Tag: Education

  • Columbia Sanctions Students Who Occupied Campus Building

    Columbia Sanctions Students Who Occupied Campus Building

    Columbia University handed down sanction decisions for student protesters who occupied Hamilton Hall in April of last year, the university announced in a statement Thursday.

    The sanctions come as the university faces crippling attacks from the Trump administration over its handling of the protests last year, including the loss of $400 million in federal funding, which could lead to mass layoffs and program cuts.

    The university has not released the names of affected students, nor more details about how many will be expelled or suspended.

    The punishments, determined by the university judiciary board, are unusually harsh, ranging from multiyear suspensions and expulsions to temporary degree revocations for graduates, according to the email. While occupying the building—which students renamed Hind Hall in honor of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed by Israeli soldiers—students damaged property and broke windows. 

    Last year, only a few of the students who occupied the building were punished, and most remained in good standing with the university, according to documents the university gave to Congress last year. Of the 22 students who occupied the hall, only three received sanctions, the most severe being short-term suspension. At the time, Columbia said the disciplinary process was “ongoing for many students.”

    University spokespeople told Inside Higher Ed that the decisions were the culmination of a months-long investigation. For all other student protests last spring, the judiciary board “recognized previously imposed disciplinary action,” according to the email.

    Last weekend, Columbia graduate and legal U.S. permanent resident Mahmoud Khalil was arrested and threatened with deportation for his role in the pro-Palestine protests. Yesterday, Khalil sued the university, along with Barnard College, for allegedly sharing private student disciplinary records with members of Congress and other third-party groups.

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  • Layoffs Gut Federal Education Research Agency

    Layoffs Gut Federal Education Research Agency

    Five years after the COVID-19 pandemic first forced schools and colleges into remote learning, researchers, policymakers and higher education leaders may no longer have access to the federal data they need to gather a complete picture of how those disruptions have affected a generation of students long term—or hold states and colleges accountable for the interventions they deployed to address the fallout.

    That’s because the National Center for Education Statistics, the Education Department’s data-collection arm that’s administered surveys and studies about the state of K-12, higher education and the workforce since 1867, is suddenly a shell of itself.

    As of this week, the NCES is down to five employees after the department fired nearly half its staff earlier this week. The broader Institute of Education Sciences, which houses NCES, also lost more than 100 employees as part of President Donald Trump’s campaign to eliminate alleged “waste, fraud and abuse” in federal funding.

    The mass firings come about a month after federal education data collection data took another big blow: In February, the department cut nearly $900 million in contracts at IES, which ended what some experts say was critical research into schools and fueled layoffs at some of the research firms that held those contracts, including MDRC, Mathematica, NORC and Westat.

    Although Trump and his allies have long blamed COVID-related learning loss on President Joe Biden’s approval of prolonged remote learning, numerous experts told Inside Higher Ed that without some of the federal data the NCES was collecting, it will be hard to draw definitive conclusions about those or any other claims about national education trends.

    ‘Backbone of Accountability’

    “The backbone of accountability for our school systems begins with simply collecting data on how well they’re doing. The fact that our capacity to do that is being undermined is really indefensible,” said Thomas Dee, a professor at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Education and research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research. “One could conceive this as part of an agenda to undermine the very idea of truth and evidence in public education.”

    But the Education Department says its decision to nearly eliminate the NCES and so many IES contracts is rooted in what it claims are the agency’s own failures.

    “Despite spending hundreds of millions in taxpayer funds annually, IES has failed to effectively fulfill its mandate to identify best practices and new approaches that improve educational outcomes and close achievement gaps for students,” Madi Biedermann, deputy assistant secretary for communications at the department, said in an email to Inside Higher Ed Thursday.

    Biedermann said the department plans to restructure IES in the coming months in order to provide “states with more useful data to improve student outcomes while maintaining rigorous scientific integrity and cost effectiveness.”

    But many education researchers disagree with that characterization of IES and instead view it as an unmatched resource for informing higher education policy decisions.

    “Some of these surveys allow us to know if people are being successful in college. It tells us where those students are enrolled in college and where they came from. For example, COVID impacted everyone, but it had a disproportionate impact on specific regions in the U.S. and specific social and socioeconomic groups in the U.S.,” said Taylor Odle, an assistant professor of educational policy studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.

    “Post-COVID, states and regions have implemented a lot of interventions to help mitigate learning loss and accelerate learning for specific individuals. We’ll be able to know by comparing region to region or school to school whether or not those gaps increased or reduced in certain areas.”

    Without uniform federal data to ground comparisons of pandemic-related and other student success interventions, it will be harder to hold education policymakers accountable, Odle and others told Inside Higher Ed this week. However, Odle believes that may be the point of the Trump administration’s assault on the Education Department’s research arm.

    “It’s in essence a tacit statement that what they are doing may potentially be harmful to students and schools, and they don’t want the American public or researchers to be able to clearly show that,” he said. “By eliminating these surveys and data collection, and reducing staff at the Department of Education who collect, synthesize and report the data, every decision-maker—regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum—is going to be limited in the data and information they have access to.”

    Scope of Data Loss Unclear

    It’s not clear how many of the department’s dozens of data-collection programs—including those related to early childhood education, college student outcomes and workforce readiness—will be downsized or ended as a result of the cuts. The department did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for clarity on exactly which contracts were canceled. (It did confirm, however, that it still maintains contracts for the National Assessment of Educational Progress, the College Scorecard and the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.)

