Trump sees the accreditation process as his “secret weapon” in his war on universities. In the USA, states have varying control of education, and universities have enjoyed a lot of autonomy. The practice of accreditation involves a “non-governmental, peer evaluation of educational institutions and programmes”.
However, eligibility for federal aid, grants, student loans and other funds that universities depend on is contingent on accreditation. And while the government does not control the process of accreditation itself, the Department of Education has the power to “recognise” accreditors, or withdraw this recognition.
With the new Republican Congress behind him, Trump wants to empower new accreditors with ideological standards such as “defending the American tradition and western civilisation, protecting free speech, eliminating wasteful administrative positions that drive up costs incredibly, [and] removing all Marxist diversity, equity, and inclusion bureaucrats”.
Incoming Vice President JD Vance once proclaimed that “professors are the enemy”. This year, Vance introduced The Encampments or Endowments Bill in the US Senate which, if passed, would punish “campus disorder” by making federal funding contingent on universities removing campus protest encampments. Efforts to introduce what Pen America has called “educational gag orders” – laws, policies and bills that restrict teaching and training on certain topics such as racism, gender and American history – in colleges and universities are also “likely to disproportionately affect the free speech rights of students, educators, and trainers who are women, people of color, and LGBTQ+.”
Education
Some high-octane anger fuel in this excellent piece:
COVID patients began raising the alarm that they weren't getting better, scientists are still racing to unravel the mystery of why a significant minority of people develop debilitating chronic symptoms while others seem to recover just fine. But if the plight of adults with long COVID remains poorly understood, the millions of children who have it worldwide are practically invisible, their suffering — and the formative years they're losing to this disease — obscured by the myths that COVID is "harmless" for kids and the pandemic is "over".
In Australia, the lack of awareness is biting in shocking ways. Too many children with long COVID are being dismissed by doctors who say there's nothing they can do to help — or worse, that their pain and fatigue is "all in their head". They're being pushed out of school by teachers who don't understand why they can't come to class or run around with their peers. Their parents have been gaslighted and blamed, too, not just by medical professionals but their closest friends and family. And experts are concerned that all this ignorance and apathy — and the unwillingness of governments to do more to curb COVID transmission — is exposing a generation of children to the same chronic illness and disability, with potentially devastating consequences.
Key Takeaway #1
Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting.
I could not believe how tired I was after the first day. I literally sat down the entire day, except for walking to and from classes. We forget as teachers, because we are on our feet a lot – in front of the board, pacing as we speak, circling around the room to check on student work, sitting, standing, kneeling down to chat with a student as she works through a difficult problem…we move a lot.
But students move almost never. And never is exhausting.[…]
Key Takeaway #2
High School students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90% of their classes. […]I asked my tenth-grade host, Cindy, if she felt like she made important contributions to class or if, when she was absent, the class missed out on the benefit of her knowledge or contributions, and she laughed and said no.
I was struck by this takeaway in particular because it made me realize how little autonomy students have, how little of their learning they are directing or choosing. I felt especially bad about opportunities I had missed in the past in this regard.[…]
Key takeaway #3
You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long.
I lost count of how many times we were told be quiet and pay attention. It’s normal to do so – teachers have a set amount of time and we need to use it wisely. But in shadowing, throughout the day, you start to feel sorry for the students who are told over and over again to pay attention because you understand part of what they are reacting to is sitting and listening all day. […] They have had enough.
In Australia, we do much the same by putting a cost premium on dangerous knowledge.
Florida’s public universities are purging the list of general education courses they will offer next year to fall in line with a state law pushed for by Gov. Ron DeSantis targeting “woke ideologies” in higher education.
These decisions, in many cases being driven by the university system’s Board of Governors, have the potential to affect faculty and thousands of students across the state. Hundreds of courses are slated to become electives after previously counting toward graduation requirements, which university professors and free speech advocates fear is just the first step toward those classes disappearing entirely.
The state’s involvement in a curriculum process — which has historically been left to universities — is riling academics and students who oppose how officials are using new authority to weed out courses like Anthropology of Race & Ethnicity, Sociology of Gender, and Women in Literature.
“This sort of state overreach could spell disaster for student and faculty retention, and the academic standing of Florida institutions,” said Katie Blankenship, who leads a state office for free speech advocacy group PEN America.
Yet the Board of Governors maintains that the state is merely carrying out the intent of the GOP-dominated Legislature, which in 2023 called for a wholesale review of general education offerings to ensure the courses stray from teaching “identity politics” and avoid “unproven, speculative, or exploratory” content.
When I read an essay with a rubric attached, I read with an evaluative mind, looking for where the student had succeeded and or not. But when I read an essay without a rubric attached, I read with curiosity about what the student had to say. I engaged more with the ideas in the essay, and my comments reflected that. Some of my feedback was evaluative, but it was more with the goal of helping students find their best ideas and express them more powerfully.
Ditching my rubrics freed me up to make the kind of comments that could most help my students. I could make observations that had no judgment attached. I could tell the student where I cheered for them and where I was puzzled. I could appreciate specific parts of an essay without worrying how it connected or didn’t connect with the rubric. I could notice what was unique about that student’s writing or make connections to the student’s previous work. I could offer ideas for how the student could expand or pose questions to get them thinking more. I could ask students to respond back to me on a particular issue, thereby starting a dialogue. I could tell my students how I personally connected with what they wrote, which built their trust in me. Most important of all, I could show through my feedback that my students’ ideas were heard — that I cared about what they had to say. I could give my students a reader — not a judge, not a critic, but a reader.
