Dear Commons Community,

The NY Times has an excellent article today on testing in Shanghai schools.  Earlier this year,  Shanghai students scored first on the PISA (Programme for International Student Assessment)  Exam that measures reading, mathematics and science among 15 year olds.  American students came in between 15th and 31st place in the three categories.  K-12 testing advocates such as Arne Duncan point to this as evidence that the United States needs to do more to compete  in the global economy.  However, the article describes the middle schools in Shanghai as highly disciplined environments that emphasize rote learning and test preparation.  One Chinese educator is quoted as saying that in such environments students will always do better on standardized tests because that is their main goal.  However, critics of  the Chinese public education system comment that:  “ The nation’s education system  is too test-oriented, schools here stifle creativity and parental pressures often deprive children of the joys of childhood. ” One Chinese educator in a Wall Street Journal article on December 8, 2010, cautioned  that there is another side to this type of schooling.  “.. Chinese schools are very good at preparing their students for standardized tests,” says Jiang Xueqin, a deputy principal at Peking University High School in Beijing. “…and for that reason, they fail to prepare them for higher education and the knowledge economy…China has no problem producing mid-level accountants, computer programmers and technocrats. But what about the entrepreneurs and innovators needed to run a 21st century global economy? China’s most promising students still must go abroad to develop their managerial drive and creativity, and there they have to unlearn the test-centric approach to knowledge that was drilled into them.”

Maybe there is a lesson here for American education  policy leaders?

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The NY Times in its editorial today congratulated the leadership of General Electric for finally agreeing to take responsibility for cleaning up the Hudson River of PCBs.   This has been a decades long saga of how America’s most profitable company legally fought local, state and federal governments attempt to clean up one of New York State’s great natural treasures.  While we congratulate the present G.E.’s leadership for agreeing to clean-up the contamination,  we should not forget that Jack Welsh, corporate America’s poster boy, refused throughout his tenure to do so.  The Nation in 2001 in an article on this topic stated that “for twenty-five years Welch worked overtime to dodge GE’s responsibility for cleaning up the upper Hudson River, the biggest toxic site on the Superfund list of the Environmental Protection Agency.”   While Jack Welsh continues to play the talk-show circuit for his business acumen and leadership skills, we should also remember that he was one of America’s worst polluters.

Tony

G.E. Plant on Upper Hudson

Dead Sturgeon

Dear Commons Community,

Nobel Laureate and  NY Times columnist, Paul Krugman, has a strong piece in today’s NY Times on what he terms  “a well-developed right-wing media infrastructure.”   Using Dickens “A Christmas Carol” as his introduction, Krugman provides several examples of how elements of the Republican Party establishment have evolved into a switch and bait operation designed to confuse the American people with data distortion and pseudo research via well-funded conservative “think thanks”.  The best insight in this piece is ”

“Still, why does it matter what some politicians and think tanks say? The answer is that there’s a well-developed right-wing media infrastructure in place to catapult the propaganda, as former President George W. Bush put it, to rapidly disseminate bogus analysis to a wide audience where it becomes part of what “everyone knows.” (There’s nothing comparable on the left, which has fallen far behind in the humbug race.)”

He concludes:  “So  in this holiday season, let’s remember the wisdom of Ebenezer Scrooge. Not the bit about denying food and medical care to those who need them: [but] America’s failure to take care of its own less-fortunate citizens is a national disgrace”.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A brief report on grade inflation in undergraduate programs in American colleges and universities was just made available in the free online version of the Teachers College Record.   Key findings include:

1.      Records of average grades show that since the 1960s, grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level.

2.      The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private.

3.      Relative to other schools, public-commuter and engineering schools grade harshly.

4.      Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade.

The authors also comment that the data might indicate why the US has difficulty filling its employment needs in engineering and technology.    This report is based on grades from over 160 colleges and universities in the United States with a combined enrollment of over 2,000,000 students.The authors have also created a website where more details about grading in American higher education can be found.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The NY Times has just made available a fine chronological review of 2010- The Year in Pictures.  Many excellent photos (mostly depicting world events such as the earthquake in Haiti, the rescue of Chilean miners, the Afghanistan war, etc.  Here is a sample.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The lead article in this week’s Chronicle of Higher Education deals with the issue of college websites being inaccessible to students with disabilities.  Specifically, the article describes several situations where services are provided online that cannot be used by blind students.  The article’s author, Marc Parry covers higher education technology issues for the Chronicle and generally does a fine and thorough job and the same is true here.   An example of the issue is a new student union that Arizona State University put up last year.   However, it is entirely virtual – made of “bits not bricks” – and is inaccessible to blind students.   The article goes on to state that “colleges wouldn’t dare put up a new building without wheelchair access but routinely roll out digital services…that are inaccessible”.  Of particular interest to us here at CUNY is that Blackboard drew praise from the National Federation of the Blind for the “great improvement” in the latest release of its course management system.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Sorry I have not been active on the blog this week but between end of semester activities and the beginning of a two-week visit by my daughter (she lives in Seattle) and two grand children, time is at a premium.

The NY Times yesterday had a short piece yesterday quoting Robert Steel, NYC’s deputy mayor for economic development, as  saying that the city was seeking seek a top caliber academic institution such as M.I.T. as a partner in building a school for applied science and engineering. The city is willing to consider locating it on one or more of its properties, including the old hospital campuses at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and on Roosevelt Island.   Of course, the major question that was raised immediately is why doesn’t the City seek to invest into the engineering schools (Manhattan, Cooper Union, Columbia, CCNY) that already exist.  As part of the online version of the article are reader comments.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

For a number of years, CUNY has had a relationship with the colleges/universities in Shanxi Province, about 300 miles west of Beijing.  Every other year, faculty and administrators would either go to Shanxi or come to the United States for about ten days of meetings and cultural tours.  Don Watkins (Baruch College) and Che-Tsao Huang (York College) were the organizers of these exchanges for CUNY.   Because of a lack of funding, this program unfortunately has basically ended.

In the two trips (2001 and 2006), I made to China with this program, we became instantly aware of the remarkable expansion of higher education opportunities in Shanxi Province as colleges and universities we visited doubled and tripled in enrollments.  One question we asked our hosts was whether the economy could absorb all of the new graduates.  Today’s NY Times has an article that looks at the lives of several new graduates from universities in Shanxi who left their homes to seek their fortunes in Beijing, only to find that there aren’t any jobs for them.   This is no small problem but one that is affecting millions of recent graduates.  For example, in 1998, Chinese universities and colleges produced 830,000 graduates a year. Last May (2010), that number was more than six million and rising.  The article goes on to state accurately that a significant part of the problem is that the economy in Shanxi is basically agrarian and coal mining with only a modest need for college graduates.  Graduates  migrate to the large cities in the East and the South such Beijing and Shanghai but unfortunately their degrees are not as well respected as those from the older, more established universities.  The article is a sad commentary that even in a centrally-controlled and planned economy that the best intentions can go awry.

Tony