    A now-fired longtime NCES employee who asked to remain anonymous out of fear of retaliation said they and others who worked on those data-collection programs for years are still in the dark on the future of many of the other studies IES administers.

    “We’ve been out of the loop on all these conversations about the state of these studies. That’s been taking place at a higher level—or outside of NCES entirely,” said the terminated employee. “What these federal sources do is synthesize all the different other data sources that already exist to provide a more comprehensive national picture in a way that saves researchers a lot of the trouble of having to combine these different sources themselves and match them up. It provides consistent methodologies.”

    Even if some of the data-collection programs continue, there will be hardly any NCES staff to help researchers and policymakers accurately navigate new or existing data, which was the primary function of most workers there.

    “We are a nonpartisan agency, so we’ve always shied away from interpreting or making value judgments about what the data say,” the fired NCES worker said. “We are basically a help desk and support resource for people who are trying to use this data in their own studies and their own projects.”

    ‘Jeopardizing’ Strong Workforce

    One widely used data set with an uncertain future is the Beginning Postsecondary Students Longitudinal Study—a detailed survey that has followed cohorts of first-time college students over a period of six to eight years since 1989. The latest iteration of the BPS survey has been underway since 2019, and it included questions meant to illuminate the long-term effects of pandemic-related learning loss. But like many other NCES studies, data collection for BPS has been on pause since last month, when the department pulled the survey’s contract with the Research Triangle Institute.

    In a blog post the Institute for Higher Education Policy published Wednesday, the organization noted that BPS is intertwined with the National Postsecondary Student Aid Study, which is a comprehensive nationwide study designed to determine how students and their families pay for college and demographic characteristics of those enrolled.

    The two studies “are the only federal data sources that provide comprehensive insights into how students manage college affordability, stay enrolled and engaged with campus resources, persist to completion, and transition to the workforce,” Taylor Myers, assistant director of research and policy, wrote. “Losing these critical data hinders policy improvements and limits our understanding of the realities students face.”

    That post came one day after IHEP sent members of Congress a letter signed by a coalition of 87 higher education organizations and individual researchers urging lawmakers to demand transparency about why the department slashed funding for postsecondary data collection.

    “These actions weaken our capacity to assess and improve educational and economic outcomes for students—directly jeopardizing our ability to build a globally competitive workforce,” the letter said. “Without these insights, policymakers will soon be forced to make decisions in the dark, unable to steward taxpayer dollars efficiently.”

    Picking Up the Slack

    But not every education researcher believes federal data is as vital to shaping education policy and evaluating interventions as IHEP’s letter claims.

    “It’s unclear that researchers analyzing those data have done anything to alter outcomes for students,” said Jay Greene, a senior research fellow in the Center for Education Policy at the right-wing Heritage Foundation. “Me being able to publish articles is not the same thing as students benefiting. We have this assumption that research should prove things, but in the world of education, we have very little evidence of that.”

    Greene, who previously worked as a professor of education policy at the University of Arkansas, said he never used federal data in his assessments of educational interventions and instead used state-level data or collected his own. “Because states and localities actually run schools, they’re in a position to do things that might make it better or worse,” he said. “Federal data is just sampling … It’s not particularly useful for causal research designs to develop practices and interventions that improve education outcomes.”

    Other researchers have a more measured view of what needs to change in federal education data collection.

    Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at Arizona State University, has previously called for reforms at IES, arguing that some of the studies are too expensive without enough focus on educators’ evolving priorities, which as of late include literacy, mathematics and how to handle the rise of artificial intelligence.

    But taking a sledgehammer to NCES isn’t the reform she had in mind. Moreover, she said blaming federal education data collections and researchers for poor education outcomes is “completely ridiculous.”

    “There’s a breakdown between knowledge and practice in the education world,” Lake said. “We don’t adopt things that work at the scale we need to, but that’s not on researchers or the quality of research that’s being produced.”

    But just because federal education data collection may not focus on specific interventions, “that doesn’t mean those data sets aren’t useful,” said Christina Whitfield, senior vice president and chief of staff for the State Higher Education Executive Officers Association.

    “A lot of states have really robust data systems, and in a lot of cases they provide more detail than the federal data systems do,” she said. “However, one of the things the federal data provides is a shared language and common set of definitions … If we move toward every state defining these key elements individually or separately, we lose a lot of comparability.”

    If many of the federal data collection projects aren’t revived, Whitfield said other entities, including nonprofits and corporations, will likely step in to fill the void. But that likely won’t be a seamless transition without consequence.

    “At least in the short term, there’s going to be a real issue of how to vet those different solutions and determine which is the highest-quality, efficient and most useful response to the information vacuum we’re going to experience,” Whitfield said. And even if there’s just a pause on some of the data collections and federal contracts are able to resume eventually, “there’s going to be a gap and a real loss in the continuity of that data and how well you can look back longitudinally.”

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  • Residential Communities Centered on Race, LGBTQ Closed for 2025

    Residential Communities Centered on Race, LGBTQ Closed for 2025

    In the wake of federal and state bans on diversity, equity and inclusion, several colleges and universities are eliminating the option for students to live in culture-based housing starting next fall—a trend that could signal increased attacks on certain student resources that went largely untouched under previous state-level DEI bans.

    The University of Iowa confirmed to Inside Higher Ed that it will be ceasing operations of three of its living-learning communities: All In, for LGBTQ students; Unidos, for Latino students; and Young, Gifted and Black, for Black students. North Carolina State University will also shut down two culture-based dorms—called Living and Learning Villages at NCSU—dedicated to Native American and Black students, as first reported in The Nubian Message, the college’s Black student-led newspaper.

