Jose Joaquin Brunner

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Febrero 29, 2012

Manifestaciones anti-recortes de fondos públicos en universidades españolas

Los Mossos [la policía] acordonan el congreso de móviles por la presencia de manifestantes

Menos de un centenar de personas permanecen en la plaza de Espanya tras los incidentes
Contenedores y motos incendiados y nueve heridos en el centro de la capital catalana
Los antidisturbios de la policía detienen a tres manifestantes, según el sindicato de estudiantes
Masivo seguimiento de la huelga convocada por las siete universidades públicas catalanas

Ivanna Vallespín / Rebeca Carranco, El País, Barcelona 29 FEB 2012

El centro de Barcelona recobra, poco a poco, la normalidad tras la jornada de protestas de los estudiantes contra los recortes de la Generalitat, a la espera de la asamblea que los universitarios celebrarán en el edificio histórico de la Universidad de Barcelona a partir de las 21 horas.

Sin embargo son varios los puntos de tensión que se mantienen en la ciudad. En el distrito de Gràcia una treintena de indignados, en los que hay defensores de la escola bressol, anticapitalistas y afectados por las hipotecas, ha 'desconvocado' el pleno del distrito tras tomar pacificamente el salón de plenos de la sede del distrito, en la plaza de la Vila de Gràcia. Cada vez que los regidores comenzaban a hablar eran interrumpidos por los gritos de los congregados, informa Camilo S. Baquero.

En el cercano distrito de Les Corts, frente a la comisaria de los mossos, un centenar de personas protestan reclamando la libertad de las tres personas detenidas, cifra no confirmada por los mossos, en los graves incidentes que se han desarrollado esta mañana, tras la manifestación de los estudiantes universitarios. Los manifestantes llevan pancartas que piden 'libertad para los detenidos', entonan cánticos contra la policía autonómica como "ninguna agresión sin respuesta" o "libertad de expresión, policía no". Un portavoz de los manifestantes ha calificado la actuación policial de este mediodía de "desmesurada y provocativa" y ha destacado que los agentes han practicado las detenciones "sólo para tener cabezas de turco". Mientras, cinco furgones de la policía autonómica les vigilan de cerca.

Un grupo de estudiantes irrumpiendo en la sede del BBVA en Barcelona. / ALBERT GARCÍA

Paralelamente en la plaza de Espanya se mantiene el fuerte dispositivo de los antidisturbios que han rodeado el recinto de la Fira de Barcelona, que acoge estos días el congreso mundial de telefonía móvil. Hasta allí se habían desplazado un grupo de 300 jóvenes procedentes del centro de la ciudad, que tras permanecer varias horas han ido abandonando la plaza. A las 18,25 horas los congresistas han comenzado a abandonar la feria por los laterales de la plaza con normalidad, mientras se mantenía el fuerte despliegue policial, informa Ana Pantaleoni.

A las tres de la tarde los antidisturbios de los Mossos d'Esquadra han rodeado el recinto histórico de la Universidad de Barcelona (UB), en el centro de la capital catalana, después de que se registraran en las calles aledañas cargas policiales y fueran incendiados varios contenedores y motocicletas. Las acciones se han acabado con nueve heridos, cinco de ellos mossos d'Esquadra.

Los disturbios se han producido tras la manifestación de los estudiantes contra los recortes de la Generalitat convocada por la siete universidades públicas de Cataluña. Cientos de participantes se han refugiado en el interior del recinto universitario mientras decenas de furgonetas de los antidisturbios tomaban la zona. Poco antes, manifestantes y agentes antidisturbios se habían enzarzado en una batalla cuando los primeros han quemado contenedores y han tirado piedras contra los agentes. Uno de los contenedores en llamas ha prendido en un coche estacionado en la zona. La policía, que ha detenido al menos cinco personas, ha disparado salvas. Tras los incidentes, el equipo rector de la Universidad ha rechazado "de manera unánime y contundente cualquier tipo de denuncia" y ha interpuesto una denuncia por daños en su patrimonio. Según un comunicado de la universidad los manifestantes han roto las cerraduras de las puertas de acceso y realizado pintadas en la fachada y el patio interior del edificio histórico de 1874.

El sector sanitario también lleva a cabo hoy una jornada de protestas por los recortes

Antes, miles de personas, 60.000 según los organizadores, 25.000 según la Guardia Urbana, han participado en la manifestación contra los recortes de la Generalitat que junto a la huelga de este miércoles han convocado las siete universidades públicas catalanas y la Plataforma Unitaria en defensa de la Universidad Pública (Pudup) que ha colapsado el centro de la capital catalana durante más de dos horas.

Tras dos grandes pancartas con los lemas "No pagaremos su estafa" y "Salvemos la universidad pública" la manifestación ha partido de la plaza de la Universitat de Barcelona, para proseguir por la ronda Universitat y el paseo de Gràcia, donde los estudiantes han lanzado huevos, globos con pintura, botellas, piedras, que han roto los cristales de la agencia de una entidad bancaria, y otros objetos contra las furgonetas y los agentes de los Mossos d'Esquadra que custodiaban el edificio de la Bolsa de Barcelona. Allí los antidisturbios han efectuado las primeras cargas, que han proseguido cuando los estudiantes han llegado a la plaza de la Universitat, donde los estudiantes han irrumpido en la sede histórica de la UB con pancarta y coreando proclamas. La policía ha cercado el edificio.

Des de primera hora de la mañana, los estudiantes han escenificado su protesta con cortes de tráfico en la autopista AP-7 a la altura de Bellaterra y el bloqueo de la estación de Universitat Autònoma de Ferrocarrils de la Generalitat (FGC). También en Barcelona se ha cortado el tráfico a las 10.30 horas en la avenida de la Diagonal a la altura de la zona universitaria desde donde estudiantes, profesores y personal no docente de la UB y la Politécnica de Cataluña han marchado en dirección a plaza de la Universitat cortando el tráfico a su paso y haciendo pintadas en los escaparates del centro comercial Illa Diagonal y de la plaza de Francesc Macià, informa Jesús Arrayás.

A esa misma hora, un centenar de estudiantes han irrumpido de forma pacífica en los estudios de la cadena SER en Barcelona, en la calle de Caspe, y una treintena de ellos se han colado en unos estudios donde uno de ellos ha leído un comunicado con sus reivindicaciones en los micrófonos de Ona FM, donde se estaba emitiendo en directo el programa Fora de joc, que presenta Sique Rodríguez. También se han colado en la sede de central en Barcelona del BBVA en la plaza de Catalunya.

Los estudiantes también han bloqueado el campus de la Universidad Autónoma de Barcelona cuyo aspecto, vacío, era el de una ciudad fantasma. Los cortes de tráfico en la AP-7 han provocado retenciones de hasta 11 kilómetros. También las líneas S2 y S55 de FGC han quedado interrumpidas hasta las 10.00 entre las estaciones de Sant Quinze y de Bellaterra por las protestas de los universitarios.

Varios centenares de estudiantes, profesores y personal no docente se han encerrado y han dormido esta pasada noche en diversas facultades de las universidades de Barcelona (UB), Autónoma de Barcelona (UAB), Politécnica (UPC) y Pompeu Fabra (UPF) como antesala de la huelga. La mayor parte de estas facultades se han levantado cerradas, y en las que permanecen abiertas la actividad es menor con respecto a un día habitual, informa Jordi Albacete

En la mañana del lunes un centenar de universitarios se concentraron frente a la sede del departamento de Economía y dos de ellos fueron detenidos después de tratar de ocuparlo. Los arrestados fueron puestos en libertad tras declarar en comisaría..

Los sindicatos denuncian el "ahogo presupuestario" que viven las universidades debido a los recortes presupuestarios y alertan del empeoramiento de las condiciones docentes y laborales. Concretamente, las organizaciones se oponen al recorte salarial del 3% (el mismo que afecta a toda la función pública) y a la ampliación de jornada de 35 a 37,5 de las horas de trabajo para el personal administrativo y de servicios.

Los sindicatos también rechazan otras medidas, como la reducción de días de asuntos propios del personal (que pasan de nueve a seis) o la reducción de beneficios sociales, como los tique restaurante, el plan de pensiones o la supresión de los complementos de productividad. A nivel de plantilla, estas entidades laborales denuncian que los recortes de la Generalitat provocarán la rescisión de contratos a más de 700 trabajadores profesores asociados.

Los recortes en educación también han tenido un efecto directo en el bolsillo de los estudiantes, que este curso han visto aumentadas las tasas en un 7,6%. La UPC insinuó la pasada semana que de cara al próximo curso las matrículas se podrían incrementar en un porcentaje similar.

Pero el 29-F no será una jornada reivindicativa exclusiva para universitarios, también los sanitarios han aprovechado la ocasión para manifestarse en la plaza de Espanya y durante la tarde se manifiestan los sindicatos y trabajadores del sector del transporte público.

Las universidades catalanas viven su segundo paro este curso 2011-2012, después de la huelga convocada el pasado 17 de noviembre, cuando 10.000 personas protagonizaron la protesta en contra de los recortes.

Más información relativa a manifestaciones en otras ciudades españolas aquí.

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OCDE: Evidencia sobre escuelas efectivas en medios socioeconómicamente vulnerables

Valiosa revisión de la literatura especializada.

Faubert, B. (2012), “A Literature Review of School Practices to Overcome School Failure”, OECD Education
Working Papers, No. 68, OECD Publishing.

Bajar el documento aquí.

This working paper was prepared as part of the OECD thematic review Overcoming School Failure: Policies that Work, www.oecd.org/edu/equity. The project provides evidence on the policies that are effective to reduce school failure by improving low attainment and reducing dropout, and proactively supports countries in promoting reform. The project builds on the conceptual framework developed in the OECD’s No More Failures: Ten Steps to Equity in Education (2007). Austria, Canada (Manitoba, Ontario, Québec and Yukon), Czech Republic, France, Greece, Ireland, Netherlands, Spain and Sweden took part in this project. This working paper is part of a series of papers prepared for the thematic review Overcoming School Failure: Policies that Work covering the topics of policies to reduce dropout and in-school practices to reduce school failure. These report have been used as background material for the final comparative report Equity and Quality in Education: Supporting Disadvantaged Schools and Students (OECD, 2012), which gives evidence on the policy levers that can help overcome school failure and reduce inequities in OECD education systems. It focuses on the reasons why investing in overcoming school failure -early and up to upper secondary- pays off, on alternatives to specific system level policies that are currently hindering equity, and on the actions to be taken at school level, in particular in low performing disadvantaged schools.

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Febrero 28, 2012

¿Mayor gasto significa necesariamente mejores puntajes en prueba PISA?

Síntesis producida por la OCDE.

Acceder al texto completo (en inglés) (4 pp) aquí

Does money buy strong performance in PISA?

• Greater national wealth or higher expenditure on education does not guarantee better student performance. Among high-income economies, the amount spent on education is less important than how those resources are used.
• Successful school systems in high-income economies tend to prioritise the quality of teachers over the size of classes.
• School systems that perform well in PISA believe that all students can achieve, and give them the opportunity to do so.

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Febrero 27, 2012

Harvard muestra que no es posible "democratizar" el acceso a una universidad ultra-selectiva

Harvard and the American
February 2, 2012, 1:40 pm

By Richard Kahlenberg! The Chronicle of Higher Education

http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/harvard-and-the-american-dream/31493?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/harvard-and-the-american-dream/31493?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

President Obama’s recent address at the University of Michigan rightly su gestead that if the American Dream is to be open to all, not just some, college must be made more affordable to average Americans. But a new analysis of America’s oldest and richest university suggests that adequate financial aid is necessary, but not sufficient, to ensuring that students of all economic backgrounds have access at selective colleges.

Eight years ago, Harvard’s president Lawrence Summers suggested that “an important purpose of institutions like Harvard is to give everybody a shot at the American Dream.” Strongly backed by William Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions at Harvard, the university crafted an innovative and far-reaching financial-aid program to make Harvard virtually free for students from families making less than $40,000 (and today, for families making less than $60,000) in annual income. In important ways, the system worked, as the percentage of students eligible for Pell Grants rose substantially from 9.6 percent in 2004 to 15 percent in 2011.

But looking at the class as a whole (not just the proportion of students who receive Pell grants), a new analysis of data by Justin Lanning in the Harvard Crimson, found that in the 2010-11 academic year, almost half (45.6 percent) of Harvard undergraduates came from families with incomes above $200,000 a year, a level of affluence that only 3.8 percent of American households enjoy. Only about 4 percent of Harvard undergraduates came from the bottom quintile of U.S. incomes, he notes, and 82.2 percent came from the richest two-fifths of the population. (Admissions dean Fitzsimmons did not respond to a request for comment on these data.)

Critics will note that Lanning examines the income of all Americans, not those with children of college-going age (which is somewhat higher), but the overall issue he raises is important. Harvard’s record tells us something about the insufficiency of addressing financial-aid concerns alone in giving students from all backgrounds a shot at attending selective colleges. Even the most generous financial-aid program is meaningless for students who aren’t admitted in the first place. Selective universities seeking diversity should more aggressively count obstacles overcome as an element of merit in admissions decisions. And they should end preferences for the children of alumni, which today increase the odds of admission by 45 percentage points for students at institutions like Harvard.

Lanning’s overall conclusion is hard to argue with: “Undoubtedly, Harvard is more socioeconomically diverse than ever before, but, as with all things, better does not always equal good.”

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Febrero 26, 2012

10 tendencias en el uso educacional de las NTICs

New Media Consortium Names 10 Top ‘Metatrends’ Shaping Educational Technology
The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 1, 2012, 2:58 pm

By Nick DeSantis
A group of education leaders gathered last week to discuss the most important technology innovations of the last decade, and their findings suggest the classroom of the future will be open, mobile, and flexible enough to reach individual students—while free online tools will challenge the authority of traditional institutions.

The retreat celebrated the 10th anniversary of the New Media Consortium’s Horizon Project, whose annual report provides a road map of the education-technology landscape. One hundred experts from higher education, K-12, and museum education identified 28 “metatrends” that will influence education in the future. The 10 most important, according to a New Media Consortium announcement about the retreat, include global adoption of mobile devices, the rise of cloud computing, and transparency movements that call into question traditional notions of content ownership concerning digital materials.

Larry Johnson, the consortium’s chief executive, said the meeting was important because it brought together groups from three different education sectors that don’t often collaborate. He said the retreat intended to “drive a conversation around how to think about the future.”

Of the top 10 trends the group flagged, Mr. Johnson said one of the most interesting conversations to emerge was about open data and open-educational resources. As the group discussed these issues, he said, the participants began to think about transparency “as a value” rather than a buzzword.

Later this year, the consortium will build on its retreat by publishing videos of the event, hosting a series of social-media conversations, and writing a more extensive report on its findings.

UPDATE: Here are the top 10 trends from the report:

1. The world of work is increasingly global and increasingly collaborative. As more and more companies move to the global marketplace, it is common for work teams to span continents and time zones. Not only are teams geographically diverse, they are also culturally diverse.

2. People expect to work, learn, socialize, and play whenever and wherever they want to. Increasingly, people own more than one device, using a computer, smartphone, tablet, and ereader. People now expect a seamless experience across all their devices.

3. The Internet is becoming a global mobile network — and already is at its edges. Mobithinking reports there are now more than 6 billion active cell phone accounts. 1.2 billion have mobile broadband as well, and 85% of new devices can access the mobile web.

4. The technologies we use are increasingly cloud-based and delivered over utility networks, facilitating the rapid growth of online videos and rich media. Our current expectation is that the network has almost infinite capacity and is nearly free of cost. One hour of video footage is uploaded every second to YouTube; over 250 million photos are sent to Facebook every day.

5. Openness — concepts like open content, open data, and open resources, along with notions of transparency and easy access to data and information — is moving from a trend to a value for much of the world. As authoritative sources lose their importance, there is need for more curation and other forms of validation to generate meaning in information and media.

6. Legal notions of ownership and privacy lag behind the practices common in society. In an age where so much of our information, records, and digital content are in the cloud, and often clouds in other legal jurisdictions, the very concept of ownership is blurry.

7. Real challenges of access, efficiency, and scale are redefining what we mean by quality and success. Access to learning in any form is a challenge in too many parts of the world, and efficiency in learning systems and institutions is increasingly an expectation of governments — but the need for solutions that scale often trumps them both. Innovations in these areas are increasingly coming from unexpected parts of the world, including India, China, and central Africa.

8. The Internet is constantly challenging us to rethink learning and education, while refining our notion of literacy. Institutions must consider the unique value that each adds to a world in which information is everywhere. In such a world, sense-making and the ability to assess the credibility of information and media are paramount.

9. There is a rise in informal learning as individual needs are redefining schools, universities, and training. Traditional authority is increasingly being challenged, not only politically and socially, but also in academia — and worldwide. As a result, credibility, validity, and control are all notions that are no longer givens when so much learning takes place outside school systems.

10. Business models across the education ecosystem are changing. Libraries are deeply reimagining their missions; colleges and universities are struggling to reduce costs across the board. The educational ecosystem is shifting, and nowhere more so than in the world of publishing, where efforts to reimagine the book are having profound success, with implications that will touch every aspect of the learning enterprise.

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Febrero 25, 2012

Cómo la Universidad de Stanford busca adptar el pregrado a las exigencias del futuro

Interesante documento que contiene las orientaciones y concreciones de la reforma curricular decidida en estos días por la Universidad de Stanford, la cual pone énfasis en el desarrollo de ciertas competencias superiores, la familiaridad con diversos enfoques disciplinarios, el compromiso ciudadano y la formación en valores. Todo esto, a 10 mil kilómteros de distancia (espiritual o de ethos) con las orientaciones y prácticas curriculares prevalecientes en Chile

Bajar el Report aquí.

Acceder directamente al Report aquí 1,9 MB

Give undergraduates the 'gift' of adaptive learning, committee tells senate

The first senate meeting of winter quarter focused on the report of the Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford. Speakers included the co-chairs of the university committee that produced the report – Susan McConnell, biology, and James T. Campbell, history – as well as Harry Elam, vice provost for undergraduate education.

Stanford University News, Stanford Report, January 27, 2012

BY KATHLEEN J. SULLIVAN

At Thursday's senate meeting, faculty had their first opportunity to ask questions about the final report of the Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford (SUES) following a presentation by the co-chairs of the committee that produced the 128-page document.

Professors Susan McConnell, Jennifer Summit, Sarah Billington, Chris Edwards, Jonathan Berger, Rob Reich and James Campbell field questions after the SUES report at the Faculty Senate meeting.

The report recommends replacing the yearlong Introduction to the Humanities sequence with a quarter-long "Thinking Matters" course, and requiring freshmen to take Introductory Seminars, which would give them the opportunity to know and work closely with a professor.

The report also recommends expanding the September Studies Program, by piloting additional courses aimed at students in their junior year, and "creat[ing] a culture of expectation" that students will do a capstone project during their senior year.

During the Q&A that followed their presentations, co-chairs James T. Campbell, history, and Susan McConnell, biology, were joined at the front of the chamber by the chairs of five of the SUES committee's seven subcommittees. They fielded a variety of questions:

"SUES is recommending that Stanford faculty see themselves more and more robustly as teachers in diverse ways: Did the committee think about what the implications are for the understanding of a research university, particularly in terms of the criteria that we use in hiring, rewarding and promoting colleagues?"

"How are you going to know if you're successful? Five years from now, how will you know whether this report accomplished what you hope?"

"Exactly how are you intending to expand the freshman seminar program so that it comes close to being accessible and available to 100 percent of our freshman class? How are we going to do that in response to the very limited schedules of our many athletes, or for the populations that we know demographically have been very reluctant to take these seminars?"

McConnell, the Susan B. Ford Professor in the Department of Biology, presented an overview of the major recommendations of the report, including a new way of organizing breadth requirements that focuses less on disciplinary content and more on their purposes and their learning goals, known as "Ways of Thinking, Ways of Doing."

"In reconceiving breadth in this way we're not suggesting that disciplinary knowledge is unimportant," she said. "To the contrary, knowledge is the platform on which skills and capacities are built. But we think that a system that's focused on ways of thinking and doing is more coherent, more transparent in its rationale, and more responsive to the needs and goals of students."
Harry Elam speaking to Faculty Senate

Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education Harry Elam speaks at the Faculty Senate meeting.

McConnell said the recommendations for freshmen are designed to make arriving students "immediate and full partners in the intellectual life of the university" and to "deliver a curriculum to them that addresses their distinctive learning needs."

Campbell, the Edgar E. Robinson Professor in United States History, said one of the committee's fundamental goals was to try to create opportunities for students to integrate different aspects of their experience, "not only because we believe that those moments are powerful and lasting educationally, but also because we believe that developing that capacity for integrative knowledge is in fact one of the most crucial gifts that we can give them going forward."

Campbell said the capacity to integrate new and old experiences, and to adapt knowledge and skills to new circumstances, will help protect Stanford students from professional obsolescence and will best prepare them to face life's unforeseen challenges.

Harry Elam, the Freeman-Thornton Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, said his office already has begun laying the groundwork to implement some of the recommendations by meeting with faculty and with the Committee on Undergraduate Standards and Policy (C-USP).

Elam said Stanford has 120 introductory seminars for freshmen.

"We also have 99 courses that are sophomore seminars," he said. "What we will think about is how will we use those sophomore seminars. Will some of them become freshman seminars? Yes, we may need more."

In a spirited talk, Elam urged the senate to embrace the recommendations, which reflect Stanford's entrepreneurial, pioneering spirit.

"Here is a chance to really potentially reinvent what we do, think about what we do," he said. "The reverberations will be felt not only here, but around the country. What SUES is asking us to do is to take that leap. I hope we'll have fun doing it."

Rosemary Knight, chair of the Faculty Senate and a professor of geophysics, said C-USP will present proposals related to the SUES recommendations that require a senate vote. Proposed changes to the freshman year will be discussed at the senate's Feb. 23 meeting, followed by a senate vote on March 8. The other SUES recommendations that require a senate vote will be considered during spring quarter.
President Hennessy talks about StanfordNYC

At the start of the meeting, Knight said she had asked President John Hennessy to comment on Stanford's decision late last year to withdraw its proposal to create an applied sciences campus in New York City, and to briefly discuss the process of preparing and vetting the proposal.

Hennessy said that during the December negotiations, the city imposed requirements that increased the risks and the costs of undertaking the project, and decreased some of the project's long-term benefits to Stanford.

"At that time, I notified the Board of Trustees that I did not think the negotiations were going particularly well," he said. "We felt like we were in an adversarial negotiating position, rather than a partnership. I said if we couldn't straighten that out, we might have to abandon the project."

Stanford made its decision to withdraw on the evening of Dec. 15.

"In the end, we withdrew, because we felt in the senior team that while we believed we could win the proposal, it would require us to make concessions which would reduce or eliminate future opportunities for the core campus," Hennessy said. "We felt that we were being asked to do too much. We decided it was better to withdraw than to enter into an agreement that would be a legally binding agreement that would compromise the university's future."

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg later announced that Cornell University, in partnership with Technion of Israel, would build a campus on Roosevelt Island.

In a Q&A published Dec. 27 in Stanford Report, the StanfordNYC team explained its decision.

Hennessy also announced that John Mitchell, the Mary and Gordon Crary Family Professor in the School of Engineering, had accepted an appointment as special assistant to the president for educational technology. Mitchell will help Stanford launch its next efforts in online education and help the university develop agreements with outside entities that might host its courses.
Minutes available next week

The full minutes of the Jan. 26 meeting, including the questions and answers that followed the SUES presentation, will be available on the Faculty Senate website next week. The next Faculty Senate meeting will be held Feb. 9.

Foreword

The university should be enormously grateful to the authors of the Study of Undergraduate Education at Stanford and to the hundreds of faculty members, administrators, and students who contributed to this thoughtful and well-informed report.

The SUES report is a radical document, less because it proposes to redesign undergraduate education than because it tries to get at the root of teaching and learning. The report asks us to think beyond the categories around which the curriculum is conventionally organized. By emphasizing skills and capacities, ways of thinking and doing, and especially by aspiring to integrate undergraduates’ academic experiences, the report encourages both students and teachers to reconsider what they do, how they do it, and why it matters.

The report is also a conservative document because it is tightly connected to Stanford’s distinctive character and traditions. It rests on a careful and comprehensive examination of current practices. Moreover, no other study of undergraduate education at Stanford has been so conscious of previous efforts at reform. Those involved in the Commission on Undergraduate Education, SUES’s immediate predecessor, will be particularly gratified by the ways in which the study amplifies, amends, and sometimes corrects CUE’s efforts.

Education is, as the report reminds us, always a work in progress, the product of an open-ended conversation between and among teachers and students, a conversation embedded in the university but also animated by the changing world around it. The SUES report enriches this conversation with fresh ideas, useful information, and, above all, a renewed commitment to the abiding importance of the university’s educational mission.

James J. Sheehan
Chair, Commission on Undergraduate Education, 1993–94
Dickason Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History emeritus

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Febrero 23, 2012

La docencia: el hermano pobre de las funciones universitarias

February 5, 2012
Harvard Conference Seeks to Jolt University Teaching
By Dan Berrett
Cambridge, Mass., The Chronicle of Higher Education
http://chronicle.com/article/Harvard-Seeks-to-Jolt/130683/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

A growing body of evidence from the classroom, coupled with emerging research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, is lending insight into how people learn, but teaching on most college campuses has not changed much, several speakers said here at Harvard University at a daylong conference dedicated to teaching and learning.

Too often, faculty members teach according to habits and hunches, said Carl E. Wieman, a Nobel Prize-winning physicist and associate director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, who has extensively studied how to improve science education.

In large part, the problem is that graduate students pursuing their doctorates get little or no training in how students learn. When these graduate students become faculty members, he said, they might think about the content they want students to learn, but not the cognitive capabilities they want them to develop.

"It really requires someone to be doubly expert," Mr. Wieman said. As sometimes happens in some disciplines and departments, a few people develop deeper knowledge of pedagogy. These doubly expert faculty members, he said, can show colleagues how to apply new approaches to teaching the discipline.

Such approaches would demand much more of students and faculty. Students should be made to grapple with the material and receive authentic and explicit practice in thinking like an expert, Mr. Wieman said. Faculty would need to provide timely and specific feedback, and move beyond lectures in which students can sit passively receiving information.

"We assume that telling people things without asking them to actively process them results in learning," Mr. Wieman said.

The conference, which also featured demonstrations of innovative approaches to teaching, was the first event in a new Harvard Initiative for Learning and Teaching, a project supported by a $40-million grant from two benefactors, Gustave M. and Rita E. Hauser. In addition to the conference, the money will pay for the redesign of classrooms at Harvard and for a grant program that will finance innovative ideas. More than 250 Harvard faculty, staff, and students have submitted letters of interest for projects costing nearly $10-million. Awardees will be selected in April.

Many colleges routinely hold seminars on teaching and learning. But the fact that Harvard is focusing on the subject—and that many speakers referred worryingly to the growth of online and for-profit providers—suggests a growing concern at even the most elite institutions that the classroom experience is not all it could be.

The Hausers wanted their money to have a broad effect across Harvard's departments and disciplines. They also wanted the university to respond to changes in students. "You can see there will be a fundamental break in how students are learning," Mrs. Hauser said in an interview, "and we thought Harvard should be at the forefront of that."

Confronting Misconceptions
Students are indeed changing, some speakers said. Their level of curiosity has declined over the past two decades, said Clayton M. Christensen, a professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School.

Mr. Christensen also drew an analogy between Harvard and the for-profit world, and General Motors and Toyota, describing how new businesses often enter the bottom of a market and claim untapped customers whom they reach through some new technological advance. Eventually, they move up-market and overtake the dominant player.

Higher education once was immune, he said, until the spread of online learning, which will allow lower-cost providers to extend into the higher reaches of the marketplace. "Higher education," he said, "is vulnerable to disruption."

And, while students are changing, several speakers described conventional teaching approaches as being ineffective.

Take, for example, the lecture, which came up for frequent shellacking throughout the day. It is designed to transfer information, said Eric Mazur, professor of physics at Harvard. But it does not fully accomplish even this limited task.

Lectures set up a dynamic in which students passively receive information that they quickly forget after the test. "They're not confronted with their misconceptions," Mr. Mazur said. "They walk out with a false sense of security."

The traditional lecture also fails at other educational goals: prodding students to make meaning from what they learn, to ask questions, extract knowledge, and apply it in a new context.

And yet, many speakers acknowledged, faculty members harbor their own misconceptions about learning, which still hold sway at Harvard and beyond.

One, said Mahzarin R. Banaji, a professor of psychology at Harvard, is what she called a "myth" about different learning styles, in which it is thought that some students learn best visually, others by hearing, and still others kinesthetically.

"There's no evidence, zero, that teaching methods should be matched up with different learning styles," Ms. Banaji said. "It's intuitively appealing, but not scientifically supported."

Assessing as Learning
Another commonly held notion, that studying is how learning occurs and testing is an afterthought, was upended by Henry L. "Roddy" Roediger III, a professor of psychology at Washington University in St. Louis, who has studied what is known as the "testing effect."

In an experiment, he broke students into three different groups: One studied a list of words eight consecutive times without taking any tests; the second studied the list six times and was tested twice. The last studied the words four times and took four tests. Two days later, they were asked to recall as many words as they could. Those who took four tests recalled words at up to twice the rate of those who only studied.

"Taking a test on something is a very effective way to learn about it," Mr. Roediger said.

But frequent quizzes—which he said should be low-stakes and not "deadly" multiple choice—often hit a wall of disdain among both faculty and students, he noted. "There's a kind of a conspiracy in higher education that professors don't like to give tests," Mr. Roediger said. "We hate grading tests. Students don't like taking them, so we don't give them very much."

But there are other ways to get students to truly learn, other speakers said. Asking students to explain concepts or to teach one another the material they have just learned are also effective.

Writing is often an effective pedagogical tool, too, several speakers said. For his history of psychology course, Mr. Roediger asks his students to send him short essays before each class meets. They respond to the reading. (Others at the conference who use this method said they sometimes ask their students to identify outstanding questions or relevant areas of their reading that have been left unexplored.) Mr. Roediger reads the one-page essays before class and works their thoughts into his comments.

But writing is also more than a means to convey content. It is a core skill that faculty members often hope their students will carry with them after they graduate, said Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard who studies language and cognition. But even here, students and faculty often fail.

Students are trained to write in jargon-heavy language that obscures rather than reveals the underlying ideas. Mr. Pinker drew an analogy to teaching, saying that obtuse writing and poor teaching both reflect what he called the "curse of knowledge."

Having this curse means that a writer or professor often assumes knowledge the reader or student does not have. More important, the writer or teacher usually forgets that the reader or student is struggling to learn the material for the first time, which often was long ago for the teacher.

"It's hard to know what it is like for someone else not to know something that you know," Mr. Pinker said. "It's the chief driver of bad writing and, I would argue, bad teaching."

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Febrero 22, 2012

Propuestas de la PUC para una carrera docente

Ver las Propuestas para una carrera docente, coordinada por Elige Educar y el Centro de Políticas Públicas UC. Este trabajo, que convocó a trece expertos, pretende ser una invitación al debate, estableciendo una serie de propuestas centrales para el desarrollo y fortalecimiento de una profesión docente en el país.

Bajar el documento aquí 9,4 MB

El documento final refleja la discusión y propuesta realizada por un grupo de expertos y conocedores de la práctica de la docencia, provenientes de diversas instituciones. Los participantes firman a título personal y no representan la opinión de sus instituciones ni de los convocantes.

VERUSHKA ÁLVAREZ
Corporación Municipal de Educación, Maipú
CELIA ALVARIÑO
Directora Colegios Dunalastair
BEATRICE ÁVALOS
Académica CIAE, Universidad de Chile
JAIME BELLOLIO
Subdirector Fundación Jaime Guzmán
ALEJANDRO CARRASCO
Académico P. Universidad Católica de Chile
VIOLETA CASTILLO
Directora Educación Municipal, Santiago
SOLEDAD CONCHA
Académica Universidad Diego Portales
CAROLINA HERRERA
Profesora General Básica, Equipo Elige Educar
CARLOS HENRÍQUEZ
Director Corporación Municipal de Educación, Maipú
CRISTIÁN INFANTE
Director Colegio San Luis Beltrán
CLAUDIA PEIRANO
Directora Grupo Educativo
ANDRÉS RIVEROS
Profesor Liceo Estación Central
JUAN PABLO VALENZUELA
Académico CIAE Universidad de Chile

Las instituciones editoras del documento agradecen también la colaboración que prestó durante el proceso A:
HARALD BEYER

Coordinación del Proyecto:
MARÍA PAZ MEDEIROS
Edición:
GABRIEL GUTIÉRREZ
HERNÁN HOCHSCHILD
Edición General:
MICAELA LOBOS

El debate y la discusión acerca de cómo mejorar la calidad de la educación se ha intensificado estos últimos años. Tanto en Chile, como en el resto del mundo, cada vez se reconoce con más fuerza la importancia de desarrollar políticas enfocadas en atraer alumnos destacados a las carreras de educación, formar profesores de alto desempeño y retener a docentes efectivos en el sistema educativo. En este contexto, a principios del año 2011 el Ejecutivo asumió un compromiso fundamental para los desafíos que enfrenta el país en materia educativa: el envío de un proyecto de ley que instaurara una nueva Carrera Docente.

Como parte de este proceso, la iniciativa Elige Educar y el Centro de Políticas Públicas de la Universidad Católica, convencidos de la necesidad de aportar desde lo académico y lo social a la discusión nacional en torno a la Educación, convocaron a una mesa de trabajo para consensuar una propuesta de nueva Carrera Docente, que en su diseño y justificación, sirviera como insumo para facilitar y orientar el debate. Esta instancia contó con la participación de académicos y expertos en educación, docentes, directores de establecimientos educacionales y administradores de educación municipal (corporaciones y DAEM).

