Anxious families awaiting April college admission news are living their own March Madness.
Their insanity is captured in Andrew Ferguson’s new book, “Crazy U: One Dad’s Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College” (Simon & Schuster). He describes the vanity of a desperate mother at a cocktail party who is dying to announce her daughter’s perfect SAT scores:
“‘We were really surprised at how well she did,’ the mother would say, running a finger around the rim of her glass of pink Zinfandel.
Her eyes plead: Ask me what they were, just please please ask.”
Next US education reform: Higher teacher quality
Christian Science Monitor
Compared with more than 70 economies worldwide, America’s high school students continue to rank only average in reading and science, and below average in math. But this sorry record for a wealthy nation can be broken if the US focuses on recruiting and keeping first-rate teachers.
That’s the conclusion of a new paper that looks at the latest achievement tests of 15-year-olds in the 34 developed countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), as well as many other nations.
America has been trying to raise its academic standards for more than two decades, an effort that cannot be abandoned in tough times. But it can learn more from other countries about the difficult task of teacher training, selection, and compensation – even as cash-strapped states take on teacher unions.
The government-union wrangling would be less if both sides focused on quality investments in better teachers. The goal is not debatable. Studies show that matching quality teachers with disadvantaged students is an effective way to close the black-white achievement gap. Good teachers are more effective than small class sizes, for instance.
For starters, the United States needs to increase its pool of quality teachers. Almost half of its K-12 teachers come from the bottom third of college classes. Classroom leaders such as Singapore, South Korea, and Finland select from the top ranks. In Finland, only 1 in 10 applicants is accepted into teacher training.
Part of the hurdle in the US is compensation. Teaching offers job security but not great pay compared with other professions that top college graduates might choose. As states tussle over budgets, one solution might be to lower teacher benefits and end tenure while bulking up salaries.
And yet pay isn’t the only consideration. Last year, 11 percent of graduates from US elite colleges applied to the federally funded Teach for America program. Participants teach in low-achieving rural and urban districts for two years.
In Finland, teachers earn only about what their American counterparts do (US teacher pay starts, on average, at $39,000). The difference is that in Finland, teaching is a high-status, well-respected job, right up there with doctoring and lawyering.
Another US hurdle is teacher training. Many states require a master’s degree in education in order to be certified to teach. This automatically locks out a talented population such as second-career experts in a field who don’t want to invest the time or money in a graduate degree that’s often short on classroom skills and long on pedagogy.
President Obama’s “Race to the Top” fund encourages states through competitive grants to open up alternative, effective routes to teacher certification. Hopefully, that fund will survive budget cutting (same for Teach for America).
Public schools won’t be able to attract and keep high quality teachers if they don’t reward and develop them once they get into the classroom.
That’s next to impossible given the standard operating procedure of teacher unions. As the nation is witnessing, a rigid rule such as last-hired, first-fired lops off enthusiastic newcomers in favor of those with seniority. Experience is important in education, but it does not always add up to quality. Performance must be the determiner.
Unions need to accept that the main goal is high teacher performance and student outcomes, not job preservation. That’s what the teacher union did in Ontario, Canada, according to the paper based on the OECD findings.
Teachers in Ontario are heavily organized. Yet, in 2003, the union and the premier of Ontario reached a grand bargain based on the need to elevate student achievement.
“The educators, through their union, agreed to accept responsibility for their own learning and the learning of their students; the government agreed to supply all of the necessary support,” according to the report.
The paper, called “What the U.S. Can Learn from the World’s Most Successful Education Reform Efforts,” says that Ontario students subsequently shot up from the bottom to the top of test scores.
Investing in high quality teaching is necessary to boost US economic competitiveness. The study argues that the US also needs to elevate the teaching profession to one of high status and respect. But respect doesn’t come overnight. Government and educators will have to earn it by working together to improve teacher quality.
Education reform: the problem with helping everyone reach ‘average’
Ann Robinson
The alarm clock is sounding on American education. While China’s emergence as an educational powerhouse is relatively new, the continued poor performance by US students – though improved, still 31st place in math on the most recent international test – is not. Today, Shanghai tops the charts, but yesterday, it was other nations. Even a casual observer of education news knows the US long ago ceded its place as world leader in student performance. It’s an unsettling state of affairs.
West loses edge to Asia in education: Top five OECD findings
But what’s more unsettling is how prominent education leaders like Education Secretary Arne Duncan have called America’s sorry standing a “wakeup call.” President Obama has called for a new “Sputnik moment” to reignite the nation’s commitment to science education. But the wakeup alarm didn’t just start going off. It sounded decades ago; the US has just repeatedly hit the snooze button.
The crisis in American education includes both our overall poor national performance and the miniscule numbers of US students achieving at the highest levels. Even our best students are less competitive. The problem with previous education reform efforts is that they have poured time, money, and resources into bringing all students up to proficiency – at the expense of our most gifted students. If we want the best educational performance, we have to target our brightest students, not ignore them in the fight to help everyone reach “average.”
Moving from paper to practice
We’ve been inundated with reams of reports, studies, and expert panels advising us how to fix this problem. During one week last fall, two government-convened panels released reports full of prescriptions for what the nation must due to reclaim its position as a leading innovator.
The reports by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology (PCAST) and the National Science Board offer a plethora of recommendations including better teacher training, creating 1,000 new STEM-focused (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) schools, and holding schools accountable for the performance of high-achieving students.
Teaching to the Text Message
I’VE been teaching college freshmen to write the five-paragraph essay and its bully of a cousin, the research paper, for years. But these forms invite font-size manipulation, plagiarism and clichés. We need to set our sights not lower, but shorter.
I don’t expect all my graduates to go on to Twitter-based careers, but learning how to write concisely, to express one key detail succinctly and eloquently, is an incredibly useful skill, and more in tune with most students’ daily chatter, as well as the world’s conversation. The photo caption has never been more vital.
So a few years ago, I started slipping my classes short writing assignments alongside the required papers. Once, I asked them, “Come up with two lines of copy to sell something you’re wearing now on eBay.” The mix of commerce and fashion stirred interest, and despite having 30 students in each class, I could give everyone serious individual attention. For another project, I asked them to describe the essence of the chalkboard in one or two sentences. One student wrote, “A chalkboard is a lot like memory: often jumbled, unorganized and sloppy. Even after it’s erased, there are traces of everything that’s been written on it.”
Private school funding draws ire
James Salzer and Laura Diamond:
Lawmakers are cutting state appropriations and HOPE scholarship money for public college students at the same time they are maintaining relatively stable funding for private colleges.
For weeks, students at Georgia State, Kennesaw State and other public universities have been the face of protest as legislators reduced the benefits of the nationally lauded HOPE scholarship program.
But inside the Statehouse, a strong lobbying effort led by politically active private college presidents has worked to persuade lawmakers to maintain about $110 million in state funding for their colleges.
The College Board Honors 4 Districts with Advanced Placement District of the Year Awards:
Districts in Chicago; Tampa, Fla.; Hudson County, N.J.; and San Bernadino, Calif. to Be Recognized at the AP® Annual Conference in July
AP Achievement List of 388 school districts that have had similar successes.
“These districts are defying expectations by expanding access while improving scores,” said College Board President Gaston Caperton. “They are experimenting with initiatives and strategies that have driven increases in average exam scores when making AP available to a much broader and more diverse student population. Over the next two months we will work closely with each of the AP District of the Year winners to document what they are doing so we can share their best practices with all members of the AP community.”
Wisconsin Districts that achieved recognition:
Appleton Area School District
Columbus School District
D C Everest Area School District
Diocese of Madison Education Office
Germantown School District
Green Bay Area Public Schools
Kimberly Area School District
Marshfield School District
Menomonie Area School District
Middleton-Cross Plains Schools
Monroe School District
Mt Horeb Area School District
Mukwonago Area School District
School District of Hudson
School District of Rhinelander
Stevens Point Area Public School District
Trevor-Wilmot Consolidated School District
Watertown Unified School District
Wauwatosa School District
West Bend School District
Are “charter universities” the future of state-funded higher ed?
On the face of it, the budget proposal that Ohio Governor John Kasich released this week looks like terrible news for state universities. Not only would Kasich’s plan slash higher education spending by 10.5 percent but it also would cap tuition increases at 3.5 percent a year.
So it might come as a surprise that some university presidents received the plan warmly. Within hours, Ohio State University President E. Gordon Gee released a statement praising the governor for “understanding that higher education and our state’s long-term strength are inextricably linked.”
Gee’s optimism rests on another aspect of the governor’s budget. In exchange for the budget cuts, Kasich would give state universities more autonomy in running their day-to-day affairs. Long-term, that could save schools money. “We at Ohio State continue to move aggressively in both advocating for regulatory freedom and reconfiguring and reinventing our institution,” Gee said.
British University Leaders: Pay for Performance
Vice chancellors of British universities (the equivalent of university presidents) could lose up to 10 percent of their salaries if they fail to do their job properly under new plans to establish fair pay in the public sector in Britain.
Under the proposals, set out today by journalist and economist Will Hutton, rank-and-file academics would also play a role in setting the salary of their vice chancellor. Hutton, executive vice-chair of the Work Foundation think tank, was commissioned by the British government last year to lead a review of fair pay in the public sector.
An interim report published in December revealed that universities had the highest pay differential between the top and bottom earners across the entire public sector, with vice chancellors earning on average 15.35 times the salary of those at the bottom of the pay spine such as porters and cleaners. For Russell Group universities (leading research universities), the ratio rose to 19:1.
College Degree Fails to Promote Active Civic Engagement Beyond Voting
Intercollegiate Studies Institute:
nlightened Citizenship: How Civic Knowledge Trumps a College Degree in Promoting Active Civic Engagement is the fifth report to the nation issued by ISI’s National Civic Literacy Board. While each past study has had a different point of emphasis, all share a common thread of examining the relationships that exist between higher education, civic knowledge, and citizenship.
Unfortunately, the results of ISI’s past civic literacy research does not inspire confidence that our institutions of higher learning are living up to their educative and civic responsibilities, responsibilities that almost all American colleges recognize as critical to their overall public missions.
In 2006 and 2007, ISI administered a sixty-question multiple-choice exam on knowledge of American history and institutions to over 28,000 college freshmen and seniors from over eighty schools. In both years, the average freshman and senior failed the exam.
In 2008, ISI tested 2,508 adults of all ages and educational backgrounds, and once again the results were discouraging. Seventy-one percent of Americans failed the exam, with high school graduates scoring 44% and college graduates also failing at 57%.
On Creative Writing
Creative writing is an academic discipline. I draw a distinction between writing, which is what writers do, and creative writing. I think most people in the UK who teach creative writing have come to it via writing – they are bona fide writers who publish poems and novels and play scripts and the like, and they have found some way of supporting that vocation through having a career in academia. So in teaching aspirant writers how to write they are drawing upon their own experience of working in that medium. They are drawing upon their knowledge of what the problems are and how those problems might be tackled. It’s a practice-based form of learning and teaching.