    In both cases, the institutions will no longer offer the residential communities starting next semester. Both NCSU and Iowa are retaining other learning communities focused on academic majors and other interests.

    The cancellations come in the wake of President Donald Trump’s crusade against all things even tangentially related to diversity, equity and inclusion. A Feb. 14 Dear Colleague letter from the Department of Education stated that federal law prohibits the use of race in relation to a variety of campus programs and activities, including housing, going beyond the restrictions set by most statewide anti-DEI legislation.

    In the aftermath of that letter, many universities—including some private institutions and institutions in solidly blue states—began scrubbing words related to DEI from their websites and shuttering DEI offices. But only a handful of institutions have gotten rid of the housing communities, which have often been lauded for strengthening students’ sense of belonging on campus. (Belonging is associated with higher rates of retention and mental well-being, multiple studies have found.)

    A spokesman for the University of Iowa did not say what led to the decision to close the three living-learning communities. Iowa passed legislation last year banning diversity, equity and inclusion offices on college campuses. The university also announced Thursday that it would be permanently shuttering its DEI office, which it had rearranged and renamed to the Division of Access, Opportunity, and Diversity as a result of last year’s legislation.

    NCSU did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment but told The Nubian Message that the changes were “part of the university’s ongoing review of compliance with executive actions issued by the federal government and UNC System policy.”

    Another institution, the University of Florida, has removed the option to sign up for any of its nonacademic learning communities for next semester, including those dedicated to Black, first-generation, international, LGBTQ+ and out-of-state students, plus one for students in the arts. According to The Alligator, the university’s student paper, the university also changed language on its housing website from describing the learning communities as “interest-based communities” to “academic-based communities.”

    In an email to the campus community, the institution said the change was related to the university’s housing master plan.

    “The University of Florida’s Housing & Residence Life is unwavering in our commitment to providing community-orientated facilities where residents are empowered to learn, innovate and succeed. As we enter a 10-year Housing Master Planning process, all programmatic offerings are being evaluated to ensure we continue to provide a premiere on-campus living experience,” the message read. “As a result, we are pausing all activities associated with non-academic Living Learning Communities.”

    But some students have expressed concern that the elimination of the communities focused on identity may actually be related to Trump’s anti-DEI push or existing Florida anti-DEI legislation.

    “Cancelling the activities of marginalized LLCs follows a long history of UF stripping protections from vulnerable students,” reads a petition calling on the university to reverse its decision. “It is clear that this latest attack on safe housing is only part of a larger plan to transform the UF campus into a space that is no longer safe for marginalized groups. LLCs will not be the last protection to be targeted.”

    A Best Practice to Support Students

    The Young, Gifted and Black learning community debuted in 2016 in response to a proposal by a group of students, The Daily Iowan, the University of Iowa’s student newspaper, reported at the time.

    The university’s housing website says that students living in YGB “will be challenged to understand the various experiences among the African/Black diaspora, encouraged to learn and develop critical thinking skills outside the classroom, relate your passions to your academics and better Iowa’s Black Community through campus involvement.” Students who live on the floor are also required to take a course on African American culture.

    Sandrah Nasimiyu, an Iowa alumna, lived in the community in the 2019–20 academic year—though, of course, her time there was cut short by the COVID-19 pandemic. Her happiest memories in college took place in the residence hall, she told Inside Higher Ed, from debriefing with her floor mates after a long day of classes to a memorable game night when her friends tried, unsuccessfully, to teach her to play spades.

    “I was already at a [predominantly white institution]. We live in Iowa—I had grown up in the suburbs and really wanted to have some form of community,” she said. “Where you put your head at night, where you’re going to spend the most time, you have to feel comfortable … when I stepped off that floor, I was in an environment I see all the time that wasn’t made for me.”

    Nasimiyu is still friends with several people she met in the brief time she lived there. Sometimes, she recalled, Black students who didn’t live on YGB would tell her that they struggled to make Black friends on campus; Black people make up just 2.8 percent of the student body at Iowa.

    LGBTQ+ and culture-based residence halls have come under fire from conservatives before; in 2023, the conservative campus group Young Americans for Freedom criticized Lavender Living Learning Community, the LGBTQ+ dorm at UF, for “segregating” students and “bombarding” them with leftism because its residents were encouraged to take a course on social justice. Right-wing news sources like Campus Reform and The Daily Caller, too, have discredited affinity housing as segregation.

    But advocates for these spaces have long countered that residents of learning communities are rarely, if ever, required to be a certain race or identity. Jason Lynch, a professor of higher education at Appalachian State University and an expert in housing and residential life, said he saw firsthand that a number of non-Black students lived in the Black residential community when he worked in residential life at a previous institution.

    Beyond that, though, he noted that the communities “are seen as a best practice, a high-impact practice … LLCs are a direct way to combat loneliness and isolation. We’re going to see a rise in mental health [concerns], especially for these minority communities” if these communities vanish.

    Restricting LGBTQ+ Housing

    At the same time that some campuses are doing away with LGBTQ+ affinity housing, others are overhauling inclusive housing in other ways. Florida State University recently came under fire for removing an option on its housing application that allows students to indicate that they would like to live in LGBTQ-friendly housing.

