Friday, December 01, 2017






A tax on the American Dream (?)

Larry Summers below is a smart guy but he is overlooking TWO elephants in his room. He fails to notice that most of the universities and colleges in America these days have made themselves into Leftist Madrassas, deeply antagonistic to anything conservative.  Trump is simply responding to that and hitting them where it hurts.  A resumed interest in real scholarship will be needed to turn that around.

Secondly, he assumes that universities offer the best path towards upward mobility.  They probably do enable social mobility for the most part but they certainly are not the best path to income mobility. Tradesmen earn more than most graduates.  Apprenticeships are the best path to upward income mobility.



Equipped with de-identified tax records, economist Raj Chetty and his team at the Equality of Opportunity Project have provided the hard numbers to confirm what many have long feared: Upward income mobility in America is on a steady downward trajectory. Whereas 95 percent of sons born in the United States in 1940 made more money than their fathers, this was true for only 41 percent of sons born in 1984. These data points seem profoundly important for anyone hoping to interpret the current state of our politics and national dialogue. But they also merit the close attention of both our university leaders and legislators working on the tax code. In a country of declining intergenerational mobility, the proposed endowment tax is seriously misguided.

Educational institutions should be important actors in reversing the American Dream’s decline. A new paper released by Chetty’s team this year has helped to affirm the potential for higher education to foster more broadly shared opportunity. The research, published alongside a set of mobility report cards for all 2,199 US colleges and universities, shines a light on the relative success (or lack thereof) of American institutions in creating pathways to economic success for low-income students.

What one might call the “manifest inadequacy of . . . higher education’s contribution to equality of opportunity” is unfortunately not a new phenomenon. Over a decade ago at Harvard, we were similarly troubled by the striking underrepresentation of the bottom half of the income distribution. During the Summers presidency in 2004, Harvard initiated the most ambitious expansion to date of financial aid, specifically targeting families of low and moderate incomes. Along with eliminating parental contributions for parents earning under $40,000 (since increased to $65,000), the college made changes to applicant review and launched new outreach and recruiting efforts across the country. The idea was that the most talented students should know that Harvard was an option for them, no matter their economic background.

No doubt, this has been a persistently stubborn problem to address. And yet, data show that efforts at Harvard, unlike other elite institutions, appear to have borne some fruit. Harvard’s mobility report card shows noticeable upticks in the mid-2000s share of students from the bottom 60th and 20th percentiles of the US income distribution, beginning with the class of 2009, right after the new policy was announced. These gains occurred even as real incomes of these families were declining over the same period due to widening inequality.

Notably, Harvard has outperformed other Ivies and top-tier peers, who did not experience similar increases in the fraction of low- or middle-income students. And here in Boston, data for Boston University, Boston College, and Northeastern actually all show declines in proportions of low- or moderate-income students over the same period, with especially visible drops during the Great Recession.

This contrast with other Boston private universities helps illuminate why Harvard is able to continue admitting and supporting more low-income students, irrespective of economic conditions or parents’ ability to pay. Harvard’s financial aid budget, totaling $414 million university-wide this year (including $175 million in need-based undergraduate aid) is directly supported and enabled by the returns of the university’s endowment. As its largest source of revenue financing operations, Harvard’s endowment is precisely the reason the school can strive toward more economic diversity. Today, 90 percent of American families would pay the same or less to send their children to Harvard as a state school — this would be impossible without these funds.

It is especially troubling, then, that the Republican tax plan seeks to compensate for lost corporate tax revenue by penalizing a select group of educational institutions. The $43 million annual hit on Harvard would directly impact the college’s efforts to further expand financial aid for low-income families. It is hard to take Republicans’ claims of economic fairness seriously when other nonprofits, like exclusive prep schools and opera companies, are ignored. It seems especially preposterous in a piece of legislation that simultaneously repeals the estate tax, which benefits only the wealthiest 0.2 percent of Americans. Instead, this all smells of a certain kind of politics — where rather than careful welfare analysis, tax policy instead is a political weapon used to reward supporters and penalize perceived opponents. Coupled with the House bill’s proposed elimination of the student loan interest deduction and repeal of the tuition tax waiver, the tax plan will make pursuing higher education more difficult for anyone not at the top of the income distribution. Those who would suffer disproportionately are the young adults whose lives could be most transformed by a place like Harvard — students from the bottom 20 percent families who rise to the top 1 percent as adults. Harvard ranks in the 99th percentile nationally on this metric.

Of course, this is no warrant for complacency. Harvard’s top-heavy skew in the admitted class limits mobility potential, as does its still small bottom-quintile share (Berkeley has almost double Harvard’s percentage). We know that there are a lot of low-income high-achievers who aren’t applying or making it to the Ivy League. Economic diversity has often not received the same intensity of attention rightfully paid to racial diversity. But the Chetty data show earnings outcomes at elite institutions for students from modest economic backgrounds look almost identical to higher-income peers. It would be an unfortunate irony if “need-blind” admission policies, intended to protect low-income applicants, had the effect of preventing institutions from giving preference to these applicants, who succeed when given the chance. Universities should be more ambitious in recruiting low-income students, expanding their classes to provide more access, and admitting more transfer students from public institutions.

Whatever your political persuasion, equality of opportunity should be a major concern. If America is going to make the progress we all want to see, its private universities need to take on an increasingly active role. The federal government is right to call on them to step up. But Congress and the president are gravely wrong to levy punitive taxes on engines of opportunity at a time when they need to be enabled to do more, not forced to do less.

SOURCE





Want a Choice Not an Echo in Education? Then Keep the Feds Out

A provision of the recent House GOP tax plan would allow parents to use up to $10,000 of their 529 college savings plans for K-12 expenses including private school tuition. Parental choice in education is a bedrock Republican principle, and President Trump along with Education Secretary Betsy DeVos are leading advocates.

Yet even if the proposed federal K-12 education savings account (ESA) does pass, it may benefit a relative handful of parents, but it likely won’t expand non-public educational choice to parents whose children need it most. Even worse, such help would come at the cost of further expanding the federal government into K-12 education.