But because it is in academia there is all this paraphernalia that has to go with it. So you get credits for attending classes. You have to do supporting modules; you have to be assessed. If you are doing an undergraduate degree you have to follow a particular curriculum and only about a quarter of that will be creative writing and the rest will be in the canon of English literature. If you are doing a PhD you have to support whatever the creative element is with a critical element. So there are these ways in which academia disciplines writing and I think of that as Creative Writing with a capital C and a capital W. All of us who teach creative writing are doing it, in a sense, to support our writing, but it is also often at the expense of our writing. We give up quite a lot of time and mental energy and also, I think, imaginative and creative energy to teach.
Lieutenant governor favors Iowa high school graduation test
Iowa Lt. Gov. Kim Reynolds said Monday that she may support requiring students to pass a competency test before graduating from high school.
Reynolds was asked about her views on required competency tests for high school students during a news conference to announce details of an education summit that Gov. Terry Branstad plans for July.
“I think it’s something we need to take a look at,” Reynolds said. “That’s been very effective in Massachusetts, as has been indicated by the test scoring.”
She said requiring such competency tests could help determine how effective schools are in bolstering student achievement.
New York High School Investigating Alleged SAT Cheating Ring
A group of students at a prestigious New York high school was being eyed in a college test cheating ring, the New York Post reported Monday.
The teens, seniors at John L. Miller Great Neck North High School on Long Island, allegedly tried to improve their college prospects by hiring a third party to take their SAT exams, sources said.
A school board source confirmed that the district was investigating the alleged cheaters.
Guido Sarducci and the Purposes of Higher Education
Sandy Baum and Michael McPherson:
The way college courses generally work is that a teacher presents a group of students with some subject matter, then attempts through tests and papers to determine how well the students have mastered the subject matter. Those judgments are summarized in a letter grade. A list of those subject matters and grades constitutes the transcript that describes what the student has learned and what the student’s performance was overall.
The students and the teacher are focused on the subject matter, and the implied view is that the learning in college is captured in the exercises that inform those grades. The limitations of this “subject matter recall” model of higher education are hilariously captured in Don Novello’s comic performance on Saturday Night Live as Father Guido Sarducci, who marketed the “Five Minute University”: http://youtu.be/kO8x8eoU3L4
Alaska legislative task force releases tentative education report
The Legislature should attend to policies impacting distance education, teacher training and student counseling, a task force has said.
The tentative report serves as early recommendations from the group, which formed almost a year ago under a legislative directive.
Policy makers will ultimately look to its final recommendations for guidance when setting education policy. The group spent two days last week combing, as a co-chairman put it, through a “kitchen sink” of 63 ideas. Roughly half remained when it wrapped up work Friday afternoon.
The list — still tentative — places emphasis on turning to technology-supported distance education in a vast state with relatively few residents. The group suggested state education and workforce development departments should team with university leaders to assess broadband infrastructure. The list would also nudge lawmakers further by asking them to consider encouraging school districts to start requiring some online coursework before a student can graduate.
The Classroom vs. the Workshop
When I was a child there was a truism that anyone could make something (a rabbit hutch, say) or mend something (a bicycle) if they had a classical education. It was felt that using intellectual tools–parsing a bit of Latin history, constructing an argument–was training enough for taking on the material world. Learning gave you a steady approach to the tricksiness of the world of things. Lurking behind this belief was an attitude of de haut en bas; condescension towards those working with their hands.
This annoyed me. Partly because I could only stumble through my Latin lessons but mostly because my afternoons were spent in a pottery workshop learning to throw pots. It was clear to me–a white apron over my school uniform as I kneaded the clay to take out the air bubbles and give it the right consistency, pulled the long twisted wire made from rabbit snares, divided it into 4-ounce balls and sat at my kick wheel in the corner readying myself for my hours of practice–that this was different from classroom learning.
UNLV’s Music Center
How Did Students Become Academically Adrift?
“Academically Adrift,” a new book on the failures of higher education, finds that undergrads don’t study, and professors don’t make them.
Here’s the situation. You’re an assistant to the president at DynaTech, a firm that makes navigational equipment. Your boss is about to purchase a small SwiftAir 235 plane for company use when he hears there’s been an accident involving one of them. You have the pertinent newspaper clippings, magazine articles, federal accident reports, performance graphs, company e-mails and specs and photos of the plane.
Now, write a memo for your boss with your recommendation on the SwiftAir 235 purchase. Include your reasons for finding that the wing design on the plane is safe or not and your conclusions about what else might have contributed to the accident.
You have 90 minutes.
5 Ways the Value of College Is Growing
“It’s no longer true that having a college degree guarantees that you’ll get a good job, and it’s becoming less true with each passing decade,” Paul Krugman writes today.
Krugman is right that more school is no total panacea for our jobs crisis. But he’s wrong that college is losing its edge. The fact is that that the bonus from a college education for men and women has doubled since the 1970s. Although the costs of an advanced degree have never been higher, the benefits of post-secondary education are growing similarly. Here are five reasons not to doubt the value of a college education today.
1. Seven of the ten fastest growing jobs in the next 10 years require a bachelor’s degree or higher
Study Hard to Find If Harvard Pays Off
The notion that education pays and that better education pays better is taken for granted by almost everyone. For college professors like me, this is a very convenient idea, providing a high and growing demand for our services.
Unfortunately, the facts seem to disagree. A recent study by economists Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger showed that going to more selective colleges and universities makes little difference to future income once one accounts for the underlying ability of the student. Their work confirms other studies that find no financial benefit to attending top-tier schools.
It’s good to know that Harvard applicants can safely attend Boston University (my employer), and that “better” higher education doesn’t pay better. But does higher education pay in the first place?
My hard lessons teaching community college
“Stand up if you have ever been told that you weren’t college material,” the school president booms during the commencement ceremony.
In answer to his question, dozens of students stand and pump their fists; cheers go up; an air horn blasts. He goes on:
“Now, stand if you are the first member of your family to go to college.”
Dozens more rise.
“Stand if you started your degree more than 10 years ago,” and then the president tells them to stay standing as he ticks off intervals of time, “Fifteen years? Twenty years? Twenty-five years?”
More on Whether Computers Can Assess Writing
A few weeks ago, I wrote about research on new computer-based tools to assess student essays. I concluded that, for now, these tools might be best for establishing basic levels of writing proficiency. But, I also noted that the most important value of these tools may not be for high-stakes testing, but to increase writing practice and revision.
Randy Bennett, one of the world’s leading experts on technology-enhanced assessments, points me to his extremely helpful — and readable — new article, which offers advice to the assessment consortia as they look to implement automated scoring (not just in writing, but also for literacy and math).
Bennett’s paper distinguishes among the various types of automated scoring tasks, illustrating where automated scoring is most ready for high-stakes use. He makes a much needed call for transparency in scoring algorithms and even provides ideas on how automated and human-based scoring can improve one another (noting flaws in human-based scoring, too). Finally, he ends with this sensible approach:
Higher education: An Iowa success story
Iowa has been widely known as an “education state” throughout its existence. Because of population shifts and changing educational needs for our K-12 students, this part of our education system receives a great deal of attention.
There is another component of Iowa’s education system which internally has probably not attracted as much attention but which has brought both distinction and tens of thousands of high school graduates to our state for more than a century and a half.
That component is higher education – public universities under the governance of the Board of Regents, private colleges and universities, and area community colleges. All have made great contributions to Iowa, the United States and the world. Their economic impact within Iowa might be described as “hidden in plain sight.”
The Way You Learned Math Is So Old School
Your fifth-grader asks you for help with the day’s math homework. The assignment: Create a “stem-and-leaf” plot of the birthdays of each student in the class and use it to determine if one month has more birthdays than the rest, and if so, which month? Do you:
a) Stare blankly
b) Google “stem-and-leaf plot”
c) Say, “Why do you need to know that?”
d) Shrug and say, “I must have been sick the day they taught that in math class.”
If you’re a parent of a certain age, your kids’ homework can be confounding. Blame it on changes in the way children are taught math nowadays — which can make you feel like you’re not very good with numbers.
Well, our math guy, Keith Devlin, is very good at math, and he tells Weekend Edition Saturday host Scott Simon that there’s a reason elementary schools are teaching arithmetic in a new way.
“That’s largely to reflect the different needs of society,” he says. “No one ever in their real life anymore needs to — and in most cases never does — do the calculations themselves.”
Breakthrough
It is settled wisdom among Funderpundits and those to whom they give their grants that the most important variable in student academic achievement is teacher quality.
However, a small number of dissenting voices have begun to speak. Richard Arum and Josipa Roksa, in Academically Adrift have suggested that (p. 131) “Studying is crucial for strong academic performance…” and “Scholarship on teaching and learning has burgeoned over the past several decades and has emphasized the importance of shifting attention from faculty teaching to student learning…”
This may seem unacceptably heterodox to those in government and the private sector who have committed billions of dollars to focusing on the selection, training, supervision, and control of K-12 teachers, while giving no thought to whether K-12 students are actually doing the academic work which they are assigned.
In 2004, Paul A. Zoch, a teacher from Texas, wrote in Domed to Fail (p. 150) that: “Let there be no doubt about it: the United States looks to its teachers and their efforts, but not to its students and their efforts, for success in education.” More recently, and less on the fringe of this new concern, Diane Ravitch wrote in Death and Life of the Great American School System (2010) (p. 162) that “One problem with test-based accountability, as currently defined and used, is that it removes all responsibility from students and their families for the students’ academic performance. NCLB neglected to acknowledge that students share in the responsibility for their academic performance and that they are not merely passive recipients of their teachers’ influence.”
There are necessarily problems in turning attention toward the work of students in judging the effectiveness of schools. First, all the present attention is on teachers, and it is not easy to turn that around. Second, teachers are employees and can be fired, while students can not. It could not be comfortable for the Funderpundits and their beneficiaries to realize that they may have been overlooking the most important variable in student academic achievement all this time.
In February, when the Associated Press reported that Natalie Monroe, a high school English teacher in Pennsylvania, had called her students, on a blog, “disengaged, lazy whiners,” and “noisy, crazy, sloppy, lazy LOAFERS,” the response of the school system was not to look more closely at the academic efforts of the students, but to suspend the teacher. As one of her students explained, “As far as motivated high school students, she’s completely correct. High school kids don’t want to do anything…(but) It’s a teacher’s job…to give students the motivation to learn.”
It would seem that no matter who points out that “You can lead a student to learning, but you can’t make him drink,” our system of schools and Funderpundits sticks with its wisdom that teachers alone are responsible for student academic achievement.
While that is wrong, it is also stupid. Alfred North Whitehead (or someone else) once wrote that; “For education, a man’s books and teachers are but a help, the real work is his.”
As in the old story about the drunk searching under the lamppost for his keys, those who control funds for education believe that as long as all their money goes to paying attention to what teachers are doing, who they are, how they are trained, and so on, they can’t see the point of looking in the darkness at those who have the complete and ultimate control over how much academic achievement there will be–namely the students.
Apart from scores on math and reading tests after all, student academic work is ignored by all those interested in paying to change the schools. What students do in literature, Latin, chemistry, history, and Asian history classes is of no interest to them. Liberal education is not only on the back burner for those focused on basic skills and job readiness as they define them, but that burner is also turned off at present.
