Tag: education

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Resistance is Not Futile

The interpretation of student resistance has undergone dramatic transformation over the past century, reflecting broader shifts in how we understand human behavior, learning, and institutional power. This evolution reveals as much about our own assumptions and blind spots as it does about student behavior itself. Historically, educational institutions approached resistance through a distinctly moralistic lens. Students who failed to comply were seen as suffering from character defects and thereby lacking discipline, respect, or proper upbringing. This perspective, rooted in patriarchal authority structures and commodified approaches to knowledge, positioned educators as moral arbiters whose job was to correct wayward youth through punishment, shame, and rigid behavioral expectations.[i] Resistance was seen as willful disobedience requiring forceful correction rather than thoughtful analysis.

The rise of behaviorism in the mid-20th century brought a different but equally reductive approach. Resistance became reframed as a technical problem representing a failure of stimulus-response systems that could be solved through better classroom management techniques. B.F. Skinner’s operant conditioning principles dominated educational psychology, suggesting that resistant behaviors could be eliminated through appropriate schedules of reinforcement and punishment.[ii] This scientific veneer made the approach seem more sophisticated, but it still treated resistant learners as broken mechanisms needing repair rather than human beings with complex inner lives and legitimate concerns about their educational experiences.

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Inclusive Teaching 2.0: The Challenge of Equity in Anti-DEI Times

These days American universities find themselves at a peculiar crossroads. With the stroke of a pen, federal actions have swept away diversity, equity, and inclusion programs at institutions dependent on government funding. Yet in this moment of apparent retreat, one might discern not an ending but a beginning, creating the potential for a more profound transformation in how we understand the art of teaching itself.

equity, diversity, inclusion, DEI, university, teaching, learning, students, learners

The moment demands reinvention, not retreat. For decades now, inclusive teaching has been quietly revolutionizing classrooms, operating not by privileging some students over others, but by ensuring all students can thrive. The principle, though deceptively simple, borders on the radical: every learner deserves access to tools that support their academic growth. This principle can guide institutions toward a universal model of excellence, grounded in research, focused on outcomes, and aligned with the values of higher education.

Never has the need been greater. Today’s college student defies easy categorization. The stereotypical image of young adults attending full-time classes on residential campuses has given way to something far more complex, with students juggling work commitments, family responsibilities, and extended degree timelines to manage costs.[1] This demographic shift demands nothing less than a pedagogical evolution, one that acknowledges students’ multifaceted lives while maintaining academic rigor.

Enter Universal Design for Learning (UDL), an evidence-based framework offering a compelling vision for the future. UDL is defined as “a framework developed to improve and optimize teaching and learning for all people based on scientific insights into how humans learn.”[2]  Grounded in cognitive neuroscience and educational research, UDL principles encourage educators to present information in multiple ways, offer students various methods for demonstrating understanding, and foster engagement through real-world relevance and autonomy.

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The Other Campus Gender Matter

Recent months have witnessed heightened gender-related conflicts in higher education. From debates over transgender athletes to challenges against Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives, a narrative portraying universities as ideological battlegrounds has gained traction. Political figures, including Vice President J.D. Vance, have amplified this perspective, saying “universities are the enemy” as sites of indoctrination rather than education.[1]

Beneath these controversies lies a significant but often unacknowledged factor: women’s dramatic ascendance in higher education. The gender gap in college enrollment has reached historic proportions, with female-identified learners constituting approximately 60% of U.S. college students.[2]  This unprecedented shift, a cornerstone of women’s empowerment and presence in the workforces, appears to have become a focal point for those seeking to reshape or constrain the university system.