Under the proposed change to 529 college savings plans, included in the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, “higher education expense” is expanded to include up to $10,000 annually for elementary and secondary school tuition expenses, including public, private, and religious schools. Qualified expenses also include costs associated with apprenticeship programs, such as textbooks, supplies, and equipment. (See Section 1202 Consolidation of College Savings Rules, summary pp. 9-10; full bill text, pp. 91-94. See here also.)

This idea isn’t new. In fact, the feds got the idea from the states, which began implementing prepaid college and savings plans more than 30 years ago, starting with Michigan in 1986. A handful of other states had also enacted similar plans by the late 1980s and early 1990s, including Florida in 1987 and Ohio in 1989.

Originally, those state plans were subject to federal income tax because they are investment vehicles. That situation began to change in 1994 when the state of Michigan beat the IRS in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit by having its prepaid college plan declared tax-exempt. In response, the IRS threatened to challenge the tax status of all other existing state college savings plans. Congress intervened by passing the Small Business Protection Act of 1996, which created Internal Revenue Code 26 U.S.C. § 529 granting tax-deferred status for qualified state tuition savings programs. By 2000 fully 30 states had enacted tuition savings programs, or Section 529 Plans as they’re now called. (See here also.)

The Economic Growth and Tax Relief Reconciliation Act of 2001 spurred another expansion in education savings by making Section 529 Plans tax-exempt. Today 529 plans exist in every state except Wyoming and have maximum lifetime balances that average nearly $400,000. Anyone can open or contribute to a 529 plan, and there are now nearly 13 million 529 plans averaging more than $21,000 each and worth a combined $275 billion.

Such statistics seem like good news since children with dedicated college savings accounts are far more likely to attend college.

Nevertheless, for all the potential of 529 plans, there’s little reason to believe this federal proposal will expand educational options for parents who need it most, including lower-income parents and those living in states that do not have non-public-school parental choice programs.

Fully two-thirds of Americans are unaware of these plans, even though they originated in the late 1980s. (See also here.) What’s more only families with sufficient disposable income to deposit into savings accounts benefit from 529 college plans. (See here, here, and here.)

Better approaches (again) are coming from the states, where K-12 ESA programs have been proliferating since 2011, when Arizona became the first state to enact such a program. Although existing programs rely on government appropriations, more recent state proposals would be funded privately similar to how tax-credit scholarship programs are funded.

Yet perhaps the biggest risk of all to the proposed federal ESA plan is the further expansion of the federal government into K-12 education. While some parental choice proponents may downplay the likelihood of federal regulation of private schools (see here and here), just wait until the D.C. bureaucrats with a hand in crafting tax policy start having ideas about which K-12 private schools they think parents should choose.

For example, would private schools have to participate in Common Core-influenced state testing? If so, how frequently? Would faith-based schools be required to offer curricula that violates their core beliefs about gender, marriage, birth control, and abortion?

These are not unreasonable concerns given the ongoing controversies involving private postsecondary institutions and the federal government.

As the Cato’s Institute’s Neal McCluskey recently summed up, “We have abandoned federalism to our detriment.” D.C.-driven policies intended to improve K-12 education, including No Child Left Behind and Common Core, have actually made matters worse with seemingly endless testing, invasive data collection, and school curriculum that’s of dubious academic quality, not to mention the homogenizing effect these national policies have on American education.

And such homogenization is perhaps the worst possible outcome. After all, expanding educational options is supposed to be about offering parents alternatives to, not echoes of, the status quo.

SOURCE 





Australia: University dropout rate is telling us something

The disappointing news from the Federal Government on university completion rates and employment outcomes should inspire reflection. Is university a wrong path for many?  Youth career coach Steve Shepherd comments:

“These figures clearly highlight a systemic problem with the way we educate young people on their career path. We’ve created a herd mentality, where high schools, parents and peer pressure are pushing young people towards university, saying it’s the only way to get a good career, earn good money and get ahead.”

“As such, is it the University’s fault that so many young people end up dropping out? Are we encouraging too many young people to go to university, when it doesn’t really suit their strengths? Is this creating a problem where young people pick any degree to say they’ve been to university, without thinking about the impact it will have on their careers?”

According to research from TwoPointZero, nearly a quarter (24%) of young people are unsure of which career direction to take, with over half (55%) coming to regret their electives.

Should we be blaming universities?
“In my mind, the problem starts before university. Applications for university are higher than ever but you can’t tell me everyone wants to go to university or is suited to it? In reality, that’s not really the way it should work.”

“Many of the most in demand jobs at the moment, don’t require a degree. So why all the pressure to go to university? There needs to be a better balance and we need to start educating young people on their career paths much earlier. This would help prevent people from taking a degree for the sake of it and better align their education with their chosen career path, making it more relevant to the employment market.”

“And, if they still want to go to university, we need to have safety nets in place to intervene if they are likely to drop out. In our experience, one small tweak to the subjects they take or changing course can prevent them from dropping out and see them succeed.”

Performance funding a distraction from the real issue
“Performance funding is not the answer. It doesn’t actually address the issue, just distracts from it and could lead to higher education being out of reach for many young people today.”

“We need to better fund career education in schools, as most schools currently spend less than a cup of coffee per student per year on careers advice. We need to provide more guidance to parents to help them understand the employment market isn’t the same as when they left school. And, we need to stop thinking going to university is the be all and end all.”

“Everyone is different. Everyone likes different things. Everyone has different strengths. It is time we accept that and better align our educational institutions to encourage diversity and create better career paths for our young people.”

“Otherwise, we’ll continue to see the youth unemployment rate rise. Continue to see an increase in drop-outs and more young people in debt. And, will end up creating a huge problem for the Australian economy, as we will not have a strong workforce to support our country moving forwards.”

Via email


Wednesday, November 29, 2017



Online learning can ease economic inequality

Digital learning is often seen a complement to sit-in-the-classroom colleges courses, but at a recent conference at MIT, experts convincingly portrayed innovative online offerings as a key tool for helping those of modest means move up the economic ladder.

College degrees pay off. But low-income students often face family, financial, or work constraints that keep them from pursuing higher education full-time or even on a regular nights-and-weekend basis. Citing the fact that 36 million Americans have some college but no degree, keynote speaker Ted Mitchell, president of the American Council on Education and a former federal undersecretary of education, said the American higher education system is “leaving too many students along the side of the road.”