I eventually came to understand that not all alternative assessments are authentic. My growing doubts about rubrics in particular were prompted by the assumptions on which this technique rested and also the criteria by which they (and assessment itself) were typically judged. These doubts were stoked not only by murmurs of dissent I heard from thoughtful educators but by the case made for this technique by its enthusiastic proponents. For example, I read in one article that “rubrics make assessing student work quick and efficient, and they help teachers to justify to parents and others the grades that they assign to students.” To which the only appropriate response is: Uh-oh.
First of all, something that’s commended to teachers as a handy strategy of self-justification during parent conferences (“Look at all these 3’s, Mrs. Grommet! How could I have given Zach anything but a B?”) doesn’t seem particularly promising for inviting teachers to improve their practices, let alone rethink their premises.
Second, I’d been looking for an alternative to grades because research shows three reliable effects when students are graded: They tend to think less deeply, avoid taking risks, and lose interest in the learning itself. The ultimate goal of authentic assessment must be the elimination of grades. But rubrics actually help to legitimate grades by offering a new way to derive them. They do nothing to address the terrible reality of students who have been led to focus on getting A’s rather than on making sense of ideas.
More than a dozen academics and students who spoke to Guardian Australia, most on the condition of anonymity, said the universities’ financial reliance on foreign students over many years had hollowed out academic integrity and threatened the international credibility of the sector.
Many said the rise of artificial intelligence was accelerating the crisis to the point where the only way to fail a course would be to hand nothing in, unless universities came up with a coherent institutional response.
A tutor in an arts subject at a leading sandstone university said in recent years the number of overseas students in her classes – who may pay up to $300,000 in upfront costs – had reached as high as 80%.
“Most can’t speak, write or understand basic English,” she said. “They use translators or text capture to translate the lectures and tutorials, translation aids to read the literature and ChatGPT to generate ideas.
“It’s mind blowing that you can walk away with a master’s degree in a variety of subjects without being able to understand a sentence.”
A remarkable body of research over many years has demonstrated that the sort of teaching in which students are provided with answers or shown the correct way to do something — where they’re basically seen as empty receptacles to be filled with facts or skills — tends to be much less effective than some variant of student-centered learning that involves inquiry or discovery, in which students play an active role in constructing meaning for themselves and with one another.
[…]
Now put yourself in the place of one of those hard-liners who want teachers to remain the center of gravity in the classroom, disgorging information. How might you circle the wagons despite all the research that undercuts your position? Even more audaciously, how could you try to get away with saying DI is “evidence-based” or supported by the “science of learning” — a favorite rhetorical gambit of traditionalists?
To the rescue comes an idea called cognitive load theory (CLT). This concept, primarily associated with an Australian educational psychologist named John Sweller, basically holds that trying to figure things out for yourself uses up so much working memory that too little is left to move whatever has been learned into long-term memory. It’s therefore more efficient for the teacher just to show students problems that have already been worked out correctly or provide them with “process sheets” that list step-by-step instructions for producing the right answer. (Imagine Jack Nicholson as the cognitive load theorist, hollering at students, “Inquiry? Your brain can’t handle inquiry!”)
By blaming poor children’s school learning failure on their brains, the billionaires are continuing a long pseudoscientific charade extending back to 19th century “craniology,” which used head shape-and-size to explain the intellectual inferiority of “lesser” groups, such as southern Europeans and blacks. When craniology finally was debunked in the early 20thcentury, psychologists devised the IQ test, which sustained the mental classification business. Purportedly a more scientific instrument, it was heavily used not only to continue craniology’s identification of intellectually inferior ethnic and racial groups, but also to “explain” the educational underachievement of black and poor-white students.
After decades of use, IQ tests were substantially debunked from the 1960s onward, but new, more neurologically complex, so-called brain-based explanations emerged for differing educational outcomes. These explanations conceived of the overall brain as normal, but contended that brain glitches impeded school learning and success. Thus entered “learning disabilities,” “dyslexia,”and “attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)” as major neuropsychological concepts to (1) explain school failure, particularly for poor children, although the labels also extended to many middle-class students; and (2) serve as “scientific” justification for scripted, narrow, pedagogy in which teachers seemingly reigned in the classroom, but in fact, were themselves controlled by the prefabricated curricula.
Why is it clear to us that it's degrading and objectifying to measure and rank a girl’s physical body on a numeric scale, but we think it’s perfectly okay to measure and rank her mind that way?
Over the years I've watched the many ways that children try to cope with the evaluative gaze of school. (The gaze, of course, can come from parents, too; just ask my kids.) Some children eagerly display themselves for it; some try to make themselves invisible to it. They fight, they flee, they freeze; like prey animals they let their bodies go limp and passive before it. Some defy it by laughing in its face, by acting up, clowning around, refusing to attend or engage, refusing to try so you can never say they failed. Some master the art of holding back that last 10%, of giving just enough of themselves to "succeed," but holding back enough that the gaze can't define them (they don't yet know that this strategy will define and limit their lives.) Some make themselves sick trying to meet or exceed the "standards" that it sets for them. Some simply vanish into those standards until they don't know who they would have been had the standards not been set.
[…]
When a child does something you can't understand, something that doesn't make sense, when they erupt into recklessness, or fold up into secrecy and silence, or short-circuit into avoidance, or dissipate into fog and unfocus, or lock down into resistance, it's worth asking yourself: are they protecting themselves from the gaze?