To encourage high school students to tackle tougher academic classes, many schools assign bonus points to grades in Advanced Placement or honors courses. But schools’ policies on whether students should receive a grade-point boost and by how much are all over the map.
My local public school district, for instance, used to add an extra third of a grade-point to students’ AP course grades while the private high school on the other side of town would bump up students’ grades by a full letter grade.
Since students from both schools would be applying to many of the same colleges, and essentially competing with one another, it didn’t seem fair to me that the private school kids should get such a generous grade boost.
That’s why I was heartened to come across a new study by a Harvard University researcher that takes a more systematic look at the practice of high school grade-weighting.
He found that for every increasing level of rigor in high school science, students’ college course grades rose by an average of 2.4 points on a 100- point scale, where an A is 95 points and a B is worth 85 points and so on. In other words, the college grade for the former AP chemistry student would be expected to be 2.4 points higher than that of the typical student who took honors chemistry in high school. And the honors students’ college grade, in turn, would be 2.4 points higher than that of the student who took regular chemistry.
Translating those numbers, and some other calculations, to a typical high school 1-to-4-point grade scale, Sadler estimates that students taking an honors science class in high school ought to get an extra half a point for their trouble, and that a B in an AP science course ought to be counted as an A for the purpose of high school grade-point averages.
Average Faculty Salaries by Field and Rank at 4-Year Colleges and Universities, 2009-10
Obama’s plan for education reform: short on specifics, so far
In Saturday’s address, Obama called for Congress to reauthorize the Elementary and Secondary Education Act, which in 2002 became known as the No Child Left Behind Act.
With a goal of having every child read at grade level by 2014, No Child Left Behind has been criticized by current Education Secretary Arne Duncan as “utopian” and as failing to properly reward schools for progress. One change under his proposed legislative blueprint, Obama said, would be that schools that perform well would be rewarded, while underperforming schools would face tough consequences.
A focus on education reform may be a politically astute move for the president and fellow Democrats in Congress, some of whom face difficult elections in the fall. Education reform, unlike financial regulatory reform or new environmental laws, is a kitchen-table issue that many Americans support.
“The announcement’s timing suggests Obama is looking beyond the health care proposal that still lingers in Congress, has delayed the president’s international trip next week, and threatens his party’s electoral prospects in November,” writes the Associated Press.
On the Barricades at Shimer
Are you going back to the wars?”
“Not a war . . . a family dispute.” So said Carson Holloway, a board member at Shimer College, responding to a student’s half-joking remark. At this unique college, which calls itself “the ‘Great Books’ school of Chicago,” a struggle over academic authority has been raging recently, rife with 1960s-style undertones. The school’s embattled president, Tom Lindsay, is facing ideological opposition from faculty and students. Yet he thinks that the resolution of tensions at Shimer could serve as a “bellwether” for colleges nationwide, where for the past 50 years political agendas have too often contaminated the quality of a liberal-arts education.
Everyone at Shimer believes in a great-books education, through which students study the profound questions of Western thought and civilization. The “family dispute” is over how to govern this great-books school. Should a community of scholars call the shots, as it has done over the past 30 years? Or should the school be run by a chief executive, as the college’s president thinks? Is Shimer a Greek-style polis, as many Shimerians believe? Or does it need to function more like a corporation, as the president contends?
Profit!
Big front page story in the WaPo todayabout a debate over getting rid of congressional “earmarks” for for-profit entities. But is the problem that for-profits can get earmarks or that the earmark process is just not very meritorious in its selection regardless of the tax status of the recipient? Plenty of for-profits will continue to get federal money through a variety of avenues. Meanwhile, not every non-profit is a model of efficiency, virtue, or effectiveness.
In K-12, and education more generally, we have a similar problem when it comes to thinking about quality.
Obama-Care Meets Obama-Ed
Of President Obama’s three big takeovers–cap ‘n trade, health care, and higher ed–higher ed has garnered the least public attention. That may change now that the administration is attempting to impose its wishes by legislative trickery.
The health care bill that the Democrats hope to pass by “reconciliation” to avoid the normal Senatorial voting procedure is now being amended to include the administration’s Big Grab on federal student loans. If this works, we will have one bill in which the federal government not only takes primary control of American health care but also simultaneously takes practical control of American higher education.
Some background: last September, The Wall Street Journal (“The Quietest Trillion”) gave an early heads-up to the administration’s then-plan to move the Department of Education from a 20 percent to an 80 percent share of the student loan market. A bill passed the House that month that would have eliminated private lenders from the federally guaranteed student loan market by July 1, 2010. It came with a promise that taxpayers would save some $87 billion from substituting a government-run service for the rough-and-tumble of private lenders. In October, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan sent a letter to colleges and universities across the country advising them to get their institutions ready for a 2010 implementation of the new rules, dubbed “Direct Lending.” College officials, some House Democrats, and a few Republicans expressed their uneasiness at the new plan.
School Districts vs. A Good Math Education
If you are a parent in cities such as Bellevue, Issaquah or Seattle, your kids are being short-changed–being provided an inferior math education that could cripple their future aspirations–and you need to act. This blog will tell the story of an unresponsive and wrong-headed educational bureaucracies that are dead set on continuing in the current direction. And it will tell the story of how this disaster can be turned around. Parent or not, your future depends on dealing with the problem.
Let me provide you with a view from the battlefield of the math “wars”, including some information that is generally not known publicly, or has been actively suppressed by the educational establishment. Of lawsuits and locking parents out of decision making.
I know that some of you would rather that I only talk about weather, but the future of my discipline and of our highly technological society depends on mathematically literate students. Increasingly, I am finding bright students unable to complete a major in atmospheric sciences. All their lives they wanted to be a meteorologist and problems with math had ended their dreams. Most of them had excellent math grades in high school. I have talked in the past about problems with reform or discovery math; an unproven ideology-based instructional approach in vogue among the educational establishment. An approach based on student’s “discovering” math principles, group learning, heavy use of calculators, lack of practice and skills building, and heavy use of superficial “spiraling” of subject matter. As I have noted before in this blog, there is no competent research that shows that this approach works and plenty to show that it doesn’t. But I have covered much of this already in earlier blogs.
Related: Math Forum audio / video.
Gates Funds Aid University of Oregon’s College-Prep Efforts
Developing a set of core content standards to prepare high school students with the academic foundation and skills necessary to succeed on any college campus is the goal of a new initiative at the University of Oregon.
Specifically targeted are the subject areas of mathematics and English, as well as a set of career-oriented two-year certificate programs.
David T. Conley, a professor of education and founder and chief executive officer of the non-profit Educational Policy Improvement Center (EPIC), will lead the ambitious project, which is partially funded by a $794,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.
The Seattle-based foundation announced in February a $19.5 million package of 15 grants to develop and launch new instructional tools and assessments to assure college readiness across the nation. Other support for the UO project comes from the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association as part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative.
The World’s Most Beautiful College Campuses
Draft US K-12 “Core Standards” Available for Comment
National Governors Association Center for Best Practices and Council of Chief State School Officers:
As part of the Common Core State Standards Initiative (CCSSI), the draft K-12 standards are now available for public comment. These draft standards, developed in collaboration with teachers, school administrators, and experts, seek to provide a clear and consistent framework to prepare our children for college and the workforce.
Governors and state commissioners of education from 48 states, 2 territories and the District of Columbia committed to developing a common core of state standards in English-language arts and mathematics for grades K-12. This is a state-led effort coordinated by the National Governors Association Center for Best Practices (NGA Center) and the Council of Chief State School Officers (CCSSO).
The NGA Center and CCSSO have received feedback from national organizations representing, but not limited to teachers, postsecondary education (including community colleges), civil rights groups, English language learners, and students with disabilities. These standards are now open for public comment until Friday, April 2.
Governors, state school superintendents to propose common academic standards
The nation’s governors and state school chiefs will propose standards Wednesday for what students should learn in English and math, from kindergarten through high school, a crucial step in President Obama’s campaign to raise academic standards across the country.
The blueprint aims to replace a hodgepodge of state benchmarks with common standards. The president has aggressively encouraged the states’ action as a key to improving troubled schools and keeping the nation competitive. Instituting new academic standards would reverberate in textbooks, curriculum, teacher training and student learning from coast to coast.
Fourth-graders, for example, would be expected to explain major differences between poetry and prose and to refer to such elements as stanza, verse, rhythm and meter when writing or speaking about a poem. Eighth-graders would be expected to use linear equations to solve for an unknown and explain a proof of the Pythagorean theorem on properties of a right triangle — cornerstones of algebra and geometry.
