Worried about how to balance authority and reach in online media?  Well, apparently Encylopedia Britannica is worried as well.  

In an announcement posted on their website, the editors of Britannica have announced a new online site that will allow contributions from a broader community beyond the experts previously engaged.

The editors will still review content that is part of the core Britannica product, and such content will be labeled “Britannica Checked” to assure readers that it has been, eh, well, “checked.”    

“Now is not the time for more educational research or reports or commissions.”  So says A Stagnant Nation, a new report that examines the state of U.S. education twenty-five years after the release of A Nation at Risk.  

The report observes that few of the recommendations of the earlier report resulted in substantial action, and the U.S. educational system has continued to decline, particularly in comparison with the educational systems of other nations.

The American Legislative Exchange Council has released a new report ranking the educational systems in the states.  This is the 14^th edition of the report, and it contains data from 1985-1986 through 2006-2007

The 2007 rankings show Minnesota ranked first and the District of Columbia in last place.

Leading educators have identified the lack of attention to values and character as major failings of the Indonesian education system, according to a recent article in the Jakarta Times.  

They cited the importance of emotional maturity, called for the cultivation of wisdom, and highlighted the lack of a national vision for the country’s educational system.

Amidst the political turmoil and on-going campaign in Pakistan the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) and the Pakistan Institute of Legislative Development and Transparency will convene a conference for the leaders of the political parties to consider the state of primary education in the country.  This report from the Daily Times notes that Pakistan lags behind is neighbors in the region in the provision of elementary education.

What happens when K-12 teaching becomes more widely visible?  We can glean some indication of the impact of highly visible teaching through the case of a Monmouth, Oregon science teacher who created short video talks on global change and posted them on YouTube.  

The videos have been viewed millions of times by individuals all over the world, including a number of experts directly involved in the debate on global climate change.  The impact on this teacher’s career and on his students is worth considering.  It seems that the visibility has energized an already successful teacher and engaged his students.

Observers of higher education have long lamented the limited visibility of teaching in building academic careers and institutional reputations, but that is starting to change.  According to an article in the NY Times professors like MIT’s Walter Lewin are developing global followings as a result of recorded lectures made available on the Internet.

The lectures delivered by Professor Lewin appear to be having a big impact on the lives of a wide range of viewers of all ages from around the world.  The positive impact seems to be adding luster to MIT and even to the USA.

So says Harvard President Drew Gilpin Faust who is quoted in a BusinessWeek article on The Dangerous Wealth of the Ivy League as advising lesser universities “to really emphasize social science or humanities and have science endeavors that are not as ambitious” as the Ivy Plus schools.  

The article discusses the enormous wealth of the elite private institutions and how their financial prowess is leading to problems for the higher education sector, particularly public universities in danger of being drained of talent.

Educators at all levels using Hurricane Katrina and the New Orleans recovery as a case to examine race and poverty in the United States will find a wealth of ideas in Ellen Livingston’s new blog for the Teaching the Levees project.  

Recent entries have covered the events directly connected to New Orleans, such as the visit of Mikhail Gorbachev to the Lower Ninth Ward, as well as those that raise related issues of race and class in the U.S., such as the rally in support of the Jena 6.

The blog is designed to support educators using the Spike Lee’s HBO film, When the Levees Broke and the curriculum designed to support use of the film in classrooms.

As reported in an article in the NY Times, a new effort is underway to provide ongoing systematic examination of New York City public schools.

Modeled after the Consortium on Chicago Schools Research, The Research Partnership for New York City Schools is a collaborative effort that brings together scholars from New York University, Teachers College, and the CUNY Graduate Center.  

The Partnership will seek to enhance the infrastructure for educational research in New York City by providing an independent source of information on the performance of NYC public schools.

Creating and Connecting, a new study from the National School Boards Association, reports that students between the ages of 9 and 17 are now spending nearly as much time using online social networking services each week as they do watching television.  

Many of these students are engaged in creative activities online, including uploading their own music or podcasts, uploading videos they have created, uploading their own photos or artwork, updating a personal website, contributing to a blog, or authoring other kinds of content.  Nearly 60% of all students report talking online about education related topics, and about half report talking online specifically about homework.  

The report goes on to discuss the ways that schools are responding to the growing popularity of these new social networking technologies and the variety of policies that both discourage and support student use.

