Monday, April 6, 2015

EDUCATION USA PRESENT AND FUTURE NEWSLETTER #3

OMNI
EDUCATION USA FOR THE FUTURE NEWSLETTER #3, April 6, 2014
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace, Justice, and Ecology.
 (#1 July 7, 2011; #2, May 28, 2014).


Newsletters
Index:
Blog
See Newsletters #1 and #2 at end
Needs editing, compare Contents with actual contents--karen
Contents: Education for Change Newsletter #3

Present Condition of Higher Education
Chomsky, Dwindling Away of Faculty Control
Laurence Wittner, “The $7 Million University President.”  Administrators UP,
     Faculty DOWN
Karen Madison, Contingent (non-tenured) Faculty, Sign Petition
Steve Smith, Contingent Faculty

Student Debt
The Nation, Student Debt Protest Petition  
 Matt Taibbi, College Loan Scandal
 Scot Ross and Mike Browne, Student Debt Should be Lightened
 Rolling Jubilee

Higher and Public Education for Change
Critical Pedagogy
Totten and Pederson: Critical Pedagogues and Theories
Iveta Silova, Education for Global Citizenship
Rossatto, Globalizing Education on Freirean  Principles
Bowen, Schwartz, Camp: Academic Freedom and the University’s Purpose
Struggle to Increase Girls and Women in STEM

Recent Related Newsletters
Contact Your District Superintendent and School Principals, Tell Them about
    Giroux and Others in these Newsletters.


PRESENT CONDITION OF HIGHER EDUCATION

Chomsky: CorporateThink is harming American Universities

http://www.alternet.org/education/chomsky-thinking-corporations-harming-american-universities?page=0%2C4

Under representative systems, you have to have someone doing administrative work, but they should be recallable at some point under the authority of the people they administer. That’s less and less true. There are more and more professional administrators, layer after layer of them, with more and more positions being taken remote from the faculty controls. I mentioned beforeThe Fall of the Faculty by Benjamin Ginsberg, which goes into a lot of detail as to how this works in the several universities he looks at closely: Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and a couple of others.

Meanwhile, the faculty are increasingly reduced to a category of temporary workers who are assured a precarious existence with no path to the tenure track. I have personal acquaintances who are effectively permanent lecturers; they’re not given real faculty status; they have to apply every year so that they can get appointed again. These things shouldn’t be allowed to happen.

 

 

Laurence Wittner, “The $7 Million University President.”  Z Magazine (February 2015).  About the extraordinary salary for the president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a private university in Troy, NY, as presaging the future of US universities:  “inflating administration salaries; exploiting adjunct faculty, regular faculty, and other workers; strengthening administration power; raising tuition to astronomical heights; and, above all, running colleges and universities like modern business enterprises. . . .”


CONTINGENT FACULTY

SIGN PETITION FOR CONTINGENT (NON-TENURED) FACULTY

From: Karen Lentz Madison
Sent: Friday, August 01, 2014 8:09 PM
Hi Dick, Steven, and Stephanie--I just sent the note below to our non-tenure track listserv in the English Department. Could you forward to any friends or colleagues who would help us in our goal for signatures on the petition found in this email? And would you sign it, too! Thanks--Karen Madison

Hi Gang,

I hope you are having a good summer. For those of us who won't be back this fall, you will be missed, and I hope you have found a position or work that suits you. Please let me know if you are still looking and or you have had trouble applying for .unemployment.

