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UNIVERSITY PROGRAMS THAT TRAIN TEACHERS GET MEDIOCRE MARKS
The vast majority of the 1,430 education programs that prepare the nation’s K-12 teachers are mediocre, according to a first-ever ranking that immediately touched off a firestorm. Released Tuesday by the National Council on Teacher Quality, a Washington-based advocacy group, the rankings are part of a $5 million project funded by major U.S. foundations. Education secretaries in 21 states have endorsed the report, but some universities and education experts quickly assailed the review as incomplete and inaccurate. The article is in The Washington Post.

LUMINA PRESIDENT ON INCREASING GRADUATION RATES
In February 2009, President Obama declared that “ ... by 2020, America will once again have the highest proportion of college graduates in the world.” Around the same time, Lumina Foundation released its first strategic plan in 2009 with the goal that 60% of Americans obtain a high-quality postsecondary degree or credential by 2025—a goal Lumina now calls Goal 2025. Expansion of undergraduate enrollments and the need to improve degree-completion rates—essential in both the Obama plan and Goal 2025—call for recasting the role of American colleges and universities and system-level change to improve student access and success in higher education. Lumina President Jamie Merisotis observes in the New England Journal of Higher Education that there are significant obstacles that stand in the way of these attainment efforts.

COMMUNITY COLLEGE COUNSELING GAINS
A new study provides evidence of slow and steady recognition that mental health services matter at two-year colleges. Data from the American College Counseling Association show that even as their enrollments have swelled, community college counseling centers continue to have proportionally fewer resources than do their counterparts at four-year institutions. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

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DUNCAN TO ALLOW WAIVER STATES FLEXIBILITY IN TEACHER EVALUATIONS
U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan will call today for a new process allowing states that have gotten waivers from parts of the Elementary and Secondary Education Act some flexibility in using student achievement to evaluate teachers, sources say. Teacher evaluation based in part on student outcomes (i.e. test scores) has been the most difficult piece of the waiver framework. And it's become even more complicated as states begin to embrace the Common Core State Standards, which mean new, higher expectations for students. The post is from Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog.

Will Teacher Value-Added Scores Change when Accountability Tests Change?

Please join us for the next webinar of the Carnegie Knowledge Network’s What We Know Series on Value-Added Methods and Applications.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013
1pm-2pm (Pacific)
Register Now »

Event Information
A teacher’s value-added can depend on the test used to assess student achievement. Questions about the effect of a test on a teacher’s value-added are particularly salient today because most states will soon adopt new tests aligned with the Common Core State Standards. In this webinar, Carnegie Panelist Daniel McCaffrey, Principal Research Scientist at Educational Testing Service, will review research that suggests that teachers should be prepared for greater year-to-year variability in their value-added ranking for a few years after the change when districts use both old and new tests for value-added calculations.

Your Host

• Christopher Thorn, Director of the Assessing-Teaching Improving-Learning Program

Who should attend?
Practitioners and policymakers who want to learn more about how current research can inform the design and implementation of educational evaluation systems.

Wednesday, August 14, 2013
1pm-2pm (Pacific)
Register Now »

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OUR SCHOOLS, CUT OFF FROM THE WEB
Ford Foundation President Luis A. Ubiñas writes in The New York Times: The factors that will drive our national future — educational achievement, a healthy population, broad political participation and economic opportunity for all — depend in significant ways on how we structure and manage our spreading digital frontier. About 19 million Americans still lack access to high-speed broadband; many more can’t afford it. Virtually all of America’s schools are connected to the Internet today. But that success is a lot like trumpeting, a century ago, that virtually every town in the country was reachable by road. Then, as now, the question is quality. Children who go to school in poor neighborhoods are connected to the Web at speeds so slow as to render most educational Web sites unusable. The exploding world of free online courses from great academies is closed to those who lack a digital pathway.

MARYLAND APPROVES TEACHER, PRINCIPAL EVALUATION PLANS
The Maryland education department has approved 21 out of 22 teacher and principal evaluation plans that are required to take effect for the 2013-14 school year. The state asked districts to ensure that the Maryland School Assessment comprised 20% of the measure for evaluating teachers. Districts had to have new teacher evaluation systems in place to comply with the states' Race to the Top grant. The article is from the Washington Post.

ARE MARYLAND’S TEACHER EVALUATION DEALS A HOAX?
Maryland may have announced new teacher evaluation deals with districts on June 13, but the key parties involved can't even agree on what they mean. On June 13, the Maryland State Department of Education announced that it had reached agreements regarding teacher evaluations with 21 of the 22 county school districts in the state that needed to submit acceptable deals by June 7 (just a few signatures were needed to approve the pending deal in Baltimore city). But that word "agreements" could end up meaning very little to nothing at all, especially after the 2013-14 school year. The post is from Education Week’s State Ed Watch blog.

FUNDING FOR COMMON CORE IMPLEMENTATION ENDS WITH GOV. SNYDER’S SIGNATURE
Michigan joined Indiana as the only other state to halt implementing the Common Core standards after Gov. Rick Snyder signed the state's budget. The House Speaker said lawmakers will revisit the standards in the fall. Both houses of the legislature voted to prohibit any spending on implementing the standards or the related assessments without prior legislative authorization. The post is from Mlive.com.

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CREDIT CREEP
Few community college students graduate on time. One reason many spend extra time and money trying to earn associate degrees is because community colleges often require more than 60 credits to meet academic program requirements. Most four-year institutions now stick to the standard of 120 credit hours, according to a study conducted last year for Complete College America. But community colleges are a different story. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

WHY WE FEAR MOOCS
Regent University Professor Mary Manjikian writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education’s The Conversation blog: As hybrids, MOOCs defy easy categorization and threaten to upset the tidy categories we have for judging who is and is not college-educated. Like monsters, MOOCs threaten to disrupt our social world and bring chaos in their wake. Our most basic understanding of the college experience used to be twofold: It occurs during a finite period of time, and in a fixed place known as a campus. Those two assumptions have taken on the status of  “social facts,” in the words of Émile Durkheim. Both of those ideas are so much a part of our culture that we often do not even notice them or think to question them.

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STUDY LOOKS AT VALUE OF TECHNOLOGY IN SCHOOLS
With school districts rushing to buy computers, tablets, digital white boards and other technology, a new report questions whether the investment is worth it. In a review of student survey data conducted in conjunction with the federal exams known as the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the nonprofit Center for American Progress found that middle school math students more commonly used computers for basic drills and practice than to develop sophisticated skills. The report also found that no state was collecting data to evaluate whether technology investments were actually improving student achievement. The article is in The New York Times.

