Category Archives: education

April 5, 2013, 11:48 am

Good News Friday: Teaching is FUNdamental

It’s rare that you hear anything good about educators nowadays. If they aren’t huddled in the closet boosting students’ standardized test scores with an eraser and a number 2 pencil, teachers are pulling the Miss Jean Brodie thing, being charging little kids with assault and battery, or being arrested themselves for organizing extended, unnatural nap times. Oh sure: every once in a while there’s a magazine feature about a hero teacher in a burned out district of a major American city who teaches sends former gang members on to MIT by running his advanced calculus class as a hip hop poetry jam, but the next day we are back to stories about middle school teachers who are so despised that their students conspired to poison them with hand sanitizer.

So imagine my surprise and…

January 27, 2013, 10:34 am

Want Helicopter Parents Gone? Teach Your Students To Fly

By Claire Potter

In today’s New York Times KJ Dell’Antonia weighs in on helicopter parenting, speculating that one outcome of articles like his is to give some parents the warm and fuzzies. After having read about how other people’s kids wander clueless through their educations, “most readers get to give themselves a pat on the back. They would never do such crazy stuff! Therefore, they are not helicopter parents. Case closed — off to drive the kid to hockey practice as soon as I pack up his bag.”

Dell’Antonia missed the second audience for this article. College teachers and university administrators will be re-posting it to Facebook, with hair-raising stories about the heli-relllies who have been camped out in the President’s waiting room, grimly awaiting action on last semester’s Epic Fail. Parents intervening on behalf of young people who have screwed up in some dismal way or another is a fact …

November 28, 2012, 5:00 pm

AFT Prez Randi Weingarten, Russian Prez Vladimir Putin — What’s the Difference?

By Claire Potter

Please to keep your clothes on, Arne. Photo Credit: Jacquelyn Martin, AP

Why should do-nuthin’ Secretary of Education Arne Duncan be the next Secretary of State? According to Thomas Friedman in today’s New York Times,

…anyone who has negotiated with the Chicago Teachers Union, as Duncan did when he was superintendent of the Chicago Public Schools before going to Washington, would find negotiating with the Russians and Chinese a day at the beach. A big part of being secretary of education (and secretary of state) is getting allies and adversaries to agree on things they normally wouldn’t — and making them think that it was all their idea. Trust me, if you can cut such deals with Randi Weingarten, who is president of the American Federation of Teachers, you can do them with Vladimir Putin and Bibi…

September 28, 2012, 2:48 pm

A Cheating Heart: There Are Reasons, But No Excuses

By Claire Potter

Did Bernie Madoff’ cheat on tests in high school?

I am in Ithaca for a conference honoring a distinguished scholar. This conference began — as many do — over an evening of drinks and informal chat as we awaited the proceedings that would commence today. After the usual introductions (this includes assurances that one has met before — which is likely among historians, even if neither of us is sure where we met) folks got down to the business of launching conversations and extracting wine from cunning banks of mechanical dispensers.

One topic was the prevalence of cheating among college students. Specifically we discussed this article in the New York Times (9/26/2012) in which students at Stuyvesant, a prestigious New York public high school, opened up to a reporter about how they cheat and why…

August 22, 2012, 1:52 pm

When An Evangelical Christian Candidate Sneezes, The GOP Catches A Cold

By Claire Potter

It’s not allergies — my fallopian tubes are spasming to prevent conception!

This is my hope, at least, following Representative Todd Akin’s (R-MO) recent explanation that women who have been “legitimately” raped don’t get pregnant, and hence have no need for abortions. These words prompted a call by GOP conservative kingmakers for Akin to voluntarily withdraw from a key race against Senator Claire McCaskill, which he has (rightly) refused to do.

What Akin actually said, according to a Sunday news interview transcribed by the WaPo, was this:

“From what I understand from doctors, that’s really rare,” Akin said. “If it’s a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down. But let’s assume that maybe that didn’t work or something, I think there should be some…

January 27, 2012, 12:18 pm

What a Real Education Policy Would Look Like

By Claire Potter

Photo Credit: Associated Press

I have repeatedly complained in this blog that the Obama administration has no education policy. Part of what is horrible about the Republican presidential field turning into a political version of the Human Centipede is that Barack Obama, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and the Democratic party will not be challenged on four years of education non-policy. They are operating under No Child Left Behind with a policy nip here and an administrative tuck there. And now they want to extend this non-policy to higher education. (more…)

January 16, 2012, 9:41 pm

Happy Birthday To You

By Claire Potter

I present to you the radicals without tenure:

Happy Birthday, Martin.

November 19, 2011, 12:09 pm

On the Nature of Change in Higher Ed (Part III): Assessing the Costs

By Claire Potter

Students at UC-Berkeley marching on behalf of public education last week. Photo credit: Judith C. Brown.

We return to guest blogger, historian and former Zenith provost Judith C. Brown. Her full biography and Part I of this series, which asks us to think about what modern higher education is, and can be viewed here. Part II, where she addressed the larger economic context for higher education, can be viewed here. In this concluding post, she responds to the question: “What is to be done?”

Many who are impatient with the slow pace of change in higher education see the key to success in Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring’s, The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out (2011). The authors’ main argument is that traditional colleges and (more…)

October 24, 2011, 10:48 am

How Does Occupy Wall Street Speak To A Broken Education System? A Manifesto

By Claire Potter

Today’s lesson is: thanks to the absence of leadership from the political class; the failure to nurture an empowering dialogue between high school and college teachers that might have a broad impact on education policy; the domination of university Boards of Trustees by the 1%; and Wall Street’s destructive attempts to transform education into a tradable commodity, educators are increasingly drawn to the Occupy Wall Street movement. There could not be more chaos in the education world than there is now. It is a world in which school reform = a takeover of public schools by profit seekers, or by philanthropies that funnel tax-free corporate profits into shaping the world that corporations want. Hence, contemporary activism creates an unprecedented opportunity for progressive change in education. Let us observe the impact that Occupy Wall Street is having on national political culture…

July 26, 2011, 6:33 pm

Who Needs A Faculty Advisor When You Can Have An Adaptive Advising Tool?

By Claire Potter

The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is giving Tennessee a $1 million grant to help college students take the most efficient steps to a degree. The grant will fund a new computerized advising program….The computer software looks at students’ transcripts and experience and suggests areas the student may be interested in – and the courses to take to follow that path. Joe White, Nashville Public Radio, July 26, 2011

When the neoliberal education professionals adjunctified higher education, I always wondered how they were going to solve the problem of not having full-time faculty available to actually meet with students. Now we know: getting a good grade in a course will be similar to clicking “Like” on Facebook; students can be advised by a computer to take other courses like that one. Thanks to the Gates Foundation, students at Austin Peay State University will also be…