The University of Louisiana, Lafayette, is eliminating its philosophy major, while Michigan State University is doing away with American studies and classics, after years of declining enrollments in those majors.

And in a class called “The English Major in the Workplace,” at the University of Texas, Austin, students read “Death of a Salesman” but also learn to network, write a résumé and come off well in an interview.

The pressure on institutions to answer those questions is prompting changes from the admissions office to the career center. But even as they rush to prove their relevance, colleges and universities worry that students are specializing too early, that they are so focused on picking the perfect major that they don’t allow time for self-discovery, much less late blooming.

“The phrase drives me crazy — ‘What are you going to do with your degree?’ — but I see increasing concerns about that,” says Katharine Brooks, director of the liberal arts career center at the University of Texas, Austin, and author of “You Majored in What? Mapping Your Path From Chaos to Career.” “Particularly as money gets tighter, people are going to demand more accountability from majors and departments.”

Consider the change captured in the annual survey by the University of California, Los Angeles, of more than 400,000 incoming freshmen. In 1971, 37 percent responded that it was essential or very important to be “very well-off financially,” while 73 percent said the same about “developing a meaningful philosophy of life.” In 2009, the values were nearly reversed: 78 percent identified wealth as a goal, while 48 percent were after a meaningful philosophy.

The shift in attitudes is reflected in a shifting curriculum. Nationally, business has been the most popular major for the last 15 years. Campuses also report a boom in public health fields, and many institutions are building up environmental science and just about anything prefixed with “bio.” Reflecting the new economic and global realities, they are adding or expanding majors in Chinese and Arabic. The University of Michigan has seen a 38 percent increase in students enrolling in Asian language courses since 2002, while French has dropped by 5 percent.

Of course, universities have always adjusted curriculum to reflect the changing world; Kim Wilcox, the provost and vice president for academic affairs at Michigan State, notes that universities, his included, used to offer majors in elocution and animal husbandry. In a major re-examination of its curriculum, Michigan State has added a dozen or so new programs, including degrees in global studies and, in response to a growing industry in the state, film studies. At the same time, it is abandoning underperformers like classical studies: in the last four years, only 13 students have declared it their major.

Dropping a classics or philosophy major might have been unthinkable a generation ago, when knowledge of the great thinkers was a cornerstone of a solid education. But with budgets tight, such programs have come to seem like a luxury— or maybe an expensive antique — in some quarters.

When Louisiana’s regents voted to eliminate the philosophy major last spring, they agreed with faculty members that the subject is “a traditional core program of a broad-based liberal arts and science institution.” But they noted that, on average, 3.4 students had graduated as philosophy majors in the previous five years; in 2008, there were none. “One cannot help but recognize that philosophy as an essential undergraduate program has lost some credence among students,” the board concluded.

Related posts

• No related posts.

“If my parents would have taught me, it would have been different,” said Ashley, a 16-year-old sophomore. “When I drive, they try to tell me what to do, and I get nervous.”

Some educators and others worry that such cutbacks could prove tragic.

“As soon as people start taking driver’s education away from the kids, we’re going to pay for it with lost lives, collisions, and ultimately that costs everybody,” said John Bolen, past president of the Florida Professional Driving School Association.

Some worry also that many parents can’t afford the $350 to $700 that private lessons can cost or don’t have the skills to teach their kids themselves. Even for those who can do it, the combination of parents, teenagers and learning how to drive can be volatile.

In more than half the states, minors who want a license must take driver’s education from a certified instructor, said Allen Robinson, CEO of the American Driver and Traffic Safety Education Association. However, that doesn’t necessarily mean schools are required to offer a class. (Generally, after age 18, would-be drivers do not have to undergo any formal instruction.)

High schools started rolling back driver’s ed after their effectiveness was called into question in the 1980s. The more recent cutbacks have been driven by school funding shortages, and the trend might be accelerating because of the downturn in the economy, said J. Peter Kissinger, president and CEO of the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

Robinson said the nation’s schools have all but eliminated driver’s ed as an elective course offered during the school day.

