Washington View: Money, power, and education

2019 ◽  
Vol 100 (8) ◽  
pp. 72-73 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maria Ferguson

Three news stories from spring 2019 put the spotlight on the interaction between money, power, and political influence in education. The Varsity Blues scandal, in which 50 people were charged with using bribes, false test scores, and other shady methods to influence college admission decisions, highlights not just the pernicious influence on money in higher education but also the false notion that certain schools are so special the mere act of attending can set its students up for a happy and successful life. President Donald Trump’s fiscal year 2020 budget preserved funding for popular programs but cut programs for teacher professional development and federal student aid for higher education. And new research by Frederick Hess and Jay Greene reveals that the education reform and research movements are populated by a large proportion of supporters of Democratic candidates.

2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (4) ◽  
pp. 297-306 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edith Braun ◽  
Bernhard Leidner

This article contributes to the conceptual and empirical distinction between (the assessment of) appraisals of teaching behavior and (the assessment of) self-reported competence acquirement within academic course evaluation. The Bologna Process, the current higher-education reform in Europe, emphasizes education aimed toward vocationally oriented competences and demands the certification of acquired competences. Currently available evaluation questionnaires measure the students’ satisfaction with a lecturer’s behavior, whereas the “Evaluation in Higher Education: Self-Assessed Competences” (HEsaCom) measures the students’ personal benefit in terms of competences. In a sample of 1403 German students, we administered a scale of satisfaction with teaching behavior and the German version of the HEsaCom at the same time. Using confirmatory factor analysis, the estimated correlations between the various scales of self-rated competences and teaching behavior appraisals were moderate to strong, yet the constructs were shown to be empirically distinct. We conclude that the self-rated gains in competences are distinct from satisfaction with course and instructor. In line with the higher education reform, self-reported gains in competences are an important aspect of academic course evaluation, which should be taken into account in the future and might be able to restructure the view of “quality of higher education.” The English version of the HEsaCom is presented in the Appendix .


Author(s):  
Natalia Kraevskaia

The article addresses the needs of educational system in context of rapidly developing globalization and explores internationalization of higher education as one of the main factors which contributes to integration of international dimension to professional training at universities. Different components and strategies of internationalization, such as strong collaboration in teaching, internationalization of the curriculum, cooperation in researches and knowledge production, students and professors’ mobility, and participation in international networks are analyzed in connection to education reform in Russia. The article provides the comparison of internationalization policies in Russian and Vietnamese education systems, argues that innovations in higher education should be adjusted to the national interests, traditions and mentality and finally describes new strategies in collaboration of Russia and Vietnam in the field of education.  


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