An education in occupation--what happened to Iraqi universities

An education in occupation—what happened to Iraqi universities (Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists 2-2-12)

Until the 1990s, Iraq had perhaps the best university system in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's regime used oil revenues to underwrite free tuition for Iraqi university students — churning out doctors, scientists, and engineers who joined the country's burgeoning middle class and anchored development. Although political dissent was strictly off-limits, Iraqi universities were professional, secular institutions that were open to the West, and spaces where male and female, Sunni and Shia mingled. Also the schools pushed hard to educate women PDF, who constituted 30 percent of Iraqi university faculties by 1991. (This is, incidentally, better than Princeton was doing as late as 2009.) With a reputation for excellence, Iraqi universities attracted many students from surrounding countries — the same countries that are now sheltering the thousands of Iraqi professors who have fled US-occupied Iraq.

Teachers Matter. Now What?

Teachers Matter. Now What? (The Nation 1-15-12)

Last month, economists at Harvard and Columbia released the largest-ever study of teachers' “value-added” ratings-a controversial mathematical technique that measures a teacher's effectiveness by looking at the change in his students' standardized test scores from one year to the next, while controlling for student demographic traits like poverty and race.

Raj Chetty, John Friedman, and Jonah Rockoff analyzed the test scores and family tax returns of 2.5 million Americans over a twenty-year period, from 1989 to 2009. The team concluded that students who have teachers with high value-added ratings are more likely to attend college and earn higher incomes, and are less likely to become pregnant teens.

Salman Khan: The New Andrew Carnegie?-emergence of free, high-quality online cou

Salman Khan: The New Andrew Carnegie?-emergence of free, high-quality online courses could change learning forever (Time 11-16-11)

Khan is the former hedge fund manager who set out to tutor his young cousin in math with a homemade video he posted online. From that modest beginning has grown the Khan Academy, a free online library of more than 2,700 videos offering instruction in everything from algebra to computer science to art history. Running the nonprofit academy is now Khan's full-time job, and he plans to expand the enterprise further, adding more subject areas, more faculty members (until now, all the videos have been narrated by Khan himself) and translating the tutorials into the world's most widely used languages.

Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (It's Just So Darn Hard)

Why Science Majors Change Their Minds (NY Times 11-4-11)

Studies have found that roughly 40 percent of students planning engineering and science majors end up switching to other subjects or failing to get any degree. That increases to as much as 60 percent when pre-medical students, who typically have the strongest SAT scores and high school science preparation, are included, according to new data from the University of California at Los Angeles. That is twice the combined attrition rate of all other majors.

For educators, the big question is how to keep the momentum being built in the lower grades from dissipating once the students get to college.

Trade geometry class for entrepreneurship

Trade geometry class for entrepreneurship (Washington Post 10-24-11)

The most commonly offered defense of requiring a year of geometry in high school is that it teaches thinking skills. No less than Plato believed that so strongly that he had “Let no one ignorant of geometry enter” engraved over the entrance to the The Academy. But I have yet to be presented with evidence that teaching thinking skills in an abstract context such as geometry yields better real-world thinking skills than if taught in a real-world context, such as in a course in entrepreneurship, personal finance, or conflict resolution.

Seeing Value in Ignorance, College Expects Its Physicists to Teach Poetry

Seeing Value in Ignorance, College Expects Its Physicists to Teach Poetry (NY Times 10-16-11)

Sarah Benson last encountered college mathematics 20 years ago in an undergraduate algebra class. Her sole experience teaching math came in the second grade, when the first graders needed help with their minuses.

And yet Ms. Benson, with a Ph.D. in art history and a master's degree in comparative literature, stood at the chalkboard drawing parallelograms, constructing angles and otherwise dismembering Euclid's Proposition 32 the way a biology professor might treat a water frog. Her students cared little about her inexperience. As for her employers, they did not mind, either: they had asked her to teach formal geometry expressly because it was a subject about which she knew very little.

It was just another day here at St. John's College, whose distinctiveness goes far beyond its curriculum of great works: Aeschylus and Aristotle, Bacon and Bach. As much of academia fractures into ever more specific disciplines, this tiny college still expects—in fact, requires—its professors to teach almost every subject, leveraging ignorance as much as expertise.

New Higher Education Model

New Higher Education Model (Inside Higher Ed 10-6-11)

Rising costs and reduced government funding in the wake of an economic recession have resulted in financial burdens that our state universities have never known before, and it is clear that funding is unlikely to return to pre-recession levels. These financial realities are compounded by tech-savvy students demanding a high-quality education when, where and how they want it. Today's students live lives that are divorced from the static, brick-and-mortar reality of institutions built for 19thcentury economic circumstances, leading Ralph Wolff, president of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges, to conclude, “Our business model is broken.”

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure?

What if the Secret to Success Is Failure? (NY Times 9-14-11)

For the headmaster of an intensely competitive school, Randolph, who is 49, is surprisingly skeptical about many of the basic elements of a contemporary high-stakes American education. He did away with Advanced Placement classes in the high school soon after he arrived at Riverdale; he encourages his teachers to limit the homework they assign; and he says that the standardized tests that Riverdale and other private schools require for admission to kindergarten and to middle school are “a patently unfair system” because they evaluate students almost entirely by I.Q. “This push on tests,” he told me, “is missing out on some serious parts of what it means to be a successful human.”

If It Feels Right ...

If It Feels Right … by David Brooks (NY Times 9-12-11)

During the summer of 2008, the eminent Notre Dame sociologist Christian Smith led a research team that conducted in-depth interviews with 230 young adults from across America. The interviews were part of a larger study that Smith, Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson, Patricia Snell Herzog and others have been conducting on the state of America's youth.

The interviewers asked open-ended questions about right and wrong, moral dilemmas and the meaning of life. In the rambling answers, which Smith and company recount in a new book, “Lost in Transition,” you see the young people groping to say anything sensible on these matters. But they just don't have the categories or vocabulary to do so.

SAT Scores Fall as Most Test Takers Miss College Benchmark

SAT Scores Fall as Most Test Takers Miss College Benchmark (US News & World Report 9-14-11)

The College Board, creators of the SAT, say they've discovered what score students need to succeed in college: 1550. It's a score 43 percent of SAT takers met in 2011, the nonprofit organization announced today.

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Testing experts say there's more cause for concern. Bob Schaeffer, public education director of FairTest, a testing-integrity organization, says high-stakes standardized tests are bringing down the quality of public schools.

Schaeffer notes that SAT scores have declined 18 points overall since 2006, the first year that No Child Left Behind legislation required annual tests for public school students in grades three through eight and at least once in high school.