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Ed Webb

What Cliff? Data and the Destruction of Public Higher Ed | Just Visiting - 2 views

  • That higher education institutions are facing a “demographic cliff” in the coming years has become conventional wisdom. But what if there is no cliff? What if we’ve instead been subjected to a narrative rooted in limited data that serves the interests of corporations and is doing real damage to our public institutions?
  • Currently, the NCES projects relatively constant numbers of high school graduates through 2030, with total graduates expected to increase in the mid-2020s, followed by a modest decline, making the projected 2029–30 number slightly greater than in 2016–17. Further, it is important to note that since the 1970s, the total number of high school graduates in the U.S. has declined several times before. More importantly for higher education, the NCES projects modest increases in higher education enrollments through 2029.
  • WICHE is an interest group with an explicit policy agenda—“focus areas”—which includes “developing and supporting innovations in technology and beyond that improve the quality of postsecondary education and reduce costs.”
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  • The purported demographic crisis is being used around the country to fundamentally remake higher education. For example, this is the main argument being advanced by Republicans in the Wisconsin Legislature seeking to radically reshape the University of Wisconsin system. This plan calls for the significant expansion of online education, regionalization of the comprehensive campuses, increased campus specialization and program consolidation and elimination, among other long-standing priorities.
  • The current context of higher education provides fertile ground for the uncritical acceptance of the demographic cliff. Higher education enrollments have declined since reaching historic highs in 2010. And decades of political decisions have made higher education tuition-driven, one state budget cycle at a time. We are vulnerable to the demographic cliff framing because of the politically imposed financial crunch in which we exist. Enrollments dictate everything we do.
  • the demographic cliff is an austerity-driven narrative that assumes that public funding will never—and should never—come back
  • Programs must be eliminated, online education must be expanded and, if necessary, even entire campuses must be closed. Higher education must be agile because tax increases are off the table, even as stock markets reach new highs and the income and wealth of the highest earners skyrockets. The interests of corporations and the wealthy will dictate public policy.
  • official population and education data—which come with no political assumptions, narrative or products for sale—show a slowly increasing population, including higher education enrollments, in the coming years.
  • demographic cliff is a manufactured crisis
  • takes advantage of a tuition-dependent higher education system to implement even greater austerity while imposing an education policy agenda that could never be adopted through normal political means
Ed Webb

Liberal Education after the Pandemic | AAUP - 1 views

  • The current massive and unanticipated experiment in online education could transform higher education as we know it. We should begin these difficult conversations about the future of the liberal arts now, in cyberspace, before the new normal takes shape—whenever that may be. Even if we feel trapped in our own homes and beset with anxiety and cabin fever, we also have an opportunity to reconsider the aims of higher education not in the abstract but in this concrete historical moment, with attention to specific institutional needs, public policy proposals, ideological pressures, and the overarching economic crisis.
  • A genuine commitment to ethical, historically aware, egalitarian, or democratic principles can land an individual in a world of trouble. I am thinking, for example, of the basic scientific literacy, historical awareness, and ethical commitment that equip an individual citizen to recognize the expertise of infectious disease specialists and reject the common sense of neighbors or the priorities and demands of an employer—or to spot the bogus claims, fundamental incompetence, or ethical depravity of some elected leaders. Such scientific literacy and basic familiarity with statistical analysis allow nonexperts to understand the arguments of climatologists and reject the sophistry of coworkers or talk show hosts or governors who point out, for example, that “the climate has always been changing.”
  • The reason that individual institutions cannot pitch such potential outcomes under ordinary circumstances is that these intellectual faculties serve the public good but do not necessarily advance the economic interests or career objectives of individual prospective or current students, especially those incurring significant debt. Being a whistleblower, for example, is generally a costly, painful career move—but the public needs to know nonetheless if the US military is shooting civilians in the streets of Baghdad; or the pharmaceutical industry is engineering a profitable opioid epidemic; or the health insurance industry is denying legitimate claims.
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  • just as the current crisis represents an opportunity for the people who have been working hard to privatize everything imaginable, dismantle public education, sink net neutrality, and align higher education with the demands of prospective employers and industry moguls (think here of the interventions of the Koch brothers in higher education, for example), it also represents an opportunity to push for the basic conditions under which a liberal education might properly serve its public functions. We should use these months to advocate for the kinds of public policies, such as tuition-free higher education, that recognize liberal education as a common good. We must articulate the reasons why a liberal education is in fact a common good and why a liberal education is disfigured if it is made to promote the demands of prospective employers.
  • We need a society capable of devising new and more humane social contracts, new political economies, new food and energy grids, and sustainable use of resources—whether or not these projects produce financial dividends for individual graduates or for their employers. An accessible, publicly funded liberal education decoupled from the demands of industry and prospective employers is the best way to prepare people to do these things.
  • we should use these months of confinement to strategize about a long-term case for liberal education and for public investment in an educated citizenry. Now is the time to invest some of our intellectual capital in education advocacy that ultimately makes a difference not only in the lives of students but also for the collective well-being of our nation and the world
Ed Webb