This situation will persist as long as those funding programs and projects for reform in education pay no attention to the actual academic work of our students. And students, who see little or no pressure to be other than “disengaged lazy whiners” will continue to pay the price for their lack of education, both in college and at work, and we will continue to draw behind in comparison with those countries who realize that student academic achievement has always been, and will always be, mainly dependent on diligent student academic work.
How We Ranked the Business Schools
To identify the top undergraduate business programs, Bloomberg Businessweek uses a methodology that includes nine measures of student satisfaction, postgraduation outcomes, and academic quality.
This year we started with 139 programs that were eligible for ranking, including virtually all of the schools from our 2010 ranking plus three new schools that met our eligibility requirements. In November, with the help of Cambria Consulting in Boston, we asked more than 86,000 graduating seniors at those schools to complete a 50-question survey on everything from the quality of teaching to recreational facilities. Overall, 28,377 students responded to the survey, a response rate of 33 percent.
The results of the 2011 student survey are then combined with the results of two previous student surveys, from 2010 and 2009, to arrive at a student survey score for each school. The 2011 survey supplies 50 percent of the score; the two previous surveys supply 25 percent each.
China’s College Applicants: What Defines ‘Cheating’?
Thank you to those who have commented on my blog of February 28.
One reader made a thoughtful point about letters of recommendation and my use of the word “cheat.” The writer points out that in writing a letter of recommendation, the student has a chance for self-evaluation and that there is also transparency if the student writes and the teacher signs — both know what was said.
While I agree that self-evaluation and transparency are both good qualities, letters of recommendation for colleges are supposed to be confidential comments by a teacher about a student. In the States, it is rare for a teacher to agree to write a letter of recommendation if it will be negative, but a thoughtful letter that gives some detail about the work of a student, how a student interacts with others in the class, the degree of maturity shown, and the strengths and even some weaknesses as a way of showing where a student has worked hard to improve, are things that admissions people want to see; it’s one of the many efforts to get to know many aspects of the applicant.
Students Struggle for Words Business Schools Put More Emphasis on Writing Amid Employer Complaints
Alex Stavros, a second-year student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, had been pitching an eco-tourism luxury resort idea to potential investors for months, but wasn’t getting any bites.
He noticed that investors lost interest after the first few minutes of his presentation, and were slow to reply to emails. So Mr. Stavros enlisted the help of one of Stanford’s writing coaches for six weeks to help streamline his pitch. After the instruction, his pitch was whittled down to 64 words from 113, and he dropped three unnecessary bullet points.
“During my consulting career, each slide was a quantitative data dump with numbers and graphs, which I thought proved I had done the work,” he says. “Now, my presentations are simpler, but more effective.”
Texas group launches scholarship exclusively for white males
The application for a $500 scholarship from the Former Majority Association for Equality looks pretty much like all the others out there. Well, except for this eligibility requirement: “Male – No less than 25% Caucasian.”
Yes, the Texas-based nonprofit organization has launched a scholarship for white men. Members of the group, which goes by FMAFE, say they aren’t racist and “have no hidden agenda to promote racial bigotry or segregation,” according to their Web site. Instead, they say their goal is to provide financial aid to white men who might not qualify for other scholarships.
“FMAE’s existence is dedicated around one simple principle, to provide monetary aid for education to white males who need it,” the group’s mission statement reads.
Labor union supporters say Wisconsin test scores vastly outpace those in five states without collective bargaining for teachers
With that question out of the way, we’ll take a look at the thornier question of how those five states’ test scores stack up nationally, and against Wisconsin in particular.
On Feb. 20, 2011, Angus Johnston, an adjunct assistant professor at the City University of New York, published a comprehensive analysis of this question on his blog. He published links to a chart that appears to have been the inspiration for the tweets and Facebook postings. It offers a state-by-state analysis of scores on the SAT and the ACT, the two leading college-admissions tests, assembled by University of Missouri law professor Douglas O. Linder.
Johnston is critical of Linder’s methodology for a variety of reasons, which he explains in more detail here. But without even taking those concerns into account, we find the statistics unreliable. They were published in 1999, meaning that the statistics themselves are likely more than a dozen years old — far too old to be presumed valid in 2011.
Fortunately, it’s possible to obtain state-by-state rankings for the SAT and ACT of a more recent vintage. Here’s a table of the relevant states:
Bill Gates Addresses Governors on Improving Education
The National Governors Association concluded its 3-day winter meeting today with an address by Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates. Governors from across the country gathered to discuss issues facing states, including job creation and providing education that prepares workers to compete in a global market.
Today’s closing session focused on “Preparing to Succeed in a Global Economy.” Gates talked about the efforts of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to improve education and how education is imperative to remaining competitive in a global economy.
This morning, the Governors were at the White House to meet with President Obama. He discussed with them the ongoing state and federal budget situation as well as the implementation of the health care law. In remarks, the President said that he is open to new ideas on how to lower the cost of health care and the burden on the states, but the quality of care cannot suffer.
Gates notes that US per pupil spending has doubled in the past 20 years and yet the outcomes have not changed that much. Gates advocates “flipping these curves”, essentially spending the same and doing much more.
Gates also noted the decline in the amount of time teachers spend teaching (adult to children) accompanied by an increase in adult staffing levels over the past 20 years.
Inside the multimillion-dollar essay-scoring business
Dan DiMaggio was blown away the first time he heard his boss say it.
The pensive, bespectacled 25-year-old had been coming to his new job in the Comcast building in downtown St. Paul for only about a week. Naturally, he had lots of questions.
At one point, DiMaggio approached his increasingly red-faced supervisor at his desk with another question. Instead of answering, the man just hissed at him.
“You know this stuff better than I do!” he said. “Stop asking me questions!”
DiMaggio was struck dumb.
“I definitely didn’t feel like I knew what was going on at all,” he remembers. “Your supervisor has to at least pretend to know what’s going on or everything falls apart.”
DiMaggio’s question concerned an essay titled, “What’s your goal in life?” The answer for a surprising number of seventh-graders was to lift 200 pounds.
Is America’s best high school soft on math?
By all accounts, he is one of the best math teachers in the country. The Mathematics Association of America has given him two national awards. He was appointed by the Bush administration to the National Mathematics Advisory Panel. For 25 years he has prepared middle-schoolers for the tough admissions standards at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the most selective high school in America.
Yet this year, when Vern Williams looked at the Jefferson application, he felt not the usual urge to get his kids in, but a dull depression. On the first page of Jefferson’s letter to teachers writing recommendations, in boldface type, was the school board’s new focus: It wanted to prepare “future leaders in mathematics, science, and technology to address future complex societal and ethical issues.” It sought diversity, “broadly defined to include a wide variety of factors, such as race, ethnicity, gender, English for speakers of other languages (ESOL), geography, poverty, prior school and cultural experiences, and other unique skills and experiences.” The same language was on the last page of the application.
“This is just one example of why I have lost all faith in the TJ admissions process,” Williams said. “In fact, I’m pretty embarrassed that the process seems no more effective than flipping coins.”
How Chinese Students Struggle to Apply to U.S. Colleges
As I’ve worked with Chinese students who want to attend college or university in the US, there are some, not surprising, generalizations that apply to the process and there are also constant and gratifying distinctive stories that keep me from being too stereotypical in my assumptions.
Today the generalizations.
The US college application preparation is 180-degrees different from preparing to attend college in China. At the most basic level it is a difference between one test score (in China) and a process of many forms, the occasional interview, and each school’s idiosyncratic process (in the States). In China, “universities” are the desired place for undergraduate education; “colleges” are three-year institutions more like our vocational schools. This difference can lead to some confusion at the outset of talking with Chinese students and parents about undergraduate education in the US.
Washington should stick to proven state math standards
IF our state Legislature takes no action this session, Washington state will drop its new, improved math standards for an untested experiment: Common Core “national” standards that have never been used in the classroom and for which assessments have yet to be developed.
And there is a high price tag for such a switch, an expense our state can ill afford. Surprisingly, one of the most profound changes in U.S. education in decades has been virtually uncovered by the national media.
Until two years ago, our state had some of the worst math standards in the country, rated “F” by the Fordham Foundation, and lacking many of the essentials found in standards used by the highest-performing nations. That all changed in 2008, when under the impetus of the state Legislature, a new set of standards, based on world-class math requirements, was adopted.
‘Crazy U,’ by Andrew Ferguson, about his family’s college admissions experience
My daughter’s college applications are all in, and now we can quietly go nuts while admissions fairies from coast to coast get busy, as Andrew Ferguson wonderfully puts it, “sprinkling pixie dust and waving wands, dashing dreams or making them come true.”
It’s an apt metaphor because, as anyone who’s been in it knows, the family caravan to collegeland is magical and terrifying: You begin wide-eyed and innocent, skipping along with outsized hopes, only to shrink before the fire-breathing ogres of the SAT, the essay, the deadlines, the costs. In “Crazy U,” Ferguson invites you to join him on the dream-mare that he and his son endured.
The book is both a hilarious narrative and an incisive guide to the college admissions process. Ferguson, a senior editor at the Weekly Standard, has done his research, poring over mountains of published material and interviewing admissions officers, college coaches, academics and the guy behind the U.S. News & World Report college rankings.
American Teaching Standards: Don’t know much about history
Many states emphasise abstract concepts rather than history itself. In Delaware, for example, pupils “will not be expected to recall any specific event or person in history”. Other states teach children about early American history only once, when they are 11. Yet other states show scars from the culture wars. A steady, leftward lean has been followed by a violent lurch to the right. Standards for Texas, passed last year, urge pupils to question the separation of church and state and “evaluate efforts by global organisations to undermine US sovereignty through the use of treaties”.
Some states fare better. South Carolina has set impressive standards–for example, urging teachers to explain that colonists did not protest against taxation simply because taxes were too high. Other states, Mr Finn argues, would do well to follow South Carolina’s example. “Twenty-first century skills” may help pupils become better workers; learning history makes them better citizens.
Related: The State of State U.S. History Standards 2011: Wisconsin = F.
More Flexibility to Raise Tuition?
Central to debates over the New Badger Partnership is the question of whether additional flexibilities that make it possible to raise tuition are desirable.
Evidence can and must be used to make these decisions. A robust, evidence-based debate on our campus is obviously needed but to date has not occurred. Instead, to many of us outside Bascom it seems as though administrators have mostly relied on the input of a few economists and some other folks who work in higher education but are not scholars of higher education. It also seems like seeking advice from those mostly likely to agree with you. (Please–correct me if I’m wrong–very happy to be corrected with evidence on this point.)
It would be wonderful to see a more thorough review of existing evidence and the development of an evaluation plan that will assess positive and negative impacts of any new policy in ways that allow for the identification of policy effects– not correlations. (Let’s be clear: comparing enrollment of Pell recipients before and after the implementation of a policy like the MIU does not count.)
A few years ago I blogged about studies on the effects of tuition and financial aid on individual decision-making. To summarize– effects of each are relatively small (especially when compared to effects of academic under-preparation, for example) but usually statistically significant. Also, what we call “small” reflects our value judgments, and we must recognize that.