El trabajo de la mesa tomó como referencia y punto de partida la propuesta del “Panel de Expertos para una educación de Calidad”, coordinado en ese momento por el actual Ministro de Educación Harald Beyer. Además, se revisaron otros documentos que plantean propuestas y sugerencias para relevar la profesión docente. A partir de estos antecedentes se dio inicio a un proceso de debate considerando la experiencia de cada uno de los participantes, en el que se buscó identificar elementos para crear una carrera que permitiera potenciar el desarrollo profesional de los profesores. Este documento es el resultado de dicho proceso y rescata los puntos de encuentro entre los participantes, entregando propuestas sobre temas que son esenciales de considerar en una nueva carrera docente.

Este documento pretende ser una invitación al debate, estableciendo una serie de propuestas centrales para el desarrollo y fortalecimiento de una profesión docente en el país. Esperamos sea un aporte en esta línea y contribuya a la atracción y retención de buenos profesores, fortaleciendo así la calidad de nuestro sistema educativo. En este sentido, no aspira a establecer una propuesta que aborde todos los aspectos asociados a las condiciones laborales de los profesores chilenos, ni todas las dimensiones que podría considerar una carrera docente en el contexto nacional.

HERNÁN HOCHSCHILD OVALLE
Director Ejecutivo
Elige Educar

IGNACIO IRARRÁZAVAL LLONA
Director
Centro de Políticas Públicas UC
Santiago, 25 Enero de 2012

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Febrero 21, 2012

Resultados PISA y su potencial de uso en América Latina

 ¿Qué hacer con los resultados de PISA en América Latina?. Pedro Ravela
Documento PREAL Núm. 58
http://www.preal.org/BibliotecaN.asp?Id_Carpeta=64&Camino=63%7CPreal%20Publicaciones/64%7CPREAL%20Documentos

Este documento propone una reflexión acerca de los modos en que los resultados de PISA podrían aprovecharse más y mejor en la construcción de las políticas educativas en América Latina. A lo largo del texto se intentar dar algunas respuestas a las siguientes preguntas: cuáles han sido los principales temas de debate público en los países latinoamericanos participantes en PISA 2009, a partir de la publicación de sus resultados; más allá de los ordenamientos relativos de los países, qué otra información relevante aporta PISA para la discusión y construcción de las políticas educativas; y cómo usar la información derivada de PISA para la construcción de políticas educativas. Para la producción del texto fueron revisados los informes internacionales de PISA 2009 y de los ciclos anteriores, los reportes y presentaciones nacionales de los resultados, el informe elaborado por el Grupo Iberoamericano de PISA (GIP) y una colección de los debates y posturas públicas recogidas en los medios de prensa de cuatro países (Argentina, Chile, Panamá y Uruguay) luego de la divulgación de los resultados de PISA 2009, en diciembre de 2010.

 pdf  •   448,39 Kb  • Español  •  Descargar aqui:
http://www.preal.org/Archivos/Bajar.asp?Carpeta=Preal%20Publicaciones%5CPREAL%20Documentos&Archivo=PREALDOC58.pdf

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Febrero 20, 2012

España: efectos de la crisis sobre el desarrollo de las universidades

Para atender y entender. Dice esta información: "Ya es oficial. El programa Campus de Excelencia Internacional (CEI), en el que el Estado ha invertido más de 700 millones (de euros) desde su puesta en marcha en 2008, ha entrado en vía muerta".

Los campus de excelencia, en vía muerta
El Gobierno paraliza en 15 comunidades los créditos a los proyectos universitarios más ambiciosos Educación asegura que la ley de estabilidad le impide autorizarlos
Neus Caballer Valencia, El País, 19 FEB 2012

Ya es oficial. El programa Campus de Excelencia Internacional (CEI), en el que el Estado ha invertido más de 700 millones (de euros) desde su puesta en marcha en 2008, ha entrado en vía muerta. El Ministerio de Educación comunicó durante el mes de enero, en reuniones con los rectores y presidentes de consejos sociales, que no autorizará créditos para desarrollar los proyectos de agregación e internacionalización de las universidades seleccionados por un jurado de expertos en 2011. “Solamente se han concedido las subvenciones directas”, confirman fuentes del ministerio. “Los préstamos en 15 autonomías están parados. Solo se han hecho efectivos en Madrid y La Rioja”, añade.

El nuevo Gobierno de Mariano Rajoy justifica la decisión amparándose en “la disposición adicional 41 de la Ley de Presupuestos de 2011, que dice que todas las comunidades autónomas que no cumplan con el plan de estabilidad no podrán recibir ningún préstamo”. El ministerio sostiene que, “en este momento, solo dos comunidades, Madrid y La Rioja, lo cumplen”.

En las dos primeras ediciones del Programa CEI —además de las subvenciones directas de entre 3.000 y 5.000 euros—, la mayor parte de la financiación se diseñó en forma de créditos sin intereses.

Con la crisis, el último Gobierno de Zapatero introdujo una modificación en la convocatoria de 2011: los préstamos estatales son a 15 años, los tres primeros de carencia, pero a un interés del 5,66%. Andalucía rechazó el pasado diciembre endeudarse “a precios por encima del mercado”, y se comprometió con los rectores a financiar los 8,8 millones de euros para la excelencia con “recursos propios”.

El programa contribuye a la transferencia tecnológica

Sin embargo, la Generalitat Valenciana, gobernada como el Gobierno central por el PP, aceleró los trámites con el último ministerio socialista para tratar de que, “en enero, a más tardar”, se hiciera efectiva la autorización para solicitar el crédito de siete millones de euros concedido al proyecto conjunto del sistema universitario valenciano, en el que participan las cinco universidades públicas.

El nuevo ministerio reconoce ahora que el programa está en “stand by”, en el aire hasta que el ministro de Educación, José Ignacio Wert, decida qué rumbo tomará la excelencia universitaria española. “Su futuro aún no está definido”, señalan desde el ministerio.

Los rectores conocieron esta decisión la semana pasada, en un escrito remitido por el rector José Moreso, de la Universidad Pompeu Fabra, tras reunirse con la secretaría general de Universidades y la dirección general de Universidades del ministerio. “Lo que señalaron es que, en principio, no está claro lo que van a hacer”, confirma el rector de la Universidad Politécnica de Valencia y vicepresidente de la Confederación Española de Rectores de Universidades Españolas (CRUE), Juan Juliá. “Está en vía muerta”.

En la reunión, el presidente de los Consejos Sociales, Joaquín Moya, defendió la necesidad de continuar con el proyecto implantado en buena parte de Europa, señala Juliá. El vicepresidente de la CRUE defiende que el programa ha sido “una buena iniciativa” y que suspenderlo sería “una pérdida”.

El modelo de financiación no resiste comparación con Europa

“Los CEI potenciaban la transferencia tecnológica porque obligaban a hacer agregaciones entre centros universitarios, pero también con organizaciones empresariales, precisamente para fomentar ese discurso sobre la necesidad de incrementar la transferencia tecnológica de las universidades hacia el mundo empresarial”, subraya Juliá.

El sistema universitario público valenciano es el único a nivel nacional que ha logrado que todos sus campus sean calificados con el sello de Excelencia Internacional. El programa de 2011 compitió con un ambicioso proyecto sobre hábitat y territorio para desarrollar un nuevo modelo productivo en una comunidad donde el ladrillo y el pinchazo inmobiliario han hecho mella, dejando casi 560.000 parados de baja cualificación.

“Los rectores creemos que es un buen programa para la Administración, porque las universidades nos pusimos a trabajar a fondo en ello y con retribuciones que son el 38% inferiores, en términos del coste de la vida, a la media de Alemania, Francia, Italia y Reino Unido”, remata Juliá.

El sistema de financiación de la excelencia universitaria en España no resiste comparación con otro país europeo. Francia destina una media de 34 millones de euros directos por proyecto y anualidad durante cuatro años. Alemania, tras muchas negociaciones con los länder (Estados) acordó crear un marco estable de financiación en forma de subvenciones directas. La iniciativa alemana destinará 1.900 millones de euros solo para el periodo 2007-2012.

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Crédito estudiantil: ¿una solución para México?

The Dangers of Mexico’s New Student-Loan Program

The following is a guest post by Marion Lloyd, chief project coordinator at the Office for Institutional Assessment at the National Autonomous University of Mexico and a former Latin America correspondent for The Chronicle.

The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2012
——————————————————————————

Citing the need to “democratize” access to higher education, Mexican President Felipe Calderón announced this month the country’s first system of federally-backed commercial student loans. The National Program for Financing Higher Education, presented amid much fanfare on January 9, seeks to extend some $200-million in loans this year to more than 23,000 college students. As public universities are free, the program only applies to students at private universities.

At first glance, the government’s decision to work with private lenders to expand credit options for students might seem like a no brainer. After all, Calderón notes, more than 60 countries in the world operate such systems. Mexico, if anything, is a late-comer to the trend, with the first private college loans available on the market here in 2006.

But with skyrocketing college debt triggering protests around the world, Calderón’s push to increase the number of Mexican debtors is wrongheaded–if not downright cynical. Calderón cites Chile and the United States as examples of successful student-loan programs, but both facing huge social problems because of their so-called success. The South American country has been rocked by massive student-led protests since May against the college-loan system. The protesters are demanding an end to reforms implemented by the Pinochet dictatorship in 1980, which required all universities–public or private–to charge tuition, and implemented a system of government-backed student loans.

The system helped bankroll the massive expansion of higher education, mostly through the creation of new private universities. Over the past two decades, enrollment has quintupled from 200,000 to a million, out of a population of just 15 million. Today, Chile has the second-highest college enrollment rate in the region, 59 percent, behind only Argentina, with 69 percent, according to the latest Unesco figures from 2009. But Chile also leads the region in the number of student debtors, including the more than 100,000 loan defaulters, who owe an average of $5,400 each–roughly equivalent to the country’s annual per capita income–according to the government’s own estimates.

The United States, where protesters from California to New York are demanding relief from a record $1-trillion in college-loan debt, is another case that should raise alarm bells in Mexico. Fueled by rising college tuition and sliding wages, total outstanding student debt has doubled in just five years, with the average debtor owing a record $25,250 last year, according to government figures. In addition, the share of debtors who have failed to make their payments during the first two years rose from 6.7 percent in 2007 to more 8.8 percent last year, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

That said, there are arguments in favor of the student-loan systems in both Chile and the United States, to the extent that they have vastly expanded access to higher education. The Mexican program, in its current form, holds no such potential.

Despite Calderón’s assurance that the program “benefits those students who need it most,” in reality, it mostly benefits the banks, followed by a limited group of private universities. Unlike student-loan programs in other countries, in which students can decide which colleges to attend, the Mexican program is restricted to 21 private universities who committed to help cover part of the debt should the students default on their loans.

The announcement this month triggered scathing criticism from many of the country’s most respected higher-education experts. They accuse Calderón of pandering to the private sector at the expense of the public universities, which enroll 70 percent of Mexico’s three million students, including many of the poorest, and conduct the vast majority of scientific research.

Such claims are not totally unfounded. The program comes less than a year after Calderón made private-school tuition–from preschool through high school–tax exempt, starting this year. Under his predecessor, former President Vicente Fox, the government began paying a share of bonuses for top researchers at private universities, a cost previously covered by the institutions themselves.

Politics aside, however, there are other problems with the loan program–namely the high cost for students and the mediocre quality of most of the participating universities. Despite Calderón’s assurances that the loans’ interest rate of 10 percent is “highly affordable,” in reality it’s far above rates charged by most other countries, including the United States and Chile, according to a study by the International Comparative Higher Education Finance and Accessibility Project at the State University of New York at Buffalo.

While the program might marginally increase the number of poor and middle-class students attending private colleges, it also holds the potential to push thousands of Mexican youths into unmanageable debt. As with their counterparts in Chile–and increasingly in the United States–there is no guarantee that college graduates will land a decent-paying job. The average salaries for recent graduates in Mexico are $6,500 for those with a bachelor’s degree, $9,800 with a master’s degree, and $12,200 with a Ph.D., according to a 2010 study by the Public Education Secretariat, Mexico’s equivalent of the Department of Education.

Under such a scenario, Mexico may soon have its own version of the Take Back Student Loan movement rocking the United States, albeit on a smaller scale. So far, the Mexican program is a fraction the size of those in place in other countries, although Calderón has pledged to vastly expand it if his party retains power.

While the student-loan program may be politically popular with middle-class Mexicans, are the potential benefits of a college education really worth taking on some $20,000 worth of debt? Just ask the protesters sitting in at Berkeley or New York University or the thousands of striking students in Chile, and the answer is most likely: no.

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Febrero 19, 2012

¿Cómo medir el impacto total de la producción académica?

Scholars Seek Better Ways to Track Impact Online

By Jennifer Howard for The Chronicle, January 29, 2012

In academe, the game of how to win friends and influence people is serious business. Administrators and grant makers want proof that a researcher's work has life beyond the library or the lab.

But the current system of measuring scholarly influence doesn't reflect the way many researchers work in an environment driven more and more by the social Web. Research that used to take months or years to reach readers can now find them almost instantly via blogs and Twitter.

That kind of activity escapes traditional metrics like the impact factor, which indicates how often a journal is cited, not how its articles are really being consumed by readers.

An approach called altmetrics—short for alternative metrics—aims to measure Web-driven scholarly interactions, such as how often research is tweeted, blogged about, or bookmarked. "There's a gold mine of data that hasn't been harnessed yet about impact outside the traditional citation-based impact," says Dario Taraborelli, a senior research analyst with the Strategy Team at the Wikimedia Foundation and a proponent of the idea.
As Scholarship Goes Digital, Academics Seek New Ways to Measure Their Impact 2

Jason Priem, a graduate student at the U. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is part of the team that created Total-Impact, a system to track the movement of research across the Web.

Interest in altmetrics is on the rise, but it's not quite right to call it a movement. The approach could better be described as a sprawling constellation of projects and like-minded people working at research institutions, libraries, and publishers.

They've been talking on Twitter (marking their messages with the #altmetrics hashtag), sharing resources and tools online, and developing ideas at occasional workshops and symposia. They're united by the idea that "metrics based on a diverse set of social sources could yield broader, richer, and timelier assessments of current and potential scholarly impact," as a call for contributions to a forthcoming altmetrics essay collection puts it.

Jason Priem, a third-year graduate student at the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is a leader in this push to track impact via the social Web. Scholarly workflows are moving online, leaving traces that can be documented—not just in articles but on social networks and reference sites such as Mendeley and Zotero, where researchers store and annotate scholarship of interest. "It's like we have a fresh snowfall across this docu-plain, and we have fresh footprints everywhere," he says. "That has the potential to really revolutionize how we measure impact."

Mr. Priem helped write a manifesto, posted on the Web site altmetrics.org, which articulates the problems with traditional evaluation schemes. "As the volume of academic literature explodes, scholars rely on filters to select the most relevant and significant sources from the rest," the manifesto argues. "Unfortunately, scholarship's three main filters for importance are failing."

Peer review "has served scholarship well" but has become slow and unwieldy and rewards conventional thinking. Citation-counting measures such as the h-index take too long to accumulate. And the impact factor of journals gets misapplied as a way to assess an individual researcher's performance, which it wasn't designed to do.

"I'm not down on citations," Mr. Priem says. "I'm just saying it's only part of the story. It's become the only part of the story we care about."

That's where altmetrics comes in. It's a way to measure the "downstream use" of research, says Cameron Neylon, a senior scientist at Britain's Science and Technology Facilities Council, and another contributor to the manifesto. Any system that turns out to be a useful way to measure influence will tempt the unscrupulous to try and game it, though. One concern is that someone could build a program, for instance, that would keep tweeting links to an article and inflate its altmetrics numbers.
Devising a Method

So how do you reliably measure fluid, fast-paced, Web-based, nonhierarchical reactions to scholarly work? That problem has been keeping Mr. Priem busy. He's part of the team that designed an altmetrics project called Total-Impact.

Researchers can go to the site and enter many forms of research, including blog posts, articles, data sets, and software they've written. Then the Total-Impact application will search the Internet for downloads, Twitter links, mentions in open-source software libraries, and other indicators that the work is being noticed. "We go out on the Web and find every sort of impact and present them to the user," Mr. Priem explains. When possible, they gather data directly from services' open-application programming interfaces, or API's.

These are very early days for Total-Impact, and there's a lot of information it doesn't gather yet. For instance, right now it only searches blogs indexed by the site Research Blogging. That "amounts to a very small subset of science blogs," according to Mr. Priem, who adds that most of the other metrics are more robust.

"Although it's still in alpha and has plenty of bugs, if you upload identifiers, you can and do get all sorts of impact information back," he says. "We've gotten many reports of people using the application, although certainly not in vast numbers" yet. "We've also gotten many requests from academic publishers and creators of scholarly Web applications to embed TI data into their pages" using Total-Impact's open API, he says.

He doesn't know yet how significant Total-Impact will prove to be. Will scholars take to it? Will tenure-and-promotion gatekeepers be willing to add altmetrics to the evaluation mix any time soon? Those are big unknowns right now. The long-term goal is "to completely change the way scholars and administrators think about academic impact" and get them to move away from what Mr. Priem calls "a citation-fetishizing article monoculture." But he's realistic. "Clearly, that's going to take some time," he says.

The Total-Impact site features several cautions about how it should and should not be used. It may help a researcher ascertain the "minimum impact" his or her work has made on the scholarly community; it can provide a sense of who's bookmarking or responding to that work. But it's not yet an indicator of comprehensive impact. "Take it all with a grain of salt," a warning on the site advises. "The meaning of these metrics are not yet well understood."

One of Mr. Priem's Total-Impact partners is Heather A. Piwowar. As a postdoctoral researcher at DataOne, affiliated with the National Evolutionary Synthesis Center and the Dryad digital repository, she studies patterns in how researchers share and reuse data. She and Mr. Priem have been building Total-Impact in their spare time. "Our day jobs are being a grad student and a postdoc," she says, but "we just couldn't stop ourselves. It seemed to have such profound possibilities."

The main difficulty they've encountered, she says, is finding sources of open data. Every blog post has a URL, and "you can search Twitter and other places for that URL," she says. But the Total-Impact algorithms can't just rely on Google searches, because those "aren't open and free data," she says. There's a lot of information behind the results of a Google search that Total-Impact can't really get to yet.

Another technical challenge for altmetrics is what to do about multiple digital "addresses" for a specific article online. Someone who tweets about a paper will probably link to a URL but not include the digital object identifier, or DOI, that makes the paper more permanently findable online, even if the URL changes. "So it's been more of a challenge than we expected to gather all of the synonym identifiers for an object and then search for all of them" in all the places where people might leave evidence of use, Ms. Piwowar says.

Right now, the Total-Impact group has to go ask Mendeley for an article's permanent Mendeley address, or "identifier," PubMed for its identifier, and so on. "Having one place where a lot of these identifiers are aggregated would be very helpful," she says.

Software and data can be especially tricky to track. A piece of code may be hosted by an open repository like GitHub but not cited in ways that are easily recognized.

And scholarly culture doesn't always encourage openness. "There's a lack of reward for sharing data," Ms. Piwowar says.

Altmetrics' emphasis on openness aligns it with the open-access movement, whose goal is to make published research freely available online. "Once you see the potential for using the Web for research communication," says Britain's Mr. Neylon, it's hard to look at the traditional model of scholarly communication "without a growing sense of horror."

Altmetrics has made some inroads in the publishing world. For instance, one open-access publisher, the Public Library of Science, or PLoS, has been experimenting seriously with article-level metrics, a fresh way to measure who's using PLoS articles and how.

Unlike PLoS, however, many publishers are not keen to share usage statistics with the world. Neither are some institutional repositories.

Ms. Piwowar says that proprietary attitude is the wrong approach for publishers to take. Altmetrics "is a call to people who host research projects to make information about their impact openly accessible," she says.

Gaming the System

As its proponents themselves acknowledge, the altmetrics approach has vulnerabilities that go beyond how much data can be had for free. Just because an idea gets buzz online doesn't always mean it has genuine intellectual value, as anyone who follows social media knows. And what about gaming the system?

"Can Tweets Predict Citations?" asked a paper published last year in the Journal of Medical Internet Research by Gunther Eysenbach, a senior scientist and professor of health policy at the University of Toronto. Based on a survey he conducted, Dr. Eysenbach concluded that the answer is yes; tweets often do flag papers that turn out to be important.

But measures of influence on Twitter "should be primarily seen as metrics for social impact (buzz, attentiveness, or popu­larity) and as a tool for researchers, journal editors, journalists, and the general public to filter and identify hot topics," the researcher wrote. He cautioned that significant research in many fields wasn't necessarily going to get picked up by people who are on Twitter.

But traditional citations too have limitations, Dr. Eysenbach pointed out; social-media-based metrics should be considered complementary to citations rather than alternatives to them.

The key question might be how vulnerable altmetrics, or any metrics, is to being gamed. Traditional measures of influence aren't immune to corruption; journals have been known to drive up their impact factors by self-citing.

Mr. Taraborelli of the Wikimedia Foundation says "we should expect major attempts at gaming the system" if and when altmetrics really catches on. "My expectation is it will be an arms race," he says. But there are ways to build in safeguards against gaming, he says, much as people keep creating better spam filters.

The inclusive, diffuse approach that drives altmetrics may actually help protect it. A Godzilla-like monster ranking "is the best way to manipulate the system, to make it dependent on curation strategies that may end up invalidating the metric itself," Mr. Taraborelli says. "The last thing we want is a system that's dominated by a monolithic ranker for all the scholarly literature."

Researchers' behavior on the social Web works against the idea that one number should rule them all, Mr. Taraborelli says: "I think we're moving to a system where, regardless of the benefits of single, monopolistic metrics, people will be able

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Febrero 18, 2012

EEUU: Cómo cambiará el test de admisión para estudiantes de medicina

Interesante reportaje aparecido recientemente en The Chronicle of Higher Education el cual da cuenta de los cambios a la prueba de admisión universitiaria para futuros médicos en los EEUU. Al final, versión en español proporcionada por el traductor automático de Google.

Medical-Admissions Test to Look More Broadly at Who Will Be a Good Doctor

By Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 16, 2012

The Association of American Medical Colleges on Thursday approved sweeping changes to the Medical College Admission Test that will require aspiring doctors to show that they understand the psychological and social underpinnings of medicine, and not just the hard science.

The changes, the first in the test since 1991, will take effect in 2015, giving the current crop of premedical students a few years to broaden their course loads.

The revamped test is designed to help students prepare for a rapidly changing health-care system and a patient base that is growing, graying, and becoming increasingly diverse, officials said.

"Being a good doctor is about more than scientific knowledge. It also requires an understanding of people," the association's president, Darrell G. Kirch, said in a prepared statement.

The changes were developed by a 21-member advisory committee that spent three years studying the matter and analyzing 2,700 survey responses from college and medical-school faculty members, medical residents, students, and advisers. The panel released its recommendations in November.

The test will include two new sections: one on the psychological, social, and biological foundations of behavior, and another on critical analysis and reasoning skills. It will also have two natural-science sections covering material learned in introductory biology, general and organic chemistry, biochemistry, and physics courses. The new test does away with a writing section that wasn't widely considered.

The changes will tack an extra two hours onto a grueling test that currently takes four and a half hours to complete, Dr. Kirch said during a conference call with reporters. To prepare for it, students might want to add introductory courses in psychology and sociology to the natural-sciences courses they have traditionally been told to focus on, he said.

Critics, including some medical-student advisers, have said such a broadening of the scope of the test would burden premedical students with more requirements and discourage many from applying. But Dr. Kirch said, "We see it as giving them more freedom" to study what they're really interested in. He added that one of the best ways to prepare for the new exam is by reading broadly.

"These changes should signal that someone who was a psychology major or a cross-cultural studies major or an English major has as much potential to enter medical school as someone who majored in chemistry," said Dr. Kirch, who majored in philosophy before he entered medical school four decades ago.

At a time when medical schools are struggling to attract more minority students to meet the needs of an increasingly multicultural population, a broader, revamped test should help, Dr. Kirch said. That, combined with a more holistic look at applicants in both interviews and letters of recommendation, should give medical schools a better sense of which applicants have the personal, as well as the intellectual, attributes to be successful doctors.

16 de febrero 2012
Test de Admisión para Médicosmirará con mayor amplitud a quienes serán buenos médicos

Por Katherine Mangan, The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 16, 2012

La Asociación Americana de Colegios Médicos aprobó el jueves cambios radicales en el Medical College Admission Test que requiere de los aspirantes a médicos demostrar que entienden los fundamentos psicológicos y sociales de la medicina, y no sólo la ciencia dura.

Los cambios, la primera en la prueba desde 1991, entrarán en vigor en 2015, dando a la actual generación de estudiantes de medicina unos años para ampliar sus cargas de los cursos.

La prueba renovada está diseñada para ayudar a los estudiantes a prepararse para un rápido cambio del sistema de salud y para una base de pacientes que está creciendo, envejeciendo, y es cada vez más diversa, dijeron las autoridades.

"Ser un buen médico es algo más que el conocimiento científico. También se requiere una comprensión de la gente", dijo el presidente de la asociación, Darrell G. Kirch, en una declaración preparada.

Los cambios fueron elaborados por un comité consultivo de 21 miembros, que pasó tres años estudiando el asunto y el análisis de 2.700 respuestas de la encuesta a los miembros de las facultades y las escuelas de medicina, médicos residentes, estudiantes y asesores. El panel emitió sus recomendaciones en noviembre.

La prueba contará con dos nuevas secciones: una sobre los fundamentos psicológicos, sociales y biológicas de la conducta, y otro sobre el análisis crítico y las habilidades de razonamiento. También contará con dos secciones de las ciencias naturales que cubren el material aprendido en la introducción a la biología, en general y química orgánica, bioquímica, y los cursos de física. La nueva prueba acaba con una sección de escritura que no se ha considerado ampliamente.

Los cambios agregarán más de dos horas en una prueba agotadora que en la actualidad lleva cuatro horas y media para completar, dijo el Dr. Kirch durante una conferencia telefónica con periodistas. Para prepararse para ella, los estudiantes que deseen agregarán cursos de introducción a la psicología y la sociología además de los cursos de las ciencias naturales que tradicionalmente han sido considerados.

Los críticos, incluyendo algunos asesores médicos de los estudiantes, han dicho que esta ampliación del ámbito de aplicación de la prueba de que los estudiantes premédicos carga con más requisitos e irá a desalentar a muchos de ellos de la aplicación. Pero el doctor Kirch, dijo, "Lo vemos como darles más libertad" para estudiar lo que realmente interese. Agregó que una de las mejores maneras de prepararse para el nuevo examen es mediante la lectura en sentido amplio.

"Estos cambios deben indicar que alguien que era un estudiante de psicología o de algunos estudios interculturales mayor o un mayor del Inglés tiene tanto potencial para entrar en la escuela de medicina como una persona que se especializó en química," dijo el Dr. Kirch, quien se especializó en filosofía antes de que entró en la escuela de medicina de hace cuatro décadas.

En un momento en que las escuelas de medicina están luchando para atraer a más estudiantes de minorías para satisfacer las necesidades de una población cada vez más multicultural, una prueba más amplia debe ayudar, dijo el Dr. Kirch. Eso, combinado con una mirada más integral a los solicitantes, tanto en entrevistas y cartas de recomendación, debe dar a las escuelas de medicina una mejor idea de que los solicitantes tienen los atributos personales e intelectuales para convertirse en médicos con éxito.

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¿De qué sirve aumentar el acceso si no se reduce la deserción?

Pregunta vital también para el futuro de la educación superior chilena.

Education Department Turns Policy Attention to College Completion

By Eric Kelderman, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2012

Washington

Following a flurry of higher-education policy proposals by President Obama, the U.S. Department of Education on Monday hosted a symposium meant to advance the administration's goal of increasing the nation's number of college graduates.

The president has said that he wants the United States to have the highest rate of college completion in the world by 2020. So far, however, the administration has focused more on getting students into college than on helping them finish their degrees, Education Secretary Arne Duncan said to participants at the symposium.

"To this point, we have been working on access," Mr. Duncan said—for example, by increasing the amount of federal Pell Grants for low-income students. "We have not done enough to incent completion," he said.

The symposium featured presentations on research and best practices on how to better prepare incoming students for the rigor of college courses, and how to better support those students through advising and mentoring as they progress through higher education. A list of attendees included about 60 faculty researchers, administrators, and representatives of companies and nonprofit organizations that are working on improving completion rates.

Stan Jones, president of the nonprofit group Complete College America, said the issue of increasing completion rates was still emerging and that many in higher education were unaware of how low graduation rates are at many institutions. The value of the department's symposium, he said, is the opportunity it provides for groups and institutions to get together and share their experiences with promising new practices.

George D. Kuh, emeritus professor of higher education at Indiana University, said the symposium was a good symbolic gesture to show that the department is putting some thought and effort into fulfilling its completion agenda. But he added that the practices that were discussed were all covered in a symposium that the department hosted in 2006 that attracted more than 500 people.

"The topic that has received the most attention in the higher-education literature for the past 40 years is student persistence," said Mr. Kuh.

What has been lacking, however, is the institutions' commitment to using a variety of common practices to keep college students enrolled and graduating, he said. "Our problem is we don't use very much of what we know works."

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Febrero 17, 2012

La gratuidad de la educación discutida en Colombia

Repensar la gratuidad educativa
Daniel Mera Villamizar, El Espectador, Bogotá, Opinión |14 Feb 2012
¿Cómo se relaciona la reciente gratuidad educativa total con los cambios que necesita el sistema de educación?

Cuatro efectos negativos de la medida: separa aún más socialmente la educación pública de la privada, desfinancia la educación pública, desestimula la corresponsabilidad de los padres de familia y lesiona la autonomía escolar con una centralización presupuestal.

Primero. Si la educación pública es totalmente gratuita se dirigirá a los pobres, pues al extenderse a las clases medias y altas habría gasto regresivo. Se está renunciando al ideal de una educación pública de calidad a donde asistan niños de distintas condiciones socioeconómicas. No es posible generalizar los colegios públicos de buena calidad, con jornada única (y grado 12), sin el concurso financiero de las familias, que fue “prohibido” por el Ministerio de Educación. Así, se está profundizando la fragmentación social de la educación.

Segundo. Sin saber a cuánto asciende el aporte de dinero de las familias, el Ministerio lo está sustituyendo por $288.000 millones adicionales este año. Hablando con rectores de varias regiones, la diferencia puede estimarse —bajito— en $500.000 millones. Una desfinanciación que explica las numerosas denuncias de “trampas” a la gratuidad total. El ministerio cree que con $32.000 más por alumno al año puede tachar todo aporte (hasta “en especie”) de los padres. Que le pregunten al secretario de Educación de Pereira, por ejemplo. Contrario a lo que se necesita, la medida debilita financieramente a las instituciones educativas.

Tercero. En vez de empoderar a los padres (y madres) en el mejoramiento de la institución educativa, los vuelve simples beneficiarios (“exijan, denuncien”). Un poco más de imaginación habría puesto a las juntas de padres de familia a decidir sobre los $288.000 millones, incluyendo avances en gratuidad para las familias sin recursos. El efecto sería una conversación intensa e interesada de la comunidad de padres de familia con las directivas y profesores sobre lo que conviene al colegio y a los hijos, justo lo que hace falta. No esa cultura que privilegia la gratuidad del derecho (así sea deficientemente provisto) sobre la corresponsabilidad (que puede mejorar su realización). Por fortuna, se observa un movimiento de padres de familia dispuestos a aportar voluntariamente a sus colegios.

Cuarto. El Proyecto Educativo Institucional, PEI, ya no podrá contar con recursos propios (salvo los muy modestos de la cafetería y la fotocopiadora). Para muchos gastos, las instituciones quedan supeditadas a los giros de la nación y, si acaso, a algunos aportes de las entidades territoriales. Para el resto, no saben qué hacer. Un verdadero problema. Como los recursos impuestos desde el ministerio no alcanzarán, la autonomía del PEI ya no será lo que se necesita. Adiós a las innovaciones. Para aumentar el acceso y evitar la deserción de los más pobres, no había que decretar la gratuidad total. Si el Gobierno escuda este populismo en los intérpretes oficiales de la Constitución, pues hay que discutir con ellos, a menos que tengamos pereza o derrota.

Elespectador.com| Elespectador.com

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¿Puede el hogar sustituir a la escuela?

Interesante reportaje sobre el tema del home schooling, o educación de los hijos en el hogar, practica que algunos países prohiben (Alemania y España) y otros, como EEUU, aceptan.

La educación en casa aísla y adoctrina

La formación al margen del sistema escolar gana peso en algunos países por razones religiosas y de movilidad laboral. Alemania y España la rechazan por considerarla perjudicial

DAVID ALANDETE, El Pais, 16 FEB 2012 - 00:01 CET178
http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2012/02/15/vidayartes/1329331413_944686.html

En España, el Tribunal Constitucional ilegalizó la práctica de la educación en el hogar en una sentencia de 2010. Dos familias de Málaga habían recurrido a él por su deseo de enseñar en casa a sus tres hijos. Finalmente, la máxima instancia judicial del país falló en su contra, al considerar que el derecho a la educación recae en el menor, y no en los padres. Aun así, numerosos padres siguen luchando hoy día en los tribunales, defendiendo lo que consideran su derecho a educar a los niños en casa, por razones muy variadas, que abarcan desde los motivos religiosos a los casos extremos de acoso en las aulas.

