The education secretary nominee fired off one of her first public salvos last week, and it was a dilly. Responding to Education Week’s Quality Counts grade of an F in K-12 Achievement and a D+ in Chance for Success in the report (though we got an overall grade of C), Hanna Skandera said, “It is unacceptable that New Mexico has an F in K-12 achievement and that our rankings have decreased each year. … For every decision that needs to be made, we will ask, ‘Are New Mexico students the winners in this decision?’ Our focus must be on the classroom.”
That’s the same argument all the challengers for Santa Fe’s board of education are making as they continue to hit the campaign trail this month (more on that in a moment).
A Review of the Nation’s Education Schools
National Council on Teacher Quality:
It’s never been done.
We’re going to do it.
Every year across the country, around a quarter of a million people enter the teaching profession. Almost all of them are prepared in the nation’s schools of education. If the country is serious about bending upward the curve of its students’ stagnant academic performance, improving the preparation of new teachers would seem to be a crucial step. And yet, very little is known about the quality of teacher preparation programs–their selectivity, the content and pedagogical knowledge that they demand that their teacher candidates master, or how well they prepare candidates for the rigors of the classroom. Without such knowledge, people thinking about becoming teachers can’t make informed choices about where to get trained, district superintendents and principals don’t know where to look for well-prepared teachers, and policymakers lack the means to sanction poorly performing education schools.
High School graduation and college readiness: Is there a problem here?
Everyone knows that for many years, at least in this part of the Land Between the Coasts, high schools have been judged based on what percentage of their students graduate within four years of entering as freshmen. I start with this fact deliberately. More on this later.
Recently, I read this online from the St. Louis Post-Dospatch, and I include it here in its entirety in case it suddenly disappears and online news articles are wont to do. Please note the parts I have boldfaced:More than 40 percent of area public high school graduates in 2009 entered Missouri colleges and universities so far behind in reading and math that they took at least one remedial course once they arrived on campus, data show.
Of the 7,067 area graduates who enrolled that year as freshmen in state-funded schools, 3,029 of them landed in academic purgatory, taking catch-up classes that didn’t count toward a college degree, according to the Missouri Department of Higher Education.
The proportion of Missouri public school students who end up in remedial college classes has risen only slightly in recent years but is up sharply since 1996. Thirty-eight percent needed remediation before moving on to college-level courses in 2009, compared with 26 percent 14 years ago.
Governance Matters
Who should govern universities? Should the best scholars sacrifice their career as researchers and govern academic institutions or should professional managers provide the experience of running healthy and competitive business? This question is currently discussed in different countries and across different academic cultures.
In his recent blog, “Training university administrators: Should management schools do it?” Prof. Philip Altbach raises this important question and stresses the risk of professional business management training for academic managers. Prof. Altbach explains that the uniqueness of universities as complex organizations needs further clarification. Certainly, recognizing the differences in specific environment matters but awareness of university processes is not enough. Those who have governing authority at universities must be respected by the academic community or forego their support for critical management decisions. Typically respect is based on academic status and research achievements, accomplishments less common among business professionals.
Galveston superintendent puts adults to test
Larry Nichols sensed disdain for the level of instruction in public schools after taking the job of Galveston school district superintendent in September.
“One of the things attributed to public schools is that the curriculum is watered down, it’s not as rigorous as it was,” Nichols said.
To combat that idea, Nichols decided to begin challenging adults to answer the same questions that confront students. He began handing out 10 multiple-choice questions from the Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills, or TAKS, the test every Texas high school senior must pass in order to receive a diploma.
Nichols handed the questions out every time he met with a local organization, among them the Rotary Club, the Kiwanis Club, the Realtors Association, the Pachyderm Club.
Tulane
Is There An Education Bubble?
If you pull some free market logic from Finance and apply it to the education market, you might frame things differently. Eugene Fama from the University of Chicago says that there are no such things as “bubbles” in financial markets. If there are, you ought to be able to predict them and act accordingly. He correctly points out that all publicly known information is incorporated into the price of an asset. Are asset bubbles in financial markets directly comparable to intangible assets? Probably not, but Fama’s theory on efficient markets should at least give us a touchstone to think about.
In this case, our asset is a college education. The asset is not physical like a stock or a piece of real estate, but intangible. Hence, there are properties to that asset that are subjective. For example, what is the real value of the Coca-Cola brand name? In turn, what is the real value of a college education-and within the finite range of colleges, what’s the individual value?
Here is the hypothesis: We will assume that there is an education bubble.
KPMG to fund young recruits’ degrees
A big graduate recruiter plans to hire the “majority” of its trainees from among school leavers, not university graduates, and pay for them to receive a bespoke degree from a well-regarded British university.
From next year, KPMG will take in 75 school leavers, and then meet the cost of a four-year accountancy degree from Durham university and an accountancy qualification. Trainees on the six-year scheme will start on up to £20,000 a year.
In 2012-13, the maximum university tuition fee, now £3,290, will rise to £9,000. At the same time, subsidies are being withdrawn from the sector and rules loosened to allow new entrants into the market and innovation in course design.
As a consequence, such schemes could become more attractive to universities. David Willetts, universities minister, welcomed the news, saying: “It’s the kind of initiative that we hope will flourish as we reform higher education.”
Elite French University Joins College Board
The Institut d’Etudes Politiques, better known as Sciences Po, one of France’s most prestigious universities, on Wednesday became the first French public institution to join the College Board, the nonprofit American organization that oversees the SAT exam and Advanced Placement program.
“This is an important step forward for us,” Francis Vérillaud, deputy director of Sciences Po and head of the International Affairs Division, said in a press release, adding that “40 percent of our students already come from 130 countries.”
As a new member of the College Board, Sciences Po, which specializes in humanities and social sciences, will be better able to recruit students in North America and beyond.
Unlike Madison, Evanston is cutting honors classes
Twenty-three years ago I walked the halls of Evanston Township High School in Evanston, Ill., with a diverse mix of white-, black- and brown-skinned fellow students.
Then I would walk into an honors class and be confronted with a near-blanket of white.
Not much has changed at my alma mater, and as a result the school district has been embroiled in a contentious curriculum debate that touches on race, academics and the meaning of public education itself.
Sound familiar?
Evanston and Madison are both affluent, well-educated and liberal. And both have high schools where racial achievement gaps are the norm. Their school districts differ, though, in their approach to that gap today: Evanston is cutting honors classes; Madison is adding them.
Unlike Madison, Evanston has long had a sizable minority population and began desegregating its elementary and middle schools in the 1960s — with some positive academic results.
Seniors at ETHS, the city’s only public high school, last year had an average ACT score of 23.5, or 2.5 points higher than the national average. This in one of only five states that requires its students to take the test and in a high school whose student population, about 2,900, is 43 percent white, 32 percent black and 17 percent Latino.
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
- An Update on Madison’s High School Reforms
- Madison School District High School Planning Meeting Video
More here.
School Board Governance
When the new Board majority was elected in 2007 they started their terms of office talking a lot about Governance. It was all just talk; there wasn’t any action associated with it. Then, after the first few months that talk faded away. Back then it was code for staying out of management and restricting themselves to “policy issues”. After the audit was released six months ago, they started talking about Governance again. I’m not sure what it means this time around, but not only are they talking about it a lot, they are also claiming to take some action. I’m not sure those claims can be proven.
There was a discussion of Governance Priorities at the December 15, 2010 Strategic Plan Update work session.
One of the Governance Priorities is Budget development. They say that they will implement a comprehensive budget development process that reflects the strategic plan priorities and includes both internal and external engagement. Why isn’t this what they were doing all along? I’m not asking that as an accusation, but to focus the attention on the obstacles to this sort of work. If they say that they are going to start doing this then they will have to identify and overcome those obstacles, won’t they? I think that they have already found and addressed one of the historic obstacles, the budget timeline that put the central administration budget ahead of the schools’ budgets. I suspect there are others.
The Almighty Essay
On a freezing Saturday in February, my wife and I sat through a full-day introduction to college admissions for the parents of 11th graders. This was our first little step on the high-anxiety journey thousands of families trod each year. As parents of twins, we were double-booked. There wasn’t a vacation day in the next eight months that one of us didn’t spend on a college campus, somewhere.
That day, at a workshop called “Behind Closed Doors: the Life of the Application,” an admissions dean from a prestigious small college in Connecticut described carrying home a teetering armload of folders every night during her decision season. She told of examining a student’s high school transcript, the SAT or ACT scores, the letters of recommendation.
“And then,” she said, her manner growing brighter, almost big-sisterly and confidential, “I turn to the personal essay, my favorite part.”
Character & Fitness Fail for Graduate With ‘No Plan’ To Pay Off His Debts
Wow. Guy goes to law school, guy racks up a huge amount of debt, guy has no idea how he’ll pay off his debts. Sound familiar? Okay, here’s the twist: the guy failed the “character and fitness” component of the Ohio bar because he has no plan to pay off his loans.
What the hell kind of legal education system are we running where we charge people more than they can afford to get a legal education, and then prevent them from being lawyers because they can’t pay off their debts?
Because it’s not like Hassan Jonathan Griffin was in a particularly unique situation when he went before the Ohio bar. A year and a half ago, we wrote about a man who was dinged on his character and fitness review because he was $400,000 in debt. That’s an extraordinary case. Hassan Jonathan Griffin owes around $170,000. He has a part-time job as a public defender. He used to be a stockbroker. He’s got as much a chance of figuring out a way to pay off his loans as most people from the Lost Generation.
The New Subject-Test Math: 2 = 3
THE nation’s most selective universities have long required three SAT subject tests. But with the introduction of writing sections on the SAT and ACT in 2005, colleges have been gradually reducing the subject-test requirement.
This admissions cycle, Harvard has jumped on the two-test bandwagon, and Georgetown is “strongly” recommending three instead of requiring them. The most subject tests that any American college now requires is two, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. For 18 institutions, the ACT is good enough — no subject tests required at all.
The writing test has been found to be a good indicator of future academic success, says Jeff A. Neal, a Harvard spokesman.
Kids in Milwaukee choice program still 17% more likely to finish, study says
High school graduation rates increased for both Milwaukee Public Schools students and low-income city children using vouchers to attend private schools in 2008-’09, but voucher students are still more likely to graduate than their public school peers, according to data released Monday.
The latest findings add a seventh year of data – for 2008-’09 – to a study that has followed the graduation rates of both groups of students since 2002-’03.
Because the latest graduation rate went up 5 percentage points from the previous year for both Milwaukee Parental Choice Program and MPS students, the report contends that choice (also called voucher) students were 17% more likely to graduate from high school than children in MPS over the past two years of the study.
