someone can come up with a better way of tracking college credit, it won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. It presents challenges, but it has value because it sets minimum instructional standards.

That’s the conclusion of a report being released today by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. The report, “The Carnegie Unit: A Century-Old Standard in a Changing Education Landscape,” examines the role of the Carnegie Unit, more commonly called the credit hour, in an ever-evolving world of education.

The authors of the report looked into the Carnegie Unit and its relationship to various elements of education reform, specifically transparency and flexibility in regard to the design and delivery of education, both in elementary and secondary schools and in postsecondary education…

Critics of the Carnegie Unit have argued that it is a poor indication of how much students have learned, given that it emphasizes how much time people spend in the classroom rather than how much knowledge they have gained.

In its report Carnegie acknowledges the difficulties that the credit hour can present to the allocation of financial aid, the development of curricula with alternative pacing, and innovations that make education more flexible and learning outcomes more transparent…

Perhaps the most compelling argument for the Carnegie Unit is that no one has come up with a better system. “The crux of the issue is measuring time is easy, measuring learning is hard,” said Amy Laitinen, deputy director for higher education at New America, formerly the New America Foundation, and author of Cracking the Credit Hour.

Colleges need to create a culture centered on student learning, but that is not happening systematically, she said.

“Until we have some agreement upon what the unit is—the learning unit is—we don’t have much of a choice other than to rest on this time-based notion,” she said.

It will be a long time before there is agreement on a suitable replacement for the credit-hour. And until there is,  innovations such as competency-based education will remain on the fringes of education more so than the mainstream.

Tony

 

Marian Wright Edelman – Child Poverty is a National Moral Disgrace!

Dear Commons Community,

It is a national moral disgrace that there are 14.7 million poor children and 6.5 million extremely poor children in the United States of America – the world’s largest economy. “It is also unnecessary, costly and the greatest threat to our future national, economic and military security” comments Marian Wright Edelman in a report, Ending Child Poverty Now, published by the Children’s Defense Fund (CDF). Edelman further states:

“The 14.7 million poor children in our nation exceeds the populations of 12 U.S. states combined: Alaska, Hawaii, Idaho, Maine, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont, West Virginia, and Wyoming and is greater than the combined populations of the countries of Sweden and Costa Rica. Our nearly 6.5 million extremely poor children (living below the poverty line) exceeds the combined populations of Delaware, Montana, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, South Dakota, Vermont and Wyoming and is greater than the populations of Denmark or Finland.

The younger children are the poorer they are during their years of greatest brain development. Every other American baby is non-White and 1 in 2 Black babies is poor, 150 years after slavery was legally abolished.

America’s poor children did not ask to be born; did not choose their parents, country, state, neighborhood, race, color, or faith. In fact if they had been born in 33 other Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) countries they would be less likely to be poor. Among these 35 countries, America ranks 34th in relative child poverty — ahead only of Romania whose economy is 99 percent smaller than ours….”

The report shows how relatively modest changes in policies we know work can be combined to significantly reduce child poverty, and implemented right now if our political leaders put common good, common sense and economic sense for children first to improve the lives and futures of millions of children, and save taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars each year.

CDF’s report estimates a cost of $77.2 billion a year for the combined proposed policy improvements and suggests multiple tradeoffs our country can make to pay for this huge, long overdue and urgently needed reduction in child poverty without raising the federal deficit.

Tony