Para esos padres hay dos modelos legislativos, en dos extremos, uno positivo y otro negativo. Estados Unidos es el caso que consideran a seguir. En ese país es completamente legal apartar a los niños de las aulas para educarlos en casa. Las leyes varían en cada uno de los 50 Estados de la Unión. En el otro extremo está Alemania, un país que ha ilegalizado y que persigue activa y agresivamente la educación en el hogar. Ambas naciones entraron hace años en un complejo juego judicial que se saldó en febrero de 2010. Entonces, un juez norteamericano de Tennessee le concedió a la familia alemana Romeike el asilo político, por considerar que los padres, Uwe y Hannelore, habían sido sometidos a persecución en su país natal por querer educar en casa a sus cinco hijos.

El Constitucional falló que el derecho a la educación es del menor
La Administración de Obama apeló aquella decisión y hoy día los juzgados federales aún no se han pronunciado al respecto. Los Romeike siguen viviendo en EE UU. A aquella familia la representó el abogado Michael Donnelly, que trabaja para la asociación Home School Legal Defense Association, de EE UU, y que desde entonces también ha asesorado a varias familias, algunas españolas. Entre ellas se halla la de Mila González y Rodolfo Sala, de Alicante, que en septiembre vieron cómo un juez desestimaba una demanda contra ellos por educar a su hijo en el hogar. Asegura Donnelly que hay varios casos de familias extranjeras que, como los Romeike, han solicitado asilo a EE UU. “Son decenas”, comenta. “El modelo americano es un buen modelo, en el sentido en el que en todos los Estados es legal educar en el hogar y así se respeta un derecho básico”, explica.

“Es cierto que en España hay una sentencia del Constitucional, pero no hay ninguna ley que explícitamente rechace la educación en el hogar”, asegura Donnelly. “Nos gustaría que España cumpla con la legislación internacional, ya que ha suscrito la Convención Europea de los Derechos Humanos y, por ello, debería respetar la libertad de los padres para decidir cómo quieren educar a sus hijos. Esos derechos deberían ser amparados por el Congreso español, que debería ser líder en ese movimiento en Europa”. Y añade: “La Declaración de los Derechos Humanos de la ONU, en su artículo 26, parte tres, asegura que los padres tienen el derecho prioritario para decidir qué educación recibirán sus hijos”.

Es cierto que EE UU es una meca para el movimiento mundial de la educación en el hogar, por su permisividad. Hay allí aproximadamente dos millones de niños y adolescentes, en edad escolar, educados en el hogar por sus progenitores. El último informe del Gobierno habla de 1,5 millones, pero es una cifra que corresponde a 2007 y en el último lustro ha aumentado en, al menos, medio millón, según los analistas. La ley permite a las familias hacerlo, en la mayoría de instancias sin tener que aducir razón alguna para ello. La gran mayoría de los padres lo hace por motivos religiosos, para inculcarles a sus hijos ideas como el creacionismo.

“Los principios morales que les hemos enseñado a nuestros hijos provienen de los testamentos, y los temarios de asignaturas como ciencia, los basamos en la Biblia”, explica Yvonne Bun, de 64 años, que forma en casa a tres de sus cinco hijos y que ahora trabaja en la Asociación de Educadores en el Hogar de Virginia. “Y no solo enseñamos lo que dice la Biblia. Empleamos la Biblia como una base moral, de la que extraemos los principios de la educación, tanto del Viejo como del Nuevo Testamento. Y eso afecta a asignaturas como la ciencia o como la literatura clásica”.

En EE UU, el de los motivos religiosos es el caso más común. Según el estudio de 2007 del Departamento de Educación, mencionado previamente, hay tres razones principales por las que los padres educan a sus hijos en casa. La primera, elegida por el 36% de encuestados, es precisamente “proveerles de instrucción moral o religiosa”. La segunda, por la que opta el 21%, es “preocupación por el entorno escolar”. Y, finalmente, un 17% lo hace por “insatisfacción con la instrucción académica y sus métodos de escolarización”. Normalmente, esos padres son evangélicos, pero también hay baptistas y católicos que no escolarizan a sus Niños.

La escuela ha sido, históricamente, un lugar idóneo para que los niños vivan la diversidad y la tolerancia. Así opina la profesora de derecho de la Universidad George Washington Catherine J. Ross, que se granjeó numerosas críticas del movimiento de educación en el hogar por un artículo publicado en 2010, titulado Desafíos fundamentalistas a los valores fundamentales democráticos: retirada y educación en el hogar. Ross decía en aquel texto que “cuando los hijos de padres que tienen creencias fundamentalistas acuden a la escuela pública, existe la esperanza de que aprendan las normas cívicas que conforman el corazón de la Primera Enmienda [de la Constitución, la que protege la libertad de expresión]”.

“Desgraciadamente, esa es una de las principales razones por las que esos padres les retiran de la escuela. Si los niños escuchan el mensaje de tolerancia en la escuela, pueden estar en desacuerdo con el profesor, pueden tener discusiones sobre ello en la cafetería”, asegura en el artículo. Así se fomenta la independencia de pensamiento y el respeto a la diversidad, “fundamental en democracia”, explica la profesora Ross en una entrevista telefónica. “Lo que les suele molestar a esas personas que defienden la educación en el hogar es que los niños pueden quedar expuestos a ideas nuevas y diferentes”.

En EE UU, se han dado casos extremos de maltrato, propiciados por la incapacidad del Gobierno de supervisar los métodos a los que recurrían los padres en casa. En 1994, el pastor evangélico de Tennessee Michael Pearl, que tiene cinco hijos, publicó un libro titulado Cómo educar a tu hijo, del que salieron 670.000 copias. En él, Pearl aconseja directamente emplear el castigo físico, incluido el azote con fusta, para disciplinar a los pequeños.

Los duros métodos de quienes han seguido las enseñanzas de ese libro han acabado teniendo consecuencias trágicas. En mayo del año pasado murió en el Estado de Washington Hana Williams, de 11 años, y sus padres fueron llevados a juicio por los maltratos infligidos contra ella. La niña fue encontrada en el patio de su casa, desnuda, congelada y desnutrida. Lo mismo sucedió en California en 2010, en el caso de la pequeña Lydia Schwartz, de siete años, a la que sus padres dieron una brutal paliza. Ambos están en prisión por ello.

Las regulaciones gubernamentales em EE UU respecto a este método educativo son muy variadas. Normalmente, los Estados no exigen un temario concreto a los padres. Algunos, como Washington, obligan cada año a los niños a que se sometan a una evaluación con un profesor independiente. Por lo general las regulaciones son muy laxas.

Krista Cole, con una hija autista, optó por esta fórmula para evitar complicaciones
La escolarización en el hogar es, sin embargo, una tendencia creciente en EE UU. Y no solo por la vía religiosa. Hay familias, más minoritarias, que educan a sus hijos en casa porque estos padecen trastornos físicos o psicológicos. Hay quienes lo hacen porque el trabajo de los padres implica constantes mudanzas, como sucede en el Ejército. Otros optan por ello para evitar el acoso escolar, dicen. Esas familias piden que no se las califique como fundamentalistas religiosas. Krista Cole, residente de Virginia de 40 años, asegura que tiene razones de peso. Educa en casa a dos niñas de tres y seis años. La mayor, Ellie, padece síndrome de Asperger, un trastorno autístico. “Educarla en casa me ahorra muchas dificultades. No tengo que estar pendiente de los profesores y terapeutas respecto a su proceso de aprendizaje”, explica. Ellie tiene dificultades para responder a órdenes habladas. “Tenerla en casa, además, significa que no la acosan en clase. Otros padres, en la misma situación, me cuentan que sus niños, de solo siete años, sufren el acoso de los demás por ser distintos. Aquí Ellie está protegida”, añade.

El de la educación en el hogar es un método, además, que requiere que uno de los dos padres se dedique de lleno a los niños. Según un estudio de 2009 del Instituto Nacional para la Investigación de la Educación en el Hogar, lo hacen sobre todo las madres. Un 81% de las mujeres que escolarizan a sus hijos en casa no trabaja fuera del hogar. Ese informe revela además que esas familias son, normalmente, numerosas. Un 68,1% tiene tres o más niños. Y un 91,7% es de Raza blanca.

Para evitar el aislamiento de sus hijos, muchos padres buscan en Internet grupos de familias que también eduquen en casa. Bahar Picariello, residente de Virginia de 29 años, que educa a dos niños en casa, coordina el grupo de las localidades de Sterling y Ashburn, que cuenta con 70 miembros. “Nosotros mismos, como grupo, organizamos encuentros sociales para que los niños se relacionen entre ellos. Los llevamos al parque, u organizamos talleres. No están aislados”, explica.

Internet le sirve a Bahar, también, para encontrar temarios y actividades adecuadas para los niños. “Nos conectamos y compartimos ideas de enseñanza, experiencias y demás consejos”, explica. “Esto no consiste en llevar el sistema escolar a casa. Nos permite ser más flexibles en horarios y en otros asuntos, diseñar las materias de acuerdo con las necesidades de los niños, reforzar sus puntos débiles”.

Algunos de los detractores de ese método suelen criticar, sin embargo, que educar a los niños en casa supone privarlos del contacto diario y en solitario con otros niños, parecidos y diferentes, algo que les puede preparar para la vida de adultos.

Jeanne Faulconer, sin embargo, optó por ese método por sus reiteradas mudanzas. “Es la globalización. Los puestos de trabajo se esfuman del país y las familias tienen que mudarse para mantener sus ingresos”, explica. Su familia se ha mudado seis veces, en localidades de tres Estados. En lugar de pasar por seis escuelas diferentes, decidió tomar las riendas de la educación de los niños. “Mis hijos han sido aplicados y han tenido buenas notas cuando han ido a la universidad”, explica Jeanne. “Y han sido muy responsables en los demás aspectos de su vida. Son valores que les hemos inculcado en casa”.

Shay Seaborne, de 51 años, residente de Woodbridge, en Virginia, admite que formó en casa a sus hijas por un motivo principal: “Evitarles la horrible experiencia que yo tuve en la escuela”. Esta pionera en la educación en el hogar rechaza que todo ese movimiento sea conservador. “En realidad nació como algo progresista, como una tendencia de reformistas que pensaron que el sistema escolar era demasiado rígido. Pero en realidad es un movimiento muy vibrante y diverso”, añade. “Posteriormente, hubo un movimiento conservador, ligado a la intentona de instaurar una teocracia cristiana, que controló el debate. Eso existe, está ahí, pero no era parte de la semilla fundacional del movimiento”.

Las regulaciones

España. La ley establece 10 años de escolaridad obligatoria para todos los alumnos. La Constitución señala que es obligatoria la educación, no la escolarización; los padres que optan por enseñar en casa se aferran a ese punto para exigir que se regule su opción.

Portugal. Se puede educar en casa sometiendo a los hijos a evaluaciones de la Administración a los cuatro, seis y nueve años.

Francia. También esta permitido, pero en este caso la Administración hace controles cada año.
Italia. El que quiera educar a sus hijos en casa debe demostrar que tiene capacidad técnica y económica para ejercer de profesor e informar cada año a las autoridades.

Reino Unido. La ley deja abierta la puerta, pues dice que los padres deben facilitar la educación de sus hijos a tiempo completo en una escuela “o de otra manera".

Recursos asociados
http://www.elpais.com/articulo/espana/Constitucional/excluye/educacion/hijos/domicilio/familiar/escolarizacion/elpepuesp/20101216elpepunac_29/Tes

http://www.hslda.org/

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Convenci%C3%B3n_Europea_de_Derechos_Humanos

http://www.un.org/es/documents/udhr/

http://www.heav.org/

http://www.nheri.org/

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Febrero 16, 2012

¿Poca contribución de la educación superior al desarrollo económico?

Nuevo informe aparecido en los EEUU da cuenta de las preocupaciones del sector de negocios sobre la educación superior en dicho país, sobre todo alto costo de los estudios, falta de pertinencia de los mismos para el mundo productivo contemporáneo y escaso sentido de responsabilidad de las universidades frente a la sociedad (accountability).

Hiring and Higher Education
In new research, U.S.business leaders say higher ed's resistance to change is widening skills gap, putting economic future at risk

Executives Worry that Challenges of Cost, Quality, Accountability Are Holding Higher Ed, America Back
Download the full report (PDF) here:
http://www.publicagenda.org/files/pdf/Hiring_HigherEd.pdf

WASHINGTON, D.C. – In new research from Public Agenda and the Committee for Economic Development (CED), a number of America’s business leaders say that skyrocketing tuition and a growing skills gap could have serious consequences for the nation’s economic future. Corporate executives may consider America’s higher education system the best in the world, but this report suggests that they believe the challenges of cost, quality and accountability present great threats to the nation’s economic prospects.

The report, Hiring and Higher Education, is based on qualitative research by Public Agenda commissioned by CED and adds an important voice to a growing debate about the role and value of America’s higher education system in fueling an economic recovery. In the report, corporate executives speak candidly about the consequences of rising tuition, which they say is putting the squeeze on the middle class. They also express concern that higher education is unable or unwilling to adapt to economic demands and lacks accountability. The result, they say, is a lack of qualified workers for the jobs they have available.

“There are growing and grave concerns about the system’s ability to remain a leader and produce the workforce our future economy demands,” said Steve Farkas, lead author of the Public Agenda report. “Business leaders told us that, if higher education fails to control costs and hold itself accountable for results, our colleges and universities will become less relevant, and our economy will suffer greatly.”

The report is the result of focus groups and interviews with nearly 40 business executives from a variety of large and mid-size companies. This research suggests that business leaders have a common concern about the key challenges facing higher education, and highlights the opportunity – and the economic imperative – for the business community to be more engaged in higher education reform.

Cost

According to the College Board, tuition and fees at public universities have jumped nearly 130 percent in the last two decades. Business leaders interviewed for the report point to costs as one of the most serious weaknesses in higher education. Some are concerned that too many qualified students may be shut out of higher education altogether because of the high costs of tuition and fees. As one business leader put it, “The middle class is not going to be able to afford it. If their parents are really poor they can get a grant. If the parents are very wealthy it’s not a problem. It’s a real struggle for the middle class kids.”

Many of the business leaders interviewed don’t see where higher prices correspond with quality improvement. Also, most say that postsecondary institutions, particularly four-year colleges and universities, are wasteful and inefficient and must learn to do more with less, much like businesses do.

Quality, Workforce Preparation and the Skills Gap

According to the Minneapolis Federal Reserve Bank, unemployment would only be 6.5 percent if the US could better match skills with today’s jobs. This research suggests that business leaders agree, saying there is a disturbing mismatch between what higher education produces and what the economy needs.
Business leaders point to a particular talent shortage in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields. Even with high unemployment, businesses struggle to find qualified candidates to fill available jobs. They worry that nations like India and China are producing more STEM workers while the U.S. produces too few.
“We cannot get qualified people,” said one corporate executive. “An electrician is not somebody you pull off the street. You have to be able to read blueprints. You have to know some trigonometry. There’s a lot of stuff involved in that. We cannot get qualified people so we start 30 kids every year in a four-year [company] program. We’re having to produce our own.”

Accountability
Most business leaders interviewed have a general sense that higher education is a system lacking accountability. "All that we have are third parties that produce ranking and rating systems," said one business leader, "and they're not particularly effective."

Business leaders believe colleges and universities should be held accountable for results, particularly graduating more students on time. In discussions, however, they remained uncertain about how to make meaningful accountability work without inadvertently giving colleges incentives to weaken their standards to easily reach benchmarks. One corporate executive said, “In the area of accountability, I think we need much more creative partnerships between the public and the private sector, and more financial incentives that are real and disincentives that are real to be able to continue to promote quality.”

“Reviving our economy and ensuring a vibrant future for America demand that our business and higher education communities work together,” said Charles Kolb, president of CED. “Our companies and our postsecondary institutions need each other – they are inextricably linked. That’s why America’s business community must play an active and leading role in helping determine what our young people should know and be able to do in today’s workforce and as citizens in our democracy – and then we need to help them get there.”
Download the full report (PDF).

About The Committee For Economic Development (CED)

CED is a non-profit, non-partisan organization of more than 200 business leaders and university presidents. Since 1942, its research and policy programs have addressed many of the nation’s most pressing economic and social issues, including education reform, workforce competitiveness, campaign finance, health care, and global trade and finance. CED promotes policies to produce increased productivity and living standards, greater and more equal opportunity for every citizen, and an improved quality of life for all.

About Public Agenda

Public Agenda is a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that helps communities and the nation solve tough civic problems. It does this by illuminating people's views and values, getting them working together on solutions, and building momentum for change. Public Agenda is fostering progress on a wide variety of critical issues, including K-12 and higher education, climate change and health care. Its goal is to contribute to a democracy in which problem solving triumphs over gridlock and inertia, and where public policy reflects the deliberations and values of the citizenry.

Business Leaders See Higher Education as Hampering Economic Growth
The chronicle of Higher zeducation, February 14, 2012
http://chronicle.com/blogs/ticker/business-leaders-see-higher-education-as-hampering-economic-growth/40520

The rising cost of higher education, its indifferent quality, its resistance to change, and its lack of accountability are endangering the nation’s prospects for future economic growth, according to a report on the views of business executives that was released today by Public Agenda and the Committee for Economic Development. The report, which draws on focus groups last year with 27 executives in Ohio and Texas, and on telephone interviews with 12 others, echoes the concerns that business leaders have expressed in two other recent reports that cover similar terrain: one based on a survey of 500 business leaders released in January and one based on a survey of more than 1,000 employers released in September. In the new report, “Hiring and Higher Education,” the business leaders say colleges’ inability to control their costs, lack of adaptability, and meager accountability have resulted in a dearth of qualified workers for the jobs the leaders need to fill.

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Febrero 15, 2012

R. J. Sternberg al Presidente Obama sobre créditos estudiantiles

A propósito de los anteriores postings sobre las propuestas del Presidente Obama para los créditos estudiantiles en los EEUU, resulta interesante la carta que le dirige el comncoido psicológo R. J. Sternberg.

Dear President Obama …
Indise HigherED, January 30, 2012 - 3:00am
By Robert J. Sternberg, provost, senior vice president, Regents Professor of Psychology and Education, and George Kaiser Family Foundation Chair in Ethical Leadership at Oklahoma State University

Dear President Obama:

Thank you for the interest in, and passion for, higher education you showed in your talk on January 27 at the University of Michigan. Many of us in higher education, and especially in state institutions of higher learning, are excited about the prospect of increased federal funds directed at our enterprise, especially in a time of relative drought for state funding. I would like to express 10 hopes for the new program that perhaps some others share, although of course I only can speak for myself.

Please don’t rush it. Some of us will be afraid of a replay of the scenario that emerged from No Child Left Behind (NCLB). Although the law was well-intentioned, its metrics for progress and implementation were not well-thought through, and have resulted in (a) straitjacketing of public schools in terms of what curriculum they feel they can teach, (b) relegation of important school subjects -- such as history, civics, languages, music and art -- to the back of the back burner, (c) high-stakes tests that were not ready for prime time, (d) gaming the system, with some states actually lowering standards when they discovered that they otherwise could not meet the ever-more-stringent goals the law placed, and (e) demoralization and discouragement among educators regarding the role of the federal government in education. Many, including myself, feel it was an overreach on the part of the federal government, and we seek to prevent the same phenomenon in higher education. Whatever legislation may emerge from your new initiative needs to be much better planned than NCLB was.
Please respect differences in college missions and goals. Although there are commonalities among institutions of higher learning, a wonderful feature of higher education in the United States is its diversity — students can go to a wide variety of institutions to learn different things in different ways. For example, students who engage in a pre-professional major come out of college with a somewhat different kind of knowledge base and set of skills from students who strongly emphasize the liberal arts. I worry that a one-size-fits-all measure of outcome quality will hamper colleges and the students in them from optimally achieving their own individual goals. I especially worry about metrics for progress that will undermine liberal education in this country — the very education that brought you, your wife, and most of the nation’s leaders to where they are today. Many educators hope that the federal government does not intrude upon the diversity in educational experiences that makes our system of education great.
Please understand the limitations of standardized tests. Virtually all of us in higher education believe in accountability, but many of us know that there are no standardized tests out there — at least at this time — that comprehensively measure the outcomes that are important for college learning. Both the Association of American Colleges and University (AAC&U) and the Lumina Foundation have proposed exciting frameworks — Liberal Education for America’s Promise (LEAP) and the Degree Qualification Profile (DQP), respectively -- for capturing many (but not all) aspects of college learning. Standardized tests, however, do not come close to measuring all or even most of them. For example, none of these tests measure the creative, practical, ethical, wisdom-based, and team-based skills that students will need to succeed in the world of work and the broader world of life. I very much hope that any legislation will reflect the limitations of standardized tests and not create a nightmare in which college professors are pressured to teach to some kind of narrowly conceived national test.
Please understand the pressures on college tuition and fees. We in higher education empathize with families who feel that tuitions and fees are climbing at a rate faster than they can afford. My family is one of them, worrying about how we eventually will have the funds to put our 1-year-old triplets through college. But please understand that, at least for state institutions, we have had to raise our tuitions and fees largely because of substantial, and in some states (but not my own State of Oklahoma), draconian cuts in state funding. Private colleges and universities are under pressures of their own. Please ensure that colleges and universities are not penalized for increases in price that reflect our continued commitment to providing quality education at an affordable price. Please keep centrally in view the role our higher education system plays in supporting cutting-edge scholarly activity and research that are fundamental to our world standing. We know we can do better on price and we are trying to control costs and hence tuition, but federal price controls are not the answer to the problem.
Please take into account factors that lead to differential college completion rates. I can understand why any governmental body at any level would be concerned with completion rates. So am I. But at least some of us in higher education wish to make sure that three factors are taken into account in evaluating completion rates. First, some colleges purposely accept students who, for a variety of reasons, are less likely to complete college than are other students who go elsewhere. In elite institutions that accept primarily students at the top of the academic heap who come from relatively affluent families, completion rates are likely to be higher than at open-admission institutions that accept all applicants, many from indigent families. The country needs many different kinds of institutions of higher learning, but their completion rates almost inevitably will be different and for good reasons. Second, I hope, along with my colleagues at the AAC&U, that considerations of completion do not overshadow considerations of quality. Over-focusing on completion can lead one to disregard the important issue of whether the education being completed is of the best quality our institutions of higher learning can provide. Third, please keep in mind that students fail to complete college for varied reasons, only some of which are under the control of the institution.
Please be temperate in focusing on a jobs-based agenda. Certainly one measure of the success of an institution is whether students are employed upon graduation, whether they are employed in their field of study, and what level of income the jobs provide, especially in helping students repay their student loans. But please keep in mind that there are many factors that determine how well an institution will stack up in the jobs competition, some of which are not perfectly correlated with the quality of education they provide. One is the perceived prestige of the institution, independent of the actual quality of education it provides. Another is whether the institution emphasizes pre-professional training — students are more likely to be employed in the field of their major if they are pre-professionally oriented; many students intend careers in areas that welcome and reward broad knowledge and a strong liberal arts foundation, rather than job-specific skills (fields such as communications, public service, and the nation’s many service and innovation-minded industries). A third factor is the part of the country and even a given state in which students study and then seek jobs. The employment situation is better in some locations than in others. Please consider that there is no simple statistic that will indicate how well colleges are doing in achieving appropriate job placement and starting salary. And finally, as you know from your own post-college experience, some students do not seek the highest starting salaries. Teachers in this country, for example, are underpaid (relative to other countries and relative to what I, at least, believe they are worth) and yet they choose a profession knowing they will be underpaid because they want to educate our students. A college should not be penalized for producing more poorly-paid teachers than, say, better-paid engineers.
Please don’t force us into political correctness. Some of us may worry that the grant proposals the government seeks will lead institutions to try to satisfy some governmentally imposed agenda rather than their own. As I said above, institutions have different goals and missions, and it would be unfortunate if they were forced to compromise in their own missions in a search for federal funds. Such enforced conformity would impoverish, not enrich, higher education in our great nation.
Please ensure sufficiency of resources. Some of us worry that either the money the federal government puts into higher education will not be sufficient to make a large difference or that some states, upon receiving grants, will commensurately decrease their own state funding. I suspect many of us hope that any new funds the federal government allocates to higher education will be incremental funds rather than replacement funds.
Please create a sustainable program. If colleges are asked to make substantial commitments to achieve federal funding, I hope that whatever program is created will be sustainable — even after a new president and Congress eventually come into power — so that the effort of the colleges will be worth their while in the long as well as the short term. Sustainability will mean bipartisan support for whatever initiative is eventually passed.
Please ensure whatever program is enacted has self-correcting mechanisms. It is rare that a large new educational initiative is perfect in its original implementation. Who among us can claim quickly to attain perfection in the implementation of any of our strategic plans? If and, more likely, when things begin to go off course, please ensure that mechanisms are in place to ensure that the program can be self-correcting so that it truly accomplishes its goals.

Thank you again for your interest in, and desire to enhance, higher education in our country. We in universities want to do what we can to improve and we welcome assistance.

Sincerely,

Robert J. Sternberg

Bio
Robert J. Sternberg is provost, senior vice president, Regents Professor of Psychology and Education, and George Kaiser Family Foundation Chair in Ethical Leadership at Oklahoma State University. He also is president of the Federation of Associations in the Behavioral and Brain Sciences and Treasurer of the Association of American Colleges and Universities (AAC&U). The views represented in this letter were influenced by conversations at the 2012 Annual Meeting of the AAC&U in Washington. The opinions expressed in the letter, however, are strictly the author’s own personal views and do not represent those of any institution with which he is affiliated.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/30/open-letter-president-obama-his-plans-deal-tuition-increases#ixzz1kxtceEky
Inside Higher Ed

Más sobre el tema de los créditos estudiantiles en los EEUU

'Gainful' Comes to the Nonprofits
Obama higher education plan signals policy shift

By Libby A. Nelson, Inside HigherED, January 30, 2012 - 3:00am

After the applause faded from President Obama’s State of the Union address, a question lingered: Obama told colleges they were "on notice," but what does “on notice” mean, anyway?

Friday provided a few answers.

In a speech at the University of Michigan, the president laid out a plan for higher education that could be a key plank of his re-election campaign this year. Obama proposed using campus-based financial aid programs to reward colleges that keep net price low and punish those that do not. Two new competitions, modeled on the administration’s “Race to the Top” program for elementary and secondary education, would reward states that invest in higher education and colleges and nonprofit groups that improve productivity. A host of new disclosure forms would give students more information on price and financial aid.

On one level, the plan is an election year crowd-pleaser, an appeal to middle-class voters who feel college for their children is increasingly out of reach. But it also signals a shift in the administration’s higher education policy, which until now has focused on reining in for-profit colleges and increasing financial aid for low-income students.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/30/obama-higher-education-plan-signals-policy-shift#ixzz1kxuh2HDz
Inside Higher Ed

The plan calls for linking federal aid not only to net price increases but to whether colleges provide “good value” to students -- a “quality education and training that prepares graduates to obtain employment and repay their loans,” the White House wrote.

If that sounds familiar, it’s for good reason. A similar philosophy guided the Education Department’s controversial and much-protested "gainful employment" rule, which judges the value of for-profit colleges and vocational programs based on on whether they prepare their students for “gainful employment” by looking at student loan repayment rates.

The real message in “on notice”: Increased scrutiny and regulation aren’t just for for-profit colleges anymore.

“They’re sending a strong signal about where the second Obama administration, if we have one, is likely to go,” said Kevin Carey, policy director at Education Sector, a think tank. “They’re not going to just keep putting millions of dollars into the Pell Grant Program and letting the chips fall where they may.”

The president’s higher education plan appears poised to become a major feature of his re-election campaign, alongside support for manufacturing, clean energy and other ideas intended to help shore up the troubled economy.

The plan’s central feature is a change to the campus-based Perkins Loan Program, which provides funds to institutions to lend to their students. The White House has proposed expanding the program to $10 billion per year and revamping the formula for distributing both Perkins loans and Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants. Money would be directed to colleges that do well on three criteria: setting a “responsible tuition policy,” providing “good value” to students, and enrolling and graduating relatively large numbers of low-income students. Colleges that do not meet those standards could see their funding for campus-based programs cut.

The plan also would create a $1 billion “Race to the Top” competition for college affordability and completion. The money would serve as an incentive for states to maintain funding on higher education, the administration said. A second competition, called “First in the World,” would provide up to $55 million for colleges or nonprofit organizations to improve productivity.

“If you can find new ways to bring down the cost of college and make it easier for more students to graduate, we’ll help you do it,” Obama said, referring to the states, in his speech at Michigan.

Many higher education experts and college groups were skeptical of Obama’s plan when it was first proposed, in broad strokes, during the State of the Union address Tuesday night. Reactions from the major higher education associations after his speech Friday were tempered. Most praised the president for his proposals to expand work-study programs and Perkins loans: “If approved by Congress, it would provide an enormous amount of money to help students and families,” Molly Corbett Broad, president of the American Council on Education, said in a statement. “Colleges and universities stand ready to do everything they can to help enhance student access and completion.”

But they also pushed back strongly on additional federal involvement, especially in measuring the value of a college education or trying to force universities to keep prices low: “Colleges, states, and the federal government must work together in a climate of mutual trust and collaboration,” David Warren, president of the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, said in a statement. “The answer is not going to come from more federal controls on colleges or states, or by telling families to judge the value of an education by the amount young graduates earn in the first few years after they graduate.”

(Responses from individual college presidents were less measured. Michael Young, president of the University of Washington, called Obama’s plan “nonsense on stilts” and “political theater of the worst sort,” according to the Associated Press.)

All noted that important questions remained. For public universities, state support is key: so far, it’s unclear how the Race to the Top competition would function, and whether it would be enough of a reward to spur states into increasing support. Tuition increases at public colleges and universities have been driven largely by declining state support, which Obama noted in his speech Friday and many higher education leaders reiterated.

“I think it’ll be very hard to sustain holding tuition to inflation if the states can’t keep their side of the bargain,” M. Peter McPherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, said in an interview. “Affordability for publics is fundamentally a question of state appropriations.”

The Race to the Top for elementary and secondary education required states to make policy changes before they could even be eligible to enter the competition. But whether the competition for higher education will work that way, and what changes might be required, is unclear, said Andrew Kelly, a research fellow in education policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.

“It sounds like what they’re getting at is a maintenance of effort,” Kelly said, referring to requirements to keep funding above certain levels to remain eligible for federal funds. But maintenance of effort requirements, including some related to higher education, have foundered in the past because the amount of federal funding at risk pales in comparison to state budget shortfalls. “What would the prerequisites even look like?” Kelly said. “I don’t think anybody knows.”

Education Department officials said more details will be released with the budget request for fiscal year 2013, which will provide information on how the administration plans to pay for the expanded Perkins loans, the two competitions and other factors of the plan. Obama has called on Congress to act on other parts of his higher education agenda immediately, including stopping the interest rate on subsidized student loans from doubling in July. The Democratic-led Congress cut the interest rate in half in 2007, with the knowledge that it would reset to the higher 6.8 percent rate without action (and available funds) to stop it, as Republican critics of Obama's new plan have been quick to note.

Still, given the Congressional deadlock, it’s unclear whether any part of the plan will face a vote in the near future. And some provisions, especially the proposal to measure the “value” of degree programs, might require additional legislation, Kelly said. The regulation of for-profit colleges hinged on a brief phrase in the Higher Education Act: for-profit colleges, and programs not in the liberal arts, must prepare students for “gainful employment in a recognized occupation.” There is no such basis for regulating traditional degree programs.

In a way, using similar criteria makes sense, Carey said: after all, even students studying art history or philosophy are attending college because they hope to get a job. “The president has kind of taken on the lenders and the for-profits and won significant victories, and he’s now turning his attention to the traditional sector,” Carey said. “They’ve been treating the symptoms of rising college prices, but they haven’t really tackled it as a problem.”

But some critics said that shift in focus takes away from what was seen as the administration’s primary goal: enrolling and graduating more low-income students. Further expansions to the Pell Grant Program would do more to make college accessible, said Sara Goldrick-Rab, an associate professor of higher education policy at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

“I don’t have high hopes for [the new plan] being very effective in helping him achieve what I thought his goal was, which is getting more students from low-income families to be college graduates,” Goldrick-Rab said, describing the plan as “a little all over the place.”

“This is going to cause problems for the institutions that have the least resources to begin with.”

Goldrick-Rab said she saw the plan largely as an election-year attempt to appeal to the middle class. But given the unlikelihood of major change this year -- and the fact that a second Obama term would also include the 2013 scheduled reauthorization of the Higher Education Act, an anticipated vehicle for many of the new policy proposals -- its ramifications are likely to linger long beyond 2012.

“This is setting a new agenda, and I think it’s easy to underestimate that this is an important shift in the dialogue,” Kelly said. The new conversation is about using incentives to force colleges to change, rather than just funding grants for low-income students, he said. “That’s a fundamentally different agenda than we’ve had in the past, even within this administration.”

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/01/30/obama-higher-education-plan-signals-policy-shift#ixzz1kxuZxtaP
Inside Higher Ed

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Febrero 14, 2012

Ponencia sobre aprendizaje a lo largo de la vida (video y PPT disponibles)

Se encuentran disponibles en la Red las presentaciones (pdf) y conferencias video) realizadas durante el II Encuentro Internacional sobre Aprendizaje a lo largo de la Vida organizado por el gobierno del Pais Vasco en Donostia/San Sebastián los dias 7, 8 y 9 de noviembre de 2011.

