Tuesday, September 25, 2012

CALL TO INVESTIGATE COLLEGES OF EDUCATION


The first time I have ever heard a leading politician say anything about the real problem with education was this morning. Jeb Bush on MSNBA Morning Joe said he was concerned about colleges of education. He said that students applying to Colleges of education have below average GPAs when compared to other colleges in Universities. This, if it is true, is something that has wide ramifications: quality of teachers when they graduate, quality of future professors in the colleges of education, as well as attractiveness of a future as a teacher. Teachers have been maligned for a number of reasons; most often related to inferior schools, inferior students, inferior, education programs or inferior teachers. Usually the word ‘unqualified’ and not inferior is used. No one I am acquainted with has ever mentioned that teachers with a BA teaching degree might not be qualified to teach; the quality of their degree has now been brought into question —at last. I am not referring to religious controlled teachers college that are producing obviously unqualified teachers of biology and sciene.

Ask yourself the question, especially if you are an administrator in a university, “What is a universities main mission?”  I wrote a book about how industrialization of universities has affected undergraduate education with engineers and professionals, products of school where industrial grants enticed administrators to hire  researchers and not teachers, how they beg money to build buildings to house research laboratories to entice research grants, and increase class size sometimes to the point of 1,000 kids in a freshman college class, to allow foreign born teaching assistants to teach class in a language they can barely speak, etc. They do all of this to provide money to support building an industrial research reputation and not to teach undergraduates. If you look at this blog as a call for an investigation, that is exactly what it is, a call to find out about them before it is too late. How has the University Industrialization affected out Colleges of Education? Has industrial greed kill the goose that lays the golden egg; Are the research administrators in the process of destroying the very thing that makes the United States the great place it is? I think that is what University Industrial Complex (Amazon) claim’s is happening.

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