“It’s hugely significant,” said Michael Cohen, a former Clinton education official, who is president of the standards advocacy organization Achieve. “The states recognize they ought to have very consistent expectations for what their students should learn.”
Making Tough Choices for Higher Education
Faculty and staff members at the University of Illinois at Chicago will take an anger-fueled field trip on Monday to visit a growing, bedeviled species: financially beleaguered politicians. One can predict the topics of discussion — and those likely to be avoided.
Several hundred people from the university will fan out and both rally and lobby local and state officials, including Gov. Patrick J. Quinn, about the state budget mess and against the near certainty of more cuts and increased tuition.
They’re calling it “A Day of Education in Defense of Public Education,” and participants will make virtue out of necessity, venting on one of four furlough days mandated for the rest of the school year. Central topics include the $500 million that the state owes the University of Illinois for a fiscal year that’s almost over.
Dick Simpson, the decidedly sober but deceptively passionate head of the U.I.C. political science department, said he had not seen this much on-campus emotion and faculty mobilization since the campus was closed after the 1970 shootings of students at Kent State University by members of the Ohio National Guard.
Ed chief: Agency to review equal access at schools
Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday the federal government will become more vigilant to make sure students have equal access and opportunity to everything ranging from college prep classes to science and engineering programs.
“We are going to reinvigorate civil rights enforcement,” Duncan said on a historic Selma bridge to commemorate the 45th anniversary of a bloody confrontation between voting rights demonstrators and state troopers.
Duncan said the department also will issue a series of guidelines to public schools and colleges addressing fairness and equity issues.
“The truth is that, in the last decade, the office for civil rights has not been as vigilant as it should be. That is about to change,” Duncan said.
Duncan spoke to a crowd about 400 people on the Edmund Pettus Bridge in observance of “Bloody Sunday,” the day in 1965 when several hundred civil rights protesters were beaten by state troopers as they crossed the span over the Alabama River, bound for Montgomery.
That Other Government Takeover: Higher Education Act
Everyone knows Democrats are planning to use the budget reconciliation process to get ObamaCare through the Senate. Less well known is that Democrats are plotting add-ons to that bill to get other liberal priorities enacted–programs that could never attract 60 votes.
One of these controversial measures rewrites the Higher Education Act to ban private companies from offering federally guaranteed student loans as of this July. Congress has already passed laws in recent years discouraging private lenders from making loans without a federal guarantee. But most college financial-aid departments still want private companies to originate and service the guaranteed loans. That’s because the alternative–a public option run by the Department of Education–has been distinguished by its Soviet-style customer service.
The Democratic plan is to make this public option the only option mere days before colleges send out their financial aid packages to incoming students. The House and Senate budget committees issued instructions last year to look for savings in the student-lending program, so the Democrats have prepared in advance their excuse to jam these changes through the reconciliation process.
Fixing US STEM education is possible, but will take money
The state of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education in the United States has seen some unflattering appraisals in recent years, and deservedly so. In early February, the House of Representatives heard testimony on undergraduate and graduate education. The message from the panel, which included experts from academia, STEM-based industries, and the National Science Foundation (NSF), was clear: the problems in STEM education are well-known, and it’s time to take action.
Both the hearing’s charter and its chair, Daniel Lipinski (D-IL), pointed out the obvious problem in higher education: students start out interested, but the STEM programs are driving them away. As the National Academies described in its 2005 report Rising Above the Gathering Storm, successful STEM education is not just an academic pursuit–it’s a necessity for competing in the knowledge-based economy that the United States had a key role in creating.
The potential for action comes thanks to the fact that the America COMPETES Act of 2007 is up for reauthorization. Its initial focus was on STEM education at the K-12 levels, but efforts at the undergraduate and graduate levels are needed to retain students to fill the jobs left vacant as baby boomers retire.
Grades continue to climb, but does it matter?
Grades awarded to undergraduates attending college in the United States have gone up significantly in the past couple decades according to a report titled “Grading in American Colleges and Universities,” which was published in the Teachers College Record.
The article was written by UW-Madison graduate Stuart Rojstaczer and Christopher Healy, an associate professor of computer science at Furman University. Rojstaczer is a retired professor of geophysics at Duke University and the creator of GradeInflation.com, a website that tracks grading trends.
Rojstaczer has posted a free copy of the article on his Forty Questions blog.
The report analyzes decades of grading patters at American four-year institutions and notes that “grading has evolved in an ad hoc way into identifiable patterns at the national level. The mean grade point average of a school is highly dependent on the average quality of its student body and whether it is public or private. Relative to other schools, public commuter and engineering schools grade harshly. Superimposed on these trends is a nationwide rise in grades over time of roughly 0.1 change in GPA per decade.”
Bill Ayers and friends eat their young
Amidst the Race to the Top excitement this week, an important story may have gotten lost in the buzz. On Wednesday, my colleague Jamie Davies O’Leary, a 27 year-old Princeton grad, liberal Democrat, and Teach For America alumna described her surprise bookshop encounter with former Weatherman and lefty school reformer Bill Ayers.
If Bill Ayers and Fred and Mike Klonsky were 22 again, they would be signing up for Teach For America. The whole thing is worth reading (it’s a great story) but note this passage in particular, about Ayers’ talk:[Ayers] answered a young woman’s question about New York Teaching Fellows and Teach For America with a diatribe about how such programs can’t fix public education and consist of a bunch of ivy leaguers and white missionaries more interested in a resume boost than in helping students. Whoa.
And:
As someone who read Savage Inequalities years ago and attribute my decision to become a teacher partially to the social justice message, I almost felt embarrassed. But that was before I learned a bit of context, nuance, data, and evidence surrounding education policy debates. It’s as if Bill Ayers hasn’t been on the planet for the last two decades.Almost as soon as Jamie’s essay was posted, the Klonsky brothers (Fred and Mike–both longtime friends and associates of Ayers, both involved in progressive education causes) went after her. Fred posted a missive titled, “File under misguided sense of one’s own importance.” Mike tweeted that her depiction of the encounter was a “fantasy.”
As public education goes, so goes California
San Jose Mercury News Editorial:
How appropriate that, as one of the biggest education protests in history unfurled across the state, California’s application for a Race to the Top school reform grant was rejected by federal officials. Could there possibly be a louder wake-up call?
Given the chaos and infighting that muddied the state’s halting attempt to qualify for Race to the Top, the rejection is no surprise. But if education funding continues to decline, and if turf battles continue to prevent real reform, it’s not just students who will suffer. California’s greatness is at risk.
For much of the late 20th century, our public schools, colleges and universities were the envy of the nation, driving an economic boom that made the Golden State a global power. It’s no coincidence that this happened when taxpayers’ commitment to education was at its zenith.
That support has been declining for years, and the results are alarming.
Community colleges are required to accept everyone, but next fall, they’ll turn away some 200,000 students because they can’t afford to offer enough classes. With unemployment around 12 percent, what will those students — with only a high school diploma — do while waiting for a spot on campus?
Frosh will need to show writing skills
Anne Simons, via a kind reader’s email:
Seniors will have to “show evidence of their writing” in order to graduate, beginning with the class of 2013, Dean of the College Katherine Bergeron will announce Thursday.
“All students are expected to work on their writing both in general courses and in their concentration,” Bergeron wrote in an e-mail to be sent to students Thursday. Sophomores will have to reflect on their writing in their concentration forms, according to the letter.
The changes come out of recommendations from the Task Force on Undergraduate Education, Bergeron told The Herald. Based on the findings of an external review and discussions with faculty and academic committees, the College Writing Advisory Board and the College Curriculum Council collaborated on a new, clearer delineation of the expectations of writing at Brown, she said.
Bergeron’s letter ends with a statement on writing, explaining why it is an important skill for all graduates. “Writing is not only a medium through which we communicate and persuade; it is also a means for expanding our capacities to think clearly,” she wrote.
“Clearly what’s needed and lacking in the district is a curriculum.”
That’s a real quote. The speaker is Asbury Park School District’s new superintendent Denise Lowe, who says that “major changes have to be made to the schools or the school district will cease to exist, ” according to the Asbury Park Press. Enrollment is dropping because students are leaving for parochial schools and charter schools, so she’s put together a five-year plan to improve achievement.
She’s got her work cut out for her. Asbury Park High School, for example, with 478 kids, has a 45.7% mobility rate. (The state average is 9.6%.) 72% of students failed the 11th grade HSPA test in language arts and 86.1% failed the math portion. Average SAT scores are 325 in math and 330 in verbal. Attendance rates in 9th grade are 83%. A whopping 64.6% of kids never pass the HSPA and end up taking the Special Review Assessment, a back-door-to-diploma-route that is impossible to fail. The total comparative cost per pupil? $24,428. (DOE data here.)