Disponible en: http://www.boi-alva.org/eng/conferences.html

VÍDEOS
En You Tube ver/escuchar aqui: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL119618A0F5ECE458&feature=plcp

Conferencia de JJ Brunner (cada parte de alrededor de 11 minutos):

Parte 1: http://m.youtube.com/?rdm=4phc78fv7&reload=3#/watch?desktop_uri=/watch?v=5B--Zu4do-U&list=PL119618A0F5ECE458&index=8&feature=plpp_video&index=8&list=PL119618A0F5ECE458&feature=plpp_video&v=5B--Zu4do-U&gl=CL

Parte 2: http://m.youtube.com/?rdm=4phc78fv7&reload=3#/watch?desktop_uri=/watch?v=5B--Zu4do-U&list=PL119618A0F5ECE458&index=8&feature=plpp_video&index=8&list=PL119618A0F5ECE458&feature=plpp_video&v=5B--Zu4do-U&gl=CL

Parte 3: http://m.youtube.com/?rdm=4phc78edl&reload=3#/watch?desktop_uri=/watch?v=X5db2kWUE8U&list=PL119618A0F5ECE458&index=10&feature=plpp_video&index=10&list=PL119618A0F5ECE458&feature=plpp_video&v=X5db2kWUE8U&gl=CL

CONFERENCES
The future of Lifelong Learning in the world from the point of view of UNESCO by Arne Carlsen
How to address from education, Internet, the expansion of knowledge and the acquisition of new skills? By José Joaquín Brunner
The Evolution of Lifelong Learning indicators in Europe by Bryony Hoskins
Presentation of the New Law for Lifelong Learning in Euskadi by Carlos Crespo
Conference by Craig Mahoney
Prospects of Lifelong Learning in Sweden by Margaretta Allen
LLL and the Regions in Europe by Paolo Federighi
Training as a basic tool for employability by Javier Ruiz

CONCLUSIONS

Disponibles en PDF aqui: http://www.boi-alva.org/ponencias/conclusiones_en.pdf

Disponibles como PPT (en PDF): http://www.boi-alva.org/ponencias/conclusions.pdf

Conferencia José Joaquín Brunner. José Joaquín Brunnerren hitzaldia
Publicado el 15/12/2011 por canalhirutube
2º Congreso Internacional de Aprendizaje a lo largo de la vida.
Bizialdi Osoko Ikaskuntzari Buruzko 2. Nazioarteko Biltzarra

Conferencia de José Joaquín Brunner, profesor e investigador de la Universidad Diego Portales en Chile, donde dirige el Centro de Políticas Comparadas de Educación (CPCE) y la Cátedra UNESCO de Políticas Comparadas de Educación superior. "¿Cómo abordar desde la Educación, Internet, la expansión del conocimiento y la adquisición de nuevas competencias?" ha sido el tema elegido para ofrecer la conferencia.

José Joaquín Brunner Txileko Diego Portales Unibertsitateko irakasle eta ikerlariaren hitzaldia. Brunnerrek Hezkuntzako Politika Konparatuen Zentroa eta Goi mailako Hezkuntzako Politika Konparatuen UNESCO katedra zuzentzen ditu eta hitzaldian "Hezkuntzatik nola ekin Internet, ezagutzaren zabalkunde eta konpetenzia berrien eskuratzeari" gaia jorratu du.

http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL119618A0F5ECE458&feature=plcp

Posted by jjbrunner at 08:06 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Febrero 13, 2012

La UCH de cara al futuro

Mensaje entregado por el Rector Victor Pérez en el marco de la Ceremonia Oficial del Aniversario 169 de la Universidad de Chile, el 18 de noviembre de 2011.
http://www.uchile.cl/noticias/76791/discurso-del-rector-victor-perez-vera-en-aniversario-169-de-la-uchile

1.- LA UNIVERSIDAD DE CHILE EN EL AÑO 2011

Chile y la Universidad de Chile hoy están de fiesta. Hace 169 años, en 1842, los órganos del Estado de la naciente República de Chile, instalaron la Universidad de Chile, la primera universidad republicana de la nación. Y, junto con darle como misión tener como norte a Chile y su gente, y ser el lugar donde todas las verdades se juntan, el Estado le entregó al Presidente de la República la calidad de Patrono de la Universidad de Chile, así como para la Real Universidad de San Felipe, su antecesora, el rey de España era su Patrono, del latín pater, patris, patronus, protector, defensor.

En los últimos 169 años de vida republicana, es difícil encontrar un tema, una política pública, una iniciativa de bien social, cultural, artística, económica, científica o tecnológica en la cual la Universidad de Chile no haya estado presente de alguna u otra manera, manteniéndose fiel al mandato misional que recibió, a pesar de todas las dificultades y vicisitudes vividas que, por lo demás, no han sido ajenas a aquellas vividas por la república y por la ciudadanía toda.

Todos los chilenos y chilenas, sobre todo aquellos y aquellas de los sectores más vulnerables de nuestra población, pueden estar orgullosos y esperanzados: su Universidad, la Universidad de Chile, la Universidad de todos los chilenos y chilenas, la universidad estatal, pública y laica por mandato del Estado, sigue siendo la número 1 en el país en calidad.

Gracias al trabajo de nuestros académicos y académicas, y del personal de colaboración, somos la número 1 a nivel nacional, número 10 en Latino América y número 407 a nivel mundial en el ranking SCIMAGO 2011 ( www.scimagoir.com) que considera la productividad y calidad de las investigaciones de 2080 universidades del mundo que en el período de los últimos 5 años hayan publicado al menos 241 trabajos; las siguientes universidades nacionales están en los números (2, 13 y 600), (3, 27 y 891) y (4, 58 y 1632), respectivamente. Somos la número 1 en publicaciones internacionales ISI, 2005-2010: 7.175 (28,4%). La número 1 en publicaciones Scielo 2005-2010: 2.313 (25,7%). La número 1 en cantidad de programas de Doctorado: 36. La número 1 en cantidad de graduados de programas de Doctorado 2006-2009: 424 (34%). La número 1 en cantidad de graduados de programas de Magister 2006-2009: 3.080 (25%). La número 1 en proyectos de investigación Fondecyt Regular 2005-2011: 762 (26,5%). La número 1 en proyectos Fondecyt de postgrado 2011: 29 (32,2%). La número 1 en proyectos de investigación Fondecyt Iniciación 2011: 49 (18,7%). La número 1 en proyectos FONIS (Fondo de Iniciación a la Investigación): 29,7%.  La número 1 como institución principal de Centros de Excelencia: 34 de 87 (39%); de manera desagregada, nuestros académicos y académicas dirigen 5 de los 9 Institutos Milenios (56%); 4 de los 15 Núcleos Milenio en Ciencias (27%); 3 de los 7 Núcleos Milenio en Ciencias Sociales (43%); 4 de los 6 centros de excelencia Fondap que se han concursado en ciencia y tecnología (67%); 6 de los 20 Anillos PBCT en Ciencias (30%); 4 de los 11 Anillos PBCT en Ciencias Sociales (36%); 5 de los 13 Proyectos con Financiamiento Basal Conicyt  (38%); 1 de los 2 Centros de Investigación en Educación (50%); y 2 de los 4 Centros de Equipamiento Mayor (50%). La número 1 en cantidad de académicos y académicas con Premios Nacionales y que están con actividad académica vigente: 32. La número 1 en infraestructura, con 574.172 m2 construidos y con 79.672 m2 en ejecución.

El año 2011 se dio inicio al proyecto Bicentenario Juan Gómez Millas para la Revitalización de la Humanidades, Artes, Ciencias Sociales y de la Comunicación, mediante un Convenio de Desempeño entre el Ministerio de Educación y la Universidad de Chile, durante 5 años, y en que se concordaron las metas y resultados académicos y de infraestructura concretos que se deben cumplir cada año, con los procesos de evaluación correspondientes. En este primer año, además de la instalación del equipo de gestión, ya se  ha contratado 7 nuevos doctores para las Facultades de Ciencias Sociales, Filosofía y Humanidades e ICEI; se ha aprobado la visita de 17 prestigiados profesores extranjeros; y se está apoyando la indexación de 7 revistas de estas áreas (4 en el sistema ISI y 3 en SCIELO. Se está en proceso de adquisición de 1.400 libros. En estos días se está comenzando el proceso de construcción de los tres aularios centrales que contarán con 2.610 puestos de trabajo. El proyecto arquitectónico de la Plataforma Cultural del campus se entregará en enero próximo.

En el ámbito de la Extensión, la Vicerrectoría de Extensión, en conjunto con la Dirección de Comunicaciones, han abierto la Universidad a la ciudadanía en el ámbito de un impacto en la cultura y en el desarrollo del pensamiento crítico: sus Diálogos con el Conocimiento han tocado materias sensibles y fundamentales para la inclusión democrática de las diferencias, destacados y destacadas intelectuales han dialogado con un amplio y a veces masivo publico extendiendo sus saberes disciplinarios a quienes no tienen acceso fácil a los mismos. Del mismo modo, la revitalización de la Revista Anales cumple con esa labor tan cara a nuestra misión como es ser un espacio donde la reflexión se centra en los problemas acuciantes de nuestra sociedad.

Nuestro Museo de Arte Contemporáneo, nuestro Museo de Arte Popular Americano, y nuestro Centro de Extensión Artística y Cultural, CEAC, con la Orquesta Sinfónica de Chile, el Ballet Nacional Chileno, la Camerata Vocal, y el Coro Sinfónico de la Universidad de Chile, constituyen un patrimonio cultural del cual estamos orgullosos.

A la luz del informe de la Contraloría General de la República, estamos constituyendo una comisión de expertos en derecho, telecomunicaciones, finanzas y comunicaciones para estudiar la relación contractual entre la Universidad de Chile y Chilevisión y para elaborar un proyecto que instale en la Universidad de Chile una plataforma de servicios digitales que incluya la televisión digital, como instrumento esencial para nuestro proyecto educacional. Hemos iniciado las acciones destinadas a obtener una señal de prueba de la autoridad para transmisiones de televisión digital terrestre experimentales.

Todo lo que he descrito es el resultado del trabajo comprometido, generoso y de excelencia de todas y todos los integrantes de la comunidad universitaria, del Senado Universitario, del Consejo Universitario, del Consejo de Evaluación, de las Comisiones Superiores y Locales de Evaluación Académica y de Calificación Académica, y de las muchas direcciones, comisiones y comités académicos, docentes, de escuelas, de investigación, de creación, de extensión y en materias administrativas y económicas, y para quienes expreso nuestro reconocimiento y agradecimiento.

2.- INICIATIVAS INSTITUCIONALES

a) EDUCACION

En junio de 2010 esta rectoría se comprometió a impulsar un gran Proyecto Institucional de Educación como respuesta al desafío nacional más importante y urgente de los tiempos actuales: asegurar una educación de calidad para todos los chilenos y chilenas. 

Así, en octubre del mismo año, se convocó a un equipo transversal de académicos, coordinada por la Prorrectora.

El proceso de reflexión y planificación fue apoyado por el proyecto "Bases para el Proyecto Institucional de Educación de la Universidad de Chile"de Mecesup y contó con la participación directa y comprometida de más de 30 académicos y estudiantes de distintos organismos y unidades de la Universidad que participaron en la generación de la propuesta. 

Los horizontes que la Universidad de Chile espera concretar en este campo son ambiciosos.

En el plano de la formación inicial de profesores se trata de potenciar, ampliar, concentrar y en algunos casos, reformular nuestra propuesta formativa. Ello, a través de la formación de educadoras y educadores para el nivel parvulario, y de la formación de profesores de enseñanza básica y de enseñanza media. Se propone ampliar la  formación de profesores de educación media actuales para incluir otras áreas disciplinarias y aumentar la cobertura. Se plantea así la formación de profesores de enseñanza media en tres modalidades: consecutiva post-licenciatura en tres semestres, integrada-concurrente en Ciencias, Artes, y Humanidades (como hoy existe para Física y Matemáticas) en 10 semestres; y  una formación de Doble Grado a la cual podrán acceder los alumnos que cursan otras carreras en la Universidad.

En el ámbito del postgrado, aspiramos a mantener una oferta diversa de magísteres y postítulos y educación contínua, sustentada en las capacidades de investigación existentes y por crear, basada en la multidisciplinariedad y con una fuerte vinculación internacional. Por lo mismo, desarrollaremos un programa de Doctorado en Educación de nivel y calidad internacional.

En el campo de la investigación en educación aspiramos a acelerar la senda iniciada en pos de elevar la contribución de la Universidad de Chile a la producción de conocimiento a nivel internacional y nacional en el área. Ello, a través del fortalecimiento del cuerpo académico, contratando nuevos académicos de jornada completa con grado de doctor, los que deberán ejercer labores constantes de docencia en los programas de formación docente.

b) EQUIDAD

El permanente desafío que tiene la Universidad de Chile como un espacio "público de calidad"[1] que existe como garantía de equidad, transversalidad y cohesión social, ha instalado la necesidad institucional de revisar  las formas concretas en que se manifiesta nuestro compromiso con la equidad y la inclusión antes, durante y después del paso de un estudiante por nuestra Universidad.

Durante el mes de octubre del 2010 se instaló la Comisión de Equidad e Inclusión, coordinada por la Prorrectora, y con participación de académicos, profesionales y estudiantes.

La meta es que de aquí a cinco años, el 20% de los estudiantes que ingresen a la Universidad de Chile lo haga por la vía de cupos supernumerarios o nuevas modalidades de ingreso. Dicha intención también ha sido declarada en nuestro PDI, donde se promueve "...el desarrollo de estrategias de reclutamiento estudiantil que hagan posible la incorporación a la Universidad de los estudiantes más talentosos, independiente de su condición socioeconómica..."

Conscientes de la magnitud y complejidad de los cambios culturales y administrativos que trae consigo la intención de avanzar hacia la equidad y la inclusión en la Universidad de Chile, se realizó durante el año en curso el levantamiento de un diagnóstico de la situación interna de nuestros estudiantes en términos de diversidad y resultados académicos, así como una revisión de experiencias de cambio para incrementar la equidad y la diversidad dentro y fuera de nuestra universidad. Este trabajo dio origen al informe "Hacia una Política de Equidad e Inclusión en la Universidad de Chile", y la recomendación de implementar el Sistema de Ingreso Prioritario de Equidad Educativa.

Entendiendo que en la actualidad la vía de admisión a la educación superior se centra principalmente en el proceso de selección vía PSU, y que este mecanismo desfavorece a los alumnos de colegios vulnerables, el Sistema de Ingreso Prioritario de Equidad Educativa privilegia la condición de vulnerabilidad del establecimiento educacional al cual pertenece el alumno, priorizando el Índice de Vulnerabilidad Escolar (IVE) y la condición socio-económica de éste, a través del quintil al cual pertenece. Además considera criterios de excelencia académica como el desempeño escolar de acuerdo al ranking de egreso y el puntaje PSU (mayor de 600 o 650 puntos según carrera). Estos elementos están destinados a detectar el talento distribuido en todos los sectores de nuestra sociedad, hecho que es profundamente relevante al momento de determinar la calidad del proyecto educativo de nuestra Universidad, el cual se basa en los principios de calidad, equidad y diversidad.  El  Sistema de Ingreso Prioritario se fundamenta en la  exitosa experiencia de tres años de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y está destinado a estudiantes de colegios municipales, que pertenecen a los primeros quintiles de ingreso (1, 2 y 3) y que se destacan por su desempeño académico.

Durante el año 2012 la admisión por esta vía totalizará 131 estudiantes que ingresarán a las carreras de: Administración Pública (10), Antropología (5), Ciencias Veterinarias (10), Derecho (10), Ingeniería Plan Común (20), Ingeniería Comercial (20), Ingeniería de Información y Control de Gestión y Auditoría (10), Periodismo (10), Psicología (26) y Sociología (10).

Agradecemos a las autoridades y los cuerpos académicos relacionados a estas carreras por su importante contribución  a esta iniciativa pionera.

La implementación, el seguimiento y la evaluación de los programas que se desprendan del presente proyecto serán coordinados y facilitados centralmente desde una Oficina de Equidad e Inclusión que  tendrá por objetivo facilitar el desarrollo de estrategias, políticas, programas y procedimientos que le permitan a la Universidad  cumplir con su compromiso con la  equidad y la diversidad en la educación.

3.- EL AÑO DE LA REFORMA DEL SISTEMA DE EDUCACIÓN SUPERIOR

Cuando la autoridad dijo a principios de este año, con altiva confianza, que este iba a ser el año de la educación superior, no se figuraba lo exacto que sería su pronóstico ni tampoco se imaginó hasta qué punto se probaría su verdad. Porque este ha sido y sigue siendo efectivamente el año de la educación superior, el año en que los problemas, conflictos y desregulaciones en que se desenvuelve han quedado a la vista de todos.

Más aún: este ha sido y es el año de la educación en todos sus niveles, porque no solo se han evidenciado los problemas de la educación superior, sino que han vuelto a emerger las gravísimas falencias de la educación municipalizada y de la educación técnico-profesional, todo un cúmulo de deudas que el país tiene contraídas consigo mismo. Porque junto con evidenciarse los problemas y las falencias, también se ha instalado en la conciencia ciudadana la centralidad estratégica que tiene la educación para el futuro de la nación. Y una cosa más, la más importante, la decisiva: se ha puesto en la agenda de discusión la centralidad de la educación pública.

Y resulta que la educación es la pieza clave en el fortalecimiento de la democracia. Esta es una de las lecciones fundamentales de este año agitado.

La reivindicación del derecho a la educación como un derecho fundamental e irrestricto, es decir, no sujeto a limitaciones y condicionamientos arbitrarios o discriminadores, no es la demanda por un derecho meramente individual, es la reivindicación de un derecho social: la masividad de las manifestaciones callejeras a que el país ha asistido durante los últimos seis meses es precisamente la expresión del carácter social y colectivo de esa reivindicación. Por eso mismo, es una demanda que apunta al centro de las deudas históricas del país, no porque las agrupe a todas, que son tantas y tan graves, sino porque la acogida que se le dé a esa demanda, la respuesta positiva e integral que se le dé a esa demanda es de manera inmediata construcción de futuro.

Pero esto supone dejar en claro qué tipo de educación es enteramente compatible con la plena vigencia del derecho social a la educación. Porque no es de cualquier índole o carácter: solo la educación pública puede satisfacer adecuadamente la exigencia que se expresa en ese derecho. Solo ella, porque solo ella está exenta de las restricciones o sesgos que tienden a limitar el ejercicio de ese derecho o que de hecho lo hacen; hablo de restricciones o sesgos económicos, sociales, ideológicos. Por eso, es imperativa la recuperación de la educación pública, el decidido respaldo del Estado a sus instituciones educativas, el compromiso recíproco entre el Estado y estas instituciones, precisamente, en cuanto a construir futuro para un Chile plenamente democrático e inclusivo.

Un Chile democrático e inclusivo supone una educación democrática e inclusiva, que no se limite a preparar capital humano para el mercado del trabajo, sino que despierte en las personas el sentido de su propia dignidad y la conciencia de sus derechos y que les entregue las herramientas para hacerlos valer en un contexto de solidaridad social. La desigualdad en la distribución de la riqueza forma una ecuación con la desigualdad en la distribución del conocimiento y en el desarrollo de las capacidades que deben irle aparejadas. Todo educador lo sabe: una genuina educación da autonomía. Esa es la vocación esencial de la educación pública.

4.- HACIA UN NUEVO SISTEMA CHILENO DE UNIVERSIDADES PÚBLICAS

La celebración del aniversario 169 de nuestra universidad, la más antigua del país, la hacemos en esta hermosa Sala de la Facultad de Economía y Negocios, y no en el Salón de Honor de nuestra Casa Central, y eso es un dolor para mí en mi calidad de Rector de la Universidad de Chile, y estoy seguro de que es también una herida para nuestra comunidad. La solemnidad y la dignidad institucionales son parte integral de nuestra historia, de nuestra identidad.

Y es verdad, hemos visto y ha visto el país cómo se han alterado los calendarios docentes. Nos ha tocado vivir una larga suspensión de actividades. Nuestros recintos han sido ocupados, a veces de manera amistosa, a veces no tanto. Se le ha faltado el respeto a nuestros símbolos institucionales. Nuestros recintos han sido invadidos por diversos contingentes. Hemos vivido esto intensamente no sólo en la Universidad de Chile, sino en todas las universidades públicas del país, también en casi todas las universidades del Consejo de Rectores, en algunas otras, en los liceos, y en general en toda la educación pública chilena.

Todos estos meses de agitación política y movimientos sociales hemos vivido en el desgarro espiritual, y por eso hemos llamado reiteradamente a nuestros estudiantes a compatibilizar su movilización con su obligación de mantener sus actividades académicas.

¿Acaso el bullicio de la consigna no ahoga nuestro sagrado deber? Claro que sí. Lo afirmo sin dudar. Los medios del espíritu han de ser tan puros como el alma que los alienta y guía.

Los lienzos que lo cubren todo, incluso la histórica arquitectura de nuestra Casa Central, no dañan nuestra calmada estética? Tampoco lo dudo y señalo mi dolor por no habérsenos devuelto; abusando de nuestro rechazo a usar la fuerza física, que aunque legítima, siempre es dolorosa y de nociva huella, especialmente en la casa del espíritu.

¿Qué hacen esos rayados en los muros que albergan las obras de Rebeca Matte, bisnieta de don Andrés Bello, o de Camilo Mori, quien entró en nuestra Escuela de Bellas Artes, bajo la dirección de pintores como Juan Francisco González y Alberto Valenzuela Llanos? No debieran estar ahí.

¿Qué quiere ocultar a los ojos de don Andrés Bello la venda ("media") que cubre su rostro? ¿No vio acaso nuestro primer rector también revoluciones en Venezuela, violencia y experimentó el exilio en sus hijos? Nada hay que debamos ocultarle. Ni siquiera cuando no estamos a las alturas de su deber.

Con todo y a pesar de los inconvenientes sufridos, y como máxima autoridad de la Universidad de Chile, no puedo sino saludar con emoción la actitud valiente, generosa y luchadora de nuestros estudiantes. Los estudiantes han demostrado nuevamente que son la sal de la vida, el fermento vivo y el motor de la universidad pública. Ellos han logrado quitar la venda negra y mercantil que tapaba la vista de las autoridades y de gran parte de nuestros conciudadanos, y han dicho con fuerza: no al lucro, no al dinero público para negocios privados, no al abandono del estado a sus universidades, no más deudas humillantes, no más inequidad, no a la educación entendida como un negocio. La tremenda y sostenida convocatoria lograda por los estudiantes en los temas de la educación pública, el apoyo masivo de la ciudadanía a las universidades del estado, abre una brecha de esperanza después de décadas de políticas absurdas y dañinas. El país, finalmente, se ha sensibilizado.

Estamos entrando en una era de rectificación. Se abren por fin las puertas de la sensatez y de los debidos equilibrios.

El movimiento estudiantil ha logrado instalar en la calle, con su lenguaje y sus acciones, lo que de modo más académico hemos venido diciendo desde las universidades públicas desde hace mucho tiempo, año tras año, en discursos oficiales, en seminarios, intervenciones, entrevistas, publicaciones, estudios y documentos: ningún país puede desarrollarse armoniosamente sin un sistema potente de universidades públicas. Las universidades públicas constituyen la herramienta más eficiente para que el conocimiento se genere, se conserve y se transmita en toda su complejidad, en condiciones de equidad y de calidad, al servicio de las personas.

La falsa idea de que es posible sustituir el sistema público y estatal de universidades por un menú de opciones privatizadas se instaló durante demasiado tiempo en Chile sin contrapesos. Era como una verdad única. Desde la dictadura, también en la democracia que hemos tenido después de ella, los sucesivos gobiernos, todos ellos, le dieron la espalda a las universidades estatales, considerándolas despectivamente una cosa del pasado, una carga no rentable, una molestia. Hemos representado mil veces lo absurdo que es para el estado ser dueño de un sistema al que sólo le aporta el 10% de su financiamiento, en circunstancias de que en cualquier país desarrollado éste va desde el 50% hasta el 90%. Se nos ha atacado porque hablamos de dinero. Un dinero, el público, que quienes nos atacan están empeñados en que vaya a subvencionar establecimientos de enseñanza superior que, aunque se les denomine universidades, son en verdad negocios inmobiliarios o similares, centros de irradiación ideológica, y otros empeños quizá legítimos y respetables pero que es una vergüenza que se hagan pasar por lo que no son sólo para captar recursos.

Una universidad es una cosa seria, y cuando se hace de buena manera, con la calidades debidas, participativamente, con las inversiones a largo plazo que se requieren, con una sostenida continuidad entre los respetos históricos, la mirada de contexto y la visión de futuro, entonces vemos que se trata de un empeño muy costoso, cuya rentabilidad es de orden cultural, social, valórica.

Debemos caminar hacia un nuevo sistema chileno de educación superior pública, el cual debe gozar de la debida consideración y de los debidos recursos. Su  misión es otra que la de los privados, sus rasgos son distintos, su modo de funcionamiento es específico. Renunciar a las universidades públicas significa para cualquier sociedad privarse de un espacio irreemplazable para el desarrollo cultural, económico y social.

El estado tiene hoy la posibilidad y el deber de garantizar la gratuidad de la educación superior a un porcentaje muy amplio de la población. Los recursos existen.

Pero ese esfuerzo no tiene sentido si no se acompaña de un esfuerzo decisivo para robustecer a los planteles estatales y públicos. No se trata, otra vez, de seguir subvencionando a establecimientos que ni ofrecen las debidas calidades académicas, ni tampoco están en condiciones de garantizar la carrera académica, la libertad de cátedra y de investigación o creación, el pluralismo, la equidad, la no discriminación, la complejidad del saber.

Mayores aportes del estado nos obligarán a mostrarle al país desempeños de alta calidad. Y ello debe ocurrir no sólo respecto de los indicadores orientados al mercado que manejan las privadas, sino también en el cumplimiento de los valores que las definen, como el pluralismo, la equidad, el gobierno participativo, la responsabilidad en el uso de los recursos, o la complejidad del saber. Es lo que ha ocurrido en muchos países desarrollados. A mayor compromiso del estado, mayor compromiso de las universidades por mantener su identidad y servir al país ofreciendo una gestión eficiente y transparente enmarcada en sus principios orientadores.

Por último, es preciso despedirse de la idea de que las reformas que vienen significan volver al pasado. Nuestro compromiso es con el futuro, y como hicieron nuestros fundadores, con una adecuada lectura de lo que viene.  

5.- EN LO QUE ESTAMOS HOY

Estimados amigas y amigos, quiero compartir con ustedes algunas reflexiones en torno a lo que estamos hoy.

Estos últimos meses han sido intensos para miles de chilenos y chilenas, algunos de los cuales se han visto sorprendidos por las demandas de académicos, investigadores, funcionarios y estudiantes, donde nuestra Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile ha tenido un gran liderazgo, que han planteado con mucha fuerza y coraje la necesidad de hacer reformas profundas al modelo de educación superior de nuestro país.

Cualquier observador desapasionado tendrá que reconocer que estas demandas no son nuevas y han sido permanentemente olvidadas por la clase política. Desde que asumí la Rectoría hemos venido planteando en forma consistente y permanente la urgencia de un nuevo trato entre el Estado y sus universidades, debido a que el sistema actual no es sostenible y causa un grave perjuicio especialmente a la Universidad de Chile, a sus estudiantes y al país. Para el aniversario 166 de la Universidad de Chile, en noviembre de 2008, propuse públicamente las bases para un Nuevo Trato entre el Estado y sus universidades, con los deberes y derechos de ambas partes, fundamentado en lo esencial que es para el país la preservación de la educación superior pública de calidad y equitativa, y del rol que en ello tienen las universidades públicas, o sea, de las universidades estatales, y en particular la Universidad de Chile. Argumenté que el país no tenía un modelo sustentable de universidades públicas, y reclamé al Estado que financiara, al menos, el 50% de sus presupuestos, con Aportes Basales, diferentes al Aporte Fiscal Directo que va a las universidades estatales y privadas del Consejo de Rectores.

El 23 de junio de 2010, al asumir esta segunda rectoría, expresé con respeto y franqueza mi reclamo porque el país fue informado por la prensa acerca de las medidas que el Ministerio de Educación tomaría para reformar el sistema de educación superior, las cuales, a nuestro juicio, eran inconsultas, decididas entre cuatro paredes y afectaban gravemente a las universidades estatales, y a la Universidad de Chile en particular.

A fines de 2010 las autoridades del Ministerio de Educación dijeron que el 2011 sería el año de la reforma del sistema de educación superior. A partir de ahí, solicitamos reiteradamente al entonces ministro de Educación abordar la reforma a la educación superior planteada por el gobierno.

Lamentablemente no se aceptó nuestra solicitud, y las reuniones sobre este tema comenzaron, por decisión ministerial, después del 21 de mayo de este año, específicamente el 26 de mayo, en que se nos entregó una Agenda de Educación Superior del Mineduc de 12 puntos. Como respuesta y con el objetivo de seguir trabajando, el Comité Ejecutivo del Consejo de Rectores elaboró una Minuta, la que se entregó al entonces Ministro de Educación, y que el día 7 de junio pasado también se presentó a la Comisión de Educación, Cultura, Ciencias y Tecnología del Senado de la República. En dicha Minuta, el Comité Ejecutivo del Cruch dijo que, en su opinión, los 12 puntos de la agenda del Mineduc, si bien apuntan a situaciones específicas necesarias de ser resueltas, no explicitaban la mirada de mediano y largo plazo que se quiere que tenga la política pública en el sistema de educación superior en relación al desarrollo humano, social, cultural, educacional, humanístico, económico, científico y tecnológico del país; ni el hilo conductor correspondiente.

Además, nuestra Minuta de comienzos de junio pasado hacía planteamientos, los que desde entonces hemos venido reiterando de manera consistente.

1.- Educación Superior: Debe ser una Política de Estado, abordada con visión de largo plazo, y definida con la participación de actores relevantes, avanzando sobre grandes acuerdos y con sentido de urgencia.

2.- Sistema Universitario: Debe ser reconocido por el Estado como contribuyente fundamental para el desarrollo social, cultural, educacional, humanístico, económico, científico y tecnológico del país.

3.- Universidades pertenecientes al CRUCH: universidades tradicionales, con vocación pública, que han sido, son y serán fundamentales para el desarrollo universitario del país, lo que requiere asegurar por parte del Estado un AFD que les asegure su sustentabilidad y desarrollo en el tiempo.

Las universidades regionales deben ser apoyadas para constituirse efectivamente en polos educacionales de desarrollo regional. Aumento significativo del AFD, al menos un 20%, con el establecimiento de fondos de revitalización.

4.- Universidades Estatales: Deben constituir Responsabilidad y Atención Preferente del Estado para garantizar la provisión de bienes públicos en ambientes públicos, por lo que requieren un Aporte Basal del Estado, complementario al AFD, y un Nuevo Trato. Que estos aportes basales, en conjunto con el AFD, hagan llegar el aporte directo del Estado a lo menos al 50% de los actuales presupuestos de las universidades estatales, en un lapso de 10 años, definiendo rendición de cuentas

5.- Universidades privadas nuevas: se han establecido según la ley de 1981, la que no les otorga aportes basales del Estado y les prohíbe tener fines de lucro.

6.- El Estado tiene que aumentar significativamente el monto del financiamiento estatal al sistema de educación terciario (IES y estudiantes) de modo de llevar, en un período de 10 años, el actual 0,3% del PIB al promedio de la OECD (1,3%).

7.- El Estado debe aumentar sus aportes al sistema de Ciencia, Tecnología e Innovación del país según los estándares de la OECD, apoyando con fondos significativos y competitivos para que algunas universidades de investigación alcancen nivel internacional, contribuyendo a mejorar los estándares del resto del sistema.

8.- Todas las Instituciones de Educación Superior que reciban recursos fiscales deben cumplir con condiciones de elegibilidad, de transparencia, con control de la CGR de todos los recursos fiscales que se entreguen a las IES y cumplimiento con la ley que establece que las universidades son corporaciones sin fines de lucro.

9.- En pro de la transparencia, se debe legislar para regular el lobby en Chile.

10.- El Ministro de Educación y los rectores del Consejo de Rectores deben conformar una Mesa de Trabajo para concordar los conceptos generales y fundamentales de los temas centrales a trabajar en la Reforma al Sistema de Educación Superior, el tipo de resultados buscados, el cronograma y la forma de asegurar la visión, orden, coherencia y consistencia del trabajo de las diferentes Mesas Temáticas que se instalen y de los instrumentos que en tales Mesas se acuerden.

11.- Las medidas a poner en práctica para reformar el Sistema de Educación Superior deberán estar definidas por la mesa Ministro-Rectores, a más tardar, en el mes de septiembre 2011, no obstante que la implementación de algunas de ellas se realice más adelante.  Algunas de estas medidas debieran verse reflejadas en el presupuesto de la nación 2012.

12.- Creación de una Superintendencia de Educación Superior y de la Subsecretaría de Educación Superior, Ciencia y Tecnología.

13.- La Contraloría General de la República debería estar encargada de la fiscalización del uso y manejo de todos los recursos públicos que reciben las universidades y demás Instituciones de Educación Superior.

14.- Financiamiento estudiantil: a) Ley de Reprogramación Deudores Morosos del FSC. b) Aumento del número, tipo y monto de las becas y ayudas estudiantiles de estudio, alimentación y de mantención, para asegurar equidad e igualdad de oportunidades para el acceso, la permanencia y el egreso de los estudiantes vulnerables y de clase media. c) Arancel de Referencia: definir conceptos, forma de cálculo, financiamiento de brechas respecto al arancel real, y aumentar su monto. d) Establecer mecanismos para disminuir fuertemente el costo del CAE, con elegibilidad de las instituciones más allá de la acreditación. e) Reemplazar el uso de quintiles por deciles, para efectos de asignar las becas y ayudas económicas para los estudiantes, de modo de no perjudicar a las familias de clase media.

