Forbes Magazine, February 02, 2009As college costs have risen at twice the inflation rate, students have resorted to costly private loans. Now rising bad debt is harming borrowers and lenders alike.
Friday, February 13, 2009
The Great College Hoax
Kathy Kristof
Forbes Magazine, February 02, 2009
Higher education can be a financial disaster. Especially with the return on degrees down and student loan sharks on the prowl.
As steadily as ivy creeps up the walls of its well-groomed campuses,the education industrial complex has cultivated the image of college as a sure-fire path to a life of social and economic privilege.
Joel Kellum says he's living proof that the claim is a lie. A 40-year-old Los Angeles resident, Kellum did everything he was supposed to do to get ahead in life. He worked hard as a high schooler, got into the University of Virginia and graduated with a bachelor's degree in history.
Accepted into the California Western School of Law, a private San Diego institution, Kellum couldn't swing the $36,000 in annual tuition with financial aid and part-time work. So he did what friends and professors said was the smart move and took out $60,000 in student loans.
Kellum's law school sweetheart, Jennifer Coultas, did much the same. By the time they graduated in 1995, the couple was $194,000 in debt. They eventually married and each landed a six-figure job. Yet even with Kellum moonlighting, they had to scrounge to come up with $145,000 in loan payments. With interest accruing at up to 12% a year, that whittled away only $21,000 in principal. Their remaining bill: $173,000 and counting.
Kellum and Coultas divorced last year. Each cites their struggle with law school debt as a major source of stress on their marriage. "Two people with this much debt just shouldn't be together," Kellum says.
The two disillusioned attorneys were victims of an unfolding education hoax on the middle class that's just as insidious, and nearly as sweeping, as the housing debacle. The ingredients are strikingly similar, too: Misguided easy-money policies that are encouraging the masses to go into debt; a self-serving establishment trading in half-truths that exaggerate the value of its product; plus a Wall Street money machine dabbling in outright fraud as it foists unaffordable debt on the most vulnerable marks.
College graduates will earn $1 million more than those with only a high school diploma, brags Mercy College radio ads running in the New York area. The $1 million shibboleth is a favorite of college barkers.
Comment On This Story
Like many good cons, this one contains a kernel of truth. Census figures show that college grads earn an average of $57,500 a year, which is 82% more than the $31,600 high school alumni make. Multiply the $25,900 difference by the 40 years the average person works and, sure enough, it comes to a tad over $1 million.
But anybody who has gotten a passing grade in statistics knows what's wrong with this line of argument. A correlation between B.A.s and incomes is not proof of cause and effect. It may reflect nothing more than the fact that the economy rewards smart people and smart people are likely to go to college. To cite the extreme and obvious example: Bill Gates is rich because he knows how to run a business, not because he matriculated at Harvard. Finishing his degree wouldn't have increased his income.
All the while students have been lulled into thinking of the extra $1 million that will be theirs, they have been forced to disgorge an ever larger fraction of it in pursuit of the degree. While the premium that college grads earn over high schoolers has remained relatively constant over the past five years, the cost of acquiring a degree has risen at twice the rate of inflation, dramatically undermining any value a sheepskin adds.
Offsetting that million-dollar income discrepancy is the $46,700 four-year cost of tuition, fees, books, room and board at a public school and $99,900 at a private one--even after financial aid, scholarships and grants. Add all this to the equation and college grads don't pull even with high school grads in lifetime income until age 33 on average, the College Board says. Even that doesn't include the $125,000 in pay students forgo over four years.
"I call it the million-dollar misunderstanding," says Mark Schneider, vice president of the American Institutes for Research, of the prevailing propaganda.
Not only are college numbers spun. Some are patently spurious, says Richard Sander, a law professor at UCLA. Law schools lure in minority students to improve diversity rankings without disclosing that less than half of African-Americans who enter these programs ever pass the bar. Schools goose employment statistics by temporarily hiring new grads and spotlighting kids who land top-paying jobs, while glossing over far-lower average incomes. The one certainty: The average law grad owes $100,000 in student debt.