17 states to fight dismal college completion rates
More than a dozen states have formed an alliance to battle dismal college completion rates and figure out how to get more students to follow through and earn their diplomas.
Stan Jones, Indiana’s former commissioner for higher education, is leading the effort with about $12 million in startup money from several national nonprofits including the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.
About one in every two Americans who start college never finish, said Jones, who founded Complete College America, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit, last year.
The U.S. has focused on access to higher education for the past several decades, and states need to turn their focus toward how many students actually graduate after they get in, even if it means using a funding structure that is based on degree completion instead of attendance, Jones said Tuesday.
Calling the Parents When a College Student Drinks
I visited my college-freshman son last week, and over pizza we talked about drinking. Part of pledging a fraternity means being the sober designated driver, I learned, and I was relieved that the the idea had become ingrained in college culture. Kids get it that driving while drinking is dangerous, right? Not exactly, he corrected. What they get is that a single D.U.I. means expulsion, and that’s a concept students respect.
So schools have the tools to stop students from drinking altogether, at least those who are under-age and breaking the law, I suggested. Just throw the book at anyone who gets caught?
He didn’t think that sounded like a good idea.
50 State Report on College Readiness
Many states have made measurable progress in recent years toward the elusive goal of college readiness, according to a new report by the nonprofit Achieve.
Maryland, Virginia and the District have made more progress than some, but less than most. Each state has achieved only one of five college-readiness goals identified in the report.
“What started off as isolated efforts among a few states five years ago has produced a national consensus: All students should receive a quality education that prepares them to succeed in college, career and life,” said Mike Cohen, Achieve’s president, in a release.
Achieve’s fifth annual “Closing the Expectations Gap” report finds that the majority of states, 31, now have high school standards in English and mathematics that align with the expectations of colleges and business. (Meaning that collegiate and business officials were involved in drafting the standards and approved the final product.) In 2005, by contrast, only three states had such standards.
Complete report here, which mentions:
Four additional states: new Hampshire, New Mexico, Wisconsin and Wyoming reported plans to administer college and career ready assessments, although their plans are not yet developed enough to include in the table on page 16.
Yo, Ho, Ho, and a Digital Scrum
History shows that intellectual property is more complex than either its creators or copiers care to admit, says a Chicago scholar
The history of publishing is swimming with pirates–far more than Adrian Johns expected when he started hunting through the archives for them. And he thinks their stories may hold keys to understanding the latest battles over digital publishing–and the future of the book.
Johns, a historian at the University of Chicago, has done much of his hunting from his office here, which is packed so high with books that the professor bought a rolling ladder to keep them in easy reach. He can rattle off a long list of noted pirates through the years:
Alexander Pope accused “pyrates” of publishing unauthorized copies of his work in the 18th century. At the beginning of the 19th century, a man known as the “king of the pirates” used the then-new technology of photolithography to spread cheap reprints of popular sheet music. In the 1950s, a pirate music label named Jolly Roger issued recordings by Louis Armstrong and other jazz greats from LP’s that the major labels were no longer publishing. A similar label put out opera recordings smuggled from the Soviet bloc.
School choice – an overrated concept
As a teacher for 20 years, I can tell parents that with their support children can flourish anywhere
The agony of waiting is over. Yesterday was national offer day, when parents learnt if their children had got into their favoured secondary schools. Unfortunately, as many as 100,000 children and their families have been bitterly disappointed.
As a teacher who has taught at various comprehensives for 20 years, I know that means a lot of tears and pain. I have seen parents who hit the bottle and come raging on to the school premises, demanding that the school takes their child; parents who do nothing but pester the school secretaries on the phone or by email; and parents who have just given up in despair, despite the fact that they have good grounds to appeal.
The main things parents should remember is not to descend into a great panic, and to review their situation dispassionately. What many don’t grasp is that if they fail to meet the admissions criteria of a school, children won’t get in, no matter how wonderful. The government has a strict admissions code that means schools have little room for manoeuvre: they can no longer just pick pupils they like the look of.
Seeking the Definition of a “Quality School”
Southeast Seattle for an Excellent Education:
SES4EE requests
1. SPS to publicly define a Quality School (as stated in SPS Strategic Plan Vision 2008) which will include objective measures of that quality.
2. SPS to compare each SE School to that definition of a Quality School and make those results available in a public manner.
3. For each school that does not fall within the parameter of a Quality School, SPS to provide
a. a public, written Plan with specific deadlines and timeframe to make that school a Quality School.
Knewton launches adaptive-learning SAT Prep Course
Knewton, an online test prep company that uses adaptive learning to boost scores on standardized tests, announced today the launch of its new SAT prep course. The company already provides prep courses for the GMAT and LSAT, and now hopes to tap the market of high-pressure parents and overachieving high school students.
The SAT prep course will include live instructors, educational videos and real-time feedback on students’ performance in specific SAT concepts. Overbearing parents can also track their children’s progress with a set of tools designed for them. The course costs $490, (there’s a $290 intro offer).
The courses use adaptive learning technology–a method that serves up questions and resources according to students’ needs based on their past performance. The concept is taken from adaptive learning tests, which serve questions that get harder or easier, depending on a student’s answers. In fact, Knewton’s two chief test designers, Len Swanson and Robert McKinley, helped design those tests: Swanson wrote the scoring algorithms for the adaptive learning tests used by the Educational Testing Service (ETS), which administers the SAT, GRE, and AP tests, and McKinley wrote the algorithms for the ACT.
Doyle: Each Wisconsin Covenant scholar will get $250 or more
High school students who complete a new Wisconsin program to promote college attendance will be eligible for annual grants worth $250 to $2,500 for their first two years of college, Gov. Jim Doyle said Monday.
Doyle also said Wisconsin Covenant scholars would be eligible for additional aid during their final two years, with the amounts depending on the availability of funding. He said he was unhappy his administration had issued a proposal while he was traveling overseas in December to limit the grants to two years.
Under the revised proposal Doyle submitted to the Legislature on Monday, the poorest Wisconsin Covenant scholars will receive $2,500 grants _ $1,000 from the state and $1,500 from a private foundation _ during each of their first two years in college.
Those with higher family incomes _ up to $80,000 in some cases _ will receive between $1,000 and $1,500, he said. All others who complete the Covenant challenge will receive $250, an amount one Republican critic mocked as paltry.
Playing along with the Mozart effect
If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, you need to be a participant, not just a listener.
Five months after we are conceived, music begins to capture our attention and wire our brains for a lifetime of aural experience. At the other end of life, musical memories can be imprinted on the brain so indelibly that they can be retrieved, perfectly intact, from the depths of a mind ravaged by Alzheimer’s disease.
In between, music can puncture stress, dissipate anger and comfort us in sadness.
As if all that weren’t enough, for years parents have been seduced by even loftier promises from an industry hawking the recorded music of Mozart and other classical composers as a means to ensure brilliant babies.
But for all its beauty, power and capacity to move, researchers have concluded that music is little more than ear candy for the brain if it is consumed only passively. If you want music to sharpen your senses, boost your ability to focus and perhaps even improve your memory, the latest word from science is you’ll need more than hype and a loaded iPod.
United STATES Coalition for World Class Math!
The Florida State DOE posted (leaked) the January 13th confidential draft of the Common Core Standards in their Race to the Top Application. Thank you Florida!
Read them here:
January 13th Draft of Common Core Mathematics.pdf
January 13th Draft of Common English-language Arts.pdf
A few of NJ Coalition for World Class Math’s Major Concerns on Jan. 13, 2010 Mathematics draft:
Book: From A Wisconsin Soapbox
Mark H. Ingraham Dean Emeritus, College of Letters & Science, University of Wisconsin
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, University of Wisconsin [Click to view this 23MB PDF “book”]:
Contents
Preface
Part I Liberal Education
The Omnivorous Mind 3
Given May 16, 1962, to the University of Wisconsin Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa. Republished from The Speech Teacher of September 1962.
Truth-An Insufficient Goal 17
The Keniston Lecture for 1964 at the University of Michi- gan; March 17, 1964. Republished from the Michigan Quarterly Review of July 1964.
On the Adjective “Common” 31
An editorial for the February 1967 Review of the Wisconsin Academy of Arts, Letters, and Sciences, February 23, 1967.
Part II Educational Policy
Super Sleep-A Form of Academic Somnambulism 37
First given as retiring address as President of A.A. U.P . This much revised version was given to the Madison Literary Club, March 12, 1940.
No, We Can’t; He Has a Committee Meeting 57
Madison Literary Club; May 11, 1953.
