Education

New Movement In Higher Education

/ Gregory Clark / Leave a comment

The ideas in this New York Time article can be applied to many different areas of education in addition to higher ed. For those who do not wish to read the entire article, I’ll provide a brief summary. There is a recent movement in higher education to grant degrees for the amount of knowledge and skills you can demonstrate; this is in place of how long you have studied. In order to keep down the costs (money AND time) of obtaining a college degree, higher education institutions have begun to offer credit for finishing the work. These “competency-based” programs are all about outcomes, providing certification once learning requirements can be demonstrated. Many institutions, including the University of Wisconsin, have started testing these programs, and from what I can tell they are exclusively online.

Are you skeptical of these new programs? You’re not alone. A lot of questions (some are my own, and some are in the article) are being raised about whether or not degrees obtained this way can be compared to those conferred by a traditional college or university. Is the quality of education provided high enough? What about the classroom experience? If credits can be earned quickly, can we be sure the students have learned anything? How can we be sure they have learned the right things?

My largest concern is about assessment. In most areas of learning, it is a constant challenge for instructors to know how to create assessments that reflect what a student has (and should have) learned throughout the course. My initial reaction to this article was fear that it may be impossible to grade a student who a professor has never met, and who sprinted through the material in three weeks. But this is not entirely unique to online courses. College and university courses usually have only a few graded assignments; they just take four months to complete and occasionally an instructor will actually interact with the student. So in this light, any concern about assessment may actually be misguided.

This can also be applied to K-12 education. The role of assessment is growing in importance every day it seems. After No Child Left Behind, the results of standardized tests carry weighty consequences. If we’re comfortable with assessment when applied frequently (as in K-12), and infrequently (in higher education, online and/or on campus), what is it about a large standardized test that is so different and controversial? Is it the weighty consequences? College exams have weighty consequences. Is it their frequency? Some courses only have a midterm and a final exam.

I find myself unable to provide a full answer to the questions raised by this article and my own analysis of its significance. Please feel free to comment and let me know what you think.

No Child Left Behind: For Better or for Worse, It Is (Probably) Here to Stay

/ Gregory Clark / Leave a comment

I just finished reading a book about the radical change in American public education policy: No Child Left Behind and the Transformation of Federal Education Policy, 1965-2005, by Patrick J. McGuinn.

Here is a brief summary of his findings, so you don’t have to read the entire book if you don’t have the time.

Beginning in the 1960’s, the Elementary and Secondary Education Act (ESEA) was created during the Johnson Administration as part of the Great Society. This marked a significant increase in federal involvement in public education. Whereas public education was traditionally the jurisdiction of the states, the federal government now became a player. The policy regime resulting from the ESEA, the equity regime, was centered on the idea that the federal government had the responsibility to provide financial assistance to underprivileged students. The focus was on policy inputs. After the Nation at Risk report in the early 1980’s, a focusing event, public education began to increase in salience as an issue needing to be addressed by government. National-level politicians, wanting to capitalize on this increase in salience, broadened the scope of conflict to the federal level. This marked the beginning of the end of the equity regime. The preferred policy from ideological centrists and the broader public was standards-based reform. However, because this reform did not appeal to some strong groups from within both Republican and Democrat constituencies, it fell prey to institutional difficulties inherent in creating policy change. Once pressure to solve the perceived public education crisis peaked in 2000, a bipartisan effort overcame these obstacles and No Child Left Behind was passed in 2002. The new policy regime focused on government responsibility to educate all students, and to monitor educational outputs through standards-based accountability measures.

The findings indicate, and the author argues, that education policy is very difficult to change. It took twenty years (from start to finish) to dismantle one paradigm and install another. For those who are unhappy with the status quo being No Child Left Behind (NCLB), this is not good news.

