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GATES IS PUSHING MOVING TO SCALE
For colleges to succeed at graduating more students, institutions will have to embrace "transformational change," and if they do, they may get some help from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. That was the message from Hilary Pennington, who directs the foundation's efforts in higher education, in a talk Monday to college presidents gathered at the annual meeting of the American Council on Education. In the talk, Pennington mixed not-so-subtle criticism of the policies of many traditional colleges with a concrete example of the foundation's willingness to back dramatic change in the way education is delivered. She announced that the Gates Foundation, along with the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, will provide $3.6 million to expand Cabrillo College's Academy for College Excellence to allow the effort to be used at three other (unidentified) community colleges in California and one in another state. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
NEW BATTLEGROUND FOR PUBLISHERS
Scott Hildreth’s training in physics and astronomy stopped short of teaching him how to read minds. For much of his career as a professor at Chabot College, this presented a problem. Hildreth recalls the daily routine of trying to figure out which concepts he should try to reinforce in his lecture. “Now, it’s totally different,” Hildreth says. “I literally spend my time now tuning my delivery for each class according to so much more information.” What changed was that Hildreth started instructing his students to do their homework online through a suite of “Mastering” tools from Pearson, which the publishing giant is marketing alongside its textbooks. Not only does the software tell Hildreth which problems students are getting wrong, it tells him why they are getting them wrong, so he can tailor his class sessions to reinforce certain concepts accordingly. It also relieves him of the burden of grading homework for dozens of students — a task so time-consuming, Hildreth says, that it forces many math and science professors to extrapolate homework grades on assignments based on only a few answers. Historically, this flawed grading method has prompted professors to count homework for a disproportionately small percentage of each student’s overall grade, giving their students little incentive to spend much time on it. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.
RAVITCH: WHY I CHANGED MY MIND
Diane Ravitch writes in the Wall Street Journal: As No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) accountability regime took over the nation's schools under President George W. Bush and more and more charter schools were launched, I supported these initiatives. But over time, I became disillusioned with the strategies that once seemed so promising. I no longer believe that either approach will produce the quantum improvement in American education that we all hope for.
SUCCESS ADDS UP FOR DC MATH PROGRAM
It was fractions week in Camille Jackson's third-grade math class at Noyes Education Campus. To kick off a mid-morning lesson last month, she asked her 18 students to look not at the board or at materials on their desks, but under their chairs. Taped to the bottom of each was a card with the last name of a teacher at the Northeast Washington school. The students' task: Pick out the vowels and determine what fraction of the whole name they represent. "What's the fraction of vowels in Mr. Waldstein's name?" "Three-ninths," said one boy. "Ms. Tugman?" "Two-sixths?" a girl ventured. "Very good. You guys are doing an awesome job!" Jackson said. Her approach is part of a math curriculum that is yielding promising results for D.C. public school children. The road to mastery no longer runs strictly through rote memorization and drilling, District educators say. It requires deeper conceptual understanding. The article is in the Washington Post.
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