Is There a Heaven and a Hell for Colleges? 70
Commencement address, Hiram College; June 8, 1958.
The College of Letters and Science 79
Talk given to the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin, May 3, 1958.
Some Half Truths About the American Undergraduate 84
Orientation conference for Whitney-Fulbright Visiting Scholars. Sarah Lawrence College, September 6, 1962.
Maps Versus Blueprints 94
Honors Convocation, University of Wisconsin, May 18, 1973.
Part III To Students
A Talk to Freshmen 103
University of Wisconsin; September 18, 1951
Choice: The Limitation and the Expression of Freedom 112
Honors Convocation, University of Wisconsin; June 17, 1955. Republished from the Wisconsin Alumnus.
“The Good is Oft Interred with Their Bones” 121
Commencement, University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh; Janu- ary 19, 1968.
Talk at Honors Convocation at Ripon College
Talk at Honors Convocation at Ripon College 129
April 9, 1969
The Framework of Opportunity 136
Thanksgiving Address, University of Wisconsin; November, 1947
Part IV A Little Fun
Food from a Masculine Point of View 149
Madison Literary Club; November 11, 1946
On Telling and Reading Stories to Children 165
Attic Angel Tower, Madison, Wisconsin; March 6, 1978
Three Limericks 179
Fragments 181
a. From an address given to the University oF Wyoming Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, April 26, 1965
b. A comment
Part V Somewhat Personal
Letter of Resignation from Deanship 185
April 5, 1961
Retirement Dinner Talk 188
May 24, 1966
Thanks to Richard Askey for extensive assistance with this digitized book. Search Mark Ingraham.
Online courses can reduce the costly sting of college
Inessa Volkonidina had taken precalculus once and dropped it. She needed to take it again, and quickly, to fulfill a graduation requirement at Long Island University. She went online and found a company with an odd name, StraighterLine, that offered the course on even odder terms: $99 a month.
She thought it might be a scam. But StraighterLine, based in Alexandria, is a serious education company and a force that could disrupt half a millennium of higher-education tradition. The site offers students as many general-education courses as they care to take for a flat monthly fee, plus $39 per course. As college tuitions go, it is more on the scale of a cable bill.
The courses, standard freshman fare such as algebra, are cash cows for traditional schools, taught to students by the hundreds in vast lecture halls. They generate handsome profits to support more costly operations on campus.
Writer David Carr’s unconventional education
David Carr writes about media and culture for The New York Times, which is not why I wanted to interview him for this series. Rather, it was what Atlantic Monthly called his “joyous peculiarity” in this article.
Carr tells his own story in “The Night of the Gun,” a beautifully written, funny yet wrenching memoir that spares nothing about the drug addiction and madness into which he descended, but, from which, almost unbelievably, he escaped.
Before going to The Times, he was a contributing writer for Atlantic and New York Magazine and was the media writer for Inside.com. He also worked at the alternativeCity Paper in Washington D.C., as editor.
A father with three daughters, Carr and his wife now live in Montclair, N.J. Here are excerpts from our conversation about his formal and informal education.
Student assignment wins essay contest
A former bank compliance officer now enrolled in graduate school has won the inaugural essay contest on banking regulation sponsored by the International Centre for Financial Regulation and the Financial Times.
Nana Esi Atsem, 31, won the $7,500 prize for the best entry with an essay that sought to answer the question: “What works best for banking regulation: market discipline or hard-wired rules?”
Her essay won praise from the judges for its discussion of the best way to give creditors a stake in preventing excessive risk-taking, including a comparison of contingent capital, a form of debt that converts to equity when a bank gets into trouble, with subordinated debt, in which some creditors would see their claims made junior to those of depositors and senior bond holders.
“Fuelling debate around regulatory reform remains a key objective for the ICFR and the Financial Times. The research prize was designed to engage financial industry participants in a discussion on the repercussions of banking regulation on the global economy and the submissions we received surpassed our expectations,” said Lord Currie, ICFR chairman.
Digital Dilettantism
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
26 February 2010
The Kaiser Foundation, in its January 2010 report on the use of electronic entertainment media by U.S. students, aged 8-18, found that, on average, these young people are spending more than seven hours a day (53 hours a week) with such (digital) amusements.
For some, this would call into question whether students have time to read the nonfiction books and to write the research papers they will need to work on to get themselves ready for college and careers, not to mention the homework for their other courses.
For the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, however, the problem appears to be that we are not paying enough attention to the possible present and future connections between digital media and learning, so they have decided to invest $50,000,000 in grants to explore that relationship.
One recent two-year grant, “for $650,000 to study the effect of digital media on young people’s ethical development and to develop curricula for parents and teachers,” went to the Harvard Education School, which has distinguished itself for, among other things, seeming to have no one on its faculty with any research or teaching interest in the actual academic work of high school students, for example in chemistry, history, economics, physics, foreign languages, calculus, and the like.
The Harvard Ed School faculty do show real interest in poverty, disability, psychological problems, race, gender, ethnicity, and the development of moral character, so they may take to this idea of studying the relation between electronic media and student ethics. A visit to the Harvard Ed School website, and a review of the research interests of the faculty would prove enlightening to anyone who thought, for some odd reason, that they might be paying attention to the academic work of students in the schools.
Whether Harvard will conclude that seven hours a day doesn’t help much with the ethical development of students or not, one could certainly wish that they would discover that spending a lot of their time on digital media does very little for student preparation for college academic work that is at all demanding, not to mention the actual work of their careers, unless they are in the digital entertainment fields, of course.
The National Writing Project, which regularly has received $26,000,000 each year in federal grants for many years to help thousands of teachers feel more comfortable writing about themselves, has now received $1.1 million in grants from the MacArthur Foundation, presumably so that they may now direct some of their efforts to helping students use digital media to write about themselves as well.
Perhaps someone should point out, to MacArthur, the National Writing Project, the Harvard Ed School, and anyone else involved in this egregious folly and waste of money, that our students already spend a great deal of their time each and every day writing and talking about themselves with their friends, using a variety of electronic media.
In fact, it is generally the case that the students (without any grants) are already instructing any of their teachers who are interested in the use of a variety of electronic media.
But like folks in any other self-sustaining educational enterprise, those conversing on the uses of digital media in learning about digital media need a chance to talk about what they are doing, whether it is harmful to serious academic progress for our students or not, so MacArthur has also granted to “the Monterey Institute for Technology and Education (in Monterey, California) $2,140,000 to build the field of Digital Media and Learning through a new journal, conferences, and convenings (over five years).”
The MacArthur Foundation website has a list of scores more large grants for these projects in digital media studies and digital learning (it is not clear, of course, what “digital learning” actually means, if anything).
This very expensive and time-consuming distraction from any effort to advance respectable common standards for the actual academic work of students in our nation’s schools must be enjoyable, both for those giving out the $50 million, and, I suppose, for those receiving it, but the chances are good that their efforts will only help to make the college and career readiness of our high school students an even more distant goal.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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
How Corrupted Language Moved from Campus to the Real World
In some quarters I’m viewed as a lawyer with a professional identity problem: I’ve spent half of my time representing students and professors struggling with administrators over issues like free speech, academic freedom, due process and fair disciplinary procedures. The other half I’ve spent representing individuals (and on occasion organizations and companies) in the criminal justice system.
These two seemingly disparate halves of my professional life are, in fact, quite closely related: The respective cultures of the college campus and of the federal government have each thrived on the notion that language is meant not to express one’s true thoughts, intentions and expectations, but, instead, to cover them up. As a result, the tyrannies that I began to encounter in the mid-1980s in both academia and the federal criminal courts shared this major characteristic: It was impossible to know when one was transgressing the rules, because the rules were suddenly being expressed in language that no one could understand.
In his 1946 linguistic critique, Politics and the English Language, George Orwell wrote that one must “let meaning choose the word, not the other way around.” By largely ignoring this truism, administrators and legislators who craft imprecise regulations have given their particular enforcement arms—campus disciplinary staff and federal government prosecutors—enormous and grotesquely unfair power.
Ten rules for writing fiction
Elmore Leonard, Diana Athill, Margaret Atwood, Roddy Doyle, Helen Dunmore, Geoff Dyer, Anne Enright, Richard Ford, Jonathan Franzen, Esther Freud, Neil Gaiman, David Hare, PD James, AL Kennedy:
Get an accountant, abstain from sex and similes, cut, rewrite, then cut and rewrite again – if all else fails, pray. Inspired by Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, we asked authors for their personal dos and don’ts
Elmore Leonard: Using adverbs is a mortal sin
1 Never open a book with weather. If it’s only to create atmosphere, and not a charac ter’s reaction to the weather, you don’t want to go on too long. The reader is apt to leaf ahead look ing for people. There are exceptions. If you happen to be Barry Lopez, who has more ways than an Eskimo to describe ice and snow in his book Arctic Dreams, you can do all the weather reporting you want.
