The Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that does fundraising and back-end support for the popular open-source encyclopedia, says yes. So do the nine professors at prominent colleges who have agreed to make creating, augmenting, and editing Wikipedia entries part of their students’ coursework.

“We’ve known for a long time that students are the fuel of Wikipedia,” said LiAnna Davis, a Wikimedia spokeswoman. “{hellip}We feel there is a place for Wikipedia in the classroom.”

“Students have access to so many journals and library materials and other scholarly materials that other people just don’t have access to,” she said.

Wikimedia’s new alliances with professors stem from its Public Policy Initiative, an effort to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of topics relating to U.S. public policy. On a grant from the Stanton Foundation, Wikimedia started recruiting public policy professors who were willing to have their students create content for Wikipedia. This fall, the foundation will help nine instructors — four at George Washington University, two at Georgetown University, and one each at Indiana University at Bloomington, Syracuse University, and Harvard University— integrate Wikipedia-related assignments into their syllabuses. (Wikimedia does not pay the professors to do this; the Stanton grant pays for foundation staff and training associated with the project.)

“The social media trend is something that students have definitely latched on to, and regardless of what everyone else thinks, they’re going to continue to be involved with it,” says Carol Ann Dwyer, a public affairs instructor at Syracuse, who is among Wikimedia’s academic recruits. “I would prefer, particularly if they’re going to become ‘Wikipedians,’ that they do it properly.”

The foundation also recruited student “ambassadors” at those colleges to serve as on-campus resources for professors and students who might be less familiar with the technical aspects of contributing to Wikipedia. It gathered the ambassadors in Washington this summer for three days of training. The foundation also recruited “online ambassadors” — experienced Wikipedia users from around the world — to serve as a second line of support, especially for students who might need help while burning the midnight oil the night before a due date.

The particular ways the professors are planning to work Wikipedia into their courses vary. The graduate students in Peter Linquiti’s policy analysis course at George Washington will be asked to pen a detailed critique of an existing entry, assessing its “credibility, intended audience, currency of content, degree of support for the information and analysis, use of policy analysis tools or concepts, extent of balance and/or bias, and any recommended changes to content, style, and tone,” according to a summary provided to Wikimedia. They will then submit appropriate edits to the entry, and then monitor those edits for a week to see what happens to those changes in the fray of editing and counter-editing that is a common byproduct of the site’s wild-west revisions policy.

Rochelle Davis, an assistant professor in the school of foreign service at Georgetown, says contributing to Wikipedia dovetails nicely with the sort of literature review and summarizing that she already has students do as part of preparing to write an argumentative paper. Davis says she plans to simply have the students in two of her classes format those summaries for Wikipedia, submit them to the site, then use that as a jumping-off point for writing a proper research paper. In this way, the process mirrors a strategy already employed by many college students, only in reverse: Instead of starting with a Wikipedia page as a nexus to find more authoritative material, the students would do research first, then consolidate their findings into a concise entry on the site.

“I’m tired of my grad students saying, ‘All we ever do is critique and discuss and deconstruct,’ ” Davis says. “So I’m going to make them create something that’s not just a thing for me to read; it’s going to go out into the community.” The fact that summarizing for Wikipedia comes with the pressure of knowing others might read and rely on their work might even prompt students to be more meticulous than they might have if the summaries were for Davis’s eyes only, she says. Several other people involved with the project made the same point.

The tower and the crowd

Academe historically has viewed Wikipedia, which allows any visitor to edit its entries and relies on the vigilance of volunteer fact-checkers, with a great deal of ambivalence. In 2007, the history department at Middlebury College took a stand against citing Wikipedia entries directly in papers, and many others have worried that Wikipedia sows the same moral hazard in students as Google by enabling, by virtue of its breadth and convenience, lazy research habits. A study published earlier this year in the online journal First Monday reported that more than half of college students use Wikipedia at some point in the research process either all or most of the time (though their professors might be relieved to hear that 70% of those students use it at or near the beginning of their research).

