Education – General

Should We Expect All College Graduates to Write Well?

/ The Old Crank

From a recent Chronicle of Philanthropy article on the importance of writing skills at nonprofits:

…bosses shouldn’t assume that even college graduates can write at a professional level because so few institutions teach grammar or the critical thinking processes that go into good writing.

This adds some additional perspective to all the stories about rapidly increasing college costs, doesn’t it? I realize that the assumption used to be that high school graduates would enter college with decent writing skills to begin with, but since we know that this isn’t true anymore (if it ever was), it’s odd that we make this huge, ever-increasing  investment in higher education but can’t figure out how to ensure that those students who enter with poor writing skills learn to write at a professional level before graduating.

I’m been thinking lately about whether to ask for a writing sample from every potential employee. I’ve employed people with just GEDs, as well as people with college degrees, and the one place in my experience where the skill gap really narrows between people with different levels of formal education is with writing.

Most Poor People Graduated From High School

/ The Old Crank / 1 Comment

My guess is that a lot of people may assume that the majority of those who live in poverty are high-school dropouts—and certainly not college graduates. The fact that a vast majority of poor people finished high school, and quite a few went to college, might mean that economic policies slightly more sophisticated than “educating our way to prosperity” may be required to help people work their way out of poverty in the U.S.

The Common Core’s Influence on Adult Literacy Goes Beyond the GED

/ The Old Crank

Aside from it’s influence on the redesign of the GED, the debate over the Common Core for K-12 can also serve as a window into the views of K-12 teachers on what constitutes adequate adult literacy in the 21st century. This recent Education Week piece by Paul Barnwell is a good example:

Adult literacy in 2012 means being able to synthesize information from multiple online sources to write a blog post or substantive email. It means analyzing which online tools will best serve your communications purpose. It means making smart decisions about what information is useful online, and how to curate and filter the endless stream of data coming in. It means reviewing your digital footprint and learning how to take some control over what information you broadcast to the world, from your tweets, profile pictures, and recommended links.

Barnwell adds “This is not to say that traditional reading and writing skills don’t have their place,” (specifically, he thinks that “[w]e still need to continue to teach students to sustain their attention and thought on longer texts), but he calls for a “greater balance between traditional literacy skills and interactive competencies.”

Poll: 60% of Americans Say Balancing Federal Budget More Important Than Improving Quality of Education

/ The Old Crank

In a recent Phi Delta Kappan/Gallup Poll, (as reported in Education Week) a majority of respondents (60%) said that balancing the federal budget was more important than improving the quality of education, “even though they said funding [was] the biggest problem facing public schools.”

The deficit issue gets a lot of attention in the media, so it would not surprise me if it’s true that many people fear the budget deficit to the point where they are willing to sacrifice federal investments in public education to reduce it. While it’s not actually necessary to sacrifice those investments any further in order to do so, it would also not surprise me to learn that it is a widely shared belief that deficit reduction must involve sacrifices  in every area of federal spending—even among people who are not, in general, hostile to a federal role in education, or to education spending in general.

These are a big hurdles for education advocates to overcome.

More on the poll in Education Week: PDK/Gallup Poll Offers Glimpse into Americans Views of Public Education – K-12 Talent Manager – Education Week.

h/t Committee for Education Funding for the pointer to the article