"There are a lot of aspects of selling education that are tinged with consumer fraud," Sander says. "There is a definite conspiracy to lead students down a primrose path."
Warped as the numbers are, they don't begin to account for the hidden cost of higher education: financing it. Borrowing has doubled over the past decade, to roughly $85 billion in new student loans in the 2007--08 academic year, bringing total student debt owed to well over half a trillion dollars. The average borrower went $19,200 into debt for a diploma in 2004, a 58% increase after inflation since 1993, according to the Project on Student Debt.
Monday, January 26, 2009
Go Western, Young Man
By KATHLEEN KINGSBURY, Reprinted from TIME Partners with CNN
Let's not waste anyone's time or money. You won't find that phrase emblazoned on a T shirt, but it's essentially the motto of Western Governors University (WGU), a private online school that has worked hard to prove it is anything but a diploma mill.
Established 11 years ago by the governors of 19 states, the virtual university--which is administered from Salt Lake City--has experienced a surge in admissions as more college students look for low-cost alternatives. Enrollment topped 10,000 last spring, growing at a rate of 40% in both 2006 and 2007.
Some 4 million Americans sign up for a distance-learning course each year, whether at an extension of a bricks-and-mortar institution or at an online-only school. Although the latter category is populated mostly by for-profit companies, WGU stands out as a nonprofit funded mainly by tuition and the $20 million in seed money supplied by those 19 governors. To help bolster its reputation, the school obtained accreditation from both regional standard bearers and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the professional body recognized by the U.S. Department of Education for certifying teacher-preparation programs. (WGU remains the only online institution that has NCATE's seal of approval.) Such moves were designed to "lend WGU more legitimacy as an educational institution," says Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, who helped found the school when he was governor of Utah. Today WGU is the nation's largest supplier of math and science teachers in urban school districts. And its alumni are hired by such FORTUNE 500 companies as Microsoft and AT&T. "[WGU] has earned a reputation for producing high-quality graduates, particularly in education," says Kevin Kinser, a professor at New York's University of Albany who studies online learning and is not affiliated with WGU.
The school's success is owed in large part to its competency-based approach. Instead of requiring that students take specific courses or amass a certain number of credit hours--as most colleges do--WGU asks only that students demonstrate mastery of the subject matter via online exams or papers that could take a day or a decade, depending on the student.
WGU has no full-time instructors, at least not in the conventional sense. Course work for its four majors--education, IT, business and health care--is developed by and licensed from outside vendors. But WGU does have about 250 full-time faculty members who work as mentors, checking in with students by phone every couple of weeks to ensure they are making progress in their courses and to recommend additional resources. "I get to know each of my students much better than I did when I lectured to them once a week in class," says Alisa Izumi, a business professor at WGU who lives in Granby, Mass., and used to teach at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
At $3,000 per six-month semester, WGU charges a sixth of the average annual tab at private four-year colleges and half as much as an online for-profit like the University of Phoenix, a mega virtual school that has some 200,000 students. And WGU lets you take as many courses as you can fit in a semester, which means some students are able to finish an undergraduate degree in as little as two years. "Before WGU, I would have had to drive almost two hours to Richmond," says Sandy Newsome, a teacher in rural Virginia who is getting her master's in math education. "Learning this all from home seems so much smarter." Sure does.
Let's not waste anyone's time or money. You won't find that phrase emblazoned on a T shirt, but it's essentially the motto of Western Governors University (WGU), a private online school that has worked hard to prove it is anything but a diploma mill.
Established 11 years ago by the governors of 19 states, the virtual university--which is administered from Salt Lake City--has experienced a surge in admissions as more college students look for low-cost alternatives. Enrollment topped 10,000 last spring, growing at a rate of 40% in both 2006 and 2007.