For voucher school students, the graduation rate increased to 82% in 2008-’09; for MPS students, it increased to 70%, the study says.
Wisconsin is ripe for many more student/parental choices.
The Newest College Credential
EDUCATION, students are frequently told, is the key to a better job. First, finish high school. Then, go to college and get a degree. For those with higher aspirations, try for a master’s.
But increasingly, there is another way. Short vocational programs leading to a certificate are becoming the kudzu of the educational world. There’s a program for virtually any skill, from interior design to paralegal to managing records at a doctor’s office. Instead of investing in a master’s, professionals itching to move up the career ladder can earn certificates in marketing strategies, credit analysis or even journalism.
In an economy that increasingly rewards specialization, more and more institutions — from the ones that advertise on late-night cable to the most elite of universities — are offering these programs, typically a package of five or six courses, for credit or not, taken over three to 18 months. Some cost a few thousand dollars, others tens of thousands.
In Budget Crises, an Opening for School Reform School systems can put students first by making sure any layoffs account for teacher quality, not seniority.
In the past year, 46 states grappled with budget deficits of more than $130 billion. This year could be worse as federal recovery dollars dry up. And yet, for education reform, 2011 could be the best of times.
California, to name one example, bridged its $25.4 billion budget gap by cutting billions from public education. It is now forced to cut another $18 billion to fill its current deficit. State executives and legislatures face severe choices and disappointments that could undo political careers and derail progress.
On the bright side, public support is building for a frontal attack on the educational status quo. And policy makers are rising to the challenge, not only because their budgets are tighter than ever, but also because they see an opportunity to reverse the current trend of discouraging academic results for our children.
Three weeks ago, I founded StudentsFirst, a national organization to defend and promote the interests of children in public education and to pursue an aggressive reform agenda to make American schools the best in the world. In the first 48 hours, 100,000 Americans signed up as members, contributing $1 million in small online donations.
Madison Schools will press ahead with High School honors classes despite protests
Despite lingering concerns from some parents, students and teachers, the Madison School District will introduce 9th and 10th grade honors classes next fall at West High School — changes that prompted a student protest last fall.
Superintendent Dan Nerad said he discussed with staff over the weekend the possibility of not introducing the honors classes after school board members and parents raised questions at a meeting Thursday night.
Nerad said the decision comes down to following the district’s talented-and-gifted plan, which called for offering honors classes at all high schools starting in this current school year.
“This has already been put off a year,” Nerad said in an interview Monday. “We have an obligation to move forward with what’s been identified in the TAG plan.”
On Friday, 18 West parents sent a letter to the district asking that the honors classes be delayed.
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
- An Update on Madison’s High School Reforms
- Madison School District High School Planning Meeting Video
More here.
100 Extensive University Libraries from Around the World that Anyone Can Access
Universities house an enormous amount of information and their libraries are often the center of it all. You don’t have to be affiliated with any university to take advantage of some of what they have to offer. From digital archives, to religious studies, to national libraries, these university libraries from around the world have plenty of information for you. There are many resources for designers as well. Although this is mainly a blog that caters to designers and artists I have decided to include many other libraries for all to enjoy.
A critic of the College Board joins forces with it to build a better Web site for students
IN the seven years since he quit his job as a college counselor at a private high school in Portland, Ore., Lloyd Thacker has become something of a folk hero in admissions circles. In standing-room-only gatherings in high school auditoriums, he has implored families to take back the college admissions process from those entities that, he says, do not always act in their best interests — whether a magazine seeking to drum up sales for its rankings issue or a college trying to boost applications.
Among his prime targets has been the College Board, the sprawling, nonprofit organization that oversees the SAT and Advanced Placement program.
In the introduction to “College Unranked: Ending the College Admissions Frenzy,” a collection of essays he edited that was published in 2005, Mr. Thacker lamented the “corporatization” of the board and suggested that its efforts to “compete with other purveyors of college prep services and materials” — referring, in part, to a failed attempt at a for-profit Web site — raised questions about its credibility.
But that was then.
Last spring, Mr. Thacker announced that he and the organization he founded to promote his ideals, the Education Conservancy, were going into partnership with the College Board. Their joint venture: a Web site, free to users, that would provide all manner of advice and perspective on the admissions process.
Rethinking Advanced Placement
WHEN Joan Carlson started teaching high school biology more than 30 years ago, the Advanced Placement textbook was daunting enough, at 36 chapters and 870 pages. But as an explosion of research into cells and genes reshapes our sense of how life evolves, the flood of new material has been staggering. Mrs. Carlson’s A.P. class in Worcester, Mass., now confronts a book with 56 chapters and 1,400 pages, along with a profusion of animated videos and Web-based aids that supplement the text.
And what fuels the panic is that nearly every tongue-twisting term and microscopic fact is fair game for the year-end test that decides who will receive college credit for the course.
“Some of the students look at the book and say, ‘My gosh, it’s just like an encyclopedia,’ ” Mrs. Carlson says. And when new A.P. teachers encounter it, “they almost want to start sobbing.”
A Professor Disagrees with Putting Grades Online
A FEW weeks after I started a tenure-track job last semester at the State University of New York at New Paltz, an e-mail message landed in faculty in-boxes relaying the news that an online textbook-rental company had requested records for all grades awarded on campus since 2007.
The company, Chegg.com, wanted grade distributions — how many A’s, B’s, C’s, etc., were given — organized by semester, course section and instructor, without individual student information. The request was made under New York’s Freedom of Information Law, which allows the public to access state government records. That definition covers grades at state universities, according to SUNY New Paltz lawyers. So the administration had to give up the goods.
Chegg, a rapidly growing company backed by more than $221 million in venture and debt capital, sent similar requests to 533 colleges and universities, according to Tina Couch, its vice president of public relations. The company is in the process of uploading the grades on CourseRank.com, a class planning Web site that Chegg acquired in August. Students who register for CourseRank will be able to take into account a professor’s grade distribution, along with peer reviews and ratings, when deciding whether to take a class.
College’s Value Added: “Large Numbers Don’t Appear to be Learning Very Much”
AT a time when recent graduates, age 24 and under, are experiencing a jobless rate of nearly 10 percent, a new study renews the debate over the value-added component of going to college.
The sociologists Richard Arum of New York University and Josipa Roksa of the University of Virginia tracked 2,300 students through four years of college and into the labor market. The first two years are chronicled in their forthcoming book, “Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses” (University of Chicago Press).
This interview with Dr. Arum was conducted and condensed by Amanda M. Fairbanks.
Q. What piqued your interest in this topic?
A. For the last several decades, we’ve evaluated learning in K-12 education. But there’s never been a serious attempt to follow kids through college. We conclude that large numbers don’t appear to be learning very much.
The Concord Review Showcases Journal Showcases The Dying Art of the Research Paper
William H. Fitzhugh, the cantankerous publisher of a journal that showcases high school research papers, sits at his computer in a cluttered office above a secondhand shop here, deploring the nation’s declining academic standards.
“Most kids don’t know how to write, don’t know any history, and that’s a disgrace,” Mr. Fitzhugh said. “Writing is the most dumbed-down subject in our schools.”
His mood brightens, however, when talk turns to the occasionally brilliant work of the students whose heavily footnoted history papers appear in his quarterly, The Concord Review. Over 23 years, the review has printed 924 essays by teenagers from 44 states and 39 nations.
The review’s exacting standards have won influential admirers. William R. Fitzsimmons, Harvard’s dean of admissions, said he keeps a few issues in his Cambridge office to inspire applicants. Harvard considers it “something that’s impressive,” like winning a national math competition, if an applicant’s essay has appeared in the review, he said.
Getting Schooled in Law Loans
The American Bar Association has officially issued a warning on its website.
The ABA is now making the case to persuade college students not to go to law school.
According to the association, over the past 25 years law school tuition has consistently risen two times faster than inflation.
The average private law student borrows about $92,500 for law school, while law students who attend public schools take out loans for $71,400. These numbers do not include any debt law students may still have from their time as undergraduates.
The AI Revolution Is On
Diapers.com warehouses are a bit of a jumble. Boxes of pacifiers sit above crates of onesies, which rest next to cartons of baby food. In a seeming abdication of logic, similar items are placed across the room from one another. A person trying to figure out how the products were shelved could well conclude that no form of intelligence–except maybe a random number generator–had a hand in determining what went where.
But the warehouses aren’t meant to be understood by humans; they were built for bots. Every day, hundreds of robots course nimbly through the aisles, instantly identifying items and delivering them to flesh-and-blood packers on the periphery. Instead of organizing the warehouse as a human might–by placing like products next to one another, for instance–Diapers.com’s robots stick the items in various aisles throughout the facility. Then, to fill an order, the first available robot simply finds the closest requested item. The storeroom is an ever-shifting mass that adjusts to constantly changing data, like the size and popularity of merchandise, the geography of the warehouse, and the location of each robot. Set up by Kiva Systems, which has outfitted similar facilities for Gap, Staples, and Office Depot, the system can deliver items to packers at the rate of one every six seconds.
So You Have a Liberal Arts Degree and Expect a Job?
low-up to a story we aired last month on the tough job market for recent college graduates.
NewsHour economics correspondent Paul Solman looks at job-hunters who’ve already been out of school for a few years.
RICHARD WHITE, Career Services, Rutgers University: The last couple of years have been a very, very tough time to be coming out of college.
PAUL SOLMAN: Rutgers University, where Richard White runs career services.
RICHARD WHITE: At the time of graduation, probably 50 percent of college grads have some kind of job. That’s during the good times. That probably was cut in half during these last two tough years.
A ‘Sputnik’ moment for education
Mike Petrilli & John Richard Schrock:
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said the results from the international education test scores (PISA) were “a massive wake-up call” for American educators. Midmorning discusses what kind of reform American schools need, and if there is room for the rote test-driven education that put Shanghai on top and the U.S. far behind.
Video essays are a hot topic in college admissions as more schools allow them
To complete a half-dozen college applications, Morgan Malone lined up letters of recommendation, penned essays and – for George Mason University – carried around a video camera for several days.
The result was a nearly two-minute video essay that opens with Malone introducing herself from atop the sign outside Mountain View High School in Stafford County. There are clips of her walking the school’s hallways, participating in a quiz bowl and volunteering. At the end, her assistant principal jumps on a desk and shouts, “I approve this message.”
“Instead of having an application and words in an essay, they get to see me,” said Malone, 17. “Hopefully, when they are watching the video, they will get a picture of what I am like. The way I talk in the video is the same way I talk every day.”
