Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
President Obama wants community colleges to train 2 million “21st-century workers” for skilled technical jobs in the next three years — but most community college students don’t have the math and reading skills these jobs require.
California’s high-minority community colleges have low transfer rates. Graduates of low-performing high schools who enroll in community college have little chance of completing a bachelor’s degree.
RESPECT, which stands for Recognizing Educational Success, Professional Excellence, and Collaborative Teaching is the administration’s new competitive grant idea for education. The $5 billion would reward states and districts that work with teachers and their unions, education schools and others to remake teaching. Education Secretary Arne Duncan gave no specifics, but Ed Week’s Politics K-12 suggests some possibilities:
. . . overhaul teachers’ colleges to make them more selective, create career ladders for teachers, give extra money to teachers who work in tough environments, bolster professional development, revamp tenure, craft evaluation systems, and make teachers’ salaries more competitive with other professions.
Dennis Van Roekel, the president of the National Education Association, is all for it.
A new $5 billion spending program has little chance of being approved, notes Politics K-12. The money is part of the $60 billion American Jobs Act proposal, “which is going absolutely nowhere in Congress.”
It’s an election year, and President Obama—and other Democrats—are expected to face a tough campaign season. They’ll almost certainly need help from the teachers’ unions blockbuster get-out-the-vote apparatus. Proposing a bunch of new money to improve the teaching profession might go a long way to assuaging educators—and their unions—who are less than thrilled with the administration’s focus on using student test scores to at least partially inform teacher evaluations.
Turn out the vote now, but will he respect you in the morning?
As part of a Black History Month program, kindergarteners at Tipps Elemementary School in Houston were sent home with lyrics to a chant lauding Barack Obama, reports The Blaze. It includes “Barack Obama is the man” and “He’s our man, yes we can!” A note to teachers said students would be “required” to learn the chant, though the school claims only some students were chosen for the evening program and parents could refuse to sign a permission form.
Joe “Pags” Pagliarulo, a syndicated radio host, publicized the chant after receiving a complaint from a parent. It’s fine to be proud that Obama is the first black president, but children shouldn’t be forced to “genuflect” before him, the radio host wrote in a letter to the principal.
“The Barack Obama Song,” which prioritizes rhyme over substance, does have a sort of North Korean enthusiasm for every aspect of our president’s life.
Who is our 44th President?
Obama is our 44th President
Who is a DC resident?
Obama is a DC resident
Resident, PresidentWho’s favorite team is the Chicago White Sox?
Obama’s favorite team is the Chicago White Sox
Who really thinks outside the box?
Obama really thinks outside the box
Outside the box, Chicago White Sox
Resident, PresidentWho really likes to play basketball?
Obama really likes to play basketball
Who’s gonna answer our every call?
Every Call, Basketball
Outside the box, Chicago White Sox
Resident, PresidentWho’s famous slogan is Yes we can?
Obams’s famous slogan is Yes we can
Who do we know is the man?
Barack Obama is the man
He’s our man, Yes we can!
And it goes on and on. I wonder how they get little kids to learn all that, even with a teacher doing the first line of every stanza.
In my kindergarten days, we’d never be asked to learn more than four lines. And our parents would have complained about a program in which public school students proclaimed:
We like Ike.
He took Allied Forces on a European hike.
He likes to play golf, but doesn’t bike.
Ike, hike, bike
We like Ike.
We did learn: “If your Mommy is a Commie, then you gotta turn her in,” but not in class.
President Obama’s budget includes $8 billion for the Community College to Career Fund, which would fund partnerships between local employers and colleges to train 2 million people for high-demand, high-paying jobs. In the State of the Union speech, the president called for colleges to become “community career centers.” That phrase was repeated by Education Secretary Arne Duncan yesterday at a press conference, along with several references to America, an economy and a workforce ”built to last.” Must have tested well with focus groups.
A new initiative will help low-income community college students apply for a range of benefits including food stamps, health insurance, subsidized child care, housing vouchers and more. The goal is to increase graduation rates by relieving financial pressures.
Assigned to draw political cartoons on current issues, a student at a suburban New Orleans middle school depicted President Obama with a bullet hole in the head; another showed Mitt Romney and Looney Tunes characters flanking an “Obama hunting season” sign.
“Several were blatantly disrespectful and derogatory,” said parent Karen Stampley, who complained to the principal of Boyet Junior High in Slidell, Louisiana. The whole exhibit came down today and the school district has launched an “investigation.” (Here are the offending cartoons.)
Stampley also objected to two other cartoons.
(One shows) a mixed crowd of black and white, young and old people saying “Bring back ‘our’ America!!” on one side of the Washington Monument while, on the other side, a confused-looking Obama shrugged his shoulders below a thought balloon filled with question marks and exclamation marks.
The fourth shows the president’s face, a red map marked “Libya,” and a question that is illegible in the photo except for the last word and punctuation: “Obomba?”
Political cartoons often disrespect the president or other leaders. Joking about assassination is another matter. The social studies teacher should not have posted the bullet-hole cartoon. The “hunting season” cartoon was defensible, since it clearly wasn’t meant to be literal, but a wise teacher would not have displayed it.
Was the whole assignment unwise?
President Obama has waived No Child Left Behind requirements for 10 states ”in exchange for embracing the Obama administration’s educational agenda,” reports the New York Times.
Education Trust analyzes what each state promised to earn a waiver, highlighting the best and “most worrisome” ideas.
Obama and Duncan Waive Goodbye to Systemic Reform, headlines RiShawn Biddle, who objects to putting low-income, minority, disabled and non-fluent student in one high-needs subgroup.
States had to jump through a lot of hoops to get very limited flexibility, writes Rick Hess.