And though Massachusetts is a comparatively well-educated state, the same problem exists here. Chris Gabrieli, chairman of the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, noted that those who have a bachelor’s degree make, on average, about twice as much as those who don’t. Still, 1.5 million working-age Massachusetts residents either have only a high school diploma or, if they have taken some college courses, have not obtained any kind of degree. That despite the fact that almost a third of working-age residents without a degree say they’d like to pursue one.

The Baker administration hopes that flexible, expanded digital learning opportunities will help them achieve that goal. One subject that came up repeatedly at was the importance of college courses built around mastering competencies, something that students can work on at their own pace and on their own schedule, rather than on spending a specific amount of time in the classroom.

A second: College credit for prior learning. By identifying and giving credit for legitimate skills already obtained, colleges can ease the path toward a degree. That’s particularly important for those who have served in the military, since their careers often included high-quality training.

Meanwhile, several leading employers showcased their own efforts to make digital learning work for current and prospective employees. Partners HealthCare, the state’s largest employer, announced it will make a new online health care-management program, offered through the University of Southern New Hampshire, available to all its employees on an affordable basis. General Electric pledged to interview for jobs any state resident who completes a “MicroMasters” program in cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, supply-chain management, or cloud computing offered through the online-learning platform edX.org.

So how to push these trends along? One problem is that federal financial aid is generally not available for competency-based online learning. Meanwhile, more employers should take their cues from Partners and GE in encouraging digital education. And more colleges should get in the game with affordable, for-credit online offerings.

The Baker administration, which sponsored the conference and will soon appoint a commission to explore ways to expand online learning opportunities in areas critical to the state’s economy, should be applauded for its efforts here. This kind of wonky work often get overlooked, but it’s an important effort to create a future where more residents can share the benefits of our knowledge-based economy.

SOURCE 






Students, stop waging war on the past

Now British student leaders want to erase William Gladstone's name

Disappointing news this week from my alma mater, Liverpool University. A campaign has been launched to change the name of the Roscoe and Gladstone halls of residence. Students want the name of four-time prime minister William Gladstone to be expunged from the site because he didn’t support the abolition of slavery and his father’s money came from the slave trade.

In my first year at Liverpool I lived in the neighbouring halls: Derby and Rathbone. I’ll admit it never occurred to me to look up the background to these names. All I knew was that I had selected the halls that had not had the asbestos scare a few years earlier – and that was good enough for me.

Incidentally, it seems the student leading the campaign against Roscoe and Gladstone halls, Alisha Raithatha, hadn’t bothered to look up the names while she lived there, either. ‘As former residents of the halls we were horrified to find out we had been living in a building named after such a figure for a whole year without even realising’, she wrote on the university’s students’ guild website. A case of delayed outrage, it would seem.

Raithatha argues that Gladstone’s name should be replaced with the name of someone ‘more worthy’. She has suggested Liverpool alumnus and journalist Jon Snow. Oh dear.

The campaign has received 80 ‘likes’ on the guild website, which means it will be debated at a guild summit – the first step to it becoming an official campaign for the guild. Liverpool is following in the footsteps of Oxford University and Kings College London (KCL) in embracing historic virtue-signalling. The Rhodes Must Fall Oxford campaign sought to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel Square in order ‘to decolonise the institutional structures and physical space in Oxford and beyond’.

Earlier this year, KCL’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience decided to replace portraits of its founders with a more racially diverse selection of scholars, after it was concluded that the old paintings did not reflect today’s standards of diversity.

It really can’t be a shock to people that historical figures do not stand up to today’s standards of goodness or diversity. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a contemporary figure who could withstand student activists’ testing of virtuousness, never mind someone from the past, when very often black people and women were not seen as deserving of equal rights.

Past historical figures whose names we remember, and sometimes attach to buildings and streets, are celebrated for what they achieved. This doesn’t mean they were nice people. Most of us are aware of that. Charles Dickens had a problem with Jews: that doesn’t make his work any less important.

Raithatha says of Gladstone: ‘We believe that someone with this controversial background should not have a university hall named after them, especially in a city where we try hard not to forget the atrocities that took place on our docks.’ But no one is forgetting about slavery – and it is absolutely undisputed today that slavery was a terrible historic crime.

So what is the point of all this historical editing? Have the thousands of students who have lived in the Roscoe and Gladstone halls been so influenced by the halls’ namesake that they have come to think slavery was an acceptable institution? Of course not. If we continue this incessant judgement of historic figures by today’s standards, no one from the past will survive our wrath: we will have to tear down pretty much every statue and rename all buildings, streets and squares.

It’s sad to see some Liverpool students pandering to the new PC fury with the past. One of the best things about living and studying in Liverpool was how down-to-earth the city and its people are. But I’m heartened by the fact that just 122 students have taken the time to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ Raithatha’s proposal. Considering the students’ guild represents 21,000 Liverpool students, that means not even one per cent of the student body care enough about the name of the Roscoe and Gladstone halls to express an opinion on it.

This campaign is armchair activism. A handful of students realised, after having lived in a building for a year, that one of its historic namesakes, who died in 1898, held dubious views on slavery. If Gladstone’s name is deleted, who benefits? What will happen? What he thought and said will still have been thought and said. The fact that he was Britain’s PM four times won’t have changed. We cannot edit history, and we shouldn’t try to.

A better approach would be to credit Liverpool students with being intelligent enough to know that historic figures were not perfect, and that history is a complex process.

SOURCE






Australia: Perth Modern School wants bigger classes

Larger class sizes can in fact be highly beneficial if they expose more students to good teachers.  But the unions are afraid of them in case they reduce the number of teaching jobs available

WA’s only academically selective school is offering teachers up to $500 cash in exchange for taking extra students above maximum class-size thresholds, raising the ire of the teachers’ union.

Perth Modern School has told teachers they can “negotiate” compensation for accepting bigger classes above the limit of 32 pupils in Years 7 to 10 or 25 in Years 11 and 12.

A document circulated last week to staff at the Subiaco school said it was not compul-sory for teachers to take on extra students but there would be trade-offs for those who chose to do so.

“Examples of negotiated compensation may include trading off yard duty or, in some cases, for middle years there is a figure of $300 for an extra student and $500 for senior years, or you are welcome to negotiate for something else if you require,” it said.