The gender gap in education begins well before college, with girls outperforming boys in reading and writing during elementary years and making up 60 percent of the top students graduating from high school.[3]  In the 1990s, some universities began giving boys extra points on their applications, owing to concerns that students might avoid gender imbalanced schools. While federal law never sanctioned this kind of affirmative action, a Title IX lawsuit filed against the University of Georgia in 1999 effectively ended the practice.[4]  

The historical context illuminates the significance of this transformation. Before the mid-20th century men made up 80% of college students.[5]  Women’s integration into universities in substantial numbers, accelerating after World War II, represented a profound social change. This evolution challenged established gender norms, created pathways to professional careers for women, and contributed substantially to their economic and social independence.[6]

The increasing presence of women in higher education stands in direct opposition to reactionary ideologies evident in current university critiques. The Heritage Foundation’s “Project 2025,” with its emphasis on traditional family structures and gender roles, fundamentally conflicts with the educational empowerment of women in contemporary and growing representation in academic leadership.[7]

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The Value of Inclusive Teaching

From Degrees of Difficulty: The Challenge of Equity in  College Teaching by David Trend, forthcoming from Worlding Books

As awareness grows about the role of structural inequities and systemic biases in student success or failure, many schools are exploring the role of instructional methods and course design in bringing equity to the educational environment. In doing so, institutions are finding emerging teaching practices guided by evidence-based research can broaden learner success. Key to this movement is the practice of inclusive teaching, a pedagogical approach that recognizes the inherent diversity of learners and seeks to accommodate their varying needs. This philosophy is predicated on the understanding that students come from various backgrounds, possess different learning styles, and often face individual challenges in their educational pursuits. In recognizing these forms of diversity, educators can develop strategies catering to the most significant number of learners, ensuring no one is left behind. This also treats classroom diversity as an asset, enriching the learning experience for all students by introducing multiple perspectives and fostering cross-cultural understanding.

inclusion, teaching, equity, inequity, fairness, college, university, degrees, difficulty

For many faculty like me, the COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed a heightened attention to inclusive principles. The sudden transition to remote learning destabilized my ongoing practices in two significant ways: first, by forcing the adoption of new instructional methods, and second, by making visible latent inequities I hadn’t previously recognized. As mentioned above, this situation led many colleges and universities to scrutinize their teaching approaches and adopt new tools and strategies to enhance fairness, flexibility, and accessibility. The pandemic also highlighted the importance of social-emotional learning and mental health support in education, prompting institutions to integrate these elements into their teaching strategies more fully.

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Legacies of Western Exclusion

Education in the U.S. has a complex history, marked by intellectual progress and systematic exclusion. For over three centuries, its institutions have often prioritized certain forms of knowledge and ways of thinking, inadvertently or intentionally reinforcing intellectual hierarchies. Western philosophical traditions played a significant role in this by emphasizing reason and science while promoting a Eurocentric worldview. The influence of colonialism further complicated matters, as it led to the suppression and erasure of Indigenous knowledge systems around the world and in the U.S. This historical context left a lasting impact on the structure and focus of American higher education, influencing who has access and what is considered valuable knowledge. 

Much of this can be traced to the Age of Reason of the 17th and 18th centuries, which profoundly shaped philosophical and educational frameworks in Europe and internationally. Prominent thinkers like John Locke and Immanuel Kant advanced the authority of rationalism and empiricism, influencing philosophical discourse and promoting certain disciplines over others.[i] This focus led to the development of university curricula that, while comprehensive, often functioned selectively.

The Age of Reason reinforced a Eurocentric perspective that marginalized non-Western forms of knowledge and understanding. Visions of world history that placed Europe at the pinnacle of civilization, as set for by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, rendered other cultures as less developed or worthy.[ii]  This prejudice led academic institutions to the criticize, misrepresent, or entirely disregard non-Western philosophies, sciences, and cultural practices. Edward Said’s concept of “Orientalism” explained how Western academia constructed and perpetuated distorted views of non-Western societies, often rendering them as exotic, backward, or irrational in contrast to the supposedly rational and progressive West.[iii] This intellectual bias not only shaped academic disciplines like anthropology and geography but also influenced broader educational curricula, diplomatic relations, and colonial policies. Consequently, the university emerging from this intellectual milieu often failed to recognize or value Indigenous knowledge systems, oral traditions, and alternative epistemologies, further entrenching the dominance of Western thought in global academic discourse.

