What's News in Education

When they return to school next fall, Bowling Green State University students will have a new president.  Dr. Mary Ellen Mazey was chosen last week to be the BGSU’s 11^th president. 

Students say that being open to suggestions and opinions of university staff and students is a good quality for a leader to have.  According to a story on the BGSU website, after being chosen for the job, Mazey said, “the next few months will be a learning experience … the first thing that I’ll be doing is listening.”  Business major Nicole Neyer, 20, from Cincinnati, Ohio, said that by communicating with students and staff, Mazey will find out what the university needs, and be able to effectively make the university better.

Mazey has thirty years experience working in higher education, twenty-six of which were in Ohio.  Rachel Tobe, 20, a dietetics student from Fort Recovery, Ohio, said that because of her experience, Mazey “knows where education’s lacking, and knows the ultimate goals of education.”  She knows what it is like to run a university, and can find and fix faults in the system.  

In a Toledo Blade article, Mazey said she understands that one of her biggest challenges will be balancing the university’s budget.  She has experience dealing with cutbacks, including $100 million in cuts at her current institution.  At BGSU, one strategy Mazey will use is to find ways that BGSU can increase its own revenues.  “We’ll do everything we can to continue to build BGSU through these difficult times,” she said in the Blade article. “We can’t let [state cuts] stop us.”  Students said that this experience will help her to know what should or shouldn’t be cut.

Kaitlyn Pukansky, 18, an environmental science student from Colorado Springs, Colo., said if funding to student organizations is reduced, some groups will need to learn how to fundraise for themselves, but everyone will adapt to budget changes. 

Architecture major Elissa Barnes, 19, from Port Clinton, Ohio, says that even though everyone will not agree with Mazey’s decisions, she should do what she thinks is right, and be sure to listen to the other side’s opinions on budget issues. 

Several students were concerned that the budget reductions may lead to higher tuition rates.  One student said she wasn’t concerned about budget cuts “just as long as they don’t bother me.  And tuition doesn’t go up.”

The U.S. News & World Report is planning on assessing more than 1,000 teachers colleges, grading them A through F.  Many deans and schools are protesting this plan, saying that their methods are flawed and the scoring criteria is not clear.  The project, which will be completed next year, will cost $3.6 million and is being supported by education foundations such as the Carnegie Corporation and the Eli and Edythe Broad Foundation.

An editor of U.S. News, Brian Kelly, said “This is coming at a time when you have this tremendous national push for improvements in teacher quality: Who’s teaching the teachers?”  The National Council of Teacher Quality is in charge of this proposed grading of education colleges, and the main purpose of which is to “provide school districts and other education consumers with more information about the training teacher-candidates receive.”  As described on edweek.org , the council will rate teacher education programs on an A-F scale on up to 17 standards.  These include whether teacher candidates are well trained in the areas of teaching and math, the length and quality of their field experiences, and whether the program includes training on how to work with English-language learners.  In response to the criticisms, the council has put its scoring criteria on its website to be publicly accessible. 

According to another article from edweek.org  and NY Times, when the council first sent requests to education schools in January, at least two groups of deans objected with letters to U.S. News.  One dean wrote, “The data-collection process must itself be transparent and clear, the assessments must be reliable, and the presentation of findings must be honest and fair. Without these characteristics, the rating will be meaningless.”  The dean of the Steinhardt School of Education at New York University said, “Nobody’s against rankings, nobody’s against evaluation, nobody’s even against high-stakes evaluations. But if the methodology is flawed, how does that serve the public?”

In order to arrive at its ratings, the council will ask schools for detailed information about courses, textbooks, and admissions criteria.  Some objections follow that the review is too focused on teacher preparation programs, with not enough focus on measuring what graduating teacher candidates have learned and can do effectively in the classroom.   A representative group for the education schools made a statement that grading schools based on  course descriptions and textbooks  is like  “evaluating the quality of restaurants by only requesting that menus be mailed to the evaluator — without sampling the food or visiting the site.”

President of the council Kate Walsh said that “short of sitting in on a college’s classes for a year,” her evaluation methods are sound.  She explained “we’re asking folks to put that to the side and recognize what we all recognize, that there are many institutions in the U.S. not preparing teachers adequately, in addition to many doing a great job.”  She also said that rating education schools will provide valuable for  public schools for teacher recruitment. 

The Dean  of the education school at Rutgers University in New Jersey is still considering whether to take part in the review.   “It’s unfortunate that this can be painted as shying away from evaluation,” he said. “But that’s not what it’s really about. You have to have judgment criteria that are clear and evidence everyone can see.”

A student at the University of Colorado decided to make a point about how expensive college is by paying his $14,000 tuition in cash.  According to a story on  Salon.com,   after going to six banks, Nic Ramos walked in to pay his tuition with a 33 pound bag full of one dollar bills. He joked, “It’s not often you get to walk out of a bank with a suitcase full of cash.”  The university staff, who had to count the money, saw the humor in the end but asked him not pay in cash again. 

In an interview with CBS news, UC Regent Michael Carrigan said, “We know that tuition is expensive, but it’s an investment in one’s future.”  He explained that while tuition is expensive, the burden of the cost actually falls on the state.  The school has made extensive cuts, $50 million in the past few years.  Even so, the school had to raise tuition 5 percent last year, and predicts an increase of up to 9 percent this coming year.  “The state of Colorado needs to step up, because we are now 49^th in the nation for funding higher education” Carrigan continued.  “The more the legislature cuts, the more we have to turn to students and their families.” 

The student, Nic Ramos, explains more in his Skype video on CNN