State School Teachers Union president Pat Byrne said offering teachers a financial incentive for extra students was “highly unusual”. The union had raised its concerns with the department after Perth Modern teachers flagged the issue.

“Planning to have classes that exceed the limit is a breach of our industrial agreement,” Ms Byrne said. “So that’s certainly a concern.”

She said that under the union’s agreement with the Education Department, schools were not permitted to plan for classes to be above the agreed maximum. The agreement recognised that classes sometimes exceeded the limit after new students enrolled, so teachers could discuss reducing other duties in recognition of the additional workload.

“There is nothing unusual about that,” Ms Byrne said. “Where it gets unusual is the notion that people are paid extra. It means the school is actually not prioritising class sizes. Class sizes are fixed at a number for a range of reasons — a lot of that is to do with the size of the classroom and safety, particularly if you’re in a science lab or home economics room.

“It isn’t just about workload, it’s also about the actual attention that a teacher can give to individual students.”

Ms Byrne said she had not heard of any other public schools making a similar offer but worried it could set a precedent.

“It undermines the whole rationale for having smaller classes,” she said. “Schools are funded according to the class size ratio, so there should be no reason for a school to be needing to offer that sort of payment,” she said.

“The implication here is that as long as people get paid money, it’s all right to have larger class sizes.

“But we wouldn’t support that at all. It’s about the quality of education you can provide for that class and the bigger it gets the harder it is to do that.” An Education Department spokeswoman said: “This matter was brought to the department’s attention recently and we are currently looking into it.”

SOURCE


Tuesday, November 28, 2017



Lecturer accused of harassing conservative student will no longer work at UNL; 2 PR officials also outed

Background: Professor Amanda Gailey led a cohort of her colleagues to protest a Turning Point USA recruiting event by chanting things like “fuck (TPUSA founder) Charlie Kirk.” The group called TPUSA members “Nazis” during the heated protest, and directed their anger towards TPUSA chapter president Kaitlyn Mullen.  Mullen went home in tears.  No word on Prof. Gailey being fired

The Graduate Student Assembly believes that Courtney Lawton should not have been fired as she was simply using her free speech entitlement.  But attacking someone else's free speech is misbehaviour, not free speech. It is the negation of free speech.  To attack someone else's free speech and then expect free speech protection for yourself is really rich



University of Nebraska officials announced Friday that new steps are being taken in relation to an incident involving a conservative student Aug. 25.

NU President Hank Bounds said the graduate student-lecturer who called a conservative student a “neo-fascist” for recruiting for Turning Point USA would no longer teach at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The World-Herald further learned that the lecturer, Courtney Lawton, will be released from employment completely when her contract expires at the end of the school year.

Bounds also sent Gov. Pete Ricketts and Nebraska’s state senators a letter that cites various actions that reflect “the importance of open conversation that respects each other’s differences” on campus.

One of those is to have Gallup do a survey to assess the campus environment for people of diverse political backgrounds on NU’s campuses in Omaha, Lincoln and Kearney.

NU also released emails as a result of public records requests by Conservative Review and other organizations. Some emails indicated UNL public relations staffers were eager to spin the story and “have a surrogate(s) submit op-eds” to the Omaha World-Herald and Lincoln Journal Star as “aggressive counter-measures” to coverage of the matter.

One of those staffers, UNL news director Steve Smith, was no longer employed as of Friday. “I was not asked by anyone to leave the university,” Smith said. “I did, however, decide to resign.”

Teresa Paulsen, UNL’s chief communication and marketing officer, said Saturday she had also resigned, effective Dec. 1. Paulsen indicated that her resignation related to the emails over the Turning Point issue and that “the clear purpose of my email was simply to ensure that we were conveying the positive attributes of the university’s students, staff and faculty.” She cited “irresolvable differences” between her and the NU system.

Paulsen wrote that the NU system’s “views and values related to communication practices do not align with mine …“

Bounds’ letter said: “Some of the emails reflect unprofessional behavior by our employees and I apologize.”

UNL Chancellor Ronnie Green also sent a letter to Nebraska newspapers. Green’s op-ed piece said UNL has been at the center of discussions about free speech, tolerance and respectful behavior.

“Finding the right balance isn’t always easy. Sometimes, we come up short. August 25 was one of those times,” he wrote.

In that incident, sophomore Kaitlyn Mullen drew protests when she set up a recruitment table for Turning Point USA outside the Nebraska Union.

Mullen, of Highlands Ranch, Colorado, met derision from several UNL faculty members or graduate students after setting up her table. Lawton flipped her off and called her a “neo-fascist.” Mullen, in tears, was escorted home by police.

The incident exploded into a national rallying point for conservatives who criticize universities as havens of liberalism. Three Nebraska state senators wrote a letter to media outlets asking whether NU is hostile toward conservative students.

UNL’s top two administrators, Green and Executive Vice Chancellor Donde Plowman, spoke at length Friday to two reporters about parts of the situation.

They sought to tamp down the notion that UNL is a hostile place for conservative students and professors.

SOURCE 






Students, stop waging war on the past

Now British student leaders want to erase William Gladstone's name

Disappointing news this week from my alma mater, Liverpool University. A campaign has been launched to change the name of the Roscoe and Gladstone halls of residence. Students want the name of four-time prime minister William Gladstone to be expunged from the site because he didn’t support the abolition of slavery and his father’s money came from the slave trade.

In my first year at Liverpool I lived in the neighbouring halls: Derby and Rathbone. I’ll admit it never occurred to me to look up the background to these names. All I knew was that I had selected the halls that had not had the asbestos scare a few years earlier – and that was good enough for me.

Incidentally, it seems the student leading the campaign against Roscoe and Gladstone halls, Alisha Raithatha, hadn’t bothered to look up the names while she lived there, either. ‘As former residents of the halls we were horrified to find out we had been living in a building named after such a figure for a whole year without even realising’, she wrote on the university’s students’ guild website. A case of delayed outrage, it would seem.

Raithatha argues that Gladstone’s name should be replaced with the name of someone ‘more worthy’. She has suggested Liverpool alumnus and journalist Jon Snow. Oh dear.