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The Crisis of Belonging

The structural inequities and systemic biases present in higher education profoundly affect learners’ sense of belonging, which in turn influences their academic and social experiences. Research consistently shows that students from historically minoritized backgrounds, including students of color, low-income students, and first-generation college students, often feel less connected to their institutions. This lack of belonging can have far-reaching consequences, impacting learners’ engagement with courses and materials, their sense of connection with peers and community, and their overall well-being and acceptance within the campus culture. As institutions strive to create more inclusive environments, it is essential to understand the multifaceted ways in which belonging influences student experiences and outcomes.

When learners perceive themselves as outsiders, their motivation and participation in academic activities suffer. A recent study found that students who do not feel a sense of belonging are less likely to engage in classroom discussions or participate in group projects, leading to a diminished learning experience.[1] This disengagement is particularly pronounced among learners from underrepresented groups, who may already feel alienated due to cultural and institutional biases. Such environments fail to support these learners, exacerbating feelings of isolation and disengagement. Consequently, these students are often left to navigate academic challenges without the support structures necessary for success, further entrenching existing inequities.

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The New Case Against College

David Trend

It’s called the “paper ceiling” –– the barriers for skilled job seekers who lack a bachelor’s degree. Amid the brouhaha in recent years over admissions scams and student debt, a new line of attack is emerging against higher education. This one is being described as an ontological threat in that it questions the existence and value of college itself, while accusing the system of perpetuating multiple forms of inequity. Of course, higher education often has found itself a political football in the past. What makes this time different is its critique of qualities universities typically have seen as their strength. 

Everyone knows it’s been a tough few years for higher education. Even before the pandemic, colleges and universities were seeing public opinion souring over rising costs, political correctness, and faculty misbehavior –– causing more than a few students and their families to start doubting the value of degree. With enrollments dropping during the “great disruption” at a pace not seen for half a century, concurrent changes in the American workplace have rendered college degrees unnecessary for a growing number of high wage jobs. Yet many employers require four-year credentials anyway, in what some observers see as an antiquated habit and a cover for discrimination.

The numbers are deceptively simple – that 75% of new jobs insist on a bachelor’s degree, while only 40% of potential applicants have one.[1] According the advocacy group Opportunity@Work, employers mistakenly equate college completion with work aptitude, while disregarding self-acquired knowledge or non-academic experience.  The group asserts that the nation’s undervalued workforce “has developed valuable skills through community college, certificate programs, military service, or on-the-job learning, rather than through a bachelors degree. Workers with experience, skills, and diverse perspectives are held back by silent barrier.” As a consequence, over 50% of the American skilled workforce has been under employed and underpaid.[2]  More concerning still is that such discrimination is unevenly distributed. Within a 70-million worker cohort of what are termed STARs  (Skilled Through Alternative Routes) employees, one finds 61% of Black workers, 55% of Hispanic/Latinos, and 61 of veterans.[3]

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You 2.0 – The Will to Improve

David Trend

You’ve probably never heard of TestingMom.com. It’s part of a new generation of test-prep companies like Kaplan and Princeton Review –– except this one is for toddlers. Competition for slots in kindergarten has gotten so intense that some parents are shelling out thousands to get their four-year olds ready for entrance tests or interviews. It’s just one more example of the pressure that got celebrity parents arrested for falsifying college applications a few years ago. In this case the battle is over getting into elite elementary schools or gifted programs. While such admissions pressure is widely known, what’s new is how early it’s occurring. Equity issues aside, the demand to improve performance is being drilled into youngsters before they can spell their names.  All of this bespeaks the competition for grades, school placement, and eventual careers that has transformed the normal impulse to do better into an obsession for students and their families. Much like the drive for perfection, an insatiable hunger to be quicker, smarter, and more acceptable to admissions officers is taking its toll in many ways. 

What explains this obsessive behavior? Brain science has been proving what advertising long has known ­–– that wanting something is far more powerful than getting it. School admissions and other markers of success are part of an overarching mental wanting mechanism. That new iPhone might bring a thrill. But soon comes the yearning for an update, a newer model, another purchase. Neuroimaging shows that processes of “wanting” and “liking” occur in different parts of the brain, with the former more broadly and powerfully operating than the latter. This reverses the common wisdom that primal hungers and “drives” underlie human motivation.  Unlike animals, the motor force driving human beings is imagination –– with anticipation of something more important than the experience itself. This partly explains why merchandizing deals more with feeling than facts. Slogans like “Just Do It” and “Think Different” bear no direct relationship to shoes or computers, but instead tingle feelings of desire. In the fuzzy realm emotion pleasure is a fungible currency. 

