Daily News Roundup, February 24, 2012

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Some of the News Fit to Print

ABOUT HIGHER ED

U.S. BACHELOR DEGREE RATE PASSES MILESTONE
More than 30 percent of American adults hold bachelor’s degrees, a first in the nation’s history, and women are on the brink of surpassing men in educational attainment, the Census Bureau reported on Thursday. The figures reflect an increase in the share of the population going to college that began in the mid-1990s, after a relatively stagnant period that began in the 1970s. They show significant gains in all demographic groups, but blacks and Latinos not only continue to trail far behind whites, the gap has also widened in the last decade.  As of last March, 30.4 percent of people over age 25 in the United States held at least a bachelor’s degree, and 10.9 percent held a graduate degree, up from 26.2 percent and 8.7 percent 10 years earlier. The article is in The New York Times.

ARE GRADUATE DEGREES WORTH THE COST?
Many workers are considering whether a masters or doctorate degree will provide a competitive edge. NPR’s Tell Me More Host Michel Martin explores the costs and benefits of getting one. She talks with Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce.

PUBLIC COLLEGE MONEY WOES WILL BOOST FOR-PROFITS, STUDY SAYS
For-profit colleges will grow as they continue to fill a gap left by public higher education, which cannot keep pace with demand thanks to slumping government support, according to a new study  by John Aubrey Douglass, a senior research fellow at the Center for Studies in Higher Education at the University of California at Berkeley. That growth will not be due to well-thought-out policy, and will happen despite concerns about the performance of for-profits, Douglass writes. This "policy default" in the United States follows a pattern in Brazil, South Korea and Poland -- dubbed "the Brazilian Effect" -- that will encourage lower-quality institutions and fail to meet national educational goals, the study predicts. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

ABOUT K-12

NEW YORK TEACHER RATINGS SET TO BE RELEASED
The New York City Education Department will release the ratings of thousands of teachers on Friday, ending a nearly year-and-a-half-long legal battle by the teachers’ union to keep the names confidential. The ratings, known as Teacher Data Reports, grade nearly 18,000 of the city’s 75,000 public school teachers based on how much progress their students have made on standardized tests. The city developed these so-called value-added ratings five years ago in a pilot program to improve instruction and has factored them into yearly teacher evaluations and tenure decisions.  Even before their release, the ratings have been assailed by independent experts, school administrators and teachers who say there are large margins of error — because they are based on small amounts of data, the test scores themselves were determined by the state to have been inflated, and there were factual errors or omissions, among other problems.  The article is in The New York Times.

REFLECTIONS ON A HALF CENTURY OF REFORM
American school reform has not been bold enough or comprehensive enough to substantially improve public education, writes Jack Jennings on the Horace Mann League website. Over the past 50 years, reform has been dominated by three movements: promoting equity, increasing school choice, and using academic standards to leverage improvement. Jennings feels it's time to concentrate on core components of what happens in the classroom: Who is teaching, what is taught, and how those key elements are funded. The quality and training of teachers and administrators must be improved, common standards must be fully infused throughout the education system, and schools should offer high-quality preschool, summer programs, adult mentors, health clinics, and after-school programs to compensate for parental and societal deficiencies. Equal educational opportunity for all ought to be declared a federal civil right. If states can't broadly improve the quality of teaching and learning and provide sufficient funds to pay for that, then the federal government should step in. PEN NewsBlast picked this up from the Horace Mann League blog.