The campaign has received 80 ‘likes’ on the guild website, which means it will be debated at a guild summit – the first step to it becoming an official campaign for the guild. Liverpool is following in the footsteps of Oxford University and Kings College London (KCL) in embracing historic virtue-signalling. The Rhodes Must Fall Oxford campaign sought to remove the statue of Cecil Rhodes from Oriel Square in order ‘to decolonise the institutional structures and physical space in Oxford and beyond’. Earlier this year, KCL’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology and Neuroscience decided to replace portraits of its founders with a more racially diverse selection of scholars, after it was concluded that the old paintings did not reflect today’s standards of diversity.

It really can’t be a shock to people that historical figures do not stand up to today’s standards of goodness or diversity. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a contemporary figure who could withstand student activists’ testing of virtuousness, never mind someone from the past, when very often black people and women were not seen as deserving of equal rights.

Past historical figures whose names we remember, and sometimes attach to buildings and streets, are celebrated for what they achieved. This doesn’t mean they were nice people. Most of us are aware of that. Charles Dickens had a problem with Jews: that doesn’t make his work any less important.

Raithatha says of Gladstone: ‘We believe that someone with this controversial background should not have a university hall named after them, especially in a city where we try hard not to forget the atrocities that took place on our docks.’ But no one is forgetting about slavery – and it is absolutely undisputed today that slavery was a terrible historic crime.

So what is the point of all this historical editing? Have the thousands of students who have lived in the Roscoe and Gladstone halls been so influenced by the halls’ namesake that they have come to think slavery was an acceptable institution? Of course not. If we continue this incessant judgement of historic figures by today’s standards, no one from the past will survive our wrath: we will have to tear down pretty much every statue and rename all buildings, streets and squares.

It’s sad to see some Liverpool students pandering to the new PC fury with the past. One of the best things about living and studying in Liverpool was how down-to-earth the city and its people are. But I’m heartened by the fact that just 122 students have taken the time to ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ Raithatha’s proposal. Considering the students’ guild represents 21,000 Liverpool students, that means not even one per cent of the student body care enough about the name of the Roscoe and Gladstone halls to express an opinion on it.

This campaign is armchair activism. A handful of students realised, after having lived in a building for a year, that one of its historic namesakes, who died in 1898, held dubious views on slavery. If Gladstone’s name is deleted, who benefits? What will happen? What he thought and said will still have been thought and said. The fact that he was Britain’s PM four times won’t have changed. We cannot edit history, and we shouldn’t try to. A better approach would be to credit Liverpool students with being intelligent enough to know that historic figures were not perfect, and that history is a complex process.

SOURCE 





What should schools teach?

A new book makes the case for imparting knowledge and pursuing truth

In the UK, decades of political meddling in the curriculum have resulted in endless lists prescribing what – and how – teachers should teach. How refreshing then, that unlike many educational policy prescriptions, What Should Schools Teach? does not offer a dazzling list of innovative academic hybrids, along with an interactively inspirational flowchart of how to deliver them.

Rather, the answer is laid out in beautiful clarity, in chapters on mathematics, foreign languages, physics, biology, history, geography, English literature and art – not as an exhaustive list, but the beginning of a conversation about why these core subjects continue to be essential and relevant to the 21st-century curriculum.

Why should schools teach mathematics? Usually, this question would be answered with the ‘duh!’ of pragmatic common sense: to survive in the modern world, people need ‘numeracy skills’. But Cosette Crisan’s chapter transcends this dull instrumentalism, with her account of the discipline as:

‘A powerful tool for making sense of the world; an art with its aesthetic appeal; a language with its syntax and syntactic rules that facilitate precise, concise and rigorous communication; a poetry that I read and do for pure enjoyment; and a creative art, with its struggles, frustrations and elations.’

According to Cosan, the ‘utlilitarian’ view of maths, ‘as a “tool” subject that equips pupils for solving problems’, is a ‘good reason for its inclusion in the school curriculum’. But it’s one that fails to appreciate the ‘intrinsic value’ of mathematics as a school discipline that introduces pupils to ‘the great ideas and controversies in human thought’.

Children often don’t like learning maths, but they find art quite fun. Is this a reason to include it in the curriculum? Again, the tendency to focus on the ‘how to’ of art as a school subject, and to view it as a creative break from the boring stuff, gives the subject a one-sided dimension, which deprives pupils of knowledge and insight of art as a discipline. Studying the history of art alongside practical skills and application would, argues Powell, foster an appreciation of ‘the centrality of the individual in art, as both a subject and as an interpreter, of our cultural practices and our relationships with nature’.

Shirley Lawes’s chapter reveals the wealth of possibility offered to all children by learning a foreign language. To learn a foreign language is to ‘open a new window on the world’, which enables pupils to ‘move beyond their parochial, subjective experiences, to appreciate cultural achievements that have spread beyond national boundaries and are part of universal human culture’. As such, language learning ‘should be seen as an essential part of the education of every individual’.

Yet almost as soon as the possibility arose to open this window on the world for more children, it was narrowed by an instrumental focus on teaching language as a ‘skill’ that would benefit the needs of the economy, and become easy for children to acquire at a rudimentary level. The study of history and literature became superseded by ‘a “get by” toolkit of transactional and “survival” language’. As a result, argues Lawes, ‘Even the small proportion of pupils who continue to learn a foreign language beyond the compulsory minimum acquire very little cultural knowledge, and thus the “window on the world” is shut.’

In the book’s foreword, Michael Young, professor of sociology of curriculum at UCL Institute of Education, recommends that it is read inside out, starting, if you’re a teacher, with the chapter on the reader’s own subject, before exploring other chapters and the Introduction. This brings to the fore the exceptional quality of What Should Schools Teach? – its grounding in the authors’ knowledge of, and passion for, their subjects and the disciplinary approach behind them.

Each chapter is written by secondary-school teachers and lecturers, each of whom, explain the editors, ‘describes [his or her] discipline, how it evolved in relation to an area of human enquiry and how it helps is to explore an aspect of truth’. This is important, not because the chapters ‘present the only, or even the best, account of disciplinary knowledge in the curriculum’, but because ‘each chapter illustrates the kind of curriculum thinking that should be going on in schools and in relation to education policymaking’. This is a thinking that should centrally involve teachers and academics who, as specialists in their disciplines, are the only people who are equipped to make a genuinely educational case for what schools should teach.