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The Learning Society

David Trend

As consumer prices continue to rise, experts now warn of a looming recesssion brought about by pandemic manufacturing slowdowns and supply-chain shortages. Economists explain it as a classic case of demand outpacing availability –– with scarcity making things more costly. Unfortunately, the painful solution now being launched will raise borrowing costs rates so that people spend less. While these measures may or may not improve the overall economomy, the combined effects of inflation and rising interest rates will exact a double blow to people struggling to make ends meet. In such an atmosphere it becomes critical to help people manage their own finances and to prevent the broader economy from overheating. This is where consumer education and financial literacy can help as part of a largermove toward a “learning society.”

For some time now, economists have been promoting financial education in public schools and urging people to become more resourceful. Time Magazine reported polls showing “99 percent of adults in agreement that personal finance should be taught in high school.”[i]  The Federal Reserve argued that “financial literacy and consumer education, coupled with strong consumer protections, make the financial marketplace ‘effective and efficient’ and assists consumers in making better choices.”[ii] Many colleges and universities have started making financial literacy courses graduation requirements. And for some it has worked, as many Americans “put their own budgets under the microscope –– akin to what financial analysts routinely do when the scrutinize companies.”[iii]  

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The Creative Inner Child?

David Trend

Pablo Picasso once quipped that “Every child is an artist; the problem is how to remain an artist once they grow up.”[i]  In this often-quoted slogan, Picasso neatly summarized idealized views of the universally creative child and the uncreative adult. In a similar fashion he would later write that, “It takes a long time to become young.” What is one to make of such laments? Nostalgia over a lost youth? A yearning to escape a pressurized grown-up life?  Regardless of origins, it’s impossible to deny America’s ongoing infatuation with childhood creativity.

This fascination childood artistry dates to the 1700s, corresponding to evolving views of children as “blank slates” (tabula rasa) better served by nurturance and education than by discipline alone. At the same time, Enlightenment debates ver individualism and personal autonomy were bringing considerable anxiety to the era, evidenced in worries that self-interest would overwhelm moral sentiments. This set the stage for the naturalism espoused by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in his book Emile: Or, On Education, seeing an inherent “goodness” in children, which becomes corrupted by adult desire and material want.[ii] With the 1800s, views of “human nature” gave ways to theories of evolution and behavioral adaptation –– owing in large part to the influence of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer. While the resulting rationalism eventually would make educatio more formulaic, an artsy transcendentalism would counterbalance American culture with an advocacy for an “educated imagination.”[iii] The Romantic Era writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Walt Whitman advanced themes of emotion over reason and imagination over reality –– setting in place a tradition progressive of push-back against the instrumentalist ethos of science and industry.

In the 1920s, Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget began charting children’s “stages” of maturity, hence launching the modern field of child development.[iv] Piaget saw “realistic” rendering as a learned ability rather than a natural inclination. In one famous study, Piaget asked a group of four-year olds to draw familiar people or objects. He found that the images invariably had the same characteristics: drawn from memory rather than observation, exaggeration of certain salient features (faces, for example), and a disregard of perspective or scale. In other words, the images derived more from mental symbolism than they did conventional schema of visual representation. Piaget would note that at later ages children acquire the ability to “correct” their images to conform to normative depictions of reality. Later observations of so-called “feral” children (raised” in the wild without human contact) found that such children often didn’t speak or make pictures of any kind, further reinforcing the premise that language and “artistic” rendering were largely determined by culture.[v]

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Inclusive Pedagogy

David Trend

The pandemic years have been rough on college students everywhere, with record levels of academic stress and losses in student learning.  While occurring throughout higher education, these problems haven’t affected all groups the same way. Students from privileged backgrounds have fared better than the under-resourced, with disparities in network access, income, and external responsibilities exacerbating inequities. As I saw these dynamics play out in the large undergraduate general education courses I teach, I began wondering if instructional methods might be partly to blame and if changes might improve matters going forward. Working with UC Irvine’s Division of Teaching Excellence and Innovation (DTEI) helped me to rethink my own teaching by searching out ways that I unconsciously had been putting up roadblocks

