Education is the Exception, Finally

As President Obama and his aides unveiled the administration's fiscal 2011 budget with lots of talk about reining in discretionary spending, they largely exempted programs important to higher education from the budget restraint they urged.

Not every higher education-related program would fare well under the budget blueprint; the administration would hold funding for many student aid programs other than Pell Grants at their 2010 levels and eliminate a handful of others; end the Department of Labor's Career Pathways Innovation Fund (a $125 million grant program for community colleges); and slice the budget of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

"At a time when most government spending is being frozen, President Obama is investing in education -- a clear reflection of the president's deep commitment to education," Education Secretary Arne Duncan said in a telephone news conference Monday. "The president has set a goal that America once again will lead the world in college completion by the end of the decade, and to do that, we need to improve the education at every level. This budget puts us on a path to success and meeting that goal. We have to educate our way to a better economy."

Read the full Inside Higher Ed article

VA County Not Teaching New Version of Anne Frank Classic

I was astounded by the article I recently read in The Washington Post regarding the classic work The Diary of Anne Frank. The Washington Post is reporting Culpeper County public school officials have decided to stop assigning a version of Anne Frank's diary, one of the most enduring symbols of the atrocities of the Nazi regime, after a parent complained that the book includes sexually explicit material and homosexual themes.

"The Diary of a Young Girl: the Definitive Edition," which was published on the 50th anniversary of Frank's death in a concentration camp, will not be used in the future, said James Allen, director of instruction for the 7,600-student system. The school system did not follow its own policy for handling complaints about instructional materials, Allen said.

The diary documents the daily life of a Jewish girl in Amsterdam during World War II. Frank started writing on her 13th birthday, shortly before her family went into hiding in an annex of an office building. The version of the diary in question includes passages previously excluded from the widely read original edition, first published in Dutch in 1947. That book was arranged by her father, the only survivor in her immediate family. Some of the extra passages detail her emerging sexual desires; others include unflattering descriptions of her mother and other people living together.

In 2010 it seems we are still living in the days when books such as this classic are banned in our schools. A sad time indeed.

Read the full article

Colleges Directing Efforts to Federal Funded Student Loans

The vast majority of colleges have begun to prepare themselves for what the Obama administration considers a likely transition of all student lending to the federal direct student loan program -- but a solid majority of lending is still being made through the competing lender-based guaranteed loan program, according to an analysis of federal data by Student Lending Analytics. The Education Department reported this week that 96 percent of colleges had taken at least some crucial steps toward being able to issue loans through the government-run program, to which legislation passed by the House and pending in the Senate would shift all federal student loan origination. But with the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act seemingly stalled behind health care on Congress's agenda, and the July 1 deadline for institutions to switch looming, the Student Lending Analytics data suggest that many colleges are hedging their bets. On a related note, Rep. Timothy Bishop, a New York Democrat who supports the president's legislation, said in comments before the Council for Higher Education Accreditation Thursday that it was "likely" that Congress would delay until 2011-12 implementation of major changes that the SAFRA bill would make in the Perkins Loan Program.

Haiti Tragedy Impacts University

Over the last two weeks we've seen horrifying images from Haiti. The Haitian people have been living in devastated conditions for some time, the earthquake just brought their plight to the forefront of the media. This tragedy has also impacted several U.S. students and faculty.

Lynn University announced yesterday that all signs indicate that four students and two faculty members who have been missing in Haiti since the earthquake were killed by the disaster. Eight other Lynn students who were part of the service trip were able to return safely to the United States. A statement from Lynn's president, Kevin M. Ross, praised the dedication of those who went to Haiti. "Theirs was a journey of hope. Theirs -- a selfless commitment to serving others," he said. "They were on the ground in Haiti to find, feed and focus on the poor of that nation. In the day and a half before the quake, they did just that -- doling out rice at a distribution center and holding the hands of sick children in a dilapidated orphanage. They intended to do much more. In their absence, it is incumbent upon the rest of us to follow in their stead."

Anyone interested in donating to Haitian relief can contact the American Red Cross.

You're Never Too Old to Fulfill Your Dream

We are bombarded daily with what is wrong with our world, albeit the economy, crime, environment, just life in general. Then we hear a story that gives us hope and a renewed sense of purpose. This is one of those stories.

Harriet Richardson Ames dream was to receive her degree in education. She realized that dream the day before she died at 100! Ames, who turned 100 on Jan. 2, had earned a two-year teaching certificate in 1931 at Keene Normal School, now Keene State College. She taught in a one-room schoolhouse in South Newbury, and later spent 20 years as a teaching principal at Memorial School in Pittsfield, where she taught first-graders.

Through the years, she had taken classes at the University of New Hampshire, Plymouth Teachers College and Keene State to earn credits for her degree. With her eyesight failing, she stopped after retiring in 1971 and was never sure if she had enough credits.

Her wish for a degree became known when a Keene State film professor interviewed her a couple of years ago for a piece on the college's own centennial, which the school celebrated last year.

The school decided to research her coursework and see if it could award Ames her long-sought diploma. The offices of the provost, registrar and other departments worked quickly in the last month to determine, that indeed, it could.

"She wanted to be the best that she could be," said Norma Walker, coordinator of the Keene State College Golden Circle Society, an alumni group for classes that graduated 50 or more years ago.

Walker said when she mentioned to Ames during a recent visit that the college was working on the degree, Ames started to cry and said, "'If I die tomorrow, I'll know I'll die happy, because my degree's in the works.'"

College officials, including Walker, drove the document to Ames' bedside on Friday.

Harriet Ames finally realized her dream and gives the rest of us the courage to realize ours.

DNA for a Day

The Society of Biology and Edvotex have scheduled eleven one day seminars called, DNA for a DAY throughout England and in Glasgow, Scotland and Belfast, Northern Ireland this February through July, 2010.

The training course is for teachers and technicians and will center around bringing biotechnology, genetics forensics and polymerase chain reaction (PCR) to life in the classroom.


Full schedule and details

Media Copywright Law Clashing with the Classroom

In the latest clash of copyright law and instructional technology, the University of California at Los Angeles has stopping allowing faculty members to post copyrighted videos on their course Web sites after coming under fire from an educational media trade group.

The policy, enacted earlier this month, has been planned since last fall, when the Association for Information and Media Equipment — a group that protects the copyrights of education media companies — charged the university with violating copyright laws by posting the videos to the password-protected course Web pages without the proper permissions.

Read the full articleon Inside Higher Ed.