2 Avoid prologues: they can be annoying, especially a prologue following an introduction that comes after a foreword. But these are ordinarily found in non-fiction. A prologue in a novel is backstory, and you can drop it in anywhere you want. There is a prologue in John Steinbeck’s Sweet Thursday, but it’s OK because a character in the book makes the point of what my rules are all about. He says: “I like a lot of talk in a book and I don’t like to have nobody tell me what the guy that’s talking looks like. I want to figure out what he looks like from the way he talks.”
U.S. students need to play catch-up, Obama says
He tells the National Governors Assn. that states will be required to help students be ‘college- and career-ready.’
Reporting from Washington – Decrying shortcomings of the No Child Left Behind Act, President Obama on Monday pledged to make American students more competitive in the global economy by encouraging higher state standards for primary and secondary education.
Students in the United States lag by several crucial measures, Obama told a gathering of the nation’s governors at the White House, with eighth-graders ranking ninth in the world in math and 11th in science.
“In response to assessments like these, some states have upped their game,” Obama said, pointing to Massachusetts, where eighth-graders are tied for first in science around the world. “Some states have actually done the opposite, and between 2005 and 2007, under No Child Left Behind, 11 states actually lowered their standards in math.”
Reactions: Is Tenure a Matter of Life or Death?
The shootings on February 12 at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, which left three faculty members dead and two more professors and a department assistant wounded, have sparked a good deal of soul-searching within higher education. Amy Bishop, an assistant professor of biology at the university who was recently denied tenure, was arrested at the scene and has been charged with murder and attempted murder.
Bishop’s tenure denial may or may not be relevant to the shootings, but some scholars are asking what role, if any, the stresses of academic life played in the tragedy. What are the psychological effects of academic culture, particularly on rising scholars? Can or should something be done to change that culture?
The Chronicle asked a group of scholars and experts what they thought.
Cristina Nehring, writer and Ph.D. candidate in English literature at the University of California at Los Angeles:
Amy Bishop is nobody’s poster girl–not even for the tragic perversity of the tenure process.
More high-schoolers reinvent or skip their senior year
When Utah state Sen. Chris Buttars unveiled a cost-cutting measure this month that would have made the high school senior year optional, perhaps no one in the state Capitol Building was more surprised than 18-year-old Jake Trimble, who already opted out of the second half of senior year just weeks earlier.
He has spent the past month working at the Capitol as an unpaid intern for the state Democratic Party’s communications team, designing posters and writing scripts for legislators’ robocalls. Trimble graduated in January, one semester early, from the nearby Academy of Math Engineering and Science (AMES).
“I’m very happy to not be in high school anymore,” says Trimble, who proudly reports that he’s “not rotting in my parents’ basement.” Actually, when the legislative session ends next month, he’ll move on to another internship (this one paid) as a lab assistant at the University of Utah’s Orthopedic Center.
Trimble is part of a small but growing group of students — most of them academically advanced and, as a result, a tad restless — who are tinkering with their senior year. A few observers say the quiet experiment has the potential to reinvent high school altogether.
Will Fitzhugh…has been fighting for more non-fiction for years: Help pick non-fiction for schools
Jay Matthews:
It wasn’t until I was in my fifties that I realized how restricted my high school reading lists had been, and how little they had changed for my three children. They were enthusiastic readers, as my wife and I were. But all, or almost all, of the required books for either generation were fiction.
I am not dismissing the delights of Twain, Crane, Buck, Saroyan and Wilder, all of which I read in high school. But I think I would also have enjoyed Theodore H. White, John Hersey, Barbara Tuchman and Bruce Catton if they had been assigned.
Maybe that’s changing. Maybe rebellious teens these days are fleeing Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen, and Baldwin, or whoever is on the 12th grade English list, and furtively reading Malcolm Gladwell, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and other non-fiction stars.
Sadly, no.
The Renaissance Learning company released a list of what 4.6 million students read in the 2008-2009 school year, based on its Accelerated Reader program that encourages children to choose their own books. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter has given way to the hormonal allure of Stephenie Meyer’s teen vampire books, but both school and non-school books are still almost all fiction.
When I ask local school districts why this is, some get defensive and insist they do require non-fiction. But the only title that comes up with any frequency is Night, Elie Wiesel’s story of his boyhood in the Holocaust. It is one of only two nonfiction works to appear in the top 20 of Accelerated Reader’s list of books read by high schoolers. The other is ‘A Child Called ‘It,’ Dave Pelzer’s account of his alleged abuse as a child by his alcoholic mother.
Will Fitzhugh, whose Concord Review quarterly publishes research papers by high school students, has been fighting for more non-fiction for years. I agree with him that high school English departments’ allegiance to novels leads impressionable students to think, incorrectly, that non-fiction is a bore. That in turn makes them prefer fiction writing assignments to anything that could be described by that dreaded word “research.”
A relatively new trend in student writing is called “creative nonfiction.” It makes Fitzhugh shudder. “It allows high school students (mostly girls) to complete writing assignments and participate in ‘essay contests’ by writing about their hopes, experiences, doubts, relationships, worries, victimization (if any), and parents, as well as more existential questions such as ‘How do I look?’ and ‘What should I wear to school?'” he said in a 2008 essay for EducationNews.org.
Educators say non-fiction is more difficult than fiction for students to comprehend. It requires more factual knowledge, beyond fiction’s simple truths of love, hate, passion and remorse. So we have a pathetic cycle. Students don’t know enough about the real world because they don’t read non-fiction and they can’t read non-fiction because they don’t know enough about the real world.
Educational theorist E.D. Hirsch Jr. insists this is what keeps many students from acquiring the communication skills they need for successful lives. “Language mastery is not some abstract skill,” he said in his latest book, The Making of Americans. “It depends on possessing broad general knowledge shared by other competent people within the language community.”
I think we can help. Post comments here, or send an email to mathewsj@washpost.com, with non-fiction titles that would appeal to teens. I will discuss your choices in a future column. I can see why students hate writing research papers when their history and science reading has been confined to the flaccid prose of their textbooks. But what if they first read Longitude by Dava Sobel or A Beautiful Mind by Sylvia Nasar? What magical exploration of reality would you add to your favorite teenager’s reading list?
The high school courses students need for college
Bruce Vinik via Valerie Strauss:
It’s that time of year again. Pitchers and catchers are reporting to spring training and high school students are puzzling over which classes to take next fall. The choices students make do matter. Outside of grades, nothing is more important in college admissions than the classes kids take in high school. “Strength of Program” is a big deal.
Let’s start with the basics. Colleges expect students to take at least five core academic subjects every year of high school — English, social studies, science, math and foreign language.
In a perfect world, students would take each core subject every year. But the world isn’t perfect and colleges don’t expect kids to be. As long as students take each core subject through eleventh grade, they should feel free to pursue their particular academic interests in greater depth during twelfth grade. There’s nothing wrong with dropping social studies senior year in order to double up on science.
Assessment as Marketing
n a conversation last week with a big muckety-muck, I realized that there are two fundamentally different, and largely opposed, understandings of outcomes assessment in play. Which definition you accept will color your expectations.
The first is what I used to consider the basic definition: internal measures of outcomes, used to generate improvement over time. If you understand assessment in this way, then several things follow. You might not want all of it to be public, since the candid warts-and-all conversations that underlie real improvement simply wouldn’t happen on the public record. You’d pay special attention to shortcomings, since that’s where improvement is most needed. You’d want some depth of understanding, often favoring thicker explanations over thinner ones, since an overly reductive measure would defeat the purpose.
The second understanding is of assessment as a form of marketing. See how great we are! You should come here! The “you” in that last sentence could be prospective students being lured to a particular college, or it could be companies being lured to a particular state. If you understand assessment in this way, then several things follow. You’d want it to be as public as possible, since advertising works best when people see it. You’d pay special attention to strengths, rather than shortcomings. You’d downplay ‘improvement,’ since it implies an existing lack. And you’d want simplicity. When in doubt, go with the thinner explanation rather than the thicker one; you can’t do a thick description in a thirty-second elevator pitch.
To Impress, Tufts Prospects Turn to YouTube
There are videos showing off card tricks, horsemanship, jump rope and stencils — and lots of rap songs, including one by a young woman who performed two weeks after oral surgery, with her mouth still rubber-banded shut.