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CLINTON PROJECT PROMOTES ‘OPEN BADGES’
Working with Mozilla, the MacArthur Foundation and a consortium interested in virtual learning, former President Bill Clinton announced a project on Thursday to expand the use of Open Badges — online credentials that employers or universities can use in hiring, admissions, promotions or awarding credit. The badges serve as credentials that can help self-taught computer programmers, veterans returning to civilian life and others show skills they learned outside a classroom. The article is The New York Times.

NO LOVE FOR ACCREDITATION
WASHINGTON -- To hear members of Congress tell it, reauthorizing the Higher Education Act is looming on the near horizon of the legislative agenda -- even though most others here consider it a mirage that’s still years away. But when lawmakers do sit down to rewrite the law governing financial aid programs, accreditation will be under a particularly harsh spotlight. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

CHAOTIC ENROLLMENT PATTERNS AT COMMUNITY COLLEGES
Students at two-year institutions display "astounding variation" in their patterns of enrollment, according to a new study by the Community College Research Center at Columbia University's Teachers College. The research, which tracked more than 14,000 students at five community colleges over 18 semesters, showed that students often switch back and forth between full- and part-time status. They also regularly spent time away from being enrolled. Continuous enrollment was particularly linked to earning an associate degree, according to the research, while full-time enrollment was associated with transfer to four-year institutions. This information is from Inside Higher Ed’s Quick Takes.

BROWN RETREATS FROM CONDITIONS ON UNIVERSITY FUNDING
SACRAMENTO — Gov. Jerry Brown has backed off his proposal to tie some money for California's public universities to such requirements as improving graduation rates, enrolling more low-income students and freezing tuition for four years. University of California and California State University officials fought Brown's carrot-and-stick approach to higher education, which the governor had embedded in his budget plan. The article is in the L.A. Times.

RACE VS. CLASS
The Supreme Court has not yet announced its decision in the landmark case of Fisher v. University of Texas; that ruling is expected any day now. But an alarming number of scholars, pundits and columnists — many of them liberal — have declared that economic class, not race, should be the appropriate focus of university affirmative-action efforts. The commentary is in The New York Times.

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PREPARING INCOMING TEACHERS FOR ASSESSMENT
Teaching is the hardest job on the planet. It requires deep content knowledge, an understanding of how kids learn, a skill in connecting to students as human beings, and patience for the often inane demands of the profession. No matter how good a teacher-preparation program is (or how bad for that matter), beginning teachers always have a learning curve as they face the realities of the day-to-day demands. Through my own work in professional development, focused on supporting the use of data to help kids learn, it is clear to me that there is a growing need to introduce assessment literacy in preservice programs. The commentary, by Anne Udall, vice president of professional development at the Northwest Evaluation Association, in Portland, Ore., is in Education Week.

QUESTIONS ARISE ABOUT NEED FOR ALGEBRA 2 FOR ALL
Should all students take Algebra 2? Florida and Texas seemed to say "no" with the passage of legislation that backs away from Algebra 2 for all. But other states have moved in the opposite direction. Those steps come as the Common Core standards set the expectation that all students should meet learning objectives at what's generally considered the Algebra 2 level. The article is in Education Week.

OVERHAUL OF NO CHILD LEFT BEHIND BILL PASSES SENATE COMMITTEE
A lengthy overhaul of the No Child Left Behind Act passed through a Senate education committee Wednesday, with senators voting 10-12 along party lines. The "Strengthening America's Schools Act" is an over 1,000-page bill authored by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), who chairs the Health, Education, Labor & Pensions Committee. It rolls back some of the more stringent aspects of the No Child Left Behind Act, but keeps in place the requirement that states set and report performance targets for their students. Senators sparred over the federal government's role in education when considering the overhaul, with Republicans calling Harkin's bill a federal overreach. The article is in the Huffington Post.

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MIND THE GAP
The percentage of adults who will hold a college degree in 2025 is projected to hit 48 percent, far short of what is needed to reach the Lumina Foundation's 60 percent goal for degree- and certificate-holders. So to stay on track to achieve that “big goal,” the foundation today announced a set of 10 incremental targets to hit by 2016. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

DATA REVEAL A RISE IN COLLEGE DEGREES BY AMERICANS
WASHINGTON — The number of Americans graduating from college has surged in recent years, sending the share with a college degree to a new high, federal data shows.  The surge follows more than two decades of slow growth in college completion, which caused the United States to fall behind other countries and led politicians from both parties, including President Obama, to raise alarms.  Last year, 33.5 percent of Americans ages 25 to 29 had at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 24.7 percent in 1995, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In 1975, the share was 21.9 percent. The number of two-year college degrees, master’s degrees and doctorates has also risen recently.  The article is in The New York Times.

AAUP SEES MOOCS AS THREAT TO PROFESSORS’ INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY
Colleges broadly threaten faculty members' copyrights and academic freedom in claiming ownership of the massive open online courses their instructors have developed, Cary Nelson, a former president of the American Association of University Professors, argued here on Wednesday at the group's annual conference. In the meeting's opening address, Mr. Nelson characterized the debate at colleges over who owns the rights to faculty members' MOOCs as part of a broader battle over intellectual property that's being waged on America's campuses. At stake, he said, is not just the ability of faculty members to profit from their own writings or inventions, but the future of their profession. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

MUCH ADO ABOUT MOOCS
Carnegie Board member and Stanford University professor Rob Reich writes in the Boston Review: The backlash against MOOCs and online learning in higher education has begun. Philosophers at San Jose State University recently wrote an open letter to Harvard’s Michael Sandel, explaining why they were declining to support the use of his acclaimed class, Justice, in an online format provided by edX, an online course platform created jointly by Harvard and MIT. “There is no pedagogical problem in our department that JusticeX solves,” they wrote. Moving beyond Sandel’s class to MOOCs of all kinds, they broadly rejected “products that will replace professors, dismantle departments, and provide a diminished education for students in public universities.” The letter is an exceptional document, articulating with welcome clarity several distinct objections and concerns. In considering the future of higher education in an era of MOOCs and the expansion of online learning, these objections and concerns are worthy of widespread attention and debate.

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IN COUNTER TO ‘JOYLESS SCHOOLS,’ COALITION DEMANDS SUPPORTS-BASED REFORMS
A group of 46 educators and policy advocates who are pushing what they call a more-progressive education agenda ramped up their call for "supports-based reform" by issuing a declaration to "rebuild America." They decried the current state of the standards-based movement, particularly the emphasis on high-stakes testing, and said "this approach—along with years of drastic financial cutbacks—are turning public schools into uncreative, joyless institutions." The post is from Education Week’s Politics K-12 blog.