For the Love of Math!
You’ve heard this a million (10 to the power of 6) times, but it is frightening. In the 2009 (41 X 49) Program for International Student Assessment US 15-year-olds ranked 25th (4! + 1) among 34 (square root of 1156) countries in math falling behind Canada, New Zealand, Finland, and Asian countries such as China, South Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Hong Kong.
To counter this sad trend, stop by The Math Salon at Mosaic Coffeehouse on February 28th from 4-6 PM:
On Science Exams, New York’s Students Fall Short
Only 18 percent of the city’s public school fourth graders and 13 percent of its eighth graders demonstrated proficiency on the most recent national science exams, far below state and national achievement levels, according to results released Thursday.
Alan J. Friedman, a member of the National Assessment Governing Board, the bipartisan group that oversees the tests, called the city’s results “a big disappointment,” particularly because New York has a number of cultural organizations devoted to science, like the Museum of Natural History and the New York Hall of Science in Queens, which he directed for 22 years.
The exam was given in 2009 to a sampling of 4,300 fourth and eighth graders in the city, or about 3 percent of students in those grades. Nationwide, 33 percent of fourth graders and 29 percent of eighth graders showed proficiency, and in New York State, those numbers were 30 and 31, respectively.
Unileaks: “Keeping Education Honest”
Cutting Tuition: A First Step?
Despite the outcry over high college costs, tuition rates are still going up. Princeton, Brown, Stanford and George Washington, for example, all announced increases in the last few weeks.
But a Tennessee college, the University of the South, better known as Sewanee, is reducing the cost to attend the school next year by 10 percent.
Tuition, fees, and room and board are all affected, with the overall cost falling from around $46,000 to about $41,500. The university said it will alter its student aid formula, but officials say no students will pay more next year than they pay now, and most will pay less.
A review of A Dictionary of Modern English Usage
The third edition of the work of the brilliant and cantankerous Englishman H. W. Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage, published in 1996, signaled the triumph of the descriptivist view of language–the view, that is, that the lexicographer’s duty is merely to describe the language as it’s used, not to make pronouncements about how it ought to be used. It also signaled the triumph of tedium over enjoyment, and of abstract truth over utility. Edited by the late R. W. Burchfield, The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, as the third edition was titled, addressed all the significant questions about English grammar and usage and explained with sufficient clarity the ways in which those questions have been addressed in the past.
But it only gave unambiguous counsel if there were some practical reason for it, and then only in the mildest terms: “this use should probably be eschewed.” If you wanted to know whether “their” may refer to singular antecedents, for example (If someone isn’t doing their job, they should be fired), Burchfield told you that “the issue is unresolved, but it begins to look as if the use . . . is now passing unnoticed.” Maybe the issue is “unresolved,” one thought, but could you please resolve it and tell me whether I should write “they” or “he” or “he or she” and so avoid sounding like an ignoramus to an educated audience? For his part, Fowler–the original Fowler–had called this use of the plural pronoun a “mistake.” He acknowledged rare instances of the use in Fielding and Thackeray, but suggested that “few good writers” could get away with it.
Why the world’s youth is in a revolting state of mind
In Tunisia and Egypt, the young are rebelling against old rulers. In Britain, they are in revolt against tuition fees. What do these young people have in common? They are suffering, albeit in different ways, from what David Willetts, the UK government’s minister of higher education, called the “pinch” in a book published last year.
In some countries, the challenge is an excess of young people; in others, it is that the young are too few. But where the young outnumber the old, they can hope to secure a better fate through the ballot box. Where the old outnumber the young, they can use the ballot box to their advantage, instead. In both cases, powerful destabilising forces are at work, bringing opportunity to some and disappointment to others.
Demography is destiny. Humanity is in the grip of three profound transformations: first, a far greater proportion of children reaches adulthood; second, women have far fewer children; and, third, adults live far longer. These changes are now working through the world, in sequence. The impact of the first has been to raise the proportion of the population that is young. The impact of the second is the reverse, decreasing the proportion of young people. The third, in turn, increases the proportion of the population that is very old. The impact of the entire process is first to expand the population and, later on, to shrink it once again.
Jeopardy is just the start for Watson
Americans must be either very excited about the artificial intelligence that IBM has built into a new computer called “Watson” or very scared. This week, when Watson competed on ABC’s Jeopardy against two of the best players in the quiz show’s history, the network got its highest ratings in six years. Crammed full of data from reference books and trained to understand questions in regular human speech, Watson wiped its human rivals out, correctly answering questions on everything from who wrote the Études-Tableaux for piano (Sergei Rachmaninoff) to who designed the Emmanuel College chapel at Cambridge (Christopher Wren).
The feat has been compared to the 1997 victory of IBM’s chess-playing computer, Deep Blue, over Garry Kasparov, the world’s champion at the time. But for a computer to master language is a far more unsettling encroachment on the sanctum of uniquely human behaviours than superiority in a game played on an 8-by-8 grid. Outside the walls of IBM headquarters, Watson has provoked mostly anxiety – over the practical question of what jobs it will destroy, and the metaphysical question of whether talking machines will erode our sense of what it means to be human.
To some extent, this is a misunderstanding. Watson is not a smart machine that has shown its intelligence by winning at Jeopardy. It is a Jeopardy-playing machine which, after years of tinkering by dozens of IBM’s top scientists, now works reasonably well. As big as a room, it combines a supercharged version of the grammar check on your word-processing software with a supercharged version of Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” button.
The State of State U.S. History Standards 2011: Wisconsin = F
Sheldon M. Stern, Jeremy A. Stern
Presidents’ Day 2011 is right around the corner, but George Washington would be dismayed by the findings of this new study by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. Reviewers evaluated state standards for U.S. history in grades K-12. What they found is discouraging: Twenty-eight states–a majority–deserve D or F grades for their academic standards in this key subject. The average grade across all states is a dismal D. Among the few bright spots, South Carolina earns a straight A for its standards and six other jurisdictions–Alabama, California, Indiana, Massachusetts, New York, and the District of Columbia–garner A-minuses. (The National Assessment’s “framework” for U.S. history also fares well.) Read on to learn how your state scored.
The Wisconsin History Report Card:
Overview
Wisconsin’s U.S. history standards, for all practical purposes, do not exist. Their sole content is a list of ten eras in American and Wisconsin history, followed by a few brief and vague directives to understand vast swaths of history and broad historical concepts. Determining an actual course’s scope, sequence, and content rests entirely on the shoulders of local teachers and districts.
Goals and Organization
Wisconsin’s social studies standards are divided among five strands: geography, history, political science and citizenship, economics, and behavioral sciences. Each strand consists of a “content standard”–a one-sentence statement of the strand’s purpose–and a one- paragraph “rationale” justifying its importance. The history strand also includes short lists of ten chronological/thematic eras for Wisconsin, U.S. history, and world history. The ten listed eras of U.S. history are said to apply to grades 5-12, and those for Wisconsin history to grades 4-12.
Urban Prep Academy of Chicago celebrates perfect college acceptance
Every member in an Illinois school’s senior class has been accepted into college for the second time in the school’s two-year history.
“No other public school in the country has done this,” said Tim King, CEO and founder of Urban Prep Academy in Chicago.
The school was established to battle the low high school and college graduation rates among black men.
“We are Urban Prep men,” said Israel Wilson, a 2010 graduate and student at Morehouse College. “And at Urban Prep, we believe.”
Barcode-to-Bibliography App Makes College Ridiculously Easy
Sometimes a technology comes along that is so great it seems almost unjust to former generations. Aviation. The personal computer. The polio vaccine.
One gets the same feeling today when considering a new app out for iPhone and Android. Quick Cite, a 99-cent app, automates the task of putting together a bibliography–that arduous list of books, articles, and other sources consulted that goes at the end of a master’s thesis of PhD dissertation. The first thought you have is, “How much time scholars will henceforth save!” The next thought you have is, “Anyone who got a PhD before the year 2011 was a poor sucker.”
The app works by using the smartphone’s camera to scan the barcode on the back of a book. Then it emails you a citation formatted to fit one of four common bibliographic styles: APA, MLA, Chicago, or IEEE. The app was one of seven developed over seven sleepless days by seven undergraduates at the University of Waterloo. Thus they called the week-long experiment in coding creativity and class-cutting “7Cubed,” and even made a little video about it.
Google, China, and Chinese College Students – Part III
A speech which was seen by many in the US as a strong step in the right direction or even as not strong enough was in fact a gift to the Chinese government.
Before Hillary Clinton’s speech, for many Chinese students the conflict was between Google and the Chinese government. After the speech, it was Google / US government vs the Chinese government – US interests vs Chinese interests. Concerns this might be the case were earlier expressed on this site here and here.
An analysis of Clinton’s words misses the point. Most of the students didn’t know them. All that mattered to the students was that the US government had aligned itself with Google and now “Google” & “US government” were synonymous. The existence of such a close partnership was not at all a stretch for Chinese students to believe since they were already very accustomed to a blurry line, if any, between government and business in their own country – often associated with corruption.
Texas Governor Perry’s call for $10,000 bachelor’s degrees stumps educators
When Gov. Rick Perry challenged the state’s public institutions of higher learning this week to develop bachelor’s degree programs costing no more than $10,000, including textbooks, Mike McKinney was stumped.
“My answer is I have no idea how,” McKinney, chancellor of the Texas A&M University System, told the Senate Finance Committee. “I’m not going to say that it can’t be done.”
Tuition, fees and books for four years average $31,696 at public universities in Texas, according to the Higher Education Coordinating Board. Sul Ross State University Rio Grande College is the cheapest, at $17,532.
The governor’s call for low-cost degrees comes as legislative budget writers and the governor himself have proposed deep cuts in higher education funding — cuts that would put pressure on governing boards to raise tuition, not lower it.
But officials of some university systems — whose governing boards are fully populated by Perry appointees — nevertheless struck an upbeat tone, or at least a neutral one. As McKinney, a former Perry chief of staff, put it: “If it can be figured out, we’ve got the faculty that can figure it out.”
A spokesman for the University of Texas System said, “We look forward to reviewing details of the governor’s proposal.”
This is exactly the kind of thinking we need: fresh approaches toward all aspects of education.
Proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter School Budget
Urban Leage of Greater Madison:
The Urban League of Greater Madison (ULGM) is submitting this budget narrative to the Madison Metropolitan School District Board of Education as a companion to its line‐item budget for Madison Preparatory Academy for Young Men (Madison Prep). The budget was prepared in partnership with MMSD’s Business Services office. The narrative provides context for the line items presented in the budget.
Madison Prep’s budget was prepared by a team that included Kaleem Caire, President & CEO of ULGM; Tami Holmquist, Business Manager at Edgewood High School; Laura DeRoche‐Perez, ULGM Charter School Development Consultant; and Jim Horn, ULGM Director of Finance. Representative of ULGM and MMSD met weekly during the development of the Madison Prep budget. These meetings included including Erik Kass, Assistant Superintendent for Business Services and Donna Williams, Director of Budget & Planning. The budget was also informed by ULGM’s charter school design teams and was structured in the same manner as start‐up, non‐instrumentality public charter school budgets submitted to the District of Columbia Public Charter School Board in Washington, DC. DCPCSB is widely regarded as one of the most effective authorizers of charter schools in the nation.
