Dear Commons Community,

In his piece today, Testing the Teachers, New York Times columnist, David Brooks, examines assessment in American colleges and universities.  He introduces the topic as:

“ There’s an atmosphere of grand fragility hanging over America’s colleges. The grandeur comes from the surging application rates, the international renown, the fancy new dining and athletic facilities. The fragility comes from the fact that colleges are charging more money, but it’s not clear how much actual benefit they are providing.”

Citing the study  Academically Adrift,  by Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, which found that, on average, students experienced a seven percentile point gain in skills during their first two years in college and a marginal gain in the two years after that, Brooks launches on the need for greater accountability in American higher education.  He suggests that colleges and universities consider value-added assessments and to test more to find out how they’re doing. “Colleges and universities have to be able to provide prospective parents with data that will give them some sense of how much their students learn.” In sum, “There has to be some way to reward schools that actually do provide learning and punish schools that don’t. There has to be a better way to get data so schools themselves can figure out how they’re doing in comparison with their peers.”

I don’t agree with Brooks on this issue especially when he assumes that assessments should be developed or enforced by the U.S. Department of Education(USDOE).  Colleges and universities distrust the USDOE and the federal government involvement with assessment given their track record with high-stakes testing and No Child Left Behind(NCLB).   The USDOE assessment policies starting with NCLB fostered a testing mania that created an incredibly lucrative testing and tutoring industry all of which is focused on passing tests not necessarily on improving education.  Furthermore, American colleges and universities, prodded mostly by regional and professional accrediting agencies using peer evaluation, have paid a good deal more attention to assessment issues over the past dozen or more years.  As a result, most colleges and universities have established more authentic assessment strategies (i.e, culminating research projects) and are increasingly collecting data on their graduates.  I say leave assessment in the hands of educators and not place it in the hands of federal politicians.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dick Clark died of a heart attack yesterday.  His show, American Bandstand, was an important part of my generation and defined much of the music and pop culture of the late 1950s and early 1960s. We will never forget the catch phrase:  “It’s got a good beat and you can dance to it.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Now that Mitt Romney has captured the Republican presidential primary, the various polling organizations are revving up their activity.  The New York Times/CBS News poll made public yesterday is showing that the contest if held today would be a dead heat between Romney and President Barack Obama with each candidate receiving about 46% of the vote.  Democrats heavily favor Obama while Republicans favor Romney.  Men favor Romney while women favor Obama.  The economy also appears to be the major issue for all voters.  More results available at:  http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/04/18/us/politics/views-on-candidates-and-the-economy.html?ref=politics

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The wives of U.N. ambassadors from Britain and Germany targeted Syria’s first lady on Tuesday with an online appeal to “stop your husband” in his yearlong bid to quash a popular uprising that has left thousands dead.

The video contrasts the lavish lifestyle of 36-year-old Asma al-Assad, wife of President Bashar al-Assad and mother of three, with the images of dead and injured Syrian children.

“Stand up for peace, Asma. Speak out now. For the sake of your people. Stop your husband,” asks the video. “Stop being a bystander. No one cares about your image. We care about your action.”

The video asks viewers to sign a petition at www.change.org demanding the London-born first lady speak out to “stop the bloodshed.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

A number of media outlets are reporting that the Los Angeles Times released a set of photos this morning that appear to show U.S. troops in Afghanistan posing with the remains of suicide bombers. An American soldier released the photos to the LA Times “on the condition of anonymity.”

International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) commander in Afghanistan Gen. John Allen ‘strongly condemned’ the photos. In a statement, ISAF clarified that the incident took place in 2010 and “represents a serious error in judgment by several soldiers who have acted out of ignorance and unfamiliarity with U.S. Army values.”

According to NBC News, the Pentagon press secretary said Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta ‘strongly rejects the conduct’ of the soldiers depicted in the photos. Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s spokesman declined to comment.

The anonymous soldier who released the photos to the LA Times reportedly told the paper that he released the photos to highlight security shortcomings at U.S. bases in Afghanistan. “He said the photos point to a breakdown in leadership and discipline that he believed compromised the safety of the troops,” the LA Times reported.

The quicker we get our troops home the better!!!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times is reporting that New York City will open 54 new schools in Fall 2012 – 24 charter schools and 30 regular public schools.  This announcement was not without controversy especially in light of the rancor caused by the announced closing of 23 schools earlier this year.

“William C. Thompson Jr., the former comptroller and a 2009 Democratic candidate for mayor, called the closing of schools a “shell game” and a “Ponzi scheme” and urged the State Legislature to issue a moratorium on such closings.

Two other possible candidates, Scott M. Stringer, the Manhattan borough president, and Bill de Blasio, the public advocate, did not call for a moratorium but said that they would like to see fewer school closings.

The three were speaking at a forum at New York University, where a group critical of Mr. Bloomberg’s policies released a report showing that the 23 schools targeted for closing this year had higher proportions of special-education students, students who were over age for their grade and students who qualified for free or reduced-price lunches, as well as lower proportions of students proficient in math and language arts, than the city’s school system as a whole.”