DUNCAN ANNOUNCES HIGH SCHOOL REDESIGN PROGRAM
Positive changes may be on the horizon for public schools. As the 2012-13 school year winds down, President Obama and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan are delivering news about changes to schools around the United States. Take Part writer Vanessa Romo reports that President Obama recently kicked off the start ConnectED, a program that gives all US public schools access to high-speed Internet. Now Duncan has announced a $300 million competitive grant program called High School Redesign that would invest in programs to advance career and technical education. The Redesign program intends to build a solid foundation of strong academics and instructional practices that better connect students’ education to the real world. The article is from EducationNews.org.

STATES SEEK FLEXIBILITY DURING COMMON-TEST TRANSITION
With the debut of Common Core assessments less than two years away, states, and districts are worried about the accountability systems that hinge on those tests. A growing chorus of policy groups is urging more flexibility in how states evaluate teachers, label schools, and enforce other high-stakes consequences during what's likely to be a messy transition. The article is in Education Week.

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IS GOING TO COLLEGE STILL WORTH IT IF YOU DROP OUT?
It's not just that dropouts earn more than workers who halted their educations after high school or are a bit more likely to have a job (both are true). It's that, once you factor in all the costs of going to school such as tuition and the years of foregone wages, attending and dropping out is still a profitable choice. The article is in The Atlantic.

P0LL: MOST AMERICANS OPPOSE USE OF RACE IN ADMISSIONS
A large majority of Americans -- 76 percent -- oppose the consideration of race in college admissions decisions, according to a new Washington Post-ABC poll, issued with the Supreme Court about to rule on the issue. Democrats were more likely than Republicans to favor the consideration of race, 28 percent to 12 percent. Among racial and ethnic groups, the highest level of support for consideration of race was by Hispanics (29 percent). By educational attainment, those with some postgraduate education were more likely than those with other levels to favor the consideration of race (28 percent).The information is from Inside Higher Ed’s Quick Takes.

WHY ARE AMERICAN WOMEN MAKING EDUCATION GAINS AND MEN AREN’T?
Despite rising college costs and the many other challenges facing America's schools, women have made extraordinary strides in education. They have overtaken men in high school and college completion in the last few decades, earning 58% of bachelor's degrees and 62% of postsecondary occupational certificates. The commentary is in the L.A. Times.

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RACE IS ON TO READY TEACHER EVALUATIONS IN NEW YORK CITY
Administrators and teachers in New York City have just three months to adapt before the expectations of a new teacher-evaluation system kick in. State Commissioner of Education John B. King outlined the system's criteria in an arbitration ruling issued last week, putting an end to years of bitter disagreement between city school officials and the local teachers' union. Now comes the hard part. While a small fraction of the teaching force has had training in some elements through pilot programs in place for several years, the final system demands execution on a far larger scale. When it rolls out in August, it will probably be the country's largest revamped evaluation system, used for 75,000 teachers. The article is in Education Week.

NEW DENVER PUBLIC SCHOOLS REMEDIAL CLASSES AIMED AT COLLEGE SUCCESS
Denver Public Schools will offer free remedial math and English classes this summer in response to a higher education department's report, which shows that more than 60% of graduates need college remediation. A student who gets a C or higher would not have to take the course in college under an agreement with Colorado universities. The classes will be offered during the school year in 2013-14. The article is in the Denver Post.

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ACCREDITOR CONSIDERS NEW STANDARDS FOR TEACHER-TRAINING PROGRAMS
Teacher-training colleges, which have come under fire from the Obama administration, are facing new scrutiny—this time, from their accreditor. On Tuesday, a little over a year after negotiations over setting new federal rules for teacher-preparation programs ended at an impasse, a commission of the Council for the Accreditation of Educator Preparation will vote on a set of new accrediting standards that mirror several of the administration's proposals. If enacted, the new accrediting standards would require programs to tighten their admissions criteria and to prove that their graduates are contributing to the academic growth of the students they teach. The article is in The Chronicle of Higher Education.

NEW RESEARCH EFFORTS AIM TO MEASURE EFFECTIVENESS OF MOOCS
As more and more colleges experiment with massive open online courses, or MOOCs, a new project hopes to cut through the hype and gauge the effectiveness of the courses. The MOOC Research Initiative, financed by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, will award grants of $10,000 to $25,000 to researchers seeking to explore issues such as student experiences in MOOCs and the free courses’ systemic impact. The post is from The Chronicle of Higher Education’s Wired Campus blog.

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RIVAL PROPOSALS SHOW NO CLEAR PATH TO ESEA REWRITE
Lawmakers in Congress introduced three separate pieces of legislation last week to rewrite the long-stalled Elementary and Secondary Education Act—but none of the measures has bipartisan backing, meaning that there will almost certainly not be a reauthorization this year. All three bills—like the administration's series of waivers under the No Child Left Behind Act—would move away from "adequate yearly progress," the key yardstick at the center of the 11-year-old federal school accountability law. But the similarities largely end there. The article is in Education Week.

GROUPING STUDENTS BY ABILITY REGAINS FAVOR IN CLASSROOM
It was once common for elementary-school teachers to arrange their classrooms by ability, placing the highest-achieving students in one cluster, the lowest in another. But ability grouping and its close cousin, tracking, in which children take different classes based on their proficiency levels, fell out of favor in the late 1980s and the 1990s as critics charged that they perpetuated inequality by trapping poor and minority students in low-level groups. Now ability grouping has re-emerged in classrooms all over the country — a trend that has surprised education experts who believed the outcry had all but ended its use. The article is from The New York Times.

GATES FOUNDATION WANTS TO WORK MORE CLOSELY WITH TEACHERS
Five years into the second phase of its mission to overhaul America’s public schools, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is moving to work more closely with teachers, generating interest but also wariness because of past hostilities. Though widely viewed as a critic of teachers and their unions, the world’s largest foundation has begun reaching out to them in new ways, sending the message it wants to be their friend — and their champion. The article is in the Seattle Times.

DROP-OUT RECOVERY EFFORTS DRAW NEW ATTENTION
Fueled by billions of dollars in government and foundation funding and adopted as a cause célèbre by no less than Bill Gates and Colin and Alma Powell, dropout prevention has been gaining momentum. But educators and researchers who work with at-risk students say there is no way to really achieve the Graduation Nation goal of a 90 percent graduation rate by 2020 without taking time to find, bring back, and keep the students who have already fallen through the cracks, at a rate of roughly 1 million every year. The article is in Education Week.