    Unlike the learning communities, this option doesn’t place students in a particular dorm, but rather attempts to pair the student with someone who would be accepting and welcoming of an LGBTQ+ roommate, Marco Lofaso, an FSU student and member of the campus’s Young Democratic Socialists of America chapter, told Inside Higher Ed. LGBTQ+ housing has been available at FSU since 2021.

    But the option was soon reinstated after student backlash—though the university never directly answered why it had been removed, telling the student newspaper, “Florida State University routinely reviews and refreshes campus information and messaging on a regular basis to ensure information is up to date and accurate. During this review, a previously used question was omitted from the returning student housing application for the 2025–26 academic year. A revised version of the question will be included in the new student housing application when it is released Feb. 27.”

    FSU did not respond to Inside Higher Ed’s request for comment.

    The state of Utah also recently passed a law targeting trans students that requires any students who live in gender-segregated housing to live in the housing that aligns with their “biological sex.” However, the law doesn’t prevent institutions from offering gender-neutral housing.

    At least one institution has updated its housing policies to comply with the law, which passed in February. In an emailed statement, a spokesman for Utah State University said that the institution “strives to create a welcoming environment where all students who live on campus are comfortable so they can focus on succeeding in their studies. Consistent with the new law, USU’s sex-segregated housing will be assigned based on an individual’s biological sex at birth.”

    The spokesman added that the university will continue to provide gender-inclusive housing “that meet the needs of all residents and in a manner that treats everyone with dignity and respect.” He did not respond to a question about how the university will determine residents’ biological sexes.

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  • Greater width and greater depth: changing higher education in an electronic age

    Greater width and greater depth: changing higher education in an electronic age

    • Ronald Barnett is (www.ronaldbarnett.co.uk), Emeritus Professor of Higher Education at the Institute of Education and President of the Philosophy and Theory of Higher Education Society.

    Chris Husbands’ latest HEPI blog is fine so far as it goes but, I suggest, it goes neither wide enough nor deep enough.  Yes, the world is changing, and higher education institutions have to change, but the analysis of ‘change’ has to encompass the whole world (have great width) and also to burrow down into the deep structures of a world in turbulent motion (and so have much depth).

    The current crisis in UK higher education – and especially in higher education in England – has to be set more fully in the context of massive global shifts that directly affect higher education. These are too many to enumerate entirely here, but they include:

    • A hyper-fast world: Theorists speak of cognitive capitalism, but we have already moved into a new stage of electronic capitalism (of which AI is but the most evident feature).
    • Volatile labour markets (disrupting the relationship between higher education and the world of work)
    • A fragmenting state of student being: now, their higher education is just part of an incredibly complex life and set of challenges with which students are confronted
    • Geo-political shifts affecting (and the reduction of) the internationalisation of higher education; and
    • An entirely new complex of human needs (physical, cognitive, social, political, environmental, and phenomenological) for learning to be part of life, ‘cradle-to-grave’. 

    In short, the world is fast-changing not only around higher education but in the depths of higher education in ways not yet fully appreciated.  It is a world that is going through multiple and unimagined transformations, transformations that are replete with conflicts and antagonisms that are both material and discursive. These changes are already having effects on higher education, especially on what it is to be a student.

    Now, students are increasingly part-time (whatever the formal designation of their programmes of study). Moreover, they play out their lives across multiple ecosystems – including the economy, social institutions, culture, the polity, the self, knowledge, learning, the digital environment, and Nature. In the context of these nine ever-moving ecosystems, what it is to be a student is now torn open, fragmented, and bewildering to many. 

    More still, many students of today will be alive in the 22nd century and will have to navigate an Earth, a world, that will exhibit many stages of anxiety-provoking and even possibly terrifying change. Sheer being itself is challenged under such circumstances and, more so, the very being of students. And we see all this in spades in (quite understandable) growing student anxiety and even suicide.

    In this context, and under these conditions, a model and an idea of higher education bequeathed to the world largely from early 19th century Europe (Germany and England) no longer matches the present and the future age for which students are destined.

    Crucially, here, we are confronted by profound changes that are not just institutional and material in that sense, but we are – and students are – confronted with unnoticed changes in the discourse of higher education.  Not just what it means to be a student but the very meaning of student is changing in front of us; yet largely unnoticed. (Is being a student a matter of dutifully acquiring skills for an AI world or is it to set up encampments so as actively to engage with and to be a troublesome presence in world-wide conflicts?)

    Fundamental here is the idea of higher education.  Fifty years ago, some remnants of the idea of the university from 19th century Europe could romantically be held onto. Ideas of reason, truth, student development, consciousness-raising, critical thinking and even emancipation were concepts that could be used without too much embarrassment.  But now, that discourse and the pedagogical goals and relationships that it stood for have almost entirely dissolved, overtaken and trivialised by talk of skills, work-readiness, employability, impact and of using but of being ‘critical’ of AI.

    It is a commonplace – not least in the higher education consultancies and think-tanks – to hear murmurings to the effect that institutions of higher education must change (and are insufficiently changing). Yes, most certainly.  And some signs of change are apparent. In England alone, we see talk of (but little concerted action on) life-long learning, formation of tertiary education as such, better higher education-further education connections, micro-credentials, ‘alternative providers’, shortened degrees, AI and recovering part-time higher education (disastrously virtually vanquished, regretted now by David Willetts, its progenitor).

    These are but some of the adjustments that the large and complex higher education can be seen to be making to the challenges of the age.  But it is piecemeal in a fundamental sense, namely that it is not being advanced on the basis of a broad and deep analysis of the problem situation. 

