Discussion for article #240157
The author correctly points out who is responsible for the decline of higher education, but only barely touches on the severity of the problems. I would point in particular to the accreditation organizations forcing assessments onto the colleges. I teach Geology, yet I have to spend a significant amount of time teaching my students MS Excel and writing skills to meet our assessments. This takes away from time that should be spent on content. We also have until spring 2017 to find a way to assess âteamworkâ in science classes that produces an artifact we can submit to the agency. Everyone is stumped on how to do that and we are getting no guidance. If I had more time I would happily write a comment that rivals the original article in length because this is an issue that is frustrating beyond belief. My single biggest disappointment with the current administration was the appointment of Arne âclass sizes donât matterâ Duncan as Secretary of Education. He did as much damage to both K-12 and higher ed as the Bush Administration.
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The problems plaguing K-12 public education will continue until two radical shifts occur:
- a law is passed requiring that schools no longer be funded by property taxes; this system is the primary reason for educational inequality that is the reason that aggregate test scores continue to be mediocre;
- the century-old âfactory modelâ of schools with huge enrollments and class sizes, heavily regimented schedules, and compartmentalized, discrete disciplines is replaced.
Unfortunately, both of the above are unfeasible because the former would eliminate the prestige of wealthy suburban schools and their impact on property values, and because the latter would require a feces load of money. Believe me, I understand both positions. But until these two fundamental changes are made, K-12 American students will rank where they have ranked consistently since the PISA was first instituted in 1965: somewhere in the low 20s.
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The situation in higher education is appalling.
As long as students are more concerned about making sure their professor is punished for every âmicroaggressionâ rather than judged for his/her expertise on the subject, they will get exactly the education they deserve. Qualified professors can probably make more money for less hassle by working for corporate America.
That was Prop 13. This has been the most direct cause of CA schools going âFrom First to Worstâ.
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âŚwhen remedial classes began to be offered to freshman college students should have been an good indicator .
We need more community colleges.
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You must replace it with equal funding, which CA has failed to do.
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The whole problem with the education business started with in the 80s with the idea that education should be treated as a consumer product. This was bought into wholesale by the educational establishment. In conjunction with the 80s quality revolution, educators started using the language of business in constructing, managing, and selling their âproductâ. Everything else can be traced to this new paradigm.
Unfortunately, when parents and students view education as a product, then they just demand the end result, the diploma. Never mind whether learning has happened, they demand what they paid for.
Education is not a product, it is a process of learning of knowledge and skills, whereby the student has to put in their own effort, not just pay a sum. Things wonât change until the paradigm changes.
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All part of the plan tro dumb down the American people. With a dumbed down electorate there isnât any need for a logical position on the issues. Sound bites and bumper stickers rule us now and the rullers love it.
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Maybe Reaganâs intention was to destroy the public schools so he could usher in the âmaking money off of our kidsâ charter school approach. Fits with their destructive mantra of âbig governmentâ as the biggest sin of mankind.
Higher Ed in this country is truly facing some drastic issues. But, with everything facing this system (ballooning tuition, skyrocketing debt, and sexual harassment) the idea that the author included âpolitical correctnessâ as a large issue is just laziness, and frankly, overemphasizing a nuanced issue that conservative establishments have been pushing for years.
Our higher ed systems are being forced to react to the growing populations of non-white, and non-traditional students that they got to conveniently ignore for so long. That article in the Atlantic (co-written by the conservative group FIRE by the by), is overblown and cherry picks instances of administrative reaction, while ignoring the greater shift in college student population landscape and fact that grounded research demonstrates that microagressions are harmful to the educational success of non-white students. Colleges arenât becoming soft, coward institutions - the conservative establishment is just reacting to different power dynamics, and trying to reframe this as âover PC liberalâ. Itâs unfortunate that the Atlantic, and now TPM is oddly jumping on the bandwagon.
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totally with you on this. I know a lot of professors bent out shape by having to make these changes, but they are critical to making schools accepting of diverse populations. there may be extreme cases at the margins (not sure, but possibly) but that doesnât mean the enterprise isnât worthwhile.
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Way back in the primordial 1970âs, I did some in-house teaching for new hires (at a Fortune 500 co), all of whom were recent college grads.
That was an eye-opener: Persons with a 4-yr degree who canât read, write,think on what used to be a high school level.
It was just some fatuous know-nothingness, illiteracy and just plain stupidity, hard to define, that shocked me to the core.
I had one group of 12, 3 of whom had MBAâs. One day the word âsanctionâ came up in the context of legal sanctions against someone stealing a licensed product. Not one of the 12 knew what the word meant.
i thought they were pulling my leg. They werenât.
ââŚis the product of well-intentioned but misguided liberals, conservatives, and accreditation bodiesâŚâ
Iâd get rid of the âwell-intentioned.â Iâd wager this has been the game plan all along.
I got my BS in Business Administration from Arizona State Univ. in 1979 (a fact that now embarrasses me after the racism issues last fall). At that time the business school was ranked 7th in the nation and demanded a great deal of work to finish. Just 15 years later it was ranked 25th and students were graduating being unable to do basic business skills such as math and reading at a college level. During those 15 years a lot of things changed at ASU and an influx of business leaders and money into school policy making affected how the school functioned and it was not for the betterment of the students.