Europe’s Young Grow Agitated Over Future Prospects
Francesca Esposito, 29 and exquisitely educated, helped win millions of euros in false disability and other lawsuits for her employer, a major Italian state agency. But one day last fall she quit, fed up with how surreal and ultimately sad it is to be young in Italy today.
It galled her that even with her competence and fluency in five languages, it was nearly impossible to land a paying job. Working as an unpaid trainee lawyer was bad enough, she thought, but doing it at Italy’s social security administration seemed too much. She not only worked for free on behalf of the nation’s elderly, who have generally crowded out the young for jobs, but her efforts there did not even apply to her own pension.
“It was absurd,” said Ms. Esposito, a strong-willed woman with a healthy sense of outrage.
The outrage of the young has erupted, sometimes violently, on the streets of Greece and Italy in recent weeks, as students and more radical anarchists protest not only specific austerity measures in flattened economies but a rising reality in Southern Europe: People like Ms. Esposito feel increasingly shut out of their own futures. Experts warn of volatility in state finances and the broader society as the most highly educated generation in the history of the Mediterranean hits one of its worst job markets.
A fascinating article, particularly the implications of top heavy compensation/benefit costs for older, long term workers. We see similar things in the States where dual compensation schemes significantly underpay new hires for a period of time.
Dreaming of a Debt Free College Education
Takiia Anderson and her daughter, Taje.
Student debt has overshadowed much of Takiia Anderson’s career.
After graduating from law school in 1999, she spent a decade paying off the $106,000 she’d borrowed, all while moving along the East Coast for her jobs with the U.S. Department of Labor and raising her daughter, Taje, now 13.
Now that she’s free from onerous debt payments, her top priority is to set aside enough money for Taje’s college education.
But Anderson also wants to make sure she’s on track to retire once she qualifies for a full pension at age 58.
Wilkes University Professors Examine Use of Text Messaging in the College Classroom
Teachers of the past had to be concerned about students passing notes in class. Today’s educators have a much greater challenge with the advent of cell phone technology, and its prevalence in the classroom. A study by two Wilkes University professors shows that texting is a greater problem than educators might believe. They also suggest that classroom management strategies can potentially minimize texting in class.
Wilkes University psychology professors, Drs. Deborah Tindell and Robert Bohlander, designed a 32-question survey to assess the text messaging habits of college students in the classroom. In total, 269 college students, representing 21 majors, and all class levels, responded anonymously to their survey.
The study showed that 95 percent of students bring their phones to class every day and 91 percent have used their phones to text message during class time. Almost half of all respondents indicated that it is easy to text in class without their instructor being aware. In fact, students frequently commented on the survey that their professors would be “shocked” if they knew how much texting went on in class.
Harvard missed signs it was being hoodwinked
It turns out that fooling the gatekeepers of the nation’s most selective university wasn’t as hard as it looks.
Adam Butler Wheeler, portrayed upon his arrest for fraud as a con artist whose brilliant forgeries landed him a coveted spot at Harvard, won over the admissions committee with an application rife with inconsistencies and an inscrutable personal essay, despite fake faculty recommendations that repeatedly praised his lucid writing.
A close examination of Wheeler’s application materials, obtained by the Globe, reveals neither a meticulous feat of deceit nor a particularly elaborate charade. At times, he was just plain careless.
A gushing letter of recommendation, purportedly from the director of college counseling at Phillips Academy, said Wheeler enrolled in the prestigious Andover prep school as a junior. The accompanying transcript, though, indicated he attended for four years.
A new stage of higher education
Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a professor at Harvard Business School, explains how retired leaders can use their skills for social good
Surfeits of Certitude
‘Tis the season of paradox. In a widely noted op-ed in The New York Times, Judah Cohen, identified by the Times merely as “director of seasonal forecasting at an atmospheric and environmental research firm,” explained that the frigid temperatures and heavy snowfalls afflicting Europe and much of North America this year are, mirabile dictu, the result of “the overall warming of the atmosphere.” Quick-draw skeptics made the obvious retorts: (1) that advocates of the theory of global warming seem to have constructed a one-way street for interpreting data. No matter what happens in the actual atmosphere of our planet–whether temperatures rise, fall, or remain the same; ditto the level of precipitation; ditto the severity of storms–the theory of anthropocentric global warming (AGW) is vindicated. (2) the public is growing more and more jaundiced about this theoretical legerdemain; and (3) a fair amount of the skepticism now focuses on the capacity of climate scientists to be honest judges of the global warming evidence in view of the enormous amounts of money that flows their way and will continue to flow only if AGW retains its legitimacy.
As salaries rise, Fresno State coach Pat Hill takes pay cut
Steve Wieberg, Steve Berkowitz and Jodi Upton
Pat Hill came cheap when he broke into college football coaching a little more than 3½ decades ago.
He worked his first job at a California community college without pay, making ends meet by moonlighting Tuesdays and Thursdays as a pinsetter at a bowling alley and Fridays and Saturdays, when football allowed, as a bouncer. He lived for a while in his Chevy van.
“I’ve never been a monetary guy,” he says.
The contract that will take him into his 15th season as head coach at Fresno State offers further testament.
Hill will take a more than $300,000 cut in guaranteed pay in 2011, an extraordinary concession to a school budget stretched thin by the troubled economy. His guaranteed take of $650,000 remains considerable, but he’ll have to cash in heavily on incentives to match, or even approach, his nearly seven-figure earnings in 2010.
Using the College Rankings
There’s a big difference between thinking the U.S. News & World Report college rankings are of dubious value — and actually refusing to try to use them to an institution’s advantage.
That’s the conclusion of the second of a series of surveys released by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. A special NACAC committee has been conducting the series as part of an effort to study the impact of the U.S. News rankings. More survey results and a final report are expected from the panel next year.
Showdown in the Offing
Three years ago, Congress stopped then-Education Secretary Margaret Spellings dead in her tracks. Cheered on by college leaders, Senator Lamar Alexander and other lawmakers — irked by the Education Department’s aggressive attempts to regulate higher education accreditation and by what they perceived to be the executive branch’s encroachment on their turf — took several legislative steps that effectively blocked the department from issuing new rules on student learning outcomes.
The players and the issues have changed, but signs are emerging that a similar showdown could unfold early next year over the Obama administration’s plan to require for-profit colleges and other vocational programs to prove that they prepare their graduates for “gainful employment.” Exactly how such a showdown would shake out is hard to predict, but the likelihood of it taking place grew significantly in recent days.
State Schools Rethink Fees
Public universities across the U.S. are arguing for freedom to reap more revenue and create more efficiencies to offset dwindling state dollars.
One way, they say, is to raise tuition. At California University of Pennsylvania, a 158-year-old state school serving 9,400 students, enrollment is rising for all but the poorest students, which, in part, has led to a novel idea: replace the “low tuition for all” policy with a market-rate policy.
University officials say students from wealthier families could afford to pay more than the average $5,804 annual tuition at the state’s 14 universities. Fresh revenue from the higher tuition, they say, could be used to offer more scholarships to help the neediest students.
Post-Union Disunion
Bowling Green State University trustees justified recent sweeping changes to a key governing document as a necessary response to faculty unionization, but some professors there say the board is engaged in a retaliatory power grab.
Faculty voted in October to grant collective bargaining powers to the university’s chapter of the American Association of University Professors (AAUP), and the board responded Dec. 10 with changes to the Academic Charter that eliminated numerous faculty committees and stripped professors of their existing roles in the evaluations of deans, directors and chairs.
“This set of changes is allegedly done in response to collective bargaining, but there are so many changes that go beyond that, that clearly something else is afoot,” said David Jackson, president of Bowling Green State University’s Faculty Association, the AAUP union. “It certainly appears, to us anyway, that the administration is using the collective bargaining election and the need to negotiate salaries and benefits to justify wholesale changes.”
Also of concern to Jackson and others is the elimination of the faculty’s role in determining financial exigency, which universities can invoke to dismiss tenured professors. Removing even the faculty’s advisory function in this area, as the trustees have done, constitutes “a clear taking of power,” Jackson said.
Too dumb? Too fat? Too bad
It’s been well-documented that many high school grads are now too fat to meet the U.S. military’s physical requirements. Now it turns out that many of those same kids may be too dumb.
The nonprofit Education Trust released a first-ever report this week showing that more than one in five young people don’t meet the minimum standard required for Army enlistment. Among minority candidates the ineligibility rates are higher: 29 percent. In Minnesota, the disparity for black applicants was even more startling: 40 percent were found to be ineligible. Among Hispanics in Minnesota the rate was 20 percent, but among whites, it was 14.1 percent.
This is more a distressing indictment of the U.S. education system than it is a testament to today’s Cheeto-eating, Xbox-playing youth, say the authors of the report. It strips away that illusion that the military can be an easy landing ground for those not bound for college, and it suggests that national security is at stake.
Taking a Gap Year Before College
Eighteen-year-old Monika Lutz had dreams of a career helping solve economic and social problems in poor nations. So after high school, she took a year off before college to work with a company, suggested by family friends, that is trying to bring solar power to a remote village in India.
A few weeks of living in a mud hut changed her mind. Exhausted by the obstacles, she says, she told herself, “I’m not ready. I can’t dedicate my life to this yet.”
When Ms. Lutz starts college in the fall, she plans to explore other careers. “If I hadn’t gone on a gap year, I might have spent four years and $200,000 on tuition to end up in that same country and find out the same thing,” says Ms. Lutz, of Boulder, Colo.
College-admission letters are starting to roll in, but a growing number of students will decide instead to take a year off to try out potential careers or broaden their horizons. Gap-year activities range from doing volunteer work or taking classes, to working for pay, traveling or tackling outdoor adventures.
Time for Big Cuts in Education Spending?
America spends far more on education than countries like Germany, Japan, Australia, Ireland, and Italy, both as a percentage of its economy, and in absolute terms. Yet despite this lavish government support for education, college tuition in the U.S. is skyrocketing, reaching levels of $50,000 or more a year at some colleges, and colleges are effectively rewarded for increasing tuition by mushrooming federal financial-aid spending. Americans can’t read or do math as well as the Japanese, even though America spends way more (half again more) on education than Japan does, as a percentage of income, according to the CIA World Fact Book.
In light of this, it is easy to see why some education experts like Neal McCluskey are floating the idea of “draconian education cuts” to shake up a rotten educational establishment.
Student Loans: Legislation to Clarify Co-signer Obligations
When a student dies, the bill for his student loans often lives on – to the painful surprise and dismay of his co-signers. New Senate legislation seeks to change that, by requiring lenders to make clear the obligations of co-signers in the event of death.