The recent re-promotion of academic subjects, through former education secretary Michael Gove’s reforms to GCSEs and A-levels, provided a much-needed counter to the flabby, content-lite substance of previous years. These have at least opened the door for subject specialism to come back into its own. Unfortunately, this possibility remains bounded by instrumental demands, political agendas, and an overarching distrust of teachers. The content of what schools are supposed to teach may have improved, at least in the sense that there is more of it; but the imperative to deliver prescribed outcomes, stick to the mark scheme, and prioritise attainment over understanding continues to dominate educational practice.

As such, the question raised by What Should Schools Teach? is as much about the relationship between teachers and their subjects, as it is about the content of the school curriculum. Each chapter speaks eloquently to the way that subject knowledge becomes a living, humanising, enriching thing, through those who teach it. Education is more than skills; knowledge is more than facts; teaching is more than meeting performance goals. That is why, explain Standish and Sehgal Cuthbert, schools need teachers who are ‘well-versed in disciplinary knowledge’ and have the autonomy to bring this to the classroom, rather than being held to account for their skill in jumping through hoops.

Jennie Bristow is senior lecturer in sociology at Canterbury Christ Church University and an associate of the Centre for Parenting Culture Studies. Her new book, The Sociology of Generations: New Directions and Challenges, is published by Palgrave Macmillan.

SOURCE 


Monday, November 27, 2017






Elitists, crybabies and junky degrees

A Trump supporter explains rising conservative anger at American universities

Frank Antenori shot the head off a rattlesnake at his back door last summer — a deadeye pistol blast from 20 feet. No college professor taught him that. The U.S. Army trained him, as a marksman and a medic, on the “two-way rifle range” of Afghanistan and Iraq.

Useful skills. Smart return on taxpayers’ investment. Not like the waste he sees at too many colleges and universities, where he says liberal professors teach “ridiculous” classes and indoctrinate students “who hang out and protest all day long and cry on our dime.”

“Why does a kid go to a major university these days?” said Antenori, 51, a former Green Beret who served in the Arizona state legislature. “A lot of Republicans would say they go there to get brainwashed and learn how to become activists and basically go out in the world and cause trouble.”

Antenori is part of an increasingly vocal campaign to transform higher education in America. Though U.S. universities are envied around the world, he and other conservatives want to reduce the flow of government cash to what they see as elitist, politically correct institutions that often fail to provide practical skills for the job market.

To the alarm of many educators, nearly every state has cut funding to public colleges and universities since the 2008 financial crisis. Adjusted for inflation, states spent $5.7 billion less on public higher education last year than in 2008, even though they were educating more than 800,000 additional students, according to the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

In Arizona, which has had a Republican governor and legislature since 2009, lawmakers have cut spending for higher education by 54 percent since 2008; the state now spends $3,500 less per year on every student, according to the progressive Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Tuition has soared, forcing students to shoulder more of the cost of their degrees.

Meanwhile, public schools in Arizona and across the nation are welcoming private donors, including the conservative Koch brothers. In nearly every state, the Charles Koch Foundation funds generally conservative-leaning scholars and programs in politics, economics, law and other subjects. John Hardin, the foundation’s director of university relations, said its giving has tripled from about $14 million in 2011 to $44 million in 2015 as the foundation aims to “diversify the conversation” on campus.

People across the ideological spectrum are worried about the cost of college, skyrocketing debt from student loans and rising inequality in access to quality degrees. Educators fear the drop in government spending is making schools harder to afford for low- and middle-income students.

State lawmakers blame the cuts on falling tax revenue during the recession; rising costs of other obligations, especially Medicaid and prisons; and the need to balance their budgets. But even as prosperity has returned to many states, there is a growing partisan divide over how much to spend on higher education. Education advocates worry that conservative disdain threatens to undermine universities.

In July, a Pew Research Center study found that 58 percent of Republicans and GOP-leaning independents believe colleges and universities have a negative effect “on the way things are going in the country,” up from 37 percent two years ago. Among Democrats, by contrast, 72 percent said they have a positive impact.

A Gallup poll in August found that a third of Republicans had confidence in universities, which they viewed as too liberal or political. Other studies show that overwhelming numbers of white working-class men do not believe a college degree is worth the cost.

A single year at many private universities costs more than the median U.S. household income of $59,000. Though most students receive financial aid, a four-year degree can cost more than a quarter-million dollars. Tuition at public universities has soared, too, and a degree can easily cost more than $100,000.

It’s not just the money: Dozens of the most prestigious schools reject more than 80 percent of applicants, and the admissions system often favors the wealthy and connected.

Since 2008, Arizona has cut per-student funding more than any other state, according to an analysis of changes since the recession. At the same time, the state increased public-school tuition more than all but one state, Louisiana.

“The new upper class has nothing to do with money. It has to do with where you were educated,” said Arizona State University President Michael Crow, who is pushing to make quality degrees more accessible to lower-income students.

Antenori views former president Barack Obama, a Harvard-educated lawyer who taught at the University of Chicago Law School, as the embodiment of the liberal establishment. Antenori said liberal elites with fancy degrees who have been running Washington for so long have forgotten those who think differently.

“If you don’t do everything that their definition of society is, you’re somehow a knuckle-dragging Neanderthal cave man,” Antenori said.

Antenori was drawn to Trump, he said, because he was the “reverse of Obama,” an “anti-politically correct guy” whose attitude toward the status quo is “change it, fix it, get rid of it, crush it, slash it.”

Even though Trump boasts of his Ivy League degree from the University of Pennsylvania, Antenori said he “had a different air about him.” Unlike Obama, Trump has not emphasized the importance of Americans going to college.

During the campaign, Trump said many colleges “have gone crazy” and that young people were “choking on debt.” He criticized universities for getting “so much money from the government” while “raising their fees to the point that’s ridiculous.”

Hillary Clinton trounced Trump in the nation’s most educated counties, but Trump won white voters without a college degree by 37 points.

Though Trump has largely ignored higher education during his first year in office, his son Donald Trump Jr. recently excoriated universities during a speech in Texas, for which he was paid $100,000. On college campuses, he said, “Hate speech is anything that says America is a good country. That our founders were great people. That we need borders. Hate speech is anything faithful to the moral teachings of the Bible.”

