We're looking for any upcoming or recent accounts of freshman orientation from those who've undergone the process or shortly will. PC skits, "white privilege" games, and the like, we're interested in all of this. Any stories are welcome and encouraged. Write us or urge anyone you know who might be going through the process to write us at editor@campusmind.org

The National Council for the Accreditation of Teacher Education (NCATE) seems finally to have perceived what was in plain view to many people: that most of America's ed schools are mediocre at best, offering curricula that mix lightweight courses, ivory-tower ideology, and minimal clinical exposure of student teachers to real-life classrooms.

NCATE has revised upwards the standards that the 632 college and graduate-level education programs it accredits---a little more than half of the nation's 1,200-odd teacher-training courses of study-- must meet in order to maintain their accreditations. Currently only a few of those schools meet NCATE's highest levels of achievement, and many rate as merely "acceptable"---the lowest level an ed school can meet and still qualify for accreditation. Now, NCATE says, institutions must not be acceptable but "demonstrate continuous improvement toward excellence."

Ed school critics have complained for years that the curricula at many education programs skimp on content knowledge (many history teachers don't know much about history, and many math teachers can barely add or subtract, let alone help youngsters learn those operations). The programs also waste credit hours and ed students' time on trendy theories (Marxism, feminism, and the "pedagogy of the oppressed," just to name a few) and teaching techniques that are light on proven usefulness but heavy on academic fashionableness, whether it's having high-schoolers make a poster in English class instead of writing an essay, so as to cater to "multiple intelligences," or having middle-schoolers who misbehave participate in a "talking circle" instead of having to leave the classroom, all in the name of "restorative justice," one of the latest trends in school discipline.

Continue reading "Are Ed Schools Failing?" »

High schools appear to be steadily dumbing down summer reading assignments, if this Boston Globe report is any indication. One teacher:

..created a cheeky list with titles like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies by Seth Grahame-Smith and Our Dumb World by The Onion. The former is a spoof on the Jane Austen classic that has the Bennet daughters more concerned with self-defense than marriage, and the latter pokes fun at Americans and, well, everything.

Unfortunate, but not really any surprise, if you've paid any attention to college summer reading assignments lately.

"Maximize Your 529 College Savings Plan" from the Boston Globe

Those who suspect that "Middle Eastern studies" is actually a code word for anti-Israel advocacy have some new evidence to support their position: an entire academic conference scheduled for this week at York University in Toronto that appears to be entirely devoted to the idea of erasing the state of Israel from the map. The conference, scheduled to run from June 22 through June 24, is titled "Israel/Palestine: Mapping Models of Statehood and Prospects for Peace."

Yet the overwhelming majority of the 44 speakers scheduled to read papers, many of whom are not professional scholars (and of those who are, many are not experts in the Middle East but rather in law, film, medicine, and other fields) have only one "model of statehood" in mind for the lands between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean: a single, putatively secular political entity that would encompass all of Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights and in which Jews would be vastly outnumbered by Muslim Arabs and the Jewish identity of the land in which they live would be annihilated. The conference is jointly sponsored by York, Queens University in Kingston, Ontario, and a Canadian government entity, the Social Sciences and Humanities Council, which helped fund the conference with a grant of nearly $20,000.

To get an idea of the one-sided ideological thrust of the conference, you need only click to its website, which prominently features two maps, on neither of which the state of Israel (or any other political entity west of the Jordan) is demarcated or otherwise identified. One of the maps features a zipper, presumably a symbol of a successful effort to stitch up the boundaries of the various contested lands, but it functions visually in a different way: to portray Israel as visually swallowed up.

Continue reading "Erasing Israel At York University" »

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Two weeks ago a state district judge in Denver issued a ruling that makes it next to impossible for a college in the Colorado state system to revise its faculty handbook so as to make it easier to lay off tenured faculty members in the event of a reduction in employment force, even when state law and the previous version of the faculty handbook itself allow the college to make the revisions.

Denver District Judge Norman D. Haglund's June 8 order, in the case of Saxe vs. Board of Trustees of Metropolitan State College of Denver, which has spent at least five years in the Colorado court system, including an appeal, stated that the "public interest" in the academic freedom of tenured faculty outweighs any public interest that a financially stretched public college might have in preserving flexibility in hiring and firing tenured professors so as to serve its student body more effectively. As Inside Higher Education reported, Haglund effectively said that "not only is tenure a good thing for the professors who enjoy it, it is valuable to the public."

As Inside Higher Ed also reported, the Saxe case is "much more important" than the specific issues at play, which involved the efforts of the trustees of Metro State, a 21,500-student, heavily Hispanic four-year public college in one of Denver's oldest urban neighborhoods, to put into effect a revised faculty handbook in 2003 that rescinded a provision in the previous handbook, issued in 1994, generally requiring that non-tenured faculty be laid off before the jobs of tenured faculty members be touched. The 1994 handbook also required that that college first attempt to place affected tenured professors in other campus jobs, a requirement that the trustees rescinded in 2003. Haglund ruled that the changes amounted to a deprivation of the "vested rights" of tenured Metro State professors.

Continue reading "Does Tenure Mean You Can't Be Laid Off?" »