15.- Otros temas en Enseñanza Técnico-Profesional, Ciencia y Tecnología, Innovación, Capital Humano Avanzado, Convenios de Desempeño, Aseguramiento de Calidad y Acreditación, Sistema de Admisión, Formación de Profesores.

Posteriormente, y con fecha 15 de julio de 2011, el Comité Ejecutivo del Cruch, en respuesta a una propuesta de Minuta de Acuerdo que nos hizo llegar la Confech, propusimos suscribir un Minuta con 18 puntos convergentes entre el Consejo de Rectores y la Confech. En esa Minuta, se reconoce y valora el aporte del movimiento estudiantil al debate que el país necesita sobre el destino y sustentabilidad de su educación superior. Además, se reitera la necesidad de aumentar significativamente el AFD para el Cruch, la entrega de aportes basales para las universidades estatales, la reestructuración integral del sistema de becas y ayudas estudiantiles en sus montos, cobertura y condiciones de postulación para terminar con el insostenible endeudamiento de las familias, avanzando en la gratuidad a los 7 primeros deciles, entre otro temas como democratización y acceso e inclusión. Tal Minuta no fue firmada por la Confech pues no compartieron el punto 17, que consideraba la compatibilización de la movilización activa con el restablecimiento de las actividades, ya que lo consideraron que significaba la desmovilización del movimiento, lo que no era la intención de los rectores ni se desprende del texto propuesto.

Si se lee nuestro discurso sobre el Nuevo Trato del 18 de noviembre 2008, el discurso del 23 de junio de 2010 sobre la anunciada reforma al sistema de educación superior del Minedu, ambos en la Casa Central de la Universidad de Chile, y la Minuta al Mineduc y a la Comisión de Educación del Senado de la República, del 7 de junio pasado, y la Minuta del 15 de julio pasado con los 18 puntos convergentes a la Confech, ambos del Comité Ejecutivo del Cruch, y los diversos planteamientos que he hecho en los medios, se puede observar con claridad que son los mismos planteamientos de bien público que hemos venido haciendo por años y que ahora he llevado hasta el Congreso Nacional, sitio escogido públicamente por las autoridades para resolver el debate y donde también hemos debido conversar sobre el presupuesto 2012 enviado y que es muy perjudicial para nosotros.

Por lo mismo, es injusto e inaceptable que algunos sectores pretendan traspasar sus responsabilidades a las autoridades, académicos o dirigentes estudiantiles de la Universidad de Chile, quienes hemos actuado con gran responsabilidad y consistencia en la defensa de nuestra Universidad, del sistema de educación superior pública y de la docencia e investigación de excelencia que realizamos. Han sido otros los actores que no han sabido conducir y dar gobernabilidad a la reforma de la educación superior, demorando largamente soluciones que son de pleno sentido común.

En este contexto, basta recordar cómo hasta hace semanas atrás se cuestionaban o criticaban planteamientos nuestros que hoy son aceptados por todos, como las becas para la educación gratuita para los más pobres y la clase media, la Superintendencia de Educación Superior, los aportes basales a las universidades estatales.

Entendiendo que una reforma al sistema de educación superior y, dentro de ella, el Nuevo Trato entre el Estado y sus universidades, tienen que ser políticas de Estado que tomarán su tiempo, también debiese ser entendido que como resultado de todo el proceso de movilización que hemos vivido este año en todas nuestras comunidades universitarias, especialmente nuestros estudiantes, desde ahora deben ir delineándose y avanzando en ellas a través de acciones específicas que muestren la voluntad política de los diferentes actores políticos y sociales para hacer efectiva esta reforma. En esta línea de pensamiento, el debate y la posterior decisión que se tome en torno al Presupuesto de la Nación 2012, debe incorporar medidas concretas que reflejen esa voluntad política y que empiecen a hacerse cargo, aunque sea de manera gradual, de las demandas que han planteado nuestras comunidades universitarias y la ciudadanía.

De manera consiste con lo que hemos venido planteando desde el inicio de este movimiento, reitero mi llamado a que en el Presupuesto 2012 escuche a la gente que quiere una educación superior pública de calidad y equitativa para todos y que se avance, al menos, en los siguientes 10 ejes:

1.- Gratuidad efectiva, a través de becas, a los y las estudiantes de los 7 primeros deciles de ingresos. Esta modalidad permite que estos estudiantes no tengan que pagar nada y que las universidades estatales puedan aumentar responsablemente el número de sus estudiantes y crear nuevas carreras, algo que el país espera, sabiendo que tendrán el financiamiento correspondiente.

Recordemos que la crisis financiera europea está significando recortes de hasta un 30% a los aportes a las universidades estatales, las que deben seguir atendiendo a sus estudiantes.

2.- Aumentar, entre un 20% y 25%, los actuales aranceles de referencia, de modo de acercarlos a los aranceles reales, y así evitar las actuales brechas entre los aranceles de referencia y los aranceles reales. En nuestro caso y con cargo a nuestros recursos, la Beca Equidad Universidad de Chile cubre la diferencia entre estos aranceles para los y las estudiantes provenientes de los dos primeros quintiles de ingreso  más vulnerables, con lo que 5.000 de nuestros estudiantes estudian gratis. A partir de esos montos, los aranceles y, por ende las becas correspondientes, debieran aumentar sólo según un indicador conocido, como el Índice de Reajustes del Sector Público (IRSP).

3.- Aumentar el número y monto de las becas y ayudas estudiantiles de alimentación y mantención, de modo de permitir que los y las estudiantes puedan mantenerse efectivamente durante los 30 días del mes, y durante los 10 u 11 meses de sus estudios.

4.- Aumentar, entre un 20% y 25 % el Aporte Fiscal Directo de las universidades del Consejo de Rectores, con un programa de aumentos reales en el tiempo, de modo de asegurar su sustentabilidad y su quehacer universitario en niveles de calidad. Entre 1981 y 2010, el AFD en las universidades estatales ha disminuido desde $ 2,4 millones por alumno a $ 500 mil por alumno, monede 2010.

5.- Poner en práctica el Nuevo Trato del Estado con sus universidades estatales, anunciado por S.E. el Presidente de la República en su discurso por cadena nacional el pasado 5 de julio, instalando una Glosa en el Presupuesto 2012 para asignarles un Aporte Basal, equivalente al 20% o 25% de su Aporte fiscal Directo, con un programa de aumentos reales en el tiempo, de modo de establecer un modelo sustentable de universidades estatales de calidad y equidad y terminar así con la creciente privatización de su quehacer académico. En un plazo razonable, la suma del AFD más el Aporte Basal, debería representar al menos el 50% de los presupuestos de las universidades estatales, con la debida rendición de cuentas.

6.- Todos los fondos tipo MECE, Innovación, Apoyo Regional, y otros, y que estén orientados al fortalecimiento de las instituciones, deben estar  dirigidas a las universidades tradicionales, con quienes el Estado tiene una relación de apoyo directo o indirecto por años y que representan un patrimonio para el país. El desarrollo y mejoramiento de la gestión de las universidades privadas nuevas debe ser responsabilidad de sus propietarios.

No hay que olvidar que la ley de 1981, que permitió la incorporación de privados al sistema de educación superior, en instituciones sin fines de lucro, tenía, entre otros, el propósito de incorporar capitales privados al sistema de educación superior, y aparece como un contrasentido que ellas pretendan ahora que el Estado financie su desarrollo.

7.- Aumentar los fondos concursables en Ciencias y Tecnología, así como el número y monto de las becas para estudios de Magister y Doctorado. Al tiempo que aumentar los overheads en los proyectos de investigación concursables y competitivos, de modo de llevarlos en los próximos 3 - 5 años a porcentajes similares con los países desarrollados, entre 35% y 45%, muy superiores al 17% y menos que tienen hoy. Ello permitirá hacerse cargo de los costos reales que tiene la investigación y terminar con los eventuales subsidios cruzados que hoy existe entre docencia e investigación. Incorporar un fondo para fortalecer áreas institucionales que tienen un quehacer universitario de estándares internacionales, de modo que ellas pasen a "otro estadio" y "arrastren" al resto del sistema de educación superior.

8.- Las instituciones de educación superior que reciban, directa o indirectamente, recursos públicos, deben cumplir con criterios de elegibilidad previamente establecidos, entre las cuales debe contemplarse el que sean efectivamente corporaciones sin fines de lucro, que existan instancias de participación de las comunidades universitarias, rendición de cuentas públicas y entrega de información al Sistema de Información de Educación Superior, SIES.

9.- El manejo y uso de todos los recursos públicos, directos e indirectos, que reciban las instituciones de educación superior deben tener el mismo tipo de control público: Contraloría General de la República y Portal Chile Compras. De igual modo, y por tratarse en la práctica de un sector en que existe una fuerte competencia, todas las instituciones de E.S. tienen que  cumplir con las mismas normas de transparencia y de entrega de información pública; es inaceptable que estas normas sólo se exijan a las universidades estatales; también deben ser exigidas a las instituciones privadas, por cuanto hay recursos públicos de por medio. 

10.- Ley para regular el lobby.

Sí debo confesarles que me he preguntado muchas veces por qué se ha demorado tanto la solución a este conflicto, asumiendo que ha sido tan costoso para las autoridades, para las universidades públicas, para los estudiantes y para nuestra convivencia social.

¿O acaso no es de sentido común pedir que el Estado financie la construcción de laboratorios de investigación de universidades estatales o las becas de los estudiantes de menos recursos que tienen buenos puntajes?

¿No es de sentido común que todas las universidades cumplan la ley vigente y sus programas de estudio sean acreditados para asegurar su calidad? 

¿Tampoco es de sentido común pedir una ley para regular el lobby oscuro que se hace de espaldas a la ciudadanía y que beneficia a unos pocos y perjudica nuestra convivencia democrática? El silencio de las autoridades respecto de este tema oscurece cada vez más el asunto.

La verdad es que es muy contradictorio estar celebrando los 169 años de la Universidad de Chile como el principal actor social y cultural del Estado de Chile para mejorar la docencia e investigación en función de las políticas públicas, y constatar lo que ha sucedido en los últimos meses, donde hemos sido víctimas de parte de algunos sectores relevantes de críticas injustas, de intentos de marginación y de un permanente tono despectivo.

Esta contradicción se plantea porque mientras la realidad confirma que la Universidad de Chile es por lejos la número 1 del país en docencia, investigación e incorporación de estudiantes de menores ingresos con mejores puntajes, el gobierno pretende darnos menos del 10% de nuestro presupuesto 2012, con lo que el 90% restante dependerá de concursos y postulaciones.

El sentido común y la razón, recursos muy propios de nuestras aulas universitarias, dicen que el Estado de Chile debiera potenciar a su principal universidad estatal para sus políticas públicas y para que nuestro país alcance mayores logros en docencia e investigación, como lo están haciendo muchos países del mundo, basta observar detenidamente la experiencia reciente de Brasil. 

¿Por qué no se hace esto mismo en Chile? Quizás porque aquí vivimos una época de hipocresía total, donde dentro y fuera de los hogares, de las empresas y de los edificios públicos se habla mucho de educación. Algunos incluso prometen y prometen... Pero en verdad la agenda pública habla principalmente de una educación azucarada, maquillada, que en verdad es muy brutal porque frustrará los sueños de miles de chilenos, al ser una educación de retail, de pizarrón, sin investigación, sin inserción internacional, sin política pública...

Es decir, la agenda pública habla en el fondo de una educación de baja calidad pero de alta rentabilidad, que aumenta sus ganancias gracias a que recibe dineros públicos. Y eso puede ser un muy buen negocio para los controladores chilenos e internacionales de esas universidades, pero una pésima inversión para Chile, su desarrollo y su independencia científica y cultural.

Y quizás también porque hay algunos sectores que no nos quieren, que no sienten afecto por la Universidad de Chile, imagino que basados en la sensación de que aquí hay un referente público no vinculado a sectores particulares y fuente de un pensamiento crítico.

¿No hay hipocresía cuando se defiende con tanta pasión la inversión de miles de millones en la estatal Codelco para comprar un nuevo yacimiento y se critica la inversión de unos pocos pesos en la Universidad de Chile para desarrollar docencia e investigación?

¿No hay hipocresía cuando se habla de transparencia pero se permite que opere un lobby oscuro o que las universidades privadas no deban entregar balances o ser fiscalizadas por la Contraloría General de la República o cumplir con las mismas normas de transparencia e información pública que se pide a las universidades estatales, pese a recibir recursos públicos? Quiero reafirmar nuevamente que la Universidad de Chile está totalmente unida y comprometida en la defensa de la educación superior pública de calidad, de sus estudiantes, de su docencia e investigación de calidad al servicio de las políticas públicas, de su permanente fiscalización por parte de la Contraloría General de la República.

Reconocemos y valoramos el rol que juegan los principales actores en el sistema de educación superior del país, pero no aceptaremos que algunos pretendan perjudicar a la principal universidad pública de Chile, la que tiene un carácter público único y representativo de Chile, y donde sus académicos, estudiantes y funcionarios viven su trabajo de servicio público con mística, pasión y amor.

6.- UN DOLOR Y UNA INVITACIÓN

Nos duele la violencia; nos duele la intransigencia ideológica que sólo busca defender intereses o visiones minoritarias; nos duele que se desvíe el fondo de los asuntos planteados hacia la discusión sobre formas que son rechazadas por la amplia mayoría y que nuestra rectoría ha condenado en todo momento. Nos duele que para algunos la estrategia sea jugar a la frustración de toda una generación de jóvenes que han decidido hacerse parte de los destinos de un país que también les pertenece.

 Lo que ha pasado este año, sin embargo, no es enteramente nuevo en la historia de nuestro país. No es primera vez tampoco que nuestra Universidad se ve sacudida e interpela al alma profunda de Chile, siendo a su vez interpelada ella misma por la propia sociedad, sus cambios y sus anhelos profundos.

Hace más de 70 años el poeta Julio Barrenechea, autor de la letra del Himnode la Universidad de Chile, escribía en el centenario de la Universidad:

"No eres sólo el hogar de la ciencia,

Yunque nuevo de un nuevo metal.

También eres la sangre y la fuerza

Alas firmes de la libertad."

"Si la Patria en un tiempo dormía,

escuchando tu voz despertó.

Tus murallas quedaban heridas,

pero alzabas tu espíritu en flor."

"Egresado, maestro, estudiante,

vibre entera la Universidad,

bajo el blanco y ardiente estandarte

que levanta la ciencia y la paz."

Sus versos recogían ya entonces el carácter y misión de nuestra Universidad, dando cuenta de los 100 años de historia transcurridos desde su instalación hasta la creación de este Himno, por quien fuera presidente de la FECH encabezando las manifestaciones contra el entonces general Carlos Ibañez a inicios de la década del 30, y cuyo texto fuera musicalizado por quien fuera un denodado pedagogo e innovador en el campo de la música: René Amengual.

 Pero esta vocación y este vínculo indisoluble entre la Universidad de Chile con la libertad y el progreso, ya  habían sido señaladas al momento de su fundación por el propio Andrés Bello cuando, de manera precisa, decía ante los poderes del naciente Estado de Chile que: "La Universidad, señores, no sería digna de ocupar un lugar en nuestras instituciones sociales, si (como murmuran algunos ecos oscuros de declamaciones antiguas) el cultivo de las ciencias y de las letras pudiese mirarse como peligroso bajo un punto de vista moral, o bajo un punto de vista político."

¿Qué es lo que sostiene entonces, pese a todos los embates del tiempo y los poderes de turno, el alma profunda de la Universidad de Chile? ¿No es acaso ese anhelo de justicia en un país y un continente tantas veces marcados a fuego por el miedo a la libertad que emerge de la autonomía intelectual? ¿No es acaso la fidelidad y la generosidad con la que día a día, año tras año, nos esforzamos cotidianamente, cada uno de sus miembros, por estar a la altura de estas ideas fundantes y esenciales? ¿Qué explica, sino aquello, que en 169 años de existencia sigamos siendo una institución que el pueblo de Chile continua sintiendo como propia, como necesaria y como parte indispensable de su futuro y desarrollo?

Allí radica nuestra fuerza y nuestro mandato. Allí radican también las razones y temores de nuestros adversarios, cuando no las de nuestros enemigos declarados, y que ven hoy, en pleno inicio del Siglo XXI, los mismos fantasmas que Bello se esforzaba por disipar y poner en su justo lugar.

Frente a todos aquellos que -ya sea con la ingenua brutalidad de los conversos, con la astuta sagacidad del comerciante, o con la férrea mirada del fanático inquisidor-, dicen y vuelven a decir con gran tribuna que la Universidad de Chile debe "olvidarse" de su vínculo con el Estado y la sociedad chilena, que debemos asumirnos como una más en el "university-market" del Chile post-1981, frente a todos ellos sostenemos sin ambigüedad alguna que las Universidades del Estado son bienes públicos en sí mismos, y que la vigencia de este argumento se ve refrendada, una y otra vez, con o sin gran tribuna, por las encrucijadas de desarrollo que tensionan los sueños y aspiraciones de los chilenos y chilenas.

Invitemos a toda la sociedad chilena a perder el miedo a ese diálogo profundo que la ciudadanía reclama hoy a propósito del futuro y la sustentabilidad de su sistema de educación. Rompamos las barreras de las intransigencias y los quiebres de todo tipo -generacionales, políticos y sociales- propiciando un diálogo fecundo que tiene que ver con enfrentar el futuro. Pongamos nuestras mejores capacidades y nuestros empeños en proyectos de futuro que Sigamos abriendo nuestras puertas a las nuevas generaciones de estudiantes de profesionales y académicos. Sigamos haciéndolo con el rigor y oficio que nos caracteriza, con la misión y la entrega generosa que nos animan.

Hay verdades que -a algunos- incomodan y por ello, son temidas.

Mientras la Universidad sea espacio privilegiado del libre pensamiento, de la cultura plural y diversa, será siempre una amenaza para los que profitan con el sueño educacional de los jóvenes; para quienes olvidan el valor ético de la verdad; para los que abjuran de los derechos humanos a cambio de la seguridad de sus intereses individuales; para quienes desconfían en la fuerza movilizadora de la democracia.

La Universidad de Chile será, no sólo una incomodidad, sino una amenaza latente para quienes quieran ensombrecer el sueño de un Chile para todas y todos.

Invito desde aquí, pues, a los estudiantes, para que con nosotros entiendan que la protesta y la firmeza, para ser efectivas, deben enmarcarse en los valores de respeto, pluralismo y equidad que nos definen, y no es este un llamado a detenerse, ni mucho menos. Actuemos con fuerza, pero con equilibrio. Entendamos que un país está hecho de comunidades y sensibilidades distintas, y que a la gente del país, a toda ella, nos debemos. 

Invito a las autoridades políticas a impulsar las reformas que está pidiendo el país. Este momento es antes que cualquier otra cosa una oportunidad para establecer un sistema de universidades públicas dinámico y con visión de futuro, orientado a las necesidades de las personas, de los jóvenes, del país.

Invito a nuestra comunidad universitaria a aportar, cada cual desde su rol, en la construcción de un nuevo espacio en que nuestros ideales se concreten creativamente y lleguen a los estudiantes, a los chilenos y chilenas, a nuestros pares en el mundo.

Invito al país, a los chilenos y chilenas, a hacer fe en sus universidades estatales, a confiar en que seremos capaces de ofrecerles un sistema de conocimiento avanzado que haga carne en todo momento los valores humanistas que la Universidad de Chile ha defendido históricamente: el pluralismo, la equidad, la complejidad del conocimiento, la libertad de expresión, el respeto, el sentido de servicio al país. Seremos capaces de proyectar esos valores en un nuevo sistema nacional de universidades públicas al servicio del país, sustentado en las tradiciones republicanas y académicas que nos han hecho libres, con plena vigencia y movilidad globales. Somos parte vital de este nuevo mundo integrado y cruzado de múltiples redes que empieza a aparecer ante nuestros ojos donde los seres humanos luchan con toda justicia por sus derechos, por sus libertades, por sus bienes intelectuales, por sus valores.

Vamos a ser nosotros, estudiantes, académicos y personal de colaboración de la gloriosa Universidad de Chile, desde esta ciudad primaveral, desde este país contradictorio,  protagonistas de esta nueva etapa de la historia humana. A eso los invito.

7.- PALABRAS FINALES

La Universidad de Chile ha sido tributaria de los mejores valores públicos de Chile. Ha sido vanguardia del pensamiento crítico, voz alerta ante las amenazas de la libertad de pensamiento y de cátedra. Una y otra vez ha debido sortear reveses, pero ha sabido salir siempre airosa y fortalecida. A la Universidad la afectan más que los terremotos y las catástrofes, las arremetidas contra la libertad de pensamiento, contra la tolerancia a la diversidad y contra el pluralismo. Por eso, hemos hecho escuchar nuestra voz para reclamar por el abandono de la educación pública. En efecto, el descuido de las instituciones públicas de educación esconde una perniciosa forma de empobrecer el clima donde se desenvuelven nuevas ideas y empobrece el espacio intelectual donde crece la innovación y la cultura democrática.

Sin embargo, lo peor de ello está en la frustración de miles de niños y jóvenes con talento que el país se permite abandonar a su suerte, esperando en vano que el mercado les provea de la educación de calidad a la cual tienen derecho, para habilitarlos para acceder a iguales oportunidades y para hacer de ellos ciudadanos, comprometidos con su patria y el progreso de su gente.

Ninguna universidad luego de 1973, sufrió institucionalmente con la falta de libertades públicas, con la censura, con la desconfianza oficial, con la vigilancia intelectual y el acoso político, tanto como la Universidad de Chile. A ello se agregó la reforma al sistema de financiamiento de la educación superior en 1981, que la obligó, como a todas las demás estatales, a buscar recursos financieros en el mercado para poder retener a sus mejores académicos, solventar la docencia y atender sus compromisos institucionales.

La Universidad de Chile, como todas las universidades estatales, ha convivido mal con esta modalidad de autofinanciamiento porque su función pública la compromete social, política y culturalmente, mucho más allá de las obligaciones -normalmente pecuniarias- de las privadas para con sus propietarios. En el mercado financiero no existirán jamás recursos suficientes para financiar la integración social, la formación de vocación pública, para moldear almas de ciudadanos, para formar conductas democráticas, para sustentar necesidades estratégicas superiores del Estado, o por último, para la reproducción de conciencia pública, esto es, aquella que antepone el Bien Común al interés particular. No obstante, esta institución legendaria aprendió de aquella traumática experiencia.

Sabemos hoy que el espíritu de aquellos académicos, funcionarios y estudiantes que supieron luchar por su universidad,  al tiempo que luchaban por restituir la libertad de pensamiento y la dignidad de esta institución señera,  estaban también luchando por los valores permanentes del Chile republicano que heredamos de los grandes inspiradores y tenaces constructores de este país.

Nuestra comunidad académica aprendió la lección y no volverá a dejarse avasallar. 

Estimados amigos y amigas: El pensamiento crítico molesta e incomoda, enhorabuena, a quien descansa en el status quo.

La democracia y la universidad son hijas del espíritu libre y por eso van de la mano.

Estas son nuestras creencias. Estamos en paz.

Pero por eso nos atacan quienes, desde tiempos inmemoriales, han temido al poder del pensamiento y la libertad de los seres humanos.

Hoy nos critican todos los días. Nos defendemos con toda la voz que tenemos.

Nos quieren ahogar negándonos los recursos para desarrollar nuestra función pública. Los padres de las familias chilenas responden apostando por nosotros, a costa de angustioso endeudamiento.

Nos escatiman más recursos. No pedimos para nuestro peculio ni nuestros apetitos individuales, sino para acrecentar el patrimonio cultural y educacional público, o sea de todos los chilenos.

Cuesta entender que un conflicto se desarrolle por seis angustiosos meses.

Nos intentan dividir y desgastar. Reaccionamos uniéndonos más y cambiando toda acción ineficaz y objetivo contraproducente: salvo uno "Estar al servicio de Chile y de su pueblo".

Nos golpean y caemos. Nos levantamos, tomamos  las banderas del espíritu y retomamos el hollado camino de los hombres y mujeres libres.

Los ídolos del foro afirman arrogantes que el poder del dinero todo lo compra.

La comunidad de la Universidad de Chile está sin embargo férreamente unida, entera y de pié. La denegación de espacios y recursos a la Universidad de Chile es una afrenta a lo que ella representa y que se confunde con la historia misma del Chile democrático, libre y republicano. No se ilusionen quienes creen que estamos resignados ante el desconcierto que se ha apoderado del mundo, como tampoco permitiremos que la opinión pública del país se resigne ante el abandono de los íconos de la educación pública.

Nosotros, con una sola voz más que centenaria, gritamos:

¡¡La Chile no!!

¡Viva la Universidad de Chile! ¡Viva la Universidad de Chile Libre!

¡Viva Chile!

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Paso adelante en educación terciaria virtual

Hoy comienza el periodo de matricula para el primer curso libremente ofrecido por MITx en la Red. Luego del articulo original de Inside HigherED ver traducción automática de Google.

Breaking Virtual Ground

By Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher ED, February 13, 2012 - 3:00am
http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/02/13/mitx-opens-registration-interactive-online-course

Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced today that registration has opened for its first online course through MITx, its new online spin-off devoted to offering “interactive” online versions of MIT courses to people not enrolled at the prestigious university.

The first course is an adapted version of Circuits and Electronics, an introductory course in which students learn the basic architecture of computers and gadgets.

Participants will watch five- to 10-minute video tutorials, read an e-textbook, and complete homework assignments, virtual laboratories and two exams. At the end of the course, they will receive a cumulative grade and a certificate from MITx.

“We’re trying to model it, as much as possible conceptually at least, with how we do it at MIT,” said Anant Agarwal, the MIT electrical engineering and computer science professor who will be teaching the course, in a phone call with media last week.

Registration will cost nothing, and there is no limit to enrollment.  The “modest” fees that the university has said it will charge for MITx will most likely be tied to the credential, according to a spokesman. He said pricing has not been determined yet.

The assignments and exams will be graded by computer programs. MITx does not plan to include any protection against cheating beyond an honor code and the natural obstacles inherent in the complexity of the assignments and exam questions. The completion certificate will note this explicitly, Agarwal says. In the future, MITx may pursue more sophisticated checks on dishonesty, he added.   

One homegrown e-learning innovation MITx hopes to bring to bear in its inaugural course is a virtual circuits laboratory that will allows participants to play with chips and resistors and orient themselves to the building blocks of microprocessors — all via a browser window. Instead of handling a breadboard and connecting components with their hands, the MITx registrants will do so by clicking, dragging and dropping in “the gaming equivalent of a physical lab,” Agarwal said.

The simulation software will run on MIT servers; participants will not need especially powerful computers in order to use it, Agarwal said. Also, MITx will be making the source code for its software infrastructure available to other institutions for free.

What will the certificate from MITx be worth in the job market? That remains to be seen. But those who earn a certificate can be expected to come away with at least a working familiarity with the underlying physics of circuits and electronics, said Rafael Reif, the university provost, and that may well be a boon to their job prospects.
For the latest technology news and opinion from Inside Higher Ed, follow @IHEtech on Twitter.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/02/13/mitx-opens-registration-interactive-online-course#ixzz1mGDfPtre
Inside Higher Ed

RECURSOS ASOCIADOS EN INSIDE HIGHER ED

http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2011/12/20/planned-mit-courses-may-advance-front-elite-open-education

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/mitx-next-chapter-university-credentialing

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/mitx-3-cheers-and-3-questions

http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/02/03/essay-massive-online-courses-not-game-changing-innovation

http://www.insidehighered.com/blogs/5-predictions-higher-ed-technology-2012

Abriendo terremo virtual
13 de febrero 2012 - 3:00 am
Por
Steve Kolowich
Massachusetts Institute of Technology ha anunciado hoy que ha abierto el registro para su primer curso en línea a través MITX, su nueva línea de spin-off dedicado a ofrecer "interactivo" de versiones en línea de cursos del MIT a las personas que no están inscritos en la prestigiosa universidad.
El primer curso es una versión adaptada de Circuitos y Electrónica, un curso introductorio en el que los estudiantes aprenden la arquitectura básica de las computadoras y gadgets.
Los participantes observarán de cinco a tutoriales en vídeo de 10 minutos, leer un e-libro de texto, y completa sus tareas escolares, laboratorios virtuales y los exámenes de dos. Al final del curso, recibirán una calificación acumulativa y un certificado de MITX.
"Estamos tratando de modelar, tanto como sea posible al menos conceptualmente, con la forma en que lo hacemos en el MIT", dijo Anant Agarwal, de la ingeniería eléctrica del MIT y profesor de ciencias de la computación que se va a enseñar el curso, en una conversación telefónica con los medios de comunicación la semana pasada.
La inscripción costará nada, y no hay límite para la inscripción. La "modesta" honorarios que la universidad ha dicho que va a cobrar por MITX más probable es que estar atado a la credencial, según un portavoz. Él dijo que los precios no se ha determinado todavía.
Las tareas y los exámenes serán calificados por programas informáticos. MITX no tiene planes de incluir ningún tipo de protección contra las trampas más allá de un código de honor y los obstáculos naturales inherentes a la complejidad de las tareas y preguntas del examen. El certificado de terminación en cuenta de manera explícita, Agarwal dice. En el futuro, MITX puede seguir controles más sofisticados en la falta de honradez, agregó.
Una de cosecha propia de e-learning la innovación MITX espera hacer valer en su curso inaugural es un laboratorio de circuitos virtual que permite a los participantes a jugar con fichas y las resistencias y se orientan a los bloques de construcción de microprocesadores - utilizando una ventana del navegador. En vez de manejar una placa y la conexión de los componentes con sus manos, los solicitantes de registro MITX lo hará haciendo clic, arrastrar y soltar en "el equivalente del juego de un laboratorio de física", dijo Agarwal.
El software de simulación se ejecuta en los servidores del MIT, los participantes no necesitan computadoras, especialmente de gran alcance con el fin de usarlo, dijo Agarwal. Además, MITX va a hacer el código fuente de su infraestructura de software a disposición de otras instituciones de forma gratuita.
¿Cuál será el certificado de MITX valer en el mercado de trabajo? Eso está por verse. Pero los que obtener un certificado se puede esperar a salir con al menos una familiaridad con la física subyacente de los circuitos y componentes electrónicos, dijo Rafael Reif, el rector de la Universidad, y que bien puede ser una bendición para sus perspectivas de trabajo.

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Nuevo numero de la Revista Iberoamericana de Educación Superior

Citcula la siguiente nota del Director de la RIES:

Nos complace informarles que el 31 de enero apareció el número 6 de la Revista Iberoamericana de Educación Superior, coeditada por la UNAM-IISUE y Universia. Su consulta en internet se puede realizar en  http://ries.universia.net

            La visibilidad de la RIES ha sido significativa, pues a menos de dos años de existencia, tiene registradas más de 90 000 visitas en sus diferentes secciones.

           

            Aprovecho la ocasión para reiterarles nuestra invitación a presentar artículos para ser publicados en ella y solicitarles, si están en condiciones, hagan extensiva esta invitación a sus colegas y estudiantes de posgrado.

 

            A continuación enviamos el índice de este número

 

Índice RIES núm. 6, vol. III

Territorios

Una mirada a la presencia de las mujeres en la educación superior en México
Adrián de Garay y Gabriela del Valle-Díaz-Muñoz

Deserción y graduación estudiantil universitaria: una aplicación de los modelos de superviviencia
Ana-María Osorio, Catalina Bolancé y Marible Castillo-Caicedo

Formación de docentes en la educación superior: la experiencia del Instituto Politécnico de Leiria, Portugal
Graça Seco, Luís Filipe, Patrícia Pereira, Sandra Alves y Ana-Lúcia Duarte
 

Genealogías
La formación en Ciencias de la Educación durante la última dictadura militar. Una comparación entre el Instituto Joaquín V. González y la Universidad de Buenos Aires
Marcela Mollis, Hilda Lanza y Sofía Dono-Rubio
 

Contornos
La investigación educativa en México: entre una semiprofesión y una práctica no consolidada
Raúl Osorio-Madrid

Perfil y prácticas educativas del docente orientado a la innovación en las escuelas de negocios en México
Jesús Lavín-Verástegui y Gabriela-María Farías-Martínez

Exploración del clima ético en estudiantes escuela de terapia ocupacional
Laura Rueda-Castro
 

Visiones
Reseña del libro La investigación en el posgrado de la Universidad Pedagógica Nacional 2010, coordinado por Ángel López y Mota, Ernesto Díaz-Couder Cabral y Andrés Lozano Medina
Concepción Barrón

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Febrero 12, 2012

Educación superior: la agenda faltante

Columna de opinion publicada hoy domingo 12 de enero de 2012.

Educación superior: la agenda faltante

2012 será un año de prueba: llamados a rendir examen serán el Gobierno y las políticas del Mineduc, las instituciones y el CRUCh, y los principales actores: rectores, académicos y federaciones estudiantiles.  

