By Olivia Scheck

In 2005, Yasmine Issa was a 24-year-old homemaker, raising twin toddlers in Yonkers, New York. Having just divorced, the newly single mom, with no college degree or professional training, was also in need of a job.

So, like 2.8 million others, Issa enrolled at a for-profit postsecondary school – the kind that you see advertised on TV and highway billboards – called the Sanford-Brown Institute in White Plains.

The program, for people training to become ultrasound technicians, included 12 months of classes, a 6-month internship and the assistance of their career services center, all for around $32,000. Issa used her savings and child support payments to pay for half of the training and took out a federal student loan of $15,000 to pay the rest.

What Issa didn’t realize, until she’d finished the program and spent five months unsuccessfully searching for a job, was that the Sanford-Brown ultrasound program was not accredited by the American Registry for Diagnostic Medical Sonographers (ARDMS).

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By Nina Power

Is it necessary to presuppose the intellectual equality of those you teach? To be an educator at all it seems likely that one would have at least an implicit theory of mind, such that one knows what one is doing (or, at least, what one aspires to be doing) when standing at the front of the classroom. Is education merely the transplanting of gobbets of information onto the blank slate of a student’s mind (we could call this the Lockean approach), or are we drawing out forms of rational and creative capacity possessed (equally?) by students qua rational beings? Jacques Rancière contributes much to this debate, particularly in his work on the unusual educator Joseph Jacotot in The Ignorant Schoolmaster. This paper attempts to analyse the possibility of what could be called the “utopian rationalism” of Jacotot (and of Rancière himself), within the context of the modern university. Rancière’s work will be read alongside that of Pierre Bourdieu and Ivan Illich as other crucial figures in the understanding of the way in which educational achievement relates to certain assumptions about what teaching involves. Ultimately, it may be that the modern university is antithetical to any possibility of establishing true equality among its players – Rancière’s position at times invokes the possibility of a radically de-institutionalized autodidacticism that predicates all learning merely on the basis of the will of those desiring to learn. This stance is the very opposite of the Lockean approach, which emphasizes the passivity of the student-receiver. Can the contemporary university bear the weight of Rancière’s challenge?

Mainstream education arguably operates with two major contradictory imperatives: that one should in principle be able to teach everyone openly and equally and, at the same time, one must constantly rank these same students via tests, marks, and, in the case of higher education, final degree classifications. The rationalist educator is constitutively torn. But how to reconcile the desire to – on some level – treat students equally, with the simultaneous recognition that injustice necessarily lies at the heart of all assessment?

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By BENEDICT CAREY

Every September, millions of parents try a kind of psychological witchcraft, to transform their summer-glazed campers into fall students, their video-bugs into bookworms. Advice is cheap and all too familiar: Clear a quiet work space. Stick to a homework schedule. Set goals. Set boundaries. Do not bribe (except in emergencies).

And check out the classroom. Does Junior’s learning style match the new teacher’s approach? Or the school’s philosophy? Maybe the child isn’t “a good fit” for the school.

Such theories have developed in part because of sketchy education research that doesn’t offer clear guidance. Student traits and teaching styles surely interact; so do personalities and at-home rules. The trouble is, no one can predict how.

Yet there are effective approaches to learning, at least for those who are motivated. In recent years, cognitive scientists have shown that a few simple techniques can reliably improve what matters most: how much a student learns from studying.

The findings can help anyone, from a fourth grader doing long division to a retiree taking on a new language. But they directly contradict much of the common wisdom about good study habits, and they have not caught on.

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By Christopher A. Lubienski and Peter C. Weitzel, foreword by Jeffrey R. Henig

When charter schools first arrived on the American educational scene, few observers suspected that within two decades thousands of these schools would be established, serving almost a million and a half children across forty states. The widespread popularity of these schools, and of the charter movement itself, speaks to the unique and chronic desire for substantive change in American education. As an innovation in governance, the ultimate goal of the charter movement is to improve learning opportunities for all students—not only those who attend charter schools but also students in public schools that are affected by competition from charters.

In The Charter School Experiment, a select group of leading scholars sets out to survey the past, present, and future of this dynamic area of education reform. Contributors with varying perspectives on the charter movement carefully evaluate how well charter schools are fulfilling the goals originally set out for them: introducing competition to the school sector, promoting more equitable access to quality schools, and encouraging innovation to improve educational outcomes. They explore the unintended effects of the charter school experiment over the past two decades, and conclude that charter schools are entering a new phase of their development, beginning to serve purposes significantly different from those originally set out for them.

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By Preaprez

The LA Times decision to use a value added assessment method to look at LA teachers and then publish a ranking of teachers by name in their newspaper has created clarity and confusion.

That alone is not surprising.

What is surprising is who is clear and who is confused.

Over on the political right a dispute has erupted between Ricky Hess of the far right-wing American Enterprise Institute and the wing-nut Fordham’s Liam Julian.

Hess likes the use of the questionable value added approach but thought the LA Times crossed some lines in publishing individual teacher names. Julian likes value added but thinks teachers should be marched through the public square with dunce caps on if their students don’t score well.

Then there is the national education czar, Arne Duncan. He likes the test. He likes the publication of teacher names. The goof just loves it all. So Duncan and Fordham are on the same page. This guy isn’t just bad. When a Democratic president has a Secretary of Education who is to the right of the American Enterprise Institute…

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