By this fall, the Bloomberg administration will have closed, or will have begun phasing out, 140 schools since 2002 and will have opened 589 new ones — many of them small schools that share space in old school buildings. Teachers at closed schools cannot be fired, but they are often not hired by the new schools, and can wind up as substitute teachers for years before finding permanent positions.

Michael Mulgrew,  the president of the United Federation of Teachers, noted that 9 out of the 23 schools targeted for closing this year had been created by the Bloomberg administration since 2002.

“We intend to fight to make sure these new schools get the supports they need,” Mr. Mulgrew said. “Nearly 40 percent of the schools on the current closing list were created by Bloomberg, and we’d hate to see him try to close these at the same rate before he leaves office.”

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post’s senior military correspondent David Wood has spent decades covering war, watching as wounded combat troops are loaded onto medical evacuation helicopters and, he said, “go off in a cloud of dust.” But after their sacrifice on the battlefield, Wood said, “you never know what happened to them.”

So for eight months this past year, Wood reported extensively on the lives of severely wounded veterans and their families in “Beyond the Battlefield”, a 10-part series awarded Monday with the Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting. Wood’s Pulitzer marks the first win for the seven-year-old Huffington Post and a milestone in the influential Pulitzer committee’s recognition of online-only news organizations.  The Huffington Post’s editor Timothy O’Brien stated:

“This Pulitzer is a recognition of decades of dedicated, courageous work by David Wood, and of the great insight and sensitivity he’s brought to the plight of severely wounded soldiers and the very human tragedy of modern warfare,”… “We’re also grateful that the Pulitzer committee recognized that great, hard-won journalism can thrive and flourish on the web.”

In addition to the recognition for Wood’s work, this award also is important for new media.   Media observers said the Pulitzer committee’s recognition of The Huffington Post represents a milestone for the organization and digital news outlets in general.

Rem Rieder, editor of the American Journalism Review, said the award is “quite a benchmark in the evolution of The Huffington Post, which early on, had plenty of aggregation and plenty of opinion and no original reporting.” He specifically praised the hiring of Wood, saying that it’s “terrific that there are emerging newish outlets where not only talented young reporters, but experienced older reporters, have the chance to showcase ambitious work.”

“I think it’s very healthy to see the Pulitzers have moved, albeit slowly, from a solely print focus,” Rieder said. “The world has changed dramatically. There’s an awful lot of exciting developments with digital news operations.”

Indeed there is!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times today has an article describing the work of hundreds of brain researchers who are collaborating and using crowd-sourcing techniques to share their activities via Internet technology.   The article states:

“In the largest collaborative study of the brain to date, scientists using imaging technology at more than 100 centers worldwide have for the first time zeroed in on genes that they agree play a role in intelligence and memory.

Scientists working to understand the biology of brain function — and especially those using brain imaging, a blunt tool — have been badly stalled. But the new work, involving more than 200 scientists, lays out a strategy for breaking the logjam. The findings appear in a series of papers published online Sunday in the journal Nature Genetics.

“What’s really new here is this movement toward crowd-sourcing brain research,” said Paul Thompson, a professor of neurology at the University of California, Los Angeles, and senior author of one of the papers. “This is an example of social networking in science, and it gives us a power we have not had.”

Crowd-sourcing has its proponents as well as questioners.   Regardless I think we will see more of this type of collaboration especially as researchers become more comfortable using social networking technologies.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

There is a good deal to report on the presidential campaign trail.  First, Hilary Rosen’s comments about Ann Romney and working moms are not going way.  During a closed-door fundraiser in Florida, Ann Romney described Democratic strategist Hilary Rosen’s recent criticism of her choosing to be a stay-at-home mother as an “early birthday present,” according to a report by NBC News.

Second, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner threw water on one of GOP presidential hopeful Mitt Romney’s claims about the economy and women, saying Sunday that it is “ridiculous” to imply the president is to blame for high unemployment among women.

“It’s misleading and ridiculous. It’s just a political moment,” Geithner told CBS’s Bob Scheiffer on “Face the Nation,” adding that the quality of debate over economic policy is “really terrible.”

Geithner was referring to a statistic cited by Romney this week on women who lost jobs during President Barack Obama’s time in office. Romney said that 92.3 percent of the jobs lost during that period were held by women, which he said was “the real war on women.”

Third,  President Barack Obama probably received an important endorsement yesterday from former Vice President Dick Cheney during his first major public appearance since his heart transplant.  Speaking before the Wyoming Republican Party state convention:

“He has been an unmitigated disaster to the country,” Cheney said of President Barack Obama.

The Wyoming Republican Party chose 14 delegates Saturday to this summer’s Republican National Convention and all of them are committed to support Romney.

We wish Mr. Cheney a speedy and full recovery but unfortunately for us, he was the worst vice president this country has seen in recent history.  A megalomaniac who lied, cheated and deceived the American people into going to war in Iraq.  Anything he says negative about Barack Obama candidate can only help the president be re-elected.

Tony