The 2007 edition of the Southern Regional Education Board’s Factbook highlights the progress in higher education enrollment made by women students and black students, but it also notes the coming collision between the costs of college and the need for higher education for students from middle- and lower-income families.  A related report from Inside Higher Education discusses some of the trends for different types of higher education institutions.

The NY Times Magazine features a piece on the work of Ruby Payne. Payne’s work has been discussed in TCR on several occasions, notably by Gorski with a reply by Payne and by Ng and Rury again with a reply by Payne. TCR receives a mention near the end of the piece.

The recently announced effort by Eli Broad and  Bill Gates to raise the profile of education in the coming presidential campaign appears to be getting mixed reviews.  A key point in this effort is dissatisfaction with the pace of education reform.  What new ideas are being surfaced by this new initiative?  Stronger and more consistent standards, lengthening the school day and year, and enhancing teacher quality by means of merit pay.  Yawn.  

A study of open access publishing reveals that although scholars are willing consumers of open access journals, they are reluctant to use them as outlets for their own work.

The reluctance to publish in open access journals appears to be related to insufficient impact factors, questions about long-term availability, difficulty reaching a specific target audience, and low levels of use of open access publishing outlets by colleagues.

Although the headline reads A History Department Bans Citing Wikipedia as a Research Source, this article in the NY Times provides a more nuanced and complete discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of student use of the online collaborative encyclopedia.   The piece discusses the immediate action of the Middlebury College history department, the forthcoming debate on the issue at Middlebury, and the ways in which professors on other campuses are incorporating Wikipedia use and contributions into their courses.  

Fostering democratic dialogue is the goal of a new curriculum called Teaching the Levees being developed by the Social Studies Program at Teachers College in conjunction with the EdLab at the Gottesman Libraries.  The project, sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation, draws on Spike Lee’s HBO movie When the Levees Broke.  

The curriculum, available to schools nationwide later this year, is discussed by Rockefeller Foundation President Judith Rodin in an article in the New York Times as an example of the new types of foundation work spanning former program boundaries.

Should schools send student Body-Mass Index data to parents?  An article in the NY Times reports on the impact of new initiatives to provide information on student weight.  In the article Marlene Schwartz of the Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity at Yale is quoted as noting that there is “no solid research” on either the physical or psychological impact of reporting and that “Entire states are adopting a policy that has not been tested.”

I have not noticed schools sending such data to employees such as teachers, administrators, or even professors of education so I suppose this is another “special” assessment service provided to students.

The transcripts from the oral arguments before the Supreme Court in the case of Meredith versus Jefferson County Board of Education are now online for examination.  Related materials and a set of briefs in the case are also available online.

The American Educational Research Association has released the Standards for Reporting on Empirical Social Science Research.  The standards provide a valuable framework to guide the preparation of manuscripts based on empirical studies.

The Gottesman Libraries at Teachers College have just announced the availability of a new digital archive that brings together a large collection of materials documenting the events and school finance issues connected with the Campaign for Fiscal Equity (CFE) v. State of New York case that began in December of 1999.  The archive, developed through a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation, is designed to support a variety of research and teaching activities.  

If you think the world of education research and policy is overly tame, just consider the following excerpt from the U.S. Department of Education’s Inspector General’s report on The Reading First Program’s Grant Application Process:

In e-mail correspondence with the staff member regarding the Wright Group, the Reading First Director stated:

Beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in a way that will stand up to any level of legal and [whole language] apologist scrutiny. Hit them over and over with definitive evidence that they are not SBRR, never have been and never will be. They are trying to crash our party and we need to beat the [expletive deleted] out of them in front of all the other would-be party crashers who are standing on the front lawn waiting to see how we welcome these dirtbags. (p. 24)

The entire report reveals a wider culture at the Department to subvert the intentions of Congress by intervening to influence the selection of reading programs at the state level.

The story has been reported by various media outlets, including the NY Times, the Anniston Star, and the Eugene Register-Guard which offers a special take on the role of University of Oregon researchers.

Let’s see how much sustained attention this all gets from the public, and more importantly, from Congress.  And, let’s see if the educational research community can resist getting itself all worked up the next time the administration plays the science card.

 

Two recent NY Times pieces take on the issue of teacher and executive salaries.  William Chace observes that as a college president he was over compensated at about five times the salary of an average professor while Hubert Herring points out that a corporate CEO makes in a day about what a typical teacher earns in a year.

