It Figures.

And now? The Aggies can't even leave. Yet. Doesn't matter. They're as good as gone when the SEC figures out who else they can poach. My first guess is N.C. State, another alienated school needing cash. I'm told there is a school there to complement their athletic program. If only there were a COLLEGE lockout. Oh, yeah. They don't actually pay players outside of tuition and fees. Another blog for a later time.

I'd Leave, Too!

OK, gotta discuss this. The highest paid state employee in all of Texas is...



Nope.



How about Giuseppe N. Colasurdo, M.D.--President of The University of Texas Health Science Center?

...not even close.



Yep! Mack Brown. Head football coach of the University of Texas. He makes $5,161,500 per year from sales tax.



No. This man does not sell car insurance where new customers saved an average of 44%. Mike Sherman is the head coach at Texas A & M. He makes $2,200,000. Still ridiculous, but you get the point.

After moving from the ridiculous to the near-criminal, the University of Texas athletic (read: football) department has actually found a way to damage itself, and do it in a way that couldn't happen from anywhere outside the "40 acres." Texas A & M University is leaving the Big 12 Conference. That leaves a 9-team "Big 12" with a questionable future. It could be the end of the third largest football rivalry (116 games).

UT deserves the migraine. Not just as a football team, but as an institution.

You can't start your own network, build in multiple unfair advantages (in a college setting!), and expect your local rival to stick around to start every season three to five major steps behind you in money, recruiting and success. A & M left because UT made them leave. If the Big 12 folds, it's on Texas. UT needs to go independent if they're going to act this way.

I'm sure I'll go off when the "Field of 64" gets announced in March, but there was a time when athletics served a purpose on campuses. They weren't money-making machines to feed on themselves. They were a way to entertain students on weekends, bring the student body together to bond, offer the athletically gifted a chance to improve their minds, meet people from other campuses through friendly rivalries.

Now? Well, none of that money from UT football is going to the foreign language faculty, let's just say that.

This is why liberal arts colleges tend to play Division III football or just ignore the sport altogether. The Williams-Amherst rivalry clocks in at 124 games. But it's not about football, per se, so you probably don't know about it. The biggest? Lehigh and Lafayette have played 145 games! Who cares?

The people that matter: the students, alumni, staff, community members. There are no "T-shirt" Lafayette fans. Their pride is in their school, not their team.

Schools are ranked many inaccurate ways: the size of the endowment, the area of the country, graduates from 25 years ago...but this one program takes the cake. I like to ask the question, "Name one thing about the state of Nebraska other than the Cornhusker football program." The most common answer? "Their basketball program." Cute. Especially since the basketball team up there rarely gives reason for attention.

Nebraska has other colleges and universities. I attended one. One without a huge endowment. One with a good football program at times that served its intended purpose. The same can be said regarding hundreds of other campuses. It was a terrific experience. Every grammatical error in this blog is intended. I learned stuff, and the athletic teams provided excitement, entertainment and pride in a strong school that wasn't home to the Cornhuskers.

You know, some of these football teams actually have schools associated with them...

Back in the Day...

Sometimes you need to look back a little to understand just how forward we all are. I once read an article in The Onion, where I get all my news, that spoke about Google renaming itself "The Google" to appeal to the aged. It's all well and good to make fun of older folk for not fully understanding the web, and I become frustrated when people get downright angry about having to deal with all this "technology" stuff.

That's where this video comes in.

Picture yourself on the set of Lou Grant, which depicted life at a major Los Angeles newspaper in the 70's. What was it like...doing all of this by hand? You begin to wonder how they pulled anything off, at all! Of course, technology just replaces people in this case, and thousands have lost jobs to computers in every major work sector. Still, it's good to take a step back and see where we were. We're trying to decide whether to jump from Facebook to Google +. At one point, there was a jump from a typewriter to a computer that seems laughable by today's standards. Check it out. Props to UCF for exposing journalism students to their past--directly.