The academy's neoliberal response to COVID-19: Why faculty should be wary and how we can push back - Academic Matters - 1 views

  • In the neoliberal economy, workers are seen as commodities and are expected to be trained and “work-ready” before they are hired. The cost and responsibility for job-training fall predominantly on individual workers rather than on employers. This is evident in the expectation that work experience should be a condition of hiring. This is true of the academic hiring process, which no longer involves hiring those who show promise in their field and can be apprenticed on the tenure track, but rather those with the means, privilege, and grit to assemble a tenurable CV on their own dime and arrive to the tenure track work-ready.
  • The assumption that faculty are pre-trained, or able to train themselves without additional time and support, underpins university directives that faculty move classes online without investing in training to support faculty in this shift. For context, at the University of Waterloo, the normal supports for developing an online course include one to two course releases, 12-18 months of preparation time, and the help of three staff members—one of whom is an online learning consultant, and each of whom supports only about two other courses. Instead, at universities across Canada, the move online under COVID-19 is not called “online teaching” but “remote teaching”, which universities seem to think absolves them of the responsibility to give faculty sufficient technological training, pedagogical consultation, and preparation time.
  • faculty are encouraged to strip away the transformative pedagogical work that has long been part of their profession and to merely administer a course or deliver course material
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  • remote teaching directives are rooted in the assumption that faculty are equally positioned to carry them out
  • The dual delivery model—in which some students in a course come to class and others work remotely using pre-recorded or other asynchronous course material—is already part of a number of university plans for the fall, even though it requires vastly more work than either in-person or remote courses alone. The failure to accommodate faculty who are not well positioned to transform their courses from in-person to remote teaching—or some combination of the two— will actively exacerbate existing inequalities, marking a step backward for equity.
  • Neoliberal democracy is characterized by competitive individualism and centres on the individual advocacy of ostensibly equal citizens through their vote with no common social or political goals. By extension, group identity and collective advocacy are delegitimized as undemocratic attempts to gain more of a say than those involved would otherwise have as individuals.
  • Portraying people as atomized individuals allows social problems to be framed as individual failures
  • faculty are increasingly encouraged to see themselves as competitors who must maintain a constant level of productivity and act as entrepreneurs to sell ideas to potential investors in the form of external funding agencies or private commercial interests. Rather than freedom of enquiry, faculty research is increasingly monitored through performance metrics. Academic governance is being replaced by corporate governance models while faculty and faculty associations are no longer being respected for the integral role they play in the governance process, but are instead considered to be a stakeholder akin to alumni associations or capital investors.
  • treats structural and pedagogical barriers as minor individual technical or administrative problems that the instructor can overcome simply by watching more Zoom webinars and practising better self-care.
  • In neoliberal thought, education is merely pursued by individuals who want to invest in skills and credentials that will increase their value in the labour market.
  • A guiding principle of neoliberal thought is that citizens should interact as formal equals, without regard for the substantive inequalities between us. This formal equality makes it difficult to articulate needs that arise from historical injustices, for instance, as marginalized groups are seen merely as stakeholders with views equally valuable to those of other stakeholders. In the neoliberal university, this notion of formal equality can be seen, among other things, in the use of standards and assessments, such as teaching evaluations, that have been shown to be biased against instructors from marginalized groups, and in the disproportionate amount of care and service work that falls to these faculty members.
  • Instead of discussing better Zoom learning techniques, we should collectively ask what teaching in the COVID-19 era would look like if universities valued education and research as essential public goods.