Also, folks, please, please read over this petition and then sign it and forward it, post it on your social media platforms. It concerns improving the working lives of all contingent faculty (full time and part time) across the US. https://www.change.org/petitions/david-weil-dir-wage-and-hour-div-u-s-dept-of-labor-open-an-investigation-into-the-labor-practices-of-our-colleges-and-universities-in-the-employment-of-contingent-faculty?recruiter=394703&utm_campaign=twitter_link&utm_medium=twitter&utm_source=share_petition

I helped write it, and it's going to the Sect. of Labor on Labor Day or right after. It's been written about in Salon, and the Chronicle of Higher Education, Adjunct Project, New Faculty Majority, talked about on NPR, and blogged about in Harvard University Press Blog, to mention just a few of our media connections

http://harvardpress.typepad.com/hup_publicity/2014/08/adjuncts-petition-david-weil.html

And, Rebecca Schumann (pankisseskafka) is going to sing a song chosen by her readers when we hit 7500. Well, her followers all know that it will be "Major Tom" in German, regardless of suggestions. But if we hit 10000-- just read her post and the comments:

 http://pankisseskafka.com/2014/07/31/the-adjunct-petition-challenge-watch-me-humiliate-myself-more-than-usual/

You get the idea. We are pushing for 10000 signatures and are asking friends, students, family, tenure-stream and non-tenure stream colleagues to help us get there. And I am asking you to be a part of it, too.

 

Hi Dick,
I need to share an article that
Stephen Smith wrote. He told me he hoped it would fire up some people. We shall see!  Here's the link to it:
http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/MU68CbncAe6ICNYa257E/full#.VQduYo74K9g
Karen

 

 

STUDENT DEBT

The Nation Magazine
Dear DICK,
$1.3 trillion. That’s how much Americans owe in student loan debt. $1.3 trillion.That’s more than credit card debt. More than car loans. In fact, it’s more than any kind of debt other than mortgages.
This is a big problem and we need big ideas to fix it. Sign our petition to cancel all student loan debt.
We know that this is a big ask and that you’re probably constantly getting emails asking you to sign petitions. But we need a dramatic change in the conversation around this issue if higher education is ever going to be affordable in America.
We know we can do it. Just a few decades ago, you could pay for a college education with your average summer job. After World War II, the G.I. Bill helped thousands of veterans get a college education and establish a middle class life.
Today, students leave school burdened by an average of $25,000 in debt. Their debt then makes it difficult for them to make big purchases like cars or homes, dragging down the entire economy.
College needs to be affordable. Students need to be able to build their lives. Sign our petition demanding that all student debt be forgiven.
All the best,
Sarah Arnold
donate-2


MATT TAIBBI, “RIPPING OFF YOUNG AMERICA.”  ROLLING STONE. 

“Ripping Off Young America: The College-Loan Scandal.”  

The federal government has made it easier than ever to borrow money for higher education - saddling a generation with crushing debts and inflating a bubble that could bring down the economy