In addition, Madison Prep’s Facilities Design Team is led by Dennis Haefer, Vice President of Commercial Banking with Johnson Bank and Darren Noak, President of Commercial Building with Tri‐North Builders. Mr. Noak is also the Treasurer of ULGM’s Board of Directors. This team is responsible for identifying Madison Prep’s school site and planning for related construction, renovation and financing needs.
……
Budget Highlights
A. Cost of Education
In 2008‐09, the Madison Metropolitan School District received $14,432 in revenue per student from a combination of local, federal and state government and local property taxes. The largest portion of revenue came from property taxes, $9,049 (62.7%), followed by $3,364 in state aid (23.3%), $1,260 in federal aid (8.7%) and $759 in other local revenue (5.3%). That same year, MMSD spent $13,881 per student on educational, transportation, facility and food service costs for 25,011 students for a total of $347,177,691 in spending.
In 2010‐11, MMSD’s Board of Education is operating with an amended budget of $360,131,948, a decrease of $10,155,522 (‐2.74%) from 2009‐10. MMSD projects spending $323,536,051 in its general education fund, $10,069,701 on food service and $8,598,118 on debt service for a total of $342,203,870. Considering the total of only these three spending categories, and dividing the total by the official 2010‐11 enrollment count of 24,471 students, MMSD projects to spend $13,984 per student.3 This is the amount per pupil that ULGM used as a baseline for considering what Madison Prep’s baseline per pupil revenue should be in its budget for SY2011‐12. ULGM then determined the possibility of additional cutbacks in MMSD revenue for SY2011‐12 and reduced its base per pupil revenue projection to $13,600 per student. It then added a 1% increase to it’s per pupil base spending amount for each academic year through SY2016‐17.
ULGM recognizes that per pupil funding is an average of total costs to educate 24,471 children enrolled in MMSD schools, and that distinctions are not made between the costs of running elementary, middle and high schools. ULGM also understands that the operating costs between all three levels of schooling are different. Middle schools costs more to operate than elementary schools and high schools costs more than middle schools.
Reviewing expense projections for middle and high schools in MMSD’s SY2010‐11 Amended Preliminary Budget, ULGM decided to weight per pupil spending in middle school at 1.03% and 1.16% in high school. Thus, in SY2012‐13 when Madison Prep opens, ULGM projects a need to spend $14,148 per student, not including additional costs for serving English language learners and students with special needs, or the costs of Madison Prep’s third semester (summer).
B. Cost Comparisons between Madison Prep and MMSD
Staffing Costs
In 2010‐11, MMSD projected it would spend $67,133,692 on salaries (and benefits) on 825.63 staff in its secondary (middle and high) schools for an average salary of $81,312. This includes teachers, principals and in‐school support staff. In its first year of operation (SY2012‐13), ULGM projects Madison Prep it will spend $1,559,454 in salaries and benefits on 23 staff for an average of $67,802 in salary, including salaries for teachers, the Head of School (principal) and support staff. In its fifth year of operation, Madison Prep is projected to spend $3,560,746 in salaries and benefits on 52 staff for an average of $68,476 per staff person. In both years, Madison Prep will spend significantly less on salaries and benefits per staff member than MMSD.
Additionally, MMSD spends an average of $78,277 on salaries and benefits for staff in its middle schools and $79,827 on its staff in its high schools.
Additional documents: budget details and Madison Prep’s Wisconsin DPI application.
Matthew DeFour:
The high cost results from the likelihood that Madison Prep will serve more low-income, non-English speaking and special education students, said Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, which is developing the charter school. The school also plans to have a longer school year, school day and require students to participate in volunteer and extracurricular activities.
“What we’re asking for is based on the fact that we’re going to serve a high-needs population of kids,” Caire said. “We don’t know yet if what we’re projecting is out of line.”
Caire said the proposal will likely change as potential state and federal revenues are assessed.
A Republican charter school bill circulated in the Legislature this week could also alter the landscape. The bill would allow charter schools to receive approval from a state board, rather than a local school board, and those that don’t use district employees, like Madison Prep, would be able to access the state retirement and health care systems.
Much more on the proposed Madison Preparatory Academy IB Charter school, here.
Forget Mandarin. Latin is the key to success
On the face of it, encouraging children to learn Latin doesn’t seem like the solution to our current skills crisis. Why waste valuable curriculum time on a dead language when children could be learning one that’s actually spoken? The prominence of Latin in public schools is a manifestation of the gentleman amateur tradition whereby esoteric subjects are preferred to anything that’s of any practical use. Surely, that’s one of the causes of the crisis in the first place?
But dig a little deeper and you’ll find plenty of evidence that this particular dead language is precisely what today’s young people need if they’re going to excel in the contemporary world.
Let’s start with Latin’s reputation as an elitist subject. While it’s true that 70 percent of independent schools offer Latin compared with only 16 per cent of state schools, that’s hardly a reason not to teach it more widely. According to the OECD, our private schools are the best in the world, whereas our state schools are ranked on average 23rd.
No doubt part of this attainment gap is attributable to the fact that the average private school child has advantages that the average state school child does not. But it may also be due to the differences in the curriculums th
B-Schools Struggle to Get Global
Business schools like to tout their focus on globalization, but a new report from a b-school accrediting agency says most of their strategies don’t go far enough.
To boost globalization, many M.B.A. programs in the U.S. require students to complete internships abroad. Schools are also beefing up case studies that focus on international companies and partnering with foreign schools by sending faculty abroad and exchanging students.
These partnerships can be risky, according to the report, released Thursday by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business. A school’s reputations could be tarnished depending on the schools it chooses. Schools also often shoulder “severe” financial costs to expand their global footprint, the report says.
Stanford Corners the ‘Smart’ Market After Its Best Football Season in Years, School Chases Top Recruits With Elite Grades; Building Robots
Darren Everson & Jared Diamond:
As college football’s 2011 recruiting classes took shape last week, much of the talk was dominated by the usual question: Which team pulled in the richest talent haul? Some say it was Alabama, others Florida State.
What was not acknowledged, or even noted, was the impressive and unusual incoming class assembled by Stanford.
The school, which is coming off its best football season in 70 years, didn’t land the most physically talented class of high school football players. The consensus says their crop ranks somewhere around No. 20 in the nation among all the major college programs. What stands out about Stanford’s class is something entirely different: what superior students they are.
Wayne Lyons, a four-star defensive back from Fort Lauderdale, Fla., who has a 4.96 weighted grade-point average and likes to build robots in his spare time, is widely considered the best student among the nation’s elite recruits. When he visited Stanford, he said he was whisked to a seminar on building jet engines and to a facility where robots are built.
Minnesota AP class results continue to improve, still behind national average
More high school seniors are taking Advanced Placement courses in Minnesota and scoring higher on the tests, but the state’s rankings are still below national averages.
According to new data from the College Board, more than 15,000 Minnesota high school seniors took an AP course last year, and nearly 10,000 of them scored at least a three on an AP test. A score of three to five usually allows students to gain college credit for that class.
Students have other options to take advanced coursework in Minnesota schools, including throughout the International Baccalaureate program. Tuesday’s report was confined to the AP program.
18.3% of Wisconsin high school seniors completed school with at least one successful AP experience. Wisconsin’s report can be found here.
Graduates, but Ill-Prepared Big Disparity Reported Between Getting a Diploma and College-Readiness Rates
New York state high-school students’ college and career readiness lags far behind the graduation rates that most school districts post, according to data from the state Department of Education.
Across the state, the graduation rate in 2009, the last year for which figures are public, was 77%. But only 41% of high-school students were prepared for a career or college, the state said. The state defines students as college- and career-ready if they score at least an 80 on the state’s math Regents exam and at least a 75 on the English Regents exam. New York students receive a high-school diploma if they achieve a score of at least 65 on Regents tests.
Data indicates 5 percent of Rochester graduates ready for college, careers
The New York State Education Department has released data that it said indicates that not all students graduating high school are prepared to enter college or careers.
The data compares graduation rates versus college- and career-ready graduation rate calculations for general education students who entered ninth grade in the 2005-06 school year, through June 2009.
General education graduation requirements for a local diploma include a score of 65 or better on two Regents exams and 55 or better on three Regents exams. The designation of college- and career-ready is defined by graduates who received at least an 80-percent grade on the math Regents exam and 75 on the English Regents exam.
In Rochester, there was a 46.6 percent graduation rate, with only 5.1 percent of graduates being college- and career-ready, said state education officials. This compares to 49.5 and 14.7 percent, respectively, in Syracuse, and 64.5 and 22.8 percent in New York City.
A Walk Around Emory University
The Escalating Arms Race for Top Colleges
It is no secret that the children of certain families (and we all know who we are) are primed to take a disproportionate share of the places at the best–or at least the most prestigious–colleges. That’s because we’re already sending our kids to the kinds of excellent schools that help prepare them for admission to such colleges.
But just in case our children don’t quite have the stats to make it into, say, Georgetown or UNC on their own steam, you can bet that we, as parents, will do everything in our power to make it happen. We are all caught up in a crazy arms race, where the order of the day (to borrow a useful term from the Cold War) is “escalation dominance.”
It May Be a Sputnik Moment, but Science Fairs Are Lagging
Rarely have school science fairs, a source of pride and panic for generations of American students, achieved such prominence on the national stage. President Obama held one at the White House last fall. And last week he said that America should celebrate its science fair winners like Sunday’s Super Bowl champions, or risk losing the nation’s competitive edge.
Yet as science fair season kicks into high gear, participation among high school students appears to be declining. And many science teachers say the problem is not a lack of celebration, but the Obama administration’s own education policy, which holds schools accountable for math and reading scores at the expense of the kind of creative, independent exploration that science fair projects require.
Should Everyone Go to College?
In a report issued on February 2nd, Harvard researchers question the value of ‘college for all.’
According to the co-authors of the report, Academic Dean Robert Schwartz and Ronald Ferguson, a Senior Lecturer at Harvard, the US’s four-year colleges are failing students by focusing too much on classroom-based academics and not adequately preparing students for careers. The proposal has sparked immediately concern from educators as it raises the ‘specter of tracking,’ in which students (often from lower-income or disadvantaged backgrounds) are ‘channeled unquestioningly into watered-down programs that curtail their prospects,’ according to EdWeek.
Currently, 42 percent of 27-year-olds in the US have no more than a high school degree. Only 30 percent of Americans earn a bachelor’s degree by the time they are 27. President Obama has stated that he wants to improve the nation’s college graduation rate to 60 percent in 10 years (ABC News). The US now ranks in 12th place in the world for college graduates, In comparison Canada’s college graduation rate is 55.8 percent; in South Korea and Russia, the rate for college graduates is 55.5 percent, according to statistics from the College Board.
Arab World Built Colleges, but Not Jobs Unemployment, Broad Among Region’s Angry Youth, Is High Among Educated
The anger of demonstrators in Tunisia and Egypt runs, too, through 25-year-old Saleh Barek al-Jabri.