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AFFIRMATIVE REACTION
Bill Keller writes in The New York Times: In the coming days the Supreme Court is expected to rule on a case that could further restrict the use of race as a factor in college admissions. A white student denied a place at the University of Texas at Austin claims that although Texas uses race sparingly in its college admissions, the state is still cheating white students and violating the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment. The betting among court watchers is that the verdict will be another setback for racial affirmative action. As a supporter of diversity, I wonder: could that be a blessing in disguise?

TEACHERS’ TEACHERS FACE TEST AS SCRUTINY RISES
Scores of teacher-training programs across the country will likely face scrutiny in the coming years. Following the lead of Tennessee and Louisiana, policymakers in a growing number of states are evaluating the programs — and even issuing report cards for them — based on the test scores of their graduates’ students. So far, eight states have policies requiring them to do a similar analysis, most of them adopted in the last few years, according to the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a research and advocacy group that supports higher standards for schools of education. The article is from the Hechinger Report.

ONLINE EDUCATION BILL CLEARS CALIFORNIA SENATE
A controversial California proposal to expand the state public colleges' use of online education has passed the Senate, though it's been amended again. Early versions of the bill would have required the state’s 145 public colleges and universities to grant credit for low-cost online courses offered by outside groups, including classes offered by for-profit companies. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

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THE SPLIT BETWEEN THE STATES
On Medicaid, education and many other issues, the map of the United States is becoming a patchwork of conscience and callousness. People on one side of a state line have access to health care, strong public schools and colleges, and good transportation systems, while those on the other side do not. The breakdown of a sense of national unity in Washington is now reflected across the country, as more than two dozen states begin to abandon traditions of responsible government. The editorial is in The New York Times.

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ACCREDITATION FAST TRACK?
WASHINGTON -- A proposal is circulating quietly on Capitol Hill to ask accreditors to create a new, more flexible form of approval for new and nontraditional providers of higher education. The measure, a slight 37 words, contains few details about the new system it envisions. Its odds are long; so far, no lawmakers have volunteered to sponsor it. Still, the proposal represents a shot across the bow at the traditional system of higher education accreditation, which has been under increasing pressure since the second half of the Bush administration. Margaret Spellings, the former education secretary, tried to take on the system through tighter scrutiny and new regulations, but met opposition in Congress. The article is in Inside Higher Ed.

THE DECEPTIVE DATA ON ASIANS
It is time to disaggregate data about Asian-American students as much as possible, says a report, issued Thursday by the Educational Testing Service and the National Commission on Asian-American and Pacific Islander Research in Education. The failure of most schools and colleges to do so has resulted in key problems facing Asian-American groups being "overlooked and misunderstood," said Robert T. Teranishi, associate professor of higher education at New York University and principal investigator for the report, during a news briefing. Aggregated data "conceals significant disparities," Teranishi said.

THE CHANGING FACE OF HIGHER EDUCATION
Two historic pieces of federal legislation, the original G.I. Bill and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, transformed America by helping hundreds of thousands of Americans to earn postsecondary degrees, and dramatically expand the middle class. Now again, we are faced with demographic shifts will transform our country and our education system. Growth in the Hispanic/Latino population leads the way. The post is in The  Hill’s Congress Blog.

CALIFORNIA RESIDENTS SAY TUITION UNAFFORDABLE
A majority of California residents say public university tuition is unaffordable, but would prefer to keep the schools top-notch instead of making them cheaper, according to a poll released Thursday. The University of Southern California Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences/Los Angeles Times poll found that 56 percent believe public university tuition is unaffordable in California. But 46 percent said maintaining excellence was more important than lowering tuition. Thirty-six percent said affordability was more import than quality. The article is in the Huffington Post.

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PROMOTING DATA IN THE CLASSROOM
The No Child Left Behind Act launched a decade of development in state educational data systems, and since its passage, states and school districts have produced reams of student achievement data each year. However, unless teachers are able to capture those and other data and utilize them in the classroom to ensure each student’s needs are met, they are of little value to school officials or students. A recently released report from the New America Foundation offers federal policymakers a view into two states’ federally funded efforts to implement data systems that work for teachers. It also provides states with a glimpse of the challenges and successes each state reached throughout the implementation of their projects, and explores the federal policy implications of each project.

OBAMA ANNOUNCES INTERNET PLAN FOR ALL SCHOOLS
President Barack Obama announces a plan to enhance Internet speed in America's schools while creating jobs in the process. Obama unveiled the plan at Mooresville Middle School in North Carolina Thursday. The piece ran on NBC News.

HOUSE REPUBLICAN INTRODUCES EDUCATION BILL
Staking a claim in the debate over how the federal government should direct public schooling, Representative John Kline, chairman of the House Education Committee, introduced legislation on Thursday to replace the decade-old No Child Left Behind federal education law. The article is in The New York Times.

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NATION’S GRADUATION RATE NEARS A MILESTONE
At the beginning of the last decade, before concerns about the nation's graduation rate ascended to prominence on the policy agenda, only about two-thirds of U.S. public school students were finishing high school with a regular diploma. A new analysis from the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center finds that the graduation rate for America's public schools stands just shy of 75 percent for the class of 2010, the most recent year for which data are available. The article is in Education Week.

G.O.P. BILL ON SCHOOLS WOULD SET FEWER RULES
Signaling a preference for a much smaller role for the federal government in public schooling, Senator Lamar Alexander, Republican of Tennessee, is introducing legislation on Thursday to revise No Child Left Behind, the Bush-era education law. Coming two days after Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa and chairman of the Senate education committee, released a 1,150-page education bill, the bill by Mr. Alexander, who is the ranking Republican on the committee, will compete with it. T  he article is in The New York Times.

POSTPONING ‘STAKES’ FOR COMMON CORE WON’T WORK
Postponing high stakes for the common-core assessments would delay important progress, writes Alice Johnson Cain of Teach Plus in Education Week.“The common core is not just another reform; it is truly a revolutionary development. But it is also a package deal in which next-generation assessments will inform and improve instruction in ways that make far more sense to teachers than the current "bubble tests" that are often disconnected from what they teach and what their students need,” she writes. “The common core defines critical, real-world understandings that students need for success in college and career, broken down by grade level.”

BETTER TEACHERS FOR NEW YORK CITY
The new teacher evaluation system that the New York State education commissioner, John King Jr., has imposed on New York City represents an important and necessary step toward carrying out the rigorous new Common Core education reforms. These reforms, which set learning benchmarks, have been adopted by 45 states, and it is essential that teachers be good enough to meet them. The new evaluation system could make it easier to fire markedly poor performers. But the most important task at hand is helping the great majority of teachers become better at their jobs. The editorial is in The New York Times.