Some 4 million Americans sign up for a distance-learning course each year, whether at an extension of a bricks-and-mortar institution or at an online-only school. Although the latter category is populated mostly by for-profit companies, WGU stands out as a nonprofit funded mainly by tuition and the $20 million in seed money supplied by those 19 governors. To help bolster its reputation, the school obtained accreditation from both regional standard bearers and the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE), the professional body recognized by the U.S. Department of Education for certifying teacher-preparation programs. (WGU remains the only online institution that has NCATE's seal of approval.) Such moves were designed to "lend WGU more legitimacy as an educational institution," says Health and Human Services Secretary Mike Leavitt, who helped found the school when he was governor of Utah. Today WGU is the nation's largest supplier of math and science teachers in urban school districts. And its alumni are hired by such FORTUNE 500 companies as Microsoft and AT&T. "[WGU] has earned a reputation for producing high-quality graduates, particularly in education," says Kevin Kinser, a professor at New York's University of Albany who studies online learning and is not affiliated with WGU.
The school's success is owed in large part to its competency-based approach. Instead of requiring that students take specific courses or amass a certain number of credit hours--as most colleges do--WGU asks only that students demonstrate mastery of the subject matter via online exams or papers that could take a day or a decade, depending on the student.
WGU has no full-time instructors, at least not in the conventional sense. Course work for its four majors--education, IT, business and health care--is developed by and licensed from outside vendors. But WGU does have about 250 full-time faculty members who work as mentors, checking in with students by phone every couple of weeks to ensure they are making progress in their courses and to recommend additional resources. "I get to know each of my students much better than I did when I lectured to them once a week in class," says Alisa Izumi, a business professor at WGU who lives in Granby, Mass., and used to teach at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
At $3,000 per six-month semester, WGU charges a sixth of the average annual tab at private four-year colleges and half as much as an online for-profit like the University of Phoenix, a mega virtual school that has some 200,000 students. And WGU lets you take as many courses as you can fit in a semester, which means some students are able to finish an undergraduate degree in as little as two years. "Before WGU, I would have had to drive almost two hours to Richmond," says Sandy Newsome, a teacher in rural Virginia who is getting her master's in math education. "Learning this all from home seems so much smarter." Sure does.
Wednesday, January 14, 2009
Obama style change in Trenton?
Recently I had the opportunity to meet Tim Razzaq, who marches to his own cadence and has the ability to attract other marchers in his quest to make change happen. His unusual education and career path seems to be relevant to the focus of this blog. An excerpt from the U.S. 1 Newspaper interview:
Despite being frustrated and bored by high school and one semester of college, Razzaq was eager to learn. In 1997, based on his publishing contacts (he had sold books door-to-door and worked for Africa World press), he began to organize book signings and conferences, eventually forming a grassroots education group, the Communiversity of Trenton. It ran from 1997 to 2002 and focused on Afro-centric history and health. “We wanted to take university knowledge into the community,” says Razzaq, “so people could have easy, affordable access to education. We created our own syllabus and our own library, pooled our money, and flew university leaders to Trenton.”
Razzaq went on to be a community organizer and to found a grass roots organization, We Are Building Open Opportunity Structures Together (We Are BOOST). Its current mission: "to facilitate personal, organizational, and social empowerment through our consortium of academic and industry leaders by offering everyday citizens innovative, yet practical ways to use green technology and sustainable design in everyday living."
The full interview about We Are BOOST is available at U.S. 1 Newspaper, and additional observations are blogged at Princeton Comment.
As the United States prepares to welcome another African American community organizer -- one with a stellar traditional education -- as its president for the next four years, it is intriguing to observe what Tim Razzaq may be able to accomplish in that time. He is starting in Trenton, New Jersey, but sets no geographical limits.
Monday, January 12, 2009
The CNMI Trades Institute needs your help!
