Dear Commons Community,

The Graduate Center’s own David Bloomfield has an article in The Hechinger Report on the possible departure of Los Angeles Schools’ Superintendent John Deasy.   According to news sources,   terms of a possible exit from that post have been discussed ahead of his Oct. 21 performance review. As reported by Bloomfield:

“Deasy was appointed in 2011 and his current contract runs to June, 2016. Despite this, LAUSD’s Deasy bio says he’s “a man on a mission” who’s “championed rigorous and ambitious learning opportunities for youth, fair teacher and administrator evaluations, pay‐for-performance, staff development and training, and data‐based decision‐making.” In short, he is another high-profile accountability-side casualty of the nation’s school wars.

Didn’t Tolstoy say that all failed superintendents fail in their own way? Here, Deasy’s immediate problem is a $1.3 billion debacle over a controversial iPads-for-all program in which he reportedly engaged in contact with software and test vendor Pearson PLC. deemed to be inappropriate before the contract was opened for competitive bidding.

But Deasy’s departure, should it come, will also be the result of the policies that brought him to LAUSD in the first place: the corporate-type school reform agenda, backed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and Broad Foundations. Deasy is the former deputy director of Education at Gates and was a Broad fellow. (The Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation is a funder of The Hechinger Report).”

Bloomfield also comments:

“In addition to Deasy’s likely membership [departure], others in the ousted leaders club include Michelle Rhee from D.C., Paul Vallas from Bridgeport, Alan Bersin from San Diego, and Jean Claude Brizard from Chicago. Rejection of harsh accountability policies was an important factor in New York’s recent election of Mayor Bill de Blasio after the mayoralty of Michael Bloomberg and, next door in Connecticut, State Superintendent Stefan Pryor just called it quits over similar issues to free Democrat Daniel Malloy from that yoke.”

The entire piece is very well done and worth  a read.

Tony

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Dear Commons Community,

The Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2014-2015 were released on Wednesday and there is good news and not-so-good news for American higher education. The good news is that the US has 7 in the top 10 universities and 74 universities in the top 200. However, these 74 universities are down from 77 last year and some 60 per cent of those institutions rank lower than they did 12 months ago.  The reason for the slippage stems mainly form a decline in funding.

“Western universities, in many cases starved of vital public funding, are losing ground,” said Phil Baty, THE rankings editor, who added that there was “something approaching a crisis” for US state institutions.  Philip Altbach, director of the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College, said that the “serious hit” in funding to the “great American public universities” had major implications for US science and competitiveness.

The United States Education Department and state education department officials should seriously think about the issue of funding raised in these rankings.  Over the past dozen years, a number of states have pretty much abandoned their financial commitment to public higher education.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

In his column today, Nicholas Kristoph focuses on ISIS and other extremists who indoctrinate young people and use them in their fights against civilized societies. Specifically, he calls for funding and supporting education and women’s rights throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world. Here is an excerpt:

“As we fight the Islamic State and other extremists, there’s something that President Obama and all of us can learn from them. For, in one sense, the terrorists are fighting smarter than we are.

These extremists use arms to fight their battles in the short term, but, to hold ground in the long run, they also combat Western education and women’s empowerment. They know that illiteracy, ignorance and oppression of women create the petri dish in which extremism can flourish.

That’s why the Islamic State kidnapped Samira Salih al-Nuaimi, a brave Iraqi woman and human rights lawyer in Mosul, tortured her and publicly executed her last week. That’s why the Taliban shot Malala Yousafzai, then 15 years old, after she campaigned for educating girls. And that’s why Boko Haram kidnapped hundreds of schoolgirls in northern Nigeria and announced that it would turn them into slaves.

In each case, the extremists recognized a basic truth: Their greatest strategic threat comes not from a drone but from a girl with a book. We need to recognize, and act on, that truth as well…

…So let’s learn from the extremists — and from those brave girls themselves who are willing to risk their lives in order to get an education. They all understand the power of education, and we should, too.”

Kristoph concludes by calling on the United States and other developed countries to support education and women’s rights initiatives promoted by the United Nations and other international organizations.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

MOOC fever is cooling among campus information-technology leaders, according to the 2014 edition of the Campus Computing Survey, an annual report on technology in higher education. As reported in The Chronicle of Higher Education:

“While a little more than half of last year’s respondents thought MOOCs “offer a viable model for the effective delivery of online instruction,” just 38 percent of this year’s participants agreed with that statement. And only 19 percent of respondents in 2014 said MOOCs could generate new revenue for colleges, down from 29 percent last fall.

“I’m not surprised to see some pessimism about the role of MOOCs in the future,” said Norman Bier, director of the Open Learning Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. “After a lot of “Part of the challenge is, they came out guns blazing with this grand prediction of disruption,” said Benjamin B. Bederson, associate provost for learning initiatives at the University of Maryland at College Park. “It’s absolutely the case that they haven’t come anywhere close to the level of disruption” people thought possible two years ago.excitement and a little bit of hype over the past year or two, what we’re seeing is, simply taking learning materials and making them available is not a guarantee of quality.”

This was inevitable as it is with many over-hyped, “disruptive” technologies. I would add that this survey is important given that the respondents are IT leaders who generally are the most informed individuals on campuses with regard to technology. However, I would not equate the pessimism regarding MOOCs as equivalent to pessimism regarding online learning in general. To the contrary, faculty at colleges and universities are adopting more online technology including MOOCs and doing so in pedagogically valuable ways and especially in blended formats. In my opinion, the attractiveness of the MOOC model was always more about mass production and costs than teaching and learning.

Tony

P.S. The survey will be available for purchase starting on December 1 at campuscomputing.net.

Dear Commons Community,

Wyoming is the best state overall for teachers, while North Carolina is the worst, according to a new list from personal finance website Wallethub. Wallethub ranked the best and worst states for teachers using data like average starting teacher salaries and the number of teachers per capita. The site also looked at the average work hours for teachers and the relative safety of different schools. The rationale for compiling this list is described at the Wallethub website:

“Most educators don’t pursue their profession for the money. That’s a no-brainer these days. But that also doesn’t justify low pay, especially for a profession that makes such a profound difference in young people’s lives. And the sad reality is this: Many teachers are shortchanged with salaries that fail to keep up with inflation. Meanwhile, their workloads have grown with heightened demand from the law to elicit better student performance.

It’s no surprise that the high turnover rate within the field has been likened to a revolving door. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about a fifth of all newly minted public school teachers leave their positions before the end of their first year. And almost half never last more than five.

But besides inadequate compensation, other problems persist in the academic environment. Teachers, especially novices, move to other schools or abandon the profession “as the result of feeling overwhelmed, ineffective, and unsupported,” according to the ASCD. And without good teachers who are not only paid reasonably but also treated fairly, the quality of American education suffers.

In light of World Teachers Day on Oct. 5, WalletHub analyzed the 50 states and the District of Columbia to ease the process of finding the best teaching opportunities in the country. We did so by examining 18 key metrics, ranging from median starting salary to teacher job openings per capita. “

The top five states for teachers are: Wyoming, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Massachusetts, and Virginia. The worst states are: North Carolina, Mississippi, West Virginia, South Dakota and Hawaii. The complete list and other metrics are available at the Wallethub website.

Tony