  • while there are still some advocates for the democratic potential of online teaching, there are strong criticisms that pedagogies rooted in well-established understandings of education as a collective, immersive, and empowering experience, through which students learn how to deliberate, collaborate, and interrogate established norms, cannot simply be transferred online
  • Humans learn through narrative, context, empathy, debate, and shared experiences. We are able to open ourselves up enough to ask difficult questions and allow ourselves to be challenged only when we are able to see the humanity in others and when our own humanity is recognized by others. This kind of active learning (as opposed to the passive reception of information) requires the trust, collectivity, and understanding of divergent experiences built through regular synchronous meetings in a shared physical space. This is hindered when classroom interaction is mediated through disembodied video images and temporally delayed chat functions.
  • When teaching is reduced to content delivery, faculty become interchangeable, which raises additional questions about academic freedom. Suggestions have already been made that the workload problem brought on by remote teaching would be mitigated if faculty simply taught existing online courses designed by others. It does not take complex modelling to imagine a new normal in which an undergraduate degree consists solely of downloading and memorizing cookie-cutter course material uploaded by people with no expertise in the area who are administering ten other courses simultaneously. 
  • when teaching is reduced to content delivery, intellectual property takes on additional importance. It is illegal to record and distribute lectures or other course material without the instructor’s permission, but universities seem reluctant to confirm that they will not have the right to use the content faculty post online. For instance, if a contract faculty member spends countless hours designing a remote course for the summer semester and then is laid off in the fall, can the university still use their recorded lectures and other material in the fall? Can the university use this recorded lecture material to continue teaching these courses if faculty are on strike (as happened in the UK in 2018)? What precedents are being set? 
  • Students’ exposure to a range of rigorous thought is also endangered, since it is much easier for students to record and distribute course content when faculty post it online. Some websites are already using the move to remote teaching as an opportunity to urge students to call out and shame faculty they deem to be “liberal” or “left” by reposting their course material. To avoid this, faculty are likely to self-censor, choosing material they feel is safer. Course material will become more generic, which will diminish the quality of students’ education.
  • In neoliberal thought, the public sphere is severely diminished, and the role of the university in the public sphere—and as a public sphere unto itself—is treated as unnecessary. The principle that enquiry and debate are public goods in and of themselves, regardless of their outcome or impact, is devalued, as is the notion that a society’s self-knowledge and self-criticism are crucial to democracy, societal improvement, and the pursuit of the good life. Expert opinion is devalued, and research is desirable only when it translates into gains for the private sector, essentially treating universities as vehicles to channel public funding into private research and development. 
  • The free and broad pursuit—and critique—of knowledge is arguably even more important in times of crisis and rapid social change.
  • Policies that advance neoliberal ideals have long been justified—and opposition to them discredited—using Margaret Thatcher’s famous line that “there is no alternative.” This notion is reproduced in universities framing their responses to COVID-19 as a fait accompli—the inevitable result of unfortunate circumstances. Yet the neoliberal assumptions that underpin these responses illustrate that choices are being made and force us to ask whether the emergency we face necessitates this exact response.
  • The notion that faculty can simply move their courses online—or teach them simultaneously online and in person—is rooted in the assumption that educating involves merely delivering information to students, which can be done just as easily online as it can be in person. There are many well-developed online courses, yet all but the most ardent enthusiasts concede that the format works better for some subjects and some students
  • Emergencies matter. Far from occasions that justify suspending our principles, the way that we handle the extra-ordinary, the unexpected, sends a message about what we truly value. While COVID-19 may seem exceptional, university responses to this crisis are hardly a departure from the neoliberal norm, and university administrations are already making plans to extend online teaching after it dissipates. We must be careful not to send the message that the neoliberal university and the worldview that underpins it are acceptable.
Ed Webb

