On Obama’s Bold Plan to Reshape American Higher Education

Original Article

Summary goes here!

A step finally taken, which I have advocated for a long time.

Jest few points about things the author of the article like to see to be included in Obama's plan.

On 'Nobel Prize winner wants to get in the Physics 101 business' should get more weight:

• Personally, I don't think a Researcher is necessary a better teacher. They may have their own way of understanding things, it does not necessary mean those understanding are on all levels and that they can transfer those idea effectively especially to students that may have totally different mindsets.
• If there is going to have an objective measurements of outcome, why do we try to add some un-objective impurity to the formula? This is more like going back to the old system where the established (regional accredited) are carrying more weights.
• By providing this loophole to encourage high level researcher to teach low level courses, aren't we promoting inefficiency? I am not saying there would have no benefits to the students, but I am saying that this by-law is not needed. If they can provide extra benefits to lower level courses, those benefits should be build into the objective measurement formula and, therefore, it will show if the benefits is there and, would, therefore, render the by law unnecessary.

It’s time to drop the college-for-all crusade

Original Article

Summary goes here!

Personally, I would attribute some of these kind of  bad American policies to the generosity of American and some to the idea of 'Political Correctness'.

As a foreign born American, I am totally impressed by the generosity of American and, at times, puzzled and resisted. Growing up, I took nothing for granted even though I have supporting parents. I was educated, taught and self-studied, that begging is of no dignity and god only help people that help themselves. Personally, I have been summon all these under the 'responsibility'.

As to the 'Political Correctness', for one thing, I would like to remind the reader that OPPORTUNITIES is all it should be considered. Given the opportunity, in the sense of promote responsibility, it is up to the people to work hard to get what they want.

More practically, we should realized that not all people were born equal, intellectually. The best a society can hopeful is to have everyone do their best. To have people reach their best is to teach them being responsible. To teach responsibility, the operation of the system and the society must, by itself, promote responsibility. For example, to entitle to education as a right, students must demonstrate their wiliness to put in efforts in studying. For a normal people, this can simply be a requirement to reach certain testing scores. This is nothing new, what is new is the infusion of the idea of responsibility.

In theory, I am willing to support the idea of free education for all those who did their best. On the other hand, since resources are limited, we should support those who will benefit the society the most. With the full support of the society, I am visioning the building of a system where the freely educated scholars recognizing the support from and the responsibility to the society. Formula may need be sought to build a practical system, the idea is to promote responsibility as the core value of education.

For people reaching their best but were not able to be the best, this is where the society come in to benefit the constituent of the whole society.

What Degrees Should Mean

Original Article

The point is to focus on what student learned. Not how you teach them or how institutions structure their courses.

I think the work done by Lumina has it's implication and use in generally framing the shared understanding. But, as mentioned through out the article, there is a long way to go to get to the campus level.

I would like related back to points raised by two commentators:

Andy Rundquist: "Not all employers care where a candidate got their BA/BS degree, but those that do have a lot to aid in their decision. Does the school have a good reputation? Have we hired someone from there before? "

Patrick F. Bassett: "Demonstrations of Learning"

As we all know it, institutions and faculties have a lot to say about how they like their students to achieve. That is all very well. But, on the other hand, that do not impose or limit what employers are looking for.

At this point in time, employers, in general, do not have the resources to do a thorough evaluation of their applicant. They are relied on interviews, references and reputations ... etc. Part of the reason, of cause, is a judgmental call on how much cost is worth to spend to fill a particular job, especially when there is no ready made assessment tools that can tell candidates apart.

Now, what if there were such assessment tools available? Noted that I use the plural. Each institutions are free to set their directions, tools will evaluate various kind of achievements. Employer is free to look at various combination of achievements. For highly academic courses, there are still markets for it, since the appropriate employers will understand that the usual assessment tools are not suitable in these cases.

The point is to focus on what student learned. Not how you teach them or how institutions structure their courses.

