What's Wrong With the American University

An easier question is "What isn't wrong with it?" Read the full article in the Atlantic Monthly.

LISTEN TO THE STORY ON NPR

Well, there are two ways to pick a college. One is to go to a prestigious college, and when you graduate the world will know you went to Princeton or Stanford. It doesn't matter what happened in the classroom as long as you have that brand behind you. Claudia and I were up at Harvard talking to students, and they said they get nothing from their classes, but that doesn't matter. They're smart already—they can breeze through college. The point is that they're going to be Harvard people when they come out.

The problem is that there are just too many publications and too many people publishing. This is true even in the hard sciences. If there's a research project on genetics in a lab, they will take certain findings and break them into eight different articles just so each researcher can get more stuff on his or her resume.

Here's what happens. Academics typically don't get tenured until the age of 40. This means that from their years as graduate students and then assistant professors, from age 25 through 38 or 39, they have to toe the line. They have to do things in the accepted way that their elders and superiors require. They can't be controversial and all the rest. So tenure is, in fact, the enemy of spontaneity, the enemy of intellectual freedom. We've seen this again and again. And even people who get tenure really don't change. They keep on following the disciplinary mode they've been trained to follow. What bothers us, too, is that over 300,000 professors have it. That's a tremendous number. What that means is these people never leave.

"Good teaching can't be quantified at the college level." OR CAN THEY?
Using Student Evaluations, AFTER graduation, simply ask all students for anonymous feedback before they can get their diploma. "Which of your teachers actually taught? or did you teach yourself?"

I'm not your traditional student, but when I did get to the University, thinking I was paying all that money for access to the best minds and quality education, I found the teaching worse than the Community Colleges, and that access was denied to the quality professors unless you proved yourself worthy of their audience. The only real difference was the higher intelligence of the students (because they had been screened) and we ended up teaching ourselves. Thus it has always been, thus it will always be.
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Four Area Schools Named Top American Schools

Four Area Schools Named Top American Schools
UCSD has a High School!
I want to go to that public high school.

Torrey Pines has a Hight School,
I want to go to that public high school.

There is a High School for International Studies?
I want to go to that public high school.

ECanyon Crest High School in Encinitas is wealthy.
I want to go to that public high school.

I guess the majority of kids are SOL.
Why aren't all our public schools this good?

Detracking: United we succeed, divided we fail.

(Taken from Emily Alpert's piece "The End of 'The Stupid Class'" in Voice and Viewpoint.)

Bianca Penuelas and her friends used to joke about being in "the stupid class" at Correia Middle School. The gifted kids took one set of tougher classes for English and history; she and her friends took another, easier set of classes. So Bianca didn't bother to work hard at school.

"I didn't think I had to try because I was below average anyway," the eighth grader said.

"How do you detrack and do it effectively?" said Tom Loveless, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who is skeptical of the effort. "We don't know.

"It's a tall order to work with kids who can barely write and gifted kids," said Katie Anderson, a parent who sits on a district committee on gifted students. "I'm not crazy about the idea in general. I think it asks too much of teachers. But what they've done at Correia is really good."

"We wanted to debunk the whole thing and try something new," said Principal Patricia Ladd. Her hope was that doing so could raise the bar for all kids at Correia. "So we detracked."

Most students at the Point Loma middle school now take the same English and history classes. All kids are exposed to the strategies normally used solely with gifted students, such as probing ethical issues in debates between Abraham Lincoln and his opponent.

Correia hopes it has cracked the code.
It has so many gifted students that it was able split them up among all of its classes and dub them all as gifted classes, which require a minimum share of gifted students. Most of its teachers are now trained to work with top students, pushing them with deeper questions. They still use special strategies for gifted children, but now use them with everyone.

To teach all kids at once, teachers let students show their knowledge through more flexible and open-ended assignments that allow children to make them as tough as they want, instead of asking all kids to do the same fixed task.

Kids are inspired to aim higher and work harder by their peers. "I've never had a class like this," said Lisa Young, who was used to teaching struggling students in a separate class. "The kids see someone else having success and they think, 'I want that.'"

Bianca Penuelas is one of them. Slackers won't make it in her classes this year, she says, so she's trying harder, thinking bigger, proud to be working and chatting with the "smart kids" she once saw from afar.