By MATT TAIBBI.   AUGUST 15, 2013 10:45 AM ET
student loans
Illustration by Victor Juhasz
On May 31st, president Barack Obama strolled into the bright sunlight of the Rose Garden, covered from head to toe in the slime and ooze of the Benghazi and IRS scandals. In a Karl Rove-ian masterstroke, he simply pretended they weren't there and changed the subject.
The topic? Student loans. Unless Congress took action soon, he warned, the relatively low 3.4 percent interest rates on key federal student loans would double. Obama knew the Republicans would make a scene over extending the subsidized loan program, and that he could corner them into looking like obstructionist meanies out to snatch the lollipop of higher education from America's youth. "We cannot price the middle class or folks who are willing to work hard to get into the middle class," he said sternly, "out of a college education."
Flash-forward through a few months of brinkmanship and name-calling, and not only is nobody talking about the IRS anymore, but the Republicans and Democrats are snuggled in bed together on the student-loan thing, having hatched a quick-fix plan on July 31st to peg interest rates to Treasury rates, ensuring the rate for undergrads would only rise to 3.86 percent for the coming year.
Though this was just the thinnest of temporary solutions – Congressional Budget Office projections predicted interest rates on undergraduate loans under the new plan would still rise as high as 7.25 percent within five years, while graduate loans could reach an even more ridiculous 8.8 percent – the jobholders on Capitol Hill couldn't stop congratulating themselves for their "rare" "feat" of bipartisan cooperation. "This proves Washington can work," clucked House Republican Luke Messer of Indiana, in a typically autoerotic assessment of the work done by Beltway pols like himself who were now freed up for their August vacations.
Not only had the president succeeded in moving the goal posts on his spring scandals, he'd teamed up with the Republicans to perpetuate a long-standing deception about the education issue: that the student-loan controversy is now entirely about interest rates and/or access to school loans.
Obama had already set himself up as a great champion of student rights by taking on banks and greedy lenders like Sallie Mae. Three years earlier, he'd scored what at the time looked like a major victory over the Republicans with a transformative plan to revamp the student-loan industry. The 2010 bill mostly eliminated private banks and lenders from the federal student-loan business. Henceforth, the government would lend college money directly to students, with no middlemen taking a cut. The president insisted the plan would eliminate waste and promised to pass the savings along to students in the form of more college and university loans, including $36 billion in new Pell grants over 10 years for low-income students. Republican senator and former Secretary of Education Lamar Alexander bashed the move as "another Washington takeover."
The thing is, none of it – not last month's deal, not Obama's 2010 reforms – mattered that much. No doubt, seeing rates double permanently would genuinely have sucked for many students, so it was nice to avoid that. And yes, it was theoretically beneficial when Obama took banks and middlemen out of the federal student-loan game. But the dirty secret of American higher education is that student-loan interest rates are almost irrelevant. It's not the cost of the loan that's the problem, it's the principal – the appallingly high tuition costs that have been soaring at two to three times the rate of inflation, an irrational upward trajectory eerily reminiscent of skyrocketing housing prices in the years before 2008.
How is this happening? It's complicated. But throw off the mystery and what you'll uncover is a shameful and oppressive outrage that for years now has been systematically perpetrated against a generation of young adults. For this story, I interviewed people who developed crippling mental and physical conditions, who considered suicide, who had to give up hope of having children, who were forced to leave the country, or who even entered a life of crime because of their student debts.
They all take responsibility for their own mistakes. They know they didn't arrive at gorgeous campuses for four golden years of boozing, balling and bong hits by way of anybody's cattle car. But they're angry, too, and they should be. Because the underlying cause of all that later-life distress and heartache – the reason they carry such crushing, life-alteringly huge college debt – is that our university-tuition system really is exploitative and unfair, designed primarily to benefit two major actors.
First in line are the colleges and universities, and the contractors who build their extravagant athletic complexes, hotel-like dormitories and God knows what other campus embellishments. For these little regional economic empires, the federal student-loan system is essentially a massive and ongoing government subsidy, once funded mostly by emotionally vulnerable parents, but now increasingly paid for in the form of federally backed loans to a political constituency – low- and middle-income students – that has virtually no lobby in Washington.
Next up is the government itself. While it's not commonly discussed on the Hill, the government actually stands to make an enormous profit on the president's new federal student-loan system, an estimated $184 billion over 10 years, a boondoggle paid for by hyperinflated tuition costs and fueled by a government-sponsored predatory-lending program that makes even the most ruthless private credit-card company seem like a "Save the Panda" charity. Why is this happening? The answer lies in a sociopathic marriage of private-sector greed and government force that will make you shake your head in wonder at the way modern America sucks blood out of its young.
In the early 2000s, a thirtysomething scientist named Alan Collinge seemed to be going places. He had graduated from USC in 1999 with a degree in aerospace engineering and landed a research job at Caltech. Then he made a mistake: He asked for a raise, didn't get it, lost his job and soon found himself underemployed and with no way to repay the roughly $38,000 in loans he'd taken out to get his degree.
Collinge's creditor, Sallie Mae, which originally had been a quasi-public institution but, in the late Nineties, had begun transforming into a wholly private lender, didn't answer his requests for a forbearance or a restructuring. So in 2001, he went into default. Soon enough, his original $38,000 loan had ballooned to more than $100,000 in debt, thanks to fees, penalties and accrued interest. He had a job as a military contractor, but he lost it when his employer ran a credit check on him. His whole life was now about his student debt.
Collinge became so upset that, while sitting on a buddy's couch in Tacoma, Washington, one night in 2005 and nursing a bottle of Jack Daniel's, he swore that he'd see Sallie Mae on 60 Minutes if it was the last thing he did. In what has to be a first in the history of drunken bullshitting, it actually happened. "Lo and behold, I ended up being featured on60 Minutes within about a year," he says. In 2006, he got to tell his debt story to Lesley Stahl for a piece on Sallie Mae's draconian lending tactics that, curiously enough, Sallie Mae itself refused to be interviewed for.
From that point forward, Collinge – who founded the website StudentLoanJustice.org – became what he calls "a complaint box for the industry." He heard thousands of horror stories from people like himself, and over the course of many years began to wonder more and more about one particular recurring theme, what he calls "the really significant thing – the sticker price." Why was college so expensive?