From Saipan Tribune, January 12, 2009
by Anthony Pellegrino
The Northern Marianas Trades Institute needs your help. In addition to all the wonderful support it is receiving from the community, it needs the help from people with skills and time to help the students fulfill their goals. Though it has fine instructors and willing students, NMTI needs more instructors and people's special aid in several areas. Let me explain.
The NMTI is now six months old. It is housed in a large 25,000 square foot warehouse with another 10,000 square feet of yard area located on Lower Base Drive. About 96 students are currently enrolled studying one of the following courses: carpentry, plumbing, painting, electrical and sewing. As the institute continues to grow, it will offer more courses to accommodate the needs of our community. In a few weeks, it intends to begin a welding class, an automobile repair course, a small engines repair course, and a culinary class.
However as it struggles to grow and fulfill the aspirations of its students, it is discovering that many of the students have not completed their high school studies. It is the intent of NMTI to encourage these students to resume their studies toward obtaining a high school diploma while they learn their trade. But because many of the students dropped out of school or have never studied on their own, it is extremely difficult for them to study without a tutor.
Taking a GED course and trying to study by oneself is very difficult. First, many the textbooks require a high level of reading ability. Another problem is that the concepts in these textbooks are difficult to comprehend alone. Also studying alone requires a high level of determination and self-discipline. As a result many students enroll in the GED courses, but fall by the wayside in a short period.
As NMTI motivates these students to resume their academic studies, it is asking the community for volunteers once or twice a week to act as tutors to these students. The hours and days can be arranged to suit each group and tutors' needs.
What a thrill to share your experience and motivation with these students so eager to improve their lives and serve our community. You will also enrich your own life as you give to them. Please help! Remember as you give so will you receive. Make a difference by tutoring our young students!
Another appeal for help is for instructors in various trade skills. As NMTI grows, it requires more instructors to teach the many courses it is planning. It is difficult to find qualified instructors. Share your skills and knowledge with the youth of our community. Since most of the courses are taught at night, it will not interfere with any daytime job. Regardless of your trade or skill if are willing to teach, NMTI needs you and the students need you.
The NMTI is very proud to announce that it has been certified by the National Center for Construction, Education and Research, which is affiliated with the University of Florida. The NMTI is also closely affiliated with the Guam Contractors Association Trades Academy. As a result, all the textbooks we use are approved nationwide. Graduating students will be able to work anywhere in Guam, Hawaii, and the United States because of this standardization. The students can even move to another state and continue their trade education.
The benefits of using NCCER curricula includes providing a proven training program designed around national industry standards and developed by leading subject matter experts from all sectors of the construction industry. This means that the training offered is equal to the training programs in any of the 50 states.
One of the most exciting activities planned for our students is that shortly they will be soliciting maintenance work to do in our houses. NMTI has formed small groups of the more qualified students. They will solicit maintenance work in various neighborhoods. The purpose is to have the students do actual repair work on actual job sites. All the work done will be controlled by a professional supervisor. The finished work will be guaranteed as to quality and professionalism.
In this method, the students will learn quickly to do actual hands on work. The plan is to enable the student to work in the daytime and to study the theory of his trade in the evening. Also he will earn money to pay for his tuition and have pocket money. This will also create confidence in his ability so that he will learn better and faster.
Anybody is welcome to enroll in NMTI regardless of age and gender. Because our courses are designed in a special manner, a student can enter anytime and also stop for a while if needed. This allows the student to juggle his personal life and study. NMTI does not focus on attendance but rather on attaining competence.
Encourage your sons or daughters or anyone you feel desires to learn a trade or skill. Even you! This is your institute with one goal-to improve the work skills and work ethics of our local people.
The Northern Marianas Trades Institute is proud to be an integral part of Saipan's training community, using local talent to train more local talent and strengthening our skilled work force, both in quantity and quality.
Please stop by and offer any assistance you can or become a student yourself or recommend someone to become a student. Let us begin our journey to economic independence and pride in the workplace.