In recent years, academics seem to have gotten used to Wikipedia being around (and have perhaps recognized its efforts to keep out bad information), and much of the discussion has shifted to how it can be applied constructively. The professors who have partnered with Wikimedia’s Public Policy Initiative are not the first to incorporate Wikipedia into their courses — the foundation counts 59 such instances between 2007 and 2009 — and academics have certainly played a role in helping build and edit the site since it opened in 2001. The initiative does, however, represent the first time the foundation has pushed to seed a community of contributors within higher education.

“This is exciting to be sure!” wrote Curtis J. Bonk, a professor of instructional systems technology at Indiana and author of The World Is Open: How Web Technology is Revolutionizing Education, in an e-mail to Inside Higher Ed. “That is a key part the mission of all of us in a higher education setting — to generate as well as disseminate knowledge in different disciplines,” Bonk wrote. “Given that Wikipedia is now central to the knowledge dissemination process as well as the linkages between content and fields, such partnerships are make sense.”

But for as much that the academic cloisters and the ?ber-democratic site might have to offer each other, there remains intractable philosophical tension between the two that could foil the collaboration. Linquiti’s exercise of having students track the changes made to their entries by the equally empowered masses hints at the vulnerability of their contributions. The mutability of Wikipedia entries is why Neil Waters, a history professor at Middlebury, still forbids his students from citing them. In its guidelines, Waters points out, Wikipedia instructs visitors to “Be bold in updating articles and do not worry about making mistakes” — hardly a scholarly protocol, he argues. “I want my students to worry about making mistakes, and to learn how to avoid them, and how to take responsibility for what they write,” wrote Waters in an e-mail.

Alan Liu, chair of the English department at the University of California at Santa Barbara and author of the popular academic blog Voice of the Shuttle, noted the importance of resolving these process issues if academe wants to make its authoritative voice louder in Wikipedia. “The academic community provides a constrained and relatively standard set of protocols for constructive collaboration and refereeing that could be built on (whereas the larger global community behind Wikipedia was more problematic because there is actually no such thing as a global community with sufficiently shared motives and standards of collaboration),” wrote Liu in an e-mail.

Much remains to be hashed out between academics and the general public as far as working out such “standards of collaboration,” he said, to resolve the tension between the academic value of peer review and the social media value of crowd-sourcing.

“New policies, institutional arrangements, practices, protocols, and technologies will need to be created on both sides of the divide” — between higher education and the “foundations of networked public knowledge” such as Wikipedia and Google — “to create productive and socially-good ways for experts and the crowd to teach, and learn from, each other,” said Liu.” As a handful of loose alliances between Wikimedia and professors, the project “does not seem complete enough.”

Wikimedia says it plans to recruit 15 more professors by the spring, and hopes to expand the collaborations beyond public policy eventually. “We are trying to develop a model, a body of documentation, and some technical tools and Wikipedia community processes that will be useful around the globe and in a variety of topic areas; and we hope to set into motion something that will be self-sustaining by volunteer and academic groups,” Frank Schulenberg, head of public outreach at Wikimedia, wrote in a statement. “While we are working only with U.S.-based public policy programs during the pilot program, we will also be continually seeking opportunities to engage our Wikimedia chapters, professors, students, and Wikipedians in other parts of the world and in other topic areas.”

Editing, enhancing Wikipedia becomes project at colleges

Editing, enhancing Wikipedia becomes project at colleges

Like many districts across the nation, Natomas chose to lay off teachers. So for every three classes of 20 students each that the schools had last year, this year they’ll put 30 students in two classes. The teaching staff in this 10,000-student district will be cut by 100 to 340 next fall. No one’s happy, Burns says: “We have to make choices, and none of them are good.”

Conventional wisdom says the smaller the classes, the better the education, because teachers can pay more attention to each child. But while smaller classes are popular, decades of research has found that the relationship between class size and student outcomes is murky.

“The research doesn’t show that you get significantly different student outcomes when you go from a class of 25 to a class of 30,” Burns says.

With state and local budgets still in flux, it’s hard to know exactly how many teachers will lose jobs this year.

But even with $10 billion in additional federal money, part of the $26 billion bill President Obama signed recently, the struggling economy is expected to reverse a decades-long trend toward smaller classes. Education statistics show that school personnel were hired at twice the rate that student enrollment grew from 1999 to 2007.