Work reported in an article in the Christian Science Monitor suggests that bullying behavior among middle school students might be reduced by acquainting them with the fact that most students are not engaging in such behavior.  Such social norms interventions have been used to address a range of behavior problems.

Federal earmarks to support specific research projects at universities in states of connected legislators are not new, but they are growing according to this article on the earmarks enjoyed by Mississippi State University.  Do such earmarks make us less competitive?

In this column in the Hartford Courant Lawrence DeNardis highlights the role that discussions of education in the twenty-first century will play at the G-8 Summit in St. Petersburg.  The G-8 leaders will be considering the growing importance of higher education in the wake of globalization and the impact of science and technology in advancing human progress.

The Supreme Court is moving toward a ruling on the permissibility of considering race in decisions regarding student assignments to particular schools within school districts.  While some call school districts’ claim that assigning students to achieve racial integration as a means of preparing students to be better citizens the result of “touchy-feely social science,” others such as TC Record Board member Gary Orfield worry that already growing racial isolation in schools would intensify as school boards are forbidden to do what they were once ordered by do by the courts.  

Apparently, we will have to intensify racial segregation and isolate poor and minority students until we generate a new wave of urban race riots before we get beyond “touchy-feely social science” to as we resume our journey toward “two societies.”  

The Supreme Court is moving toward a ruling on the permissibility of considering race in decisions regarding student assignments to particular schools within school districts.  While some call school districts’ claim that assigning students to achieve racial integration as a means of preparing students to be better citizens the result of “touchy-feely social science,” others such as TC Record Board member Gary Orfield worry that already growing racial isolation in schools would intensify as school boards are forbidden to do what they were once ordered by do by the courts.  

Apparently, we will have to intensify racial segregation and isolate poor and minority students until we generate a new wave of urban race riots before we get beyond “touchy-feely social science” to as we resume our journey toward “two societies.”  

Students have adopted a technology originally meant to chase them away from shopping malls as a cell phone ring tone that cannot be heard by adults, including most teachers.  According to this article in the NY Times, the new ring tone operates at frequencies that cannot be heard by most adults as a result of hearing deterioration associated with aging.  So what else are we missing?

As if we needed more evidence that education in the United States is increasingly about preserving privilege, consider this article on the growing reliance on private tutors for home schooling.

For those of you who thought that central state planning fell with the Berlin Wall, check out the report on state educational data systems in the NY Times.  Particularly outlandish is the notion that such mammoth state-wide systems, if they ever become operational, will help teachers “zone in on individual students’ learning needs.”

TCR’s own Lyn Corno has a letter in the NY Times commenting on a recent column by David Brooks.  Lyn endorses Brooks’ call for educators to help students develop good academic work habits and takes the opportunity to note that research on student volition has uncovered effective strategies for teachers.  Lyn, of course, edited the recent TCR special issue on student work habits that covered much of this research.

New legislation sponsored by Sen. Joseph Lieberman and Sen. John Cornyn would require reports stemming from government financed research projects to be posted to a government website within six months after appearing in a scholarly journal.  Academic publishers and professional societies are raising concerns about the viability of journals if research is made available free online, according to this article in the NY Times.  The financial concerns of the publishers may be reasonable.  My greater concern is involving the government as the primary or exclusive provider of scientific information.  Maintaining a scholarly publishing sector free of government support and government control seems as important as maintaining a free and independent press.

TCR readers should be concerned about current efforts afoot in Congress to abandon internet neutrality, the principle that accords equal access and service for all online content.  Commercial network service providers are lobbying for the right to create different service levels based on fees.  See the new savetheinternet website for more details and directions on how to contact Congress.  For a quick review of the basics, see the video on the Public Knowledge website

The National Society for the Study of Education has released a new yearbook focusing on the superintendency under the title “Voices for Democracy:  Struggles and Celebrations of Transformational Leaders” with chapters by Paul Houston, Beverly Hall, Larry Leverett, Allan Alson, Becky van der Bogert, and Paul Kelleher.  The chapters of the yearbook are available online to NSSE members, and members also receive online access to four additional journals in education.

Hey, let’s all get together and pretend to address the dropout problem one more time!

The March 13, 2006 issue of BusinessWeek reports that CIA staffers have been caught changing entries in Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that can be edited by anyone.  The entry for Bill Clinton was changed by someone from a CIA computer to say that Clinton was “dumber” than his Republican predecessors.  The BusinessWeek article goes on to say that users from the Justice Department, the Marine Corps and the Navy have also politicized entries and that access to Capital Hill computers was blocked earlier after lawmaker entries were similarly politicized.