    Some say we need a new Robbins, and there is more to that idea than many realise. Robbins was a free-market economist, but the then general understanding as to what constituted a higher education and the balance of the Robbins committee, with a phalanx of heavy-weight educationalists, resulted in a progressive vision of higher education. Now, though, we need new levels of analysis and imaginative thinking. 

    Consider just one of the changes into which English higher education is stumbling, that of life-long learning and its associated idea of credit accumulation. Credit accumulation was first enunciated as an idea in English higher education in the 1980s through the Council for National Academic Awards (and there through the efforts especially of Norman Evans and Peter Toyne). But the idea of universities as a site where the formation of human beings for a life of never-ending inquiry, learning and self-formation has never seriously been pursued, either practically or theoretically. 

    Now, life-long learning is more urgent than ever, but the necessary depth and width of the matters it prompts are hardly to be seen or heard.  However, and as intimated, this matter is just one of a raft of interconnected and mega issues around post-school education today.

    As is said, there is no magic bullet here in such an interconnected world. Joined-up progress is essential, from UNESCO and suchlike to the teacher and class of students. The key is the individual institution of higher education, which now has a responsibility to become aware of its multiple ecosystem environment and work out a game-plan in each of the nine ecosystems identified above.

    At the heart of that ecosystem scanning has to be the individual student. Let this design process start from the bottom-up – the flourishing of the individual student living into the C22.  It would be a design process that tackles head-on what it is to live purposefully in a world of constant change, challenge and conflict and what might we hope for from university graduates against such a horizon.  Addressing and answering this double question within each university – for each university will have its own perspective – will amount to nothing less than a revolution in higher education.

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  • Higher education postcard: Oxford Brookes University

    Higher education postcard: Oxford Brookes University

    Greetings from Oxford!

    As reported in the Oxford Times, on 21 March 1865 – which by my count is very nearly 160 years ago – a meeting was held in Oxford. This led to the establishment of the Oxford School of Art, which opened its doors to students on 22 May that year.

    The initial curriculum included freehand drawing, shading in chalk, perspective and model drawing, figure drawing and anatomy, and painting in oil and watercolour. There were separate classes for men, women, and children under 15. Men and children paid two shillings a month (with discounts for larger periods paid up front); women paid four shillings per month. It isn’t clear to me why the fees were different, but as L P Hartley says, “the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.”

    The school was initially housed on the ground floor of the Taylor Institute, a library for European languages within the University of Oxford. In 1868 or 1870 (sources differ) a school of science was added. But trouble was brewing. John Ruskin, who had recently been appointed as the Slade Professor of Fine Art at the university, did not approve of the way drawing was taught at the Oxford School of Art, and established the Ruskin School of Drawing to address this. The Ruskin School needed space, and so the School of Art and Science was moved to the basement of the Taylor Institute. The Ruskin School of Drawing is now, by the way, the Ruskin School of Art, and is the University of Oxford’s department of fine art. This tells you who won that argument in the long run!

    The move to the basement proved short lived. In 1888 chemistry labs in the Wesleyan school, Witney, were used by the school of science. In 1891 the school was taken over by the city council, following legislative changes enabling local authorities to fund education and to act as trustees, and was renamed the Oxford City Technical School. And in 1894 a new site, at St Ebbe’s in Oxford, was acquired for the school.

    The new site enabled growth in activities – so rapid that in 1899 the government Department of Art and Science declared it inadequate. Needless to say, the school remained on that site for another fifty years, albeit it also occupied other sites across the city.

    We now need to fast forward to 1928 and introduce a new character: John Henry Brookes.

    Brookes had trained as a silversmith, and was a part-time teacher of sculpture at the school. In 1928 he was appointed vice principal of the school of art (the schools of art and science were technically separate organisations); and in 1934 when the schools of art and science were formally merged to form the Schools of Technology, Art and Commerce, Brookes was appointed its first principal, and was to remain in that post until 1956.

    A pressing issue was accommodation, and in 1949 a 25 acre site in Headington was secured for the school. Planning permission was not granted until 1952, having been initially rejected in 1950, and it wasn’t until 1955 that the foundation stone for the new suite was laid. In 1952 a new name was also given: the school became the College of Technology, Art and Commerce. The Headington site was not formally opened until 1963, fourteen years after the site was acquired.

    In 1956 Brookes retired. His impact on the institution was clearly great. The college was once again renamed as the Oxford College of Technology; this and Brookes’ retirement were not, I believe, related events.

    In 1970 the college became Oxford Polytechnic and, in line with national policy which encouraged the amalgamation of smaller specialist colleges into more generalist institutions, it started to expand by incorporation. First came the Lady Spencer-Churchill College – this had been an emergency teacher training college, established in 1947. The Oxford School of Nursing joined in 1988; and in 1992 the Dorset House School of Occupational Therapy also joined the polytechnic. And also in 1992, the polytechnic became a university.

    Oxford Brookes University was the chosen name, in honour of John Henry Brookes. A few of the polytechnics had chosen names to commemorate local people – for example, Liverpool John Moores, Lanchester Polytechnic in Coventry – but I think Oxford Brookes is the only one named for a former principal. If you know different, please do say!

    In 1993 the university acquired Headington Hill Hall, formerly owned by Robert Maxwell, enabling an expansion of the Headington site. And in 2000 Westminster College, a methodist teacher training college, merged with the university.