José Joaquín Brunner, El Mercurio, 12 de febrero de 2012
http://diario.elmercurio.com/2012/02/12/educacion/_portada/noticias/5DE7966F-40BD-48FB-822B-94815D50A15F.htm?id={5DE7966F-40BD-48FB-822B-94815D50A15F}

¿Estamos bien encaminados, o no, con las iniciativas impulsadas en la educación superior? Para empezar, ¿cuáles son?
Primero, mayor gasto público en el sector vía créditos y becas estudiantiles (demanda) y, limitadamente, vía apoyo a las universidades del CRUCh (oferta). Enseguida, regulaciones más exigentes para cautelar la legalidad, otorgar transparencia a este mercado y proteger a los estudiantes (más información y control vía una superintendencia) y para asegurar estándares de calidad (acreditación reforzada, exámenes nacionales, mayor escrutinio y accountability ).
Y, por ultimo, una puesta al día de los procesos de admisión a la educación superior a través de la revisión de la PSU y la incorporación de nuevos instrumentos selectivos, con el fin de combinar mejor mérito y equidad.
Es una agenda ambiciosa. Pero avanza sólo lenta e irregularmente y, a pesar de su amplitud, es todavía insuficiente.
¿Por qué decimos que su aplicación se halla rezagada y es desigual? En cuanto al financiamiento, subsiste un desequilibrio entre el limitado esfuerzo del Estado y el masivo aporte de los hogares. Por otro lado, se mantiene la confusión en cuanto a cómo subsidiar la oferta (las instituciones). La idea del ministro Beyer de concentrar recursos en la investigación científico-tecnológica es interesante, pero muy parcial y falta de maduración aún. La superintendencia propuesta al Parlamento no ha obtenido consenso hasta ahora y no es claro, tampoco, cómo interactuaría con la Comisión Nacional de Acreditación, cuya propia reforma se encuentra pendiente.
Si ambas instancias no son diseñadas en relación una con la otra, la regulación resultante será débil y subsistirán los problemas. Los cambios proyectados para modernizar y flexibilizar los procesos de admisión y hacer más equitativa la selección por mérito avanzan en cámara lenta, responsabilidad compartida del CRUCh y el Gobierno.
Además, dijimos, esta agenda es claramente insuficiente. ¿Por qué?
Porque no se hace cargo de los desafíos formativos que enfrenta el sistema al comenzar el siglo XXI. Por ejemplo, las élites -políticas, empresariales, profesionales, culturales, militares- que allí se forman, en el grupo de instituciones más selectivas, continúan siendo educadas bajo un principio estrecho de temprana especialización.
Carecen, por lo mismo, de una visión general de su época y del mundo, de un horizonte fundado en los esquemas cognitivos de las ciencias y las humanidades, de un manejo de las competencias esenciales para asumir roles de conducción en la sociedad contemporánea. En breve, no hay en nuestro sistema cabida para la educación general o liberal, para una paideia de los grupos dirigentes. Tampoco se despliega un esfuerzo consistente para mejorar la educación masiva, no-selectiva, que es la función más interesante y progresista del sistema en su fase actual de desarrollo.
No se ha incorporado masivamente, por ejemplo, la formación por competencias vinculadas a la empleabilidad de las personas. No hay avances sustantivos en el aprendizaje del inglés ni en la enseñanza basada en la red ni se ha generalizado el uso de los medios digitales. No se otorga la importancia requerida a la educación técnico-vocacional, a pesar de su rápida expansión durante los últimos cinco años. Ni se involucra al sector empresarial en esta actividad que posee un indudable impacto en la economía.
En fin, 2012 será un año de prueba: llamados a rendir examen serán el Gobierno y las políticas del Mineduc, las instituciones y el CRUCh, y los principales actores: rectores, académicos y federaciones estudiantiles. Los desafíos son múltiples y sobrepasan con mucho la agenda a la mano, la mera mantención del statu quo y la protesta en las calles. ¡Se requiere más que todo eso!

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Simon Schwartzman reflexiona sobre políticas educacionales en Brasil

“Não existe relação clara entre gastos e resultados na educação”
Posted: 10 Feb 2012 01:33 PM PST

Com este título, a Folha Dirigida – Educação publicou uma longa entrevista minha com Renato Deccache, na edição de 9 a 15 de feveiro de 2012. Transcrevo abaixo o texto de apresentação, e a entrevista completa está disponível aquí:
http://www.schwartzman.org.br/simon/folhadirigida.pdf

Nos últimos dez anos, o país passou por um processo de ampliação do gasto na educação pública. A taxa de investimento como percentual do PIB, por exemplo, passou de 3,9% em 2000 para 5,1% em 2010. No entanto, esta destinação maior de recursos ainda não se concretizou nos indicadores educacionais que a sociedade espera. Quadros como esse reforçam posições como a do pesquisador do Instituto de Estudos do Trabalho e Sociedade no Rio de Janeiro, Simon Schwartzman, de que apenas ampliar a taxa de investimento no setor educacional não terá resultados, se certos paradigmas que norteiam as políticas públicas no país não forem revistos. Um dos que ele destaca é em relação aos critérios para a distribuição de recursos. Em vez de a distribuição pautar-se no número de alunos, segundo ele, seria mais importante que ela fosse orientada pelo total de concluintes, para contribuir com a melhoria do fluxo escolar. Para a educação básica, na visão do educador, também seria fundamental estabelecer um currículo obrigatório das disciplinas centrais do ensino, estabelecer objetivos diferenciados de formação no ensino médio para atender perfis diferentes de alunos e desenvolver um sistema de financiamento adequado para a educação de primeira infância, entre outras ações. Já para o ensino superior, ele propõe um rompimento ainda mais forte de paradigmas, com medidas que incluem o pagamento de anuidades nas instituições públicas, realização de avaliações da qualidade da gestão dos recursos nas universidades públicas e um melhor aproveitamento dos recursos humanos. “Não existem avaliações adequadas de gestão por desempenho, mas muito provavelmente elas (as instituições públicas) são caras demais, porque não têm incentivos para usar melhor os recursos e seus orçamentos não dependem de seu desempenho, e sim, sobretudo, do tamanho de seu professorado, cujos salários são definidos de maneira uniforme para todo o país”, destacou Simon Schwartzman.

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Educacion terciaria privada en China, Rpublica Popular

Significativa expansión de la educación terciaria privada en China: mas instituciones, mas programas, mas estudiantes. Y los usuales problemas...

In China, private colleges, universities multiply to meet higher-education
By Sarah Butrymowicz, in Langfang and China, The Washington Post, February 12, 2012
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/in-china-private-colleges-universities-multiply-to-meet-higher-education-demand/2012/02/07/gIQAf1ey8Q_story.html

Langfang, China — Hundreds of private colleges and universities have opened in China in the past decade in response to soaring demand for higher education in the world’s most populous nation.

The growing private sector fills a niche in a market long dominated by public universities. The private schools offer millions of students a no-frills education and a better shot at a paycheck after graduation as China continues its quest to gain influence in the world economy.

The new schools have flooded China’s big cities, spilling over into places such as Oriental University City, a complex here in the Hebei province, an hour south of Beijing. It has 14 private universities, one shared library and a handful of fast-food restaurants to feed tens of thousands of students.

“Everyone wants to have an education, but the ability of the country is limited. Public universities cannot meet the need,” said Rao Dujun, director of the international office at the private Xi’an International University in the Shaanxi province of central China. “This is why private universities can emerge.”

The number of private universities in China has soared to more than 630, up from 20 in 1997, according to a 2010 analysis from the Center for International Higher Education at Boston College. In all, the private institutions enrolled about a fifth of Chinese college students in 2008.

Private university administrators and critics of the schools have warned that as China’s population growth slows, the boom in private universities may subside and only the best ones will survive. Some have amassed enormous debt from purchasing land and building facilities. But these schools have been integral to the expansion of Chinese higher education.

In the late 1990s, fewer than 10 percent of Chinese age 18 to 22 were enrolled in higher education, according to government data. Now the figure is about 27 percent — or 30 million students — and the government hopes to reach 40 percent by 2020. If China is successful, it will have more than 40 million students in college. That would be roughly double the projected total for the United States. The U.S. population, however, is significantly lower than China’s.

In China, a college degree is often crucial for upward mobility. Competition is intense for available spots. By contrast, the United States is focused on persuading students to enroll in college and to stay and complete degrees once they do.

Higher education in China was gutted during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s, but has been built up again. In 1999, the authoritarian Communist government decided to remove restrictions on the private sector of higher education in an effort to propel economic growth.

In 2003, the government permitted private schools to partner with public universities. Although still self-funded and self-governed, these new “independent schools” gained some prestige through the associations while also helping public universities deal with overflow.

Unlike their public counterparts, private universities across China emphasize practical skills over theory. The Civil Aviation Management Institute, for instance, teaches security guards-to-be to operate metal detectors. Students in Xi’an International’s automobile college learn how to fix cars, whereas at a public university they might learn how to design them.

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Febrero 11, 2012

EEUU: Desigualdad educacional en aumento

Buen reportaje sobre el impacto de las desigualdades socioeconómicas en la educación de ls jóvenes de los EEUU.

Education Gap Grows Between Rich and Poor, Studies Say
By SABRINA TAVERNISE
The New York Times, February 10, 2012
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/10/education/education-gap-grows-between-rich-and-poor-studies-show.html?_r=1&hp

WASHINGTON — Education was historically considered a great equalizer in American society, capable of lifting less advantaged children and improving their chances for success as adults. But a body of recently published scholarship suggests that the achievement gap between rich and poor children is widening, a development that threatens to dilute education’s leveling effects.

It is a well-known fact that children from affluent families tend to do better in school. Yet the income divide has received far less attention from policy makers and government officials than gaps in student accomplishment by race.

Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.

“We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,” said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.

In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan, the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s.

The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. The data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession’s full impact was felt. Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend.

“With income declines more severe in the lower brackets, there’s a good chance the recession may have widened the gap,” Professor Reardon said. In the study he led, researchers analyzed 12 sets of standardized test scores starting in 1960 and ending in 2007. He compared children from families in the 90th percentile of income — the equivalent of around $160,000 in 2008, when the study was conducted — and children from the 10th percentile, $17,500 in 2008. By the end of that period, the achievement gap by income had grown by 40 percent, he said, while the gap between white and black students, regardless of income, had shrunk substantially.

Both studies were first published last fall in a book of research, “Whither Opportunity?” compiled by the Russell Sage Foundation, a research center for social sciences, and the Spencer Foundation, which focuses on education. Their conclusions, while familiar to a small core of social sciences scholars, are now catching the attention of a broader audience, in part because income inequality has been a central theme this election season.

The connection between income inequality among parents and the social mobility of their children has been a focus of President Obama as well as some of the Republican presidential candidates.

One reason for the growing gap in achievement, researchers say, could be that wealthy parents invest more time and money than ever before in their children (in weekend sports, ballet, music lessons, math tutors, and in overall involvement in their children’s schools), while lower-income families, which are now more likely than ever to be headed by a single parent, are increasingly stretched for time and resources. This has been particularly true as more parents try to position their children for college, which has become ever more essential for success in today’s economy.

A study by Sabino Kornrich, a researcher at the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid, and Frank F. Furstenberg, scheduled to appear in the journal Demography this year, found that in 1972, Americans at the upper end of the income spectrum were spending five times as much per child as low-income families. By 2007 that gap had grown to nine to one; spending by upper-income families more than doubled, while spending by low-income families grew by 20 percent.

“The pattern of privileged families today is intensive cultivation,” said Dr. Furstenberg, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania.

The gap is also growing in college. The University of Michigan study, by Susan M. Dynarski and Martha J. Bailey, looked at two generations of students, those born from 1961 to 1964 and those born from 1979 to 1982. By 1989, about one-third of the high-income students in the first generation had finished college; by 2007, more than half of the second generation had done so. By contrast, only 9 percent of the low-income students in the second generation had completed college by 2007, up only slightly from a 5 percent college completion rate by the first generation in 1989.

James J. Heckman, an economist at the University of Chicago, argues that parenting matters as much as, if not more than, income in forming a child’s cognitive ability and personality, particularly in the years before children start school.

“Early life conditions and how children are stimulated play a very important role,” he said. “The danger is we will revert back to the mindset of the war on poverty, when poverty was just a matter of income, and giving families more would improve the prospects of their children. If people conclude that, it’s a mistake.”

Meredith Phillips, an associate professor of public policy and sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, used survey data to show that affluent children spend 1,300 more hours than low-income children before age 6 in places other than their homes, their day care centers, or schools (anywhere from museums to shopping malls). By the time high-income children start school, they have spent about 400 hours more than poor children in literacy activities, she found.

Charles Murray, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute whose book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” was published Jan. 31, described income inequality as “more of a symptom than a cause.”

The growing gap between the better educated and the less educated, he argued, has formed a kind of cultural divide that has its roots in natural social forces, like the tendency of educated people to marry other educated people, as well as in the social policies of the 1960s, like welfare and other government programs, which he contended provided incentives for staying single.

“When the economy recovers, you’ll still see all these problems persisting for reasons that have nothing to do with money and everything to do with culture,” he said.

There are no easy answers, in part because the problem is so complex, said Douglas J. Besharov, a fellow at the Atlantic Council. Blaming the problem on the richest of the rich ignores an equally important driver, he said: two-earner household wealth, which has lifted the upper middle class ever further from less educated Americans, who tend to be single parents.

The problem is a puzzle, he said. “No one has the slightest idea what will work. The cupboard is bare."

Materiales relacionados:

http://cepa.stanford.edu/content/widening-academic-achievement-gap-between-rich-and-poor-new-evidence-and-possible-explanations

http://www.nber.org/papers/w17633.pdf

https://www.russellsage.org/publications/whither-opportunity

http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/i/income/income_inequality/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier

http://www.march.es/Recursos_Web/Ceacs/Paginas_personales/PInvestigacion/skornrich110.pdf

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Admision y ayuda estudiantil en una de las principales universidades de Canadá

No solo las notas ni tampoco más becas entregadas sin cuidadosa evaluación de sus efectos sociales. Al final de la versión en inglés, traducción automática de Google al castellano

UBC Gets It

Alex Usher, HESA, February 1, 2012

Credit where credit is due: some absolutely brilliant stuff has been coming out of UBC in the last little while. Everybody in the country should pay attention.

Exhibit A: The university's decision to use broad-based admissions (BBA) - that is to say, an application process which takes into account not just grades, but also extra-curricular activities and the contents of personal essays - for its entire student intake. This is an enormously positive step. Just as the university experience is about more than just classes, students are more than just grades. BBA recognizes that fact, and makes it the central feature of the admissions process.

Now, this isn't an entirely revolutionary step. Many universities use some form of BBA to help decide between candidates who are at the bottom of the grade range to get in. A number also use it in particularly competitive faculties (UBC's Sauder School has used it since 2004, SFU's business school began last year), and of course, BBA is actually the norm at smaller, faith-based institutions.

But most big universities shy away from using it across-the-board because it's simpler and cheaper to use grades exclusively to decide who gets in and who gets an entrance scholarship. That's undeniably true, but there's no faster way to turn yourself into a cookie-cutter institution than to treat your applicants in a one-or two-dimensional fashion. UBC's initiative is a big step away from that.

Exhibit B: UBC has axed its $6 million, grade-based automatic admissions scholarships (i.e., where one-time entrance money is distributed to students simply for achieving a certain average in secondary school), and redistributing the money towards need-based bursaries, work-study and a smaller number of larger, more prestigious multi-year scholarships.

The university has correctly sussed that the awards are not in fact a major draw for the institution, and that by distributing these awards, they were spending a lot of money to no real effect (a point we at HESA made a few years ago when we were working under another corporate name). Re-directing that money towards need-based aid means money is being used for far more socially valuable purposes, and enlarging the top-end scholarships puts the institution in a much better position to compete for the very top (1-2%) in the country - which is the real target of any institution of UBC's stature.

Too often, universities have trouble doing the right thing because in this very conservative industry it's hard to convince people to do something if no one else is doing it. UBC, gloriously, has just erased that excuse as far as improving admissions and scholarships are concerned. May they be widely imitated.

UBC It Gets

01 de febrero 2012

Alex Usher

Honor a quien honor merece: algunas cosas absolutamente brillante ha estado saliendo de la UBC en el poco tiempo pasado. Todo el mundo en el país debe prestar atención.

Prueba A: La decisión de la universidad para el uso amplio de admisión (BBA) - es decir, un proceso de aplicación que tiene en cuenta no sólo las calificaciones, sino también actividades extra-curriculares y los contenidos de los ensayos de personal - para su consumo estudiantil . Este es un paso enormemente positivo. Al igual que la experiencia universitaria es algo más que clases, los estudiantes son más que grados. BBA reconoce este hecho, y lo convierte en el elemento central del proceso de admisión.

Ahora, esto no es un paso totalmente revolucionario. Muchas universidades usan algún tipo de BBA para ayudar a decidir entre los candidatos que están en la parte inferior del rango de clasificación para entrar un número también lo utilizan en las facultades especialmente competitivos (Escuela de la UBC Sauder ha utilizado desde el año 2004, la escuela de SFU de negocios comenzó el año pasado ), y, por supuesto, BBA es en realidad la norma en las pequeñas, las instituciones religiosas.

Pero la mayoría de las grandes universidades alejarse de su uso a través de-la Junta-porque es más simple y más barato utilizar exclusivamente las calificaciones para decidir quién entra y quién recibe una beca de la entrada. Eso es innegable, pero no hay manera más rápida de que te conviertas en una institución de molde que tratar a sus candidatos en forma de una o dos dimensiones. Iniciativa de la UBC es un gran paso lejos de eso.

Anexo B: UBC ha despedido de sus $ 6 millones, el grado becas basadas en admisión automática (es decir, donde se distribuye una sola vez el dinero de entrada a los estudiantes simplemente para lograr un cierto promedio en la escuela secundaria), y la redistribución del dinero hacia la basada en la necesidad becas, trabajo-estudio y un número menor de grandes y de mayor prestigio de varios años de becas.

La universidad tiene correctamente percató de que los premios no son en realidad un atractivo importante para la institución, y que mediante la distribución de estos premios, que estaban gastando mucho dinero sin ningún efecto real (un punto que en HESA hizo hace unos años, cuando estaban trabajando bajo otro nombre corporativo). Re-dirigir ese dinero para ayuda basada en necesidad significa que el dinero se está utilizando para fines mucho más valor social, y la ampliación de las becas de gama alta pone la institución en una posición mucho mejor para competir por el más alto (1-2%) en el país - que es el verdadero objetivo de cualquier institución de la talla de la UBC.

Con demasiada frecuencia, las universidades tienen problemas para hacer lo correcto porque en esta industria muy conservadora, es difícil convencer a la gente a hacer algo si nadie más lo está haciendo. UBC, gloriosamente, acaba de borrar esa excusa en cuanto a la mejora de las admisiones y becas que se trate. Podrán ser imitado.

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Febrero 10, 2012

Préstamos estudiantiles e inversión en educación superior

Más sobre las políticas anunciadas por el Presidente Obama para enfrentar el alza de costos en las instituciones de educación superior de los EEUU.

Obama, Higher-Education Costs, and Student Aid

By Richard Vedder, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2012, 6:36 pm

Whatever else one might say about President Obama, he has good political instincts, so the heavy emphasis he is placing lately on college costs suggests this issue is breaking through the minimum threshold level of interest to make it a topic in the coming presidential/congressional campaigns. His suggestion that colleges should lose federal aid if they raise tuition too much will probably resonate well with many of all political persuasions; a former top GOP member on the House Education Committee, Buck McKeon once proposed something very similar.

I found myself in a little mini-debate with University of California President Mark Yudof about this last Friday on the PBS “NewsHour.” President Yudof, whom I greatly respect, made the usual argument about falling state appropriations being a major cause of rising college costs. I conceded that point, but argued that College Board data show that total federal student assistance in inflation adjusted dollars went from $64-billion in 2000-1 to $169-billion a decade later (see page 10 in “Trends in Student Aid 2011″)–a compounded annual increase of 10.2 percent a year. The more student “financial assistance” we give, the bigger the problem gets. Rather than alleviating the problem, this vast expenditure, which I liken to dropping money out of airplanes over college campuses, has been associated with a worsening of the financial strains of higher education on both students and society.

Rather than reduce loan interest rates, expand Perkin loans, and engage in tuition control incentives, a better, more effective, and efficient approach would be to end or radically revise our student loan/grant system. Nine problems:

1. Grant aid is disbursed without any reward for academic excellence, and, indeed, more money is disbursed to mediocre students than good ones; I once estimated (with little criticism) that for every Pell Grant recipient who graduates, almost two drop out.

2. Student-loan money is disbursed at below-market interest rates for loans of this risk level with no regard for the student’s prospects of either academic success or ability to repay the loan. As Alex Pollack of the American Enterprise Institute (among others) has suggested, college admission and student financial-aid policies would radically improve if the colleges had some “skin in the game”–if they were forced to cover some of the costs of a student’s loan default.

3. Elaborating, those who facilitate making the loans, that is, the colleges, are not the ones who bear the risk of default, exactly at least part of the problem that led to the housing bubble and collapse.

4. The implicit lowering of college costs associated with loan and grant subsidies has contributed to too many persons overinvesting in college–pursuing degrees only to end up as customer-service representatives, taxi drivers, bartenders, mail carriers, parking-lot attendants, etc. (the number of college graduates in the aforementioned occupations alone rivals the number of uniformed soldiers in the U.S. Army).

5. Loan commitments grow with tuition increases; limiting loan commitments to some maximum amount would curb the desire and ability of colleges to raise fees. Similarly, sharply increased Pell Grants have further allowed some colleges to raise fees.

6. The aid programs are increasingly viewed as entitlements for moderately affluent middle-class persons, so that the proportion of recent college graduates coming from low-income families is lower than in 1970, when federal financial-assistance programs were small.

7. The growing federalization of governmental financial assistance threatens to undercut a university system where decision making is made in a highly decentralized fashion, encouraging innovation, competition, and entrepreneurship.

8. The rise in the proportion of college students with limited cognitive abilities or discipline, encouraged by the federal student-aid programs, has led to a real if not precisely measurable decline in academic rigor and performance in America’s colleges and universities. Also, as Jackson Toby has pointed out, low college-admissions standards, aided by federal aid programs, have contributed to declining rigor at the K-12 levels, as students feel less compelled to achieve well academically in order to get into college and get financial aid.

9. There are too many federal programs: they are too complex, and often are at cross purposes with one another–for example, tuition tax credits help rich kids while Pell Grants are designed to increase the proportion of college students from low-income groups.

There is even more, but that makes the point. I fear the Obama proposal to incentivize colleges to reduce tuition increases will turn out costly and bureaucratic. And how is one going to determine what is a “just price” or tuition increase (borrowing from Saint Thomas Aquinas)? Also, college have sneaky ways of circumventing tuition controls–raising room and board rates, extra fees, etc.

Raising the issue is good, but let’s look at the real problem. Washington has been more the problem than the solution.

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Febrero 09, 2012

Créditos estudiantiles: el debate en los EEUU

Continua el debate en los EEUU a proposito de las medidas propuestas por el presidente Obama para controlar la espiral de costos de en las universidades de los EEUU.

College Officials Welcome Obama's Focus on Higher-Education Costs, but Raise Some Concerns

By Goldie Blumenstyk, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2012

Ann Arbor, Mich.

President Obama chose a spiffy new indoor football field at the University of Michigan here on Friday to kick off a broad campaign for college affordability, calling higher education "an economic imperative that every family in America should be able to afford."

Blending the personal with the political—and playfully responding to shouts of support from the audience—Mr. Obama made clear that the college-cost themes in this 35-minute speech would set the tone for a continuing national discussion that will be central not only in his administration's coming budget fight with Congress but also as he campaigns around the country for re-election.

With a message that prompted cheers and praise here—but already critiques from other college and political leaders around the country, including one president who called it "political theater at its worst"—Mr. Obama challenged states to spend more on higher education, describing cuts by Michigan and 39 other states as "the largest factor in tuition increases over at public colleges over the past decade."

He urged students to pressure Congress to keep the interest rate on federal student loans from doubling in July. "That would not be good for you," he noted with exaggerated directness, drawing laughs and applause from the crowd of more than 3,000, most of whom had camped out for hours in the cold a day earlier to get tickets.

And he warned that colleges themselves need to do more to cut costs and not assume they can "just jack up tuition every single year." Government "can't just keep on subsidizing skyrocketing tuition," said Mr. Obama.

"We should push colleges to do better," said Mr. Obama, as he briefly touched on forthcoming proposals to overhaul the way billions of dollars in federal aid to colleges and students is awarded. "We should hold them accountable if they don't."

Secretary of Education Arne Duncan, who accompanied the president here and spent time with reporters and local television stations before the speech, said the public sees higher education as unaffordable, and "that's simply unacceptable."

That anxiety was clearly reflected in the crowd that made its way through the dark and slushy streets to hear what the president had to say on Friday. "I have a daughter coming here next fall, and I want to know how we're going to afford it," said Annie Hiltner, an Ann Arbor resident waiting as the line of students and other locals filed past metal detectors.

Inside, as rock music from Bruce Springsteen and U2 played through the speakers, interrupted now and then by the live blasts of the Fight Song by Michigan pep band, Danielle Wiliams, a sophomore from Eastern Michigan University, said college costs and student-loan debt loom large for her and most of her friends. A reporter for the student paper at Eastern Michigan, Ms. Williams said many of her classmates aren't Obama supporters but they appreciate his push to keep higher education affordable. "It's too important to worry about political divisions because it's our future," she said.

Beth Dobias, an Ann Arbor resident who lives here "because it's cool" and works at the university, said she was glad to hear Mr. Obama talk about creating more opportunities for people who need retraining. "My uncle's in that boat right now," she said. he was an engineer at Chrysler but is now learning welding.

In the budget President Obama will release next month, the administration will ask Congress to change the criteria under which funds from three federal aid programs known as "campus-based aid" are awarded. (The government has more say over the allocation of money to those programs, which are used primarily by public and nonprofit colleges, than it does for larger student-aid programs such as Pell grants and the primary student-loan program.)

Details on the new formula are still being refined, but a document released by the White House on Friday said it would reward institutions that admit and graduate a relatively higher proportion of low-income students, demonstrate that their students complete college and find employment, and set "responsible tuition" policies.

"It's not just about access, it's about completion," said Mr. Duncan, emphasizing the formula would recognize affordability and "net tuition" when calculating aid awards to colleges. "If they are providing great financial aid and they serve more Pell students," that's good, he said.
Mixed Reactions

Mary Sue Coleman, the university's president, said the plan shows that the administration understands "the complexity" of issues, including the role of states and the need for universities to curtail costs. "I'm so happy that he's brought this to a national conversation," said Ms. Coleman. She watched the speech alongside students from her campus and several nearby institutions, standing behind Mr. Obama beneath a banner with the slogan he introduced during his State of the Union speech, "An America Built to Last."

Her enthusiasm was not universally held.

While many higher-education leaders said they were grateful for the president's attention, they were wary of many specifics: The American Council on Education's Molly Corbett Broad raised concern that proposed changes to the aid formula would "move decision-making in higher education from college campuses to Washington, D.C."

The American Association of Community Colleges said a change to the formula would be welcome but worried about the "extraordinary difficulty" of developing measures of student outcomes in way that was fair to community colleges.

The National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities, the largest private-college group, said the answer to the affordability problem "is not going to come from more federal controls on colleges or states." The association's president, David L. Warren, also criticized the idea of "telling families to judge the value of an education by the amount young graduates earn in the first few years after they graduate," one of the same arguments raised by the for-profit college industry over a controversial new regulation introduced last year, the gainful-employment rule.

Sterner attacks came from some university presidents, including the University of Washington's Michael K. Young, who invoked Jeremy Bentham's famous "nonesense on stilts" invective in decrying the ideas as political theater, according to the Associated Press.

Peter Mc Pherson, president of the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities, however, said the ideas deserve a try, assuming the right metrics could be designed. "It's important to focus on value and quality," he said. He'd like to see Mr. Obama take the idea further, extending the criteria even to other major aid programs, which promote access to college. "We think it's time to move to access plus completion" he said.

Along with changes to the formula for distributing campus-based aid, the administration will ask Congress to authorize a big increase in Perkins Loans, to $8-million from the current level of $1-billion—money that would eventually be repaid to the federal treasury.

Secretary Duncan said the administration also recognizes that state budgets are squeezed but that states have a responsibility to commit more money to higher education, too. "Budgets are not just numbers," he said. "Budgets reflect our values."

To encourage states to develop systemic programs to improve affordability and higher rates of college completion, the administration is also proposing a new $1-billion higher-education competition, modeled after a the Race to the Top competition it offered to states for public-school reforms.

On a much smaller scale, the administration will propose a separate $55-million competition for public and private colleges, and nonprofit organizations for new strategies that get more students to attend college and improve teaching and learning. Mr. Duncan said Mr. Obama has seen "some amazing leadership" on cost containment from the presidents he met with recently at the White House, and others, including here at Michigan. "We want to make that the norm rather than the exception."

Cost cutting is nothing new to officials here. Michigan now ranks 39th in state support for higher education, down from 10th a decade ago. At this institution, a fact sheet the university provided to reporters at the speech said state support fell from $359-million to $268-million, with state money now covering only about 17 percent of the general budget. The university has also been cutting millions from its budget with energy savings and new approaches to health-insurance.

Yet even as this campus represents the challenges of promoting access in the face of state cuts, Ms. Coleman says those actions are no substitute for public investment. "Can we cut ourselves to excellence? No," she said, minutes after Mr. Obama had departed. But she said she thinks Mr. Obama understands that. "He's being nuanced. He understands it's not one size fits all."

Like many big research universities, Michigan continues to add programs and facilities that add to costs—like the newly opened Flume Room in the handsomely renovated eco-friendly Dana Hall, where scientists can model the water flows of the Huron River, and at the law school, where students want international experiences. That's "not fluff," said the dean, Evan H. Caminker, reflecting on the cost condundrum as he grabbed a snack at the Michigan Union cafe Friday afternoon. "That's not a climbing wall."

(University officials were quick to note that the three-year-old, $26-million Al Glick Fieldhouse where Mr. Obama spoke on Friday—part of what allows the university to claim "more indoor practice space than any college or professional football team in the world"—was financed with funds from athletics budgets, as are the facility's operating costs.)

The dean, speaking from the same building where John F. Kennedy proposed the creation of the Peace Corps in October 1960, said he believed the president's decision to make a major speech here about college costs could be a significant milestone, even if the partisanship and gridlock in Washington keep the ideas from getting through Congress.

Presidents, he noted, can have a great capacity to shape public opinion, as Mr. Obama did with the auto-industry bailout. "He went out there and sold an idea," said Mr. Caminker.

Aid Experts and Officials Question President's College-Affordability Plans

By Beckie Supiano, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 30, 2012

So far, the outlines of the college-affordability proposals first mentioned in President Obama's State of the Union address last week have raised as many questions as they have answered.

"We still don't have all the details, right?" said Cynthia A. Littlefield, director of federal relations at the Association of Jesuit Colleges and Universities. "The devil's in the details."

That sentiment was repeated by a number of college administrators and financial-aid experts, many of whom expressed surprise about at least some aspects of the plan.

The president's proposals, which would expand campus-based federal aid and link it to college affordability, create a "Race to the Top" program for higher education, and require colleges to disclose more consumer information, were outlined in his speech on Friday at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and in a news release from the White House.

College officials and student-aid experts were particularly curious to learn more about the proposal to tie campus-based aid—a small fraction of federal aid spending, which is dominated by Stafford Student Loans and the Pell Grant program—to tuition policy, value, and the enrollment and graduation of low-income students. The idea that some federal student aid would be based on holding down net tuition and/or tuition growth could be particularly troubling for public colleges, which have been increasing their price tags to help make up for cuts in state appropriations.

"I question whether there's an understanding of why tuition goes up at public universities," said Shirley A. Ort, associate provost and director of scholarships and student aid at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The link between tuition and state support is often lost on the public, she said.

Public universities have a responsibility to educate students who can't afford to go elsewhere, said Sarah Bauder, assistant vice president for enrollment services and student financial aid at the University of Maryland at College Park, but that is hardly their only charge. Ms. Bauder's university can only cut costs so far without limiting its ability to help fight Maryland's brain drain, she said.

The campus-based aid programs—Federal Work-Study, Federal Supplemental Educational Opportunity Grants, and Perkins Loans—are distributed to colleges based on a formula that favors original participants in the programs. It's hardly a great system, said Sandy Baum, an independent higher-education-policy analyst who also blogs for The Chronicle.

Still, linking these programs to college affordability could be problematic, especially for public colleges and their students. Ultimately, a student could miss out on those federal financial-aid programs because she had the misfortune to live and attend college in a state where the higher-education system is raising prices to make up for budget cuts.

The amount of money at stake—the president's plan suggests putting a total of $10-billion into campus-based aid annually—is not enough to change states' budget priorities, Ms. Baum said.

Mark Kantrowitz, a student-aid expert who publishes the Web sites FinAid and Fastweb, agrees. This kind of incentive could have an influence, he said, "but there may be some colleges who have no choice but to opt out of it." As public colleges try to patch up their budgets, extra aid in these programs pales in comparison with what they could bring in by increasing tuition.

Another proposal focused on reining in costs would create a $55-million pot of money to support individual colleges and nonprofit groups in efforts to improve productivity on campuses. That idea surprised Kathy Kurz, partner in Scannell & Kurz, a consulting firm specializing in enrollment management. "I find it very hard to believe colleges aren't already working very hard on that," she said.

The president's plan also includes several proposals for bolstering specific aid programs. It suggests holding the interest rate on subsidized Stafford loans—scheduled to return to 6.8 percent this summer—to 3.4 percent. The plan also calls for doubling, over five years, the number of Work-Study jobs available, and making the American Opportunity Tax Credit, which gives a tax credit for some of the cost of tuition, permanent, among other expansions in aid.