Debt Casts a Shadow on Graduation

     
It’s college graduation time, and while it’s a happy occasion for the graduates and their families, it comes at a high price.
According to the most recent national statistics available, 71 percent of college seniors from the class of 2012 had student loan debt averaging $29,400 for a bachelor’s degree. Based on the trend over the last two decades, members of the class of 2014 can expect to find themselves in even worse shape.
·         Read more
- See more at: http://www.progressive.org/topics/education#sthash.k58dp8Ft.dpuf

See Scot Ross and Mike Browne, “Sentenced to Debt,” The Progressive (November 2013).

www.nationofchange.org
This time, it’s different. Since the beginning of the Rolling Jubilee campaign, we’ve wanted to buy ...

 

 


Higher and Public Education for Change


Critical pedagogy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Critical pedagogy
Major works
Theorists
·         Paulo Freire
·         Henry Giroux
·         Peter McLaren
·         Joe Kincheloe
·         Shirley Steinberg
Pedagogy
·         Anti-oppressive education
·         Anti-bias curriculum
·         Multicultural education
·         Educational equality
·         Curriculum studies
·         Teaching for social justice
·         Humanitarian education
·         Inclusion
·         Student-centered learning
·         Public sphere pedagogy
·         Popular education
·         Feminist composition
·         Ecopedagogy
·         Queer pedagogy
·         Critical literacy
·         Critical reading
·         Critical consciousness
Concepts
·         Praxis
·         Hidden curriculum
·         Consciousness raising
Related
·         Reconstructivism
·         Critical theory
·         Frankfurt School
·         Political consciousness
·         v
·         t
·         e
Critical pedagogy is a philosophy of education and social movement that combines education with critical theory.[1] First described by Paulo Freire, it has since been developed by Henry Giroux and others as a praxis-oriented "educational movement, guided by passion and principle, to help students develop consciousness of freedom, recognize authoritarian tendencies, and connect knowledge to power and the ability to take constructive action."[2] Among its leading figures are Michael Applebell hooksJoe L. KincheloePeter McLaren, Henry Giroux, and Patti Lather.
Critical pedagogue Ira Shor defines critical pedagogy as:
"Habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wisdom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal consequences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or discourse." (Empowering Education, 129)
Critical pedagogy includes relationships between teaching and learning. Its proponents claim that it is a continuous process of what they call "unlearning", "learning", and "relearning", "reflection", "evaluation", and the impact that these actions have on the students, in particular students whom they believe have been historically and continue to be disenfranchised by what they call "traditional schooling".[citation needed]
Contents
·         1 Background
·         2 Examples
o    2.1 History
·         3 Criticism
·         4 See also
·         5 References


 

PUBLIC SCHOOL EDUCATION

Educating About Social Issues in the 20th and 21st Centuries - Vol 4

Critical Pedagogues and Their Pedagogical Theories

 Samuel Totten, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Jon Pedersen, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

A volume in the series Research in Curriculum and Instruction

2014. Paperback 9781623966287 $45.99. Hardcover 9781623966294 $85.99. eBook 9781623966300 $50

This volume is the fourth, and last, volume in the series entitled Educating About Social Issues in the 20th and 21st Centuries: An Annotated Bibliography.