There has been more than a little discussion about the accuracy of information on the internet.  Comparisons are often made to seemingly more authoritative sources in print.  And, of course, the government is growing increasingly interested in guaranteeing that students in its schools receive and learn the “facts” as verified through government sponsored standardized tests.  The democratization of knowledge is coming just in time.    

In the absence of any credible scientific information to suggest that the adoption of standardized testing regimes offers the best opportunity to improve k-12 education where they have been employed for many years, the federal government appears to be moving to pressure higher education institutions to adopt standardized testing as a major quality control measure.  The NY Times reports a growing consensus among members of The Commission on the Future of Higher Education on the need for greater accountability in higher education that can be addressed by standardized testing of students.    

There appears to be growing support for policies that would require school districts to spend 65% of resources at the classroom level on things such as books and teacher pay.  Perhaps more interesting than the policy itself is the use of educational research to shed light on it.

There seems to be a growing consensus that it is time to invest more attention and resources to encourage more students to study science and math.  In addition to reversing the declining numbers of majors in these areas, there is interest in recruiting science and math teachers for k-12 schools.  

We have been living with shortages of math and science teachers for decades, and the problem is particularly acute in urban schools serving disadvantaged populations.  Despite stated goals of making progress in science and math, particularly in international comparisons, there has been little effort to address the lack of fully qualified teachers in these areas.  Much of the current concern is prompted by comparisons to other countries, notably China where training in science and engineering appears healthy and growing.  

Although international comparisons are always useful for moving U.S. policy makers, we might attend to some of the nuances of the differences among countries.  Instructive in this regard are the observations of Singapore’s education minister as reported by Fareed Zakaria.  Zakaria asked the minister why Singapore schoolchildren lead the world in science and math test scores but fail to deliver world class performance as adults.  The minister explained that American children test worse but do better later in life because “Yours is a talent meritocracy, ours is an exam meritocracy. There are some parts of the intellect that we are not able to test well—like creativity, curiosity, a sense of adventure, ambition. Most of all, America has a culture of learning that challenges conventional wisdom, even if it means challenging authority. These are the areas where Singapore must learn from America."  Let’s hope that American policy makers learn this lesson as well.

Will efforts to provide better schooling opportunities for low-income students drive middle class families from the public schools of New York City?  According to an article in the NY Times middle class parents are becoming discontent with the increasing focus on test preparation and remedial work as well as the declining influence of middle class parents in the schools.  This raises the more general question of whether schooling in the US can maintain support if it ceases to be a mechanism for the transmission of privilege.  

The New York City Leadership Academy, a heavily funded program to prepare new principals for city schools, has shown mixed results with only 113 of the 180 candidates who entered the program moving to positions as principals.  This raises the question of whether the current configuration of schools is such that we can reasonably expect to find and prepare enough people to serve as effective leaders.

A new course at the University of Kansas titled, “Special Topics in Religion:  Intelligent Design, Creationism, and Other Religious Mythologies” to be taught by Religious Studies Professor and Chair Paul Mirecki has set off a controversy in a state where intelligent design is now part of the state science curriculum.  The Lawrence (Kansas) Journal World reports the latest dimensions of the controversy in an article titled, “KU Official Responds to Course Critics,” including threats to the funding for the university.  The University of Kansas website presents a statement by UK Provost David Shulenberger defending the course as well as an earlier statement by Chancellor Bob Hemenway defending evolution as a “central unifying principle of modern biology.”  Further investigation reveals that this special topics course is not the only course Professor Mirecki will be offering during the spring semester.  The Religious Studies spring semester course listing indicates that Professor Mirecki will also be teaching REL 124 – Understanding the Bible and REL 500 – Readings; Non English Religious Texts.  O tempora! O mores!

Citing the low quality of the workforce and the lack of skilled technicians, China’s premier announced that the State Council will expend funds to expand secondary vocational education so that it is the same size as regular high school education by the year 2010.  

The latest data from the Massachusetts Department of Education show an increase in the dropout rate for the 2003-2004 school year.  Anne Wheelock of the Progress Through the Educational Pipeline Project at Boston College offers an interpretation of these data as they relate to the MCAS graduation requirement and suggests a number of steps that might be taken to address what appears to be a growing problem.

This article from the NY Times illustrates once again that the debate about intelligent design has more to do with religion than science.  