Mr. Jabri, the son of a Yemini bus driver, says he answered his government’s call for young people to study petroleum engineering, enrolling in a course at Yemen’s Hadhramaut University for Science and Technology. Officials visited his school to offer encouragement. An oil minister came through to promise jobs. Mr. Jabri excelled, finishing fifth in his class.
But after graduating last year, he has yet to find work. Classmates with family connections got what few jobs existed. Mr. Jabri moved to Yemen’s capital, San’a, where he shares a single room with two other unemployed recent graduates.
“I had dreams,” Mr. Jabri says. “They’ve all evaporated.”
Universities On The Brink
Higher education in America, historically the envy of the world, is rapidly growing out of reach. For the past quarter-century, the cost of higher education has grown 440%, according to the National Center for Public Policy and Education, nearly four times the rate of inflation and double the rate of health care cost increases. The cost increases have occurred at both public and private colleges.
Like many situations too good to be true–like the dot-com boom, the Enron bubble, the housing boom or the health care cost explosion–the ever-increasing cost of university education is not sustainable.
Honesty on Application Essays
While this particular website might be new, the idea is hardly innovative. That there are entrepreneurs willing to traffic in essays is no secret to anyone who evaluates admission applications for a living. And if the evidence and anecdotes of déjà vu experienced by admission officers are any indication, such sites probably do a brisk business. In that sense, the public premiere of a new outfit would border on prosaic if it weren’t for the fervent and opposing arguments that inevitably follow:
“Access to essays levels the playing field and helps students from schools with lackluster college counseling programs compete in today’s take-no-prisoners admission wars!”
“The sale of essays promotes plagiarism and diminishes the capacity of students to think for themselves!”
If the first claim is misguided (and conventional wisdom among admission professionals suggests that it is), the second one is incomplete. Yes, plagiarism is a nasty potential byproduct of these businesses. And reliance on samples of other people’s work to create one’s own can certainly constrain rather than inspire. But there’s also an important practical point that usually gets overlooked:
How Race Relates to College Grad Rates
Even while some minorities are surging ahead, others are trailing far behind.
Higher education has always been the golden ticket to better fortunes. So you’ve gotta wonder: Who’s cashing in, who’s stagnating, and why? The answers are all contained in a must-see interactive infographic showing college graduation rates across the country, created by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
We’ll get to the nuances of the story behind the data in a second, but let’s look at how the map works. You get to see a color coded scale showing what portion of each county in the U.S. has a college degree — the bluer the county, the more people are college graduates. And for every county, you can see a detailed chart, showing exactly how it stacks up against others:
The value of humanities
Throughout its 900-year history, Oxford University has survived the Bubonic Plague, the English Civil War, and a host of other maladies. Oxford Vice Chancellor Andrew Hamilton takes solace in the University’s resilient history as he grapples with the decision by the UK coalition to slash funding for higher education by 80%:
[The budget cuts] are pretty bad. The challenge for us obviously is the speed with which we have to confront the issues that result from them… One of the proposals that has been recently passed by government in the UK is to allow the cost of undergraduate education charged to students to rise. And again, that is happening in a very short period of time. Changes of this significant kind-I think we would all much prefer to be able to manage the cuts and manage any rise in tuition fees that will occur over a longer period, but we’re not being given that luxury. We’re going to have to manage them over a very short period of time, as little as two or three years. And that is going to be quite the challenge.
Prepare your middle-schooler for college
Even in middle school, there are a few easy things (and some more challenging steps) students can do to up their chances at a college admission. Join Jay Mathews to discuss these tactics.
Houston School District offering free SAT testing in class
All high school juniors in the Houston Independent School District will have the chance to take the SAT college entrance exam in class for free this April.
Typically, students only can take the SAT on Saturdays or Sundays. HISD officials say the district will be only the third in the country to offer the in-class testing — which should significantly increase the number of students taking the exam.
Nearly 5,000 of HISD’s graduates in 2010 — less than half — took the SAT, according to the district. It’s likely other students took the ACT exam, which most colleges accept as well, but that number wasn’t immediately available for the Class of 2010.
Is Going to an Elite College Worth the Cost?
AS hundreds of thousands of students rush to fill out college applications to meet end-of-the-year deadlines, it might be worth asking them: Is where you spend the next four years of your life that important?
The sluggish economy and rising costs of college have only intensified questions about whether expensive, prestigious colleges make any difference. Do their graduates make more money? Get into better professional programs? Make better connections? And are they more satisfied with their lives, or at least with their work?
New Advanced Placement Biology Is Ready to Roll Out, but U.S. History Isn’t
While the College Board plans to unveil a sweeping revision to Advanced Placement biology courses on Tuesday, it is delaying similar changes in United States history by a year to address concerns from high school teachers.
The changes in both subjects are part of a broad revamping of A.P. courses and exams to reduce memorization and to foster analytic thinking. But while the new biology curriculum is specific about what material needs to be covered, some teachers complained that parts of the history course seemed vague, and the board said it needed more time to clarify what should be studied.
Board officials said they expected to publish the new United States history curriculum next fall. That curriculum will now take effect in the 2013-14 school year, they said, rather than in 2012-13, when the new biology program is to begin.
Higher education is not broken
Gov. Brian Sandoval’s State of the State address has certainly given us all a great deal to consider. His proposals for Nevada’s public higher education system, in particular, will prompt needed dialogue. However, it is critical that such discussions begin with correct assumptions, and contrary to what we have been told, the Nevada System of Higher Education is not broken.
As evidence of that assertion, some point to our universities’ six-year graduation rates (for the period beginning in 2004) of only 50 percent. However, that statement is misleading. When student transfers and eight-year graduation rates are reflected in the calculation, the graduation rate is much higher, ranging from 55 to 70 percent — certainly in need of improvement, but a respectable figure in any national comparison.
Many have been critical of Nevada’s community college graduation rates, which range from 5 to 26 percent. However, many, if not most, community college students don’t attend community colleges to graduate from a community college — they attend to take specific courses or they transfer within a relatively short period of time. These are designed to be access institutions, and graduation rates, taken alone, really don’t adequately reflect their mission.
Grade Inflation: The more we spend on higher education, the more we spend on higher education.
When it comes to reforming Big College, give the federal government a C+. Throughout 2010, grade grubbers in Congress, the White House, the Department of Education, and the Government Accountability Office (GAO) worked hard to investigate and regulate the booming for-profit college sector. Among other sins, they accused the schools of predatory recruiting practices, inflating grades to keep students eligible for federal aid, and charging too much for degrees that ultimately have little value in the workplace.
Given that the approximately 2,000 for-profit colleges in the U.S. rely on federal aid for a huge portion of their revenues, such scrutiny is clearly warranted. Still, the $25 billion in federal grants and loans that flows to them each year represents just a fraction of the $113.3 billion the government made available to higher education as a whole in 2009-10. And not all of the $89 billion or so that non-profit institutions collected in federal aid went toward teaching the nation’s youth such career-enhancing skills as how to deconstruct soap operas from a Marxist perspective.
Contemporary Student Life
It may be that, like me, you don’t quite know what to make of articles that have appeared recently about the state of contemporary secondary and post-secondary education. But maybe you can! If so, help me sort through it. I’ve spent my entire professional life as a teacher — for over twenty years at the college level, and for the last nine years at a high school. Despite all that, I still don’t know what to make of all this.
So, I’m just going to call your attention here to some disparate things I’ve read in recent months, without trying to weave them together in a coherent essay. If you have thoughts, please let me hear them.
College grads make their own jobs
With Colorado’s unemployment rate at 8.6 percent, college graduates are getting creative when it comes to making a career out of their newly completed educations. For more and more graduates, this means starting a business venture all their own.
Fortunately for these young hopefuls, the entrepreneurial environment in Colorado is a friendly one, from business schools preparing students to begin their venture to established business owners who welcome aspiring entrepreneurs.
The College of Business at Colorado State University is making sure that students have the opportunity to gain all the skills and inspiration necessary to jump-start any entrepreneurial leanings they may have. The college offers a certificate of entrepreneurship program to interested business and engineering students.
The Process for Discussing Madison School District High School Alignment
This is to provide clarity, transparency and direction in improving our high school curriculum and instruction, with ongoing communication.
(As presented to the MMSD Board of Education on January 6, 2011)
The following guiding principles were discussed:
- We will be aligning to the ACT Cateer and College Readiness Standards and the Common Core Standards
- This will be a comprehensive Pre K-12 process, to build continuity across all grade levels
- We will be implementing aligned assessments, including the Educational Planning & Assessment System (EPAS)
- The high school alignment will focus on grades 9 and 10 in the four core content areas
- We will establish common understandings, knowledge and skills using Universal Designs for Learning (UDL)
Lots of related links:
- “Stand Up Against the MMSD High School Reform”
- Madison school district to consider alternatives to traditional public schools
- Advanced Placement, Gifted Education & A Hometown Debate
- On the Gifted & Talented Complaint Against the Madison School District
- Madison School District 2010-2011 Enrollment Report, Including Outbound Open Enrollment (3.11%)
- Complaint Filed Against Madison Schools
- English 10
- District Small Learning Community Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 2
- The Mess at West (updated)
- Laurie Frost and Lorie Raihala: Issues at West High are long-standing
What happened to studying?
You won’t hear this from the admissions office, but college students are cracking the books less and less
They come with polished resumes and perfect SAT scores. Their grades are often impeccable. Some elite universities will deny thousands of high school seniors with 4.0 grade point averages in search of an elusive quality that one provost called “intellectual vitality.” The perception is that today’s over-achieving, college-driven kids have it — whatever it is. They’re not just groomed; they’re ready. There’s just one problem.
Once on campus, the students aren’t studying.
It is a fundamental part of college education: the idea that young people don’t just learn from lectures, but on their own, holed up in the library with books and, perhaps, a trusty yellow highlighter. But new research, conducted by two California economics professors, shows that over the past five decades, the number of hours that the average college student studies each week has been steadily dropping. According to time-use surveys analyzed by professors Philip Babcock, at the University of California Santa Barbara, and Mindy Marks, at the University of California Riverside, the average student at a four-year college in 1961 studied about 24 hours a week. Today’s average student hits the books for just 14 hours.
Mystery of Piano on Miami Sandbar Finally Solved
The rumors can stop swirling: The baby grand piano that turned up on a Miami sandbar was burned to tatters by New Year’s revelers, then brought to its new home by a television designer’s teenage son who said Thursday he hoped the idea might help him get into a prestigious art school.
Theories of the instrument’s origin had abounded, with some saying they saw helicopters and television crews hovering around the piano. Others tried to claim responsibility, but Nicholas Harrington, 16, had his endeavor on videotape.
Mr. Harrington said he wanted to leave his artistic mark on Miami’s seascape as the artist Christo did in the early 1980s when he draped 11 small islands in Biscayne Bay with hot pink fabric. And if it helped the high school junior get into Manhattan’s Cooper Union college, that would be OK, too.