Fast forward to 2005. I enrolled in Walden University in their Masterâs Program in Public Administration. The courses were hard, required a great deal of independent research, papers had to meet academic research standards, and discussion groups online were in depth and enlightening for both myself and my fellow students. However, the school was sold to Laureate International that year and for the next school year nothing much changed. But then Bill Clinton was put on the Board and by the time my ex-husband enrolled in their Bachelorâs program things were going from excellent to bad to worse. They started taking the textbooks on subjects and selectively condensing them for core and major subjects so that students were only getting what the corporate message was on how things should be and if you challenged a teacher (they were not tenured professors anymore, just people who had a minimal amount of knowledge on a subject but supposedly knew it well enough to teach it) they were vicious and aggressive until you either dropped the course or moved to a different teacher. Cyberbullying by students in discussion groups as well as by teachers became the norm for many of the classes. My ex has learning disabilities, so I was tutoring him through these programs, and was appalled at how incomplete they were.
My ex completed his BS and went on to the Masterâs program hoping for a better outcome. Well, the textbooks were no longer condensed versions but the standards for academic achievement had dropped considerably and in one class he found three students who were actually high school students using fraudulent credentials because of the way they introduced themselves in class, so admissions standards were no longer being upheld. It had become all about the money for Laureate and pushing corporate and political agendas, such as trickle-down economics, profit over people HR approaches, and conservative/neoliberal political agendas.
He finished his degrees just in time to find that because of the economy and his age (50) he was essentially unemployable, despite claims that graduates from Walden were in demand because of their âgoodâ education. What they were was well-trained to fit into a corporate mold, where group think is important, just as K-12 children are dumbed down enough to make them compliant in the workplace. My exâs biggest problem - he had a GPA of 4.0 out of 4.0 and he had experience that allowed him to apply what he learned, and that made him a liability to any corporate entity because he would always be thinking âoutside the boxâ and that was unacceptable, according to one of his Walden instructors.
Higher education in this nation no longer encourages creative or critical thinking. It has abandoned academic standards in favor of which sports team is best in which season. It has sold its soul to corporate sponsors and higher TV ratings for Saturday games. Our nationâs corporations and political opportunists sell their brands for control of the academic world in exchange for research grants and endowments to the universities, and the students, our future leaders, pay the price. Academics used to be considered people who walked around studying theories and not really understanding the real world (aka the absent-minded professors), but as a result they became victims of corporate greed because they had no grounding in real life applications of what they were researching. Now the research is in, it had the wrong premise, and the universities and colleges are now being destroyed by the very monster they created.
We are in serious trouble when our academic communities no longer teach our young people to think and reason and as a nation, we put ourselves at great risk. But, until we stop treating universities and colleges as expendable or objects to be bought and sold, we will not see a change in either how K-12 or beyond teach our young people and we all lose then.
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To orthostice:
The alternatives to property taxes are sales tax and income tax. Both of those alternatives are much more volatile than are property taxes and can cause a lot of disruption to school budgets during economic downturns. The problem of property taxes is the highly unequal distribution of property values. Legislatures and courts can and have acted to reduct the inequalities in many locations.
Sandi:
The negative impact of Prop 13 on California education is almost entirely due to the portions of the law that starved the government of revenue and made it very difficult for individual districts to pass special taxes.
Prop 13 did not require that schools no longer be funded by property taxes, but it lowered property taxes to a level where they were not adequate to fund the schools.
Californiaâs Supreme Court had already ruled that funding schools with in-district property taxes was a violation of equal protection clauses of the US and CA constitutions, and there were redistribution measures in place before Prop 13.
Prop 13 went further by taking school funding mostly out of local hands and putting the state in charge. This has eliminated most of the funding disparities, but Prop 13 has squeezed overall funding. State funding formulas no provide more money to schools in poor areas than in wealthy areas.
The wealthy areas can and do provide additional funding through special taxes and by parent foundations that raise additional money for their schools and districts. At our local elementary school, the teachers for art, science, music, technology, and physical education are paid for entirely by grants from the foundation to the school district.
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My grandmother was in high school at the turn of the century. Going through old family photos we came across all of her diplomas and awards she received during high school. Iâd have to say it looked more like she was in college than high school. We were all taken aback at the subjects she studied and excelled at. That mid west high school made any school today look totally worthless. Iâve been thinking of who to show them to just to prove Americaâs school system was fantastic and has since been destroyed. Most any politician would look at them and just shrug their shoulders. I donât imagine it would do any good in this day and age. Really sad.
Correction: politicians, school board members, and administrators bought into this ethos wholesale. I have taught for 36 years, and I have never heard an actual educator use those terms, as least without irony or sarcasm.
Ironically, dependence on âcharityâ to run schools results in increased inequity. In my neighborhood, we have wealthy schools that can raise donations of $100K and upwards per year. But other schools in the district donât share that bounty at all. And of course the parent-donors donât want to pitch a few bucks to a school other than their own.