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(Tenured Radical)

Tuesday, December 12, 2006

This and That

1.) Andrew Ferguson, in an opinion piece in Bloomberg.com, summarizes Arthur Levine's scathing report on America's schools of education. An excerpt from Ferguson:

Educating School Teachers says education schools suffer from the same afflictions that have crippled primary and secondary schools until recently: low standards of performance and graduation.

This won't surprise anyone who has spent much time at an American university, where the education school is commonly thought of as either the campus joke or the campus dump -- the spots where students and teachers who can't succeed elsewhere end up. The scores of future elementary school teachers on the Graduate Record Exam, Levine says, are 100 points below the national average.


...Yet for universities, the campus joke and dump is also -- to switch to Levine's metaphor -- a cash cow.

Lowered admission standards bring more students into the education school, Levine writes, generating revenue that subsidizes more prestigious departments within the university. This leaves little incentive for universities to clean up their teacher-training program.

...What's to be done? A constructive fellow, Levine spends considerable time showing what works in the nation's exemplary education schools. (There are some.) The examples are so compelling they just might shame other universities into following their lead, removing a major obstacle to educational improvement in the U.S.


...Education schools, for example, shouldn't treat 'education' as a major in itself. Good education schools, Levine finds, require their students to master a given subject -- English or math -- the way a normal English or math major would. Beyond this standard four-year course, good schools then add another year of instruction in how to teach the subject.

This sounds obvious enough, but it's hard to overstate how far from common sense the U.S. educational establishment has wandered.



2.) UD wrote a brief note to an official at Tennessee/Chattanooga, asking for an update on the history professor there who plagiarized his book (his university webpage still promotes the book), and who graduated from what appears to be a diploma mill. The opening lines of the response she got were so out of control that she deleted the email without reading further.

3.) Later on today, UD will post about the art historian T.J. Clark. She will also analyze some charming prose she found in last Sunday's New York Times.