An experiment drives change

In the early 1990s, when many states were flush with cash, policymakers championed the findings of a 1985 experiment in Tennessee. The Student/Teacher Achievement Ratio (STAR) project compared academic achievement in small classes of 13 to 17 low-income students with that of students in classes that had 22 to 25 students. The experiment found modest but lasting gains for impoverished African-American students in the much smaller classes in kindergarten and first grade. States extrapolated from those findings to justify spending billions to make relatively modest cuts in class size in all schools, not just in those serving the poor.

About three dozen states now fund either voluntary or required class-size reduction programs. In 1996, California launched the first and largest such effort, eventually providing incentives for school districts to lower class size to 20 in kindergarten through third grade at a cost of $20 billion.

In 2002, Florida voters approved an amendment to the state constitution that reduced class size over time in all grades. The state estimates that it will cost an additional $353 million this year, on top of the $16 billion the state has spent so far, to meet the requirements. In November, Florida voters will be asked to loosen those requirements to avoid massive spending cuts.

A study released in May by the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University found that the Florida program had no effect on student achievement.

Research on California’s program also showed no gains in achievement attributable to smaller classes. Michael Kirst, an emeritus professor at Stanford University, says excitement over the program resulted in school districts hiring “all sorts of teachers just off the street” who lacked any formal training. Space shortages forced schools to hold the newly created classes in hallways and closets and on auditorium stages.

Nonetheless, Kirst says, the program was popular. “One lesson from California is that with parents, smaller class size is overwhelmingly favorable, and they don’t give a fig about the research that says this is not going to help their kids,” he says. “They intuitively believe that small class sizes will allow more individual attention.”

Slippery slope?

Dan Goldhaber of the Center on Reinventing Public Education at the University of Washington-Bothell says that “the effects of class-size reduction are pretty marginal,” except in the early grades for disadvantaged students. With rampant teacher layoffs, Goldhaber says, “it probably makes sense … to focus not so much on class sizes but on making sure that the teachers you are keeping are really effective.”

But Kirst says school districts are facing “a very dangerous period. We are increasing class size to extremely high levels.

“I don’t worry about going from 20 to 25 students that much, or 15 to 20,” he says. “But when you go from 20 to 35 in a year or two, I don’t think we don’t know the effects of that.”

Contributing: Susan Sawyers of Hechinger

Class sizes are getting bigger, but does it really matter?

Class sizes are getting bigger, but does it really matter?

Today, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announces it will award $1 million in grants for eligible high-poverty schools to start community gardens.

The goal: to teach students about gardening and nutrition and to provide fresh produce for school meals. Some of the harvest may also be given to students’ families, as well as to local food banks and senior-center nutrition programs (www.fns.usda.gov).

Improving nutrition in schools is part of the first lady’s Let’s Move! initiative to fight childhood obesity.

School gardens “give kids exposure to where food comes from and encourages them to try foods they might not otherwise try,” says Kevin Concannon, USDA undersecretary for food, nutrition and consumer services.

They give teachers an opportunity to talk about soil, water, sun, health and science, and the gardens can be used for math and art programs, he says.

Concannon has visited school gardens from Maine to Missouri to California.

When a second-grade girl took him on a tour of her elementary school’s 2-acre garden in Riverside, Calif., she waxed eloquent about strawberries, he says, pointing out that they contain vitamin C. “This was music to my ears,” he says.

Estimates suggest that about 15% to 20% of schools across the country have gardens, says Mike Metallo, president of the National Gardening Association, a non-profit group that provides gardeners and teachers with information and resources.

Since 1982, the gardening association has given out 9,310 grants and awards worth $3.7 million, reaching 1.4 million young gardeners, he says (kidsgardening.org).

“We’ve supported everything from small herb gardens at inner-city elementary schools to large, raised-bed vegetable gardens in middle schools,” Metallo says.

The group is taking applications for its youth gardening programs, which are financed by corporations.