Usually when educators speak of “inclusion” they are thinking of course content and ways to incorporate diverse perspectives or voices previously excluded. While this approach remains a central tenant of inclusive teaching, a deeper look at the issue can reveal biases or barriers built into the teaching of even the most progressive educators. Practices of exclusion can be the result of habits or structures that have become so routinized in instruction that they seem natural or neutral approaches. Costly books, rigid deadlines, and high-stakes exams are among practices that privilege students with money, time flexibility, and testing skills, for example.

Faculty attitudes also can get in the way of inclusion. This often is manifest in principles of “rigor” intended to elevate worthy over unworthy students. Such attitudes create a scarcity mentality toward success rather than one that makes high achievement possible for all students. Decades of educational research has shown the deleterious effects of such practices in conflating grades with knowledge acquisition. The grade pressure that frequently drives “rigor” has been shown to affect some students more than others, while creating an atmosphere of anxiety and an emphasis on types of learning easily that can be easily tested. Not only does this create learning inequities, but it also tends to discourage collaboration, questioning, and diverse opinion. Continue reading “Inclusive Pedagogy”

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Turn-U-In: Treating Students as Suspects

David Trend

It’s no secret that online learning has its problems, witnessed in the historic failure and drop-out rates resulting from thrown-together course overhauls in the early COVID months. Less widely reported has been another kind of failure owing to a loss faith in educational institutions and a widening trust gap between teachers and students.

Inherent school power inequities  have aggravated  antagonisms – now made even worse by a range of surveillance and security technologies. The distance in “distance learning” can create an atmosphere of alienation and distrust. When the in-person classroom is reduced to a screen image, teachers and students can seem more like abstractions than actual people.

This opens the door for all sorts of communication failures and misunderstandings, not to mention stereotyping and harm. The objectifying tendencies of media representations long have been associated distortions in the way individuals and groups view each other, whether in the marketing of products, sensationalizing news items, or spreading ideologies on social networks. When “Zoom school” does this, underlying beliefs and assumptions can overtake the reality of encounters, generating attitudes that destabilize the learning environment.

These problems have become especially evident in the panic about student dishonesty in online learning, as the absence of classroom proximity quickly escalated in into assumptions of cheating. Early in the 2020s a torrent of news reports warned of an “epidemic” of dishonesty in online learning, with some surveys showing over 90 percent educators believing cheating occurred more in distance education than in-person instruction.[i] New technologies often have stoked such fears, in this instance building on the distrust many faculty hold toward students, some of it racially inflected. [ii] Closer examination of the issue has revealed that much of the worry came from faculty with little direct knowledge of the digital classroom, online student behavior, and preventative techniques now commonly used.  Indeed more recent research has shown no significant differences between in-person and online academic integrity.[iii] Continue reading “Turn-U-In: Treating Students as Suspects”

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When School is a Factory

David Trend

For 20 years, I have been teaching large arts and humanities general education courses at the University of California, Irvine. These 400-student classes are part of the undergraduate “breadth requirements” common in most colleges and universities, and hence draw enrollments from across the academic disciplines. At UC Irvine, this means that most of the class comprises science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) majors. Aside from an orientation to more practical fields, I’ve noticed a clear shift in student attitudes in recent years –– a heightened preoccupation with grades and rankings, combined with growing anxieties about future earnings. Many of my colleagues see this as well, often disparaging students more concerned with GPA metrics than learning itself, while increasingly behaving more like consumers of educational commodities. I take a more sanguine view.

