Education update

Peter Thiel's College Bubble Theory Gains Few Believers

Higher education: Is it really the next bubble?

What to pay an 'American Teacher'

The last 12 months have been the Year of the Education Documentary. "Waiting for Superman," a cinematic adoration of the charter school movement, was screened in selected theaters. Then came the anti-Superman "Race to Nowhere," a less-slick, lower-budget flick that criticized what it saw as the undue stress on students today, with their slates of AP courses and standardized tests, hours of homework and phalanx of extracurricular activities.  Included in its complaint was the No Child Left Behind Act and lack of freedom for teachers. Screened in churches and community centers, and watched mainly by parents who shared its concerns, it received a less publicized but no less enthusiastic reception.
On Friday night, in the theater of the Creative Artists Agency in Century City, a quieter school documentary made its quiet Los Angeles debut, and there's no knowing when it will come back or in what form. "American Teacher," co-produced by acclaimed author Dave Eggers, does the usual job of weaving shots of classrooms and homes with interviews conducted with teachers, parents and experts. It carefully tiptoes around issues of school reform as it argues, with strong justification, that U.S. teachers are paid far too little. It shows how many of them get outside jobs to make ends meet; the 12-hour days; the money spent out of pocket to make sure their students have necessary supplies.
The film points out that half a century ago, schools were able to draw from among the brightest college students by hiring women, who had few choices among the professions in those days. In fact, the move to recruit women was done in part to lower the cost of public education.

Reading, ’Riting and Revenues

Then, the Legislature invited for-profit businesses into the game. “Ever since then, the innovation and competition has been phenomenal,” claimed Vernon Reaser, the president of Texas Teachers, the largest of the state’s alt-cert companies.
Here is one indicator of how innovative things are getting. Texas is currently considering — although not with any great intensity — a bill that would require that people who go through these programs spend a couple of days practice teaching before they are turned loose in their own classrooms.
The sponsor is Representative Mike Villarreal of San Antonio. Villarreal first came to my attention as the legislator who proposed requiring that the course content in public school sex education classes be medically accurate. The man is a positive genius for coming up with bills to make the Texas education system do something we really had assumed it had been doing all along. None of which make it out of committee.
At a public hearing on Villarreal’s bill, Reaser vigorously denounced the idea of requiring would-be teachers to actually get classroom experience as part of their training: “Practice teachers in front of kids that aren’t practice learning!”
To get an alternative teaching certificate in Texas you need to take coursework and have 30 hours of “field-based” experience, 15 of which can be spent watching videos. Villarreal says some programs fill up the other 15 with things like chaperoning field trips.
It’s not clear how many people get hired as full-time teachers without ever having stood in front of a classroom for a single hour. The $4,195 Texas Teachers program (its ubiquitous billboards read: “Want to Teach? When Can You Start?”) is a little opaque. For instance, Reaser assured me in a phone conversation that his students were required to have a variety of in-person interactions with their instructors even though the Web site says you can opt for “fully online instruction.”
“On our Web site, we intentionally don’t say everything,” Reaser explained. “It’s basically to get you to call us and ask us.”
When we all started clamoring for more investment in education, I don’t think we envisioned it going into corporate profits. We have seen the future, and the good news is that the kids in Florida will be wearing belts.

Is College a Rotten Investment? Why student loans are not like subprime mortgages