---
Pellegrino is a longtime businessman in the CNMI and is the former President of the Saipan Chamber of Commerce.
by Anthony Pellegrino
The Northern Marianas Trades Institute needs your help. In addition to all the wonderful support it is receiving from the community, it needs the help from people with skills and time to help the students fulfill their goals. Though it has fine instructors and willing students, NMTI needs more instructors and people's special aid in several areas. Let me explain.
The NMTI is now six months old. It is housed in a large 25,000 square foot warehouse with another 10,000 square feet of yard area located on Lower Base Drive. About 96 students are currently enrolled studying one of the following courses: carpentry, plumbing, painting, electrical and sewing. As the institute continues to grow, it will offer more courses to accommodate the needs of our community. In a few weeks, it intends to begin a welding class, an automobile repair course, a small engines repair course, and a culinary class.
However as it struggles to grow and fulfill the aspirations of its students, it is discovering that many of the students have not completed their high school studies. It is the intent of NMTI to encourage these students to resume their studies toward obtaining a high school diploma while they learn their trade. But because many of the students dropped out of school or have never studied on their own, it is extremely difficult for them to study without a tutor.
Taking a GED course and trying to study by oneself is very difficult. First, many the textbooks require a high level of reading ability. Another problem is that the concepts in these textbooks are difficult to comprehend alone. Also studying alone requires a high level of determination and self-discipline. As a result many students enroll in the GED courses, but fall by the wayside in a short period.
As NMTI motivates these students to resume their academic studies, it is asking the community for volunteers once or twice a week to act as tutors to these students. The hours and days can be arranged to suit each group and tutors' needs.
What a thrill to share your experience and motivation with these students so eager to improve their lives and serve our community. You will also enrich your own life as you give to them. Please help! Remember as you give so will you receive. Make a difference by tutoring our young students!
Another appeal for help is for instructors in various trade skills. As NMTI grows, it requires more instructors to teach the many courses it is planning. It is difficult to find qualified instructors. Share your skills and knowledge with the youth of our community. Since most of the courses are taught at night, it will not interfere with any daytime job. Regardless of your trade or skill if are willing to teach, NMTI needs you and the students need you.
The NMTI is very proud to announce that it has been certified by the National Center for Construction, Education and Research, which is affiliated with the University of Florida. The NMTI is also closely affiliated with the Guam Contractors Association Trades Academy. As a result, all the textbooks we use are approved nationwide. Graduating students will be able to work anywhere in Guam, Hawaii, and the United States because of this standardization. The students can even move to another state and continue their trade education.
The benefits of using NCCER curricula includes providing a proven training program designed around national industry standards and developed by leading subject matter experts from all sectors of the construction industry. This means that the training offered is equal to the training programs in any of the 50 states.
One of the most exciting activities planned for our students is that shortly they will be soliciting maintenance work to do in our houses. NMTI has formed small groups of the more qualified students. They will solicit maintenance work in various neighborhoods. The purpose is to have the students do actual repair work on actual job sites. All the work done will be controlled by a professional supervisor. The finished work will be guaranteed as to quality and professionalism.
In this method, the students will learn quickly to do actual hands on work. The plan is to enable the student to work in the daytime and to study the theory of his trade in the evening. Also he will earn money to pay for his tuition and have pocket money. This will also create confidence in his ability so that he will learn better and faster.
Anybody is welcome to enroll in NMTI regardless of age and gender. Because our courses are designed in a special manner, a student can enter anytime and also stop for a while if needed. This allows the student to juggle his personal life and study. NMTI does not focus on attendance but rather on attaining competence.
Encourage your sons or daughters or anyone you feel desires to learn a trade or skill. Even you! This is your institute with one goal-to improve the work skills and work ethics of our local people.
The Northern Marianas Trades Institute is proud to be an integral part of Saipan's training community, using local talent to train more local talent and strengthening our skilled work force, both in quantity and quality.
Please stop by and offer any assistance you can or become a student yourself or recommend someone to become a student. Let us begin our journey to economic independence and pride in the workplace.