Bear in mind that many of today’s college students grew up during the Great Recession, when families of all incomes had money worries. With scant knowledge of a world before 9/11, it’s little wonder that polls show millennials expecting lower earnings than their parents, seeing the United States on a downward spiral, and believing the two-party system as fatally flawed.[i] Rising income inequality doesn’t help matters, especially at UC Irvine where 6 in 10 students get financial aid and half are the first in their families earning a college degree.[ii] Because of this, Irvine has been cited by the New York Times as the country’s leading “upward mobility engine” –– making the campus a national model of what public higher education can do.[iii] But it’s still not a cake-walk for degree seekers. As at most public universities in America, the majority of Irvine’s full-time students also work at jobs to make ends meet.[iv] Continue reading “When School is a Factory”

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Striking adjuncts

David Trend

If adjuncts want more workplace rights, they have to take them. As Inside HigherEd reports, “That message was echoed throughout a discussion on non-tenure-track faculty rights here Monday at the Coalition of Contingent Academic Labor, or COCAL, conference. It’s being held this week at John Jay College of Criminal Justice of the City University of New York.

“The biennial gathering draws participants from the U.S., Mexico and Canada, and adjunct activist panelists from all three countries advocated striking as a real and valid means of achieving short- and long-term goals.

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“Unless and until faculty, including part-time faculty, hit the streets and occupy the classrooms,” said Stanley Aronowitz, a tenured professor of sociology and urban education at the CUNY Graduate Center, “there won’t be any change of substance.”  Aronowitz, who has worked as an adjunct professor several times throughout his career, said this idea applied even in those states where collective bargaining or strikes among public employees is prohibited by law. Faculty members at Nassau Community College who went on strike last year over protracted contract negotiations paid hefty fines for violating New York State’s Taylor Law, for example. (Under the law, the union was permitted to engage in collective bargaining, but not to strike.) But Aronowitz and other activists said that striking is a fundamental right that should be ensured by the First Amendment; without the right to strike, he said, collective bargaining too often becomes “collective begging.”Participants here responded to Aronowitz’s remarks on strikes with strong applause.

“Maria Teresa Lechuga, a Ph.D. candidate in pedagogy at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, added: “We need to stop asking for permission to organize ourselves.” Panelists said that striking is always a “last resort,” to be exercised only when adjunct faculty members and administrators can’t otherwise reach common ground. But in order to ensure public support when and if the time to strike comes, advocates said, adjuncts need to nurture relationships with other kinds of workers, along with parents and students.Maria Maisto, president of the New Faculty Majority, a national adjunct advocacy organization, said adjuncts shouldn’t be afraid to bring up their working conditions with their students. She said such conversations are part of students’ “civic education” — an essential part of their studies. Continue reading “Striking adjuncts”

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Fighting tenure for school teachers

David Trend

David Boies, the star trial lawyer who helped lead the legal charge that overturned California’s same-sex marriage ban, is becoming chairman of the Partnership for Educational Justice, a group that former CNN anchor Campbell Brown founded in part to pursue lawsuits challenging teacher tenure. As the New York Times reports:

“Mr. Boies, the son of two public schoolteachers, is a lifelong liberal who represented Al Gore in Bush v. Gore and prosecuted Microsoft in the Clinton Administration’s antitrust suit. In aligning himself with a cause that is bitterly opposed by teachers’ unions, he is emblematic of an increasingly fractured relationship between the Democrats and the teachers’ unions.

“Aimages-2s chairman of the new group, Mr. Boies, 73, will join Ms. Brown as the public face of a legal strategy in which the group organizes parents and students to bring lawsuits against states with strong tenure and seniority protections. In a suit filed in New York last month, plaintiffs supported by Ms. Brown’s group argued that tenure laws make it too difficult to fire ineffective teachers and force principals to make personnel decisions based on seniority rather than performance. The suit argues that such laws disproportionately harm low-income and minority students.A California judge recently ruled in a similar case that teacher tenure laws violate students’ civil rights under the state’s constitution. The group that brought that case, known as Vergara v. California, said it would be pursuing similar litigation elsewhere as well. In a sign of the legal firepower attracted to the cause, Theodore B. Olson, Mr. Boies’ partner in the California same-sex marriage case, has been advising the Vergara plaintiffs.In an interview in his firm’s offices in Manhattan, Mr. Boies said he viewed the cause of tenure overhaul as “pro-teacher.”