    Being a university sharing a city with the University of Oxford can’t be easy: comparisons will mostly be tiresome. But here’s a surprising one: Oxford Brookes is arguably the best university in the UK at which to row (as in, propel a boat by oars, not argue) – see, for example, this report on the Henley regatta, 2023. Bet you didn’t know that!

    And here’s a jigsaw of the postcard, which I found more challenging than I expected.

    Happy 160th birthday, Oxford Brookes University!

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  • Secretary of Education Linda McMahon Scheduled for ASU+GSV Summit, April 8, 2025

    Secretary of Education Linda McMahon Scheduled for ASU+GSV Summit, April 8, 2025

    On April 8, 2025, US Secretary of Education Linda McMahon will give a fireside chat at ASU+GSV, an edtech conference held in San Diego, California.  

    President Trump has tasked McMahon with dismantling the federal agency that oversees federally funded K-12 and higher education programs. In less than two weeks she has done just that.  

    Half of ED’s staff have already been fired or taken a payout, and the $1.7T student loan portfolio is likely to be transferred to the US Treasury. 

    There is no word yet on whether there will be demonstrators at the conference, but we expect some form of vocal nonviolent resistance.  AFT President Randi Weingarten is also scheduled to appear.  

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  • U.S. Department of Education slashes staff

    U.S. Department of Education slashes staff

    This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

    The U.S. Department of Education announced March 11 that it’s cutting its workforce nearly in half–a move that Education Secretary Linda McMahon said is a first step toward eliminating the department.

    Roughly a third of staff will lose their jobs through a “reduction in force,” the department said in a press release. Combined with voluntary buyouts, the Education Department will have just under 2,200 employees by the end of the month, compared with 4,133 when President Donald Trump took office with promises to shutter the department.

    The layoffs represent a significant escalation of Trump’s efforts to reduce the department’s role in education, which is mostly run by states and school districts. Already, the administration has canceled hundreds of millions of dollars in grants and contracts that paid for education research, technical assistance to states and school districts, and teacher training programs.

    Affected staff will be placed on administrative leave starting March 21, the department said. Ahead of the announcement, workers were told to leave the office by 6 p.m. Tuesday and that the office would remain closed until Thursday “for security reasons.” McMahon later said this was standard corporate process when layoffs occur.

    “Today’s reduction in force reflects the Department of Education’s commitment to efficiency, accountability, and ensuring that resources are directed where they matter most: to students, parents, and teachers,” McMahon said in a press release. “I appreciate the work of the dedicated public servants and their contributions to the Department. This is a significant step toward restoring the greatness of the United States education system.”

    The Education Department administers major federal funding programs such as Title I, which provides extra money to high-poverty schools, and the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, or IDEA, which supports special education. It also investigates civil rights complaints and oversees an accountability system that pushes states to identify low-performing schools and provide them with additional resources.

    Exactly how the layoffs will affect specific programs was not immediately clear. A former Education Department staffer, who spoke with Chalkbeat on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to disclose the information, said the entire Office for Civil Rights teams based in Philadelphia, Chicago, San Francisco, Cleveland, Boston and New York were let go. That represents half of regional civil rights offices.

    The department said all divisions are affected but did not describe specific positions that were eliminated. In the press release, department officials said all functions required by law will continue.

    Only Congress can eliminate the department, but such deep cuts could leave the department a shell of its former self.

    Appearing on “The Ingraham Angle” on Fox News shortly after the layoffs were announced, McMahon said Trump had given her a clear mandate to shutter the department. She said she would work with Congress to do that. Immediately cutting these positions would help the federal government send more money to the states, she said.

    “I said ‘OK we have to identify where the bloat is, where the bureaucracy is, and we’re going to start there,’ McMahon said. “We need to make sure that that money does get to the states.”

    Trump is expected to sign an executive order to start the process of eliminating the department, but has not yet done so. Conservatives say that for decades the department has failed to adequately address low academic performance and is a bloated bureaucracy.

    On Fox, McMahon reassured viewers that programs such as IDEA would still be funded through congressional appropriations. Asked what IDEA stood for, McMahon responded, “I’m not sure I can tell you exactly what it stands for except that it’s programs for disabled needs. It’s my fifth day on the job, and I’m really trying to learn quickly.”

    Conservative state school chiefs said in a letter to McMahon last month that they need more flexibility in how to use federal money, rather than following complex rules that ensure specific funding streams benefit certain student groups.

    Public education advocates fear that if money flows unrestricted to states, there’s no guarantee it will help the most vulnerable students. Even without an executive order, they worry that administrative changes could affect the department’s ability to perform basic functions.

    Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, condemned the layoffs.

    “Denuding an agency so it cannot function effectively is the most cowardly way of dismantling it,” she said in a statement. “The massive reduction in force at the Education Department is an attack on opportunity that will gut the agency and its ability to support students, throwing federal education programs into chaos across the country.”

    Sheria Smith, president of the American Federation of Government Employee Local 252, which represents 2,800 Education Department employees, said the union will fight back against the layoffs and against what she called a misinformation campaign about the department’s work.

    “We must ask our fellow Americans: do you want your and your children’s rights enforced in school? Do you want your children to have the ability to play sports in their school districts? Do you need financial aid for college? Are you a fellow civil servant that relies on student loan forgiveness? Does your school district offset property taxes with federal funding?” she said in a statement.

    “If yes, then you rely on the Department of Education, and the services you rely on and the employees who support them are under attack.”

    Shortly after she was confirmed, McMahon sent a message to Education Department staff describing a “final mission” that would affect staffing, budgets, and agency operations.

