writinginthewild.com

Elite colleges all allege to be global institutions, and many are known around the world. But it is simply untenable to claim global leadership in educating a planet of seven billion people when you hoard your educational offerings for a few thousand fortunates living together on a small patch of land.

“MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency”  Kevin Carey

It’s one more step in the evolution of the new decentralized education system: inexpensive credentials for MIT’s open courses. This is going to spread from school to school, in a kind of vanguard fashion, I imagine, until at some point someone will call for some sort of systemic standards. Once those standards are in place,  people  will be able to gather collections of these credentials as the  ad hoc equivalent of a college education.

At some point, someone will define how a particular collection of credentials makes up a college degree… We’ll have to figure out if a set of credentials collected online is in every case equal to, less than, or greater than, a  credential or set earned in a traditional classroom… Will a set of credentials gathered at several different places be seen as inherently more valuable than a set gathered at one place?

An Open Letter to Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum

As Catholic leaders who recognize that the moral scandals of racism and poverty remain a blemish on the American soul, we challenge our fellow Catholics Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum to stop perpetuating ugly racial stereotypes on the campaign trail. Mr. Gingrich has frequently attacked President Obama as a “food stamp president” and claimed that African Americans are content to collect welfare benefits rather than pursue employment. Campaigning in Iowa, Mr. Santorum remarked: “I don’t want to make black people’s lives better by giving them somebody else’s money.” Labeling our nation’s first African-American president with a title that evokes the past myth of “welfare queens” and inflaming other racist caricatures is irresponsible, immoral and unworthy of political leaders.

Some presidential candidates now courting “values voters” seem to have forgotten that defending human life and dignity does not stop with protecting the unborn. We remind Mr. Gingrich and Mr. Santorum that Catholic bishops describe racism as an “intrinsic evil” and consistently defend vital government programs such as food stamps and unemployment benefits that help struggling Americans. At a time when nearly 1 in 6 Americans live in poverty, charities and the free market alone can’t address the urgent needs of our most vulnerable neighbors. And while jobseekers outnumber job openings 4-to-1, suggesting that the unemployed would rather collect benefits than work is misleading and insulting.

As the South Carolina primary approaches, we urge Mr. Gingrich, Mr. Santorum and all presidential candidates to reject the politics of racial division, refrain from offensive rhetoric and unite behind an agenda that promotes racial and economic justice.

 

This needs to be more widely seen and discussed among educators, students, and teachers. In the next year, as the presidential election gets closer, the racist rhetoric is going to grow more insistent. Just last night, Santorum refused to correct a woman claiming that Obama was a “professed Muslim” and an illegitimate president, presumably because he is not a natural-born citizen.

Republican views on education are always bleakly simple: schools, from preschool to graduate, are potentially huge sources of revenue trapped in inefficient government agencies.  If you “free” the schools from these government controls, so the market ideology says, you cut inefficiencies and lower costs while improving quality.  History tells us that things are more complicated, but it’s not surprising to find Willard Romney promoting the company line (“Romney’s support for Full Sail University raises eyebrows in higher ed“).

Even nominal monopolies  like public schools face market pressures, as my Dad use to remind me, for labor and services. You can’t take any institution “out of capitalism.”  So the market shapes everything already. It’s not whether or not the  market economy shapes an institution, it’s always about  shaping  markets through our laws and regulations. In Finland, as has been said many times, education is effective because a market has been shaped that makes teaching a well paid, relatively high status profession.

It’s expensive and unnecessary to “privatize” the public school system to sharpen market forces; it’s more effective to make teaching professionally lucrative.  The privatization of the public schools should be stopped; we can use the money we save  to focus on increasing the competitiveness of teachers. Higher education is no different: we need to change the market so that teachers are well paid and high status professionals, honest competitors to lawyers and engineers. That will improve all schools, public as well as for-profit.