The President of Cornell University has termed the national movement to have intelligent design taught in U.S. science classrooms “dangerous” and called on colleges to do move to speak out on the issue.

A recent article reports that the Pacific Justice Institute and Quality Science Education for All filed suit in federal court against the University of California at Berkeley and National Science Foundation officials.  The suit, directed at the university’s Understanding Evolution Website, claims that public money is being used to endorse some religions because a part of the site states that most religions have no conflict with the theory of evolution.

What program attracted 12% of Yale’s graduates, 11% of Dartmouth’s, and 8% of those from Princeton and Harvard?  An article from the NY Times discusses what is quickly becoming the Ivy League teacher education program.

Daniel C. Dennett explains why discussions of intelligent design belong in social studies classes instead of science classes in Show Me the Science.  

Nathan Glazer reviews Jonathan Kozol’s The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America and concludes that our commitment to individual freedom will preclude politicians from preventing wealthy parents from enhancing the schooling resources of their own children or leaving the system completely.  It is hard to disagree with this conclusion in the absence of serious political leadership on this and related social issues.

The newly formed Stanford Schools Corporation as taken over operation of the East Palo Alto High School, according to this report in the Stanford Magazine.  With more than 80% of the teachers from the Stanford Teacher Education Program and the involvement of Stanford faculty such as Linda Darling-Hammond and Anthony Bryk, the school is developing as a model of university-school collaboration.

 

In The Job No One Wants from Inside Higher Ed, Russell Olwell asks whether we have made the position of ed school dean too difficult.  Have the demands of the ed school deanship become too diverse and daunting and made the position unattractive to too many potential candidates?

The TCR book review of Media Literacy: Transforming Curriculum and Teaching is a reminder of the growing online presence of the National Society for the Study of Education.  The NSSE website holds current and past yearbook content as well as news of member activities and discussions of current issues in education.  Definitely worth a look.   

The George Lucas Educational Foundation is featured in an article in the New York Times.  The article highlights the Foundation’s interest in encouraging educational programs that emphasize hands-on project-based work, practical experience, and the use of film, video, and digital materials.  The Foundation serves as a source of encouragement for educational innovation at a time when such innovation is becoming increasingly more difficult.

An article from the New York Times describes the internal struggles of a high school English teacher and Marine Corps veteran who advises students about military service in a high school that has lost four recent graduates in Iraq or Afghanistan.  This piece raises some interesting questions about the broader role of teachers in helping students with important life decisions.

This article from the New York Times discusses the controversy surrounding the battle between advocates of intelligent design and those supporting the teaching of evolution in the schools.  The article details the various conservative groups promoting intelligent design.  The most interesting aspect of all of this to me is what it says about the low level of science literacy among the American population.  Unfortunately, battles like this one that take attention and energy from the teaching of serious science, do not lead me to be optimistic that we can do much to address the real needs in the area of science education.

This article from the New York Times laments the delays in communicating the results of state standardized tests in New York, noting that it is difficult to use such tests to support student improvement.  The article lists a variety of excuses for this situation, but perhaps it is simply time to face the fact that standardized tests are not meant to enable teachers to work with students to help them improve.  Such improvements would require very different investments and assessment strategies.

A new report on Teens and Technology from the Pew Internet and American Life Project finds that teens increasingly view e-mail as a technology for communicating with teachers and adults while they prefer instant messaging for communicating with their friends.  The report also notes that teens are leading the nation in the adoption of new communications technologies.

What part of the higher education sector is growing most rapidly?  According to this article in the NY Times it is commercial institutions with a consumer orientation and a mission to help adults improve their career options.  The article examines both the positive and negative aspects of this growth, but with such institutions growing at three times the rate of the rest of higher education in New York State, commercial institutions of higher education are becoming a larger part of the higher education sector.

If we need more evidence that testing is fundamentally a socially agreed upon set of conventions, look no further than “Principal Hid Fraud on Tests in Brooklyn, Officials Say,” a NY Times article describing how educators have been altering the grades on regents exams so that more students pass.  

While we all might be concerned about the altering of grades, the most interesting part of the article is the seventh paragraph:

Last week, state officials lowered the score needed to pass the Math B Regents exam after they said they had erred in scaling the test results and that too many students would probably fail. In recent years, there were similar problems with the Math A and physics tests.