    Department staff were given one-time offers of up to $25,000 to retire or resign in advance of a “very significant reduction in force.” More than 500 employees took some form of buy out.

    Another 1,300 employees are losing their jobs through the reduction in force, McMahon announced.

    Employees who are laid off will be paid through June 9.

    This story has been updated to include comments from Linda McMahon on Fox News, reaction to the layoffs, and additional information about affected offices.

    Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

    For more on education policy, visit eSN’s Educational Leadership hub.

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  • Half of OCR eliminated after Trump Education Department layoffs

    Half of OCR eliminated after Trump Education Department layoffs

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    The U.S. Department of Education has let go of hundreds of its employees charged with protecting the civil rights of students and educators. The agency also shuttered seven of its 12 civil rights enforcement offices, according to former department employees.

    Offices in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York City, Dallas, San Francisco, Boston and Cleveland have been closed. Those in Atlanta, Denver, Kansas City and Seattle remain open, as well as the OCR headquarters in Washington, D.C. 

    In total, the seven closed offices of the Education Department’s Office for Civil Rights oversaw half of the nation’s states, impacting nearly 60,000 public schools and over 30 million K-12 students.

    Those fired include scores of civil rights attorneys, according to an internal memo from the American Federation of Government Employees Local 252. The union represents nearly 1,000 of the roughly 1,300 Education Department employees laid off Tuesday evening as part of the Trump administration’s sweeping effort to gut the department, including at least 240 OCR staff.

    More than 6,000 investigations impacted

    “The Department of Education has turned its back on civil rights in schools,” said Catherine Lhamon, who led OCR under the Biden administration. “It’s not possible to resolve cases… effectively with fewer than half the investigative staff that the office had had two days ago” 

    The agency’s civil rights enforcement arm is responsible for implementing protections for all students, including underserved students. It is tasked with ensuring that, among others, students with disabilities, students from all racial backgrounds, and sexual assault survivors have equal access to education. 

    Doing so requires investigations of alleged civil rights violations and compliance reviews of school systems that sometimes take years — even with all 12 offices operating and fully staffed. The offices that were closed were in charge of many of those cases. 

    “You’re talking about cases being in the middle of mediation right now,” said Victoria DeLano, who worked for the Atlanta office as an equal opportunity specialist prior to her termination. 

    The cases OCR settles with schools and universities often set the tone for civil rights policies and practices in schools nationwide. The seven offices shuttered had over 6,000 open investigations as of Jan. 14, according to OCR’s website that was last updated under the Biden administration.

    With the abrupt closures and layoffs, however, much of that is up in the air.

    “I can’t even comprehend it — the fallout that this is going to have,” said DeLano.

    Offices close as complaints climb

    In the past few years, the office’s caseload had been steadily climbing. In fiscal year 2023, the office received 19,201 complaints, representing a 2% increase from 2022 and nearly triple the number of complaints in 2009.

    Prior to the new administration and its sweeping layoffs, each OCR investigative staff was juggling a caseload of about 50 complaints, which Lhamon already considered “untenable.” In fact, the high number of cases and slim number of investigators at the time had prompted former Education Secretary Miguel Cardona to request more funding from Congress, which would have helped hire additional OCR staff. 

    In contrast, the Trump administration has cited a desire to reduce the Education Department’s budget as part of the reason driving the sweeping layoffs.

    Some of those cut as part of President Donald Trump and Education Secretary Linda McMahon’s effort to “end bureaucratic bloat” were onboarded just months before being fired without notice, according to DeLano, who was hired in December under the former administration and then terminated in February. 

    DeLano realized she was out of a job after being locked out of her government laptop, and she only received a formal notice of termination after six days of being denied access.

    “It was done just completely heartless,” DeLano said. “I cannot believe that 50% of OCR is gone.”

    The massive cuts come after the administration told OCR staff to hit pause on its open investigations, and — instead of addressing public complaints — directed its resources to addressing the president’s priorities, like scaling back Title IX to exclude LGBTQ+ rights. Following a Feb. 5 executive order barring transgender women from playing on sports teams aligning with their gender identities, the Education Department launched multiple investigations into athletic associations, colleges and schools over their sports policies.

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  • Columbia On Edge Following ICE’s Arrest of Former Student

    Columbia On Edge Following ICE’s Arrest of Former Student

    Columbia University remained on edge Wednesday following the Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, a green card–holding recent graduate who helped lead the pro-Palestinian protests that roiled the campus last spring. A federal judge in New York ruled Tuesday that Khalil could not be deported, but following a procedural hearing on Wednesday, the judge said he will remain in ICE custody in Louisiana for now, CNN reported.

    Hundreds of people took to the streets of Manhattan to protest Khalil’s detention; police arrested 12 protesters outside City Hall Park Tuesday night, charging 11 with disorderly conduct, The New York Daily News reported.

    Meanwhile, faculty at Columbia warned other student protesters to be careful. Stuart Karle, a First Amendment lawyer and adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School, advised students who are not U.S. citizens to avoid publishing opinions that could attract the attention of the Trump administration, The New York Times reported.

    “If you have a social media page, make sure it is not filled with commentary on the Middle East,” he told students and faculty gathered in Pulitzer Hall.

    “Nobody can protect you,” journalism school dean Jelani Cobb added, according to the Times. “These are dangerous times.”

    During a news briefing Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the Trump administration was using intelligence gathered by the Department of Homeland Security to identify people who participated in campus protests, CNN reported. She accused Columbia of holding back information.