Introduced yesterday, the “Christopher Bryski Student Loan Protection Act,” sponsored by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D., N.J.), is the culmination of a multi-year battle fought by the Bryski family, profiled by the Journal in August. In July 2006, Christopher Bryski died at the age of 25, after an accident left him with a brain injury that put him in a persistent vegetative state for two years. Today, his parents continue to make monthly payments on the $44,500 in private student loans that Mr. Bryski took out to attend Rutgers University. The legislation introduced yesterday would require lenders to provide students and parents with more information about what happens to loans in the event of death.
A first round of student loan and financial reform legislation already passed this year but did not address what happens to private student loans in the event of a student death. Federal student loans can generally be discharged if a student dies or becomes permanently disabled. But private student lenders, such as Sallie Mae, Citibank and Wells Fargo, are not required to discharge loans in the event of death or disability, leaving co-signers, typically parents, on the hook for the balance. Two years ago, Christopher’s brother, Ryan Bryski, began talking to lawmakers about a bill. It’s an amendment to the Truth in Lending Act and the Higher Education Act of 1965.
Refusing to Play ‘Whipping Boy’
The American Academy for Liberal Education has withdrawn its petition for renewal of recognition by the U.S. Education Department’s advisory panel on accreditation, which, after having been dismantled and reconfigured, held its first meeting in over two years Wednesday.
The accreditor’s decision came as a surprise to many in attendance at the first day of meetings held by the new-look National Advisory Committee on Institutional Quality and Integrity. Earlier this week, AALE officials had vowed to fight the Education Department staff’s recommendation that NACIQI urge Education Secretary Arne Duncan to deny recognition for their accreditation body because of its “continued noncompliance.”
Ralph A. Rossum, chairman of the AALE board and Salvatori Professor of American Constitutionalism at Claremont McKenna College, told Inside Higher Ed that the agency decided to withdraw from the process of seeking renewed recognition because of the lack of time his agency was given by the Education Department to defend itself. He noted that AALE received the final report of Education Department staff members — which contained 45 citations of noncompliance — the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.
College Students on the Web
Summary:
Students are multitaskers who move through websites rapidly, often missing the item they come to find. They’re enraptured by social media but reserve it for private conversations and thus visit company sites from search engines.
College students are an important target audience for many websites. They’re young, they’re about town, they spend whatever money they have (often online), and they frequently look for many different types of information. For sure, they’re an online generation spending — or squandering — large amounts of time on the Web.
User Research
To learn how students use websites, we conducted observational research with 43 students in 4 countries (Australia, Germany, the UK, and the USA). Participants ranged in age from 18 to 24 years and included 18 men and 25 women. Our test participants attended the following educational institutions:
Tracking Students to 200 Percent of Normal Time: Effect on Institutional Graduation Rates
This Issue Brief examines institutional graduation rates reported at 200 percent of normal time, a time frame that corresponds to completing a bachelor’s degree in 8 years and an associate’s degree in 4 years. The report compares these rates with those reported at 150 percent and 100 percent of normal time for all nine institutional sectors. The purpose is to determine whether the longer time frame results in higher institutional graduation rates.
‘Well-Educated’
From Examiner.com, courtesy of Hans Bader, counsel at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:
Much of college “education” is a waste of time. I learned more practical law in six weeks of studying for the bar exam and a couple summers of working for law firms than I did in three years of law school. I spent much of my time at Harvard Law School watching “Married With Children” or arguing with classmates about politics, rather than studying (much of what I did study was useless). Even students who were high on drugs had no difficulty graduating.
(Higher education is no guarantee of even basic literacy. When I worked at the Department of Education handling administrative appeals, I was dismayed by the poor writing skills of the graduate students who lodged complaints against their universities).
Readers, Writers, and the Digital Revolution
The world’s first technology for writing was invented not by poets or prophets or the chroniclers of kings; it came from bean counters. The Sumerian cuneiform script–made up of symbols incised on soft clay–grew out of a scheme for keeping accounts and inventories. Curiously, this story of borrowing arithmetical apparatus for literary purposes has been repeated in recent times. The prevailing modern instrument for writing–the computer–also began as (and remains) a device for number crunching.
Dennis Baron’s extended essay A Better Pencil looks back over the entire history of writing technologies (clay tablets, pens, pencils, typewriters), but the focus is on the recent transition to digital devices. His title implies a question. Is the computer really a better pencil? Will it lead to better writing? There is a faction that thinks otherwise:
What’s High School For?
We all want more young people to attend college. Who would argue with that? Politicians and educators at all levels extol the obvious virtues, from enhanced earning potential to a greater satisfaction in life. One increasingly popular way to encourage college attendance is through dual enrollment, in which students take courses in high school for both high school and college credit.
In theory, dual enrollment enables high school students to accrue college credits for very little cost and imbues them with a sense of confidence that they can complete college work. If students can succeed in college classes while still in high school, conventional wisdom holds, they will be more likely to matriculate at the postsecondary level.
In Indiana, dual enrollment is encouraged at the highest levels, with state Education Secretary Tony Bennett maintaining that at least 25 percent of high school graduates should pass at least one Advanced Placement exam or International Baccalaureate exam, or earn at least three semester hours of college credit during high school.
In reality, though, dual enrollment may do more harm than good.
Related: Credit for non-Madison School District Courses.
What some call cheating can help learning
My daughter is with us for the holidays, having survived her first barrage of law school exams in California. The exams were longer and more difficult than anything I ever had as a graduate student in Chinese studies. But her professors allowed students to have notes with them. This got my attention because her boyfriend at a neighboring law school was forbidden to have notes in two of his exams.
At these two institutions dedicated to equality under the law, what my daughter did during exams at one could have been considered cheating if she attended the other. What are we to make of the uneven nature of such rules, just as unpredictable as those found in our public K-12 schools? Open-book exams are okay some places, not in others. Cooperating with friends on homework is encouraged by some teachers, denounced elsewhere as a sign of declining American moral fiber.
How many minorities rejected by most selective high school?
It has been exactly a month since Jeanie Meikle, a frequent reader of this blog, asked me this good question:
“In all the articles I have read about TJ [the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, the most selective secondary school in the country] and its failures of inclusiveness, I have never seen the statistics as to how many (and %) of applicants were African American or Hispanic or what the acceptance rate of those applicants was. … So do you by any chance know what the numbers are?”
I didn’t, but I asked Fairfax County schools spokesman Paul Regnier and he got them for me. The delay in posting them is entirely my fault. All of the sports teams in Washington have been collapsing into shapeless mediocrity, and worse. I needed time to reflect on that.
The admissions statistics for the Jefferson class of 2014, this year’s ninth-graders, show there were 3,119 applicants, of which 480, or 15.4 percent, were admitted. This included 272 boys (16.4 percent of those that applied) and 208 girls (14.2 percent of applicants.)
Why top students don’t want to teach
MckInsey Quarterly, via a Rick Kiley email:
Efforts to help US schools become more effective generally focus on improving the skills of current teachers or keeping the best and ejecting the least effective ones. The issue of who should actually become teachers has received comparatively little attention. Yet the world’s top-performing systems–in Finland, Singapore, and South Korea–recruit 100 percent of their teaching corps from students in the top third of their classes.
A McKinsey survey of nearly 1,500 top-third US college students confirms that a major effort would be needed to attract them to teaching. Among top-third students not planning to enter the profession, for example, only 33 percent believe that they would be able to support a family if they did. The stakes are high: recent McKinsey research found that an ongoing achievement gap between US students and those in academically top-performing countries imposes the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession. To learn more, read “Attracting and retaining top talent in US teaching” (September 2010).
Test-driven education won’t generate future leaders
In a report based on the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA), a test of half a million 15-year-old students in 65 countries, Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) warned Western countries of the prospect of losing their knowledge and skill base.
In contrast, several Asian countries such as South Korea, Hong Kong and Singapore outperformed most other countries. China’s Shanghai took the PISA test for the first time and ranked first in all three areas: reading, mathematics and science (The Jakarta Post, Dec. 9, 2010). The Chinese government has been lauded for its investment in human capital.
It is ironic that just as PISA is highly regarded as a prestigious measure and the world is impressed by Shanghai’s achievement, insiders’ perspectives reveal skeptical and critical thoughts of the results.
One critical response came from Jiang Xueqin, a deputy principal of Peking University High School and director of the International Division. Mr. Jiang is concerned that the “high scores of Shanghai’s students are actually a sign of weakness”.
English as she was spoke The days of English as the world’s second language may (slowly) be ending
The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel. By Nicholas Ostler – The Economist:
ENGLISH is the most successful language in the history of the world. It is spoken on every continent, is learnt as a second language by schoolchildren and is the vehicle of science, global business and popular culture. Many think it will spread without end. But Nicholas Ostler, a scholar of the rise and fall of languages, makes a surprising prediction in his latest book: the days of English as the world’s lingua-franca may be numbered.
Conquest, trade and religion were the biggest forces behind the spread of earlier lingua-francas (the author uses a hyphen to distinguish the phrase from Lingua Franca, an Italian-based trade language used during the Renaissance). A linguist of astonishing voracity, Mr Ostler plunges happily into his tales from ancient history.
The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel
Professor has seen Madison’s image problem first-hand
Hi, I’m Kathy. I’m from UW-Madison. Do you mind if I join you?”
Those words, or some variation, provided an introduction at gas stations, coffee shops, cafes and churches across small-town Wisconsin.
While those of us ensconced in Madison scratch our heads about why so many in Wisconsin appear to dislike or distrust us, associate professor Katherine Cramer Walsh ventured out to hear it first-hand. So how did people respond? They were uniformly friendly, she says, but bewildered as to why she was there. “You should have seen their faces,” she says, smiling.
What she found is a big disconnect. For example: “When you ask, ‘What does hard work mean to you? Who does hard work?’ I would give examples like a waitress or someone who works in the lumber industry. Then I would say ‘professor’ and people would just laugh. Like, ‘give me a break.'”
High Expectations: Eight-year-old children publish bee study in Royal Society journal
“We also discovered that science is cool and fun because you get to do stuff that no one has ever done before.”This is the conclusion of a new paper published in Biology Letters, a high-powered journal from the UK’s prestigious Royal Society. If its tone seems unusual, that’s because its authors are children from Blackawton Primary School in Devon, England. Aged between 8 and 10, the 25 children have just become the youngest scientists to ever be published in a Royal Society journal.
Their paper, based on fieldwork carried out in a local churchyard, describes how bumblebees can learn which flowers to forage from with more flexibility than anyone had thought. It’s the culmination of a project called ‘i, scientist‘, designed to get students to actually carry out scientific research themselves. The kids received some support from Beau Lotto, a neuroscientist at UCL, and David Strudwick, Blackawton’s head teacher. But the work is all their own.