A Measured Approach to Improving Teacher Preparation
Chad Aldeman, Kevin Carey, Erin Dillon, Ben Miller, and Elena Silva, via email:
Over the next five years, more than a million new teachers will enter public school classrooms. But the system in place to produce these teachers–supported by an ever-expanding set of federal financial aid programs and multimillion-dollar federal grants–offers no guarantees of quality for anyone involved, from the college students who often borrow thousands of dollars to attend teacher preparation programs to the districts, schools, and children that depend on good teachers.
“Simply put, the nation’s thousands of teacher preparation programs are good at churning out teachers but far less successful at ensuring that those teachers meet the needs of public schools and students,” say the authors of a new Education Sector policy brief. In A Measured Approach to Improving Teacher Preparation, analysts Chad Aldeman, Kevin Carey, Erin Dillon, Ben Miller, and Elena Silva examine the way the United States currently prepares teachers and offers some specific suggestions on how to improve it.
Tailgating: Isn’t four hours long enough to party?
I’m not sure why the University of Georgia Student Government Association wants tailgating beyond four hours, which seems like a reasonable period time for any pre-game party to me.
Nor am I sure if the SGA is in the best position to ask for a relaxing of the restrictions put on tailgating by the UGA administration to cut down on the trash and mayhem. The administration says someone dragged a couch out of a dorm and set it on fire in Myers Quad during the Nov. 27 game against Georgia Tech. And the college had to deal with jagged glass from beer bottles on the ground as well.
Take a look at this AJC story, which states that UGA student leaders want three North Campus tailgating restrictions imposed last year relaxed; the prohibitions against tents, tables longer than four feet and tailgating more than four hours before kickoff. Lest anyone forget why these restrictions were imposed, please look at the photo accompanying this blog of North Campus after one of the tailgating afternoons that led to the clamp-down by UGA.
Do students at selective schools really study less?
So says Philip Babcock in today’s New York Times. He claims:
Full-time college students in the 1960s studies 24 hours per week, on average, and their counterparts today study 14 hours per week. The 10-hour decline is visible for students from all demographic groups and of all cognitive abilities, in every major and at every type of college.
The claim that this is true for “every type of college” is important because he wants to conclude that schools have lowered their standards. The alternative is that there are more, low-quality schools now, or that some schools have massively lowered their standards. These are both potentially problems — and are probably real — but are not quite the same problem as all schools everywhere lowering their standards.
So it’s important to show that individual schools have lowered their standards, and that this is true for the selective schools as well as the not-selective schools. The article links to this study by Babcock. This study analyzes a series of surveys of student study habits from the 1960s to the 2000s, and thus seems to be the basis of his argument, and in fact the introduction contains almost the identical statement that I have quoted above. Nonetheless, despite these strong conclusions, the data that would support them appear to be missing.
‘Embedded honors’ program has issues
The controversy at West High School continues about the Madison School District’s new talented and gifted program. Students, parents and teachers decry the plan, pointing to the likelihood of a “tracking” system and increasingly segregated classes.
While I am in agreement with them here, I must differ when they mistakenly point to the current “embedded honors” system as a preferable method for dealing with TAG students.
The idea itself should immediately raise red flags. Teaching two classes at the same time is impossible to do well, if at all. Forcing teachers to create twice the amount of curriculum and attempt to teach both within a single context is unrealistic and stressful for the educators.
The system creates problems for students as well. There is very little regulation in the execution of these “embedded honors” classes, creating widely varying experiences among students. By trying to teach to two different levels within one classroom, “embedded honors” divides teachers’ attention and ultimately impairs the educational experiences of both groups of students.
While the concerns raised about Superintendent Dan Nerad’s plan are legitimate, “embedded honors” as a solution is not.
Lots of related links:
- “Stand Up Against the MMSD High School Reform”
- Madison school district to consider alternatives to traditional public schools
- Advanced Placement, Gifted Education & A Hometown Debate
- On the Gifted & Talented Complaint Against the Madison School District
- Madison School District 2010-2011 Enrollment Report, Including Outbound Open Enrollment (3.11%)
- Complaint Filed Against Madison Schools
- English 10
- District Small Learning Community Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 2
- The Mess at West (updated)
- Laurie Frost and Lorie Raihala: Issues at West High are long-standing
A rebellion at Madison West High School over new curriculum
When Paul Radspinner’s 15-year-old son Mitchell wanted to participate in a student sit-in last October outside West High School, he called his dad to ask permission.
“He said he was going to protest, and wanted to make sure I had no problem with it. I thought, ‘It’s not the ’60s anymore,'” recalls Radspinner. The students, he learned, were upset about planned curriculum changes, which they fear will eliminate elective class choices, a big part of the West culture.
“It was a real issue at the school,” notes Radspinner. “The kids found out about it, but the parents didn’t.”
This lack of communication is a main reason Radspinner and 60 other parents recently formed a group called West Cares. Calling itself the “silent majority,” the group this month opposed the new English and social studies honors classes the district is adding next fall at West, as well as Memorial. (East and La Follette High Schools already offer these classes for freshmen and sophomores.)
The parents fear separating smarter kids from others at the ninth-grade level will deepen the achievement gap by pushing some college-bound students into advanced-level coursework sooner. They also believe it will eviscerate West’s culture, where all freshmen and sophomores learn main subjects in core classes together regardless of achievement level.
“It’s a big cultural paradigm shift,” says parent Jan O’Neil. “That’s what we’re struggling with in the West community.”
Lots of related links:
- “Stand Up Against the MMSD High School Reform”
- Madison school district to consider alternatives to traditional public schools
- Advanced Placement, Gifted Education & A Hometown Debate
- On the Gifted & Talented Complaint Against the Madison School District
- Madison School District 2010-2011 Enrollment Report, Including Outbound Open Enrollment (3.11%)
- Complaint Filed Against Madison Schools
- English 10
- District Small Learning Community Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 2
- The Mess at West (updated)
- Laurie Frost and Lorie Raihala: Issues at West High are long-standing
Chinese University scraps exams to boost teaching of classic books
Exams are out, the Great Books are in.
In a far-reaching overhaul of undergraduate education, Chinese University will scrap exams for most mandatory subjects and boost the teaching of both Western and Chinese classics.
The changes are part of the university’s preparation to lengthen degree courses from three years to four years next year.
Details of the overhaul revealed yesterday include a drastic reduction in the number of final exams for mandatory courses in general education, languages, physical education and information technology.
“We will focus on the classics by [authors such as] Adam Smith, Charles Darwin and Karl Marx. We want students to cite classics when thinking about modern problems,” said Leung Mei-yee, director of the university’s general education foundation programme.
Record Level of Stress Found in College Freshmen
The emotional health of college freshmen — who feel buffeted by the recession and stressed by the pressures of high school — has declined to the lowest level since an annual survey of incoming students started collecting data 25 years ago.
In the survey, “The American Freshman: National Norms Fall 2010,” involving more than 200,000 incoming full-time students at four-year colleges, the percentage of students rating themselves as “below average” in emotional health rose. Meanwhile, the percentage of students who said their emotional health was above average fell to 52 percent. It was 64 percent in 1985.
Every year, women had a less positive view of their emotional health than men, and that gap has widened.
Campus counselors say the survey results are the latest evidence of what they see every day in their offices — students who are depressed, under stress and using psychiatric medication, prescribed even before they came to college.
Credentialism and elite employment
Want an elite job at the very pinnacle of 21st century capitalism? Read the rest of this post. Here’s what I said in an earlier post How the world works: (see also Creators and Rulers.)
Go to the web sites of venture capital, private equity or hedge funds, or of Goldman Sachs, and you’ll find that HYPS alums, plus a few Ivies, plus MIT and Caltech, are grossly overrepresented. (Equivalently, look at the founding teams of venture funded startups.)
Most top firms only recruit at a few schools. A kid from a non-elite UG school has very little chance of finding a job at one of these places unless they first go to grad school at, e.g., HBS, HLS, or get a PhD from a top place. (By top place I don’t mean “gee US News says Ohio State’s Aero E program is top 5!” — I mean, e.g., a math PhD from Berkeley or a PhD in computer science from MIT — the traditional top dogs in academia.)
This is just how the world works. I won’t go into detail, but it’s actually somewhat rational for elite firms to operate this way …The paper below is by a Kellogg (Northwestern) management professor, Lauren Rivera. No offense to Rivera, because she gets things mainly right, but much of (good) social science seems like little more than documenting what is obvious to any moderately perceptive person with the relevant life experience. Bad social science, on the other hand, often means completely missing things that a moderately perceptive person would have noticed! 😉
Wisconsin NAEP science results exceed national average
Wisconsin DPI, via a kind reader’s email:
cience scores for Wisconsin students exceeded the national average on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) science assessment, administered between January and March of 2009.
The state’s scale scores on the assessments were 157 at both fourth and eighth grades, eight points higher than the national scale scores of 149 for both grades. In state-by-state comparisons, Wisconsin’s results at fourth grade were higher than those in 27 states, not significantly different from those in 12 states, and lower than seven states. At eighth grade, Wisconsin’s results were higher than 27 states, not significantly different than 14 states, and lower than five states.
Today I am releasing the 2009 National Assessment of Educational Progress science results.
Students were assessed at the fourth, eighth, and twelfth grades. Over 156,000 students at grade 4, 151,000 at grade 8, and 11,000 at grade 12 took the assessment. We have national results for public and private school students at all three grades. At grades 4 and 8, we also have results for public school students in 46 states and the Department of Defense schools. The state samples were combined and augmented with sampled students from the four non-participating states plus the District of Columbia, along with a national sample of private school students, to create the full national samples for grades 4 and 8. The twelfth-grade sample is smaller because there are no state-representative samples at that grade.
WEAC statement.
NCES state profiles.
Reading between the lines
WHAT good would a gathering of literary types be if it didn’t coincide with a little acrimony and rancour? South Asia’s largest book festival is under way in Jaipur, Rajasthan, a five-hour drive (if you’re lucky) from Delhi. From January 21st to the 25th a couple of hundred authors, tens of thousands of book-lovers and a few Nobel laureates cram the lawns of the Diggi palace in the Pink City.
The annual Jaipur Literature Festival is now big enough–32,000 attended last year; this year the tally will be much higher–that there should be no need for anyone to stir up controversy to get attention. Nonetheless, shortly before the event Hartosh Singh Bal, an (Indian) editor of a local magazine, accused William Dalrymple, a (British) writer who co-directs the festival, of being “pompous” and setting himself up as an arbiter of writers’ taste in the country.
Stung, Mr Dalrymple accused Mr Bal, in turn, of racism. A flurry of angry commentary has followed in the Indian press and beyond, along with a discussion of whether or why Indian writers crave foreign approval, especially from Brits.
Young inventors prompt colleges to revamp rules
Tony Brown didn’t set out to overhaul his college’s policies on intellectual property. He just wanted an easier way of tracking local apartment rentals on his iPhone.
The University of Missouri student came up with an idea in class one day that spawned an iPhone application that has had more than 250,000 downloads since its release in March 2009. The app created by Brown and three other undergraduates won them a trip to Apple headquarters along with job offers from Google and other technology companies.
But the invention also raised a perplexing question when university lawyers abruptly demanded a 25 percent ownership stake and two-thirds of any profits. Who owns the patents and copyrights when a student creates something of value on campus, without a professor’s help?
