In a recent post on Education Week's blog, Debra Viadero offers a caution about President Obama's support for community colleges. Pointing to her recent article on community college research that indicated how much more we need to know about how best to improve completion rates in that sector, she questions whether the president would be wiser to place his bets on career colleges. She says that a recent study by the Educational Policy Institute (EPI) and an ongoing program of research by James Rosenbaum and colleagues support her contention that community colleges ought to take cues from career colleges.

In my opinion, this talented reporter is jumping to conclusions.

Yes, the graduation rates at two-year for-profit colleges exceed those at two-year public colleges. No one disputes that. That does not necessarily mean, however, that career colleges are outperforming community...

(Guest blogger Karen Renner recently defended her dissertation at UConn and was an eyewitness at this year's MLA. If you missed it, be sure to read "MLA of the Dead, Part 1.")

The postage-paid cards fluttered down, and they went for them, whipping out ball-point pens and checking off ethnic identities and veteran and disability statuses. But what we didn't count on was how quickly they'd go looking for a mailbox to put them in. And that's when they saw us. There must have been something in our demeanor that made them think we were search-committee members. It was like they could smell our refusal to adjunct for $2,000 a semester without benefits, and they must have assumed that we had some hiring power. They descended upon us.

The first on...

A guest post by Henry Giroux
x-posted: truthout.org

In 1977 I took my first job in higher education at Boston University. One reason I went there was because Howard Zinn was teaching there at the time. As a high-school teacher, Howard's book, Vietnam: the Logic of Withdrawal, published in 1968, had a profound effect on me. Not only was it infused with a passion and sense of commitment that I admired as a high-school teacher and tried to internalize as part of my own pedagogy, but it captured something about the passion, sense of commitment and respect for solidarity that came out of Howard's working-class background. It offered me a language, history and politics that allowed me to engage critically and articulate my opposition to the war that was raging at the time.

I grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, and rarely met or read any working-class intellectuals. After reading James...

We've heard lots of talk about the revolutionary nature of Web 2.0, the conversion of whole populations from passive receivers of information (and propaganda) into active citizens and critical consumers and content-creators. Skeptics don't buy it, at least not all of it. I'd put the hype component at around 90 percent. But that does leave 10 percent of innovative, engaging, informative colloquy in the Web 2.0 universe, and readers of Brainstorm may find an example of it here at a site called "The Future of Education: Charting the Course of Teaching and Learning in a Networked World."

Among the features is a forum hosted by Steve Hargadon, and if you look at the line-up of guests he has in the coming weeks you'll see that it presents leading voices in various discussions and controversies over the Digital Age. The roster include James Paul Gee, Larry Johnson, Clay Shirky, and Dan Pink....

When I was at school, I remember one year when we were about 14 that our set book in English was Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man by Siegfried Sassoon. It is the story of a small boy living with his aunt who learns to ride and to hunt foxes. There are many humorous episodes including a wonderful cricket match. It ends with the hero joining the regiment and into the First World War. It is part of a trilogy on the War, the other two volumes being Memoirs of an Infantry Officer and Sherston's Progress.

It tells the story of an idyllic childhood that was to end with descent into the trenches, and perhaps it is because of that dreadful juxtaposition that that book has haunted me all of my life. There are events and facts that are as vivid now as they were back when I first read the book in the 1950s.  The aunt, for example, who could play Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, but only the first two...

The end of last year was a busy time for me as I waited out the birth of my daughter, who decided to spend an extra 10 days lounging in utero before emerging into the Wisconsin winter. I was so focused on strategies to promote her exit (sidenote: Talk about an area in need of better research -- given gobs of data on live births for hundreds of years, docs still refuse to hazard a prediction of labor occurring on any given night!), I virtually shut out the world of higher education policy. Imagine!

Thankfully, others were hard at work around and over the holidays, thinking about ways to make sure that the substantial, timely, and hard-won investment which will (fingers crossed) soon come to higher education via the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) are most effective. Evidence of that work is contained in a December Lumina Foundation memorandum to the U.S. Department of...

(Guest post by Karen Renner)

There were signs as far back as 2008. Every now and then, you'd find mysterious fragments of letters in the recycling bin. Position cancelled due to budgetary issues. But things didn't get ugly until Philly.

I had one interview on the 28th. The search committee thought my work on 19th-century board games like The Mansion of Happiness and The Checkered Game of Life would have wonderful applications in the classroom, but 45 minutes later, the only thing that had changed in my life was that I was $250 poorer and packing a perfectly useless syllabus.

I knew I should stick around, introduce myself to senior scholars in my field, schmooze an acquisitions editor or two, cruise an open cash-bar of some...

Howard Zinn, the Boston University historian and political activist, died Wednesday of a heart attack at age 87. The Chronicle will have more on Zinn soon. Meanwhile, below are a few videos from bigthink.com that give a sense of how Zinn wished to be remembered. And you might want to revisit Zinn's reaction in The Chronicle to 9/11 here as well as a 2003 review-essay on Zinn by James Green.

The newly-released Sloan Consortium Report on online higher education finds that the number of college students taking at least one online course increased from 3.9 million in Fall 2007 to 4.6 million in Fall 2008, a 17 percent jump. The overall number of college students grew 1.2 percent during the same time. In 2002, less than 10 percent of students were taking an online class. Today, more than 25 percent do.

The report didn't get a great deal of mainstream media attention, because the media has a terrible bias toward unpredictable short-term change. Coverage of the stock market is a perfect example. On any given day, nobody knows if the market will go up or down. So it's always treated as news, along with various vague and largely-fabricated explanations, e.g. "Investors reacted to uncertainty over XYZ Uncertain Thing today by buying and/or selling stocks and bonds. Back to you in...

Anna Deavere Smith describes her lifelong project as an attempt to theorize the links between language and identity. She came to this realization about the fundamental nature of her actorly goals while still studying her craft (several decades ago) at the American Conservatory Theater in San Francisco. Last night, Smith presented excerpts from her most recent one-woman show, Let Me Down Easy, at the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, and she tried to explain to a packed house just how her creative process works. 

For those who don't know Anna Deavere Smith, she is famous for what has been called "documentary theater," a genre that, for her, entails interviewing people from various walks of life (interviews usually organized around a particular theme or event) and staging those juxtaposed interviews as monologues in critical conversation with one...