"I feel smarter," she said, her braces glinting in a smile. "I felt like I made it up to their level."

More The End of 'The Stupid Class

Texas School Book Depository

This isn't the first time Texas has tried to re-write history.

The board is to vote on a sweeping purge of alleged liberal bias in Texas school textbooks in favor of what Dunbar says really matters: a belief in America as a nation chosen by God as a beacon to the world, and free enterprise as the cornerstone of liberty and democracy.

"We are fighting for our children's education and our nation's future," Dunbar said. "In Texas we have certain statutory obligations to promote patriotism and to promote the free enterprise system. There seems to have been a move away from a patriotic ideology. There seems to be a denial that this was a nation founded under God. We had to go back and make some corrections."

Texas school board and their quest to remake US education in a pro-American, Christian, free enterprise mode. We've been keeping an eye on this story for some time, as it will have an impact far beyond Texas. From the Guardian: "The board is to vote on a sweeping purge of alleged liberal bias in Texas school textbooks in favor of what Dunbar says really matters: a belief in America as a nation chosen by God as a beacon to the world, and free enterprise as the cornerstone of liberty and democracy. ... Those corrections have prompted a blizzard of accusations of rewriting history and indoctrinating children by promoting right-wing views on religion, economics, and guns while diminishing the science of evolution, the civil rights movement, and the horrors of slavery. ... Several changes include sidelining Thomas Jefferson, who favored separation of church and state, while introducing a new focus on the 'significant contributions' of pro-slavery Confederate leaders during the Civil War. ... Study of Sir Isaac Newton is dropped in favor of examining scientific advances through military technology."

Discuss this story at: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=10/05/16/211238

Links:
Read the full story in the Guardian.

Boston Teacher's Residency Program

Giving Teachers the Tools to Make a Difference

Boston Teacher Residency (BTR) recruits talented college graduates, career changers and community members of all ages and gives them the tools to make an immediate impact in the classrooms of the Boston Public Schools(BPS). Combining a yearlong classroom apprenticeship with targeted master’s-level coursework, the program offers much more than just an affordable route into teaching. BTR provides every Teacher Resident with the practical learning, hands-on experience and ongoing support essential to any successful career in teaching.

The Residency Year

After an intensive two-month summer institute, Residents spend the entire academic year in a BPS classroom. They work under the close guidance of an experienced mentor teacher four days a week, devoting one evening and all day Friday to rigorous coursework and seminars. This combination helps Residents link classroom experience to the latest in education theory and research, all within the context of the local education environment and the district-specific goals of the BPS.

• Yearlong classroom apprenticeship
• Rigorous, aligned coursework
• Focus on BPS/Boston context
• Collaborative learning environment

The program’s unique blend of theory and practice, combined with an emphasis on collaborative learning and peer support, gives Residents a field-tested foundation for success in the urban classroom. By the time BTR graduates become teachers of record in a BPS classroom, they already have a year of experience in their schools, an understanding of the challenges that lie ahead and an ever-expanding support network of fellow educators.  Learn more about the residency year.

From the Mouths of Babes

This is exactly how I felt at 12, and how I still feel at 40.
Too bad ADULTS rule the world.

"'Do what I tell you to do because I'm the boss' isn't the way the world works anymore."

Kids at the Innovations Academy learn the new way.

The method flies in the face of traditional school discipline. Child psychologists typically fall into two camps: Behaviorists believe in using punishments and rewards to train kids to follow directions from adults. Humanists deride them as bribes; they argue for building relationships with children to respect others' needs. David Strahan, a Western Carolina University education professor who has studied discipline, said most educators have only experienced a traditional classroom in which adults have control. It's more familiar -- and it can be much easier for a nervous teacher to handle.

Humanists have an uphill battle to convince others that their methods will work, said R.T. Tauber, professor emeritus of education at Pennsylvania State University. "To the uninformed, it sounds like you're turning over the institution to the inmates."

As schools across California try to curb detentions and referrals, "positive discipline" is the zeitgeist. But educators don't even agree on what that means or what it entails. Few are trying anything as bold as Innovations, where discipline falls at the far end of the humanist spectrum. Experimenting is easy because it's a charter school, free from school district and many state rules.

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