Tuition Hike-oholism Hits Bottom?
“After decades of funding our eleven campuses on the basis of past appropriations and past expenditures, we have lost track of the rationale for each campus’s funding level. We must begin a new approach to funding higher education where we ask the board of higher education to develop a funding methodology that is based on the outcomes that education leaders and citizens would like to see from their college campuses.”
— North Dakota Gov. Jack Dalrymple’s Jan. 4 state of the state address.
Faced with a 5 percent tuition rise and the likelihood of future increases, students at the City University of New York filed a lawsuit against the school protesting the tuition hike. Could we be on the verge of a student movement like that recently under way in England, where rioters incensed over tuition increases have thrown Molotov cocktails, smashed windows, and even attacked Prince Charles’s car?
CUNY’s was a modest hike, with average prices remaining well below the national average. CUNY takes pride in its history of serving low-income and first-generation students with a high-quality, affordable education.. But CUNY, like many public institutions in the U.S., is doing what led to student revolts in England: shifting the burden of paying for higher education from taxpayers to students. According to the State Higher Education Executive Officers association, tuition in the U.S. increased from 25 percent of all educational revenue to 37 percent from 1984 to 2009, even as total spending per student remained about the same.
Restoring the Faculty Voice
Faculty members from the unions of public colleges from 21 states met this weekend in Los Angeles and committed to launching a campaign with a lofty goal: assuring the future of higher education.
Participants reviewed and many expressed support for a set of organizing principles contained in a draft document called “Quality Higher Education for the 21st Century” that was prepared by the California Faculty Association. It advocates for more scrupulous analysis of calls to reform higher education. “Wholesale embrace of change without careful thought and deliberation can take us in the wrong direction,” the document states, “not toward reforming higher education but, in fact, toward deforming precisely those aspects of American higher education that have made it the envy of the world.”
The art of good writing
In 1919, the young EB White, future New Yorker writer and author of Charlotte’s Web, took a class at Cornell University with a drill sergeant of an English professor named William Strunk Jr. Strunk assigned his self-published manual on composition entitled “The Elements of Style“, a 43-page list of rules of usage, principles of style and commonly misused words. It was a brief for brevity. “Vigorous writing is concise,” Strunk wrote. “When a sentence is made stronger, it usually becomes shorter.” Half a century later, when preparing his old professor’s manuscript for publication, White added an essay of his own underlining the argument for concision in moral terms. “Do not overwrite,” he instructed. “Rich, ornate prose is hard to digest, generally unwholesome, and sometimes nauseating.” Strunk & White, as the combined work came to be known, was issued in 1959 and went on to become a defining American statement of what constituted good writing, with 10m copies sold, and counting. Its final rule summoned the whole: “Prefer the standard to the offbeat.”
Though never explicitly political, The Elements of Style is unmistakably a product of its time. Its calls for “vigour” and “toughness” in language, its analogy of sentences to smoothly functioning machines, its distrust of vernacular and foreign language phrases all conform to that disciplined, buttoned-down and most self-assured stretch of the American century from the armistice through the height of the cold war. A time before race riots, feminism and the collapse of the gold standard. It is a book full of sound advice addressed to a class of all-male Ivy-Leaguers wearing neckties and with neatly parted hair. This, of course, is part of its continuing appeal. It is spoken in the voice of unquestioned authority in a world where that no longer exists. As Lorin Stein, the new editor of the celebrated literary magazine The Paris Review, recently put it to me: “It’s like a national superego.” And when it comes to an activity as variable, difficult and ultimately ungovernable as writing sentences, the allure of rules that dictate brevity and concreteness is enduring.
Virtual School Enrollment Cap Stifles Choice
Today marks the beginning of School Choice Week.
Well, members of the Wisconsin legislature have several important choices ahead of them as they look at the educational landscape in this state.
The temptation is to sweep our state’s educational problems under the rug with one heck of a broom for an excuse, “there is no money.”
To give in to that temptation would be wrong and there are steps the legislature can take to restore educational innovation and improve educational access without breaking the bank.
One of the steps would be to eliminate the cap on online public charter school enrollment. The cap is one of the most shameful educational policy holdovers from the Governor Jim Doyle era, and it needs to be repealed.
The Sinking States
States are spending more than $79 billion on higher education in 2010-11, a decline of 0.7 percent from last year, according to a report being released today by the Center for the Study of Education Policy at Illinois State University and the State Higher Education Executive Officers.
While a cut of less than 1 percent might seem like a relief, given the magnitude of some of the cuts public higher education systems have faced in recent years, the report contains plenty of danger signs for the future. More than $2.5 billion of the total state spending on higher education came from the federal government in the form of stimulus funds that have now run out. Over two years, state support is down nearly 2 percent — in a period when the same economic downturn that has left state coffers empty has also spurred enrollment increases in much of public higher education, and greater demands for financial aid. And plenty of states are talking about additional cuts for 2011-12.
Dumbed-down diplomas Low academic standards have students paying more for less
The news that 45 percent of college students learn little or nothing during their first two years of college comes as no surprise to those who have been studying higher education. But it should serve as a wake up call for parents who go deeply into debt to purchase a very expensive diploma for their children.
The researchers who studied more than 2,300 undergraduates found that nearly half showed no significant improvement in the key measures of critical thinking, complex reasoning and writing by the end of their sophomore years. After four years, 36 percent of students still did not demonstrate significant improvement.
Undergraduate students just aren’t asked to do much, according to findings in the new book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses.” Half of students did not take a single course requiring 20 pages of writing during their prior semester. One-third did not take a single course requiring even 40 pages of reading a week.
College Saving Gets Trickier
After being pilloried by critics and written off by many families, 529 college-saving plans are getting better. But well-heeled investors still would be wise to spread their bets around.
So-called 529 plans allow people to save for college expenses and withdraw the earnings tax-free. Many also offer a break on state income tax–savings that, in theory, an investor can roll back into the account.
For years 529s were pitched as the ultimate college-savings vehicle, but their limitations were thrown into sharp relief during the financial crisis. Too reliant on stocks, the average 529 investment option lost nearly 24% in 2008. Even portfolios geared to older kids just a few years away from college got hammered, losing 14%, according to investment-research firm Morningstar Inc. What’s more, because savers can generally make investment changes only once a year, many people watched helplessly as their accounts dropped in value.
UW-Madison Professor Honored By President Obama
President Barack Obama is honoring 11 people, including a University of Wisconsin-Madison engineering professor, for their mentoring efforts.
Douglass Henderson was named a recipient of the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring.
Henderson, 10 other people from around the nation and four organizations will receive the awards at a White House ceremony in the next week.
The English Patient
Higher education in England is currently the subject of an extraordinary experiment in the allocation of public funding: the question is, will the patient survive, and if so, in what state?
The Conservative/Liberal Democrat coalition government is (in England, but in not the rest of the UK, where higher education is a regional responsibility) removing, at a stroke, almost all of the public funding for teaching, lending it to students to pay tuition fees, and then make them pay it back after graduation, as soon as they start earning a half-decent salary (currently £21,000). Fees are expected to go up from the present level for undergraduates of just over £3000 to (the government assumes) £6000, or in some cases up to £9000. The government clearly assumes that the £9000 level will be exceptional – but there are some indications that it may become the new norm, not least because of concerns that charging less may send a signal about academic quality (which is exactly what happened when the present fee regime was introduced in 2006). If the government is wrong about fee levels, then its financial planning is in serious trouble.
George Washington University launches online prep school
George Washington University has opened a private college-preparatory high school that will operate entirely online, one of the nation’s first “virtual” secondary schools to be affiliated with a major research university.
The opening of a laboratory-style school under the banner of a prestigious university generally counts as a major event among parents of the college-bound. The George Washington University Online High School, a partnership with the online learning company K12 Inc., is competing with brick-and-mortar prep schools and with a small but growing community of experimental online schools attached to major universities.
Online learning may be the next logical step in the evolution of university “lab” schools, an ongoing experiment in pedagogy. Online instruction holds the potential to transcend the factory model of traditional public education, allowing students to learn at their own pace. In the ideal online classroom, no lesson is ever too fast or too slow, and no one ever falls behind.
Smart.
Penn Law Professor Too Lazy To Come Up With New Multiple Choice Questions Causes Exam SNAFU
=And here’s a good one: don’t reuse exam questions just because you are teaching at a different law school. It’s called “the internet,” professors. Your students have access to it and can find your old questions. If you put in just a little bit of work, you can come up with entirely new exam questions.
It’s your job! You get paid for it!
And if you do your job with minimal diligence, you won’t end up like Penn Law professor William Wilson Bratton, and we won’t have to write about you…
Last year, a visiting professor at NYU got into trouble for re-using exam questions. It’s a mistake that’s so easy to avoid that I’m surprised to see it happen again. But maybe we just need to post one of these stories every year to encourage professors to demonstrate basic competence stay on their toes.
College Reversal? Studies find a decline in Asian-American students’ success once they move away from home and go to college.
Some research has found that once Asian-American kids hit college, they no longer outstrip white students academically — if they’re living away from home.
For example, a study of 452 students at UC Irvine led by University of Denver psychologist Julia Dmitrieva found that while both white and Asian-American students’ freshman year grades dipped below their 12th-grade GPAs, Asian-Americans’ fell dramatically, while white Americans’ dropped only slightly.
“There’s a reversal of ethnic differences in college grades, at least temporarily,” Dmitrieva says. That reversal didn’t stem, as some have guessed, from Asian-American students taking more natural science courses, which generally are graded more stringently than other subjects. In fact, her study showed that grades in both natural and social sciences dropped for the Asian-American freshmen, while grades in natural sciences rose for white students.
“We observed the same dip in grades for natural sciences among the Asian-Americans as there are for other majors,” says Dmitrieva.
The purpose of college in 2011
The Purpose of College in 2011
There exists a familiar crescendo during the holiday season that achieves its apex as the New Year begins. If your family is like mine, it began with great anticipation about gifts, both receiving them and choosing just the right one.
But after the presents were opened and the last bit of leftover turkey devoured, we turned our attention to contemplating the purpose of the holidays and our ambitions for the upcoming New Year. As the president of one of America’s oldest institutions of higher learning, Hampden-Sydney College, I thought it appropriate to offer my comments on the purpose of a college, for higher education is, or should be, central to the ambitions of all our young men and women.
A bit of history is illustrative.
Universities, when they were established more than a thousand years ago, focused on educating clergy and instilling religious piety. Over the years, religious education was supplement and then supplanted by the notion of civic virtue and, eventually, by secular humanism which became the core purpose of institutions of higher learning. The 1800s gave rise to the German university with its graduate students and deliberate focus on research. The American concept of a liberal arts education, which included emphasis on teaching and, usually, the shaping of moral character, was shaken to its core as research universities attracted talented professors, eager students, and government and foundation dollars. But undergraduate students still needed some degree of moral formation or at least some growing up. Colleges and universities still have to address this need — particularly for the Millennials — our wonderfully over-programmed, over-achieving and, at times, over-confident young people born after 1979.
