DEVELOPMENTAL EDUCATION POLICIES EMERGE
As the pressure on community colleges (like BRCC) to accelerate or even eliminate remedial-education requirements intensifies, vexing questions are being asked about the impact such a shift could have on low-income and minority students. Those who are the least prepared for college stand the most to lose from policies that push students quickly into college-level classes, according to some of the educators gathered at the annual meeting of the American Association of Community Colleges. And those students tend, disproportionately, to be minority and poor. But others argue that struggling students are ill served when they have to pass through a lengthy series of remedial courses before they can start earning college credit. Too often, they get discouraged and drop out before earning a single credit. “For many of these students, a remedial course is their first college experience, as well as their last,” Stan Jones, president of the nonprofit advocacy group Complete College America, said on Monday during a session that delved into the politics behind developmental-education reform. Here is the rest of the story published by The Chronicle of Higher Education. This issue received some local attention as the developmental education annual symposium was held on the Mid City Campus today. Nationally known experts including Dr. John Roueche, President of the Roueche Graduate Center at National American University; Dr. Terry O'Banion, President Emeritus and Senior League Fellow at the League for Innovation in the Community College; Andrea Hendricks, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Perimeter College and Interim Department Chair for the Online Math/CS Department; Susan Bernstein, Lecturer in English and a Co-Coordinator of the Stretch program at Arizona State University in Tempe; and, Riki Kucheck, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Orange Coast College, discussed present and proposed solutions to the issues that many of our under-prepared students face. The symposium was coordinated by the BRCC STAR Gates Title III staff.
HARD AT WORK TO MAKE A DIFFERENCE
Professors work long days, on weekends, on and off campus, and largely alone. Responsible for a growing number of administrative tasks, they also do research more on their own time than during the traditional work week. The biggest chunk of their time is spent teaching. Those are the preliminary findings of an ongoing study at Boise State University of faculty workload allocation, which stamps out old notions of professors engaged primarily in their own research and esoteric discussions with fellow scholars. “The ivory tower is a beacon — not a One World Trade Center, but an ancient reflection of a bygone era — a quasar,” says John Ziker, chair of the anthropology department at Boise State University. “In today’s competitive higher-education environment, traditional universities and their faculty must necessarily do more and more, and show accomplishments by the numbers, whether it be the number of graduates, the number of peer-reviewed articles published or the grant dollars won." Here is the rest of this story published by Inside Higher Ed.