Taxpayer student aid and contingency on success
What standards should career education programs have to qualify for federal student grants and loans? The U.S. Department of Education already has drafted a “gainful employment rule” that could limit the flow of taxpayer-backed student aid to some education and training programs. The for-profit education industry, however, has dug in to oppose the proposed regulation, which is still under review.
The commentaries on these pages offer two views of the controversy.
Serious Mental Health Needs Seen Growing at Colleges
Rushing a student to a psychiatric emergency room is never routine, but when Stony Brook University logged three trips in three days, it did not surprise Jenny Hwang, the director of counseling.
It was deep into the fall semester, a time of mounting stress with finals looming and the holiday break not far off, an anxiety all its own.
On a Thursday afternoon, a freshman who had been scraping bottom academically posted thoughts about suicide on Facebook. If I were gone, he wrote, would anybody notice? An alarmed student told staff members in the dorm, who called Dr. Hwang after hours, who contacted the campus police. Officers escorted the student to the county psychiatric hospital.
Sweating Bullets at the GAO
Frederick M. Hess and Andrew P. Kelly :
The authors of the Government Accountability Office’s for-profit secret shopper investigation pulled off a statistically impressive feat in August. Let’s set aside for the moment that on Nov. 30, the government watchdog quietly revealed that its influential testimony on for-profit colleges was riddled with errors, with 16 of the 28 findings requiring revisions. More interesting is the fact that all 16 of the errors run in the same direction — casting for-profits in the worst possible light. The odds of all 16 pointing in the same direction by chance? A cool 1 in 65,536.
Even the most fastidious make the occasional mistake. But the GAO, the $570 million-a- year organization responsible for ensuring that Congress gets clean audits, unbiased accounting, and avowedly objective policy analysis, is expected to adhere to a more scrupulous standard. This makes such a string of errors particularly disconcerting.
In fact, the GAO is constituted precisely to avoid such miscues. Its report-vetting process entails GAO employees who are not involved with the project conducting a sentence-by-sentence review of the draft report, checking the factual foundation for each claim against the appropriate primary source. While the research is compiled and proofed, legislators who requested the investigation may keep in routine contact with the GAO to stay apprised of the inquiry.
Cost-Effectiveness, or Cost?
Friday’s IHE did a story featuring a report by Douglas Harris and Sara Goldrick-Rab that’s well worth reading in its entirety. In a nutshell, it measures the ‘productivity’ of various programs, using what boils down to dollars-per-graduate. Among other things, it suggests that call centers to nudge students into attending class have great bang for the buck, but that Upward Bound and similar programs are wildly expensive for what they achieve.
The goal of the study — which is entirely to the good — is to encourage colleges to base resource allocation decisions on actual effectiveness, rather than on what sounds good or what has usually been done. The authors break out two-year and four-year sectors — thank you — and actually define their variables. (Notably, the productivity decline over the past forty years has been far more dramatic in the four-year sector than in the two-year sector.) Even better, they acknowledge that most of the research done on various programs are done on those programs in isolation, rather than in comparison with each other. If we’re serious about dealing with limited resources, we have to acknowledge that money spent on program A is money not available to be spent on program B. It’s not enough to show that a given program helps; it needs to help more than its alternatives would have.
An Unequal Burden
Students from families with divorced or remarried parents pay twice the share of their college education as compared to their peers whose parents remain married to each other, according to recent research published online by the Journal of Family Issues.
“Divorced or separated parents contributed significantly less than married parents — in absolute dollars, as a proportion of their income, and as a proportion of their children’s financial need,” Ruth N. López Turley, associate professor of sociology at Rice University, and Matthew Desmond, a junior fellow at Harvard University, say in their article, “Contributions to College Costs by Married, Divorced, and Remarried Parents.”
The Great College-Degree Scam
With the help of a small army of researchers and associates (most importantly, Chris Matgouranis, Jonathan Robe, and Chris Denhart) and starting with help from Douglas Himes of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP) has unearthed what I think is the single most scandalous statistic in higher education. It reveals many current problems and ones that will grow enormously as policymakers mindlessly push enrollment expansion amidst what must become greater public-sector resource limits.
Here it is: approximately 60 percent of the increase in the number of college graduates from 1992 to 2008 worked in jobs that the BLS considers relatively low skilled–occupations where many participants have only high school diplomas and often even less. Only a minority of the increment in our nation’s stock of college graduates is filling jobs historically considered as requiring a bachelor’s degree or more. (We are working to integrate some earlier Edwin Rubenstein data on this topic to give us a more complete picture of this trend).
The education bubble in pictures
Thought I’d spend a few minutes looking at the website of my alma mater, Stephen F. Austin State University. A lot has changed in the past 20 years!
My crappy (that is being kind) old dorm was torn down a few years ago. This replaced it.
What Happens When College Is Oversold
As I wrote here last week, newly compiled data shows that a great many college graduates have been settling into jobs that do not require higher education. The data, prepared and released by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity (CCAP), show that a majority of the increased number of college grads since 1992—some 60 percent– are “underemployed” or “overqualified” for the jobs they hold. Thus we have one-third of a million waiters and waitresses with college degrees. Some 17 percent of the nation’s bellhops ands porters are college graduates. A new CCAP study From Wall Street to Wal-Mart: Why College Graduates Are Not Getting Good Jobs, released today along with this essay, carries even worse news: the proportion of college-educated Americans in lower-skilled jobs has more than tripled since the 1960s, going from 11 percent in 1967 to 34 percent today.
Why are more and more college graduates not entering the class of professional, technical and managerial workers that has been considered the main avenue of employment? Anyone who has read Charles Murray’s great book Real Education (New York: Crown Forum, 2008) has good insights into why this problem has arisen. Truly, Murray argues, only a modest proportion of the population has the cognitive skills (not to mention work discipline, drive, maturity, integrity, etc.) to master truly higher education, an education that goes well beyond the secondary schooling experience in terms of rigor of presentation. Reading and comprehending 200- to 400-year-old literature is useful for advanced leadership -but difficult. Educated persons should read and understand Locke’s “On Human Understanding” or Shakespeare’s King Lear -they are insightful in many ways, but the typical person of average intelligence typically lacks both the motivation and ability to do so. Mastering complex forms of mathematics is hard -but necessary to function in some areas of science and engineering.
Some side benefits of learning both a foreign language and a foreign culture
A few months ago I wrote up a list of secondary benefits that come with learning a foreign language, based on my own experience learning Arabic. It’s a bit long, but I hope it will be of interest.
How to listen to other people’s stories and perspectives. Being able to shut up and really listen to different opinions is a rare skill. If we want to make informed policy in cross-cultural contexts, we need to humanize and understand the “other” — which includes both our allies and our enemies. We do not have to agree with each other, but we need to listen long enough to genuinely understand each other’s narratives. Being in a foreign language environment forces you to concentrate and listen, especially because you probably lack the language skill to respond as you wish.
How to operate in an environment of constant uncertainty. When you arrive in a foreign culture, everything is uncertain. You feel a constant tightness in your chest because you don’t know the rules for even the most trivial day-to-day tasks. Even something as simple as buying hummus and falafel or riding in a taxicab involves new processes, rituals, and vocabulary — especially if you want to do it like the natives. You can’t be a perfectionist, because you’ll never get anything done otherwise. You learn to control negative emotional responses like fear, anger, or frustration. Fortunately, you do acclimate to this uncertainty. You learn to be patient, cool, and observant.
The Tax-Exempt Status of the NCAA: Has the IRS Fumbled the Ball?
Maybe the IRS actually knows what it is doing. With any luck, they can look at the overwhelming number of athletic departments that are not earning a profit and realize that removing the NCAA’s tax-exempt status would only have a nominal return. Perhaps the IRS realizes that the nominal return that such a tax would generate would have such a sweeping effect on collegiate athletics that it may actually hurt schools more than it would help. Whether they realize this or do not want to overturn a long-lived precedent, the IRS has not fumbled its duty concerning the tax-exempt status of the NCAA. At this point, there is no reason to disrupt the current tax-exempt status of the NCAA, and there is no evidence that points to a change being necessary in the near future.
Regents adopt plan to push most adults through college by 2020
During a 40-year career in higher education, Stan Albrecht has seen his share of strategic plans emerge after interminable meetings and lots of sweat only to gather dust on the shelf.
The Utah State University president cautioned the Utah Board of Regents that its new 10-year road map — hoped to pave Utah’s way to a much more educated workforce — might be destined for such a fate if the scope of its 52 recommendations is not narrowed.
On Thursday, the Regents approved the 100-page Higher Ed Utah 2020 Plan, crafted at the request of Gov. Gary Herbert, after months of meetings and consultations. The plan seeks to get more students into college and earning degrees — currently less than 50 percent graduate — while promoting the role of higher education in economic innovation and workforce development.
How? By expanding need-based aid, embracing instructional technology and conducting classes online, shoring up the community college mission at the state’s regional universities, and subsidizing associate degree-seeking students, among dozens of other recommendations.
Room to improve at Wisconsin’s two medical schools
Wisconsin two medical schools failed to improve their conflict of interest policies – one actually dropped a grade – according to the latest rankings by the American Medical Student Association.
The University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health dropped from a B to a C, while the Medical College of Wisconsin maintained a B grade.
The association’s PharmFree Scorecard is a national report on 152 medical schools, looking at a variety of measures, including gifts and meals from industry to doctors, paid promotional speaking for drug and device companies, acceptance of free drug samples, interaction with sales reps and drug company-funded education.
This is what AMSA said about UW:
Who is Teaching in India’s Universities?
India faces a severe shortage of teaching staff as it rapidly expands it higher education system. At such top institutions as the Indian Institutes of Technology and the Indian Institutes of Management, the generation of academics who matured with these schools is now retiring and there isn’t another cohort in the pipeline to take their places. Similarly, there are shortages of well-qualified staff in departments as most Indian universities responsible for graduate (post-graduate) degrees. The undergraduate colleges face fewer problems although they too have problems finding highly qualified teachers.
The pace of expansion at the top of the higher education sector has been remarkable–eight new IITs, 7 new IIMs, and 12 new central universities established in the past two years. It is not clear how these new institutions are being staffed–or for that matter paid for. Although the national government has increased its investment in higher education by 40 percent, to US$3.1 billion, this is nonetheless a modest amount given the degree of expansion taking place. While most of Indian higher education is the responsibility of state governments or the private sector, the institutions above are supported by the central government and although US$3 billion is a significant amount, it is not sufficient against the need resulting from the combined challenges of expansion and retirements.