[vimeo http://vimeo.com/27130824]

 

Head + Sand = Marginal

photo from wallygrom (very busy at work)

Again, it all seems to start in Texas.

That's why Molly Ivins called the Texas legislature the National Laboratory for Bad Ideas.

Bad ideas migrate up (and in this case, east). Congress wants to think about opening the floodgates to get everybody teaching. Senate Bill 1250 is set to fund "teacher academies," where those who have earned bachelor's degrees can become teachers without the hassle of further college coursework. The new plan would streamline the process, making it possible for working professionals (and currently-unemployed amateurs) to start handling teaching duties more quickly.

Academy teachers would not need any advanced degree, nor would they need to pursue scholarly research. If you can hire a teacher-trainer who didn't plunk down $20,000 for a graduate degree and pay your new hire less, then I guess the need for colleges of education is...

Oh, yeah. One more thing: the academies wouldn't need to be accredited.

Things would be different if there were a shortage, but there isn't one. Teacher layoffs are now an accepted part of the educational landscape. Further, there was never really a shortage of teachers--there was a shortage of those who were properly certified that were willing to teach. As early as 2000, Missouri had more than twice as many people certified to teach as they did teachers.

Academia jumped into the fray. They wrote a letter. The letter was, "signed by the American Council on Education, the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, and the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education, among others."

The worst part of this is that most academics figure that this should (or will!) take care of matters. They have spoken. They are experts. People will listen. A key issue with the academic world is that it fails to listen to anything across the street from a campus, let alone thousands of miles away. But decisions are being made, and this one will hurt if it comes to pass. Teachers unions have been fighting these "academy" training programs on the basis of professionalism, but academics have always been content to look the other way in disgust and call it good.

It's a Senate bill. It ends with a zero. It's on paper, and it is scheduled for a hearing. The past year or so, the bill went from an idea to a means of destruction. The response? A letter. Nobody will organize. Nobody got involved until it was too late. So nobody's listening. Now it's just a matter of political will, and that doesn't bode well for a group of people that find themselves above such matters.

This is a perfect example of the ivory tower. At one point, alternative certification was abnormal. After all, you'd have to drop what you were doing and get licensed. Today, that's not the case. Instead, you can teach almost instantly after garnering a bachelor's degree in anything down here. Anything. Degree in Psychology? Pass the test and instantly become eligible to become a middle school science teacher.

As long as you're paying a "certifying agent," that is.  That will be $4,000. Thank you. Alternatively certified teachers make up the supermajority of new teachers in Texas now. You just don't need a teaching degree to teach in Texas. Some programs are fine. Others are run out of bail bonds companies. Still others (see, Teach for America) cream and instill demands that ensure their "great ideas" will never scale.

What makes this almost unbearable is that the young men and women who chose to become teachers from the beginning will be paid less than those who thought, "This isn't working. Maybe I'll just go teach."

The certificate would count as a master's degree, in terms of pay scale.

I enjoyed my time in academia. Teaching bright students how to engage young people was always fulfilling. But this example shows the need for colleges and universities to become much more mindful of the off-campus world. It shows the need to drop assumptions. It shows the need to drop any sense of entitlement.

And it shows the need for action, not words.

 http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/08/01/higher_ed_groups_oppose_teacher_training_bill

Verse on a New Chapter

At my last position, I heard numbers thrown around like they were confetti.

The average 14-year-old will hold 15 jobs by age 38...or 38 jobs by 15...

99.99994% of new jobs will require postsecondary training.

98.742% of these new jobs don't exist right now

College is now a necessity, not a luxury [was COLLEGE ever a luxury?]

One key way to fix the whole "post-secondary thing" would be to embrace the liberal arts concept. You learn the ways of knowing and how they interact. Economists and philosophers see the same thing differently. Both approaches are valid, at least to some degree. Where they intersect is gold. Things relate to each other. You approach new things from multiple angles; that way you get a better understanding of the whole.
Of course, there's that whole word in there...LIBERAL! This is Texas, after all.
These colleges are expensive and they teach no job skills...like a degree specific to the job you get after you graduate.

