College, President Obama and the Common Core – NYTimes.com.
Finally someone is realizing that education in America is a continuum. That continuum starts at the top. Unaccountability at the top is why American education now so bad. I’m a former math professor. Let me explain how it works. (For the details – and evidence – see my blog inside-higher-ed )
Colleges were, and are, paid (by the gov’t) to graduate “American” PhD’s – either so that your kid’s calculus teacher has the appropriate “accent”, or, so that there are enough professors to staff all the schools that we need for all the “degrees” (not “education”) that we want.
As Mr. Bruni notes, this whole system falls apart when there is no accountability. Here is what I have personally seen, and how it leads to a very poor HIGH SCHOOL education.
An “elite” university got a multi-million dollar “national need” grant to “produce” American PhD’s in math. The professor who got the grant graduated Americans all right. As an example of his fine
Many of these faux-PhD’s become “professors” at state regional schools. They don’t know the material well enough to meet the challenge of teaching with high standards. Thus – and here is the rub – their students, some of them future high school teachers, are never given the opportunity to learn.
That is it in a nutshell – how higher ed dumbs down lower ed. If we don’t stop it soon, we are in deep trouble – as an economy and as a democracy.
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