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THE POST-SECONDARY EDUCATION CONUNDRUM
Postsecondary education in the United States faces a conundrum: Can we preserve access, help students learn more and finish their degrees sooner and more often, and keep college affordable for families, all at the same time? And can the higher education reforms currently most in vogue—expanding the use of technology and making colleges more accountable—help us do these things? The article is from the Brookings Institution.

STUDY SEES IMPACT OF COACH-STYLE COLLEGE COUNSELING
Using a coaching-style of college counseling -- in which the advisors work intensely with high school students to help them navigate the application process -- can result in more students opting for four-year colleges rather than two-year colleges, a new study in the journal Educational Evaluation and Policy Analysis has found. The study was based on students in the Chicago Public Schools. The information is from Inside Higher Ed’s Quick Takes.

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ACADEMICS NOT ONLY FACTOR IN STUDENT SUCCESS
Predicting just who will go to and finish college can be tricky. A new report from ACT Inc. underscores that while academic readiness is important, it is not the sole factor at play in college success. About 19 percent of high school graduates in 2011 who took the ACT and were considered college-ready in at least three of the four subject areas never enrolled or didn't return for a second year, the Reality of College Readiness 2013 report released today reveals. The post if from Education Week’s College Bound blog.

WORK READINESS SKILLS NOT WELL DOCUMENTED
A new release from ACT ventures into territory that is largely uncharted: postsecondary work readiness standards and benchmarks. While many now have a grip on what college readiness looks like, comparable standards for work readiness-the skills involved in workplace success-are less well understood. According to the author, work readiness skills are foundational and occupation specific, vary in importance and level for different occupations, and depend on the critical tasks identified via a job analysis or an occupational profile. Examples of skills required for accountants and welders are profiled. This information is from Education Commission of the States.

WHO’S OUR COMPETITION?
Matt Reed writes in Inside Higher Ed’s Confessions of a Community College Dean blog: Community colleges are now seeing possible competition from new corners. MOOCs are still in their infancy, but are already making a mark.  If they can solve the “business model” issue, they could become formidable.  (Alternately, they may simply become variations on Open Educational Resource providers for traditional colleges as a way to ensure their survival.)  Western Governors University is experimenting with competency-based credits, and SNHU’s College for America has gone all-in with competencies.  (So far, enrollment is mostly employer-based, but that’s not necessarily intrinsic to the model.)  Credit for Prior Learning is gaining steam, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see it take off in the next few years, particularly for working adults.

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BILL TO ALTER BUSH-ERA EDUCATION LAW GIVES STATES MORE ROOM
Renewing the effort to revise No Child Left Behind, the signature Bush-era federal education law, Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, introduced a new version on Tuesday that he said would “replace the failed tenets” of the law. Less than two years after Congress last tried to update the law, which governs public schools that receive federal money to support the country’s most disadvantaged students, Mr. Harkin, chairman of the Senate education committee, opened what is likely to be a fierce debate over the proper role of the federal government in public education. The article is in The New York Times.

SOME EDUCATION REFORMS TO BE PHASED IN
The Connecticut House give final passage to a bill which allows districts to move a little slower in implementing two elements of the 2012 education reforms pushed by Gov. Dannel P. Malloy. The bill gives districts the flexibility to roll out the new teacher evaluation process over two years instead of one and delays programs to address the high rate of elementary students struggling to read. The article is in the Connecticut Mirror.

NEW DIRECTIONS INTERVIEWS CARNEGIE PRESIDENT
The convergence of forces driving change in higher education is transforming the academic enterprise—reinventing what a university is, what a course is, what a student is and what the value of higher education is.One significant sign of change could be the end of the credit hour—higher education's prevailing unit of measure. This century-old, time-based reference for measuring educational attainment used by American universities and colleges is under serious scrutiny by its creator, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching.In this first installment of a new series, Philip DiSalvio, dean of the College of Advancing & Professional Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston, speaks with Anthony Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation about the foundation’s efforts to study alternatives to the current system and the possibility of recommending revisions to the credit hour. The interview is in The New England Journal of Higher Education.

MIKE SMITH AND DAVID COHEN NAMED TO AMERICAN ACADEMY OF ARTS AND SCIENCES
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Some of the world's most accomplished leaders from academia, business, public affairs, the humanities, and the arts have been elected members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among those elected this year is Marshall (Mike) S. Smith, Senior Fellow, Education Policy at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and David Cohen, a Carnegie Board member and John Dewey Collegiate Professor of Education, Professor of Education Policy, Professor of Public Policy, University of Michigan.

One of the nation’s most prestigious honorary societies, the Academy is also a leading center for independent policy research. Members contribute to Academy publications and studies of science and technology policy, energy and global security, social policy and American institutions, and the humanities, arts, and education.

“Election to the Academy honors individual accomplishment and calls upon members to serve the public good,” said Academy President Leslie C. Berlowitz. “We look forward to drawing on the knowledge and expertise of these distinguished men and women to advance solutions to the pressing policy challenges of the day.”

Members of the 2013 class include winners of the Nobel Prize; National Medal of Science; the Lasker Award; the Pulitzer and the Shaw prizes; the Fields Medal; MacArthur and Guggenheim fellowships; the Kennedy Center Honors; and Grammy, Emmy, Academy, and Tony awards. Carnegie President Anthony Bryk was a member of the 2011 class.

TEACHERS: WILL WE EVER LEARN?
Jal Mehta from the Harvard Graduate School of Education writes in The New York Times: We let doctors operate, pilots fly, and engineers build because their fields have developed effective ways of certifying that they can do these things. Teaching, on the whole, lacks this specialized knowledge base; teachers teach based mostly on what they have picked up from experience and from their colleagues. Anthony S. Bryk, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, has estimated that other fields spend 5 percent to 15 percent of their budgets on research and development, while in education, it is around 0.25 percent. Education-school researchers publish for fellow academics; teachers develop practical knowledge but do not evaluate or share it; commercial curriculum designers make what districts and states will buy, with little regard for quality. We most likely will need the creation of new institutions — an educational equivalent of the National Institutes of Health, the main funder of biomedical research in America — if we are to make serious headway.

A number of business schools are beginning to experiment with something that might have been considered sacrilege a few years ago: incorporating the liberal arts—literature, history, science, and philosophy—into the business curriculum. The movement to incorporate the liberal arts into business education got a big push two years ago with the publication of the Carnegie Foundation’s Rethinking Undergraduate Business Education: Liberal Learning for the Profession, by Anne Colby, Thomas Ehrlich, William Sullivan, and Jonathan Dolle. The book reported on a Carnegie Foundation study that found most business programs rarely challenge students’ assumptions, ask them to think creatively, or understand the broader context of business. “Students believe history started yesterday afternoon at 3 p.m. and can’t imagine life without computers or automobiles,” Ehrlich says. “But undergraduate business is supposed to give a much broader sense of the landscape of which business is a part. That’s why it’s so important that liberal learning and business be integrated.”