There is also Rhaina Cohen’s video, working off the saying “You never truly know someone until you have walked a mile in her shoes,” and featuring the blue sandals from her bat mitzvah, the white sneakers she bought cheaply in Britain, and the black heels in which she “stood next to Hillary Clinton.”
It is reading season at the Tufts University admissions office, time to plow through thousands of essays and transcripts and recommendations — and this year, for the first time, short YouTube videos that students could post to supplement their application.
About 1,000 of the 15,000 applicants submitted videos. Some have gotten thousands of hits on YouTube.
Where the Bar Ought to Be
Deborah Kenny talks a lot about passion — the passion for teaching, for reading and for learning. She has it. She wants all of her teachers to have it. Above all, she wants her students to have it.
Ms. Kenny has created three phenomenally successful charter schools in Harlem and is in the process of creating more. She’s gotten a great deal of national attention. But for all the talk about improving schools in this country, she thinks we tend to miss the point more often than not.
There is an overemphasis on “the program elements,” she said, “things like curriculum and class size and school size and the longer day.” She understood in 2001, when she was planning the first of the schools that have come to be known as the Harlem Village Academies, that none of those program elements were nearly as important as the quality of the teaching in the schools.
“If you had an amazing teacher who was talented and passionate and given the freedom and support to teach well,” she said, “that was just 100 times more important than anything else.”
Khan Academy: Math & Science Lessons Online
33-year-old math and science whiz kid — working out of his house in California’s Silicon Valley — may be revolutionizing how people all over the world will learn math. He is Salman Khan, and until a few months ago he made his living as a hedge fund analyst. But he’s become a kind of an unseen rock star in the online instruction field, posting 1200 lessons in math and science on YouTube, none of them lasting more than about 10 minutes. He quit his job at the hedge fund to devote full time to his Khan Academy teaching efforts, which he does essentially for free.
Khan explained how the U.S. unemployment rate is calculated in a NewsHour exclusive video.
16 Wisconsin high schools have students with perfect ACT scores
Sixteen Wisconsin high schools had at least one senior in the Class of 2009 who received the top score on the ACT, ACT Inc. announced this week.
The schools with students who received 36s were:
Arrowhead High School in the Town of Merton
Bay City Baptist School in Green Bay
Central Wisconsin Christian High School in Waupun
Edgewood High School in Madison
Fort Atkinson High School
Heritage Christian School in West Allis
Homestead High School in Mequon
Marquette University High School in Milwaukee
Middleton High School
Monona Grove High School in Monona
Neenah High School
Onalaska High School
Oshkosh North High School
Oshkosh West High School
Wauwatosa East High School
West High School in Madison
Give students a reality check: Assign more nonfiction books.
It wasn’t until I was in my 50s that I realized how restricted my high school reading lists had been and how little they had changed for my three children. They were enthusiastic readers, as my wife and I were. But all, or almost all, of the required books for both generations were fiction.
I am not dismissing the delights of Twain, Crane, Buck, Saroyan and Wilder, all of which I read in high school. But I think I also would have enjoyed Theodore H. White, John Hersey, Barbara Tuchman and Bruce Catton if they had been assigned.
Could that be changing? Maybe rebellious teens these days are fleeing Faulkner, Hemingway, Austen and Baldwin, or whoever is on the 12th grade English list, and furtively reading Malcolm Gladwell, David McCullough, Doris Kearns Goodwin and other nonfiction stars.
Sadly, no. The Renaissance Learning company released a list of what 4.6 million students read in the 2008-09 school year, based on its Accelerated Reader program, which encourages children to choose their own books. J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter has given way to the hormonal allure of Stephenie Meyer’s teen vampire books, but both school and non-school books are still almost all fiction.
New regulations impacting Milwaukee school choice program: School closures up, number of new schools down
The Public Policy Forum, via a kind reader’s email:
Between the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years, fewer new schools joined the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (MPCP) than ever before. In addition, 14 MPCP schools closed and another three schools merged–the most year-over- year closures the program has seen (Chart 1).
In this 12th edition of the Public Policy Forum’s annual census of MPCP schools, we find 112 schools are participating in the choice program, enrolling 21,062 students using taxpayer-funded tuition vouchers. The number of full-time equivalent students using vouchers is greater than in any other year of the program’s 19-year history; however, there are fewer schools participating today than earlier this decade (Chart 2, page 2).
The decline in the number of new schools and the increase in the number of closed schools are likely due to new state regulations governing the program. These regulations require schools new to the program to obtain pre-accreditation before opening and require existing schools to become accredited within three years of joining the program.
Throughout this decade, the average number of schools new to the program had been 11 per year. Under the new pre- accreditation requirement, 19 schools applied for pre-accreditation, but just three were approved. Another 38 schools had previously indicated to state regulators an intent to participate in the program in 2009-2010, but did not apply for pre -accreditation. The pre-accreditation process is conducted by the Institute for the Transformation of Learning (ITL) at Marquette University.
Milwaukee Voucher Schools – 2010.
Complete report: 184K PDF, press release: 33K PDF
The secret of Schmitz Park Elementary School is Singapore Math
Sally made 500 gingerbread men. She sold 3/4 of them and gave away 2/5 of the remainder. How many did she give away?
This was one of the homework questions in Craig Parsley’s fifth-grade class. The kids are showing their answers on the overhead projector. They are in a fun mood, using class nicknames. First up is “Crackle,” a boy. The class hears from “Caveman,” “Annapurna,” “Shortcut” and “Fred,” a girl.
Each has drawn a ruler with segments labeled by number — on the problem above, “3/4,” “2/5” and “500.” Below the ruler is some arithmetic and an answer.
“Who has this as a single mathematical expression? Who has the guts?” Parsley asks. No one, yet — but they will.
This is not the way math is taught in other Seattle public schools. It is Singapore Math, adopted from the Asian city-state whose kids test at the top of the world. Since the 2007-08 year, Singapore Math has been taught at Schmitz Park Elementary in West Seattle — and only there in the district.
In the war over school math — in which a judge recently ordered Seattle Public Schools to redo its choice of high-school math — Schmitz Park is a redoubt or, it hopes, a beachhead. North Beach is a redoubt for Saxon Math, a traditional program. Both schools have permission to be different. The rest of the district’s elementary schools use Everyday Math, a curriculum influenced by the constructivist or reform methods.
Related: Math Forum Audio / Video.
Questioning the Way Colleges Are Managed
Ninety percent of parents believe it is likely that their children will attend college, and most of them believe that any student can get the loans or financial aid required. But a new survey, reported on by my colleague, Tamar Lewin, finds that parents don’t have a lot of confidence in the way colleges are managed.
Increasingly, parents think colleges are too focused on their own finances, rather than the educational experience of students, the survey found.“One of the really disturbing things about this, for those of us who work in higher education,” said Patrick Callan, president of the National Center for Public Policy and Higher Education, “is the vote of no confidence we’re getting from the public. They think college is important, but they’re really losing trust in the management and leadership.”
Plan Would Let Students Start College Early
Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.
Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but other subjects like science and history.
The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, Finland, England, France and Singapore.
The program is being organized by the National Center on Education and the Economy, and one of its goals is to reduce the numbers of high school graduates who need remedial courses when they enroll in college. More than a million college freshmen across America must take remedial courses each year, and many drop out before getting a degree.
“That’s a central problem we’re trying to address, the enormous failure rate of these kids when they go to the open admission colleges,” said Marc S. Tucker, president of the center, a Washington-based nonprofit. “We’ve looked at schools all over the world, and if you walk into a high school in the countries that use these board exams, you’ll see kids working hard, whether they want to be a carpenter or a brain surgeon.”
This makes sense.
Related: Janet Mertz’s enduring effort: Credit for non-MMSD Courses
Competing for Students Who Can Pay
My colleagues at the Economix blog have put up an interesting post by an economics professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst exploring the increasing competition for students who can help a school’s bottom line.
The professor, Nancy Folbre, notes that competition works when consumers “can taste before they buy,” but that’s difficult when making choices about higher education.
She particularly questions the marketing efforts of for-profit colleges.
The $555,000 Student-Loan Burden
As Default Rates on Borrowing for Higher Education Rise, Some Borrowers See No Way Out; ‘This Is Just Outrageous Now’
When Michelle Bisutti, a 41-year-old family practitioner in Columbus, Ohio, finished medical school in 2003, her student-loan debt amounted to roughly $250,000. Since then, it has ballooned to $555,000.
It is the result of her deferring loan payments while she completed her residency, default charges and relentlessly compounding interest rates. Among the charges: a single $53,870 fee for when her loan was turned over to a collection agency.
