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UD’s Confused.

Here you’ve got an article in the Daily Egyptian, the student newspaper at Southern Illinois University, and it’s all about how their school of education is so fantastic that …

The College of Education and Human Services is not part of the national call to significantly change teacher training, university officials say.

According to the New York Times, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a speech Thursday at Columbia University’s Teachers College in New York that all universities needed a revolutionary change in the way they prepare teachers. Duncan said many, if not most, colleges and universities are doing a “mediocre job” of preparing teachers for the realities of the classroom.

Jan Waggoner, director of teacher education, said she believes SIUC’s program is not one that needs changes. Waggoner said the college was cited as one of the top 100 colleges of teacher education programs and works to ensure the students are as prepared as possible for the classrooms.

“I don’t know that we would fall into the mediocre category that (Duncan) is naming or needing for the revolutionary change…”

UD looked at the US News rankings, about which Waggoner’s school indeed boasts in its publicity material, and she finds that Southern Illinois is not ranked at all. It’s listed along with all the other schools surveyed, but given no ranking.

To see a ranked school, look at the University of Illinois – Urbana. They’re ranked 24. See?

The thing SIUC’s education school’s best known for — giving SIUC’s current president a PhD in education even though he plagiarized much of the document — probably didn’t help much in this whole process.

But anyway. Kind of cute to see the campus paper playing along.

********************************************

UPDATE: This page, on the SIUC school of education website, deepens the pathos.

The director of teacher education tells the school newspaper reporter that the school was “cited as one of the top 100 colleges of teacher education programs.” It wasn’t. Why not?

Last year our Education programs together were ranked in the Top 100. Unfortunately, the data we provide for this year’s ranking was in advertently incomplete and so we could not be included. We have no doubt, however, that if we had been appropriately considered, we would have achieved that lofty (Top 100) ranking again.

So they’re a Top 100 school… in principle… but they can’t appropriately fill out a questionnaire from US News and World Report. Would you want to go there?

Margaret Soltan, November 2, 2009 6:12AM
Posted in: hoax

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6 Responses to “UD’s Confused.”

  1. Townsend Harris Says:
    November 2nd, 2009 at 11:05AM

    Maybe the student reporters and editors at SIU Carbondale are preparing for their futures in journalism and public relations. Maybe preparing for those vocations means learning to comfort the comfortable.

  2. RJO Says:
    November 2nd, 2009 at 2:17PM

    I think they’ve discovered that in the field of education, all the graduate programs are above average.

  3. GTWMA Says:
    November 2nd, 2009 at 5:19PM

    If you want to see hyper-inflation, check out Ed school GPAs.

  4. David Clark Says:
    November 16th, 2009 at 2:48PM

    It’s only news when university administrators tell the truth!!

  5. Margaret Soltan Says:
    November 16th, 2009 at 2:56PM

    David: True. But I thought I ought to cover this anyway.

  6. University Diaries » We’ve already seen how well one school of education… Says:
    November 26th, 2009 at 5:36AM

    […] … responded to criticism. […]

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