Seventy-One Stories About Being Trans in School - 0 views

  • (a) some of the biggest challenges trans students face are infrastructural, both bricks-and-mortar structures (the housing of trans students; bathroom facilities), and digital architecture (course information software, transcripts, diplomas and email databases all routinely misidentify students);(b) an overwhelming majority of students and graduates described the experience of being misgendered and/or deadnamed by their professors as an extremely common experience.
  • I do think there’s real value in hearing stories of what it feels like to be misgendered or deadnamed
  • Anti-trans academics who claim that their rights are being infringed are heard far more frequently in the mainstream media than are the students who are apparently doing the infringing.
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  • academic freedom is a value of deep institutional importance to the independence of the University from entrenched power. Free speech demands no such institutional defense, and is rightly deprioritized when in conflict with other interests such as equity of access to education, or the health and wellbeing of students
  • To listen to trans students and graduates is to be sure that, whatever the British gender critical academics argue, the training of the professoriate on this issue is woefully inadequate
  • Many trans and non-binary students reported challenges finding built environments where they could feel safe at college. “They keep housing me with men,” wrote one trans woman; another trans woman reported that, despite being roomed with “transphobic students,” her administrators “weren’t, in general, willing to cut me a whole lot of slack because I hadn’t legally changed my gender marker.” A trans man reported being “placed on an all-girls floor even though I stated clearly on my housing form that I’m a trans guy.” Another student described the non-accommodation of trans students as an official policy: “my school matches roommate based on assigned sex, and refuses to accommodate trans students.”
  • Many students wrote with great enthusiasm about LGBTQ support centers on campus, which provide trans students with community and guidance. One writes that “younger uni empoyees and employees who were queer or allies were actually pretty great”; another says “the campus LGBT centers at two of the institutions where I experienced […] discrimination were amazing”; another writes that “the gender equality center is really working to help students and we have queer profs and Pride programming.” Another describes the vibe at the LGBTQ center as “quite tumblr but very supportive.” Students reported valuing the opportunity to invite speakers and guests themselves, though some report a wish that more resources for such programming were available.
  • A number of students wrote to express their dismay at the poverty of counselling resources for trans students
  • A large majority of respondents – close to all - explicitly reported experiences with “deadnaming” and “misgendering” by their academic advisors – their professors and mentors. Some of these instances were “deliberate,” “malicious,” “continued,” or “transphobic,” while others were merely “ignorant” or “accidental.” One respondent reported having been taught by two kinds of teacher: “profs who never asked for pronouns and always misgendered me, and profs who asked for pronouns but would still misgender me every time and apologize every time under the guise of ‘trying their best’.”
  • Sometimes being misgendered at a key moment in one’s school career throws students into emotional disarray at an inopportune moment.
  • colleges and universities are failing to establish adequate infrastructure for trans and non-binary students (especially in respect of digital architecture, which perhaps receives less attention than bricks-and-mortar)
  • staff and faculty, far from being the mindwiped drones of the gender critical academics’ fantasy, are mostly pretty incompetent at addressing and discussing trans students
  • I have a responsibility as a teacher to ensure minimum standards of care and equitable access to education for all my trans students, but also that I have a responsibility to push back against those institutional disincentives
Martin Burrett

