Penn GSE News Archive
The Ph.D. Glut and What to Do About It
Jonathan Zimmerman writes about the declining availability of tenure-track positions and a movement toward preparing doctoral students for jobs outside the academy, but suspects the change will come from outside of the academy, not from within it.
Research universities must act as engines of optimism
Peter Eckel and Aida Sagintayeva virtually brought together higher ed leaders from across 15 time zones to talk about a way forward.
What principals have learned from COVID-19’s ‘stress test’
Jonathan Supovitz explains, “The principals are doing all these amazing things, which are serving urgent needs of kids and families. That’s not taken into account in what we think of as a good school. There is an imbalance between our metrics for assessing quality and the actual role of schools in society.” The Consortium for Policy Research in Education, housed at Penn GSE, has published five briefs about how U.S. school districts and principals have dealt with the pandemic.
EETN Insights
In this interview, Jenny Zapf highlights the importance of innovative and long-term, sustainable ideas that have impact.
Amateur Hour in the College Classroom
Jonathan Zimmerman’s The Amateur Hour: A History of College Teaching in America is a richly researched, eye-opening history of college teaching in the United States over a span of more than a century and a half, mining personal papers and institutional records and reports from over 50 archives.
Children are going hungry, and their futures are on the line. Evidence from Ghana
Sharon Wolf and an Imperial College London colleague co-authored an article about the effects of food shortages on early childhood development. “We found that children from households that were food insecure even only once during the three-year study period had lower literacy and numeracy abilities and short-term memory performance later on,” they wrote.
Freedom Center Talks: Sigal Ben-Porath on Speech on Campus
Sigal Ben-Porath discusses how our understanding of open expression and some of the boundaries of free speech that we find ourselves negotiating in this polarized time affects our ability to find common ground as a society, and what are some of the ways that higher education institutions and society more broadly can overcome polarization and mistrust and create a more engaged democratic community.