Governor To Bet Billions on SUNY reports The New York Sun.
Envisioning a dramatically greater role for universities and colleges in the remedial education of secondary students, the Spitzer administration is planning to pump billions of additional dollars into the State University of New York and the rest of New York's higher education system, sources said.
[snip]
The aim is to shift remediation to an earlier point — starting with children as young as 12 — so that more students are prepared for college by the time they graduate high school.
[snip]
In doing so, the commission is hoping to combat a persistent problem: More than half of students entering community colleges require math and reading remediation.
Apparently, the already planned $7 billion increase in K-12 funding over the next four years will not be enough to remedy the remediation problem. While the increased funding to colleges for this new proposal has not been specified, the newspaper reports that spending on higher education in New York is expected to increase by $1.6 billion over the next five years.
Mo money, mo money, mo money.
Here’s the silver lining, if there is one.
Commission members say they foresee assigning colleges and universities a greater role in helping to develop the curricula of public high schools and middle schools.
That in itself might be worth a few billion dollars. Oh wait, do they mean the education departments or the subject areas? I have a sinking suspicion it’s the former.
"Commission members say they foresee assigning colleges and universities a greater role in helping to develop the curricula of public high schools and middle schools."
ReplyDeleteBeware of anyone who talks about K-16. The control won't be from the colleges to K-12 but the other way around.
You know...they did this in CA, and control went from college professors to K-12 teachers.
ReplyDeleteThat was the project Ed worked on (CA subject matter projects).
You have to have a strong leader, I assume, which they did in Bill Honig. (Honig was later unseated through a criminal investigation of his hiring of his wife, something like that.)
Honig's focus was on content, and he set up the content projects to create real professional development for teachers, which meant teachers taking summer courses with college professors.
It went fantastically well; the h.s. teachers loved it.
otoh, Honig didn't understand the lay of the land, and initially supported whole language, then later recanted and wrote a book about it.
Also, the Math Project was run by a constructivist English professor (I think it was) from Stanford.
That's probably why, historically speaking, both the reading wars and the math wars started in CA.
So....I take it back.
Steve is certainly right about the danger.
The CA content projects were good or bad depending on the orientation of the person hired to head each one.
The History/Social Science (note: not social studies) project was headed by Ed, who was a historian and a content person.
Math was heading by a person who was not a mathematician and not a content person, either.
Another thing: Ed said that the thinking in California was that there was no way to fix the public schools short of infusing massive, massive sums of money (a position he probably doesn't hold today....but that was the thinking then).
ReplyDeleteOne of the reasons the state turned to college professors was to find an economically feasible way to improve public education.