“I think teaching is one of the most important professions that we have in this country,” he said. But, he added, “there can be a tension” between union efforts to protect workers and “what society needs to do, which is to make sure that the social function — in this case teaching — is being fulfilled.” Mr. Boies, who said he viewed education as a civil rights issue, is offering his services pro bono. Continue reading “Fighting tenure for school teachers”

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Multiplayer games as the future of learning

Appearing in today’s edition of The Atlantic: “It was just supposed to be a quick trip to Beijing, a touristy group thing to take in the sights. It wasn’t supposed to go down like this.There wasn’t supposed to be a lost manuscript; the travelers weren’t supposed to turn on each other. The only good, if any, to be found in this godforsaken quest, this unholy mission, was that by the end of it, they would all know how to speak Mandarin.imgres-1

“This intricate Maltese Falcon­-like story will unfold each day, over the course of semester, as a multiplayer game at Renssalear Polytechnic Institute in New York. It is being  designed as a language-learning exercise by Lee Sheldon, an associate professor in the college’s Games and Simulations Arts and Sciences Program. “Using games and storytelling to teach­—it’s not that radical of a concept,” says Sheldon. “It makes them more interested in what’s going on.”

“Sheldon is a pioneer in gamification, a new movement that essentially takes all the things that make video games engaging and applies them to classroom learning. Sheldon started developing the theory eight years ago. Since then, gamification now comes in all shapes and sizes and is used across educational levels, for kindergarteners through adult learners. Its practitioners range from individual teachers experimenting with game-like elements in their classrooms to entire schools that have integrated the games into their curricula.

“The goal is to change the student’s mindset to a mastery orientation­—to promote motivation, engagement, active learning­—and to cultivate 21st century skills like collaboration, problem solving, creativity and systems thinking,” says Joey Lee, a research assistant professor of Technology and Education at Teacher’s College, Columbia University. “Learning looks very different today, so we need to move away from the Industrial Revolution one-size-fits-all model that still plagues much of education.” Continue reading “Multiplayer games as the future of learning”

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U.S. schools fail to help disabled

U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan on Tuesday focuses his quest to improve classroom performance on the 6.5 million students with disabilities, including many who perform poorly on standardized tests.imgres

As Huffington Post reports, “Duncan, who has spent his years in the Obama administration using accountability measures in existing laws to drive improvements in student performance, on Tuesday joins Michael Yudin, assistant secretary for the Office of Special Education and Rehabilitative Services, to announce a new framework for measuring states’ compliance with the Individuals With Disabilities Education Act, the federal law that supports special education and services for children with disabilities. The law originally was known as the Education of Handicapped Children Act of 1975.

“After years of holding states accountable under the law for such things as timely evaluations of students and due process hearings, the Education Department plans to look at results. For the first time, the government will define compliance with the law not just in terms of what states do for students with disabilities, but with how those students perform.

“Focusing on inputs has worked on improving that type of compliance, according to information the Department released Tuesday. For example, in 2006, 84.8 percent of initial evaluations of students with disabilities were completed on time. By 2010, that number had increased to 96.9 percent. At the same time, national average math proficiency hardly budged from 33.2 percent in 2005-2006 to 35.2 percent in 2009-2010 — representing a dip from 38.7 percent in the previous year.

“Basic compliance does not transform students’ lives,” Duncan said on a Tuesday call with reporters. “It’s not enough for a state to be compliant if students can’t read or do math” at sufficient levels by the time they graduate from high school, he added.

“According to this new results-driven accountability framework, states will be responsible for students with disabilities’ participation in state tests, gaps in proficiency between students with disabilities and their peers, and performance on the National Assessment of Education Progress, or NAEP, the only national standardized test. This marks the first time the NAEP, which is often described as a low-stakes test, has been used for school accountability. Continue reading “U.S. schools fail to help disabled”

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The true student debt crisis

If you borrowed money from the federal government to finance your education and you’re having an extremely hard time paying it back, I have good news for you. As Slate reports, “President Obama has just signed an executive order that expands eligibility for Pay As You Earn, a newish program that caps the monthly debt payments of eligible borrowers to no more than 10 percent of their monthly income. And if you still have outstanding debt after 20 years, or 10 years if you work in the public sector or for a nonprofit, it will be forgiven, like a youthful transgression.imgres-1

“You crazy kid! Remember when you thought taking on this student loan debt made sense because getting a college education meant that you’d eventually earn enough to pay it off? Oh gosh. Those were the days. Clearly you had been passed the peace pipe once too often.