“In most areas of the country, schools can do a spring garden and fall garden and get parents, kids and community volunteers to maintain them throughout the summer,” Metallo says.

The gardening association also provides money for indoor gardening projects with light tables and curriculum, he says.

“It teaches students about roots and stems and the process that is going on. A lot of times, they can grow lettuce and herbs quite easily.

“Kids love to plant seeds. They love to watch them sprout and grow. It’s magical.”

USDA grants help plant seeds of good nutrition with school gardens

USDA grants help plant seeds of good nutrition with school gardens

As schools handed out pink slips to teachers this spring, states made a beeline to Washington to plead for money for their ravaged education budgets. But now that the federal government has come through with $10 billion, some of the nation’s biggest school districts are balking at using their share of the money to hire teachers right away.

Charlie Riedel/Associated Press

A 2009 job fair for teachers. The stimulus bill was intended to rehire 160,000 workers.

Given Stimulus Funds to Rehire, Schools Wait and See

He and thousands of other teachers around the country could get their jobs back now that the Senate has approved an emergency stimulus package designed to keep educators and other public employees out of the unemployment line.

“My biggest thing is I want to go back to the school I was at for the students,” said Ebersbach, 43, one of 14 math teachers in the Toledo school district to receive notice a few weeks ago that their jobs were cut. “We’re in a high-poverty school and one thing the students need more than anything else is consistency. And they’re not going to get that.”

The $26 billion measure passed Thursday is less than was initially proposed by Education Secretary Arne Duncan, but will provide $16 billion to help states balance their Medicaid budgets and $10 billion for grants to school districts to forestall layoffs.

Republicans strenuously opposed the measure, denouncing it as yet another federal bailout the government cannot afford and calling it a giveaway to public employee unions.

For educators across the country, it’s been a bewildering summer as money to save thousands of jobs stalled in Congress and unions and administrators sparred over ways to rehire laid-off teachers.

The result has been what is referred to in education circles as the “yo-yo effect.” School budgets, facing severe reductions in state funding, are cut. Layoffs are made. And some or even all of the teachers are hired back over the summer as officials scramble for money.

The money coming from Congress could help fill some of that void. But until districts actually have the money in hand, thousands of teachers must wait in limbo not knowing whether they’ll have jobs when school starts in a few weeks.

Data provided by the U.S. Department of Education on how many jobs the bill is expected to fund reads like the medical chart of a battered patient: 16,500 in California. In Texas, 14,500. More than 9,000 in Florida. Some 161,000 education jobs across the country in all.

“The Senate amendment will go a long way to protecting these jobs and ensuring that America’s educators are working to educate our way to a better economy,” Duncan said. “It’s the right thing to do for America’s students and America’s teachers.”

Throughout the summer, many districts had despaired that Congress would deliver any money, and scrambled to find other ways to bring back the teachers, offering early-retirement incentives and negotiating furlough days.

In Iowa, where 1,500 layoffs were announced earlier this year, the Des Moines district has called back all but 30 of the 173 teachers who were laid off. Twyla Woods, the district’s chief of staff, said they opened an early retirement option and hope to have enough attrition overall to bring back the remaining teachers.

In Santa Cruz, Calif., 82 teachers were laid-off this spring and rehired again this summer, also largely due to a negotiated retirement incentive that 41 workers opted into. Teachers also agreed to take furlough days. The entry level salary in the district is $40,000.

The efforts all saved jobs, but are not considered long-term solutions.

In other districts, no solution was reached at all, leaving hundreds unemployed and hoping for federal money.

Gretchen Marfisi in Florida was laid off in each of the last two summers, only to be rehired by the Broward County School District.

This year she canceled her family vacation and put her life on hold before being called back Thursday.

“Why are they firing all of us?” Marfisi said, her voice ringing with frustration. “Besides giving us all more gray hair and wrinkles, there doesn’t seem to be a lot of logic involved.”

Marfisi is now preparing to unpack all her boxes of teaching materials once again.

“It’s a relief to get a paycheck,” Marfisi said. “It’s just very weird and bizarre emotionally. It just in the process makes you feel like garbage.”