“Maybe half of it was my fault because I didn’t look at the fine print,” Dr. Bisutti says. “But this is just outrageous now.”
Black churches spread gospel of higher education
The pulpit at many black churches has become a place to pray to a higher power – and praise higher learning.
“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of the dream of reaching the promised land- with education!” cried the man addressing the congregation Sunday at Greater St. John Missionary Baptist Church in West Oakland.
The words came not from the pastor, but from the president of California State University East Bay, Mo Qayoumi, whose remarks were also carried live on KDYA the Light, a gospel radio station.
On Sundays throughout February, Qayoumi and other university leaders are fanning out to more than 100 black churches across the state to spread the gospel of higher education in a program they call Super Sunday.
They’re aiming their message mainly at the families of middle-school children, preaching the idea that it’s never too early to prepare for college.
Writing Instruction in Massachusetts: Commonwealth’s Students Making Gains, Still Need Improvement
BOSTON – Writing Instruction in Massachusetts [1.3MB PDF], published today by Pioneer Institute, underscores the fact that despite 17 years of education reform and first-in-the-nation performance on standardized tests, many Massachusetts middle school students are still not on the trajectory to be prepared for writing in a work or post-secondary education environment.
The study is authored by Alison L. Fraser, president of Practical Policy, with a foreword by Will Fitzhugh of The Concord Review, who, since 1987, has published over 800 history research papers by high school students from around the world.
Writing Instruction finds that Massachusetts’ students have improved, with 45 percent of eighth graders writing at or above the ‘Proficient’ level on the 2007 National Assessment of Educational Progress test. In comparison, only 31 percent of eighth graders scored at or above ‘Proficient’ in 1998. The paper ascribes Massachusetts’ success in improving writing skills to adherence to MCAS standards and the state’s nation-leading state curriculum frameworks. It also suggests that strengthening the standards will help the state address the 55 percent of eighth graders who still score in the “needs improvement” or below categories.
According to a report on a 2004 survey of 120 major American businesses affiliated with the Business Roundtable, remedying writing deficiencies on the job costs corporations nearly $3.1 billion annually. Writing, according to the National Writing Commission’s report Writing: A Ticket to Work…Or a Ticket Out, is a “threshold skill” in the modern world. Being able to write effectively and coherently is a pathway to both hiring and promotion in today’s job market.
“While we should be pleased that trends show Massachusetts students have improved their writing skills, the data shows that we need renewed focus to complete the task of readying them for this important skill,” says Jim Stergios, executive director of Pioneer Institute. “Before we even think about altering academic standards, whether through state or federal efforts, we need to recommit to such basics.”
The study notes that if the failure to learn to write well is pervasive in Massachusetts, one should look first to the Massachusetts Curriculum Frameworks and the Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System (MCAS) designed to measure mastery of those frameworks. Analysis completed in December 2009 by a member of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education found that nearly all of the skills that the 21st Century Skills Task Force identified as important, such as effective written communication, are already embedded in the state’s academic standards guiding principles.
Georgia Schools Inquiry Finds Signs of Cheating
Georgia education officials ordered investigations on Thursday at 191 schools across the state where they had found evidence of tampering on answer sheets for the state’s standardized achievement test.
The order came after an inquiry on cheating by the Governor’s Office of Student Achievement raised red flags regarding one in five of Georgia’s 1,857 public elementary and middle schools. A large proportion of the schools were in Atlanta.
The inquiry flagged any school that had an abnormal number of erasures on answer sheets where the answers were changed from wrong to right, suggesting deliberate interference by teachers, principals or other administrators.
Experts said it could become one of the largest cheating scandals in the era of widespread standardized testing.
“This is the biggest erasure problem I’ve ever seen,” said Gregory J. Cizek, a testing expert at the University of North Carolina who has studied cheating. “This doesn’t suggest that it was just kids randomly changing their answers, it suggests a pattern of unethical behavior on the part of either kids or educators.”
The Temptation to Cheat in Computer Science Classes at Stanford
Ryan Mac, via a kind reader’s email:
n January, on the first day of the Computer Science 106A: Program Methodology course at Stanford University, Eric Roberts, the professor, began with his customary admonition: Cheat, and you will be caught. And, he added: Cheat, and your classmates will suffer. More weight will be given to the final exam when calculating the final grade.
These are not idle threats in a department where it may be easy to cheat (cut, paste some code, voila!) but it is just as easy to detect cheating. (It is the computer science department, after all). Jay de la Torre, a senior, was caught and has been suspended this quarter as part of his punishment. Mr. de la Torre was taking the computer science class for a second time in his junior year when he cheated. After he was disciplined, he resigned from his position as student body vice president in November, The Stanford Daily reported.
“I wasn’t even thinking of how it easy it would for me to be caught,” he said.
Shylock, My Students, and Me: What I’ve learned from 30 years of teaching The Merchant of Venice
I have been teaching literature for 30 years, and the longer I teach, the more I enjoy teaching Shakespeare. As I grow older and wearier, his plays seem to deliver greater matter and art in a more condensed and lively way than any other text I could choose. To be clichéd about it: Shakespeare offers more bang for the buck.
While Shakespeare now draws me more than ever before, one work in particular draws me most. This is The Merchant of Venice. For me, this extraordinary play grows increasingly subtle and supple with time. It continues to excite me with its language, its depth of character, and its philosophical, political, spiritual, and pedagogical implications. Looking back over my years of teaching the play, I see that the way it has been received by my students is an index to how our society has changed. I also see how much the play continues to push against established readings and to challenge even the most seemingly enlightened perspectives. The Merchant of Venice is both a mirror of our times and a means of transcending the bias of our times. It teaches how to teach.
My response to the play may be connected to the nature of my career in literature. I was exposed to highbrow literary criticism in the 1970s at elite undergraduate and graduate institutions. This was a time when multiculturalism was making inroads in academia but when progressive thinking coexisted with an ingrained snobbism regarding how literature should be taught and who should teach it.
At UW-Madison, unique short courses for students who farm
Unlike other undergrads on the UW-Madison campus, many of these students weren’t interested in taking AP chemistry or honors English in high school.
They may not have taken the ACT college entrance exam or cared much about grades. Their kingdom is the farm, not the classroom.
“I’ve never liked school that much,” said Brittney Muenster, 18, of Seymour, about 20 miles west of Green Bay. “I just never saw fit to go to school for four years.”
One of the university’s oldest programs, UW-Madison’s Farm and Industry Short Course has been offering Wisconsin’s future farmers like Muenster cutting-edge techniques during the non-growing season, November to March.
6th Annual AP Report to the Nation: Maryland Finishes #1
The College Board [1MB PDF file]:
Educators across the United States continue to enable a wider and more ethnically diverse proportion of students to achieve success in AP®. Significant inequities remain, however, which can result in traditionally underserved students not receiving the type of AP opportunities that can best prepare them for college success. The 6th Annual AP Report to the Nation uses a combination of state, national and AP Program data to provide each U.S. state with the context it can use to celebrate its successes, understand its unique challenges, and set meaningful and data-driven goals to prepare more students for success in college.
Any merit to National Merit program?
Jonathan Reider via Valeria Strauss:
I have long wondered why the National Merit scholarship program had so much cache, given the criteria necessary for winning.
The program is a competition in which kids become eligible if they do well on the PSAT, or Preliminary SAT/National Merit Scholarship Qualifying Test, which is generally taken in 11th grade though some students take it earlier. Any regular reader to this blog will know that I do not look kindly on anything in education that relies on the a single standardized test score.
Here is a critique of the program that I recently read and wanted to share. It was written by Jonathan Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School, in response to a list-serv query about how schools should display National Merit winners. His advice: Don’t.
Amid rising tuition costs and heavy debt burdens, college marketplace lacks consumer focus
MassINC, C. Anthony Broh & Dana Ansel:
Rising college costs have Americans making greater sacrifices to get their degrees. In 2008, families took on more than $86 billion in college loans and the average undergraduate finished school with more than $23,000 in debt. Higher education is now one of the most important investment decisions middle class Americans make. But far too often they’re lured to colleges with the most energetic tour guide, the biggest reputation for partying, or the highest ranking in the popular press.
These temptations win out because the choices are complicated and families aren’t getting the information they needed to make truly informed decisions. Beyond choosing a school, families trying to find the best savings plan or the least expensive loan also face complicated choices with insufficient information.
According to the new MassINC report, “When you look at the tuition prices that middle class families are facing, together with the debt burdens graduates are taking on, it is astounding that there is such little transparency in the higher education marketplace,” said Greg Torres, President of MassINC and Publisher of CommonWealth magazine. “By laying out a framework for how parents and students navigate this system, we hope to shed some light on what we can do to give more support to families making one of the biggest investments of their lives.”
