Daily News Roundup, March 4, 2010

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Some of the News Fit to Print

CALIFORNIA PROTEST TODAY
Leaders of a California-born protest movement will try to spread their message across the nation today, with student rallies, panel discussions and other events to express opposition to budget cuts and tuition hikes at public colleges and universities. Organizers say they hope the events will dramatize the frustration that has been building as the recession forces deep cuts in higher education budgets, especially in California, where the fiscal situation is especially dire. Colleges there have raised tuition sharply, reduced enrollment and cut faculty pay. Students in California have declared Thursday as a Day of Action to Defend Public Education. Rallies are planned for nearly every college and university campus in the state, in addition to several K-12 schools. Organizers said there would be events in 30 states. The article is in the Washington Post.

NO SURPRISES FROM DUNCAN
Sing along if you know the words: U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sketched out his proposal for revising the Elementary and Secondary Act today before the House Education and Labor Committee. Not only were there no new specifics, there were very few new phrases from the secretary. On including incentives in ESEA: Duncan said that under current law, there are "fifty ways to fail" but very few rewards for success. On common standards: "It's an idea whose time has really come.”  On accountability: We need to be "tight on goals" but loose on means. And although few folks brought up any sort of sharp critique of Duncan, the hearing itself wasn't a love feast. The tone was generally collegial, but lawmakers on both sides of the aisle still had some pointed questions about Duncan's agenda. The piece is from Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog.

BUILDING A BETTER TEACHER
Education consultant Doug Lemov knew how to advise schools to adopt a better curriculum or raise standards or develop better communication channels between teachers and principals. But he realized that he had no clue how to advise schools about their main event: how to teach.  Around the country, education researchers were beginning to address similar questions. The testing mandates in No Child Left Behind had generated a sea of data, and researchers were now able to parse student achievement in ways they never had before. A new generation of economists devised statistical methods to measure the “value added” to a student’s performance by almost every factor imaginable: class size versus per-pupil funding versus curriculum. When researchers ran the numbers in dozens of different studies, every factor under a school’s control produced just a tiny impact, except for one: which teacher the student had been assigned to. This is a preview article from Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.

HARNESSING AMERICA’S WASTED TALENT
Peter P. Smith's career in and out of higher education has not followed the straight and narrow. Amid forays into politics (as a member of Congress and lieutenant governor of Vermont) and international affairs (at UNESCO), Smith has been a higher education innovator, helping to found the statewide Community College of Vermont in 1970 and serving for 10 years as founding president of California State University's Monterey Bay campus, beginning in 1995. In those jobs and his current one, as senior vice president for academic strategies and development at Kaplan Higher Education, Smith has pushed existing colleges and universities to better serve the adults and other students who have been least well served by traditional higher education. In his new book, Harnessing America’s Wasted Talent: A New Ecology of Learning (Jossey-Bass), he argues that the country needs to reach deeper into its population than it historically has to produce a sufficient number of educated and skilled workers, and that the thousands of current colleges cannot do that job. The interview is in Inside Higher Ed.

MEDICAL SCHOOLS EXPAND—AND CONTRACT
First, the federal government cut $10 million in Medicaid funding to the university’s hospital. Then, days later, the state Legislature eliminated $2.5 million in support. In all, the medical school lost 40 percent of its education budget nearly instantly, with no revenue-creating solution in sight. “We were a rubber band stretched to the extreme,” says David Bjorkman, the school’s dean. “We were already spending every dollar we had, maximally cross-subsidizing with clinical revenue from our health system.” After months of lobbying and left with no other choice, the school shrunk the size of its fall 2009 entering class to 82 from 102. While the rest of the university raised tuition by 10 percent, medical school tuition went up 15 percent. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.