Trump Jr. went on to say that many universities offer Americans a raw deal: “We’ll take $200,000 of your money; in exchange, we’ll train your children to hate our country. . . . We’ll make them unemployable by teaching them courses in zombie studies, underwater basket weaving and, my personal favorite, tree climbing.”

Antenori, who served as a delegate for Trump at the 2016 National Republican Convention, loves that kind of talk.

Finally, he said, people in power understand how he feels.

SOURCE 






Many US parents choosing home schooling for children

There is shift in U.S. education. A growing number of parents are opting out of public schools, and are choosing to educate their children at home instead

Heather Favelo lets her students know that school is about to begin.  “Let’s get started with our day,” she says. The four students sit around the table are attentive and ready to learn. These are Heather’s children, and they’re homeschooled.

Today, the children will learn a little art, practice their reading, and how to play the piano.

The school is here in their home in the hills of Virginia, about an hour outside of Washington, D.C.

The Favelo family is part of a growing movement of parents keeping their children out of the school system and teaching them at home.

The statistics are unclear exactly how many children are homeschooled, but some at the high-end say it could be as many as 3.5 million children in the US. And a massive boost has been the embrace of homeschooling by America’s religious conservatives.

Homeschooling “was based on our religious conviction,” says Doug Favelo explaining his and his wife’s decision to home school.

The curriculum they’ve created for their children is infused with religious teaching. They begin the day with prayers. All of this would be out of the question in a public school given the separation of church and state.

Critics of homeschooling say that it can deny children a wide variety of different views and subjects.

They also charge that children schooled at home can lack needed socialization, that ability to rub shoulder with the rest of society.

The Favelos reject this. They arrange sports outings and other social events with other homeschooled children.

The parents say that they share curriculums amongst other parents to cover the arts, sciences and even sports.

The home schooling movement has been growing progressively since it launched in the 1960s.

Mike Donnelly, director of global outreach for Home School Legal Defense Association, says many of the first proponents came from the left of the political spectrum, who were distrustful of the institution of education.

But in the 1980s, religious conservatives, frustrated by restrictions on teaching religion in school and subjects like evolution, embraced homeschooling.

And since then the phenomena has spread across the U.S. Now all 50 states allow homeschooling.

Today, Donnelly estimates that religious conservatives make up 60 percent of homeschoolers (although firm statistics on homeschooling are hard to come by).

And that homeschooling is attractive is perhaps more of an indictment of the public school system.

According to the Program for International Student Assessment, American 15-year olds scored just 38th out of 71 countries in maths and 24th in science.

Neal McCluskey on why U.S. is shrinking its education budget

CGTN’s Susan Roberts spoke with Neal McCluskey, director of the Center for Educational Freedom at the Cato Institute on top challenges in the U.S. education system

SOURCE 






Languages graduates are now the least employable in Britain, new figures show

Data released by the Office for National Statistics shows that recent graduates who have studied languages have an employment rate of 84 per cent, the lowest of any degree subject, and their average annual salary has fallen by more than £5,000 in four years.

The figure has fallen from 87 per cent in 2013, the last time the data, was released, and puts the discipline below arts, humanities and social sciences in terms of employment rates.

Entries to university for modern languages have declined sharply in recent years, as fewer students take the subjects at GCSE and A-Level.

In 2013, graduates in humanities were the least likely to be employed, while medicine had the highest employment rate for people who had left university within the past five years.

Professor Alan Smithers, head of the centre for education and employment research at the University of Buckingham, said that traditional school languages were less in demand and students were not picking up newer options like Russian and Chinese quickly enough.

He said it was more difficult to get a good grade in those languages because the subjects were more likely to be taken by native speakers who were more likely to score very highly, pushing the grade boundaries up.

"It's possible that the traditional languages are less in demand and that fewer grads are coming through in languages like Russian and Chinese, that the companies need or will be needing in greater numbers in the future.

"The shape of the eduation system hasn't caught up. we do have a variety of languages on offer at GCSE and A Level but for example English people wanting to learn Chinese tend to get put off by the native speakers of Chinese," he said.

This year's data showed that medics were still the most employable, with 95 per cent of recent graduates employed, followed by engineering, which had a 92 per cent rate.

Engineering also had the highest average salary for recent graduates, with workers paid an average of £44,980, up from £42,016 in 2013.

 Engineering had the highest average salary for recent graduates
Engineering had the highest average salary for recent graduates
Since 2013, graduates who had studied the discipline had overtaken medics to become the best-paid.

Average pay for languages graduates fell from £30,420 in 2013 to £25,012 in 2017.

Professor Smithers said engineering was becoming "increasingly important in its new forms within our economy".

In particular, he said, "civil engineering, with the launch of High Speed 2 and the other infrastructure projects, and then of course electrical engineering, which is very important in building computers and laptops and things.

"It has moved away from the image of someone in overalls with greasy hands to realising that engineering is about constructing and building a whole range of things," he said.

The figures also showed that male graduates had an average employment rate seven per cent higher than female graduates, at 86 per cent.

Of all female graduates, 11 per cent were out of the workplace because they were looking after the home or family, compared to just two per cent of men.

Male graduates were also more likely to be in high-skilled jobs and less likely to be working part-time.

SOURCE 


Sunday, November 26, 2017





Sleeping Beauty ‘fuels culture of sexual assault’

The story of Sleeping Beauty, the princess condemned to slumber for 100 years who can be woken only by a kiss from a handsome prince, has entranced generations of young children.

One mother, however, says that the fairytale is not so innocent and has called for it to be removed from the curriculum at her son’s school because it has an inappropriate sexual message.

Inspired by the #MeToo campaign against sexual harassment, Sarah Hall said that the story promoted unacceptable behaviour because the prince had not sought consent for the kiss.

SOURCE 





Number of foreign students coming to US colleges drops

The price of Saudi Arabian oil has plummeted. Brazil is recovering from recession. Anti-immigrant rhetoric has spooked young people across the globe.

These are just a few factors that led to a historic drop in the number of new foreign college students who came to study in the United States last year, the first decline in a decade, according to a study released this month.

While Massachusetts fared well compared to the nation as a whole — it continued to see an increase in foreign students — the rise was less robust than in the past. And if the trend continues, schools could face a significant financial challenge. Colleges in Massachusetts, like the rest of the country, rely on full tuition-paying foreign students to sustain their budgets in an era when Americans are increasingly unwilling, or unable, to pay expensive tuition.

