Paul Thomas - Universal Public Education Is Dead

The National Education Association (NEA) [4] received criticism for publishing an Op-Ed with Teach for America (TFA) [5]. Ken Bernstein found the piece to be “unbelievable,”[6] while raising the possibility that union members felt betrayed. Anthony Cody first responded with “I just don’t get it,” [7] and then raised this question [8]:

“I wonder how it is possible to fight vigorously for a minimum one-year residency program and simultaneously praise someone whose recruitment model features a five week summer training course, and targets people who do not even wish to become teachers?”

While this rising concern that NEA is failing its mission has received relatively strong coverage in the new media of blogs and twitter, Susan Ohanian [9] has been raising a similar (but nearly ignored) concern about the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) [10]—the largest professional organization for teachers of English. I too have challenged NCTE’s role insupporting national standards [11] and partnering with National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) for teacher certification standards [12]. But my voice like Ohanian’s has been essentially shouting down an empty well, it seems.

Read More:

http://dailycensored.com/2012/01/20/universal-public-education-is-dead-expanded/

Sarah Jaffe - $422,320 for a College Degree? With Tuition Skyrocketing, It is Time to Rethink Higher Education

$422,320.

That's what The Daily, News Corp. and Apple's daily news outlet for the iPad, calculated a college education could cost members of the class of 2034—children born this year, for the most part—if they attend one of the nation's priciest schools. But even an average public university will cost $81,000 for four years if tuition hikes continue at current rates—which are increasing much faster than inflation. As tuition continues to go up, and even the president calls for solutions, some are looking at radical possibilities for keeping tuition down—or even eliminating it.

The Daily found that tuition has been increasing even faster at public schools than private—4.5 percent a year for public universities and only 3.5 percent for private. According to Jane Wellman of the Delta Project, which studies the cost of higher education, public schools have been relying on tuition rather than endowments to make up for state education budget cuts..

Read More:

http://www.alternet.org/story/153788/%24422%2C320_for_a_college_degree_with_tuition_skyrocketing%2C_it_is_time_to_rethink_higher_education

Ellen Schrecker - The Fading Dream of Higher Education in the US

It seems fitting that some of the activity inaugurated by the Occupy Wall Street movement migrated from city squares to college campuses, where students, from Berkeley to the City University of New York (CUNY), are protesting against the rising cost of their educations. Undeterred by pepper spray or police batons, they struggle to preserve the evanescent American dream of a top-flight affordable college education available to all. But, unless there are major transformations within academe and the rest of society, they may be fighting a losing battle.

Just as the frontier once allowed an enterprising individual to get ahead (or so the story went), by the middle of the 20th century, higher education had become the main engine of social mobility in the United States. A college degree, it was believed, would boost its holders into the middle class and then keep them and their children there. Recently, however, as the US economy turned sour, that promise no longer holds. Not only have rising tuitions and unmanageable student debt threatened to put a first-rate higher education out of reach for many of the 99 per cent, but it has also become harder for graduates to enter the well-paying careers they went to college for.

Read More:

http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2012/01/2012113131643983539.html

Marian Wright Edelman - Education Cuts Aren't Smart

Once upon a time, America professed to believe in a strong public education system. While we still talk about public education as the great equalizer that can offer a pathway out of poverty, the nation is falling far short in assuring millions of poor children, especially those of color, upward mobility.

As if children and families were not suffering enough during this economic downturn, too many states are choosing to balance budgets on the backs of children. They're shifting more costs away from government onto children and families who have fewer means to bear them. It's shameful.

Of the 46 states that publish data in a manner allowing historical comparisons, 37 are providing less funding per student to local school districts this school year than they provided last year, and 30 are providing less funding than they did four years ago. Seventeen states have cut per-student funding more than 10 percent from pre-recession levels, and four — South Carolina, Arizona, California, and Hawaii — have reduced per-student funding for K-12 schools by more than 20 percent, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported.

Since the Great Recession began, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Massachusetts, North Carolina, Texas, and other states have cut funding from early education programs to help close budget shortfalls. New Jersey cut funding for after-school programs. In a 2009 survey of California parents, 41 percent reported their child's school was cutting summer programs.

Cuts limiting student learning time are likely to intensify. An American Association of School Administrators survey reports 17 percent of respondents were considering shortening the school week to four days, and 40 percent were considering eliminating summer school programs. Summer learning loss is a major contributor to the achievement gap between poor and children and their more affluent peers. Districts across the country are beginning to cut extracurricular activities and to charge fees for supplies like biology safety goggles or printer ink.

Read More:

http://www.otherwords.org/articles/education_cuts_arent_smart

Kenneth Saltman - The Failure of Corporate School Reform -- Toward a New Common School Movement

Monday 5 December 2011

by: Kenneth J. Saltman, Truthout | Op-Ed

http://www.truth-out.org/failure-corporate-school-reform-toward-new-common-school-movement/1322671494

In the United States, a corporate model of schooling has overtaken educational policy, practice, curriculum and nearly all aspects of educational reform.

While this movement began on the political right, the corporate school model has been heralded across the political spectrum and is aggressively embraced by both major parties. Corporate school reformers champion private-sector approaches to reform including, especially, privatization, deregulation and the importation of terms and assumptions from business, while they imagine public schools as private businesses, districts as markets, students as consumers and knowledge as product. Corporate school reform aims to transform public schooling into a private industry nationally by replacing public schools with privately managed charter schools, voucher schemes and tax credit scholarships for private schooling. The massive expansion of deunionized, nonprofit, privately managed charter schools with short-term contracts is an intermediary step toward the declaration of their failure and replacement by the for-profit industry in Educational Management Organizations (EMOs). EMOs extract profit by cutting teacher pay and educational resources while relying on high teacher turnover and labor precarity.(i) Corporate school reform seeks solutions to public problems in private-sector ways, from contracting out schools and services, to union-busting, a wholesale embrace of numerical benchmarking and database tracking and the modeling of schooling and administration on multiple aspects of corporate culture. Policy hawks make demands, for example, for teacher entrepreneurialism, or insist that students dress like retail chain workers and call school heads "CEO"; or install corporate models of numerical "accountability," paying students for grades and teachers for test scores; or leaders play intricate Wall Street-style shell games with test performance to show rising "return on investment"; or teachers assign students the task of crafting a resume for Benjamin Franklin; BP was involved in creating California's new science curriculum: the examples are endless.

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