Lumina and faculties' work in defining the learning are of great use in framing the assessment tools.

For-profit colleges under fire over value, accreditation

Original Article

... we shall all do the the right and justice decision through the course of this revolution.

I think you can find all the related news post and reports.

I believe the title of the article is probably very close to the reality. However, it don't have to be. What I mean is that the for-profit nature of a institution does not have to always produce low value product. It is the regulations that matters. Just think about this, almost of our daily use products are produced by for-profit companies. Even in the world of space industry, NASA isn't over achievement compared with the Scaled.

The current affair is a typical case of finding the weakest to attack. It does not attempt to solve the bigger problem - the accountability. It is reported that while the rule proposed by the Obama administration is intended for the for-profit higher education institutions, non-for-profit institutions voice to against the regulation too - for afraid that the rule may one day applied to the non-for-profit institutions. As far as I am concern, I can't see why not. At least the idea of 'gainful employment' should also applied to public institutions. The low tuition of public institution should not be considered as an exemption since public institution are usually heavily subsidized by tax dollars.

As the article said, it all comes down to the standard. If you have been following education news about accountability, you know the amount resistance from institutions and professors/teachers. I were a teacher before and even though I don't have to like to be evaluated but I am definitely not afraid of being evaluated. Sometimes, I feel that people are over-reacting to the evaluation. In my case, not all my students are the brightest or the hard working type. But to prove that I am not a good teacher, you need more than a test score - for example, they will have to prove that given the same kids, other teacher can do a better job than I can. Yes, I do against firing teachers based sololy on students' test score. But test score itself is not the subject. After all they are objective indicators. The subject is on how to move forward from there. For one, teachers should definitely be given opportunities to present their cases.

For higher education, we all understand that trainings are diverse. However, again, objective measurement is never hurt. Institutions can provide their feedback to the way measurement is done and can ask to clarify what is been measured and can voice their disagreements on their goals of education. The public can look all these information and make decisions and create the market interaction. For example, certain people may considered that the math concept is a definite requirement for a engineer degree and they can choose to attend school with solid math concept program. On the other hand, certain other people may consider, with the computer in mind, that the concept of math isn't as important as it seems, they could be listening to institutions explanation and agreed with them.

With these information in place, people will know exactly what they get and it may happens that it is no longer worth to fabricate a big lie than to actually provide a good services or product.

Personally, I think the for-profit provides a 'private option' to the higher education mix. With its very nature of for-profit, it paid for them to focus everything in efficiency. This could provide a obvious contrast to how public institution is operated. Can these institution success? Given the success of our capitalized private industries, I believe they can given enough flexibility and appropriate regulation - just like all our private companies, we do not specify how much assets they much have, as long as they can produce a good product and did not label anything the product will not do on the product.

Of cause, like we all can image that the success of these institutions could impact our current higher education institutions in big ways. The resistance and hostility from other sectors of the higher education is also expected. But we shall all do the the right and justice decisions through the course of this revolution.

No Letup From Washington

Original Article

Summary goes here!

Quote an insider's words: 'If you don't do it yourself, others will do it for you.'

I don't like him - too calculative or sophisticate if you will. But at least there are some insides.

Please read comments on the original post and you will see the view of scholars - not one but more. The sophisticate and unwillingness is just unbelievable. And you wonder why people and administrations are upset with Universities?

The argument that 'GPA is a much better predictor' is not good enough. Because this leaves out a lot of pre-conditions. First of all, it is totally subjective. I can tell you that my A is definitely much harder to get than my peer instructors. Yes, if you compare my A students with my B students, they are definitely at different caliper. But I can't tell you that with my B students and other instructors' A students. And we all heard of grade inflation. Besides, even myself, can I flunk all my students just because they are ill-prepared? No, I will adjust my grades so I can show their differences and achievements. What does this lead us? If you can establish the curriculum standard and define clearly what is to be an A. Then I will agree that WITHIN that entity, the GPA is a good measurement. So how much will it cost to establish this across all the institutions?
The argument here is that to establish the GPA as a GOOD predictor, you need the same efforts as to establish good measurement. The thing is that everyone like to define the good, themselves.