Reactions to those proposals are mixed.

Ms. Ort said that holding down the interest rate would help borrowers repay their loans at a time when "the future just doesn't look quite as bright right now for a lot of our graduates."

Mr. Kantrowitz, on the other hand, said keeping the interest rate low would have little effect on the administration's broader goals: "Nobody goes to college because they got a 3.4-percent interest rate," he said, and "no one graduates from college because they got a 3.4-percent interest rate."

Holding the interest rate down would be wonderful, said Diane Lambert Fleming, associate director of the office of scholarships and financial aid at Central Michigan University. The problem, she said, is that the interest rate typically helps pay for the Pell Grant program, and if push comes to shove, preserving Pell Grants is more important than reducing the cost of student borrowing. President Obama's plan mentions increasing the maximum Pell Grant to $5,635, but the program, often seen as the highest financial-aid priority, has been increasingly expensive and difficult to pay for.

Ms. Ort also likes the idea of expanding Work-Study. "We see a real uptick in the number of students who want Work-Study jobs," she said. Participating in the program not only helps students pay for college, she said, but can also boost their résumés and give them an edge in the job market later.

Work-Study is generally seen as a program in which everyone wins, said Ms. Kurz. Research shows working on campus can even help with student retention, she said. "That, in my mind, is one of the most important things that's been proposed."

But Ms. Baum disagreed. Doubling Work-Study jobs "sounds like a big thing, but it's not," she said. There isn't enough evidence to show if the Work-Study program actually increases job opportunities for students, she said—and ultimately, the federal money subsidizes colleges, not students themselves.

Despite all the uncertainty about how the president's proposals could play out, Ms. Ort found some encouragement in the way college was discussed in the State of the Union address. It was nice, she said, to hear higher education referred to as something worth investing in, not just as an expenditure.

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Febrero 08, 2012

España?: ¿Tendrá su propio SIMCE y semáforo?

La sombra del ‘ranking’ cae sobre la escuela

Habrá pruebas externas para ayudar a los padres a elegir centro
El ejemplo de otros países dice que pueden aumentar las brechas

PILAR ÁLVAREZ / J. A. AUNIÓN, El Pais, Madrid 7 FEB 2012 - 00:40 CET57
http://sociedad.elpais.com/sociedad/2012/02/06/vidayartes/1328552848_703017.html

Evaluación externa en la Comunidad de Madrid a los alumnos de primaria en 2008. / PAULA VILLAR

La competición como base para mejorar los resultados de las escuelas. Esta es la dirección a la que apuntan algunas propuestas que ha empezado a desgranar el nuevo ministro de Educación, José Ignacio Wert. Se celebrarán “pruebas externas” a todos los alumnos de todos los centros. Sus resultados servirán para fijar las políticas públicas, para premiar a los que tengan mejores resultados, tanto centros como estudiantes, y también para orientar las decisiones de los padres, para que puedan elegir centro según los resultados de cada escuela.

Un portavoz del ministerio asegura que, de momento, se están estudiando los detalles, así que no puede decir si se publicarán los resultados centro a centro, lo que acaba inevitablemente componiendo clasificaciones de escuelas. Desde luego, el documento que presentó en 2010 el PP para el fracasado pacto educativo hablaba claramente de exámenes a todos los alumnos al final de primaria y secundaria, cuyos “resultados de cada centro, en su conjunto, serán públicos”.

Este planteamiento se lleva discutiendo más de dos décadas en todo el mundo y en los distintos países que se ha implementado, como Chile o Inglaterra, cuenta con firmes defensores que aseguran que la elección de centro por parte de los padres, acompañada de información sobre los resultados de las escuelas, y de incentivos según esos resultados, son los ingredientes infalibles para mejorar la educación. Sin embargo, estas ideas también cuentan con infatigables detractores que aseguran que lejos de mejorar los resultados educativos como prometen, tienen efectos perversos que ahondan las brechas educativas entre los sectores acomodados y los desfavorecidos.

La Comunidad de Madrid puso en marcha en 2005 un sistema similar, que ha sido muy criticado
En España ya ha habido una prueba de este sistema. En la Comunidad de Madrid, el Gobierno dirigido por Esperanza Aguirre instauró en 2005 un examen externo de evaluación para los centros educativos públicos, privados y concertados que ha evolucionado rodeado de polémica. Es la prueba de conocimientos y destrezas indispensables (CDI). Comenzó por los alumnos de 6º de primaria, se amplió a los estudiantes de 3º de Educación Secundaria Obligatoria y, desde el curso pasado, también a los escolares de 2º de primaria.

La evaluación, en la que no puntúan los alumnos de educación compensatoria, incluye pruebas de lengua castellana, matemáticas y cultura general. La Consejería de Educación de Madrid, que dirige Lucía Figar, flirteó con la idea de incluir los resultados en la nota final de cada alumno en “el centro que libremente quisiera”, pero finalmente se ha mantenido como una prueba externa sin valor en el expediente académico que las familias consultan, como un dato más, a la hora de elegir el centro.

Paloma, una madrileña con dos hijas de cinco y siete años, consultó la lista para ver “qué colegios estaban los primeros y cuáles los últimos”. “No me fío del todo de la prueba, porque no sé cómo se hace, pero nunca llevaría a las niñas a uno de los que aparezcan al final”, admite. Se decidió por un colegio privado “que estaba entre los 100 primeros”. Carmen del Arco, con dos hijos de 4 y 13 años, eligió el centro para el mayor antes de que existieran las pruebas. Es un concertado del distrito de Carabanchel, al sur de Madrid. Revisa periódicamente esas notas. “Si el colegio sacara muy mal resultado, me plantearía llevar a los chicos a otro sitio”.

“Si el colegio sacara muy mala nota, me plantearía llevarles a otro”, asegura una madre
 
 
Tras los primeros exámenes de 2005 (que suspendió uno de cada tres alumnos y uno de cada cinco centros) la consejería facilitó la lista completa de las notas medias de los 1.153 colegios. Oposición y sindicatos denunciaron un “uso político” de los resultados, que fueron mejores en los centros concertados y privados que para la educación pública.

Sindicatos y federación de padres amenazaron con boicotear la prueba, que ha perdurado con amplia contestación desde entonces. El Defensor del Pueblo llegó a reclamar, tras una denuncia de IU, que no se hicieran públicos sus resultados y pidió a la consejería que adoptara “cuantas medidas” fueran necesarias en la custodia y difusión de los resultados para evitar que se establecieran listas o comparaciones. Profesores del Movimiento de Renovación Pedagógica llamaron también al boicoteo. El examen es “técnicamente impresentable”, dijeron, porque no incluye valoraciones del contexto, ni tiene en cuenta los recursos de los centros ni la composición del alumnado.

El colegio con la mejor nota de 2011 es un centro público de la capital, el colegio Méjico. Es un centro de integración para alumnos con problemas motores y tiene un 25% de estudiantes extranjeros. Sus calificaciones en la prueba CDI han aumentado con las sucesivas evaluaciones. En 2008, se quedó por debajo del aprobado con un 4,04; en 2009, obtuvo un notable (7,21) que raspó en 2010 (6,75). Y, en el último curso, sus alumnos sacaron de media un flamante 9,89 que le llevó al primer lugar. La directora, Almudena Armijo, explica que la evolución se debe fundamentalmente “al importante esfuerzo y trabajo” de alumnos y docentes.

“No se deben fiar solo de la fama porque cambia”, señala una directora
Los profesores del colegio Méjico se apuntaron a cursos de matemáticas que ofertaba el Ministerio de Educación tras los primeros resultados “para aprender con materiales nuevos”, hicieron una inversión en libros y practican con preguntas de exámenes anteriores durante las semanas de la ciencia y las matemáticas. Todo, asegura, sin ayuda de la Administración. “Quedar en el número uno no significa que otros colegios no trabajen, pero chapó por los centros públicos, que han salido muy bien este año”. Entre los 100 primeros hubo 43 públicos, 33 concertados y 24 privados. Armijo admite que también hay una cuestión de suerte. “El puesto en el que quedes depende de la promoción de alumnos de cada curso, hay mucho trabajo detrás aunque acabes el 500º de la lista”.

La directora del Méjico ha visto en los últimos meses cómo se acercan más padres a su centro para interesarse por las plazas disponibles. “Está bien que consulten la nota como un dato más, pero no se deben fiar solo de la fama, porque cambia”. Armijo recomienda a los padres que se informen preguntando a otras familias, acudiendo a las jornadas de puertas abiertas del colegio y les pide que consideren como un punto positivo más a la hora de elegir que en su centro los chicos conviven con compañeros en sillas de ruedas desde los tres años. “Estos alumnos enseñan al resto valores de superación”.

Otra duda que ha surgido en la trayectoria de la prueba madrileña es el riesgo de que las escuelas intenten maquillar datos dejando en casa a los alumnos con peores resultados académicos. La Comunidad de Madrid encargó en 2010 un estudio sobre la prueba CDI al catedrático de Economía Antonio Cabrales, autor del informe Los determinantes del éxito en la educación primaria en España. El autor alertó de que uno de los peligros que le comunicaron los profesores sobre la fiabilidad de este examen es que hay colegios “que animan a sus peores estudiantes a no presentarse”. Educación anunció entonces que informaría del número de alumnos absentistas al facilitar los resultados. Las listas de los resultados desde 2008 de las pruebas de 6º de Primaria se pueden consultar en la web oficial de la Comunidad de Madrid desde finales de 2011, pero ese dato aún no figura entre la información a disposición del público.

Sus defensores dicen que la competencia tira de todo el sistema hacia arriba
En todo caso, la pregunta es si los resultados de Madrid son mejores. Aunque aún es quizá pronto para hablar del impacto de estas pruebas, lo cierto es que Madrid fue la comunidad que mejor resultado obtuvo en lectura en la prueba Pisa 2009 (el informe de la OCDE que mide el aprendizaje en medio centenar de países), pero también resultó la tercera (por delante de La Rioja y Asturias), donde más influye el contexto socioeconómico y cultural del alumno en sus resultados.

En el verano de 2010, el Programa de Promoción de la Reforma Educativa en América Latina y el Caribe (PREAL) hizo un repaso al debate sobre la publicación de las evaluaciones externas. Habla de sus orígenes, hace más de dos décadas, y lo enlaza con la corriente de pensamiento neoliberal estadounidense conocida como Escuela de Chicago, aunque recuerda también que el instituto de evaluación educativa de Estados Unidos (NAEP, en sus siglas en inglés) tiene prohibido por ley publicar los resultados por escuelas de las pruebas externas.

También se repasan los argumentos a favor de esas ideas. El "derecho de las familias" a llevar "a sus hijos a las escuelas con mejores resultados”, lo que empujaría al resto de escuelas a mejorar; el derecho de las familias a tener información sobre la educación que están recibiendo sus hijos, lo que les permitiría exigir mejoras a los centros; y la promoción de la participación y el control ciudadano en el ámbito del sistema educativo.

Tras casi dos décadas con el modelo, Chile apenas ha mejorado
 
 
Pero la experiencia en países como Chile, continúa el texto, habla de pocos resultados positivos pero algunos muy negativos. “Los estudios realizados en Chile muestran que, aun cuando las familias de mejor posición económica tienen mayor conocimiento de los resultados, casi no los toman en cuenta a la hora de elegir escuela para sus hijos”, y, además, “luego de casi dos décadas implementando esta estrategia, los resultados han mejorado poco”. Y, por el contrario, el sistema “puede generar desmotivación en los centros educativos que aparecen sistemáticamente en posiciones inferiores (sobre todo si dicha situación se deriva de un inadecuado tratamiento de la información, como ocurre en el caso de los semáforos chilenos)”, añade el texto del PREAL.

El sistema de semáforos, ahora en revisión por la fuerte polémica suscitada, consistía en etiquetar públicamente a los colegios e institutos como verdes, amarillos o rojos, según sus resultados estuvieran por encima, al nivel o por debajo de la nota media en las pruebas SIMCE, las evaluaciones externas nacionales que se hacen y publican en el país andino desde mediados de los años noventa. Un modelo que ha empujado a la “privatización” del sistema, según un trabajo de 2005 del Observatorio Chileno de Políticas Educativas. Aunque finalmente no se usa mucho el SIMCE para elegir escuela, sí ha “ido imponiendo un sentido común que nos impulsa a querer que nuestros niños estudien en establecimientos particulares subvencionados [concertados], donde podrán conocer a otros niños de un estatus socioeconómico un poco mayor que en uno municipalizado [público]”.

En muchas ocasiones, las Administraciones hacen públicos los resultados y son los medios de comunicación los que confeccionan, a partir de ellos, las clasificaciones de escuelas, generales, por zonas, de los 100 primeros colegios... Esos rankings han sido muy criticados “por no controlar resultados por origen socioeconómico de los alumnos, de tal modo que el 90% de los colegios entre los 100 mejores son privados pagados, mientras el (pobre) resto son privados subvencionados y unos pocos municipales”, explicaba hace un año para el caso chileno el exministro de Educación del país José Joaquín Brunner.

Los centros se acaban centrando únicamente en los mejores alumnos, dice un especialista sobre el caso inglés
Sin embargo, esas evaluaciones, continuaba, sí contienen otras tablas que tienen en cuenta la dependencia del colegio (público, privado o concertado) o el origen socioeconómico de la población estudiantil. La gran crítica a los semáforos fue que, teniendo toda esa información, la Administración optara “por mostrar valores brutos sin intentar alguna otra (cualquiera) forma de mostrar valor agregado por escuela”.

El documento del PP para el pacto educativo de 2010 especificaba que “se evaluará el valor que añade cada centro, es decir, el avance o progreso real que promueve en sus alumnos, tomando en consideración su nivel socioeconómico y sociocultural”. Pero incluso en países como Inglaterra, donde se han sofisticado los resultados con ranking de ese “valor añadido”, los problemas siguen presentes. “Los políticos lanzan estas ideas que, en principio, suenan muy bien, pero sus consecuencias en el sistema inglés han sido contradictorias: las escuelas se ven forzadas a concentrar todos sus esfuerzos en los contenidos de las evaluaciones; en los grupos de alumnos concretos que harán que sus estadísticas mejoren, sacrificando, bajo mi punto de vista, un trato equitativo a los alumnos”, asegura el especialista Warwick Mansell, autor del libro Education by numbers, una crítica a la educación volcada en resultados estadísticos. “No culpo a las escuelas por comportarse así, pese crea un sistema basado en la desconfianza que empuja a los centros a pensar en cómo serán vistos desde fuera en vez de pensar en lo que ocurre en el interior de sus clases”, sigue Mansell.

En el eterno camino de ida y vuelta que parece ser la política educativa, en España ahora toca la competencia. ¿Será para mejor o para peor? Depende de cuál sea el objetivo y, sobre todo, de cómo se mida.

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Febrero 07, 2012

Evaluación de la prensa "anglo" sobre temas de educación superior

Excelente ensayo académico-periodístico sobre las fallas y los males de los reportajes de prensa dedicados a los temas de la educación superior. Construido como un hipertexto que permite a la vez seguir el hilo de razonamiento de la autora, Mellonie Fullik, como visitar los textos analizados. Publicado en Inside HigherED del 17 de febrero de 2012.

Bio

Melonie Fullick is currently a Ph.D. student at Canada's York University, working on research in postsecondary education, policy, and governance. She is a regular contributor at University of Venus and can be found in virtual space on Twitter [@qui_oui] and at Speculative Diction at University Affairs.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2012/01/17/essay-flawed-commentary-higher-education-during-2011#ixzz1l47HScIw
Inside Higher Ed

M. Fullick publica habitualmente en University Affairs (Canada)

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Febrero 06, 2012

¿Publicar o sucumbir?

Breve nota sobre publicaciones científicas de corta extensión y que buscan golpear al lector: riesgos en una cultura de publicar (mucho y sensacional) o morir.

Bite-Size Science, False Positives, and Citation Amnesia

Chronicle of Higher Education, January 3, 2012, 1:58 pm

By Tom Bartlett

There are good things about short psychology papers. They’re easier to edit and review, not to mention less time-consuming to write. A short paper on a CV looks just as impressive as a long one. Also, a short paper is more likely to be noticed by reporters with little to no attention span—especially if the result is interestingly contrarian—and thus bring the researcher widespread acclaim and riches. Or at least a mention in some blog.

The downside is that they tend to be wrong, at least according to a short paper titled “Bite-Size Science and Its Undesired Side Effects.” That’s because, the authors write, short papers often include experiments with smaller sample sizes, which have a higher probability of false positives. They’re more likely to suffer from “citation amnesia,” that is, the omission of previous studies that might provide context. These get left out because authors are trying to keep it tight and snappy but also because “a finding is bound to sound more newsworthy when the discussion of previous relevant work is less detailed.”

The authors lay some of the blame on journal editors. From the paper:

One of the authors has received correspondence from Psychological Science saying that they hope to find manuscripts that “report new discoveries that will make our readership sit up and take notice.” These, a priori, are more likely to be false positives (Ioannidis, 2005). Flukes tend to meet this criterion by their nature (they are surprising and different from what other people tend to find). In part this is unavoidable, but what is relevant here is that bite-size articles make this problem worse. We are all aware of the need for results to be replicated. Long articles with multiple experiments show whether an effect can be replicated and supported by converging evidence.

What to do about it? The authors point out that in genetic-association studies “independent replication in the same study is now a requirement for publication in many high-quality journals.”

In the interest of citing previous relevant work, I should note that this Chris Shea article from a little while back covers some of the same territory. Also, there’s this recent piece on fast-food scholarship.

(The paper, published in the current issue of Perspectives on Psychological Science, is not online, but a press releases can be found here [ver más bajo]. The authors are Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool and Marcus Munafò of the University of Bristol.)

PRESS RELEASE
December 28, 2011
For Immediate Release
Contact: Lucy Hyde
Association for Psychological Science
202.293.9300
lhyde@psychologicalscience.org

The perils of ‘bite-size’ science

Short, fast, and frequent: Those 21st-century demands on publication have radically changed the news, politics, and culture—for the worse, many say. Now an article in January’s Perspectives on Psychological Science, a journal published by the Association for Psychological Science, aims a critique at a similar trend in psychological research. The authors, psychologists Marco Bertamini of the University of Liverpool and Marcus Munafò of the University of Bristol, call it “bite-size science”—papers based on one or a few studies and small samples.

“We’re not against concision,” says Bertamini. “But there are real risks in this trend toward shorter papers. The main risk is the increased rates of false alarms that are likely to be associated with papers based on less data.”

The article dispatches several claimed advantages of shorter papers. Proponents say they’re easier to read. Perhaps, say the authors, but more articles mean more to keep up with, more reviewing and editing—not less work. Proponents laud the increased influence authors gain from more citations. Precisely, say the two—but two short papers do not equal twice the scientific value of a longer one. Indeed, they might add up to less.

The reason: The smaller the experimental sample the greater the statistical deviations—that is, the greater the inaccuracy of the findings. The results are sometimes flukes, with a bias toward false positives—errors a wider ranging study with multiple experiments, plus replication in the same and in other labs, could correct. Strict word limits, moreover, mean cutting the details about previous research. The new results sound not only surprising but also novel. Write the authors: “A bit of ignorance helps in discovering ‘new’ things.”

These surprising, “novel” results are exactly what editors find exciting and newsworthy and what even the best journals seek to publish, say the authors. The mainstream media pick up the “hot” stories. And the wrong results proliferate.

“Scientists are skeptics by training,” says Bertamini. But the trend toward bite-size science leaves no time or space for that crucial caution. And that, argue the authors, is antithetical to good science.

----------------------------

For more information about this study, please contact: Marco Bertamini at m.bertamini@liverpool.ac.uk.

Perspectives on Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information. It publishes an eclectic mix of thought-provoking articles on the latest important advances in psychology. For a copy of the article "Bite-size science and its undesired side effects" and access to other Perspectives on Psychological Science research findings, please contact Lucy Hyde at 202-293-9300 or lhyde@psychologicalscience.org.

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Febrero 05, 2012

Aumenta el prestigio de la profesion docente

ESTUDIO ADIMARK-ELIGE EDUCAR: AUMENTA INTERÉS DE LOS JÓVENES POR SER PROFESOR

El sondeo detectó que en el segmento entre los 18 y 24 años la motivación por estudiar carreras relacionadas con la educación supera a Ingeniería Comercial, iguala a Ingeniería Civil y se acerca a Medicina.
Viernes 3 de febrero de 2012| por Nación.cl
http://www.lanacion.cl/estudio-adimark-elige-educar-aumenta-interes-de-los-jovenes-por-ser-profesor/noticias/2012-02-03/114122.html

Un estudio de Adimark y Elige Educar detectó un aumento de la valoración social de los jóvenes de la carrera pedagógica y los profesores.

El sondeo refleja un importante cambio respecto al resultado de la 1° medición de esta naturaleza que se hizo en 2009.

Al analizar la evolución del interés por ser profesor, en los 2 años en que se realiza esta encuesta, destaca un aumento importante pasando de un 48% a un 58%.

Este incremento es aún mayor en  los jóvenes entre 18 y 24 años, en los que se observa que el interés por estudiar carreras de educación aumenta desde un 38% interesado en diciembre de 2009 a un 59% en la medición de diciembre de 2011.

El aumento es también de gran escala en el grupo de entre 25 a 35 años, donde sube del 38% a un 53%.

INTERÉS DEL GRUPO ABC1
Según se indicó, aun cuando las personas provenientes del grupo ABC1 presentan menor interés hacia el estudio de carreras del área de la educación que las de los otros grupos socioeconómicos, al comparar con los períodos anteriores se observa un aumento significativo en el interés manifestado por ellos.
Mientras en diciembre 2009 sólo un 37% dijo estar interesado o muy interesado, esta cifra ascendió a 50% en la última medición.
La medición reveló también un aumento en el  interés en los jóvenes provenientes del grupo C2 donde se observa un incremento de 47% a 51%  y el C3 de 49% a 56%.
SATISFACCIÓN POR RESULTADO
Hernán Hochschild, coordinador Ejecutivo Elige Educar, dijo que “el año pasado no fue fácil en lo referente a la educación, por esto nos sentimos doblemente orgullosos con las cifras positivas que ha entregado este estudio, donde se está considerando al profesor como el elemento clave para  mejorar de la educación. La ciudadanía, y especialmente los jóvenes, se han dado cuenta que sin buenos profesores es imposible mejorar la calidad del sistema educativo”.
Al observar el interés de estudiar Educación, versus seguir otras carreras, se observa por primera vez una cercanía entre Pedagogía y otras profesiones de alta valoración.

En los jóvenes entre 18 a 24 estudiar Educación supera el interés por la Ingeniería Comercial, iguala a Ingeniería Civil y se acerca a Medicina.

ÍNDICE ELIGE EDUCAR
El Índice Elige Educar, compuesto por un indicador de valoración docente y un indicador de perspectiva laboral de los profesores, ha sufrido también un cambio muy importante desde 2009 a la fecha, pasando de 57 a 59.

Según se indicó, lo más interesante de este aumento ha sido el comportamiento de las variables que lo componen. Mientras el subíndice de valoración pasó de 66 a 75, el de perspectiva laboral bajó de 47 a 43, lo que muestra la importancia de mejorar las condiciones laborales de los profesores.

“Si queremos que la valoración social del profesor siga aumentando es indispensable mejorar sus perspectivas laborales. Es por esto que es urgente el desarrollo de una carrera docente, que permita equiparar las condiciones laborales de los profesores con la de otros profesionales de carreras altamente valoradas”, afirmó Hochschild.

Sobre si es un orgullo de ser profesor en Chile, actualmente un 56% de la población considera que esto es efectivo. En diciembre 2009 sólo un 47% pensaba de igual forma.

Si se comparan los extremos de los segmentos socioeconómicos, se puede observar que actualmente un 52% del segmento ABC1 cree que es un orgullo ser profesor en Chile, mientras que en la medición realizada en diciembre 2009 la cifra era 39%. Este aumento también se produce en el segmento D, donde la cifra ha aumentado de 45% a 64%.
FICHA TÉCNICA
La encuesta consideró la opinión de 1.114 hombres y mujeres, mayores de 18 años, de todos los segmentos socioeconómicos, residentes en los principales centros urbanos de las 15 regiones del país.

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Alaza de aranceles y su impacto en la demanda por educación superior

Interesante reflexión tomada del Blog de Alex Uscher sobre el cobro de aranceles y su impacto sobre el recultamienbto de alumnos, tomando pie en el caso del fuerte alza de aranceles en Inglaterra.(Al final, ver traducción automática de Google)

U.K. Tuition Fees: Early Results Are In

Alex Usher, January 31, 2012

Unless you've been in a cave for the last 18 months, you've probably heard that the U.K. government is overhauling policies on student fees and government support in England and Wales (Scotland has its own arrangements). Public support for arts and social science students was eliminated, institutional grants were cut by 41% and, most strikingly, the limit on tuition fees was raised from £3,350/year to £9,000/year.

Since announcing the broad outlines of the policy fifteen months ago, the Cameron government has gone through some fairly bizarre twists and turns on certain details of the funding and tuition policies. At the end of the day, though, the final average tuition for the coming year came to £8,354, or about a 150% increase from last year.

For those of us who watch tuition fees for a living, this was a big experiment. Data from the competitive environment of the United States tends to show that even small changes in tuition fees can have significant effects on institutional enrolment, though usually through shifts from one institution to another rather than on aggregate enrolment. Large across-the-board tuition increases which affect the minimum price for all forms of higher education, on the other hand, presumably have more severe effects. But these are rarer and harder to observe, so this one-time "big-bang" in the UK seems like an ideal opportunity to examine the pure effects of a tuition hike.

Well, final application data was released yesterday. Among 18 year-olds, this £5,000 (roughly $8,000) tuition increase has lowered applicant levels by just 3.6%, or about 8,000 students. Among older students - who tend to have less time to earn back their investments in higher education - the effect was significantly larger (on the order of 11%). Now, even a single student turned away for financial reasons is too many. But if an $8,000 net tuition increase only generates a net impact of less than 3% on traditional-aged students, and only 7% overall, that strongly suggests that tuition fees are not, on their own, a major deterrent to study.

So the next time someone suggest that the $250 tuition fee increase your institution is planning might have major effects on enrolment, there's a simple reply. Such an increase would be 1/32nd of what was introduced in England and Wales. Assuming linear effects, a $250 increase might therefore be expected to reduce overall enrolments by between 0.2% and 0.25%. On an incoming class of, say, 3,000 undergraduates, that's between six and eight students. We'd guess it's not beyond anyone's wit to design some student aid to offset that kind of effect.

U.K. tuition policy isn't something we'd endorse, but clearly it's not as harmful as some would lead us to believe, either. Real life's just not that simple.

U.K. Derechos de matrícula: resultados iniciales son

Usher Alex, 31 de enero 2012

A menos que hayas estado en una cueva durante los últimos 18 meses, usted probablemente ha escuchado que el gobierno del Reino Unido está revisando las políticas de cuotas de los estudiantes y el apoyo del gobierno en Inglaterra y Gales (Escocia tiene sus propios mecanismos). El apoyo público a las artes y estudiantes de ciencias sociales fue eliminada, las subvenciones institucionales se redujeron en un 41% y, sorprendentemente, el límite de las tasas de matrícula se elevó de £ 3,350 / año a £ 9,000 / año.

Desde el anuncio de las líneas generales de la política de quince meses, el gobierno de Cameron ha pasado por algunos cambios bastante extraños y se convierte en ciertos detalles de la financiación y las políticas de la matrícula. Al final del día, sin embargo, la matrícula promedio final para el próximo año llegó a £ 8.354, o aproximadamente un incremento del 150% respecto al año pasado.

Para aquellos de nosotros que ven las tasas de matrícula para ganarse la vida, este fue un gran experimento. Los datos de las condiciones de competencia de los Estados Unidos tiende a mostrar que incluso pequeños cambios en las tasas de matrícula puede tener efectos significativos en la matrícula institucional, aunque por lo general a través de cambios de una institución a otra en lugar de en la matrícula total. Grandes a través de-la-junta aumentos en la matrícula que afectan el precio mínimo para todas las formas de la educación superior, por otra parte, es de suponer que los efectos más graves. Pero estos son menos frecuentes y más difíciles de observar, por lo que este de una sola vez "big-bang" en el Reino Unido parece ser una oportunidad ideal para examinar los efectos puros de un alza de la matrícula.

Así, los datos finales solicitud fue dado a conocer ayer. De los 18 años de edad, este aumento de matrícula £ 5,000 (aproximadamente 8.000 dólares) ha bajado los niveles de solicitante con sólo un 3,6%, o alrededor de 8.000 estudiantes. Entre los estudiantes de más edad - que tienden a tener menos tiempo para recuperar su inversión en la educación superior - el efecto fue significativamente mayor (del orden de 11%). Ahora, incluso un solo estudiante rechazado por razones financieras es demasiado. Pero si un aumento de $ 8.000 de matrícula neta sólo genera un impacto neto de menos del 3% en los tradicionales-entre los estudiantes, y sólo un 7% en general, que sugiere que las tasas académicas no son, por sí mismos, una razón importante para el estudio.

Así que la próxima vez que alguien sugiere que la matrícula $ 250 aumento de su institución es la planificación puede tener efectos importantes sobre la inscripción, no hay una respuesta simple. Este incremento podría ser 1/32nd de lo que se introdujo en Inglaterra y Gales. Asumiendo que los efectos lineales, un aumento de $ 250 por lo tanto, podría esperarse que reducir la matrícula en general en un 0,2% y el 0,25%. En una clase de entrada, por ejemplo, 3.000 estudiantes de pregrado, que es entre seis y ocho estudiantes. Nos supongo que no es más allá de saber de nadie para diseñar algunos de ayuda estudiantil para contrarrestar ese tipo de efecto.

Política del Reino Unido de matrícula no es algo que nos avala, pero está claro que no es tan dañina como algunos quieren hacernos creer, tampoco. La vida real no es tan simple.

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Febrero 04, 2012

Ranking de investigadores educacionales de los EEUU según su grado de "presencia pública"

Gregory Elacqua circula la información relativa al ranking de investigadores educacionales en los EEUU según su impacto público, de cuya versión anterior habíamos dado cuenta hace un tiempo. Acompaña la información por la siguiente nota:

Una iniciativa muy interesante de Rick Hess, Director de Education Policy Studies en American Enterprise Institute en Washington DC, de rankear el impacto público de los academicos en EEUU que trabajan en políticas educacionales. Utiliza los siguientes metricas: (1) Puntaje en Google Scholar; (2) Puntaje de libros; (3) Amazon book rating; (4) Menciones en la prensa educacional; (5) Menciones en los blogs; (6) http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/rick_hess_straight_up/2012/01/rhsu_exclusive_the_five-tool_policy_scholar_1.htmlMenciones en los diarios; (6) Menciones en los archivos del Congreso (ej. presentaciones en la comisión de educación). Linda Darling Hammond, Diane Ravitch, Eric Hanushek y Larry Cuban son los top 4. Sería interesante replicar el ranking de Hess en Chile y otros países en América Latina.

Gregory Elacqua
Director
Instituto de Políticas Publicas
Facultad de Economía y Empresa
Universidad Diego Portales

RHSU Exclusive: The Five-Tool Policy Scholar
By Rick Hess, Education Week, on January 3, 2012 7:51 AM

Tomorrow in this space, I'll be publishing the 2012 RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Presence Rankings. Today, just like last year, I want to take a few moments to explain what those ratings are about and how they were generated.

The exercise starts from two simple premises: 1] ideas matter and 2] people tend to devote more time and energy to those activities which are acknowledged and lauded. The academy today does a passable job of recognizing good disciplinary scholarship but a pretty mediocre job of recognizing scholars who effectively help to move ideas from the pages of barely-read journals into the national conversation around schools and schooling. This state of affairs may work fine when it comes to the study of material science or Renaissance poetry, but it doesn't cut it for those wanting to encourage social scientists with something to say to wade responsibly into public debates.

In baseball, the ideal is the "five-tool" ballplayer. This is a player who can run, field, throw, hit, and hit with power. A terrific ballplayer might excel at just a couple of these, but there's a special appreciation for those with a full suite of skills.

Among scholars who do policy-relevant research, there's an analogous need for us to do a much better job appreciating scholars who do more than publish opaque articles in niche journals, sit on committees, and serve as officials in professional associations. To my mind, the engaged policy scholar is a "five-tooler" in her own right.

As I see it, the extraordinary policy scholar excels in five areas: disciplinary scholarship, policy analysis and popular writing, convening and quarterbacking collaborations, providing incisive media commentary, and speaking in the public square. It's the scholars who are skilled in most or all of these areas who can cross boundaries, foster crucial collaborations, and bring research into the world of policy in smart and useful ways. The academy, though, treats many of these skills as an afterthought--if not an outright blemish on a scholar's record! And while foundations fund evaluations, convenings, policy analysis, and dissemination, few make any particular effort to develop multi-skilled scholars or support this whole panoply of activity.

Today, academe offers big professional rewards for scholars who stay in their comfort zone while pursuing narrow, hyper-sophisticated research, but little recognition, acknowledgment, or support for scholars who operate as "five-tool" scholars. One result is that the public square is filled by impassioned advocates, while we hear far less than I'd like from those who are more versed in the research and equipped to recognize complexities and explain hard truths. Now, one can hardly blame those academics who seek to avoid the unpleasantness by remaining swaddled in the pleasant irrelevance of the ivory tower. After all, wading into the public debate can anger friends and call forth vituperative personal attacks. One small way to encourage academics to step into the fray and to push back on the academic norms fueling the status quo is, I think, to do more to recognize the value of engaging in public discourse and the scholars who do so.

