By Martin Thrupp. “PISA shock” is the term that has been coined for the sense of political crisis and knee-jerk policy reaction that typically occurs when a country drops in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s international education rankings. Almost 100 education experts, including several of us from New Zealand, recently sent an open letter to the OECD’s chief education spokesperson, Andreas Schleicher, pointing out that the Programme of International Student Assessment (PISA) rankings have become more of a problem than a solution. In many ways the concern of New Zealand educators is also around the wider influence of the OECD education programme on New Zealand educational politics and policy – perhaps as much “OECD hangover” as “PISA shock”. More...

By Cristián Bellei. Chile’s newly re-elected president Michelle Bachelet has announced a radical set of educational reforms that are set to review the country’s market-based approach to primary and secondary education. Bachelet’s reforms – aimed at dismantling a series of neoliberal policies put in place in the early 1980s – will be paid for by an overhaul of the tax system. More...

By Michael Gunn. Imbalances in the share of growth across the regions continue to be deep-rooted, the Office of National Statistics has confirmed. By 2012, the South East was the only region that had only just crept ahead of the performance that it had achieved in 2008. Four years after the recession, London had pulled even further away from all other regions in England.
With the economy and the cost of living remaining key battle grounds in the longest general election campaign in history, regional growth – or the lack of it – is back on the political agenda. More...

By Vance Maverick. I checked out a study score of Shostakovich’s 5th Symphony from the local public library. It’s an early edition, maybe the first American one: © 1945, in the Leeds Music Corporation “Am-Rus Orchestra Scores series.” There’s an introduction by one Harold Sheldon, short but deeply bizarre. Shostakovich, though well established as one of the principal composers of the Soviet Union, ran afoul of the censors with the opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk (1936), unedifying in its story and violent in its musical language. More...

By Colleen Lye and James Vernon. In the rush to online education, faculty members have been signing contracts that abrogate the ownership of their classes, erode their collective interests, and threaten the quality of higher education. No standard (let alone best) practice has yet emerged, and faculty members are largely in the dark about what is at stake. More...

By Sarah Roff. As an assistant professor of German literature at Princeton University, I once taught a class about how Germans understood World War II and the Holocaust in the postwar period. Several weeks into the course, an Orthodox Jewish student came to my office hours to tell me how troubled she was by the material, which she had not realized would be included in the course. She felt that the Holocaust should only be discussed in a sacred context and had avoided taking classes on the topic taught by secular academics. As a theological question, I cannot say whether she made the right choice, but she decided to stay and became one of the most thoughtful participants in the class. Her perspective added greatly to the education of the other students. More...

By Jonathan Marks. Need a break from grading? Head on over here, where someone has posted a partial record of Modern Language Association member comments on resolution 2014-1, urging the “United States Department of State to contest Israel’s denials of entry to the West Bank by United States academics who have been invited to teach, confer, or do research at Palestinian universities.” It is a spectacle. How often do you get to see scholarly colleagues refer to one another as “Zionist attack dogs?”
In January, the MLA’s Delegate Assembly narrowly passed the controversial resolution at the association’s annual meeting. More...

By Jonathan Zimmerman. Introduction to United States History
Tu-Th, 2:15-3:45 pm
J. Zimmerman
This course will explore the main themes, trends, and dilemmas in the history of the United States. In accord with our college’s new policy on trigger warnings, I have affixed a cautionary note to each week’s topic. If the topic threatens to provoke feelings of trauma or panic in you, please inform me beforehand and I will excuse you from class. I’m looking forward to learning together in a safe environment!
I. Puritan New England: Fair warning to Quakers and Catholics. More...

Nouvelle instruction relative au pilotage de l’IAE et fiches techniques
Cette instruction présente les modalités de financement à partir de l’année transitoire 2014. Elle donne les principales orientations pour le conventionnement des structures de l’IAE, le cadre rénové de la gouvernance locale du secteur, l’organisation des dialogues de gestion ainsi que celle de la bourse aux postes. Cette instruction s’accompagne donc de 5 fiches techniques en annexes :

    Fiche 1 : Les aides financières

    Fiche 2 : le conventionnement des structures de l’IAE

    Fiche 3 : Les dialogues de gestion

    Fiche 4 : La gouvernance locale de l’IAE

    Fiche 5 : La bourse aux postes

Sur le site ville-emploi.asso.fr