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Whether “curriculum” means a high-level outline or whether it means the content of a six-week science lesson affects the conversation

it is entirely possible to agree on central ideas for the common standards and leave schools to teach them their own way. It’s a crucial distinction, she said, between guidelines and “operational curriculum.”

“What’s stirring everything up here is the word ‘common,’ ” she said. “It suggests everything is the same, when people know that curriculum has to be responsive. But we can think of ‘common’ as more like a town common, a place where we all meet.”

  I’ve read, listen and thought  more about assessment than most and yet it still baffles me. Mostly because the kind of assessment that makes most sense (immediate and descriptive feedback) isn’t really valued in schools.

The scores of fourth- and eighth-graders on reading tests have climbed steadily since the 1990s, according to the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But those of 12th-graders have fallen. Just 37 percent of high-school seniors graduate with “proficiency” in reading, meaning they can read a text for both its literal and its inferential meanings.

While those with bachelor’s and graduate degrees maintained the highest levels of literacy overall, those groups also experienced the steepest declines. Just 31 percent of college graduates were considered proficient readers in 2003, by that test’s definition, down from 40 percent in 1992.

“We quickly realized that unless you actually assign a grade for the out-of-class component, students just won’t do it,”

“Harvard students are really not that different in terms of how they behave. They’re bright, they’re academically more gifted,” she says. But they’re also “incredibly good at figuring out how to do exactly what they need to do to get the grade. They’re incredibly strategic. And I think that’s really true of students everywhere.”

turns the classroom into a social-learning environment

“We have young people who are coming away from high school with a very sort of test-driven training — I won’t call it education — training in reading.”

Teaching students how to read in college feels “remedial” to many professors

Faculty members are trained in their disciplines. “They don’t want to be reading teachers. I don’t think it’s a lack of motivation,” says Columbia’s Doris Perin. “They don’t feel they have the training.” Nor do they want to “infantilize” students by teaching basic comprehension skills, she says.

Tie reading to a grade: Quizzes and assigned journals, which can determine about 20 percent of the final grade, can double or even triple reading compliance — but rote formats that seem to exist for their own sake can encourage skimming or feel punitive.“Do away with the obvious justifications for not doing the reading,” says Naomi Baron, at American U. “If you summarize everything that’s in the reading, why should students do it?”Ask students to make arguments, compare, and contrast — higher- order skills than factual recall.Using different media is fine, but maintain rigor. “You can do critical reading of anything that has essentially an academic argument in it,” says David Jolliffe, at the U. of Arkansas. Video and audio, in fact, may sometimes be better than textbooks — what he calls “predigested food.”Explicitly tie out-of-class reading to in-class instruction, going over points of confusion and connecting lessons and texts to each other.Teach reading skills. “Hundreds” of strategies exist, all of which make “explicit the processes that proficient readers use without thinking about it,” says Doris Perin, at Columbia.

“A lot of faculty members, myself included, are saying, If they’re not doing the reading, we can get unhappy, we can get angry,” she says. “Or we can do something about it.”

Maher gets some points dead right, like the general – and especially Democratic – idea that everyone should get some post-secondary schooling.  This is still the default American idea, with persistent popularity.

not all of higher ed is about those teenagers, and it’s a mistake to assume it is

Ignoring these swarms of campuses with low (sticker!) prices in favor of complaining about the most expensive slice of American academia is, alas, a popular mistake.

He wants the college and university sector to shrink back in size and influence.  He advises an end to college for all, wanting instead college for even fewer.

Maher reminds us of the power of economic populism, and not just in the ways Trump mobilized it. Academia’s sometimes intention of mitigating inequality runs smack into our role in making inequality happen

to whatever extent Bill Maher is representative, the public has woeful gaps in its understanding of how higher ed works.  Our elite institutions stand in for the entire sector too often. Our high tuition, high discount strategy just looks like very high tuition.  Adult learners are nowhere near visible enough.

the cost of today’s education is likely to be somewhat higher than what I paid 30 years ago, but the price is definitely dramatically higher because today’s students aren’t enjoying the taxpayer support that I did. The price went up for sure. How much the cost went up is less clear