Here in Miami-Dade County, the nation’s fourth-largest school system got rid of driver’s ed during the day at all but Killian and another school. Students can still enroll in a free after-school course at one of the district’s adult education centers. But that is not an option for the many thousands of students who play sports or are involved in other extracurricular activities, or cannot get a ride.

About 10 high schools in Georgia eliminated or reduced driver’s education this school year. A dozen more did the same in Kansas last year. In Volusia County, Fla., schools eliminated daytime driver’s ed three years ago, replacing it with summer, after-school and Saturday classes. Enrollment plummeted two-thirds, saving about $400,000 a year.

“This is not because they don’t believe in driver’s ed,” said Bob Dallas, director of the Georgia Governor’s Office of Highway Safety. “They do, but they’re facing the same financial pressure that everybody in government is facing.”

In rural Pennsylvania, the Titusville district got rid of the behind-the-wheel portion of its program last spring, saving about $20,000. In Blountville, Tenn., the driver’s education program was cut in half about five years ago because of budget woes. Administrators considered eliminating the $130,000-a-year program last spring, but did not.

“It could save lives. It’s very simple,” said Jack Barnes, director of schools in Sullivan County, Tenn. “We don’t want any of our students injured or killed because of mistakes they made that possibly a program like this could help.”

Motor vehicle crashes are the leading cause of death for U.S. teens; in 2007, an average of 11 16- to 19-year-olds died every day. But Russ Rader, a spokesman for the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, said studies show there is no difference in crash risk between 16- and 17-year-olds who take driver’s ed and those who don’t.

“In some cases, driver’s education has a negative effect because in some states you can get a license sooner if you take driver’s ed,” he said.

Private instructors aren’t necessarily picking up all the students who can’t take driver’s ed at school.

Julio Torres, an instructor at the Easy Method Driving School in Miami, said he suspects the downturn in the economy is playing a role. He also said some parents simply prefer to teach their kids.

But Torres and others said parents, despite their best intentions, aren’t always the best instructors. For one thing, they may pass their own bad driving habits on to their children.

Also, “the kids are at a stage where they’re confrontational with their parents,” said Brenda Bennett, owner of a driving school in Erie, Pa., that holds contracts to teach driver’s ed through some area high schools. “Then you add driving with a parent and you have more confrontation. Whereas someone like myself, when we take kids out, there’s no personality going there. It’s just all business.”

Related posts

• Indiana Cuts $297 Million Down From K-12 Schools (0)

As part of an agreement to drop the plan, Ravenstahl, a Democrat, said three non-profit organizations — the University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University and health plan insurer Highmark — will make donations to the city. Neither Ravenstahl nor the organizations would disclose the amount or say whether they cover what the pension plan needs.

KINDNESS: New ways we give and volunteer

State Rep. Paul Costa, a Democrat from the Pittsburgh suburb of Wilkins Township, said the tuition tax idea sent the wrong message about a city that has transformed itself from a steel town into an education and technology hub.

“It was not the right thing to do,” he said. ”

As in many college towns, non-profit organizations have made donations to Pittsburgh’s coffers, finance director Scott Kunka said.

The controversy was the latest in a long-running debate between cities and tax-exempt institutions over whether the organizations contribute enough to make up for not paying real estate taxes.

Providence Mayor David Cicilline, a Democrat, proposed in April to tax students $150 per semester at schools including Brown University and Providence College. The schools have made voluntary contributions to the city since 2003. The proposal would require state legislative approval.

In Pittsburgh, non-profit organizations are exempt from most taxes, but they are many of the city’s major employers and hold about one-third of its property value.

From 2005 through 2007, the city raised $14.3 million in anonymous donations from them, Kunka said. The non-profits proposed contributing $5.8 million from 2008 through 2010.

“This is a leap of faith for us all,” Ravenstahl said. “The future of our city and of our citizens is riding on it.”

Kunka said one option is increasing a yearly tax on people who work in the city from $52 to $144.