The Value of Higher Education Made Literal
A few weeks ago at a conference, I listened to a distinguished political philosopher tell those in attendance that he would not be speaking before them had he not been the beneficiary, as a working-class youth in England, of a government policy to provide a free university education to the children of British citizens. He walked into the university with little knowledge of the great texts that inform modern democracy and he walked out an expert in those very same texts.
It goes without saying that he did not know what he was doing at the outset; he did not, that is, think to himself, I would like to be come a scholar of Locke, Hobbes and Mill. But that’s what he became, not by choice (at least in the beginning) but by opportunity.
Pell Grant Program Faces $5.7 Billion Gap
Add this to Congress’s year-end to-do list: Dealing with a potential $5.7 billion gap in grants for low-income students.
Federal Pell grants are a form of need-based aid typically given to low-income students. As part of student loan legislation passed in March, the amount of money that students can receive from a Pell grant maxes out at $5,550 for the 2010-2011 school year, and was scheduled to be the same amount for 2011-2012.
There’s usually little political wrangling around funding for the Pell grant, but this year, lawmakers underestimated the surge in students going to college — and their financial need — helping to create the gap. Congress would need to authorize the additional billions to fully fund the program for all students who qualify for the aid. They’ve done so in the past, but the gap hasn’t ever been this large and comes in the midst of a tense political climate.
“When need-based aid like Pell grants doesn’t increase,” says Mark Kantrowitz, publisher of FinAid.org, “the gap between low income students and everyone else increases faster. It has a big impact.”
Report: Strong link between test scores and teachers
A new report from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation says students’ gains in test scores is one of the strongest predictors of teacher effectiveness, apparently validating D.C.’s controversial teacher evaluation tool and drawing fire from union critics.
The preliminary findings of the Measures of Effective Teaching Project say that teachers’ past ability to raise student performance on state exams is one of the biggest predictors that the teacher would continue to oversee big test gains, and is “among the strongest predictors of his or her students’ achievement growth in other classes and academic years.”
Teachers with these high “value-added scores” — named for increasing a student’s achievement level
— were also more likely to increase students’ grasp of math concepts and reading comprehension through writing practices.
Shanghai PISA scores
The Shanghai math (+1 SD) and science (+.75 SD) scores are almost a full SD above the OECD average of 500 (SD = 100). The top 10 percent of Shanghai math students are all above the 99th percentile for the US. See earlier post for links to Rindermann’s work relating school achievement tests like TIMSS and PISA to national IQ estimates, and see here for earlier SD estimates using 2006 PISA data. (Finland has an anomalously low SD in the earlier data. A quick look at the 2009 data shows the following math SDs: Finland 82, USA 91, Korea 89, Japan 94, Germany 98, Shanghai 103, Singapore 104.)
Although Shanghai and Beijing are the richest cities in China, incomes are still quite low compared to the US. Average income in Shanghai is about $10k USD per annum, even PPP adjusted this is about $20k. People live very modestly by the standards of developed countries.
As noted in the comments, there are other places in China that score *higher* than Shanghai on college entrance exams or in math and science competitions. So while Shanghai is probably above the average in China, it isn’t as exceptional as is perhaps implied in the Times article.
Taiwan has been moving to an American-style, less test-centric, educational system in the last decade. Educators and government officials (according to local media reports in the last 12 hours) are very concerned about the “low scores” achieved in the most recent PISA 🙂
To see how individual states or ethnicities in the US score on PISA, see here and here.
NYTimes: … PISA scores are on a scale, with 500 as the average. Two-thirds of students in participating countries score between 400 and 600. On the math test last year, students in Shanghai scored 600, in Singapore 562, in Germany 513, and in the United States 487.
In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and several other countries.
In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland, where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 — in 23rd place — with a performance indistinguishable from Poland, Ireland, Norway, France and several other countries.
The testing in Shanghai was carried out by an international contractor, working with Chinese authorities, and overseen by the Australian Council for Educational Research, a nonprofit testing group, said Andreas Schleicher, who directs the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s international educational testing program.
Mark Schneider, a commissioner of the Department of Education’s research arm in the George W. Bush administration, who returned from an educational research visit to China on Friday, said he had been skeptical about some PISA results in the past. But Mr. Schneider said he considered the accuracy of these results to be unassailable.
China’s Army of Graduates Is Struggling
Liu Yang, a coal miner’s daughter, arrived in the capital this past summer with a freshly printed diploma from Datong University, $140 in her wallet and an air of invincibility.
Her first taste of reality came later the same day, as she lugged her bags through a ramshackle neighborhood, not far from the Olympic Village, where tens of thousands of other young strivers cram four to a room.
Unable to find a bed and unimpressed by the rabbit warren of slapdash buildings, Ms. Liu scowled as the smell of trash wafted up around her. “Beijing isn’t like this in the movies,” she said.
Building A Better Teacher: Some unions, management collaborating
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan appeared in Tampa, Fla. alongside the presidents of the two major teachers unions: Randi Weingarten of the American Federation of Teachers and Dennis Van Roekel of the National Education Association.
Praising teacher evaluation, tenure, and pay reforms pursued through a partnership among the local school district, union and the Gates Foundation, Duncan lobbed a message of conciliation into an often-overheated debate over the role of unions in school improvement efforts.
“I don’t think any of us like it when something is imposed on us,” Duncan said. “I think there is so much the country can learn from what’s happening here. You have elevated the profession.”
The news conference – held in Hillsborough County, where it now takes up to four years to earn tenure and teachers are paid, in part, according to how well their students perform on standardized tests – was intended to extend an olive branch to the teachers unions in recognition of an important, though increasingly embattled, Democratic Party constituency.
No High School Scholars Need Apply
Today, The Boston Globe published the latest in a long series of special “All-Scholastics” 14-page (12×22-inch) supplements on good local high school athletes from a variety of sports. These celebrations are produced three times a year (42 pages) with lots of pictures and little bios and lists of all-stars from the Boston area.
Again this Fall, there was no room for any mention by The Boston Globe of any noteworthy academic achievement by local students at the high school level. Christiane Henrich of Marblehead HS, in Marblehead, Massachusetts, wrote a 7,360-word Emerson-prize-winning history research paper on the quality (good for the day) of U.S. Civil War medicine. It was published in the only journal in the world for the academic papers of secondary students…No room in The Boston Globe for that to be mentioned. She is now at Stanford and doesn’t mind, but I mind about all the Boston-area students who are fed a constant diet of praise for athletic achievement by their peers and at the same time are starved of any and all news of the academic achievements of their peers.
In fact, over the years I have published a good number of exemplary history papers by high school students from the Boston area and they did not and do not get mentioned in The Boston Globe, nor do the academic achievements of our high school students in foreign languages (e.g. National Latin Exam, etc.), AP subject tests in Calculus, Chemistry, European history or in any other field, receive any notice from the Globe.
International competitions reveal that we are below average in Reading, Math and Science. Perhaps we should just explain that we don’t care about that stuff as much as we do about swimming, soccer, cross-country, football, golf, field hockey, and volleyball, because achievement by our high school students in those efforts are what we really like to pay attention to, (not that academic stuff), at least when it comes to The Boston Globe.
The Boston Globe (and its subscribers) are, in this way, sending a constant stream of clear messages (42 pages at a time in supplements, not to mention regular daily columns on HS sports) that in Boston (The Athens of America) what we care about is kids doing well in sports. If they do well in academics we don’t think that is worth mentioning. Sick, sad, and self-destructive, but there we are.
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“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
Ask Students
Newsweek reports this week on Michelle Rhee’s new project StudentsFirst, but I have been thinking a lot lately about the fact that, while our High School students have spent some 12,960 hours observing teachers [6 hours x 180 days x 12 years] and giving at least some of their attention to other aspects of school reform that affect them, no one seems to show any interest in actually talking with them to discover what they have learned.
Tony Wagner of Harvard did conduct a focus group for recent grads of a suburban high school he was working with, and he was surprised and intrigued by what he learned from them during the course of the conversation. But he tells me he only knows of three high schools in the whole country (of 20,000 +) which conduct such efforts to learn from students what they have noticed about their schools.
When I left my job at the Space & Information Systems Division of North American Aviation to accept a new job with Pan Am in the early 1960s, they gave me an exit interview to find out why I was leaving, but also to discover what I might offer by way of observations about my tasks and the job environment.
Our high schools, I feel it is safe to claim, do not offer their students exit interviews, either as they finish graduation or a few years later. We pass up the chance to harvest knowledge from those thousands of hours of classroom observation, and from their “hands-on” experience of the educational system in which we placed them for 12 years.
What could be the reasons for this vacuum in our curiosity about education? I believe it comes in part from our attitude that, after all, students are merely students, and that they will not become thinking human beings until long after they leave our buildings.
This is a really stupid attitude, in my view. After all, some of these students have managed calculus, chemistry, Chinese and European history. I know some who have written very very good 11,000- to 15,000-word history research papers. So it should be obvious to us, if we take a moment to think, that not only are they fully capable of noticing something about the the instruction and the other schooling processes they have experienced, but also that they are fully capable of reporting to us some of what they have learned, if we can convince them that we really want to know.
Now, someone may point out that half our college freshman drop out before their sophomore year, that a million of our HS graduates are in remedial courses every year when they get to college, and so on. I know that, so let’s, at least initially, not talk to poorly-performing students. Instead, to get our feet wet, let’s give serious interviews to the ones who will graduate summa cum laude from Yale, Stanford, Princeton, MIT and Harvard. You know, the ones who will get the Nobel Prizes one day. Surely it is not so hard to identify the ten most academically promising and thoughtful of our HS seniors each year, and, after graduation, at least ask them if they would be willing to share some of their observations and thoughts in a conversation with us.
This would give us a small first step, and a fresh one, on the way to putting Students First, and start to put an end to our really dumb neglect of this rich resource for helping us understand how to do our education jobs better for their younger peers.
I can only hope that Mr. Gates, with his hopes to improve teacher training, and Michelle Rhee, with her new push to pay attention to students for a change, are listening to this.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776-3371 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
www.tcr.org/blog
Lessons for America
What education practices can high-performing nations learn from one another?
Learning With the World is an Asia Society initiative that focuses on common educational concerns worldwide, as well as international best-practice solutions. We work with education leaders from nations with the best and quickly improving education systems to discuss the key drivers of educational improvement and the lessons learned.
Do we the courage to address flaws in our education system?
President Barack Obama said Monday in a speech about education that this is “our generation’s Sputnik moment.”
My first question is: How many high school students around here know what Sputnik is?
My second question is: Do you think there are things to be learned from the educational success in countries that are doing better overall than the United States?