I am not afraid to speak up and criticize NCLB. Some parts are worse than others, in my humble opinion, but it really is a package deal. The use of standardized testing, and using results to justify punitive “accountability” measures, is something I’m sure will pop up frequently in my future posts, and not in a positive tone. But if I take seriously McGuinn’s findings, the future is likely to be filled with standardized testing. Moreover, changing the status quo will require not just the realization that standardized testing does not accomplish what NCLB hoped it would; it will also require large public concern about the state of public education. NCLB came about only after public education became the most important issues in America (measured by opinion polls). I do not think we will see another paradigm shift for a long time, especially given the salience of economic issues which does not show much sign of decline.

Frustrations Erupt Over Common Core and NYS Assessments

/ Douglas Wieczorek / Leave a comment

This week, several sources (see here and here) have reported and blogged about the NYSED Commissioner John King and his scheduled PTA meetings scheduled around the state. While I understand citizens’ frustrations over these changes, publicly decrying and degrading Dr. King on the web is not a productive plan of action. I hope our communities rise above the fray and share their concerns in a collaborative way. We have all fallen victim to poor planning and lack of proper time management- the variable of time has compressed every aspect of these changes, increasing stress, anxiety, and resistance to these changes at home and in our schools. The rapid and premature implementation timeline has placed unnecessary pressure on the stakeholders in the system, and we are now seeing the results.

Unfortunately, these purposeful, open public meetings probably should have come before the new curricula, assessments, and teacher evaluations were unveiled as part of the state’s Race to the Top (RttT) implementation. The state leadership skipped a valuable opportunity to discuss in a positive, yet objective manner the benefits to children, teachers, taxpayers, and the nation for increasing the rigor of curriculum and accountability. They could have explained the underlying research; they could have allotted time to explain how teachers would be trained for the new curriculum and the new assessments. If you ask any school administrator in NYS, they will likely tell you they have been building the plane while it is flying, as I am sure many have shared this video at professional development sessions and faculty meetings around the state.

The NYSED leadership’s three- to five-year vision could have been clearly articulated and transparent, where the plans to manage anticipated test score reductions and resultant teacher evaluations clearly explained. Parents, school professionals, and taxpayers would have been given time to digest and understand the changes, and most importantly, be given an opportunity to weigh and consider the benefits or negative consequences. If our state leadership is now seeking to have open discourse about the state of our schools, the opportunity may be lost- key stakeholders are now angry and taking a resistant stance. Maybe we all should have been given a real opportunity to discuss these issues before NYS accepted the Race to the Top grant award.

It will be very interesting to see what this year’s results bring, especially if we use other RttT states like Kentucky as models for improvement. What will our state leaders say next year if our results mimic theirs?

Increased Assessment in Education: At What Cost?

/ Joanna Masingila / Leave a comment

There has been much discussion about increased and new types of assessment at various levels of education—of K-12 students, of teachers and principals in K-12 education, and of prospective teachers in K-12 education.

Some of the discussion has focused on what has happened to the education K-12 students receive as a result of the increased emphasis on standardized testing, fueled by No Child Left Behind. Kenneth Bernstein, a retired teacher, wrote an article that appeared in Academe in February 2013, and was reposted by Valerie Strauss in the Washington Post, “A Warning to College Profs from a High School Teacher” in which he laid out the effects he sees that result from the heightened testing environment. In August 2013, Bernstein followed this up with another article, “Teacher Who Left: Why I am Returning to School“.

As Bernstein notes in his second article, the stakes have continued to rise with the implementation of the Common Core State Standards and the tests associated with these standards. Voices from students (e.g., Nikhil Goyal, “Why I Opted Out of APPR“) as well as principals (e.g., Carol Burris, “What Big Drop in New Standardized Test Scores Really Means“) have joined the conversation on the negative effects of this increased assessment on student learning.