The U.S. Department of Education could be violating federal law by using Race to the Top to push Common Core Standards, argues The Road to a National Curriculum (pdf), sponsored by the Pioneer Institute, the Federalist Society, the American Principles Project, and the Pacific Research Institute of California.
By law, the department is barred from “directing, supervising, or controlling elementary and secondary school curriculum, programs of instruction, and instructional materials.”
Lance Izumi piles on in Obama’s Education Takeover.
It’s time to reboot the ever-growing federal role in education argues Choice and Federalism by the Hoover Institution’s Koret Task Force on K-12 Education: States should be free of federal constraints as long as they provide information on school performance and let parents choose their children’s schools.
The federal government has three critical responsibilities, the task force concluded:
creating and disseminating information on school performance, enforcing civil rights, and providing financial support to high-need students via “backpack” funding attached to individual pupils.
“Today, Washington is stuck in an education policy rut,” said task force chairman Chester E. Finn Jr. “On one side we find those who would simply let states do whatever they like with the federal dollars. On the other side are those who want the federal government to tighten the centrally prescribed accountability screws even harder. This debate is going nowhere, as is evident from Congress’s multiyear failure to reauthorize what just about everyone agrees is a badly flawed law.”
President Obama’s new higher education plan shifts priority from low-income students to the middle class.
Community colleges risk becoming separate and unequal.
College leaders don’t like President Obama’s tuition-control plan, reports AP. In his State of the Union speech, the president threatened to cut some forms of federal aid to students at colleges that raise tuition or fail to provide “good value.”
Fuzzy math, Illinois State University’s president called it.
“Political theater of the worst sort,” said the University of Washington’s head.
States have reduced higher education funding, forcing public colleges and universities to raise tuition, university presidents say.
Under the president’s proposal, colleges would be judged on “responsible tuition policy,” either by “offering relatively lower net tuition prices” or “restraining tuition growth,” reports College Inc. In addition, the Education Department would evaluate how well colleges prepare graduates to get jobs and repay student loans, and their performance in enrolling and graduating low-income students.
The aid that colleges stand to lose under the president’s plan is not the Pell grant, the largest source of federal funds to students, but rather a package of “campus-based” programs that the federal government delivers to colleges. They are Federal Work Study, an initiative that subsidizes the expenses of campus jobs for needy students at 3,400 colleges; Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, a supplement to the Pell grant that awards needy students $100 to $4,000 a year; and the Perkins loan program, which delivers low-interest loans to students.
Obama is proposing to expand all three programs to the tune of about $10 billion — enhancing the Perkins program from $1 billion to $8 billion and augmenting Work Study and Opportunity Grants by a combined $2 billion.
While some believe higher education funding should be tied to performance, Obama’s proposal would deny aid to needy students, critics charge. “Ultimately, who you are punishing with this is the students,” said Haley Chitty, spokesman for the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. “They’re the ones who get this aid.”
Requiring school attendance through age 18, as proposed by President Obama in his State of the Union speech, won’t make a difference, argues teacher Marilyn Rhames in Ed Week. Students drop out mentally long before high school — as early as third grade, she writes. By high school, it’s exceptionally difficult to save the 16-year-old illiterate or the 16-year-old expecting her second baby or the 16-year-old who “doesn’t feel safe at school because of bullying or gang activity.”
Reform efforts to lower the high school dropout rate must be focused on supporting the under-performing students in elementary and middle schools. This is where we can get the best bang for our buck. Of course, high schools would also need systems in place to continue to motivate students to stay in school. I believe that it is never too late to try to help a student, but by the time students prone to dropping out reach high school, they may be in need of an organ transplant—a radical, life-changing intervention. Just forcing him to spend a couple more miserable years in school until he reaches 18 is just prolonging the inevitable, especially if the learning credits are not there.
Some 1.2 million students drop out of high school every year, Rhames writes.
College affordability was the theme of President Obama’s speech at the University of Michigan yesterday. He called for spending more on Perkins loans and work-study programs — going from $3 billion now to $10 billion – but only at colleges and universities that provide “value.” Students at colleges that raise tuition could lose access to loans and work-study jobs.
In addition, the president’s plan (pdf) includes a $1 billion “Race to the Top for college affordability” and a $55 million “First in the World” competition to encourage productivity innovations, reports the Washington Post.
Higher education — including community colleges and lifelong learning for workers — is “an economic imperative,” Obama said. While he proposed increasing tuition tax credits and keeping interest rates low on student loans, he said that’s not enough. “Look, we can’t just keep on subsidizing skyrocketing tuition.”
So from now on, I’m telling Congress we should steer federal campus-based aid to those colleges that keep tuition affordable, provide good value, serve their students well. (Applause.) . . . If you can’t stop tuition from going up, then the funding you get from taxpayers each year will go down.
If “provide good value” and “serve their students well” means anything, it means the federal government will monitor graduation rates and employment outcomes, as well as tuition, for the entire higher education sector. Currently, “gainful employment” rules, which monitor former students’ earnings and ability to pay back loans, cover only for-profit colleges and community college vocational programs.
Following the speech, Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, issued a statement saying there’s concern that the proposal would “move decision-making in higher education from college campuses to Washington, D.C.”Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a former education secretary, said the autonomy of U.S. higher education is what makes it the best in the world, and he’s questioned whether Obama can enforce any plan that shifts federal aid away from colleges and universities without hurting students.
“It’s hard to do without hurting students, and it’s not appropriate to do,” Alexander said. “The federal government has no business doing this.”
President Obama also touted college “report cards” showing college costs and how well graduates do in the job market.
The U.S. Education Department and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau are working on Know Before You Owe, a financial aid shopping sheet that will let future students estimate their debt, monthly payment and likely ability to repay loans. Parents and students also have requested a breakdown of college costs and information on repayment rates for graduates at each college.
Recent Comments