According to today’s NY Times http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/15/nyregion/new-york-issuing-scorecards-on-teacher-colleges.html?pagewanted=1&tntemail0=y&_r=1&emc=edit_tnt_20130814 Mayor Bloomberg is holding universities responsible for poorly (or well) trained teachers – something I have stressed here. (See the category University Education Dumbs Down High School , particularly the post, A Suggestion for Holding Colleges Accountable for Teacher Performance .) I hope his administration goes on to look at graduate schools. For my views on that, see It Starts in the18th Grade .
One of the items that New York City measures is the ability to improve student test performance. (For how valuable that can be see the post Important Paper on the Value of a Good Teacher (from a MacArthur Award Winner)
I was intriqued when the article stated that, “……one in five recent graduates of teaching programs at Columbia University and New York University were given low marks for how much they were able to improve student test scores. The reason I was intrigued was that I had already been surprised by Columbia’s 3-2 engineering plan. It seems to be more of a revenue/keepUSNewsRankingHigh plan than one that is focused on graduating well-qualified students. (You can find their program mentioned under the category Engineering 3-2 Programs .) Once one sees this type of behavior in one part of a university, one expects that the whole university is influenced by an attitutude of “…an institution determin[ing] to do something in order to get money…” and then losing “…its soul…” (See President Hutchins statement under “Quotes” above.
Here is the comment I posted on the NY Times site.
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As a former math professor, I am encouraged that someone is finally looking in the right place for the problem with education. It doesn’t start in k-12. It starts with higher education. It makes imminent sense that, if the output of employees trained somewhere is consistently poor, one should stop hiring from that place. Higher ed is a business; the “customer” is – to put it simply – uneducated and easily deceived. David Riesman pointed this out in his book “On Higher Education – The Academic Enterprise in an Era of Rising Student Consumerism”. Cark Kerr wrote “…This shift from academic merit to student consumerism is one of the two greatest reversals of direction in all the history of…higher education…”
Higher ed is there to please the customer. Here is a brief version of how that affects k-12 education. The government funds programs to produce more STEM Ph.D’s. To get the money, some universities grant degrees to unqualified candidates, some of whom become regional college professors, who then produce unprepared high school teachers. Even worse, many colleges make their customers happy by not asking them to study much, while telling them (with A’s and B’s and degrees) that they are learning what they need. For these reasons, I have suggested testing all high school teachers anonymously, and reporting the scores by college.
Anyone who wants to read more can go to my blog inside-higher-ed. (There is even a post there about the 3-2 engineering program at Columbia that I found worrisome.)”
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