Read the article in Bloomberg BusinessWeek »

The second Carnegie Pathways National Forum will be held at the Chaminade Resort in Santa Cruz, Calif., July 18-21. Beginning this year, the Forum is open to the public.

It was originally designed for members of Carnegie’s Networked Improvement Communities (NICs). However, as this work has developed, Carnegie wants to engage others who are interested or involved in addressing the alarming failure rate of students in developmental mathematics in colleges and universities. Mathematics faculty members, counselors, and student advisors, researchers, college and university provosts and deans, policy makers, funders of education, would be among those who might benefit from joining Carnegie at this year’s event.

The Carnegie Community Pathways program embarked on a bold initiative, beginning in July 2010, forming a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) of 27 community colleges and three major universities, to tackle the developmental mathematics problem facing higher education.  Since then, mathematics curricula have been re-conceptualized, a new pedagogy has been designed, and effective strategies for student persistence have been tested and implemented — all grounded in cognitive, pedagogical, and psychological research. In addition, improvement science principles are being used to address what works with efficacy and at scale. 

The event includes:

• Information about how the network has evolved and how to join Carnegie’s efforts to reclaim students' mathematical lives.
• A Productive Persistence track where you will hear new developments and promising theories about mindfully improving students' tenacity and good strategies.

Keynote Speaker

Sian Beilock is a leading expert on cognitive science and the author of Choke: What Secrets of the Brain Reveal About Getting It Right When You Have To. Dr. Beilock reveals in Choke the astonishing new science of why we often blunder when stakes are high. What happens in our brain and body when we or our students experience the dreaded performance anxiety. And what we are doing differently when everything magically clicks into place and the tricky test problem, large presentation or perfect golf swing becomes easy?

• An Advancing Quality Teaching track where you will learn about improvement tools to test classroom practices, routines, and curricular changes to see whether they are making a positive difference.

Keynote Speaker

Deborah Loewenberg Ball is the William H. Payne Collegiate Professor in education at the University of Michigan, and an Arthur F. Thurnau Professor. She currently serves as dean of the School of Education and as director of a new organization called TeachingWorks. She taught elementary school for more than 15 years, and continues to teach mathematics to elementary students every summer. Ball’s research focuses on the practice of mathematics instruction, and on the improvement of teacher training and development. She is an expert on teacher education, with a particular interest in how professional training and experience combine to equip beginning teachers with the skills and knowledge needed for responsible practice. Ball has served on several national and international commissions and panels focused on policy initiatives and the improvement of education, including the National Mathematics Advisory Panel (appointed by President George W. Bush) and the National Board for Education Sciences (appointed by President Barack Obama).

Join Us

Visit the Pathways National Forum website for more information and to learn how to register: http://www.carnegiepathwaysforum.org

WHAT ARE FOUNDATIONS FOR?
Carnegie Board member and Stanford University political science professor Rob Reich writes in an essay in the Boston Review: Foundations are often black boxes, stewarding and distributing private assets for public purposes, as defined by the donor. And that donor’s intent may hold sway forever. Foundations are legally designed to enshrine the donor’s wishes in perpetuity, allowing the donor’s dead hand to extend from the grave across generations. Foundations must be governed by a board of trustees, but the donor and her family or trusted associates can serve in this role; there is no requirement of community or public governance. The Gates Foundation’s board, for example, is Bill and Melinda Gates, William Gates Sr., and Warren Buffett. The governance arrangements of countless smaller family foundations look similar. Financial advisors who set up family foundations routinely market them as vehicles for the intergenerational sustenance of family values. All of this might be understandable, if not necessarily justifiable, if foundations were simply one way for the wealthy to exercise their liberty: some choose to consume their wealth; some choose to provide gifts and bequests for heirs; others choose to give their money away for a philanthropic purpose. Why demand accountability for the philanthropists? Because foundations are not simply exercises of personal liberty.

The article leads off the Review’s debate on philanthropy, with responses from Stanley Katz, Diane Ravitch, Larry Kramer, and others.

DESIGNED-BASED RESEARCH IS WHAT COLLABORATION SHOULD LOOK LIKE
The U.S Department of Education’s Office of Educational Technology released a 100-page draft policy report on “Expanding Evidence Approaches for Learning in a Digital World.” While a key focus of the report is on the kinds of information that we should marshal to evaluate learning technologies, the more important lesson of the document is about people. Through case studies and reviews of current research, the report makes a lot of recommendations. The fifth report recommendation, which cites the work of the Carnegie Foundation, states that the people who use digital learning resources should work with education researchers “to implement resources using continuous improvement processes” (p 89). This kind of continuous improvement based on data is baked into the approaches many developers and technologists bring to the field.

A prime example of this always-testing and always-improving process can be found in the Carnegie Foundation-initiated Statway project. In an attempt to double the number of students who earn college math credits within one year of continuous improvement (p 21), the schools involved in the project agreed to collaborate with one another, with researchers and developers, and with those who implemented the new programs (teachers). Moreover, they agreed to share the data they gathered and then discuss how to refine the implementation. After a small first iteration of the project produced lackluster results, a team redesigned the course, and a new version rolled out across the entire network the next school year. In the first year of Statway at the participating colleges, three times as many students earned a college math credit in one-third the time compared with historical averages.

The report authors interviewed Louis M. Gomez of UCLA, a Statway collaborator, about whether the networked schools had conducted an “efficacy study” comparing the new project with traditional methods. “Efficacy studies” fall within the domain of academic education research, and test whether an intervention can achieve a desired effect under ideal conditions. They are in essence the polar opposite of design-based research, which deals with real-world situations in all their messy and imperfect glory. Gomez’s reply is telling:

"All kinds of promising interventions are subjected to RCTs [randomized controlled trials, the “gold standard” of academic education research] that show nothing; often because they’re subjected to [experimental studies] too early. Equally important to work on is getting your intervention to work reliably across many different contexts. This is more important at this point than understanding whether Statway works better or worse than some other approach."

The article is in EdSurge.

