Five Best Blogs: Dem Fingers Crossed For Convention Close

Initial tenure approval rates have gone down from +90pct to -50pct, according to LA Mag article ow.ly/dwbPu @LASchoolReport 

Five bad ideas in the Democratic platform. @mattyglesias ow.ly/dwhBI #2 is collective bargaining as a jobs strategy 

NEPC unhearts recent AEI report on parent power, argues "those aren't real parents" ow.ly/dvYF

Who Will Online Higher Education Help? ow.ly/dwhza Yglesias again, I think.

Charter school in Nashville's affluent west side still serves mostly poor | The Tennessean ow.ly/dvWDI via @AnnenbergInst

WPs Nick Anderson moving from education editor to higher education reporter. Congrats, condolences.

Former LA's Promise head @McGalliard helping to create a diverse new charter for downtown LA ow.ly/dwhOi

Comments

[Sarah]

I don't have an issue with online education as a whole, but I'm not sure how colleges and universities can set up a system of checks and balances to make sure students are really doing the work. My parents' neighbor needed to get her marketing degree to keep her job a few years ago, and at the age of 40, she wasn't interested in going back to a college setting, so her employer paid for an online college. She couldn't handle essay writing, so her boss and his secretary did it for her. That's the part that's bothered me. She got her degree while others did the work.

[Sarah]

And as for teachers not making tenure, how much of that is teachers being "laid off" right as they approach enough time to become tenured? That's been happening a lot at my former high school, teachers reach the age of tenure and suddenly department cuts means someone has to go and usually it's the teachers with the longest amount of the time in that position who are pushed into leaving.

[Bruce]

Sarah's point about the weak certification represented by online learning indicates the Achilles heel of the whole online education movement. Unless these colleges can definitely identify who is doing the work, which can be done in venues hosting in-person writing, their degrees will prove unreliable and will steadily become worthless.