Mike Langyel, president of the Milwaukee Teachers’ Education Association, worries about the long-term effects these series of layoffs will have on the teaching career.

“We don’t need to turn this into a Wal-Mart employment where you’re in for a while and you’re out,” Langyel said.

Teachers say the effect on morale has been overwhelming.

“Somebody said to me, ‘Teacher: I thought that was one field that was recession-proof,’” Ebersbach said. “I’m at a 50-50 shot.”

Turner reported from Atlanta. Armario reported from Miami.

Jobs bill offers teachers relief

Jobs bill offers teachers relief

In the spring of 2008, the Denver public school system needed to plug a $400 million hole in its pension fund. Bankers at JPMorgan Chase offered what seemed to be a perfect solution.

Payback Time: For Denver Schools, a Financing Deal Takes a Bad Turn

IOWA CITY — Like an airline overselling a flight, the University of Iowa extended admission this year to several thousand more applicants than it could accommodate on campus in this fall’s freshman class.

Undercounting Freshmen, Iowa Scrambles to Find Room

Michelle Rhee, the reform-minded chancellor who took over the District of Columbia public schools three years ago, on Friday fired 241 teachers, or 5 percent of the district’s total. All but a few of those dismissed had received the lowest rating under a new evaluation system that for the first time held them accountable for their students’ standardized test scores.

“Every child in a District of Columbia public school has a right to a highly effective teacher — in every classroom, of every school, of every neighborhood, of every ward, in this city,” the chancellor said in a statement. “That is our commitment.”

All told, the district terminated 302 employees — 226 for poor performance, and 76 for other problems like not having the licensing required by the No Child Left Behind act. Besides the 241 teachers, those dismissed were librarians, counselors, custodians and other employees.

An additional 737 employees were put on notice that they had been rated “minimally effective,” the second-lowest category, and would have one year to improve their performance or be fired.

In the years before Ms. Rhee took over the district, almost all the teachers had high performance ratings and almost none were fired, but students, on average, had low achievement levels.

George Parker, the president of the Washington Teachers’ Union, said the union would challenge the firings. The union has taken issue with the evaluation system Ms. Rhee used, saying that it was designed more for punishing teachers than helping them improve.

Randi Weingarten, the president of the American Federation of Teachers, also criticized the evaluation system and what she called the chancellor’s “destructive cycle of hire, fire, repeat.”

“Evaluations should include a component of student learning, of course, but there also has to be teacher development and support,” Ms. Weingarten said. “It can’t just be a ‘gotcha’ system, like the one in D.C.”

As part of the Obama administration’s focus on teacher effectiveness, Education Secretary Arne Duncan has pushed states to develop evaluation and pay models that link teacher ratings to their students’ test scores. States that use such models get points that increase their chances of winning part of the department’s $3.4 billion Race to the Top grant pool.

Since becoming chancellor in June 2007, Ms. Rhee has been intent on controlling how teachers in the district — known for a long history of low-performing schools — are managed, paid and, if necessary, fired.

Friday’s dismissals were not the chancellor’s first. In the 2007-8 school year, a district spokesman said, 79 teachers were fired for poor performance, and in 2008-9, 96 were. Also, after hiring more than 500 new teachers in the spring and summer of 2009, Ms. Rhee laid off 266 educators in the fall, citing budget problems. The union has filed suit challenging those dismissals.

Last month, the teachers’ union and the District Council approved a contract that weakened teachers’ seniority protection, in return for 20 percent raises and bonuses of $20,000 to $30,000 for teachers who meet certain standards, including rising test scores.

Only 16 percent of the teachers evaluated were rated in the top category, “highly effective.”

A spokesman for the district said that starting the new school year with a full complement of teachers would not be a problem because a pool of several hundred applicants had already been screened.

School Chancellor Fires 241 Teachers in Washington

New York State education officials acknowledged on Monday that their standardized exams had become easier to pass over the last four years and said they would recalibrate the scoring for tests taken this spring, which is almost certain to mean thousands more students will fail.

New York Will Make Standardized Exams Tougher

ORLANDO, Fla. — The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida.

To Stop Cheats, Colleges Learn Their Trickery