HOW TO MAKE STRESS WORK IN YOUR FAVOR
New research suggests that all the attention to the risks of stress may actually be part of the problem. Though it tends to get lost in the frenzy, our stress response evolved to do us good; psychologists have long recognized that under the right conditions, it can improve mental and physical health and boost athletic and cognitive performance. And researchers are finding that one way to unleash this positive side of stress is simply to retrain ourselves to think of it differently. “There are public-health messages everywhere telling us how bad stress is for us,” says Alia Crum, a psychologist at Columbia University’s Business School. “I ask people how that makes them feel, and the answer is, ‘stressed.’”

The goal is to find ways to flip the stress-response cycle from bad to good. Psychologist Jeremy Jamieson, for instance, is working with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to help community college students in a remedial math course reappraise their response to math exams. These students have a history of failure, which Jamieson says leads to “math anxiety,” clogging up the working memory that is critical for math. The article is in the Boston Globe.

CARNEGIE PROGRAM ACHIEVES DRAMATIC SUCCESS FOR COMMUNITY COLLEGE STUDENTS IN DEVELOPMENTAL MATHEMATICS
The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s newly developed community college mathematics pathway in statistics, Statway™, has achieved dramatic results in the initial implementation, tripling the success rate for developmental mathematics students in half the time.  “These are impressive results from a program in its first year of implementation. We expect to build on this and achieve even higher goals in the years ahead,” Carnegie President Anthony S. Bryk said.

Working with institutional researchers at the network institutions, Carnegie was able to establish baseline data for the percentage of developmental mathematics students that successfully completed a college-level mathematics course. Only 5.9 percent of these developmental mathematics students received credit for college-level mathematics in one year. Only 15.1 percent had achieved this goal after two years, 20.4 percent after three years, and 23.5 percent after four years.  After a full year of Statway™, 51 percent of Statway™ students had successfully completed the full Pathway (receiving a grade of C or better in the final term).

Read more...

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Community College Times

Inside Higher Ed

REPORT: FUTURE K-12 EDUCATION ASSESSMENTS MUST HELP IMPROVE TEACHING AND LEARNING
PRINCETON, N.J.-- A high-level, 30-member commission of educators and thought leaders formed to examine the future of education and its assessment issued a report this week calling upon state and federal policymakers to commit to a long-term effort to develop assessments that place greater emphasis on providing timely and valuable information to students and teachers. The report of The Gordon Commission on the Future of Assessment in Education asserts that good assessments provide timely, constructive information that help students accelerate their learning and teachers personalize instruction. Commission members expressed concern that the use of test results for the sole purpose of school accountability has overshadowed, at times, the more valuable uses of assessments. The Commission also found that although digital technologies that may one day be used for real time assessment of learning show promise, much more research is required before they can be fully integrated into classrooms and schools. Carnegie Senior Fellow Louis Gomez says in a video accompanying the release that it is time to ask how a system of assessments helps us reach the aspirations that we have for students. Gomez, who is also the The John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Chair in Digital Media and Learning at UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information, serves on the Commission with Carnegie Senior Associate for Research and Policy Elena Silva, and Carnegie President Emeritus Lee Shulman.

TOP STUDENTS, TOO, AREN’T ALWAYS READY FOR COLLEGE
Elaine Tuttle Hansen, who is a Carnegie Board member and executive director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Talent Youth, writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education: As a former college professor, provost, and president, I've been hearing faculty and administrators at top undergraduate institutions quietly complain for more than three decades about the declining quality of student preparation. What's changed is that today, college readiness is more often a hot topic for educators and policy makers focused on at-risk students. The data driving their laudable work are alarming: Only one in four high-school seniors meets the four benchmarks designed to show readiness for a successful freshman year of college, according to the 2012 ACT college-readiness test.

The truth is that not all of the smartest kids who have jumped through the hoops required for selective college admissions are ready for the demands of college-level work. Second, what are faculty doing about the problem? Unfortunately, at most colleges, even teachers devoted to undergraduate success aren't convinced that it's their problem, nor do they know how to solve it.

For the past five years, the Carnegie Foundation has been pioneering a fundamentally new vision for the research and development enterprise in education. We seek to join the discipline of improvement science with the capabilities of networks to foster innovation and social learning. This approach is embodied in what Carnegie refers to as Networked Improvement Communities (NIC).

These NICs are scientific learning communities distinguished by four essential characteristics:

• focused on a well specified common aim,
• guided by a deep understanding of the problem and the system that produces it,
• disciplined by the rigor of improvement science, and
• networked together to accelerate the development, testing and refinement of interventions, their more rapid diffusion out into the field, and their effective integration into varied educational contexts.

Explorer’s Workshop

The Explorer’s Workshop offers a first engagement with the ideas of improvement science pursued in the context of NICs. Lasting two days, it provides a “boot camp” introduction to improvement science including problem definition and specification, systems analysis, measurement and analytics, and change theory. It also includes an overview of the principles behind the organization, initiation, and support of NICs and the core functions served by a network hub. 

Who should attend?
The Workshop is designed to support teams from projects considering adoption of a NIC approach as well as individuals wishing to learn more about this strategy for accelerating learning in and through the practice to improve.
 

Details

The next Workshop will be at the Carnegie Foundation in Stanford, California, March 7–8, 2013. The cost for the workshop is $1500, with some meals and a reception included. More information is available from the Explorer's Workshop website.
 

Workshop Registration (updated 2/9/13)

Registration for the March 7–8, 2013 workshop is now closed. Another workshop will be offered in a few months, so sign up for the waiting list and we’ll let you know when the next workshop is scheduled.

Noted author and scholar Claude Steele will deliver the 2012 Martin Luther King Jr. Lecture at Brown University on Feb. 1, 2012. His talk, titled “Whistling Vivaldi and Other Clues to How Stereotypes Affect Us” is free and open to the public. It begins at 4 p.m. in the Granoff Center for the Creative Arts, Martinos Auditorium. Steele, a Carnegie Board member,  is dean and professor of education at Stanford University.

More info »

Updates from Carnegie's Pathways blog.

An Invitation
In a keynote address at the annual meeting of the Association of Community College Trustees in Dallas recently, Carnegie President Tony Bryk challenged faculty and institutional leaders to work together to build stronger institutions. He asked them “to take ownership for sustained improvement, to support the use of evidence as they work together to solve target problems of practice through innovations like our mathematics pathways.”

Good News from the Campuses
We now have 30 colleges participating in our two networked improvement communities—22 in Statway™ and eight in Quantway™. There are 1200 students enrolled in 60 sections of Statway™, and Quantway goes live in classroom beginning in January. Over 80 faculty members are now network members, all of whom have participated in some fashion in co-developing the materials with us and are beginning to engage in improvement projects seeking quality at scale.