The release last week of results from testing of 15-year-olds around the world, including in most of the world’s industrial nations, was one of the main factors underlying Obama’s statement. American students showed a bit of improvement, but overall were in the middle of the pack. That means, among the 34 countries at the center of the study, the U.S. was 14th in reading, 17th in science and 25th in math. The U.S. standings were in line with other results in recent years.
While the rankings from the Program for International Student Assessment got a lot of attention, a set of accompanying reports got little. Among those was one focused on lessons for the United States.
2 percent University of Wisconsin pay increase warranted?
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.
The University of Wisconsin System argues its faculty and staff are in desperate need of pay raises in each of the next two years just so these in-demand folks can keep from falling further behind those at peer institutions.
Fiscal conservatives reflexively howl that those within the UW System simply don’t understand the magnitude of the budgetary crisis facing Wisconsin and are out of touch for wanting more when everyone else is trying to make do with less.
The latest round of this perpetual battle took place Thursday afternoon at the Memorial Union when a Board of Regents committee voted unanimously to recommend most faculty and academic staff working across the UW System receive a 2 percent pay increase in each of the next two years. The decision by the regents’ business, finance and audit committee to back the proposal from UW System President Kevin Reilly will almost certainly be approved by the full board Friday morning.
Interested Observers
In a Newsweek article for November 28, 2010, Jonathan Alter, in the process of calling educational historian Diane Ravitch “jaundiced,” and “the Whittaker Chambers of school reform,” praises Bill Gates for his broad-minded views of the best way to evaluate teachers, including “student feedback,” which Alter observes parenthetically, is “(surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom)…”
Now, who is it that could be surprised that students might be able to predict which teachers would be successful in the classroom, Mr. Alter? How could it be, he must assume, that young students, after their thousands of hours of classroom observations, might know something about what makes an effective teacher and who might do well at the job?
I find the combination of hubris, ignorance and condescension revealed by that parenthetical aside to be truly astonishing.
Recently Randi Weintgarten told Jay Mathews in an interview that in considering school reform it was important to start from the bottom up, that is with teachers.
Hasn’t a single Edupundit or Union Leader noticed that “below” the teachers, if we want to start from the bottom up, are the students? You know, the ones who have always been there, observing and learning a lot about teachers, who they are, what they can do, and what it would take to make classrooms and schools do their job better. As John Shepard has pointed out to me: “Can we not–using W.C. Field’s paraphrase–see the handwriting on the floor?”
But perhaps someone has indeed thought of asking them. Tony Wagner at Harvard conducted a focus group of recent graduates for a suburban high school and was quite surprised by much of what he learned, but when I asked him how many high schools he knew of which did conduct such inquiries to learn how they could improve, he said he only knew of three in the country.
We are not asking students, so they are not telling us, no surprise there. But perhaps we are not asking them because, don’t you know, they are just kids. I know something about those kids because I was a teacher for ten years and for the last 23 I have been seeking out and publishing their serious academic expository writing. I know that some of my authors have graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, Princeton and Yale, that some of them have become Rhodes Scholars, Marshall Scholars, and doctors, lawyers, and chiefs of various kinds. Why is it so easy for us to forget that every Nobel Prize winner was once a high school student sitting there as an interested observer, learning about teachers, classrooms and schools?
But we don’t think to ask them. We don’t benefit from their years of experience studying the education we are offering them. This stupidity on our part has resulted in hundreds of billions of dollars and centuries of person-years deployed on education reform without making use of any of the knowledge students regularly accumulate about what we are trying to reform. What a sad thoughtless waste of money and time!
Japanese car makers had the sense to allow workers on the assembly line to stop the line if they saw a defect that needed correction, and they have led the world in quality work.
While it is no doubt impossible for us even to imagine giving students the power to stop a teacher who was doing a terrible job, why don’t we at least give some thought, with all our heavy thinkers and all our research budgets, to trying to discover at least
a tiny bit of what some of our more thoughtful students have observed over their decades in our schools?
We could actually consider asking for and even taking some small bit of their advice on how to educate them and their peers better. After all, we landed on the Moon within a decade, didn’t we? And brought the astronauts safely home…surely we could ask a few students a few questions, and listen to the answers, couldn’t we?
Next generation workforce: Outperformed in math and science
f you want to get a sense of what’s in store for the American workforce, just take a look at how our students match up against the rest of the world in math and science. After all, most of the professions within the U.S. economy that are growing — healthcare, information technology, and biomedicine — require extensive training in both subjects.
So how are we doing? Not well, at all.
American 15-year old students scored below average in math and were outperformed by 23 other countries and education systems, according to test results released Tuesday by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s Program for International Student Assessment.
And they didn’t do much better in science, ranking 19 among the lot of 65 participating countries and education systems (N.B. “educational systems” are individual cities within a country, like Shanghai).
GAO revises its report critical of practices at for-profit schools
The Government Accountability Office has revised portions of a report it released last summer on recruiting practices in for-profit higher education, softening several examples from an undercover investigation but standing by its central finding that colleges had encouraged fraud and misled potential applicants.
The revisions have come as the Obama administration and senior Democratic lawmakers are pushing for tougher regulation of the industry. A Republican senator said the revisions called into question some of the conclusions in the report.
The original report, issued Aug. 4 in testimony to the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, examined recruiting practices at 15 for-profit colleges, including campuses operated by the Apollo Group, Corinthian Colleges and The Washington Post Co.’s Kaplan unit.
Gov. Doyle: Announces 71,400 students have signed the Wisconsin Covenant
Governor Jim Doyle today announced that 18,264 students signed the Wisconsin Covenant Pledge in the fourth year of the program, bringing the total number of students who have signed the pledge and indicated that they plan to go on to college to more than 71,400 students across the state. The first class of students to sign the pledge are currently seniors in high school and preparing to make the transition to college next fall.
“I am encouraged that so many students have signed the Wisconsin Covenant and chosen the path to higher education that will help train them for the high-paying, technical jobs we need to compete in the global economy,” Governor Doyle said. “Regardless of their family’s economic background, their past academic behavior, and whether anyone in their family has a college degree, all students need to know that higher education is an option for them.”
Students who participate in the Wisconsin Covenant sign a pledge affirming that they will earn a high school diploma, participate in their community, take a high school curriculum that prepares them for higher education, maintain at least a B average in high school, and apply for state and federal financial aid.
Top Test Scores From Shanghai Stun Educators
With China’s debut in international standardized testing, students in Shanghai have surprised experts by outscoring their counterparts in dozens of other countries, in reading as well as in math and science, according to the results of a respected exam.
American officials and Europeans involved in administering the test in about 65 countries acknowledged that the scores from Shanghai — an industrial powerhouse with some 20 million residents and scores of modern universities that is a magnet for the best students in the country — are by no means representative of all of China.
About 5,100 15-year-olds in Shanghai were chosen as a representative cross-section of students in that city. In the United States, a similar number of students from across the country were selected as a representative sample for the test.
Experts noted the obvious difficulty of using a standardized test to compare countries and cities of vastly different sizes. Even so, they said the stellar academic performance of students in Shanghai was noteworthy, and another sign of China’s rapid modernization.
The results also appeared to reflect the culture of education there, including greater emphasis on teacher training and more time spent on studying rather than extracurricular activities like sports.
Madison School District Leaders Learn More About Boys-Only Charter School
Madison Metropolitan School District leaders on Monday night learned more about a proposed boys-only charter school and heard from the public.
The school, which would have uniforms and be targeted toward minority students, would be the first of its kind in Wisconsin.
The idea is called Madison Prep, and it would be part of the Madison Metropolitan School District. The school’s goal is for 100 percent higher education acceptance for its students, and to meet that goal it will have a longer school day and school year.
And while it’s never been done here before, the person behind it said that’s the idea. Kaleem Caire, president of the Urban League of Greater Madison, said it’s time to think out of the box to help children be more successful in school — specifically black middle-school children.
Friends, Romans, schoolchildren
The only remotely classical thing about Pegasus Primary School on the Blackbird Leys estate in Oxford is the name and the school logo of a blue winged horse. The logo looks cuddlier than the Pegasus of Greek mythology, sprung from the blood of the gorgon Medusa when the hero Perseus cut off her head.
This is not the Oxford of the dreaming spires; the school is in one of the largest council estates in Europe, close to the former Morris car works at Cowley, where Minis are now made. My taxi driver points out the Blackbird pub, noted for fights, and a supermarket which he claims has been raided five times in the past year.
This well-run primary school in a tough area is doing something culturally counter-cyclical: it is teaching Latin and Greek under the auspices of the Iris Project, a volunteer-run scheme which brings classics to inner-city state schools. As someone who loved classics at public school in the 1970s, when the subject seemed out of date and doomed to oblivion, I find this both incredible and thoroughly heartening.
“Education for Innovation,” a live digital town hall
Please join us to watch:
An announcement from Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Angel Gurría, Secretary General of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), on the standing of U.S. students in reading, math and science literacy compared to other countries around the world;
A two-way conversation with Secretary Duncan and students, teachers and administrators from Olin College of Engineering (Needham, Mass.) and the School of Science and Engineering Magnet (Dallas, TX);
Robert D. Atkinson, President of The Information Technology and Innovation Foundation discuss the results from a new report on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) education released that morning; and
An interview with Thomas L. Friedman on U.S. competitiveness, innovation and economic growth.
Live Webcast on Tuesday, December 7, 8:45 a.m. EST
Is the College Debt Bubble Ready to Explode?
Is the College Debt Bubble Ready to Explode?
by Laura Rowley
Friday, December 3, 2010
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Kelli Space, 23, graduated from Northeastern University in 2009 with a bachelor’s in sociology — and a whopping $200,000 in student loan debt. Space, who lives with her parents and works full-time, put up a Web site called TwoHundredThou.com soliciting donations to help meet her debt obligation, which is $891 a month. That number jumps to $1,600 next November.
In creating the site, Space, of course is hoping to ease her financial burden, but it’s “mainly to inform others on the dangers of how quickly student loans add up,” she said. So far she’s raised $6,671.56, according to her site.
Space is just one example — albeit an extreme one — of a student loan bubble that may be about to burst. Over the last decade, private lenders, abetted by college financial aid offices, eagerly handed young people hundreds of thousands of dollars to earn bachelor’s degrees. As a result of easy credit, declining grants and soaring tuitions, more than two-thirds of students graduated with debt in 2008 — up from 45 percent in 1993. The average debt load is $24,000, according to the Project on Student Debt.
The College Debt Bubble: Is It Ready to Explode?
