Printer-friendly versionSome of the News Fit to Print
ABOUT K-12
OBAMA PROPOSES NEW RACE TO TOP AIMED AT HIGHER ED.
The White House wants another Race to the Top competition for states, this time aimed at making higher education cheaper and better. To snag the grants, states would have to smooth the transition between K-12 and college education by aligning entrance and exit standards between the two systems. That proposal would appear to build on an incentive in the original, $4 billion Race to Top for K-12, which rewarded states for many things, including if they signed onto the Common Core State Standards Initiative—an effort by states to create more uniform, rigorous standards that prepare students for post-secondary education. The article is in Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog.
PROFESSOR CRITICIZES TEACHER EVALUATIONS
Students’ learning does not correlate with the education level or experience of their teachers, Graduate School of Education professor Thomas J. Kane said Thursday in a panel discussion at the School of Education. Nevertheless, current systems of teacher evaluation focus almost exclusively on those two factors, according to Kane. Instead, Kane recommended a system which would utilize students’ evaluations of teachers, students’ standardized test scores, and professional evaluations of videotaped lessons as alternative ways to judge and reward teachers. The article is in The Harvard Crimson.
ABOUT HIGHER ED
OBAMA COLLEGE AID PROPOSAL PUTS A FOCUS ON AFFORDABILITY
President Obama is proposing a financial aid overhaul that for the first time would tie colleges’ eligibility for campus-based aid programs — Perkins loans, work-study jobs and supplemental grants for low-income students — to the institutions’ success in improving affordability and value for students, administration officials said. Under the plan, which the president outlined on Friday morning in a speech at the University of Michigan, the amount available for Perkins loans would grow to $8 billion, from the current $1 billion. The president also wants to create a $1 billion grant competition, along the lines of the Race for the Top program for elementary and secondary education, to reward states that take action to keep college costs down, and a separate $55 million competition for individual colleges to increase their value and efficiency. The article is in The New York Times.
THE EVOLUTION OF AMERICAN HIGHER EDUCATION
James M. Danko, president of Butler University, writes in U.S. News & World Report: Like the auto and newspaper industries, American higher education needs to innovate and reinvent itself if it's going to survive, thrive, and recapture its earlier glory. Industries that do not recognize the need for transition—or that do not manage that transition with agility—are likely to fail.
FREE COURSES, ELITE COLLEGES
Udemy, a company that allows anyone to create and sell courses through its online platform, has announced a new area of its site, called The Faculty Project, devoted to courses by professors at a number of top institutions, such as Colgate, Duke University, Stanford University, Northwestern University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Virginia, Dartmouth College and Vassar College. While Udemy is a for-profit enterprise, the Faculty Project courses will be free. The inaugural Faculty Project courses include many humanities electives normally reserved for small classrooms of undergraduates. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
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