Spellings Ed Dept. says, "No" to more Pell grants.

[donco6]

But "Yes" to requiring a phenomenally expensive system for tracking student progress from preK to postgrad.

Yeah! That makes sense.


Education Secretary Margaret Spellings called yesterday for greater fiscal and academic accountability in higher education and endorsed a controversial plan to keep long-term records on students that would track performance from the time they enter the system in grade school to show how their educations progress.

The panel proposed that college students undergo testing to ensure that the schools are meeting their academic promises and goals, the results of which would be part of a public database that would help students and parents assess and choose schools. Spellings made the point that few objective measures for judging the quality of a school are available to parents.

The commission recommended increasing the value of Pell Grants to cover 70 percent of the average in-state tuition at public colleges; the grants now cover only 48 percent of tuition. Spellings did call for a complete overhaul and streamlining of the unwieldy college aid system and acknowledged that more money is needed, but she stopped short of endorsing increases in Pell Grants. David L. Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said: "I found that quite remarkable, because it was the key recommendation from the commission. Yet she endorsed a unit record database, which would be enormously expensive to implement."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/26/AR2006092601460.html

[aquart]

1. Spying is the goal, not education.

Republicans are control freaks.

[donco6]

2. That's a big issue to me.

Do we really want some giant database tracking every grade, every test score, every classification (special ed, ELL, disability) you or your children have ever had throughout their entire school career? Holy crap. NO ONE should have that much information on someone. EVER!

[aquart]

8. And try to correct a mistake....ho, ho, ho.

Not to mention how well the US has been able to protect confidential information of, say, our soldiers, our credit card holders............yeah, let's get all that info together so an enemy power can hack it easily.

[conflictgirl]

13. Especially children!

[lonestarnot]

3. Yes they are! Freaks and control freaks!

[madokie]

6. yes, they are fucking control dickhead freaks

that in itself should be criminal

[flyarm]

4. how better to zero in on your continued armys for perpetual wars??

yep..this way they have data bases to zero in on who to recruit!!

sick totally sick..we need to send this to every parent we know!!

fly

[Blackhatjack]

5. It is the Chinese System! Identify gifted early and choose their fate by

...limiting their options.

It is just a short hop, skip and jump from "monitoring" student progress, putting results in a database, and coming up with a list of "options formulated just for you." After all, Big Brother knows what is best for these students.

This will likely result in findings that rich upperclass kids are "projected" to be smarter and more likely to perform better --and thus have more options available to them.

[Cassandra]

7. Which repuke contributor...

is going to get the massive taxpayer dollars to create that database?

[donco6]

17. Well, let's see. Diebold comes to mind. n/t

[fed-up]

9. Don't foget tuition has almost doubled since * stole the elections n/t

[uppityperson]

10. Money to moniter but not to educate. Ah, what a deal

How about more money to educate rather than monitering?

[conflictgirl]

11. This is more proof that they DON'T really want the poor to go to college

I'm a college senior right now with a household income of less than 10K because my husband has been unemployed since February. He is in school also. We attend the cheapest university in our state and our Pell grants still did not even come close to covering our tuition.

Spend the money on educating people instead of tracking them! What a novel idea! :think:

[MountainLaurel]

15. You're dead on right

Can't have the peasant class continuing to get uppity and think they can do things like get a college education and move up the social ladder. After all, where's the next generation of proles going to come from?

[Johonny]

12. DOE

is the department of energy not education

[donco6]

18. Fixed. n/t

[tabasco]

21. Why?

What is the acronym for the Dept. of Education then?

DO the other E? :hi:

[radfringe]

14. AND as a whole - the bushies and repugs always say YES

to WEALTHY-fare taxcuts

[LeftishBrit]

16. Who comes up with all these ideas?

Testing, targets, costly bureaucratic assessments, instead of real teaching, at all levels of the educational system.

The idea is more and more that schools should be factories, teachers should be assembly-line workers, and pupils should be processed peas.

I know it too well, as it's a British phenomenon as well as an American one. Introduced by the last Tory government in the early 90s, and continued headlong by the current 'Labour' one. I wonder where the idea originates from - it would be too much of a coincidence for it to have developed separately in two countries about the same time.

On a more trivial point, is your Education Secretary really called 'Spellings'??!!!

[SDDEM06]

19. Her name is Spellings

We call her Marge. Or MisSpellings if we're being formal.

[donco6]

22. Yes, Spellings it is!

I think the craze for data is promulgated by politicians who claim that they need "more information" to make decisions. Or, that's what they say anyway. What they really want is to be able to blame their lack of decision making on lack of information. So, to make the lawmakers look bad, the gov't in power decides to take away that excuse by passing laws requiring schools to collect and archive more data. The lawmakers then get more data, which they use primarily to make schools look bad - by manipulating, reinterpreting, cherrypicking, data elements. And thus, the vicious cycle is born.

The cost of such a program of data collection is simply staggering. It would take at least one if not two full time staff members on our staff just to keep up the database throughout the year - with extra help needed during enrollment (after all, the data from other schools would have to be folded into our database at some point). And we only have 5500 students in our district. I can't imagine what a district like Jefferson county, with almost 200,000 students, would do.

[Yavin4]

20. Less Pell Grants = More Soldiers

Simple math.

[trogdor]

23. Objective measures?

How about placement rates? Starting salaries? HR people know which schools are the good ones and which are the diploma mills. It's their job.

I hears Ms. Spellings on NPR yesterday talking this bullshit about a lack of "objective measures." Diane Rehm (I think it was on her show) just nodded and didn't challenge a thing she said.