Alongside this increased testing of student learning, are new systems of assessing teacher effectiveness. In New York State, assessment of teacher performance occurs through Annual Professional Performance Review (APPR), which was adopted by the Board of Regents in 2000. Changes that were approved in 2010, require school districts to conduct an annual review of each teacher and principal resulting in a single composite effectiveness score and a rating of “highly effective”, “effective”, “developing”, or “ineffective”. This change to the APPR has not been without controversy, as evidenced in this story from October 4, 2013 of hundreds of teachers appealing their APPR.

The emphasis on increased testing has moved to the higher education arena as well, with the new requirement that all teachers seeking certification in New York State pass the edTPA (a teacher performance assessment developed at Stanford University). While the edTPA tasks assess things that teachers need to be able to do—plan for instruction, lead students in learning, and assess student learning—what has many teacher educators (e.g., teacher educators at the University of Massachusetts; Julie Gorlewski at SUNY New Paltz) and others concerned is having a prospective teacher’s performance over an entire teacher preparation program, including weeks of student teaching, come down to a snapshot of the teacher’s performance scored by a person hired by Pearson.

Commonalities among current assessment of K-12 student learning, K-12 teacher and principal performance, and prospective K-12 teacher performance are the high-stakes nature of the assessment, the use of snapshots of performance, and the critical assessment roles of persons other than the ones most familiar with the performance. Critics have already raised concerns about this increased assessment. What will be the cost to education? Kenneth Bernstein notes that we are already seeing some of the costs in the students who are now at the college level.

Should the Federal Government Hop on the College Rankings Bandwagon?

/ Steven Kassirer / Leave a comment

Let me start off by saying that for the most part, I agree with much of President Obama’s domestic policy since taking office. My bias out of the way, I want to take a moment and reflect on the President’s recent visit to New York State, during which he visited two of the State University of New York’s premier, research oriented universities, and Henninger High School, here in Syracuse. During his visit to UB (alas, one of my numerous alma maters), the President outlined his plan to make college more affordable for the middle class. While this is certainly a noble undertaking, part of the President’s “plan” includes a mandate to the U.S. Department of Education to develop a “a new ratings system to help students compare the value offered by colleges and encourage colleges to improve.” The rating system, to be implemented by 2015, would assess factors including access to low income students, based on Pell Grants awarded, affordability, based on average tuition, scholarships, and loan debt, and outcome, based on graduation and transfer rates, ‘graduate earnings,’ and advanced degrees of college graduates.
Now, keeping higher education affordable should be a top priority of this country. After all, without accessible, affordable higher education, where would we really be? The post-World War 2 GI Bill was a major force driving the economic success enjoyed by the middle class during the last half of the 20th century. Likewise, university investment in so called “high tech” fueled the brief period of middle class prosperity at the end of the 20th century and continues to impact our economic stability today.
My issue with the President’s so called “plan” for the Education Department to rate (or rank, if you prefer) U.S. colleges and universities to compete with private rankings such as U.S. News and The Princeton Review is that to effectively rank colleges based on the above standards would require the Department of Education to conduct a long-term longitudinal study to determine which colleges and universities are, in fact, the “best” as deemed by the President’s standards. It would be impossible to determine the “outcome factor” of graduate earnings without conducting such a study. In short, how is the Department of Education going to be able to determine the “value” of a college’s or a university’s degree without tracking graduates over a long period of time? Case in point: A Syracuse College of Law graduate may decide to take a public interest law job, which pays $40,000 per year, while a graduate of Onondaga Community College graduate may get a job at a family company that pays $100,000 per year. Twenty years from now, the same SU law graduate may be the senior counsel at Apple, making millions of dollars per year, while the OCC graduate, through promotion, may be making $200,000 pe year. While this is a very simplistic example, under the President’s mandate to look at “outcomes,” OCC outranks SU as a university.
Keeping higher education affordable to the middle class is a noble undertaking, and I applaud the president for even considering it; however, there are so many possible strategies to achieving this goal, the notion of a Federal Government ranking of colleges and universities is a poorly veiled attempt at making national education policy.