Costa said there is little support in the Legislature for raising taxes. He introduced a bill this month to prohibit a tuition tax.

Related posts

• Pittsburgh Mayor Shelves His plans for the Nation’s First Tax on College Tuition (0)
• Tuitions Investigation: More colleges make consumer-oriented data available to public (0)
• Community college team members and all-stars: major high intelligence students (0)
• American College Tuition Rising: record-breaking competition for slots at elite colleges (0)

“I wouldn’t want to be in here in a bad storm,” said physical education teacher Debbie Philyaw.

After the federal stimulus passed in February, North Carolina school officials thought they had found a way to repair the 58-year-old gym and other crumbling school structures. The stimulus provided money for Qualified School Construction Bonds, which is intended to let school districts raise capital through interest-free bonds to fund construction.

The program also was expected to boost North Carolina’s construction industry. Ben Matthews, director of school support for North Carolina’s Department of Public Instruction, estimated it would create 11,000 jobs.

But the bond program has become entangled in financial and bureaucratic red tape. Only $2.3 billion of the $11 billion in bonds available this year have been sold as of last week, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

“States are missing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity,” said Judy Marks of the National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities.

In North Carolina, one of the 69 districts chosen by the state to benefit from the program has found a buyer for its bonds. “The idea is to stimulate the economy,” Matthews said. “Then it comes to a screeching halt because our people can’t find lenders.”

Not seen as profitable

North Carolina’s experience highlights why it’s been so hard to get the program started. For one, North Carolina law prevents the state from issuing bonds directly, so they must be sold by individual counties. But some counties have low credit ratings, and some have been allotted such small amounts of money under the program that lenders aren’t interested.

Matthews said even North Carolina-based Bank of America, one of the nation’s largest banks, hasn’t bought any of the bonds in the state. Bank spokeswoman Nicole Nastacie said the company has invested in the bonds, but would not say where. She said the bank “will continue to consider them, subject to our ability to structure and price appropriately.”

Some potential lenders are also reluctant to buy bonds because it’s hard to make money from them.

Lenders are paid through tax credits from the U.S. Treasury worth an estimated $8 billion over 10 years. But banks battered by the financial crisis can’t use the tax credits if they have no profits and no tax liability. And Treasury has yet to issue regulations allowing banks to strip off the tax credits and sell them to third parties.

Some lenders have asked for interest. Branch Banking & Trust, which is headquartered in Winston-Salem, N.C., offered to buy Jones County’s bonds — if the county paid 2.9% interest, in addition to the tax credits, according to Michael Bracy, the Jones County schools superintendent. BB&T spokeswoman A.C. McGraw refused to comment on the Jones County bid. She said rates are “based on a thorough analysis of each individual transaction and the terms of the loans.”

Jones County’s manager, Franky Howard, said the county won’t act until next year, when he hopes Treasury will have issued new regulations.

Doesn’t just hurt education

Rep. Bob Etheridge, D-N.C., met with Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner to ask him to issue rules allowing investors to strip and sell the tax credits. Etheridge said Geithner promised his staff was working on it. That was six months ago.

“It’s complicated. I can appreciate that,” Etheridge said. “But that’s only a reason, not an excuse. Get it done.”

Nayyera Haq, a Treasury spokeswoman, said in an e-mail: “We remain committed to making the Recovery Act bond programs as effective as possible and are in the process of developing additional regulations.”

Etheridge successfully added a provision to a jobs-creation bill passed by the House last week that would allow state or local governments to choose to get a direct payment from Washington equal to the value of the tax credit. The bill heads to the Senate, which will take it up next month.

Students and teachers in Weldon City are among those waiting for the money. The school district hopes to use part of its $894,000 allotment to replace the science labs at Weldon Science and Technology High School, where rusted gas pipes have forced students to do their experiments on computers instead of Bunsen burners.

“As far as any hands-on experiments, we can’t do it,” said Elie Bracy, the superintendent.

The impact of the delay has been economic as well as educational. The city planned to use a local company, Freeman Roofing, for the repairs. On Dec. 2, Freeman went out of business and 18 workers lost their jobs.

“If we had gotten those projects,” said Bill Freeman, the company’s owner, “we’d be in business today.”

Related posts

• Obama 2009 doesn’t bring fresh start to K-12 schools (0)
• New York Teachers Scrambling to Gain High Pension (0)
• Mich. Education Reform: Key Factor is to Turn Around and Take Over Schools (0)
• Iflove Education Reviews List: Educational Resources This Week (0)
• Haberman Educational Foundation – Do You Need a Free School Superintendent? (0)

Two factors are driving the surge: Students want the courses, and employers want the trained students, says Paul Rowland, the association’s executive director.

“There’s a great perception that there’s a sweet spot with energy to do good and do well, and it appears to be the place of job growth,” says Rob Melnick, executive dean of the Global Institute of Sustainability at Arizona State University.

GREEN HOUSE: Learn and share ideas

The institute started an undergraduate program in sustainability studies — with a focus on solar — a year and a half ago. It now has about 600 students who’ve declared sustainability a major. “The growth rate is unprecedented,” even though the program has the toughest admission standards of any school at the university, Melnick says.

Other schools are also seeing big demand, including:

•Illinois State University in Normal, Ill. The school of 21,000 students has 65 majors in renewable energy, a program started in 2008 with help from a $1 million Department of Energy grant. The program has “more students wanting in than we can handle,” says Richard Boser, chair of the Department of Technology. Nearby employers, including those in wind energy, hope to hire future graduates, Boser says.

•Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In September it launched a minor in energy studies. A student survey said 43% of freshmen and sophomores were very or extremely interested in it. “That’s a very large number,” says Vladimir Bulovic, associate professor of communication and technology. MIT’s student energy club has 1,700 members, vs. several hundred a few years ago, Bulovic says.

•University of California-Berkeley. The school has seen student interest in its introductory energy class explode. Ten years ago, it attracted 40 or so students. Now, the class runs 270, says Daniel Kammen, director of the school’s Renewable and Appropriate Energy Laboratory.

The Obama administration has estimated that jobs in energy and environmental-related occupations will grow 52% from 2000 through 2016, vs. 14% for other occupations.

That’s partly why budget-strapped schools are adding energy and sustainability programs even while cutting other majors, Rowland says.

Related posts

• University Branches in Dubai Are Struggling to Attract Enough Qualified Students to Survive (0)
• Studying deeply children education and using right ways to teach them (0)
• Investigation Result: American Students better at basic writing skills (0)
• Iflove Educational News and Academic Indicators This Week: Teaching and Education Resources (0)
• Iflove Education resources for both students and educators, for K-12 and higher education (0)

It has been a decade since the U.S. Department of Agriculture decided that the ground beef it buys for school lunches must meet higher safety standards than ground beef sold to the general public. But those rules, which required that school lunch meat be rejected if it contains certain pathogens, such as salmonella, have fallen behind the standards that fast-food chains and other businesses are adopting on their own.

Moreover, the special protections that the USDA sets for the ground beef it sends to schools do not extend to other products the federal government — or schools themselves — purchase for student meals. No extra testing is required for the spinach, the peanuts or the tortillas served in schools and, sometimes, those products present similar health risks.

Today, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack has embraced a different measure for food safety — one that goes beyond pathogen tests and looks at the true toll: how many people get sick. “Until we get the number of food-borne illnesses down to zero, and the number of hospitalizations down to zero, and the number of deaths down to zero, we still have work to do,” he said this fall.

The stakes are especially high for schoolchildren with still-developing immune systems. There were more than 470 outbreaks of food-borne illnesses in schools from 1998 through 2007, sickening at least 23,000 children, according to a USA TODAY analysis of data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Yet the USDA’s National School Lunch Program, which provides food to nearly every school district in the country, lacks systems to ensure that students don’t get tainted products from poorly vetted suppliers, the newspaper found.

Vilsack has pledged to address the problems, and members of Congress are vowing to do the same as they work to update the Child Nutrition Act, which governs the National School Lunch Program.

Congress has a responsibility “to make certain the foods provided to schools are the safest possible,” says Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., the senior Republican on the Senate agriculture committee.

Another committee member, Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., has introduced a bill requiring new initiatives to ensure that recalled products are removed quickly from school pantries. She and a House counterpart, Rep. Joe Sestak, D-Pa., also are pressing the USDA to stop using school lunch suppliers with poor safety records — and to set standards for school lunch food that mirror those used by fast-food chains and other discriminating companies.

The school lunch program could become the standard-bearer for food safety, says Carol Tucker-Foreman, who oversaw school lunch purchases as assistant undersecretary of the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the Carter administration. She says that instead of buying the cheapest possible food for schoolchildren, as it does now, the government could seek out suppliers that meet high standards and then let them advertise that they have USDA’s seal of approval.

Companies could boast that ” ‘We’re qualified to sell to the school lunch program,’ ” says Tucker-Foreman, now senior fellow at the Consumer Federation of America’s Food Policy Institute.

What lessons could the National School Lunch Program learn from the industries, companies and universities that have pioneered breakthroughs in food safety? Among those cited by experts:

It is possible to produce safer food by raising standards without breaking the bank.

McDonald’s did it, after a brush with catastrophe.

In 1982, hamburgers from the fast-food chain sickened at least 47 people in Oregon and Michigan. No one died, but the pathogen that caused the severe cramps, abdominal pain and bloody diarrhea turned out to be a little-known, especially dangerous form of the common stomach bacteria E. coli. The new subtype, E. coli O157:H7, produced a toxin that destroyed red blood cells and, in later cases elsewhere, caused kidney failure or death.

Confounded by the discovery, McDonald’s hired one of the nation’s best-known food safety scientists, Michael Doyle, and told him, he recalls, “to bulletproof their system so E. coli never happened to them again.”

McDonald’s reconsidered its old assumptions about food — from how often beef-processing plants should test ground beef to how well a hamburger must be cooked to kill off pathogens such as E. coli and salmonella.

The results helped change the industry. For years, the federal food code said burgers had to be cooked only until their internal temperature reached 140 degrees; McDonald’s tests showed the safe standard was 155 degrees and that the meat must register that temperature for at least 15 seconds.

Microbial data also altered the demands McDonald’s imposed on its suppliers. After a couple of years, the company saw that “about 5% of the suppliers could not get down to what we considered a reasonable level for salmonella and E. coli,” says Doyle, now director of the University of Georgia’s Center for Food Safety. “McDonald’s worked hard with them, but they couldn’t get there, so McDonald’s let them go.”

The standards have worked, by all accounts. Seattle-based food safety lawyer Bill Marler, who has been involved in almost all the major food safety lawsuits of the past 15 years, says he hasn’t sued McDonald’s since 1994 for a company-based E. coli illness and can’t think of anyone else who has.

Other fast-food chains, including Jack in the Box and Burger King, have adopted similar practices, USA TODAY found, and many have continued to toughen their standards. As a result, many of those companies now have sampling and testing requirements for ground beef that go beyond the standards USDA set for school lunches in 2000.

At that time, USDA officials feared that their demand for sampling and testing of school meat — and their move to a “zero tolerance” standard for salmonella and E. coli O157:H7 — would drive away the program’s suppliers, says Barry Carpenter, who spearheaded the new rules as an official with the USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service.

In the beginning, that’s what happened: When the agency put its first orders out to bid in the months after the requirement was set, “we didn’t get many bids, maybe not any, and the prices were high,” says Carpenter, now head of the National Meat Association. “But eventually, one or two companies started bidding. Then, other companies realized, ‘Oh, they’re bidding at this price and they’re making money,’ and then we started getting more bids. … By fall (of 2000), we were getting an adequate supply at a reasonable price.”

The lesson, many analysts say, is that organizations with great buying power — such as fast-food chains or the school lunch program — can set higher standards, and industry ultimately will meet those standards because that’s where the money is. The school lunch program purchases huge volumes of commodities such as beef, poultry and other staples –– $830 million worth in 2008.

“If you look at the school lunch business, it’s a very big business,” says Craig Wilson, assistant vice president for quality assurance and food safety at Costco, another company that imposes strict standards on its suppliers. “Could they improve and toughen their specs? Sure they could.”

How much would it cost? David Theno, a safety specialist who overhauled Jack in the Box’s safety practices in the 1990s, estimates the new requirements there added less than a penny a pound to its beef bills.

Higher food safety standards might not cost anything at all, says Helen Jensen, an agricultural economist at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. Buyers — at least those big enough to have any clout — often don’t pay more for higher standards.

It’s not that the buyer says, ” ‘Here, I’ve added these extra tests, who wants to pay more for it?’ It’s more: ‘These are the specifications for our product, (and) if you want to sell to us, this is who we’ll buy from,’ ” Jensen says.

You can go only so far with killing pathogens at the processing plant. Eventually, food safety has to reach back to the farm.

European Union members focus on lowering levels of pathogens in animals before they are slaughtered. One much-cited example is Sweden, which has virtually eliminated salmonella in chicken and eggs by requiring the destruction of any flock that tests positive for the disease.

In the United States, the focus has instead been on technological solutions after the harvest — anti-microbial dips, disinfecting sprays and testing.

It’s partly a matter of efficiency: There are millions of ranchers and thousands of feedlots where cattle are raised and fattened, but only 50 processing plants. So in terms of the cost-effectiveness of installing safety systems, “the packing plants made the most sense,” says Mike Engler, president of Cactus Feeders, a feedlot in Amarillo, Texas. Engler, a biochemist, has chaired the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association’s beef safety committee.

Produce is different. In the United States, the safety drive recently has shifted to the field and farm — and is furthest along in leafy greens.

Three and a half years ago, an E. coli O157:H7 outbreak tied to spinach from Earthbound Farm killed five people and sickened at least 205, setting off a nationwide recall. Since then, the company in particular and California and Arizona leafy greens growers in general have remade themselves.

Western Growers, which represents the California and Arizona produce industry, estimates that producers lost about $100 million in sales because of the spinach recall. Researchers at Rutgers University’s Food Policy Institute found that a majority of consumers stopped buying spinach and that a fifth would not buy other bagged produce, either.

“Industry couldn’t wait for the government” to solve the problem, says Wendy Fink-Weber, a spokeswoman for Western Growers. So the growers worked with universities, food safety experts and processors to write new standards that are overseen by the California Department of Food and Agriculture and paid for by the growers.

The standards require bacterial testing of irrigation water, named as a possible source of contamination in federal reports. If test results suggest a problem, the vegetables themselves are tested for E. coli O157:H7 and salmonella. If either is found, the crop cannot be used for human consumption.

“There’s a huge cultural shift,” says Hank Giclas, Western Growers’ vice president for science and technology. So far, 120 California growers and handlers have voluntarily signed on to the standards. Arizona growers worked with their state officials to implement similar standards in September 2007.

Earthbound Farm went even further. The company, based in San Juan Bautista, Calif., also tests all seeds and fertilizers for E. coli O157:H7 and salmonella, then tests both raw and finished product and holds it until the tests come back negative; testing usually takes between 12 and 16 hours.

Will Daniels, Earthbound’s vice president in charge of safety, says the new processes add about 3 cents to the cost of a package of baby greens.

California and Arizona together grow 90% of the leafy greens Americans eat, Fink-Weber says — which means that at least some schools already have salad bars operating under these high standards. Safety standards for produce could become even more important when Congress takes up reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act because there’s mounting pressure to emphasize fresh fruits and vegetables in schoolkids’ diets.