This paragraph has no connection to anything else in the story, but it does provide a revealing look at how social and political circumstances grant privileges regarding testing.  Individual educators will be prosecuted for adjusting test scores, but state officials will be allowed to alter the scores of far more students as part of their regular duties.  

“Evolution is not the only issue at stake.  The very definition of science is at stake.”  This is how Alan Leshner, chief executive of the American Association of Science, justified the decision by most scientists not to participate in hearings on evolution held by the Kansas State Board of Education this spring.  An article in the NY Times discusses the refusal of scientists to participate in the hearing to avoid giving the impression that there is a credible scientific debate regarding evolution and intelligent design.

“We can practice music. But we can’t put together an orchestra.”  That is how one home schooling parent explains the interest in having home schooled students participate in some extracurricular activities and selected classes in the public schools.  An article in the NY Times reports on the growing interest among home schoolers in selective participation in parts of public education as well as the resistance to such participation by some school districts.  What I find particularly interesting about this phenomenon is how students and parents evaluate various aspects of public school offerings (e.g., athletic teams, AP courses) and how clear those evaluations become when students and parents are allowed to choose the parts of the public education system they deem worthwhile.

Charging that America operates two education systems, one for wealthy white students and an inferior one for black and Hispanic children, TC President Arthur Levine announced a new Campaign for Educational Equity to be headed by Michael Rebell, who as director of the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, has led the fight for school finance reform in New York.

Quick, who is the “worlds leading provider of international higher education”? Take your best guess, and then check your answer.

If you are not yet convinced that the forces of globalization will impact the field of education, you might want to read the BBC report on the outsourcing to India of part of the grading of standardized exams from the UK.  Still not convinced?  Then perhaps you should read this account from Onlypunjab.com that is more informative than the BBC report.  Perhaps it’s time to outsource the reporting as well.

The Evangelical Christian movement is taking on the Ivy League with plans to establish evangelical student centers on all of the Ivy campuses.  The effort is being led by the Christian Union, a group of evangelical Ivy alumni.  A NY Times article quotes Matt Bennett, founder of the Christian Union, as saying that “What is happening now is good, but it is like a finger in the dike of keeping back the flood of immorality."

Apparently, the group will have its work cut out for it.  On a tour of Harvard a few years ago, one of the people in my tour group asked the student guide, a senior, the schedule of services in a building she had just identified as the chapel.  The tour guide seemed perplexed as she explained that she had never set foot in the chapel, and while she supposed some kind of services might be held there, she certainly did not know the schedule.

“Hear me: an unconscious people, an indoctrinated people, a people fed only partisan information and opinion that confirm their own bias, a people made morbidly obese in mind and spirit by the junk food of propaganda is less inclined to put up a fight, ask questions and be skeptical. And just as a democracy can die of too many lies, that kind of orthodoxy can kill us, too.”  Bill Moyers discussed the threat to democracy posed by the current state of the press in Propaganda and the Press:  The Role of Public Broadcasting in our Democracy.  Perhaps more “news” has not resulted in a more well informed public.

"I feel a little bit coerced. Unfortunately, this is endemic in the academic world, where one way to make some people seem good is by making other people seem not so good. Most students here do a lot of work and a very good job, and they deserve to be rewarded."  The comments by Princeton Professor John Fleming appear in an article reporting on Princeton’s new grading policy limiting “A’s” to no more than 35% of a class.  The grade inflation discussions at Princeton and other elite universities have seldom risen above the technical or bureaucratic level so Professor Fleming’s brief comments seem worth considering.  

"The great enemies of learning are anonymity and invisibility…People who are invisible don't learn. In no sense are they accountable, in no sense are they responsible, and therefore they can simply turn off."  Lee Shulman quoted by John Merrow in The Undergraduate Experience:  Survival of the Fittest in the NY Times.  John Merrow follows the college experiences of five students among the 37,000 at the University of Arizona in an examination of the challenges of learning in such large state universities.

The Federal Communications Commission has responded to requests to investigate the use of video news releases (externally packaged news stories) by reminding broadcasters, cable operators, and others that they must disclose the source of such materials at the time of airing.  As I noted earlier, the growing use of VNRs by government and corporate entities threatens to compromise the educational function of the free press through increasing propaganda. The movement to present VNRs from infiltrating legitimate news operations has received further support from a recent vote by the U.S. Senate to approve an amendment to a supplemental spending bill to prevent any federal agency from using taxpayer dollars to distribute prepackaged news without identifying the pieces as being federally sponsored with taxpayer dollars.