    “Columbia University has been given the names of other individuals who have engaged in pro-Hamas activity, and they are refusing to help DHS identify those individuals on campus,” Leavitt said. “As the president said very strongly in his statement yesterday, he is not going to tolerate that and we expect all of America’s colleges and universities to comply with this administration’s policy.”

    Last week, the Trump administration canceled $400 million in grants and contracts over what it claimed was Columbia’s “continued inaction” and failure to protect Jewish students.

    Columbia’s interim president, Katrina Armstrong, released a statement Wednesday reiterating her guiding principles. She wrote, “A great institution, and particularly a great university, depends upon an unwavering commitment to following fair and just processes, no matter the internal and external pressures.”

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  • Three Questions for Duke’s Quentin Ruiz-Esparza

    Three Questions for Duke’s Quentin Ruiz-Esparza

    In my co-authored 2020 book, Learning Innovation and the Future of Higher Education, we wrote about Duke Learning Innovation and Lifetime Education. One of the leaders at LILE is Quentin Ruiz-Esparza, director of digital product strategy and design. I asked Quentin if he’d be willing to answer my questions about his role, organization and career.

    Q: Tell us about your role at Duke Learning Innovation and Lifetime Education. What are the big projects, initiatives and services that you collaborate on and lead?

    A: My role as a product strategist is a unique and new position within LILE. It reflects LILE’s intention to recenter Duke’s digital education portfolio on a customer-driven strategy. Our approach to developing courses or programs starts by understanding our learners and then designing education that meets their needs.

    My team and I develop new digital programs through strategic planning, market research and learning experience design. In strategic planning, I work with Duke’s professional schools and academic units to refine their digital learning strategy. This includes defining their learner audience, crafting a learner-centered value proposition and identifying the right program type. At the same time, I lead market research projects to validate learner and employer demand for program topics and skills. Finally, I oversee a learning experience (LX) design team that collaborates with Duke faculty. Together, the LX design team and faculty create high-quality, inclusive and engaging courses and programs aligned with our goals and market data. I truly couldn’t do this work without them!

    I constantly adapt to shifting priorities and opportunities, but I’ll share two major initiatives I am focused on right now. First, I am working with two campus partners—the Office of Climate and Sustainability and the Nicholas School of the Environment—to develop a nondegree portfolio strategy for sustainability education. Our goal is to equip professionals across industries to be leaders in sustainability within their fields and organizations. Second, I am managing a learner demand survey that will help Duke better understand our learners—their educational preferences, motivations and needs. My hope is that this analysis will shape Duke’s future priorities for professional education.

    Q: Can you help those of us outside Duke understand the history and mission of LILE? What might someone interested in pushing for an institutional approach to promoting learning innovation learn from its organizational structure and capacities?

    A: LILE’s history goes back to two different units: Duke Learning Innovation and Duke Continuing Studies. Both had a rich history of exploring new ways to serve learners. Duke Learning Innovation supported faculty to improve teaching through technology, new pedagogical approaches and data and research. Duke Learning Innovation also played a key role in online learning at Duke, launching the university’s partnership with Coursera. Today, Duke’s Coursera portfolio is arguably Duke’s largest effort to increase access to education, with between 40,000 and 50,000 learners actively participating in Duke Coursera courses each month.

    Duke Continuing Studies was founded in 1969. Over time, it created educational experiences for learners beyond traditional university students. These included working professionals, middle and high school students, and retirees. Duke Continuing Studies strengthened the university’s ties to the local community while also reaching learners around the world.

    In 2022, these two units were brought together under the leadership of Yakut Gazi, Duke’s first-ever vice provost of learning innovation and digital education. I believe that our merger as LILE created two valuable opportunities for the university. First, where continuing education may have been more on the periphery of the university’s work, LILE now advances a central university strategy to educate learners from precollege to postcareer. Second, learning innovation can serve as a catalyst for increased access to education. Collectively, our teams have the expertise to transform Duke’s learning experience, pedagogies, education technologies and business models to enable greater access to education that enriches people’s lives.

    In the world today, I believe this work of innovating towards greater educational access is paramount to colleges and universities demonstrating our value and role in society. Expanding access to education is where universities have the greatest opportunity to support social mobility through education, foster leadership across organizations and civil society, and nurture learning that empowers people to address the challenges of our day—from AI to the global climate challenge.

    Q: Reflecting on your career path, what advice might you have for early-career educational professionals interested in working toward a leadership position in digital learning?

    A: I will share a few ideas that have driven me in my own career. First, take initiative and volunteer to tackle new challenges in your department. Many growth opportunities in my career began with me identifying ways in which I could help leadership achieve their goals or mission. I pitched ideas for how I could help, which allowed me to turn a departmental need into an opportunity to demonstrate my abilities and build greater trust with managers and colleagues.

    Second, even if you are happy in your current job, regularly explore job descriptions in your field. This could be looking at open job postings or exploring staff listings at other organizations. When you find more senior roles that interest you—maybe even your dream job—identify the competencies you will need to develop in order to be qualified for that future position. Then, create performance goals in your current role that allow you to cultivate those skills and experience.

    Third, do not get lost in your to-do list. On a periodic basis (e.g., monthly or quarterly), identify a couple bigger goals that you want to accomplish in your work. Consider what work is of the highest value to your department or organization. If the goal is rather ambitious, break it down into shorter monthly goals so that you can make consistent progress. Higher-level goal setting like this will allow you to build a résumé of high-impact, strategic accomplishments (versus a list of generic responsibilities).

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