By Doug Lederman. A majority of Americans believe online instruction is at least as good as classroom-based courses in terms of providing good value, a format most students can succeed in, and instruction tailored to each individual. But they question the rigor of testing and grading, and whether employers will view such degrees positively, a new survey by Gallup shows. Read more...
By Michael Stratford. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau received more than 3,800 complaints in the last year from borrowers of private student loans, the bureau said in a report released Wednesday. Perhaps not surprisingly, given the continuing effects of the economic downturn, the largest number of complaints came from borrowers struggling to afford their monthly student loan obligations who encountered problems when they sought flexibility from their lender. Read more...
By Chris Parr for Times Higher Education. The European Credit Transfer System (ECTS) provides a legal basis for the creation of an online marketplace for academic credit that could be exploited by massive open online course providers, conference speakers have argued. Hannes Klöpper, managing director of the new German MOOC platform iversity, also said he believed that Europe's burgeoning community of online providers was better-placed than American organizations to work with universities and offer academic credit to students. Read more...
By Megan Rogers. Joshua Trader dropped out midway through his first semester at Delta College because the "timing wasn’t right." In doing so, he became another statistic of the sort often used to bemoan the performance of community colleges: of those pursuing two-year associate degrees, only 18.8 percent of full-time students graduate within four years, as do 7.8 percent of part-time students, according to a report from Complete College America. Read more...
By Colleen Flaherty. Some things are better worn than said. At least that's what one Austin Community College professor of English thinks, based on his "It's in the syllabus" T-shirt.
A student posted a photo on Reddit and Imgur of David Lydic flashing the shirt this week, with the caption, "Frustrated with the same old questions, my professor ripped off his shirt in the middle of lecture." Read more...
By Valerie Strauss. A number of recent articles have addressed the relative importance of some of the information used in the college application process. Taken as a group, these articles call into question just about every bit of data and writing students are asked to submit—a point not lost recently on Dennis Eller, College Counselor at Canterbury School in Fort Wayne, Ind., who offered this humorous summary on a counselors’ listserv. It is followed by a footnote from counselor Patrick O’Connor of Cranbrook Kingswood School in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. Read more...
By Valerie Strauss. In recent years we’ve seen the rise of big money being poured into local school board races from well outside the district, or city or even state where the election is being held. Millions were spent, for example, in Los Angeles school board races earlier this year. In April I published a piece by a teacher in New Jersey who blogs under the name “Jersey Jazzman” about the financing of a local school board campaign, and here is a new one, about another election and the same pattern of outside funding. A version of this appeared on the Jersey Jazzman blog. Read more...
By . A majority of students in public schools throughout the American South and West are low-income for the first time in at least four decades, according to a new study that details a demographic shift with broad implications for the country. The analysis by the Southern Education Foundation, the nation’s oldest education philanthropy, is based on the number of students from preschool through 12th grade who were eligible for the federal free and reduced-price meals program in the 2010-11 school year. Read more...
By Valerie Strauss. Unobtrusively slipped into the debt deal that Congress passed late Wednesday night to reopen the federal government after 16 days and allow the United States to keep borrowing money to pay its bills is a provision about school reform that will make Teach For America very happy. Read more...
By Valerie Strauss. Yesterday I wrote a post about how public education’s biggest problem — poverty — keeps getting worse, with the news from a new report that a majority of students in public schools in the American South and West are low-income for the first time in at least four decades. Here’s a related piece which argues that policy makers own life circumstances affect the way they make school reform decisions for the poor. Jack Schneider (@Edu_Historian) is an assistant professor of education at the College of the Holy Cross and the author of the forthcoming book From the Ivory Tower to the Schoolhouse: How Scholarship Becomes Common Knowledge in Education. Heather Curl is a lecturer at Bryn Mawr College. Both authors are former classroom teachers. Schneider also founded University Paideia, a pre-college program for under-served students in the San Francisco Bay Area. His research focuses on educational policy-making and school reform. Read more...
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