---
Pellegrino is a longtime businessman in the CNMI and is the former President of the Saipan Chamber of Commerce.
Wednesday, December 31, 2008
Internet Access Turns School Buses Into Rolling Classrooms
Posted by LVKen7@Gmail.com
Internet Access Turns School Buses Into Rolling Classrooms
By STEPHANIE SIMON
As part of hiseconomic-stimulus plan, President-elect Barack
Obama has
pledged to wire more schools to provide high-speed Internet access.
Ethan Clement, a student in rural Arkansas, has some advice:
Don't forget to wire the buses.
Ethan, a 17-year-old high-school senior,
has been taking
math and
science classes online during her
90-minute ride to school as part of a
pilot project to
turn old-fashioned school buses into
cutting-edge classrooms.
The project, known as the
Aspirnaut Initiative,
http://www.aspirnaut.org/
"A Pilot Educational Initiative to
Elevate the
Mathematics and
Science Achievement of
Rural Community
K-12 Students Who
Commute on
Long Bus Rides to School"
gives some high-performing
students laptops or
video iPods and
sets them up with
online courses and
educational videos
during their
long bus rides
to and from school --
a round trip that often starts before dawn and ends after dark.
A number of participants have dropped out, unable to focus on studying as the bus bumps along gravel roads. But for students such as Ethan, the Aspirnaut Initiative has opened new worlds.
The two college professors who run the program have become her mentors. For the first time, she said, she feels confident that she can aspire to a career in science. "It's not just for big-city people with good connections," she said.
Mr. Obama's
pledge to
get more
classrooms online
comes at a time of broad experimentation in high-tech education.
From - Change.gov
"...let's lay down
broadband lines
through the
heart of inner cities and
rural towns
all across America."
Small rural school districts have embraced distance learning, enrolling students in virtual classes teaching Spanish and other subjects they can't offer in person because of limited staff and funding.
Urban and suburban schools, too, are directing students to the Internet.
Elementary students learning about animal habitats check in daily with a live Webcam monitoring the Florida Everglades.
High-school literature students
set up blogs and
collaborative Web sites
*** This is EASY to do with Google Doc and Sites.
where they take on the persona of a favorite character and field questions from fellow students. In some districts, entire schools work together on online projects such as building a virtual museum.
"Technology tears down the walls of the classroom and allows students to interact with people they may find more interesting than their classroom teacher," said Don Knezek, who runs a nonprofit advocacy group called the International Society for Technology in Education.
http://www.iste.org/
The Aspirnaut Initiative extends that philosophy to the school bus.
http://www.aspirnaut.org/
The program was founded by Billy Hudson, who grew up skipping school to tend chickens and pick cotton on his family's farm in Grapevine, Ark., a sprawling and sparsely populated community of about 700 people. He was on the verge of dropping out altogether when a mentor kindled a love of science. Now a renowned kidney specialist, Mr. Hudson directs the Center for Matrix Biology at Vanderbilt University in Tennessee.
A few years ago, Mr. Hudson and his wife, Julie, a medical professor at Vanderbilt, went back to Grapevine with hopes of finding a promising student to mentor. They rode the bus -- and were shocked to learn that, thanks to school closings and district consolidations, some students now commute as long as 90 minutes each way, with nothing to do but gossip, fight or stare out the window. "I thought, 'There's got to be a better way,' " Mr. Hudson said.
The Hudsons put up $70,000 and raised another $70,000 from friends to turn three buses into rolling classrooms. Eight students selected by their teachers have received laptops to use on the bus and at home, and 10 more will be given laptops in January. An additional 20 use video iPods to watch National Geographic or Discovery Channel videos.
The Hudsons are seeking grants or public funds to expand the program statewide in Arkansas and to parts of Tennessee and Kentucky. They also are tinkering with the program in the original pilot site, the Sheridan School District, south of Little Rock. Big-screen monitors will soon be installed on buses so those students who choose not to take individual classes can watch science videos together, listening through wireless headphones.