Statway™ In the News
“Statway, created by the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of teaching is a promising approach to remedial mathematics education. Built on the premise that statistics, data analysis and quantitative reasoning are essential for a growing number of occupations and professions.”

—The Hidden Costs of Community Colleges, American Institutes for Research, October 2011

Read full post »

Teaching 2030: What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools—Now and in the Future

A Carnegie Chat with Barnett Berry
May 11, 2011
4:00–6:00 p.m.

Barnett Berry is founder and president of the Center for Teaching Quality, based in North Carolina—a nonprofit that seeks to dramatically improve student achievement nationwide by conducting timely research, crafting intelligent policy, and cultivating teacher leadership. A former high school teacher, Berry founded CTQ in 1999. Teachers College Press has just released Teaching 2030: What We Must Do for Our Students and Our Public Schools—Now and in the Future by Berry and a large set of teacher contributors.

In this book about the future of teaching and learning, twelve of America’s most accomplished classroom educators join Berry, a leading advocate for a revitalized 21st century teaching profession, to bring expert classroom know-how and fresh policy ideas to America’s school reform debate. Together they identify trends that will shape the learning experience of the next iGeneration and propose actions to guarantee that every student will have excellent teachers.

These teachers argue policymakers and the public must work with teachers to:

• Create richer learning experiences for students and teachers, and better ways to measure school success;
• Accelerate digital learning while reinventing ‘brick and mortar’ schools as 24/7 support hubs for students and families;
• Reimagine teaching as a well-paid career with many pathways, where teaching expertise is continuously spread, and;
• Establish a leadership force of 600,000 “teacherpreneurs” — classroom experts who teach students regularly while also serving as teacher educators, researchers, community organizers, and trustees of the profession.

Carnegie will provide books and the author will be available to sign copies.

A Carnegie Chat with Barnett Berry
May 11, 2011
4:00–5:00 p.m.
presentation and discussion
5:00–6:00 p.m.
wine and cheese reception and book signing

.....................................................................................................

RSVP

RSVP to Ruby Kerawalla at Kerawalla@carnegiefoundation.org or 650-566-5117 by May 4. Please include your name, title and institution in your reply. Space is limited, so early registration is highly recommended.

The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching
51 Vista Lane
Stanford, California
650-566-5100
Map and Directions

Through Carnegie Chats, the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching is providing an opportunity for friends and colleagues to connect with innovative thinkers and doers around interesting, diverse ideas on and about education. Our purpose is to provide the setting for spirited and engaging conversations. We hope you will join us for this and future events.

For those attending the AMATYC Annual Conference in Boston Nov. 11-14, there will be opportunities to hear about The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching’s new Statway and Quantway initiatives.

On Friday, Nov. 12 from 10:30 to 12:30, there will be a workshop, Statway: Integration Developmental Mathematics and College Statistics, led by John Climent, Roxy Peck, Bob delMas and Myra Snell. 

On Saturday, Nov. 13 from 10:45 to 11:35, there will be a session, Developmental Mathematics New Life Project (including Quantway), led by Jack Rotman.

There is also an open discussion scheduled for Saturday, Nov. 13 from 2:30 to 4 in the New Hampshire Room during the annual meeting. The following people will be available to answer questions: Jane Muhich, Carnegie’s new Quantway director; Kris Bishop, program coordinator at the Charles A. Dana Center, UT Austin; Rachel Mudge from Foothill College, who is also faculty-in-residence at Carnegie; Julie Phelps from Valencia College; and Jack Rotman from Lansing Community College, who also serves on the AMATYC Developmental Mathematics Committee.

In addition, those interested in Carnegie’s Faculty in Residence Program can learn more about it here.

Below C Level: How American Education Encourages Mediocrity and What We Can Do about It

Veteran journalist John Merrow believes that the recently released documentary "Waiting for Superman" and NBC's recent "Education Nation" summit (NBC's term) are salvos in a battle for control of public education that is growing more heated by the day. And as he points out in his new book, Below C Level, mediocrity is rarely punished and often pays in public education. He believes that all efforts to 'reform' schools will continue to fail until that fundamental issue is addressed. Merrow has been reporting on education for 35 years. In this collection of provocative essays, covering teaching and learning from preschool to prisons, he describes the challenges facing our nation and offers thoughtful analysis and solutions. Please join us for a lively conversation as Merrow shares his thoughts on the problems—and solutions—of public education. Participants will receive books compliments of Carnegie and Learning Matters. The event is at the Carnegie Foundation. A Carnegie Chat with John Merrow October 21, 2010 4:00 - 6:00 p.m. Wine and Cheese reception following .....................................................................

RSVP

RSVP by October 15th by contacting Dania Wright at wright@carnegiefoundation.org. Please include your name, title and institution in your reply. Space is limited, so early registration is highly recommended. The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching 51 Vista Lane Stanford, California 650-566-5104 Map and Directions ..................................................................... Carnegie Chats is a community event series that seeks to provide the setting for spirited and engaging conversations around interesting, diverse ideas on and about education.

Statway Summer Institute
Nineteen institutions in five states participated in Carnegie’s Summer Institute
focused on mathematics and college readiness held at Stanford University in July. These institutions are part of the Statway Collaboratory, a networked community working to test and design a new pathway in developmental math in community colleges. The Statway—focused on statistics, data analysis and quantitative reasoning—is a one-year pathway that culminates in college-level statistics.
 

Educating Nurses and Physicians: Toward New Horizons

Tuesday, June 29, 2010

1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m Pacific

Panelists:

Patricia Benner (author, Educating Nurses)

David Irby (author, Educating Physicians)

William Sullivan (Senior Scholar, The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching)

George Thibault (president, Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation)

The Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation and The Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching recently hosted a conference to advance inter-professional education in schools of medicine and nursing. The Macy and Carnegie foundations believe that if students in the health professions learn jointly in clinical settings, as graduates they will improve patient outcomes by working more collaboratively, communicating better with each other, and leading health care reform that assures patients quality.

“Educating Nurses and Physicians: Toward New Horizons” explored implementation of reforms in nursing and medical education called for by the Carnegie Foundation’s studies, Educating Nurses: A Call for Radical Transformation and Educating Physicians: A Call for Reform.

REGISTER NOW! FREE WEBINAR
Educating Nurses and Physicians: Toward New Horizons
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
1 p.m. Eastern, 10 a.m Pacific

Space is limited, so REGISTER NOW!

During the broadcast, the presenters will:

• Explore new models of clinical education
• Suggest innovations in teaching and learning that offer students opportunities to improve the health care system, specifically by working inter-professionally.
• Identify the shared values, behaviors and aspirations of the profession.
• Answer your questions live!