Researchers claim that educational success among children of similar cognitive ability depends on their background - 0 views

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    "Children of similar cognitive ability have very different chances of educational success; it still depends on their parents' economic, socio-cultural and educational resources. This contradicts a commonly held view that these days that our education system has developed enough to give everyone a fighting chance. The researchers, led by Dr. Erzsébet Bukodi from Oxford's Department of Social Policy and Intervention, looked at data from cohorts of children born in three decades: 1950s, 1970s and 1990s. They found significant evidence of a wastage of talent. Individuals with high levels of cognitive ability but who are disadvantaged in their social origins are persistently unable to translate their ability into educational attainment to the same extent as their more advantaged counterparts."
Martin Burrett

Key components of a mentally healthy school - 0 views

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    "Mentally healthy schools are schools that pay ongoing and dedicated attention to the emotional wellbeing of both students and staff and put in place policies and interventions to ensure that students and staff feel cared for, listened to, understand, nurtured and valued for what each of them, individually bring to the school community."
Ed Webb

Do universities liberalise students? Why education should be taken seriously in political analysis | British Politics and Policy at LSE - 0 views

  • data at the individual level has repeatedly shown that having a degree level qualification is the strongest predictor of a Remain vote
  • UKIP’s support was concentrated among those with education levels below degree level, gaining 16% of the votes of this group in 2015. The Liberal Democrats, in contrast, have historically been better at securing the votes of the degree-educated section of the electorate. In 2010, the party secured one in three votes among this group and were the most popular choice of party for voters in this group.
  • Between 2010 and 2015 the Labour share of the vote among the degree educated rose while its share of those without degrees fell. A result was the move of (some of the) ‘not degree’ group to UKIP while the degree educated deserted the Liberal Democrats after the formation of the coalition government. It is important to stress this happened while Ed Miliband was Labour party leader and before the EU Referendum – this is neither a Corbyn nor a Brexit effect.
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  • the relationship between political values and voting behaviour. While the traditional ‘left-right’ value dimension which focuses on economic justice and power barely distinguishes Leave and Remain voters, there are much larger differences according to ‘cultural’ values which relate to issues of authority, tolerance, and the rule of law.
  • This suggests that there is something specific about the experience of higher education which produces more liberal values. This appears to be something which is independent of the subject of study
  • A more fruitful line of enquiry is to seek a deeper understanding of the connections between education and values: to understand how education liberalises
Martin Burrett

Well-being School Proposal, by @Mrs_Educate - 0 views

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    "This is a proposal with many good ideas gained from different places (Facebook and Twitter) that could be put to school leaders/governors to try and integrate staff well-being into the school policies. Just add in you school name in the gaps and add your name at the bottom!"
Martin Burrett

@NFERClassroom launches free 'Assessment Hub' resource for teachers - 0 views

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    "The NFER Assessment Hub, which has been designed to help school practitioners build their confidence with classroom assessment, offers a host of free support written by NFER's team of assessment researchers with teaching backgrounds. This support includes a collection of short-read articles which introduce various aspects of classroom assessment, as well as an exclusive new practitioner guide series titled 'Brushing up on assessment', due to be released weekly throughout October and November. From guidance on understanding assessment policies to tips on making the most of assessment data, the guides will offer valuable insight and advice to support practitioners in delivering an assessment approach that is right for their pupils and their school."
Martin Burrett

Going Above and Beyond by @karadowson - 0 views

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    "Reviewing Behaviour Policies always seems to be top of the agenda when beginning a new school year and inducting new staff. Having just left an Assistant Headship in Dubai after five years, discussing the collective expectations we have of children was of paramount importance when taking up a Deputy Head position in a small school in rural Northamptonshire."
Martin Burrett

Aquation - 3 views

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    Game teaching about water conservation and management where users choose water policy, research and inferstructure on a global stage.
Martin Burrett