"Time on the bus is a no-man's land," Mr. Hudson said. "This is our chance to intervene."
Some critics, however, see a danger in bus-based education.
Most students balance the computers on their laps, putting them in close contact with the radiation emitted by WiFi technology. In Britain, health officials have raised concerns about the effect of that radiation on children, warning that prolonged exposure -- via WiFi or cellphone usage -- could raise the risk for cancer or cognitive impairment.
A 2006 World Health Organization report found "no convincing scientific evidence" that wireless networks adversely affect health.
Aspirnaut Initiative's Ms. Hudson said that while they aren't aware of any strong evidence pointing to radiation risks from laptop use, they ask the students to work with their computers in a padded case while on the bus.
Another point of contention: The Aspirnaut Initiative might lull parents into accepting ever-longer bus rides for their children, said Rachel Tompkins, president of the Rural School and Community Trust. Her nonprofit fights the growing trend to close small rural districts and community schools.
Skeptics also point out that it takes a very motivated student to power through an advanced algebra class on a bouncy, noisy bus at 6 a.m. Vera Launius, who drives one route on the pilot project, said the kids all clamored to participate at first -- "until the new wore off." Now, half turn away the video iPods she hands out. (They come preloaded with educational videos and can be used only during the ride.) "They want music on there, instead of science," Ms. Launius said.
Students who do want to focus on their studies often complain that their friends don't make it easy. Said 8-year-old Lauren Taylor, "It's hard to concentrate when you have all these kids talking."
Still, Lauren loves the program. She has learned to use email and surf the Web. She is studying data analysis in an online math unit. Her mom, Vonda Taylor, was amazed when Lauren came home one day quoting facts about Pocahontas she had learned on the bus from a Web site offering social-studies lessons along with math and science. "Before, she just kind of looked out the window," Mrs. Taylor said.
Ethan's mother, Kirsten Clement, is just as enthusiastic. The online classes allow regular interaction with far-flung teachers. Last year, Ethan completed AP Biology on the bus, earning college credit. This year, she is taking a calculus class not offered at her high school.
"Ethan has had conversations with people who can tickle her mind, and that's something I could not provide for her," Mrs. Clement said.
Write to Stephanie Simon at stephanie.simon@wsj.com
Monday, December 22, 2008
edupunk -- do we like it?
A "Buzzword" article ("Choice Syllables for 2008i, You Betcha") caught my eye in the Sunday, December 21, 2008 New York Times. TV talking heads have picked up on the political buzzwords mentioned by writer Mark Leibovich, like "Caribou Barbie" and "Obamination," but readers of this blog might well focus on "edupunk," the term coined this spring by Jim Groom and defined in Wikipedia as an approach to teaching and learning practices that result from a do it yourself (DIY) attitude.
Leibovich says edupunk is "a style of hands-on self education that benefits the student without concern for curriculums or the interests of schools, corporations, or governments. In other words, an autodidactic aproach that spurns commercialism, mass-market approaches, and top-down goal setting."
Does this sound like quality generic education?
I don 't have the time to look into the various layers behind the edupunk term, but I bet there's more than one meaning and that some aren't flattering. Can someone elucidate?
Barbara Figge Fox
PS. The plural for curriculum is curricula. After three years of high school Latin I thought it didn't look right, and I looked it up. Hands-on self education at work.
Leibovich says edupunk is "a style of hands-on self education that benefits the student without concern for curriculums or the interests of schools, corporations, or governments. In other words, an autodidactic aproach that spurns commercialism, mass-market approaches, and top-down goal setting."
Does this sound like quality generic education?
I don 't have the time to look into the various layers behind the edupunk term, but I bet there's more than one meaning and that some aren't flattering. Can someone elucidate?
Barbara Figge Fox
PS. The plural for curriculum is curricula. After three years of high school Latin I thought it didn't look right, and I looked it up. Hands-on self education at work.
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