With that aim, tomorrow's Edu-Scholar rankings offer one way to gauge whether and how scholars are impacting the public discourse. The scores really reflect three things: the influence of a scholar's articles and academic scholarship, their body of work when it comes to books, and their impact on conversation as reflected in old and new media. Broadly speaking, the scores generally draw about 40 percent on scholarly influence in terms of bodies of work and citation counts, 25 percent on book authorship and current book success, and about 35 percent on presence in new and old media.

Readers will note that the rankings do not address things like teaching, mentoring, and community service. Such is the nature of things. These scores are not imagined as a summative measure of a scholar's contribution to teaching and knowledge. Rather, they are a counterpart to traditional publication-heavy measures of research productivity. Those results tell us something, but don't offer much insight into how scholars in a field of public concern are influencing thinking and the national discourse. These results are designed to say more on that score.

The RHSU Edu-Scholar Public Presence Scoring Rubric

We opted to employ metrics that are publicly available, readily comparable, and replicable by third parties. This obviously limits the nuance and sophistication of the measures. The scoring is determined as follows:

Google Scholar Score: This figure gauges the number of articles, books, or papers a scholar has authored that are widely cited. A neat, commonly used technique for measuring breadth and impact is to tally the scholar's works in descending order of how often each is cited, and then to identify the point at which the number of works is finally exceeded by the cite count for the least-frequently cited article. For instance, a scholar who had 10 works that were each cited at least 10 times, but whose 11th most-frequently cited work was cited just 9 times, would score a ten. A scholar who had 27 works cited at least 50 times, but whose 28th work was cited 27 times or fewer, would receive a 27. An assistant professor will typically have a number in the low single digits, while veteran scholars may score a 40 or higher. This reflects the fact that bodies of work matter, by influencing what others think and how issues are understood. By design, this bias favors veteran scholars. The search was conducted on December 20-21, 2011, using the scholar's name under the "author" filter in an advanced search in Google Scholar, with the search limited to the "Business, Administration, Finance, and Economics" and "Social Sciences, Arts, and Humanities" categories. A hand-search culled out works by other, similarly named, individuals. While Google Scholar has its flaws and is less precise than more specialized citation databases for such a search, it has the virtues of being multidisciplinary and publicly accessible. This category ultimately counted the most--amounting to between 25 percent and 60 percent of the score for most scholars--as it's a quick way to gauge both the expanse and influence of a scholar's body of work.

Book Points: An author search on Amazon was used to tally the number of books a scholar had authored, co-authored, or edited. Scholars received 2 points for a single-authored book, 1 point for a co-authored book in which they were the lead author, a half-point for co-authored books where they were not the lead author, and a half-point for any edited volume. The search was conducted using an "Advanced Books Search" for the scholar's first and last name. (On a few occasions, a middle initial or middle name was used to avoid duplications with authors who had the same name, e.g. "David Cohen" became "David K. Cohen," and "Deborah Ball" became "Deborah Loewenberg Ball.") The "format" searched "Printed Books" so as to avoid double-counting books which are also available as e-books. This obviously means that books released only as e-books are omitted. However, circa 2011, that seemed a modest price to avoid double-counting and to maximize accuracy (given that very few relevant books, as of yet, are released only as e-books; this is likely to change in fairly short order.) In each category, a hand-search sought to guard against double-counting and to ensure an accurate score. Amazon-available reports and articles were excluded, as was any source listed as "out of print"--only published, available books were included. The search was conducted December 20-21. The high score in this category was 37.5, but most scholars scored between zero and 20.

Highest Amazon Ranking: The author's highest-ranked book on Amazon, as of December 20-21. The highest-ranked book was subtracted from 400,000, and that figure was divided by 20,000 to derive a point total of somewhere between zero and 20. This score, due to the nature of Amazon's ranking algorithm, is fairly volatile and biased in favor of more recent works. For instance, a book may have been very influential in the 1990s, impacting citation counts and the likelihood that a scholar is quoted in newspapers, but may not produce points in this category in 2011. The result is a decidedly imperfect way to gauge the impact of books, but one that conveys real information. To that point, many of the books that have stoked public discussion in the past few years fared relatively well. About a third of the scholars examined, including fifteen of the top twenty, scored points in this category.

Education Press Mentions: The total number of times the scholar was quoted or mentioned in Education Week or the Chronicle of Higher Education between January 1 and December 20-21. The search was conducted using each scholar's first and last name. To norm the value of this category, the total number of appearances was divided by 2 to calculate Ed Press points. Scores in this category ranged from zero to 41.5, with most falling between zero and ten.

Blog Mentions: Based on a search using Google Blogs, this reflects the number of times a scholar was quoted, mentioned, or otherwise discussed in blogs between January 1 and December 20-21. The search was conducted using each scholar's name, plus their affiliation (e.g. "Bill Smith" and "Rutgers"). Requiring university affiliation serves a dual purpose: avoiding confusion due to common names while ensuring that scores aren't padded by a scholar's blog posts (which generally don't identify a scholar by affiliation). If bloggers are provoking discussion, the figures will reflect that. If a scholar is mentioned sans affiliation, that mention is omitted here; but that's true across-the-board. If anything, that probably tamps down the scores of well-known scholars for whom university affiliation may seem unnecessary. Especially since the Ravitches, Hanusheks, Arums, and Darling-Hammonds still fare just fine, I'm good with that. Because blogging can tend towards the informal, the blog search also included the most common diminutive for a given scholar (e.g., "Rick Hanushek" as well as "Eric Hanushek;" "Pat McGuinn" as well as "Patrick McGuinn"). To norm the value of this category, points were calculated by dividing the total number of mentions by four. We also chose to cap the scores at 50 points to ensure that the rankings recognize impactful contributions without allowing the blog metric to overwhelm the other metrics. Twelve scholars hit the 50 point cap, but the vast majority of scholars scored between zero and 20.

Newspaper Mentions: Based on a search using Lexis Nexis, the number of times a scholar was quoted or mentioned in U.S. newspapers between January 1 and December 20-21. Like Blog Mentions, the search was conducted using each scholar's name plus their affiliation. To norm the value of this category, points were calculated by dividing the total number of mentions by four. Scores ranged from zero to 26.8, with most falling between zero and ten.

Congressional Record Mentions: We conducted a simple name search in the Congressional Record for 2011 to determine whether a given scholar was called to testify or if their work was referenced by a member of Congress. The reference or testimony had to have occurred on or before December 21. If a scholar was included in either capacity, they received five points in this category.

There are obviously lots of provisos in making sense of the results. Different disciplines approach books and articles differently. Scholars of K-12 and higher education may have different opportunities to engage in the public square. Senior scholars have obviously had more of a chance to build a body of work.

Moreover, some readers may have more use for some of these categories than for others. That's fine. The whole point is to encourage discussion and debate about the nature of responsible public engagement, who's doing a particularly good job of it, how much these things matter, and how to accurately measure a policy scholar's contribution.

Two questions sure to arise: Can somebody game this rubric? Am I concerned that this exercise will encourage academics to chase publicity? As for gaming, I'm not at all concerned. If scholars (against all odds) are motivated to write more relevant articles, pen more books that might sell, or be more aggressive about communicating their ideas and research in an accessible fashion, I think that's great. That's not "gaming," it's just good public scholarship. As for academics working harder to communicate beyond the academy--well, there's obviously a point where public engagement becomes sleazy P.R., but most academics are so immensely far from there that I'm not unduly concerned.

A final note. Tomorrow's rankings will feature 121 university-based edu-scholars who are widely regarded as having some public presence. However, this list is not intended to be exhaustive. There are many other faculty addressing public questions of education or education policy, and some of them may grade out quite highly on these metrics. Tomorrow's scores are for a prominent cross-section of faculty, from various disciplines, institutions, generations, and areas of inquiry. For those interested in scoring additional scholars, it should be straightforward to do so using the rubric sketched above. Indeed, the exercise was designed so that anyone with an Internet connection can generate a comparative rating for a given scholar in no more than 15-20 minutes. (At this end, for his assiduous labor and invaluable advice on how to pull this together, I owe a big shout-out to my indefatigable and eagle-eyed research assistant, Daniel Lautzenheiser. I also want to give a shout-out to his colleagues Becky King and Taryn Hochleitner).

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Febrero 03, 2012

Internacionalización puesta en duda tambien en el norte

The Case Against Internationalization
The Chronicle of Higher Education, February 2, 2012, 3:23 pm
http://chronicle.com/blogs/planet/2012/02/02/the-case-against-internationalization/?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

By David Wheeler

Is internationalization becoming too popular? When ideas become too popular, then academics, despite their feisty image, are less willing to dissent. Associate deans or assistant professors have plenty of their own battles to fight, like getting their share of the budget or winning tenure. When they see the internationalization theme sweeping across campus, they resign themselves to yet another academic fad. They keep their head below the parapet, quietly focusing on their own or their departments’ interests. Being against internationalization may look like being against diversity: a highly risky personal proposition.

The nature of the discussion about internationalization often depends on which side of the Atlantic it occurs. (I’ll save the trans-Pacific differences for another day.) Europeans sometimes talk about the “end of internationalization.” In the debates I have witnessed, the theory is that internationalization has moved out of international offices to all of the other academic and administrative offices on campuses, and thus international offices can be closed down.

But the view in the United States is very different. Some international higher-education consultants avoid working for American universities altogether, in the belief that U.S. universities aren’t serious about internationalization, with miniscule budgets and no one on the senior-leadership teams who represents the global perspective. In this view, the “beginning of internationalization” would be a more appropriate topic at many U.S. institutions, where internationalization is often mentioned but frequently not practiced.

Amid all of this discussion, the opinion that internationalization may be unwise altogether is rarely voiced. So here is a devil’s-advocate view on internationalization, offered up tongue-in-cheek. In particular, here are four reasons for an institution not to internationalize:

Internationalization eats up resources, including time and money. At some point in meaningful internationalization, video conferences and phone calls don’t work anymore, and face-to-face meetings become essential. On overseas trips, academics don’t just lose the time when they are away from their jobs on the home campus. They are distracted before they go by the extra logistical details and jet-lagged when they get back. No matter how much mental or physical stamina someone has, travel takes a personal toll, which means it ultimately takes an institutional toll.

Internationalization requires long-term thinking, and that is hard to come by in academe, because of dependence on governments. While many an academic administrator has crafted a long-term strategic plan, federal and state legislatures, economic cycles, natural disasters, and any number of other unexpected events tend to turn those plans upside down. They are not always redrawn. When disasters hit and money is tight, internationalization is often the first victim.

But there are exceptions. While some international academics have a quarrel with Singapore’s policies on such matters as freedom of speech, the Singaporean government kept spending on its universities right through the global financial crisis. U.S. state legislatures tend not to have the same kind of budgets or guts.

Internationalization requires institutional commitment, not just the commitment of leaders. Many times adventurous, well-meaning, globally minded presidents sally forth and visit other presidents. Consortia are formed. Then leadership changes. Suddenly interest drops, and the institution does not return its partners’ e-mails. Broad institutional support for international adventures is often not there. Better not to sally forth at all.

Universities should focus on supporting their own countries. In short, national competitiveness should win out over efforts at universities cooperating. For instance, because the Chinese government wants to be a “superpower” in higher education, supporting its efforts is against U.S. or European interests.

To be clear, these are all views I do not necessarily hold. What I do believe is that ideas are best sharpened by opposition. While the start-up of branch campuses has sparked robust debate at some U.S. universities, most notably Duke and New York universities, at many institutions, it often seems to be missing.

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Febrero 02, 2012

Publicaciones de libre acceso en el campo de la investigación educacional

Open-Access Publishing and EPAA

Sherman Dorn, University of South Florid
http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/blog/?p=1581

When the first editors of well-known open-access journals began publishing approximately two decades ago, the term “open-access” did not exist, nor did a coherent argument about how open-access scholarship can promote better research and the spread of ideas. But several scholars in different fields in the late 1980s realized that the use of email in their disciplines had made their professional lives easier and more interesting and decided to extend that to journal publishing by email. In fall 1990, North Carolina State University faculty members Eyal Amiran, Greg Dawes, Elaine Orr, and John Unsworth produced the first issue of Postmodern Culture, distributed as an email and formatted using the conventions of fixed-font ASCII characters (Amiran & Unsworth, 1991). Later in the same fall, Bryn Mawr College classics professor Richard Hamilton produced the first in a series of reviews that became the Bryn Mawr Classical Review, also originally distributed by email (Bryn Mawr Classical Review, n.d.). A little over two years later, Gene V Glass published the first issue of Education Policy Analysis Archives, also through email. The first issue was a discussion of action research written by Stephen Kemmis, then the director of the Deakin Institute for Studies in Education in the state of Victoria, Australia (Kemmis, 1993).

This focus on the early 1990s is in part an artifact of recognizing email distribution as an early channel for some of the older open-access journals published today; offprint and cheaply-produced publications have a long history, with open-access publishing as the younger, somewhat cleaned-up cousin. Within the field, Education Policy Analysis Archives was not the first education journal that was publicly available in a way we might today call open-access. In the Directory of Open Access Journals (doaj.org), EPAA is the eighteenth education journal in order of first publication date. Table 1 (below) shows the first-publication date for 477 education journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Centre de Recherches et d’Applications  Pédagogiques en Langues (at the University of Nancy, in Lorraine, France) owns the “first” claim in this set of journals, having started producing a series of papers called Mélange CRAPEL in 1970 (CRAPEL, n.d.). But the establishment of publicly available journals was a slow business until the late 1980s and early 1990s. The first year of publication for EPAA was the first calendar year that five or more listed open-access journals began publication, and a few years later, the establishment of new open-access journals accelerated in education and other fields. The bulk of open-access journals in education became established in the last 15 years, the majority in the last ten. A number of years before it became fashionable, Gene Glass demonstrated that publishing an open-access journal was feasible and could distribute important education research worldwide.

Table 1. Start dates for education-subject journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals, initial dates 1970-2009.

Beginning publication date
Journals

1970-1979
3

1980-1989
9

1990-1994
16

1995-1999
59

2000-2004
140

2005-2009
202

Source: Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ; http://doaj.org). Six entries removed from counts when titles changed (which are listed in DOAJ as two entries, with a note about the continuation title).

Ad Hoc Open Access

A number of practices early in the run of EPAA were the result of improvisation characteristic of many early open-access journals, from the question of copyright and permissions to submission and reviewing. The copyright notice at the top of the first issue looks similar to the lay description of the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC (Attribution–NonCommercial) license (Creative Commons, n.d.): “Copyright 1993, the EDUCATION POLICY ANALYSIS ARCHIVES. Permission is hereby granted to copy any article provided that EDUCATION POLICY ANALYSIS ARCHIVES is credited and copies are not sold.” The second condition—no selling of copies—separated Gene’s informal “license to copy” from the GNU General Public License, which allows selling of GPL-licensed software and which was the primary alternative model of distribution of intellectual work in the 1980s (Free Software Foundation, n.d.).

In addition to improvising distribution permissions, for its first decade EPAA was a relatively lonely pioneer in education in accepting electronic submissions, usually by email. Long before back-end reviewing support by journal packages such as the Open Journal System or Berkeley Electronic Press, Gene Glass accepted articles by email and used a loose email “call” to board members to solicit reviews as quickly as he could to make a decision.[1] This process gave reviewing access to prospective authors who did not need to duplicate hard copy manuscripts.[2] Today, online submissions and reviewing processes are the norm; twenty years ago, Glass had to compose an ad hoc electronic system that removed significant friction from manuscript submission and reviewing.

This informal pathbreaking towards open-access is a hallmark of the last few decades in innovations in scholarly communications (Willinsky, 2005), and one of EPAA‘s lasting contributions to education research was demonstrating the viability of open-access peer-reviewed publications. Willinsky calls EPAA an example of a zero-budget journal, which is reasonably accurate but not entirely true. Arizona State University has supported the journal through server space and through the time of its faculty serving as editors, first Glass and now Gustavo Fischman. The University of South Florida gave me time to edit the journal’s English-language side for five years, and the USF library staff converted years of HTML articles to PDF for a back-run archive. In addition, at various times both ASU and USF supported graduate students who assisted in the journal’s production. However, these subsidies are a very small proportion of the subsidies that many universities provide for editorships of other journals or that are supported by subscription-based journals. For twenty years EPAA has essentially been a “skunkworks” journal surviving in the interstices of several research universities.

A continuing dilemma of open-source publishing in education is the need for a viable long-term business model. Willinsky highlighted the low-subsidy nature of EPAA, but there are significant choices to make for any open-access journal with no revenues. While both Gene Glass and I devoted time out of our schedule to operating the reviewing process and preparing accepted manuscripts for publication, there are inevitable tradeoffs when there is not the same type of logistical support other journals have. Gene published more English-language articles per year than I did (e.g., 73 articles published in 2004), and the tradeoff was less time in the review process (the “all-call” email requesting reviews from the editorial board was very different from a standard process of identifying reviewers for requests) and less time per article composing the manuscript. I spent more time on revise-and-resubmit letters and pondering reviews, as well as in turning accepted manuscripts into article PDFs, but authors occasionally complained (with justification) at the pace of reviewing and article preparation. Other open-access journals have made other choices, such as a much less ambitious publication schedule. In the sciences, open-access journals commonly charge authors; for example, the current PLOS One publication charge for authors is $1350 per article. In the absence of significant research funding, most education researchers cannot afford such charges and a journal cannot rely on them for sustainability. In the absence of significant subsidies from learned societies, universities, or other benefactors, open-source journals in education have consequential choices driven by the lack of revenue.

Influences

The first two decades of Education Policy Analysis Archives‘ publication have influenced education research in several ways. The most important is the direct readership of published articles. EPAA is widely read and a number of its articles highly cited. According to the SCImago Journal and Country Rank (SCImago, 2011), EPAA‘s three-year citation/document ratio has ranged since 2000 between 0.29 and 0.80. According to Google Scholar, Darling-Hammond (2000) has been cited approximately 2000 times; Becker (2000) and Haney (2000) cited more than 400 times; and a number of other articles cited 100 or more times.[3] EPAA‘s first article (Kemmis, 1993) has several dozen citations noted in Google Scholar, a remarkable achievement for any first issue of a journal, let alone one in a new format. According to SCImago (2011), of the 1312 articles published in the 2000-2009 years, 372 (28% of all articles) were cited by other publications, a skewed and reasonably common pattern among research journals.[4] My own most-cited publication was published in EPAA, and that statement may well be true for many authors of EPAA articles. Open-access publication increases readership.

Beyond citation statistics, potential readers on every continent can EPAA articles when they cannot read articles in subscription-based journals. The availability of EPAA articles to potential readers without institutional journal subscriptions facilitates participation in scholarship beyond wealthy institutions. A critical component of active scholarship and teaching is keeping up with research in one’s field, and that is much more difficult if one is an independent scholar or a student or researcher at a college or university without the resources to subscribe to journals and electronic databases. Limited access to journal and database subscriptions is probably more common around the world than extensive access, and open-access journals and other non-subscription research publications provide an entree to current scholarship regardless of their access to institutional journal subscriptions.[5]

More generally, the continuing publication of EPAA has modeled the viability of open-access for others in education research. With a continuous publication history over 20 years and a sufficient density of publications per year, EPAA has a higher measure of articles with high citations (the H-Index; SciMago, 2011) than open-access journals starting publication before 1993. Its editors have maintained a commitment to an international, multilingual peer-reviewed journal that makes research accessible to the world. Both its authors and readers have benefitted as a result.

Notes:

[1] Gene’s immediate successor shifted to a more traditional solicit-reviews model of screening manuscripts, and was notably much slower in returning manuscript dispositions.

[2] This process also gave disproportionate influence on the reviewing side to the journal’s board members who responded quickly to Gene’s call for a review.

[3] Citation statistics using Google Scholar, which are a rough and imperfect indicator of use.

[4] Skewed citations and a surprisingly small proportion of ever-cited articles is the rule for most academic journals. Of the 918 Educational Policy articles published in 2000-2009, 305 (33%) had acquired citations recorded by SCImago (2011) at the time of this manuscript’s writing.

[5] Access to online journals are not entirely free, since they require internet access, often troublesome in poor countries even at universities.

References

Amiran, E., & Unsworth, J. (1991). Postmodern Culture: Publishing in the electronic medium.  The Public-Access Computer Systems Review, 2(1), 67-76.

Becker, H. (2000). Findings from the Teaching, Learning, and Computing Survey. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 8(51). Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/442

Bryn Mawr Classical Review. (n.d.). About BMCR [webpage]. Bryn Mawr, PA: Author. URL: http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/about.html

Centre de Recherches et d’Applications Pédagogiques en Langues. (n.d.). La revue Mélanges du CRAPEL [webpage]. Retrieved from http://revues.univ-nancy2.fr/melangesCrapel/articleCrapel.php3?id_rubrique=1

Creative Commons. (n.d.). Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 unported [webpage]. Mountain View, CA: Author. URL: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/

Darling-Hammond, L. (2000). Teacher Quality and Student Achievement. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 8, 1. Retrieved from http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/392

Free Software Foundation. (n.d.). Overview of the GNU system [webpage]. Boston, MA: Author. URL: http://www.gnu.org/gnu/gnu-history.html

Haney, W. (2000). The myth of the Texas miracle in education. Education Policy Analysis Archives, 8 (41). Retrieved March 15, 2006 from http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v8n41

Kemmis, S. (1993). Action research and social movement: A challenge for policy research. Education Policy Analysis Archives,1 (1) (entire issue). URL: http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/678/800

SCImago. (2011). SJR — SCImago Journal & Country Rank [website]. Retrieved from http://www.scimagojr.com/journalsearch.php?q=14193&tip=sid

Willinsky, J. (2005). The access principle. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

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A. G. Rud, Washington State University

I first met Gene Glass, appropriately, online, through the EDPOLYAN list in the early 1990s. I recognized immediately someone committed to new ways of disseminating educational research and ideas. Gene’s idea for EPAA was simple: Solicit good research with the promise that it would be reviewed quickly by peers unencumbered by slow review procedures, and then immediately distributed worldwide. Out went the customary request for two or three reviewers. Gene asked his entire editorial board to weigh in, and he often got more than enough responses within a few days, thus cutting down the review timeline drastically. EPAA was a place one could go for detailed analysis of important policy topics, particularly work on charter schools and educational reform that helped shape my thinking and work as a professor and dean. I am pleased to have been on the review board of EPAA since its inception. Gene Glass, and subsequent editors Sherman Dorn and Gustavo Fischman, have led and continue to lead the way in providing online, peer-reviewed, high-quality educational research.

 

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Linda Darling Hammond, Stanford University

For twenty years, EPAA has set the standard for the publication of timely, relevant, and fully accessible policy research.  When EPAA was launched, the idea of an on-line, rigorously reviewed journal was new and untested.  Today, it represents the state-of-the-art in open access publishing.

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Febrero 01, 2012

Elsevier se defiende

Continua campaña contra Elsevier y la casa editorial defiende sus prácticas de precios.

As Journal Boycott Grows, Elsevier Defends Its Practices

A petition effort to boycott Elsevier, the journal publisher, was inspired by a blog posting by Timothy Gowers (en la foto del TCHE), a prominent mathematician at the U. of Cambridge.

By Josh Fischman, The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 31, 2012

A protest against Elsevier, the world's largest scientific journal publisher, is rapidly gaining momentum since it began as an irate blog post at the end of January. By Tuesday evening, about 2,400 scholars had put their names to an online pledge not to publish or do any editorial work for the company's journals, including refereeing papers.

The boycott is growing so quickly—it had about 1,800 signers on Monday—that Elsevier officials on Tuesday broke their official silence to respond to protesters' accusations that they charge too much and support laws that will keep research findings bottled up behind a company paywall.

"Over the past 10 years, our prices have been in the lowest quartile in the publishing industry," said Alicia Wise, Elsevier's director of universal access. "Last year our prices were lower than our competitors'. I'm not sure why we are the focus of this boycott, but I'm very concerned about one dissatisfied scientist, and I'm concerned about 2,000."

She added that her company improves access rather than impeding it, and said that Internet downloads from some journals increased by as much as 40 percent when Elsevier added them to collections it sells to libraries.

Protesters disagree, and say Elsevier is emblematic of an abusive publishing industry. "The government pays me and other scientists to produce work, and we give it away to private entities," says Brett S. Abrahams, an assistant professor of genetics at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. "Then they charge us to read it." Mr. Abrahams signed the pledge on Tuesday after reading about it on Facebook.

Those views highlight a split that could spell serious trouble for journal publishers, and for researchers. Price complaints are not new, but some observers say this is the first time that the suppliers of journal content—the scientists—are upset enough to cut the supply line. But, if publishers are correct, those scientists could cut themselves off from valuable research tools.
The Boycotters' Complaints

According to the boycotters, Elsevier, which publishes over 2,000 journals including the prestigious Cell and The Lancet, is abusing academic researchers in three areas. First there are the prices. Then the company bundles subscriptions to lesser journals together with valuable ones, forcing libraries to spend money to buy things they don't want in order to get a few things they do want. And, most recently, Elsevier has supported a proposed federal law, the Research Works Act (HR 3699), that could prevent agencies like the National Institutes of Health from making all articles written by grant recipients freely available.

The complaints surfaced on January 21 in a blog post by Timothy Gowers, a prominent mathematician at the University of Cambridge who has won the Fields Medal, math's equivalent of the Nobel Prize. "Why do we allow ourselves to be messed about to this extraordinary extent, when one would have thought that nothing would be easier than to do without them?" he wrote. "It might help if there were a Web site somewhere, where mathematicians who have decided not to contribute in any way to Elsevier journals could sign their names electronically. I think that some people would be encouraged to take a stand if they could see that many others were already doing so."

Within days, just such a Web site surfaced. It's called The Cost of Knowledge, and biologists, social scientists, and others began signing the pledge along with mathematicians.

Sean M. Carroll, a prominent cosmologist and senior research associate at the California Institute of Technology, signed the pledge and added on his own blog that Elsevier charges "amazingly exorbitant prices to university libraries—and then makes the published papers very hard to access for anyone not at one of the universities."

Senior scholars like him, and Mr. Gowers, arguably have little to lose by turning their backs on well-regarded journals. But the protest has also reached junior scholars like Mr. Abrahams of Albert Einstein, who has yet to gain tenure.

"I have three papers I'm hoping to submit in the next 12 weeks. One was destined for Cell, and another for Neuron," also published by Elsevier, he said. "It would have been a real feather in my cap to publish there. But I won't, based on this week's discussions." His work, focused on identifying genes related to autism, will go other places. "There are other good journals. And, long term, I'd like my library to be able to use its limited resources to better ends" than high journal prices, he said.

That could signal real problems for Elsevier, says Kevin Smith, director of scholarly communications at Duke University Libraries. "Librarians have long complained about prices and bundling journals together, and nothing has changed," he says. "Now it's not just the customers who are complaining. It's the suppliers."

Academic librarians may buy journals, but it's the scientists who produce and submit articles that make them worth buying, he says. "If they are upset, there is a chance they may change the system."
The Company Responds

Ms. Wise, from Elsevier, says she understands why libraries complain about prices. "Globally, the amount of research that's published and needs to be read is going up every year. But library budgets are not keeping pace."

That is why her company offers a variety of packages and pricing schemes to libraries, and negotiates discounts based on institution size, type, and usage patterns. And while Elsevier in the 1980s and 1990s did increase prices steeply year after year, that has stopped. "We got it wrong then. But we've improved and have become good citizens," she said. So much of the community ire comes from past reputation, not present practice, she said.

Individual academics often do not have accurate notions about prices and the value of journals, particularly when they are sold in groups, said Thomas Reller, the company's vice president for global corporate relations. "They don't have access to library usage figures. They see journals that they don't use, and wonder why the library has them. It's because other people are using them, but the individual doesn't know that."

Indeed, Mr. Gowers wrote in an e-mail to The Chronicle, "I don't have detailed facts at my fingertips: So many people have complained about Elsevier that I am inclined to believe that there is something to the complaints." He also agreed that libraries are not forced to buy bundles of journals but said "that the costs of buying journals individually are so high that it's not far off compulsion."

Mr. Reller counters, emphatically, that the way to look at prices is per use, or download, of the individual articles, and that viewed that way, "access to published content is greater and at its lowest cost per use than ever."

Elsevier officials declined to provide specific examples of its journal prices, saying they were negotiated privately with individual institutions.

Ms. Wise said that it's also a misconception that publishers like Elsevier make scientists pay to read their own work. "What publishers charge for is the distribution system. We identify emerging areas of research and support them by establishing journals. We pay editors who build a distinguished brand that is set apart from 27,000 other journals. We identify peer reviewers.

"And we invest a lot in infrastructure, the tags and metadata attached to each article that makes it discoverable by other researchers through search engines, and that links papers together through citations and subject matter. All of that has changed the way research is done today and makes it more efficient. That's the added value that we bring."

The company's support of the Research Works Act is driven by its investment in those products, she added: "It's not a disavowal of the National Institutes of Health or of open access. We are just trying to avoid inflexible regulations." The company was the first and largest contributor to PubMed Central, the NIH repository of free, full-text articles, Mr. Reller pointed out.

Those arguments, however, are lost on senior scholars like Mr. Gowers, who told The Chronicle that researchers can now evaluate and review one another's papers on open Web sites. "That would be far cheaper than anything a commercial publisher could hope to offer, and just as effective," he noted.

Nor does the Elsevier infrastructure impress younger scholars like Mr. Abrahams. "It could disappear tomorrow, and I'd never notice that it's gone," he said.

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Ideas para reformar la acreditación

Repoprtaje publicado en Inside HigherED sobre el debate para una reforma de la acreditación en los EEUU. ¡Ya es hora que en Chile nos pongamos a discutir este tópico!

Firmer Proposals on Accreditation

By Doug Lederman, Inside HigherED, February 1, 2012 - 3:00am

Sustain the link between accreditation and access to federal financial aid.

Set a national minimum standard for states to follow in ensuring consumer protection in higher education.

Consider structuring accreditation so that it is judged based on institution type or mission rather than geography, and so that accreditors can more easily distinguish between colleges of varying quality.

Define a common set of data that the federal government would collect and share with accreditors, both to minimize reporting burden and to assure consistency. The data might include licensure, job placement and completion data -- the latter collected "through a privacy-protected national unit record system."

Those are among the recommendations contained in a second draft of the report that the U.S. Education Department's advisory committee on accreditation is preparing for Education Secretary Arne Duncan. The draft, which was circulated among the panel's members last month (after a public meeting in December) and obtained by Inside Higher Ed, goes significantly further than last fall's first draft in endorsing specific changes to the U.S. system for assuring higher education quality and protecting students and taxpayers. The previous draft primarily listed many possible approaches and generally declined to pick and choose among them.

But the new version still stops well short of prescribing a clear vision for how the complex and multifaceted system should work, and leaves many questions undecided.

It answers one of the most fundamental questions unequivocally, though, rejecting arguments (made most strongly by one of the panel's members, Anne Neal) that accreditation should no longer be the main gatekeeper for colleges to gain access to federal financial aid funds.

"Accreditors are the most experienced source of information about academic quality and should continue to establish and assure consistency with academic quality standards in the determination of eligibility," the panel states, noting that 10 of 13 members backed this recommendation in a straw poll. "The responsibility for evaluating how well an institution is accomplishing its educational work can and should rest exclusively with the institutions and/or the accrediting bodies," rather than becoming more directly a government function.

But language elsewhere in the draft report is likely (not that it takes much) to set off concerns among private college officials, particularly, about a more aggressive federal and state role in judging institutional (and educational) quality. The panel describes the federal government as having an interest not just in judging colleges' "financial stability/compliance" with federal rules and laws but also "quality assurance," including "promoting the improvement of education and the institutions that provide it."

And it likewise cites states' responsibility for determining "educational quality," recommends a "federally convened process" in which state leaders and others would seek to develop a "common understanding" among states about how they should protect consumers, and says states should work together to "ensure consistent and coherent application of critical standards" to ensure that "critical quality assurance/eligibility expectations are met." That consistency is increasingly necessary, the panel writes, in an era when so many institutions provide education across state boundaries.

Accrediting agencies should be more differentiated in their assessments of institutions, the panel states. "That is, the same level of scrutiny and intensity of review is given to accreditors and institutions with longstanding competent performance on quality indicators as is given to fragile, unstable, low-performing, rapidly expanding or changing, or newly approved institutions or programs," the committee writes.

While the panel declines to dictate exactly how this should change, it suggests that the current state of higher education "may call for a system of accreditation that is aligned more closely with mission or sector or other educationally relevant variable, than with geography," and provides more choice to institutions, and that accreditors should be given more latitude "to distinguish among programs or institutions with more varied levels and durations of review, such that the greater review effort is addressed to accreditors and institutions that present greater potential cause for concern and those whose circumstance may call for additional, supplemental, or heightened review."

The report talks at length about the burden imposed on institutions by the varied strands of the quality assurance process, and suggests that collection of data be coordinated to minimize the burden -- but also to increase the meaningfulness of the information collected. While many college officials might applaud the idea of centralizing data collection that is now done by accreditors, states and the federal government, the panel's assertion that the U.S. should collect more data on completion and career-related outcomes (though not specific student learning outcome measures, the document states) is likely to set off alarm bells among some college officials.

And Republicans in Congress -- who stopped a proposal to create a federal database of student-level academic records in 2005 -- don't seem any likelier to support the idea now, despite the committee's tentative endorsement.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/02/01/us-panel-offers-draft-recommendations-revamping-higher-education-accreditation#ixzz1l8VU9dHg
Inside Higher Ed

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