The TCR Editorial Board met today during the AERA Meetings in Montreal.  The Board reviewed various aspects of the operation of the journal and proposed several new initiatives to develop over the coming months.  One effort will be to design strategies to promote greater involvement of graduate students with the editorial processes of the journal.  This might entail greater use of student reviewers as well as opportunities to help students develop as reviewers.  A second effort will be to organize a special issue of the journal focusing on research on high school reform projects.

Apologies to Peter Frankel and Junior Achievement for any offense caused by my use of the term in the context of my earlier entry on the sixth grade counterfeiting incident.  I have always admired programs that try to engage students in real-world projects, and I only wish that the enterprising sixth graders behind the counterfeiting scheme could have been swept up in more wholesome activities.  Apologies also for my misreading of the report that led me to conclude that the currency in question was the $20 bill instead of the still not protected $1 bill.  Thanks to Nicholas Stroud for bringing this to my attention.

After years of careful design work by the U.S. Treasury to incorporate the most advanced anti-counterfeiting design elements, the U.S. 20 dollar bill has been counterfeited by a group of sixth graders in Seattle, Washington who scanned and made copies of the bill good enough to deceive cafeteria workers in the school lunch line.  The fake bills were discovered at the end of the day when the lunchroom staff was counting up the proceeds from the day.  According to the NY Times, the three boys involved received a stern lecture and a 3-day suspension from school. So far there are no reports of suspensions of U.S. Treasury officials in this matter.

 

Teachers might be given new responsibilities and new capacities under a proposal by National Rifle Association First Vice President Sandra S. Froman.  Responding to the recent Minnesota school shooting, Froman in an interview with the Associated Press said that all options should be on the table to enable teachers to protect students, including the possibility of arming teachers and allowing them to have guns in school.

If this proposal is adopted, we can look forward to a host of other necessary adjustments.  Schools of education might begin including methods classes on marksmanship and gun maintenance.  Gun distributors might begin renting exhibit space at conventions of teachers.  Publishers might include certain gun models in the ancillary materials provided with newly adopted textbooks.  Students might think twice before disrupting a class.  Efforts to recruit teachers might be more successful in attracting those with a penchant for fire arms as guns become standard issue equipment.  The educational research community could initiate a series of scientific studies to develop a better understanding of the impact of diverse gun practices on classroom order and student learning.

Although this is an obviously absurd idea, schools have been subjected to many absurd ideas over the years so perhaps we had better prepare in earnest for this possibility.  Lock and load!

 

The role of the news media in the education of citizens in a democracy is of enormous importance.  Not only do we rely on the media for general information on a daily basis, but we also make heavy use of information provided by the press in school-based instruction in social studies and other areas of the curriculum.  It is thus of great concern that the press is increasingly manipulated as a result of the government’s growing efforts to shape public opinion.  

A recent NY Times article reveals that the $240,000 paid to columnist Armstrong Williams to promote the No Child Left Behind Act without acknowledgment that he was working for the government is but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to government intervention in the media.  The Times reports that the Bush administration has spent a quarter of a billion dollars on public relations activities and that government produced “news stories” are increasingly appearing in the media without acknowledgment of the source of such information.  Although the Congressional Accountability Office has found that federal agencies may not produce prepackaged news reports that fail to identify the source of the material, the Justice Department and the Office of Management and Budget have instructed executive branch agencies to ignore the G.A.O. findings.  

The government operation to shape the news seen by U.S. citizens is growing more sophisticated and powerful as evidenced by efforts to contribute to news about military operations.  As the hours devoted to news programming have expanded while news budgets have been squeezed, the government has stepped in to fill the growing need for news of U.S. military operations.  A military information website provides local news directors with news segments and free satellite feeds from Iraq for use in news programs in the U.S.

The problem of government intrusion in the news may well be made worse by the erosion of paid newspaper subscriptions intensified by the migration of readers to online news sources. A decline in revenues to support news gathering is likely to make publishers more dependent on news sources provided by others.

Amidst all that has been written in response to Harvard President Lawrence Summers’ comments on women and science there have been few attempts to place the event into a broader institutional context.  A particularly interesting perspective is developed by Richard Bradley in a column that contrasts the style of university leadership represented by Summers with that of his predecessor Neil Rudenstein.

The National Governors Association held another education summit this weekend to call attention to problems in U.S. high schools.  They released an action agenda to organize efforts for high school reform, including: