If you’ve written a few five-figure tuition checks or taken on 10 years’ of debt, you probably think you’re paying to be taught by full-time professors. But it’s entirely possible that most of your teachers are freelancers.

In 1960, 75 percent of college instructors were full-time tenured or tenure-track professors; today only 27 percent are. The rest are graduate students or adjunct and contingent faculty — instructors employed on a per-course or yearly contract basis, usually without benefits and earning a third or less of what their tenured colleagues make. The recession means their numbers are growing.

“When a tenure-track position is empty,” says Gwendolyn Bradley, director of communications at the American Association of University Professors, “institutions are choosing to hire three part-timers to save money.”

In “The Case of the Vanishing Full-Time Professor,” Samantha Stainburn discusses some of the problems associated with this growing trend of relying on adjunct instructors, as well as how to ensure the best for your or your child’s college education.

This week, Governor Patterson announced he will be withholding millions in school aid payments, causing schools to look at unpleasant options of cutting costs, such as increasing class size or laying off teachers.

The Mount Vernon School District has largely stopped ordering supplies and equipment for its schools. The Saugerties Central School District has warned 36 teachers that they could face layoffs. The Albany School District is switching to a cheaper food service company starting next month.

On Monday, superintendents across the state — and particularly in smaller and poorer districts — were recalibrating their budgets after Gov. David A. Paterson announced that he would temporarily withhold $146 million in school aid payments due on Tuesday and an additional $436 million in property tax reimbursements due to be paid to districts later this month.

The New York Times article continues here.

Many urban school districts, including New York City, failed to show significant gains on the most recent round of federal math tests.  This has led critics to question whether the progress shown on state tests in districts like New York City is real, or just a result of easier tests.  According to John Hechinger of the Wall Street Journal,

“New York City failed to show significant progress on the federal test since 2007, even though its state tests showed major math gains. Joel Klein, New York City’s schools chancellor, noted that since 2003, the city had shown dramatic gains on the federal test. ‘We’re outperforming the rest of New York state and the nation,’ in terms of educational gains, Mr. Klein said. But, he added, the flat 2009 scores suggested New York state’s tests ‘have to be harder’ and its curriculum standards more rigorous.”

Continue reading more about this topic here.

Here’s a salon.com article written by a grad student who decides to live in a ‘94 Econoline van because he views it as the only way to escape taking out loans to finance his graduate education. In the article, he describes his experiences–buying food in bulk and cooking it on a small camping stove, surviving ant infestations and increasingly noxious smells–and discusses the effects of consumerism and debt on all students, and American society in general.

I was lying on the floor of my van where the middle pilot chairs used to be, trying to hide from view. This is it, I thought. They know. I’m going to get kicked out of Duke.

Moments before, I had been cooking a pot of spaghetti stew on top of a plastic, three-drawer storage container, which held all my food and my few meager possessions. I figured the campus security guard had parked next to me because he spotted the blue flame from my propane stove through the van’s tinted windows and shades.

I held my breath as he shut off the engine and opened his door. I was in my boxer shorts, splayed across my stain-speckled carpet like a scarecrow toppled by the wind.

The article continues here.

The Educational Testing Service has announced that in 2011 it will unveil a modified version of the GRE, the standardized test required to gain admission into many graduate programs.  The test will increase in length by 45 minutes, but overall the test will be friendlier to applicants, according to ETS.  Some of the other changes include:

• the option to skip questions within sections, rather than needing to answer all questions sequentially
• computer adaptive changes in difficulty occurring between sections rather than between questions
• a new scoring system of 130-180, replacing the old scale of 200-800
• the elimination of antonym and analogy questions, to be replaced by additional questions on reading comprehension
• the availability of a computerized calculator for use on the math sections

For more information on anticipated changes, see these articles from the New York Times and Inside Higher Ed.

In a recent American Prospect article, Christopher Jencks discusses the causes of the decline of higher education in the United States.

What has gone wrong? The problem has three parts. First, the college graduation rate has traditionally grown in tandem with the high school graduation rate — which hasn’t risen since the early 1970s. In addition, while the proportion of high school graduates entering college has risen, the proportion of college entrants earning a four-year degree has fallen. Meanwhile, college costs have soared, and financial aid has not kept up.

Continue reading here.

A City Journal article discusses the effect of the movement toward a “student-centered” math classroom, which began in the 1970s and 1980s when the pedagogical approach was being retooled in other subjects as well.  This new way of teaching mathematics focused on an  approach with little regard for sequence or arithmetic skills.  Instead, students were asked to find their own tools to master problem-solving, rather than following a model provided by the teacher.  In her article, Sandra Stotsky suggests that this shift in educational values is responsible for low mathematics performance in the United States.

The statistics on U.S. math performance are grim. American eighth-graders ranked 25th out of 30 countries in mathematics achievement on the 2006 Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), which claims to assess application of the mathematical knowledge and skills needed in adult life through problem-solving test items. We do better on the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), whose test items are related to the content of school mathematics curricula. (Differences in participating countries aren’t significant.) But according to Mark Schneider, a former commissioner of education statistics at the Department of Education, the United States lags behind too many countries in “overall mathematics performance and in the performance of our best students.” And achievement gaps between different student groups within the United States, Schneider says, are “about the same size or even bigger than the gap between the United States and the top-performing countries in TIMSS.”

As part of his education-reform plan, President Obama wants to “make math and science education a top priority” and ensure that children have access to strong math and science curricula “at all grade levels.” But the president’s worthy aims won’t be reached so long as assessment experts, technology salesmen, and math educators—the professors, usually with education degrees, who teach prospective teachers of math from K–12—dominate the development of the content of school curricula and determine the pedagogy used, into which they’ve brought theories lacking any evidence of success and that emphasize political and social ends, not mastery of mathematics.

Continue reading here.

In a recent Chronicle of Higher Education article, a panel of higher education experts weighs in on who should go to college, who should pay for it, and how the increase in college students affects our society.

In a recent Times Online article, Ben Macintyre writes about the death of the narrative at the hands of the internet.  According to Macintyre, the fast-paced nature of the internet has made us unable to focus our attention in a sustained manner.

The information we consume online comes ever faster, punchier and more fleetingly. Our attention rests only briefly on the internet page before moving incontinently on to the next electronic canapé.

Addicted to the BlackBerry, hectored and heckled by the next blog alert, web link or text message, we are in state of Continual Partial Attention, too bombarded by snippets and gobbets of information to focus on anything for very long. Microsoft researchers have found that someone distracted by an e-mail message alert takes an average of 24 minutes to return to the same level of concentration.

We crave plot, he continues, but the internet is not the forum for the long-form narrative–especially not when that next webpage is only a click away.  The cell phone stories that have become extremely popular in Japan may herald the next narrative form–compressed, yes, but still containing characters and a narrative arc, “proof,” he says, “that the ancient need for narrative, hardwired into human nature, can sit comfortably with the wiring of the newest technology.”

This article from the Washington Post discusses the potential effects of new technology on the narrative form.

There’s endless talk in the news media about the next killer app. Maybe Twitter really will change the world. Maybe the next big thing will be just an algorithm, like Google’s citation-ranking equation. But Smith is betting that there will still be a market, somehow, for what he does. Narrative isn’t merely a technique for communicating; it’s how we make sense of the world. The storytellers know this.

They know that the story is the original killer app.