Is the College Debt Bubble Ready to Explode?,” asks Laura Rowley at Yahoo! Finance. College tuition has skyrocketed much more than housing did during the housing bubble, in percentage terms. One hundred colleges charge $50,000 or more a year, compared to just 5 in 2008-09. College tuition has surged along with federal financial-aid spending, which effectively rewards colleges for increasing tuition. College financial-aid policies punish thrifty families, so that “parents who scrimp and save to come up with the tuition are in effect subsidizing the others.”
“University administrators are the equivalent of subprime mortgage brokers,” notes Facebook investor Peter Thiel, “selling you a story that you should go into debt massively, that it’s not a consumption decision, it’s an investment decision. Actually, no, it’s a bad consumption decision. Most colleges are four-year parties,” he says, an assessment shared by prominent law professor Glenn Reynolds.
My wife is French. She spent twice as much time in class at her second-tier French university as I did in my flagship American university (the University of Virginia), and more time studying, too (even though I was studious by American standards, and as a result, later went on to attend Harvard Law School). France spends less per student on higher education than we do, to produce a more literate and knowledgeable citizenry.
The Faculty Sabbatical on the Chopping Block
A blurb in the Chronicle of Higher Education notes that the Iowa legislature, in the face of shrinking budgets, is rattling swords at faculty sabbaticals, stating that it is unfair that academics would get paid semester or year leaves while other employees feel the budget pain. This statement caught my eye and get my mind swirling:
1. It’s almost impossible to explain a sabbatical to nonacademics and have it seem necessary. Sabbaticals are fairly unknown in most professions. I’ve heard of ministers getting sabbaticals and a million years ago a few law firms mentioned having sabbaticals, but they definitely aren’t part of the average American worker’s salary and benefits package.
2. The name “sabbatical” sounds like a rest. Making the argument that folks that do no physical labor need periodic rest is tough.
3. If a university expects faculty to apply for a sabbatical by proposing doing research or scholarly project during the sabbatical, then it is not a paid rest. In that case, a sabbatical is merely a research leave. If faculty are required to produce scholarship, and this is explicit in tenure, promotion and raise standards, then a sabbatical is merely time given to meet the requirements of the job. Perhaps re-branding is necessary: a “research intensive”? If sabbaticals are used for mere relaxation, travel or outside work, then they seem more “cut-worthy” in an era of shrinking budgets.
Britain’s students: the revolution will be along later
“YOU ARE the backbone of a new movement. This is a movement that is capable of changing Britain, Europe and the world,” bellowed the student representative from University College, London (UCL), standing on the plinth at the base of Nelson’s Column in Trafalgar Square this afternoon. His claim was manifestly false.
I am sure he believed it, as a megaphone carried his words into a horizontal-sleet-laden wind. I suspect many of the crowd of a few hundred freezing young protestors gathered below wanted to believe it. They clutched placards denouncing plans by the Coalition government to raise a cap on student tuition fees to abour £9000 a year, and they were genuinely, sincerely angry. Today’s day of action was the third major demonstration by students in central London, and the foul weather had not deterred a good number of students from showing up, though they were outnumbered by chilly-looking police.
There were signs of troublemaking here and there: hairy, middle-aged Trots handing out tracts called things like Proletarian Struggle or words to that effect. Lots of ready-made signs distributed by the Socialist Workers’ Party, a hardline outfit. A few gaggles of scary youths in hooded tops with scarves over their faces, roaming the crowd in search of trouble. An Iranian television news crew filming the scene.
What Is a College Degree Worth in China?
Quang Zha, Gordon Chang, Yong Zhao & Yasheng Huang
While China’s economy keeps growing at a rapid pace, the dim employment prospects of many of its college graduates pose a potential economic problem.
According to recent statistics, the average Chinese college graduate makes only 300 yuan, or about $44, more a month than the average Chinese migrant worker. In recent years, the wages of college graduates have remained steady at about 1,500 yuan a month. Migrant workers’ wages, however, have risen to 1,200 yuan.
If China’s graduates are unable to capitalize on their costly investment in education, then is it worthwhile for students to obtain a college degree? What does the imbalance say about China’s education system and its economy in general?
I-OWL: Building an Interactive Writing Tool to Support 11th and 12th Graders
Educational professionals have enacted initiatives to help high school students improve writing skills critical to success in higher education. In recent years university scholars and high school teachers have invested significant time and resources to better prepare students for college writing.
This project will develop, field test, and scale an interactive, on-line writing lab to help high school juniors and seniors complete school assignments and help prepare them for college level writing.
Using new media technologies, the I-OWL writing lab will help students improve specific writing strategies, transfer writing skills to assignments across three academic disciplines – science, social studies and language arts, and assess their skills in relation to college-level writing.
Perfect SAT Math Scores: Male-Female Ratio of 2:1
In September I had a post about the 2010 Math SAT test results, and reported on the gender differences in favor of males, who scored 34 points higher on average this year than their female counterparts. This follows a persistent 30+ point differential in favor of male high school students that goes back to at least the early 1970s.
This is a follow-up to that post, and the chart above (click to enlarge) displays the results of the 2010 Math SAT test by gender for all scores between 580 and 800 by 10-point intervals. Notice that:
The sum of learning A university education that broadens the mind is worth much more than its market value
As tertiary education becomes more popular and marketable, and investment in human capital a topic of attention, education is today often equated to vocational preparation. As a result, a number of leading academics have raised the alarm. Professor Steven Schwartz, vice-chancellor of Macquarie University in Australia, lamented that universities nowadays focus too much on imparting knowledge and not wisdom. Living in the age of money, modern universities are trying their best to fit in, he said, so that university education is being reduced to vocational training. He urged universities to “wise up”.
In a recent book, Not For Profit, Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, observed that modern tertiary education has lost its way. She said that if society wants to produce graduates who can empathise as a “citizen of the world”, then it should reverse the current skew towards economic productivity and restore liberal and critical values at universities.
The Rise of Online Colleges and Online Education
The 2002 American Community Survey, taken by the US Census Bureau, indicated that 52.7 percent of the American population has some sort of college education; however, only 27.2 percent of Americans actually continue their education long enough to obtain a college degree. These numbers seems pretty dismal when compared with countries like Finland and the Netherlands where the percentage of people with college degrees range from 34 to 40 percent. Fortunately, the number of people taking online classes continues to rise, increasing the percentage of people working towards obtaining a degree. When you take into consideration the benefits online classes offer it’s easy to see why the popularity of online education has grown immensely over the past few years.
On a Mission to Find an MBA Strategy
Sally Blount is getting down to business. As the newly appointed dean of the Kellogg school at Northwestern University near Chicago, the chic 48-year-old professor is taking the school back to its roots as one of the few top US business schools that focuses on teaching management rather than finance and economics.
Fast-talking and forthright, and a specialist in negotiation and behavioural decision-making, Prof Blount says she is perplexed about how MBAs have been hijacked by the finance industry.
Surprisingly Predictive (you moron!): “…student feedback (surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom)”
Bill Gates is raising his arm, bent at the elbow, in the direction of the ceiling. The point he’s making is so important that he wants me and the pair of Gates Foundation staffers sitting in the hotel conference room in Louisville, Ky., to recognize the space between this thought and every lower-ranking argument. “If there’s one thing that can be done for the country, one thing,” Gates says, his normally modulated voice rising, “improving education rises so far above everything else!” He doesn’t say what the “else” is–deficit reduction? containing Iran? free trade?–but they’re way down toward the floor compared with the arm above that multibillion-dollar head. With the U.S. tumbling since 1995 from second in the world to 16th in college-graduation rates and to 24th place in math (for 15-year-olds), it was hard to argue the point. Our economic destiny is at stake.
Gates had just finished giving a speech to the Council of Chief State School Officers in which he tried to explain how administrators could hope to raise student achievement in the face of tight budgets. The Microsoft founder went through what he sees as false solutions–furloughs, sharing textbooks–before focusing on the true “cost drivers”: seniority-based pay and benefits for teachers rising faster than state revenues.
Seniority is the two-headed monster of education–it’s expensive and harmful. Like master’s degrees for teachers and smaller class sizes, seniority pay, Gates says, has “little correlation to student achievement.” After exhaustive study, the Gates Foundation and other experts have learned that the only in-school factor that fully correlates is quality teaching, which seniority hardly guarantees. It’s a moral issue. Who can defend a system where top teachers are laid off in a budget crunch for no other reason than that they’re young?
In most states, pay and promotion of teachers are connected 100 percent to seniority. This is contrary to everything the world’s second-richest man believes about business: “Is there any other part of the economy where someone says, ‘Hey, how long have you been mowing lawns? … I want to pay you more for that reason alone.’ ” Gates favors a system where pay and promotion are determined not just by improvement in student test scores (an idea savaged by teachers’ unions) but by peer surveys, student feedback (surprisingly predictive of success in the classroom), video reviews, and evaluation by superiors. In this approach, seniority could be a factor, but not the only factor.
President Obama knows that guaranteed tenure and rigid seniority systems are a problem, but he’s not yet willing to speak out against them. Even so, Gates gives Obama an A on education. The Race to the Top program, Gates says, is “more catalytic than anyone expected it to be” in spurring accountability and higher standards.
Gates hardly has all the answers: he spent $2 billion a decade ago breaking up big high schools into smaller ones and didn’t get the results he’d hoped for. Today, he’s too enamored of handheld devices for tracking student performance. They could end up as just another expensive, high-tech gimmick. But you’ve got to give Gates credit for devoting so much of his brain and fortune to this challenge. [BIG BIAS ALERT HERE!] His biggest adversary now is Diane Ravitch, a jaundiced former Education Department official under George H.W. Bush, who changed sides in the debate and now attacks Gates-funded programs in books and articles. Ravitch, the Whittaker Chambers of school reform, gives intellectual heft to the National Education Association’s campaign to discredit even superb charter schools and trash intriguing reform ideas that may threaten its power. When I asked Gates about Ravitch, you could see the Micro-hard hombre who once steamrolled software competitors: “Does she like the status quo? Is she sticking up for decline? Does she really like 400-page [union] contracts? Does she think all those ‘dropout factories’ are lonely? If there’s some other magic way to reduce the dropout rate, we’re all ears.” Gates understands that charters aren’t a silver bullet, and that many don’t perform. But he doesn’t have patience for critics who spend their days tearing down KIPP schools and other models that produce results.
There’s a backlash against the rich taking on school reform as a cause. Some liberals figure they must have an angle and are scapegoating teachers. But most of the wealthy people underwriting this long-delayed social movement for better performance are on the right track. [BIG BIAS ALERT HERE!] Like the rest of us, they know that if we don’t fix education, we can kiss our future goodbye.
Jonathan Alter is also the author of The Promise: President Obama, Year One and The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope.