A group of legislators, led by Rep. Sam Farr, D-Calif., is pushing a bill to require the USDA to increase produce purchases for schools’ feeding programs and encourage use of salad bars in schools.

Move faster when trouble erupts.

When Costco learns that one of its suppliers has recalled a product, the members-only retailer does more than pull the item off its shelves. Because its shoppers swipe a customer identification card at checkout, Costco can track anyone who purchased the recalled product, and each of them gets an automated phone call informing them of the recall.

The calls, up to 870,000 per hour, are made immediately after a recall is initiated, arriving in some cases before the official announcement is posted on government websites. And Costco follows up with a written letter to each affected household.

“If I have knowledge (of a recall), I better do something about it … beyond putting a sticker in the aisle,” says Wilson, the company’s safety chief.

Costco’s use of modern technology is the sort of approach that some experts believe the USDA should adopt when it comes to advising schools about recalls of school lunch products, whether those products were bought by the government or purchased directly by schools themselves.

Earlier this year, an audit by Congress’ Government Accountability Office noted that both the USDA and the Food and Drug Administration lack systems for giving schools timely alerts when products such as peanut butter — the focus of a nationwide recall this year — are bought for student meals.

Part of the problem is that commodities purchased through the National School Lunch Program often pass through multiple processors and distributors, and there’s no system for tracking specific foods to their final destinations. That undermines efforts to “inform states and school districts which products were produced with recalled foods and which were not,” the auditors reported.

In some cases, such problems have led unwitting school officials to serve recalled food, the auditors found, though they could not determine whether any students were sickened as a result.

Gillibrand’s bill would require the FDA and the USDA to develop new systems for identifying whether foods implicated in a safety investigation may have been distributed to schools. It also would push the USDA to find ways to alert schools to recalls more quickly and effectively.

Improving the recall system is the first step the government should take to assure the safety of school lunches, says Dora Rivas, head of food and nutrition services for Dallas schools and president of the School Nutrition Association, which represents school meal directors. It is time, she adds, to “bring this system into the digital age.”

Related posts

• No related posts.

Disappearing dollars

State support for higher education dwindled. Oregon this month became the latest state to reduce need-based grants for students. And colleges looked for more ways to cut costs. Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., said it planned to cut up to 70 staff positions in February. The University of California system’s plans to raise fees 32% fed student protests.
Federal coffers were squeezed, too. Lawmakers approved a 13% increase in the maximum Pell Grant, signaling a strengthened commitment to ensuring access to college for low-income students. But an unexpected surge in enrollments this fall created an $18 billion shortfall in the Pell program — three times the shortfall last year, the Associated Press reported this month.

College success

Access has long been a hallmark of federal policy, but President Obama also unveiled a number of proposals that put more emphasis on ensuring that students are successful once they get to college, too.

“Obama is essentially saying we want higher ed to be an open door, not a revolving door,” says Terry Hartle, a lobbyist for the American Council on Education, an umbrella group for colleges and universities. Under Obama’s proposals, colleges could be rewarded if they demonstrate improvements in persistence and completion rates.

Two-year colleges

Obama also proposed $12 billion to reform community colleges as a way to prepare the nation’s workforce for a global economy. In beefing up funding for two-year schools, which traditionally receive less attention than four-year institutions, Obama “broke the mold,” says Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce.

Student loans

The proposal generating the most controversy this year would replace a large bank-based federal student loan program with a government direct-lending program and use some savings to boost other priorities, including Pell Grants and community colleges. While the House passed a bill based on a number of Obama initiatives with relative ease, a bigger fight is expected in the Senate.

A key critic of the plan isSen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., a former Education secretary. He argues that the federal government’s plan would “overcharge the student” and “use the profit to pay for the new programs that make the congressmen look good.” And, he says, if the Obama proposals become law, “getting your loan will become about as enjoyable as waiting in line for your driver’s license.”