• Assuming there is a job in that field after 4 or 5 years from the kid's college matriculation.


• Assuming that the other 13 or 14 jobs relate to the first, specifically because they don't exist, as previously announced.


• Assuming any of the ridiculous numbers are actually relevant.


• Assuming there's a degree for every potential job.

There's one group that seems to be fighting for liberal education. That group is NITLE ("nightly"). The acronym stands for the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education. "To the cloud" put to academic use, if you will. Higher education institutions can enhance student services with virtual computer laboratories. Multiple institutions can offer coursework that meets student needs using innovative technology.
It's a think tank. It's an institute. It's a service organization.

It's my new employer.

I join the cause tomorrow. It took some time to actually turn this last page, but it's important that I did. I got put where I belong. Again.

I expect great things from me. I'll let you know when I see them.

Short Delay...

Dr. Henley is feeling ill. His genius-level post will be coming very soon.

The Point

In Music Education, we tend to award large trophies.  It has become a system that feeds on itself. Universities and music festivals started buying larger and larger trophies. Music teachers wanted them. Kids wanted them.  Festivals need to attract bands to survive.  Soon all of the trophies had to be huge. Most marching band trophies are larger than the NBA Championship trophy.

Back in my early teaching days, I attended a session where the band directors in the state discussed changing marching band contests from a placement format to a standards-based format. In other words, there wouldn’t be a first, second and third place team in each division; rather, bands would be assessed as to whether they met standard criteria. Band would get a Division I, Division II or Division III for their performance.

During the discussion, one director from a prominent high school said, “I’ve been watching, and I’ve been looking at the big trophy case in our hallway. I notice that the kids never look at the trophy case when they walk past it, but I do…” The pause was a powerful one.

At that point, one of the smaller colleges in the state announced their competition would be using the criteria format. While the group commended the college for doing this, I don’t know of anyone who changed their schedule to include this small college’s competition.

I know I didn’t.

I once asked a class, "What if a student plays clarinet in 6th grade, 7th grade, 8th grade and quits? What has she gained from that?" One student answered, "Nothing." Everybody in the class gasped, but I praised him. He was honest, and the fact is that nearly everyone in the class would have no real answer at the time. It was my job to teach them that answer. That's what's fun about being a professor.

Today’s video comes from P.S. 22. The video site they use now is http://ps22chorus.blogspot.com/. As you can see, this is a low-budget production, including the free web space from Blogspot. It takes a guitar (or keyboard) and a bunch of kids willing to sing. I’m not sure how the YouTube channel went viral, but I’m glad it did. People wait for the next video to hit the page. Important civic and music groups have brought P.S. 22 to perform at their functions. I haven’t heard anyone call this a mis-education of children. Still, it looks like nothing else in music education.

The teacher takes great pains to make sure the content of the songs remains positive, even if that means adjusting the song’s lyrics, form or character. It works. The kids learn. They learn to love music and use it to positively express themselves. There were no giant trophies involved, although famous musicians and movie stars come by for visits. The video quality has improved, and there are lots of pictures of famous people saying nice things about them on their site.

They have trophies now. Like Grammy awards. Grammy awards aren’t giant trophies, though. Any marching band taking 2^nd place at a regional competition has won a much bigger trophy. What’s most important here is that the trophies weren’t the point. They just came after the music education focus started this whole thing.

Are the trophies that important? At some point, you need to assess yourself and not just the students. Why are you doing this? Why are you working so hard? What is your point?

My youngest daughter was frustrated that her older siblings had trophies and she did not. We asked her why she wanted a trophy and how she planned to get one. She thought they looked cool and had no plans to earn a trophy. We bought her a trophy that simply read, “KATRINA!”

She was happy. She’s the best in the world at being herself.

Were that we all felt that way about things.