Gwen Mueller is an IT Professional, #dnd Gamer-girl, #coffee drinker, geek in Secondary Education, editor on tumblr #education, curating #science, and #tech resources to inspire lifelong learning with 1/4 cup of #fun.
As more and more foundation money floods into K-12 education, it is being channeled to fewer and fewer groups, according to new research presented at the American Educational Research Association meeting here last week.
Researchers also found that foundation money is moving away from traditional public schools and toward “challengers to the system”—primarily charter schools—and that the funders in general are becoming much more active in shaping how those challengers develop.
According to the annual pay report by The Chronicle of Higher Education, four public university presidents had compensation packages topping $1 million.
This is disgusting. You try not to have a knee jerk reaction, but while tuition and fees rise, why are university presidents earning anything more than $100K? Is there a context behind this not related to greed? How does one not be upset? How can any student be ok with this? Research your school and find out what the overhead is costing you.
“According to the Chronicle report, the median total compensation for the presidents of public research universities was $441,392, up 4.7 percent from the previous year’s $421,395. The median base salary, $373,800, was up 2 percent from $366,519 the previous year.”
My major concern is the increasing standardization of the college experience. In order to make online learning worth the cost of development, institutions must achieve economies of scale so as to spread its costs over a large number of students. But achieving these economies of scale means losing certain intangible aspects of the classroom environment; indeed, online education makes no room for the interpersonal interactions that are an essential part of an authentic education.
My second concern is that cost-saving technologies will have different consequences for rich and poor institutions and for rich and poor students. Public institutions have faced decreased taxpayer subsidies for years and feel acute pressure to reduce costs through standardization. In contrast, wealthy private universities have little incentive to standardize and cheapen their learning environments.
In California, the curriculum standards and the new tests that go with them are supposed to be implemented in the 2014-15 school year.
That’s soon, and at the rate California is going, it won’t be ready. The core curriculum standards lay out extensive guidelines about the knowledge and skills that students should master in each grade of public school, in both reading and math. But there are many complicated steps involved in turning those guidelines into a day-to-day educational plan for California schools, and the state isn’t even close to halfway through them. It hasn’t figured out how to go about training teachers, and won’t begin to adopt new textbooks — a slow and politically rancorous process — for at least two years.
What’s more, common core is expensive, requiring extensive new training for teachers, new textbooks and computers on which the new tests must be taken. It’s unclear where the state will find the money.
As time passes, college administrators make health-care providers appear miserly. According to theBureau of Labor Statistics, while the Consumer Price Index for all urban consumers (CPI-U) has risen 179 percent since 1980, college tuition and fees have increased nearly five times more— a staggering 893 percent.
Few schools in America depend more heavily on the federal government than those on Indian reservations, which have no private landowners to tax. Washington pays about 10 percent of the budget for a typical U.S. public school district; on federal lands, it contributes as much as 60 percent.
“Five percent isn’t a lot when you have a lot,” said Florence Garcia, the president of Fort Peck Community College, which is looking to close two community wellness centers because of the sequester. “But when you don’t have much, five percent makes a big difference.”
Many colleges require a transfer student to make a commitment to attend—in the form of a nonrefundable deposit—before they will give out information about transfer credits. In short, they are saying, “Buy now! We’ll tell you later what it will actually cost you.”
We recently conducted a study of six private colleges in New York State—three that told students how many credits would transfer and how they would apply to the degree before the students made a financial deposit, and three that required nonrefundable deposits of up to $250 as a commitment to attend before they would provide that information.
The largest segment of the $7.76 billion ed-tech market, according to the industry group SIIA is “instructional support,” which accounts for up to 38 percent of the market — and that’s increased by 12 percent over the previous year.
It’s also worth noting that companies that create content services have almost as large a market share — 36 percent — as those working in instructional support.
It’s not clear how they define “edtech” here, but if you’re looking for the next buck in education; do not collect $200, go directly into learning analytics.
You thought the rising cost of college tuition was bad? Then check out the rising cost of college textbooks. The American Enterprise Institute’s Mark Perry has put together this chart showing the egregious, 812 percent rise in the cost of course materials since 1978, as captured in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s consumer price index data. The price of all those Intro to Sociology and Calculus books have shot up faster than health-care, home prices, and, of course, inflation.
While a straight 8 percent cut would seem to suggest everybody would share the fiscal pain equally, things get cloudier when you look at how federal education money is distributed. On average, money from Washington only makes up about 10 percent of public school funding, with the rest coming from state and local governments. But the actual spending breakdown is weighted towards services for the most vulnerable students.
High-res