E-safety policy for schools via @esafety_Kent - 0 views

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    "With technological advances moving spectacularly fast, it is difficult for schools to keep updated with e-safety policy, procedures and advice for their staff and pupils. Ensuring that everyone is informed through following policy directives can be time-consuming, and producing the documents can be equally laborious."
Martin Burrett

Why avoiding in-school politics isn't always the best policy - UKEdChat.com - 0 views

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    "Schools are inherently full of different characters. With a mix of personalities, students and staff can often clash with each other, using different strategies to gain the upper hand, or simply to avoid conflict and live a quiet life. Yet, there are those characters who can be sneaky, back-stabbing, manipulative or darn right confrontational. It's these people who know how to play politics to win friends, influence and possibly to gain the upper hand in climbing the next step on the career ladder."
Maggie Verster

Literacy, Technology, Policy, Etc....A Blog - 1 views

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    "Education, English, Lesson, Reading, Slides, students, Teaching, Theme"
Martin Burrett

A focus on wellbeing by @Exe_Head - 1 views

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    We are a happy and stable staff, and my colleagues are a fabulous group of people who look after each other and genuinely care about one another. We have an experienced leadership team, and always aim to take account of how people are feeling and the pressure they are under when trying  new approaches and changes to practice. Even so, it has become more and more clear that workload is becoming untenable and wellbeing is suffering a result. I feel that we have felt obligated at times to put policies in place that seem to be there to collect evidence for Ofsted rather than solely to improve the learning of the children in our care. We want to change this.
Vicki Davis

GUEST COMMENTARY: Growing number of indicators highlight need to revamp federal education policy | Guest Commentaries | columbiamissourian.com - 1 views

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    "The most recent annual poll of the public's attitudes toward public schools conducted by Gallup indicates nearly two-thirds of American school parents (64 percent) believe there is too much emphasis on standardized tests. According to additional Gallup research performed in 2014, less than half of students in the United States agree with the following statement "I get to do what I do best every day." This is the very heart of one of the key ingredients of education: engaging students in learning."
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    I put this brief list together as a starting point to improve education. Difficult as the battle is with politicians and parents. http://www.textbooksfree.org/Education%20Axioms%20and%20Postulates.htm I am looking for suggestions.
Vicki Davis

New Research: Spending DOES Make a Difference, Especially for the Poorest Children | Diane Ravitch's blog - 0 views

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    ", new research demonstrates that spending does matter. The authors-C. Kirabo Jackson, associate professor of human development and social policy at Northwestern University, Rucker C. Johnson, associate professor of public policy at University of California, Berkeley, and Claudia Persico, a doctoral candidate in human development and social policy at Northwestern University-show that "increased school spending is linked to improved outcomes for students, and for low-income students in particular…Increasing per-pupil spending yields large improvements in educational attainment, wages, and family income, and reductions in the annual incidence of adult poverty for children from low-income families. As they also show, it matters how the new money is spent-such as on instruction, hiring more teachers, increasing teacher pay, hiring guidance counselors and social workers. Money well-spent "can profoundly shape the life outcomes of economically disadvantaged children and thereby reduce the intergenerational transmission of poverty. Money alone may not lift educational outcomes to desired levels, but our findings confirm that the provision of adequate funding may be critical.""
Vicki Davis

bcg.perspectives - Decoding Global Talent - 4 views

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    Excellent research study of 200,000 people on work and jobs. Leaders and policy makers will want to read this.
Vicki Davis

Teaching and Schooling: Supporting High-Quality Teaching and Leadership in Low-Income Schools - 5 views

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    This important excerpt of a larger book hits on the quality of teachers and the success of children in low-income schools. If you want a better school, spend money on staff development and helping your teachers become more proficient. This article is full of research and important topics of conversation among teachers and policy makers. via: http://www.stanford.edu/~ldh/publications/LDH-Post-Inequality.pdf
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