Volumes I and Volume 2 focused on (1) the lives and work of notable scholars dedicated to addressing why and how social issues should become an integral component of the public school curriculum, and (2) various topics/approaches vis-à-vis addressing social issues in the classroom. Volume 3 addressed approaches to incorporating social issues into the extant curricula that were not addressed in the first two volumes. This volume, Volume Four, focuses solely on critical pedagogy: both the lives and work of major critical pedagogues and the different strains of critical pedagogy the latter pursued (e.g., critical theory in education, critical feminism in education, critical race theory).

 

 

Educating About Social Issues in the 20th and 21st Centuries Vol. 3

A Critical Annotated Bibliography

 Samuel Totten, University of Arkansas, Fayetteville

Jon Pedersen, University of Nebraska-Lincoln

A volume in the series Research in Curriculum and Instruction

Information Age Publishing, 2014. Paperback 9781623965235 $45.99. Hardcover 9781623965242 $85.99. eBook 9781623965259 $50

EDUCATING ABOUT SOCIAL ISSUES IN THE 20th and 21st Centuries: A Critical Annotated Bibliography, Volume 3 is the third volume in a series that addresses an eclectic host of issues germane to teaching and learning about social issues at the secondary level of schooling, ranging over roughly a one hundred year period (between 1915 and 2013). Volume 3 specifically addresses how an examination of social issues can be incorporated into the extant curriculum. Experts in various areas each contribute a chapter in the book. Each chapter is comprised of a critical essay and an annotated bibliography of key

works germane to the specific focus of the chapter.


Teaching for Global Community: Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategies of the Oppressor by: César Augusto Rossatto, The University of Texas at El Paso .   Information Age Publishing, 2011.

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Education has long been viewed as a vehicle for building community. However, the critical role of education and schools for constructing community resistance is undermined by recent trends toward the centralization of educational policy-making (e.g. racial profiling new laws in the US—Arizona and Texas; No Child Left Behind and global racism), the normalization of “globalization” as a vehicle for the advancement of economic neo-liberalism and social hegemony, and the commodification of schooling in the service of corporate capitalism. Alternative visions of schooling are urgently needed to transform these dangerous trends so as to reconstruct public education as an emancipatory social project.

Teaching for Global Community: Overcoming the Divide and Conquer Strategies of the Oppressor examines these issues among related others as a way to honor and re-examine Freirean principles and aim to take critical pedagogy in new directions for a new generation. The goal is to build upon past accomplishments of Paulo Freire’s work and critical pedagogy while moving beyond its historical limitations. This includes efforts that revisit and re-evaluate established topics in the field or take on new areas of contestation. Issues related to education, labor, and emancipation, broadly defined and from diverse geographical context, are addressed. The theoretical perspectives used to look at these emerge from critical pedagogy, critical race theory, critiques of globalization and neoliberalism, marxist and neo-marxist perspectives, social constructivism, comparative/international education, postmodernism indigenous perspectives, feminist theory, queer theory, poststructuralism, critical environmental studies, postcolonial studies, liberation theology, with a deep commitment to social justice.



Globalizing Minds
Rhetoric And Realities In International Schools.
 Iveta Silova, College of Education, Lehigh University
Daphne P. Hobson, Global Teaching Consultants, LLC
Information Age Publishers, 2014. Paperback 9781623965860 $45.99. Hardcover 9781623965877 $85.99. eBook 9781623965884 $50

Globalization has a profound effect on the mission and goals of education worldwide. One of its most visible manifestations is the worldwide endorsement of the idea of “education for global citizenship,” which has been enthusiastically supported by national governments, politicians, and policy-makers across different nations. Increasingly, the educational institutions feel under pressure to respond to globalization forces by preparing students to engage competitively and successfully with this new realm, lest their nations be left in the dust. What is the role of international schools in implementing the idea of “education for global citizenship”? How do these schools create a culturally unbiased global curriculum when the adopted models have been developed by Western societies and at the very least are replete with (Western) cultural values, traditions, and biases?


