‘Catching Kids Up’ Requires Insisting On, Embedding Mastery

Plus, Community Colleges and Israel and College Campuses

The Boston Globe generally bucks the trend of newspapers walking away from excellent education reporting. In a recent such piece, four reporters teamed up to ask “Should Mass. consider a ‘nuclear option’ for catching kids up in school? Here are 7 big ideas.”

Just as my wife penned a letter to the editor of our local digital newsroom about the new Lexington High School project last month, this time it was my turn. In response to the article, I wrote that “Conspicuously missing, however, [from the list of seven ideas] was addressing an inherent flaw in today’s education system: By design, most schools embed learning loss and failure for most students.” You can read my published letter in the Boston Globe here.

Until we take seriously a move to mastery-based learning, which structurally embeds success for each and every student, we’ll continue to serve well only the privileged few.

Community Colleges, the Value of Degrees, and Changes in Admissions

In the latest episode of Future U., I joined my co-host Jeff Selingo for a discussion in Sun Valley, Idaho about how community colleges are trying to do multiple jobs—academic transfer, job training, and community development—but aren’t optimized for any one of these. That has pernicious consequences.

We also talked about the rise of dual enrollment in community colleges. At 31 community colleges, the majority of their enrollment are now dual-enrollment students (meaning high schoolers)! That’s against a backdrop where the number of students at community colleges have fallen 40% since 2010, some 2.6 million students according to the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Jeff and I expressed our concerns about dual enrollment, which also sparked some good listener pushback. That has us looking forward to digging deeper into the research behind dual enrollment later this season.

We also discussed the downsides of the Department of Education lengthening the time to review mergers and acquisitions of colleges—from the previous standard of 45 to 60 days to now six to 18 months! The practical effect of that I imagine will be more colleges closing and fewer mergers.

Finally, we tackled some hot-button topics, such as the fate of legacy admissions (Jeff doesn’t think it’s going away), and USC telling some alums that their certificates no longer entitled them to be… USC alums. Check it out here, at Community Colleges, the Value of Degrees, and Changes in Admissions.

Israel and College Campuses

Lastly, given that I teach at Harvard and comment regularly on the future of higher education, I wanted to address Hamas’s evil attack on the Israeli population.

Photo by Oleg Vakhromov on Unsplash

The delayed and often tepid responses of many of higher education’s leaders have attracted much notice, as has some of the abhorrent statements by certain student groups—which, I think it important to say, are and should be protected free speech.

I’m ultimately in agreement with Yascha Mounk, a professor of international affairs at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, when he wrote: “I actually think universities should not be in the business of issuing these kinds of statements. But since they do issue statements about all kinds of events all of the time, it sends a very clear message if they then happen to fall silent when the victims are Jews.”

Silence has become deafening. And although that silence about this specific tragedy isn’t unbelievable, it is clarifying.

In the wake of the attack and the reactions on the Harvard campus, I added my name to the list of signatories of an open letter to the Harvard community that was organized by Boaz Barak, Jeffrey Flier, Barbara Grosz, Gabriel Kreiman, Steven Pinker, and David Wolpe, which you can read here.

As always, thank you for reading, writing, and listening.