“Cutting debt payments for cash-strapped borrowers is a nice gesture. In 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama fared well with under-30 voters, and Pay As You Earn will give some of them a nice little boost, just in time for the midterm congressional elections. But there is a much larger problem that the president’s feel-good proposal fails to address, which is the fact that people who take on federal student loan debt aren’t earning enough to pay it back. America’s higher education institutions aren’t offering value for money. And that’s a problem that tinkering with the federal student loan program won’t solve.

“To state the obvious: Borrowers can’t handle their debt payments because of the general weakness of the economy. It would be far easier for borrowers to repay their student loan debt if they weren’t unemployed or underemployed, and it would be easier still if they were employed in jobs that offered robust wage gains over time. Yet the debt crisis also reflects the corruption of mass higher education in America.

Continue reading “The true student debt crisis”

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Charting disaster

As an antidote to the “grow grow grow” mentality of the elected officials and business leaders pushing charter schools, a recent report by University of Oregon professor and political economist Gordon Lafer outlines what’s wrong with privatization of public schools.

The report, titled Do Poor Kids Deserve Lower-Quality Education than Rich Kids? Evaluating School Privatization Proposals in Milwaukee, focuses on the model of Rocketship, a national charter elementary school organization that hopes to expand its Milwaukee footprint to eight schools by 2018.

City officials have even considered carving out the lowest-performing parts of the city’s schools for charters to operate, similar to the New Orleans “recovery district.” Milwaukee’s Chamber of Commerce and Democratic Mayor Tom Barrett are among the charter chain’s supporters, raising millions to help it grow.

Rocketship’s investors, who are tech industry heavyweights, claim altruistic intentions: they care about the kids! But they’re also profiting from the expansion of charter schools, a market for their own products and services.

Case in point: Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, on the board of Rocketship, is also an investor in a company called Dream Box, which runs software the schools use for math applications. In the public sector this type of self-dealing is often prohibited, because schools should be choosing the service or product with the best track record, not the one that will enrich investors.

So it’s no surprise that businessmen like Hastings find investing in charters much more appealing than paying more taxes to support public schools. Continue reading “Charting disaster”

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“Degrees of Inequality”

We’re having the wrong conversation about higher education in our country.As reviewed in the New York Times, “So argues Suzanne Mettler in her ­provocative new book, “Degrees of Inequality,” based onthe eight years she spent studying a college system that she argues works well for those born into well-off families but few others. Tuition rates of $50,000 or more at private four-year colleges? The trillion-plus dollars Americans collectively owe on college loans? In ­Mettler’s ­telling, those should be the least of our worries when considering the “caste system” that is now higher education in the United States.images

“The picture Mettler offers of the ­postsecondary-education landscape in the United States is not pretty. Looking past the top stratum of elite colleges that normally dominate discussions of higher education (Mettler herself is a professor of government at Cornell University), she chronicles the deterioration of the country’s once-vaunted state college system, where a majority of students pursuing a postsecondary degree are enrolled. She bemoans the fact that the community ­colleges, which play a central role in educating the “less advantaged,” must beg for money, and she lays into for-profit ­colleges like the University of Phoenix, the largest of the 1,000 or so of these institutions that have sprouted up in recent years.

“For-profit colleges are the true bad guys in this tale. Though their “ardent defender,” the Republican Party, contends that the schools provide “meaningful opportunities for low-income and minority students,” Mettler mounts a persuasive case that something like the opposite is true: These institutions are generally more skilled at getting rich off those living in the lower economic reaches than they are at preparing them for the job market. She has mined congressional reports, newspaper accounts and academic ­studies, piling up example after example of recruiters who’ll say practically anything to enroll a student, any student, in their programs, resulting in graduation rates not even close to those of traditional colleges. Continue reading ““Degrees of Inequality””