I suspect that the GPA we have today is loosely defined statistical measure of the efforts of students. Assuming talents are equally likely distributed across the gender, race, geographic boundaries. Assuming teachers are generally un-biased and rank their students on things they learn. Also assuming that ... With all these assumptions, we COULD?? say that high GPA PROBABLY mean a students with right learning attitude and willing to put in efforts. These students will success no matter where you put them. Even if they were from a low standard learning community, they will put in extra efforts - even though with time crunches they may not catch up with their peers during the school year. But with life long learning, they will doing just fine.

But we have to understand that this is only a possible explanation to why GPA could predict. But it does not address what the public is asking for.

Obama Tries New Tack to Collect Student Data

Original Article
Student Data Systems, Unite!

But when it comes education, we need to think about education first, not the research.

Personally, I like this one:

"For it to succeed, it can't be loaded with those who think unlimited data collection is the holy grail of educational reform." by Ms. Flanagan.

Here are couple of my thoughts - comments welcome:
On the onset, people supporting the tracking like to quote the accountability as the reason. But, there is a problem. If you really want accountability, you should know how to delegate responsibility. If state is responsible for educating the K12 students, I see no reason for other people to snoop around on those individual records. All you need to do is knowing how many students come from that state is not performing and leave the task to the state. This concept applies to other smaller entities too. Research is a different issue. Researcher can contract with entities and help them with the task of improving their performance.

The other popular idea/practice behind the tracking is to define students' success on their performance at the next level in their life. Federal Government can then trace back to students' prior encounters (i.e. schools, teachers ... etc) and hold them accountable. This approach is, in a way, very handy for the Federal Government or any big brothers, since they do not need to set the curriculum defined success before hand but can always accuse schools for not setting the curriculum high enough.

For accountability to work, each entities should be targeted/given a clearly determined or agreed-to goals and evaluated against it. If such an objective goal have been set, a high school will already know if they met their responsibility or not. There is no use of the tracking system.

The task of the Federal Government or Colleges is to work with high schools to work out what is the reasonable goal for the high school graduates and to develop suitable objective evaluation methods.

I am a researcher and I love data. But when it comes education, we need to think about education first, which happen to be teaching responsibility, not the research.

Mixed Grades for Grads and Assessment

Original Article
Original AACU report

I read the original article and

Well. I read the original article and, in general, it's not biased.

The 'facts' are:
1. There are room for improvement in college education.
2. There are room for improvement in evaluating graduates.
3. Employer don't FEEL standardized test can measure ALL they wanted from a graduates - but so do other way of evaluation.

So. Where should we go from here?
1. Need accountability for school.
2. Develop better evaluation methods.

Faculty evaluation is OK assuming faculty does not yield to pressure from the top. Senior project is good too. But can you trust those from the for-profit institutions? - this may apply to traditional school too. Now. How can you be sure the info you received is not biased? It seems to me we need some independent vendors.

Now. The accountability. This can be done independent from the way of evaluation. As long as the result are published and broke down by school, parents and students can choose school of desired quality (employability) with reasonable price.

My post at InsideHigherEd.com: =============
First of all, I like to thank Scott to bring this report forward.

I suspected that this report is a response to Spellings' committee. In a way, it did - employers don't trust standardized test. But it does not respond to the accountability question.

The report showed that employers do want to evaluate the graduates and this is what is important. In what form is really a secondary question.

Of cause, employers can careless about school rankings if they can evaluate graduates. But the measuring of school is actually a call for accountability. This goal can be achieved regardless of the type of evaluation is used. As long as the result is published, students and parents will have the information to pick a school with desired quality(employability) with reasonable price.

There are opportunities for vendors to work with employers to create good evaluation tools. But I do hope US employers aren't like those described by Scrawed.