Related posts

• Iflove Education resources for both students and educators, for K-12 and higher education (0)
• USC to eliminate the study of German as a major and dismantle German department (0)
• University of Cambridge Gives up foreign language entry requirement (0)
• University Branches in Dubai Are Struggling to Attract Enough Qualified Students to Survive (0)
• Tuitions Investigation: More colleges make consumer-oriented data available to public (0)

Schools nationwide closed in fear of a pandemic that has proven mild. And even as recession-related budget cuts forced thousands of teacher layoffs, a modest federal grant with a catchy name consumed educators’ attention nationwide.

Swine flu fears

After the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention told schools last spring to be vigilant in the face of swine flu, or H1N1, more than 700 schools closed in April and May alone. Federal officials later said schools should close only if “high numbers” of students are absent with flu-like symptoms. At the pandemic’s height in mid-October, 949 schools closed in one week, the U.S. Department of Education said.

No Child Left Behind

Obama administration officials promised a new, “forward-thinking” approach to education. Public opinion had slipped for No Child Left Behind, President Bush’s signature education reform law, which requires schools to test most children in math and reading each year in an attempt to reduce a nagging achievement gap between whites and minorities. Recent research has suggested it led many states to lower standards. Even a co-author, U.S. Rep. George Miller, D-Calif., said in 2007 that it “may be the most tainted brand in America.”

So President Obama’s inauguration represented a fresh start to supporters. But Obama kept teachers unions at arm’s length. He talked a lot about test scores — and Arne Duncan, his Education secretary, promoted charter schools and performance-based teacher pay, as did predecessor Margaret Spellings.

This prompted education historian Diane Ravitch to declare that Obama was giving Bush “a third term in education.”

In fact, Duncan has given center stage to several Bush policies in Obama’s first big reform: a push to remake schools with a $5 billion “Race to the Top” fund. It requires states seeking a share of the economic stimulus cash (36 have applied to date) to drop limits on charter schools and tie teacher pay to test scores.

Also in 2009

Obama ruffled feathers on the right when he announced plans to address the nation’s schoolchildren in a televised back-to-school speech during school hours. Duncan said the speech would merely “challenge students to work hard, set educational goals and take responsibility for their learning,” but critics such as Florida Republican Party chairman Jim Greer feared that Obama would “indoctrinate” children with “socialist ideology.”

Schools nationwide closed in fear of a pandemic that has proven mild. And even as recession-related budget cuts forced thousands of teacher layoffs, a modest federal grant with a catchy name consumed educators’ attention nationwide.

For the nation’s K-12 schools, 2009 may well go down as the year when everything changed but little happened. A new president promised a fresh start but angered many in even his own party by polishing his predecessor’s apple.

Related posts

• New York Teachers Scrambling to Gain High Pension (0)
• Mich. Education Reform: Key Factor is to Turn Around and Take Over Schools (0)
• American schools face difficulties in terms of stimulus funds (0)
• Teachers Income Investigation: Teachers struggling to survive on income (0)
• No Child Left Behind Act: How the No Child Left Behind Act is Destroying Our Children and Schools (0)

In his decision Monday, U.S. District Judge Brian Miller changed the starting dates in response to concerns from lawyers for black students known as the Joshua intervenors who wanted more time to review thousands of pages of documents.

Related posts

• Obama 2009 doesn’t bring fresh start to K-12 schools (0)
• New York Teachers Scrambling to Gain High Pension (0)
• Mich. Education Reform: Key Factor is to Turn Around and Take Over Schools (0)
• American schools face difficulties in terms of stimulus funds (0)

The issue of school district consolidation was brought to the forefront by Gov. Haley Barbour, who recommended in November reducing the number of districts from 152 to 100 as a cost-savings measure.

Related posts

• USC to eliminate the study of German as a major and dismantle German department (0)
• University of Dayton Buys Former World Headquarters of NCR Corporation (0)
• Indiana Cuts $297 Million Down From K-12 Schools (0)
• Iflove Schooling News from Education Department: Great Expectations under the sun (0)
• Iflove Education News and Reviews This Weekend: Education is the First Productivity (0)