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Chronicle Reporter Wins Major Award for Investigative Journalism

March 8, 2011, 1:52 pm

Alex Richards, a reporter in The Chronicle’s data-research section, has been honored with the $25,000 Goldsmith Prize for Investigative Reporting for his work on a project on hospital care in Las Vegas that was published last year by the Las Vegas Sun, where he worked before joining The Chronicle. Mr. Richards shared the prize with Marshall Allen, a Sun colleague, in a ceremony on Monday at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government, whose Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics, and Public Policy selected their project over finalists from, among others, the Los Angeles Times, National Public Radio, and The Washington Post.

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  • chuckkle

    Which departments and programs are likely to be shortchanged by the new program?  Are others likely to gain?

  • chuckkle

    Have the faculty at feeder community colleges weighed in on this?

  • kmsailor

    There are two very important points that Mr. Wood does not make.  First, most issues with transfer of credits have had little to do with Gen Ed requirements.  Second, the vast majority of students do not graduates with “excess credits”.  The data reveal that a relatively small portion of students account for most of the “excess credits”.  The Pathways proposals do little to  address these problems.  For example, most professional programs at my college have entrance and progression requirements.  When students fail to maintain a minimum GPA they are dropped from these programs and the credits that they have earned do little to help them meet degree requirements when they switch majors.  Instead of empowering local administrators and faculty to solve these kinds of problems the Chancellory imposed the Pathways proposals.  Mr. Wood has hit the nail on the head- these proposals are an acknowledgement of defeat by the Chancellory. 

  • oaa80

    The City University of New York’s Pathways initiative upholds high standards across the university while helping students transfer and advance toward their degrees.The Chancellor of the City University of New York this month adopted the recommendation of a CUNY-wide Task Force for a rigorous common core (general education ) curriculum for all 19 undergraduate colleges of CUNY. The Task Force, comprised of 47 highly-respected faculty members from across the university, 4 students, and 4 campus-based administrators, designed this common core to ensure that all students are held to the same high standards, standards for what CUNY expects a CUNY graduate to know and to be able to do (see http://www1.cuny.edu/mu/academic-news/files/2011/12/CommonCoreStructureFinalRec.pdf for details on the new common core). The scope of what the Task Force said should be expected of CUNY students includes “well-rounded knowledge, a critical appreciation of diverse cultural and intellectual traditions, an interest in relating the past to the complex world in which they live today, and the ability to help society create a fresh and enlightened future.” As just one specific example, in one course in the common core, a student will “apply the scientific method to explore natural phenomena, including hypothesis development, observation, experimentation, measurement, data analysis, and data presentation,” among other learning goals. At the same time, the new common core allows each college to put its own particular stamp on general education. Each college can submit its choice of courses for the 30-credit common core, as long as those course are approved as satisfying the required learning outcomes for that part of the Common Core (a CUNY-wide committee of tenured faculty from every college will determine such approvals). In addition, the baccalaureate programs, which have rigorous admissions standards, have a further 12 credits of general education to develop at their choosing. This new common core is one piece of CUNY’s plan (the Pathways initiative) for enabling its students, including its transfer students, to graduate within the number of credits specified for their degrees (see http://www.cuny.edu/pathways). Currently, most CUNY baccalaureate graduates are transfer students, and within our single university, a great many of them are losing credits when they transfer among our colleges. This new general education framework (the 30-credit common core and the additional 12 credits for the baccalaureate programs) will replace the existing–very diverse–general education requirements at the undergraduate CUNY colleges. Further, the existing general education requirements for the baccalaureate programs have often approached, or even exceeded, 60 credits, such that, on top of a student’s major, students have had almost no room for electives–almost no room for intellectual exploration. CUNY is now moving forward with implementation of its new common core, building in systems of review and accountability to monitor and improve, on a continuing basis, what students learn and accomplish.William KellyPresident, The CUNY Graduate Center Michelle AndersonDean, CUNY Law School

  • CUNYProf

    It is self-evident that those faculty at senior (transfer receiving 4 year) colleges who demand that the state be willing to pay for credits beyond the minimum necessary – and, to be clear, we are talking about substantially more than one or two courses – have an economic interest in making such demands. What is not clear is that they have any particular justification in asserting that the transfer students are actually arriving with a substandard first two years of college.

    Rather than dealing with specific course deficiencies at particular community (CUNY 2 year) colleges, the senior college faculty would like students to arrive with their previous academic planning erased and their entire academic program refit into the senior college program, the way that transfers between entirely unrelated colleges may happen.  Even under these circumstances, the senior colleges may refuse to recognize credits for particular courses received at CUNY transfer sending campuses.

    This is not a situation that has developed in the last 4-5 years, it has gone on for decades despite extensive effort to solve it.

    The state has a legitimate interest in supplementing only the necessary credits for graduation. That interest should not be denigrated with the term “educrat.” When the state pays for excessive credits, actual money is denied for other programs, such as providing adequate education in high schools so that no one would need remediation post-secondary.

    It is, likewise, unrealistic to assert that anything like all 60 credits of the first two years of college should be directed by faculty volition.  Numerous faculty members themselves attended college in the 60s and 70s when such distributional credit requirements were much more likely to be in the neighborhood of 30-40 credits.  Even if the pathways program is created entirely for bad motives, the students will gain something by being liberated to pursue a more self-directed education.  Perhaps the senior colleges will have to have actual faculty advise students to help them select their more independent programs, rather than sloughing advisement off to relatively unqualified staff.

  • 3rdtyrant

    As money becomes paramount, more of these ill-conceived programs will be incubated, hatched, and nurtured, until they become great behemoths that either control or devour their parent institutions. Then, the lowest common denominator mentality that runs institutions where efficiency is the standard will ensure that academic rigor suffers, but enrollments stay high. Nice.

  • http://www.facebook.com/jtymony Jeff Tymony

    Now I think someone should learn this fact. The question remains who.

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