End of Academic Freedom:
The Coming Obliteration of the Core Purpose of the University
 William M. Bowen, Cleveland State University
Michael Schwartz, Cleveland State University
Lisa Camp, Case School of Engineering
Information Age Publishers, 2014. Paperback 9781623966584 $45.99. Hardcover 9781623966591 $85.99. eBook 9781623966607 $50

This book is premised upon the assumption that the core purpose of universities is to create, preserve, transmit, validate, and find new applications for
knowledge. It is written in the perspective of critical university studies, in which university governance processes should take ideas and discourse about ideas seriously, far more seriously than they are often taken within many of to day's universities, since doing so is the key to achieving this purpose. Specifically, we assert that the best way for universities to take ideas seriously, and so to best achieve their purpose, is to consciously recognize and conserve the entire range of available ideas. Though the current emphasis upon factors such as student headcounts, increased efficiency and job creation are undoubtedly important, far more is at stake in universities than only these factors.

From this premise, we deduce insights and arguments about academic freedom, as well as factors such control and monitoring of the market place of ideas,
the structure of information flows within universities, the role of language in university governance, and relationships between administrators, faculty
members and students. We identify impediments to achieving the core purpose of universities, including the idea vetting systems of authoritarianism,
corporatism, illiberalism, supernaturalism and political correctness. We elucidate how these impediments inhibit successful achievement of the core purpose
of the university. In response to these impediments we prescribe relatively autonomous universities characterized by openness, transparency, dissent, and the maintenance of balance between conflicting perspectives, values, and interests.

Girls and Women in STEM: A Never Ending Story

 Janice Koch, Hofstra University

Beverly Irby, Texas A&M University

Barbara Polnick, Sam Houston State University

A volume in the series Research on Women and Education

Information Age Publishing, 2014. Paperback 9781623965563 $45.99. Hardcover 9781623965570 $85.99. eBook 9781623965587 $50

Encouraging the participation of girls and women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) remains as vital today as it was in the 1970s. ... hence, the sub-title: “A Never Ending Story.” This volume is about ongoing advocacy on behalf of the future workforce in fields that lie on the cutting edge of society’s future. Acknowledging that deeply embedded beliefs about social and academic entitlement take generations to overcome, the editors of this volume forge forward in the knowledge that these chapters will resonate with readers and that those in positions of access will learn more about how to provide opportunities for girls and women that propel them into STEM fields. This volume will give the reader insight into what works and what does not work for providing the message to girls and women that indeed STEM fields are for them in this second decade of the 21st century. Contributions to this volume will connect to readers at all levels of STEM education and workforce participation. Courses that address teaching and learning in STEM fields as well as courses in women’s studies and the sociology of education will be enhanced by accessing this volume. Further, students and scholars in STEM fields will identify with the success stories related in some of these chapters and find inspiration in the ways their own journeys are reflected by this volume.

 

 


Contents Education Newsletter #1, July 7, 2011
Giroux on Commercialization, Militarization of Higher Ed:
Radder on Commodification of Research
Diane Ravitch and Other: Responses to Waiting for “Superman” on Charter
     Schools:
Peace Education
11 Articles in Monthly Review
Stanley Fish for Kant and Against Corporatization 


Contents Education USA Newsletter #2, May 28, 2014
Henry Giroux’s Books on the Corporate, Military, Education Complex
College
Contingent Faculty
    Noam Chomsky, Destroying the University by Temps
    Chomsky, Academic Labor
     Karen Madison Recommends 3 Articles
     AAUP Position
Hearn, The Promotional University
Andrew Delbanco,   College: What It Was, and Should Be
Public Schools
Schneider, A Chronicle of Echoes, The Corporate Destruction of Public
     Education for Profit
Antush, “Ed Deform” and Standardized Testing in NYC
Doerr, Against Vouchers




END EDUCATION USA FOR THE FUTURE NEWSLETTER #3

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