The new data come from the 2016-17 school year, which started just before last November’s election. But educators expect President Trump’s targeted travel bans and anti-immigrant rhetoric to exacerbate the trend, signaling what could actually be an even larger shift in the lucrative international student market.

Overall, the number of new international students for the 2016-17 school year dropped by about 10,000 (3.3 percent) from the year before, according to the Open Doors report, an annual publication from the Institute of International Education. There are about 1 million foreign students in the United States and Massachusetts is the fourth-most-popular destination, with about 60,000.

The rate of increase in the number of new students has been slowing for several years, but this is the first time it dropped. Experts attribute much of the drop to the recent demise of government scholarship programs in Saudi Arabia and Brazil. The number of students from Saudi Arabia, whose government is struggling financially amid dropping oil prices, decreased by 14 percent. Students from Brazil, whose economy is also suffering, dropped by 32 percent.

There has also been an increase in foreign students staying in the United States after graduation for a temporary work program, which has inflated data for the past few years because they are still counted as students even though they have graduated, according to IIE. But experts say beyond those two factors, winds are changing in the international student industry.

“Something else has been going on, and it’s a real mix of factors,” said Peggy Blumenthal, senior counselor to the president at the institute.

Foreign students are increasingly choosing to study in English-speaking countries that are not the United States, with a record number choosing Canada. At the University of Toronto, for example, the number of foreign students who accepted admission offers rose 21 percent over last year, especially students from the United States, India, the Middle East, and Turkey. Other Canadian universities also saw record increases in the last year, which many attribute to Trump and an increasing number of foreign students, and even Americans, who want to avoid the United States.

Meanwhile, Massachusetts bucked the trend. It saw an increase in overall foreign students, albeit a smaller rise than in the past. In 2015-16 the number of students rose 7.2 percent, but it rose just 5.9 percent this past year. Foreign students brought an estimated $2.7 billion to the state economy in the 2016-17 school year, according to the study.

Northeastern is the top destination for foreign students in Massachusetts, with 13,201 students in the 2016-17 school year, up from 11,702 the year before. The next-most-popular Massachusetts schools among foreign students are Boston University, Harvard, MIT, and UMass Amherst. The students come mostly from China, India, South Korea, Canada, and Saudi Arabia.

Foreign students make up about 22 percent of BU undergraduates. The number of students rose to 8,992 in 2016-17 from 8,455 the year before, according to the new data.

Kelly Walter, Boston University’s associate vice president and dean of admissions, said BU has fared well, with some record increases this year (2017-18) in students from the Middle East, even, but the school is not complacent. It has plans to increase recruitment to new parts of the globe this spring.

“This is a rude awakening, frankly, about how difficult it may continue to be to recruit and enroll students from abroad,” she said.

The school has planned a recruiting trip to Africa, where officials will visit 16 countries, she said. They have also added Australia and New Zealand to their schedule, she said, and expanded recruitment in Vietnam. Recruiters are also headed to parts of Europe experiencing political upheaval, she said.

“What we’re trying to do is not be as reliant on Asia, and in particular China,” she said.

Marguerite Dennis, an international higher education consultant who is writing a book on the changing recruitment landscape, said these data are finally proof of subtle changes that have been happening for years.

“Everyone is going to blame Trump. That’s part of it, but that’s not all of it at all,” she said.

She said as universities in many regions of the world improve, in some cases adding professors educated in the United States, more students are staying local. Technology is also allowing students to enroll online, she said.

“What this all means is change,” she said. “It’s not a blip.”

SOURCE 





Education Department considers narrowing civil rights work

The Education Department wants to narrow the scope of civil rights investigations at schools, focusing on individual complaints rather than systemic problems, according to a document obtained by The Associated Press.

Under the Obama administration, when a student complained of discrimination in a particular class or school, the education agency would examine the case but also look at whether the incident was part of a broader, systemic problem that needs to be fixed.

Proposed revisions to the department’s civil rights procedures, distributed last week among civil rights officials at the department, remove the word “systemic” from the guidelines.

The changes would also allow schools a greater say in how a case is handled, compared to the student or parent who filed the complaint, and would eliminate the appeals process.

The document is only a draft; a final version is expected to be published next year after suggestions and proposals from staff.

The action comes as the Trump administration looks for ways of streamlining the work and trimming the budgets of many federal agencies. The administration has called for a $9 billion, or 13.5 percent, cut to the education budget, which would mean the loss of more than 40 employees out of about 570 at the agency’s Office for Civil Rights.

The Education Department did not comment on the proposed document Wednesday.

Seth Galanter, former principal deputy assistant secretary for human rights in Obama’s Education Department, criticized the proposed revisions, saying the civil rights office’s key mission is to identify and solve systemic problems.

Galanter gave an example of a complaint stemming from a white and a minority student getting into a fight, but the minority student being disciplined more harshly than the white student. Under the previous procedure, OCR would examine that particular case but also look at whether that teacher, school or school district was engaging in other similar discriminatory behavior.

“It’s a very surface level fix that certainly will make that particular parent happy, but isn’t fulfilling OCR’s obligation,” Galanter said. “OCR is underfunded and understaffed and in order to get through all the complaints in some kind of timely manner, staff is being forced to give them superficial treatment.”

Another proposed revision would allow the school or school district to negotiate a resolution agreement with the agency before any findings are released to the parent in a letter. Galanter said that was cause for concern because the parent was being kept in the dark.

“The letter may still reach the same result, but it may be completely diluted of any fact that would inform the parent and the community about what’s going on in the school,” Galanter said.

Miriam Rollin, director of the National Center for Youth Law, said those changes, coupled with eliminating the appeals process, were bad news for students.

“School deficits will be held accountable less for violations and parents will have less opportunity to get justice,” Rollin said.

But Rick Hess, director of education policy at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, praised the revisions, saying Education Secretary Betsy DeVos was seeking to fix the Obama administration’s tactic of using the agency’s civil rights investigations to push policy.

“What the Department of Education is talking about is wholly sensible and is an appropriate and totally unsurprising correction to what the Obama administration did,” he said.

SOURCE