Read the complete report here. CTRL – click to download the 2.0MB PDF file.
An Evaluation: Virtual Charter Schools
Wisconsin Legislative Audit Bureau:
Virtual charter schools are publicly funded nonsectarian schools that are exempt from many regulations that apply to traditional public schools and that offer the majority of their classes online. They began operating in Wisconsin during the 2002-03 school year. Pupils typically attend from their homes and communicate with teachers using e-mail, by telephone, or in online discussions. During the 2007-08 school year, 15 virtual charter schools enrolled 2,951 pupils. Most were high schools.
A Wisconsin Court of Appeals ruling in December 2007 prevented the Department of Public Instruction (DPI) from providing state aid payments to a virtual charter school through the open enrollment program, which allows pupils to attend public schools outside of their school districts of residence. 2007 Wisconsin Act 222, which was enacted to address concerns raised in the lawsuit, also required us to address a number of topics related to virtual charter schools. Therefore, we evaluated:
- enrollment trends, including the potential effects of a limit on open enrollment in virtual charter schools that was enacted in 2007 Wisconsin Act 222;
- virtual charter school operations, including attendance requirements, opportunities for social development and interaction, and the provision of special education and related services;
- funding and expenditures, including the fiscal effects of open enrollment on “sending” and “receiving” districts;
- teaching in virtual charter schools, including teacher licensing and pupil-teacher interaction; and
- academic achievement, including test scores and other measures, as well as pupils’, parents’, and teachers’ satisfaction with virtual charter schools.
Achievement gap
Ask about the signature achievements of George W. Bush’s eight years as president, and the No Child Left Behind Act is certain to be high on the list. The 2002 law made accountability a watchword in public school education. It aimed to evaluate the nation’s elementary and secondary schools based on student test scores and to hold schools, teachers and administrators to account for their success or failure in moving students to achieve proficiency targets for the classroom.
The law, which has been the subject of much debate and criticism from the start, is up for reauthorization this year. President Obama has made clear his intent to reshape the legislation and the federal role in public education. Not clear yet is what precisely he intends to do.
No Child Left Behind has been criticized fiercely for its heavy emphasis on yearly testing and the rating of schools as successes or failures on the basis of test scores. For teachers and school officials, one of the most contentious of the law’s requirements is that schools be able to show, from the test scores, that every student group is making adequate yearly progress, AYP. Repeated failure to make AYP results in penalties that include shutting down schools.
The law also set a deadline: that students be proficient in math and English by 2014, a goal Obama’s secretary of education, Arne Duncan, recently described as utopian.
Rigorous college-prep (AP) classes skyrocketing in Washington state
A decade ago, most Seattle-area high schools offered just a handful of rigorous classes that provided a way to earn college credit while supercharging a transcript. And only students with top grades were allowed to sign up.
But in 10 years, the intensive, fast-paced Advanced Placement (AP) classes have skyrocketed in this state.
In 2008, fully one-quarter of Washington public-school seniors took at least one AP test during their high-school years, compared with 10 percent in 1997. In some schools, almost every student takes an AP class in junior or senior year.
And other schools around the state are moving fast to add AP classes and expand participation, in part because college admissions officials say the demanding classes do a good job of preparing students for higher education.
Many schools are encouraging all students — not just the high achievers, but also average students and even those who struggle — to take AP classes or enroll in other rigorous programs such as the International Baccalaureate (IB).
Creativity & Accountability
Yong Zhao is back in receptive Seattle this week preaching his gospel of edu-innovation. The anti-standards, pro-creativity Zhao is a Chinese-born prof at Michigan State. Here’s his thesis in a nutshell:
In my new book Catching Up or Leading the Way, I mostly focus on issues facing education in the United States noting that the current education reform efforts, with their emphasis on standards, testing, and outcome-based (read test score-based) accountability, are unlikely to make Americans “globally competitive.”
Zhao and I like the same schools and probably share a similar vision for what a good education looks like and the benefits it provides students. We both agree that bad standards and tests badly applied is bad for kids.
But his anti-standards mantra strikes me as a bit irresponsible in the sense that he doesn’t grapple with accountability. We have NCLB because states were not fulfilling the good school promise–they ignored generations of chronic failure. The Department of Education is now grappling with a new accountability framework, one that is tight on goals and loose on means.
Widespread corruption among some of the mainland’s most ambitious academics has undermined the country’s scientific community but one man has made it his mission to expose the culprits and clean up the system
On January 16, Fang Shimin kicked off the new year with a recap of his top 10 news items of 2009. On his popular New Threads blog (www.xys.org), Fang, both respected and hated as the mainland’s self-appointed “science cop”, revisited a string of startling allegations: 12 university presidents and vice-presidents accused of plagiarism; a university president who claimed a leading scientific prize that was not rightfully his; two professors caught faking research results in an international journal; and a medical doctor who distorted the success rate for a new surgical procedure, which could have had serious health implications….
A Chicago High-Tech Alternative for Hollywood Hopefuls
House lights up!” proclaimed the silver-haired former lawyer who, with blue jeans, black T-shirt, black safari jacket and Nikes, looked oh-so Hollywood in an oh-so Chicago bastion, the Merchandise Mart.
As four understudies from the Second City comedy troupe entered the sound stage, they were trailed by film students climaxing three weeks of labor by taping a half-hour faux “Saturday Night Live.” It featured comedy sketches, droll pre-taped mock commercials and a live performance by Rhymefest, a hip hop artist.
The students get academic credit by handling sound, cameras, lights and the funny people, all with the help of professionals, and their polished handiwork, “Live at the Mart,” may soon be shown on NBC locally or nationally. It underscored the glitz, teamwork and market-driven pragmatism at the core of Chicago’s Flashpoint Academy of Media Arts and Sciences, one of the country’s most curious and disorienting educational institutions.
Imagine Pixar, Disney, Nintendo and Dreamworks all melded into a vocational setting. Started in 2007, this is a pricey ($25,000 a year) two-year school intended for those not motivated by high school, or brief college stays, but who are captivated by technology.
For Students at Risk, Early College Proves a Draw
Precious Holt, a 12th grader with dangly earrings and a SpongeBob pillow, climbs on the yellow school bus and promptly falls asleep for the hour-plus ride to Sandhills Community College.
When the bus arrives, she checks in with a guidance counselor and heads off to a day of college classes, blending with older classmates until 4 p.m., when she and the other seniors from SandHoke Early College High School gather for the ride home.
There is a payoff for the long bus rides: The 48 SandHoke seniors are in a fast-track program that allows them to earn their high-school diploma and up to two years of college credit in five years — completely free.
Until recently, most programs like this were aimed at affluent, overachieving students — a way to keep them challenged and give them a head start on college work. But the goal is quite different at SandHoke, which enrolls only students whose parents do not have college degrees.
Here, and at North Carolina’s other 70 early-college schools, the goal is to keep at-risk students in school by eliminating the divide between high school and college.
“We don’t want the kids who will do well if you drop them in Timbuktu,” said Lakisha Rice, the principal. “We want the ones who need our kind of small setting.”
Once again, the MMSD and State of WI are going in the wrong direction regarding education. Much more on “Credit for non-MMSD courses.
Relevant to Them
North Carolina has dropped the teaching of United States History before 1877 for its public high school students. Quite a number of U.S. History teachers have argued for years that they should have two years for the subject, but North Carolina has just dropped year one.
One argument they advance for doing this is that it will make our history “more relevant” to their students because it will be “closer” to their own lives.
The logical end of this approach will be, I suppose, to constrict the teaching of U.S. History to the latest results for American Idol.
This is just one more egregious consequence of the flight from academic knowledge in our schools.
One of the authors published in The Concord Review wrote more than 13,000 words on Anne Hutchinson, who not only lived before the student did, but even lived and died more than two centuries before 1877. How was this possible? The public high school student (who later graduated summa cum laude from Yale and won a Rhodes Scholarship) read enough about Anne Hutchinson so that her life became relevant enough to the student to let her write a long serious term paper about her.
For students who don’t read history, and don’t know any history from any other source, of course anything that happened “back then” seems not too relevant to their own lives, whether it is or not.
It is the job of the history teacher to encourage and require students to learn enough history so that what happened in the past is understood to be relevant, whether it is Roman Law, or Greek Philosophy, or the Han Dynasty, or the Glorious Revolution or our own.
If the student (and the teacher) has never read The Federalist Papers, then the whole process by which we formed a strong constitutional government will remain something of a mystery to them, and may indeed seem to be irrelevant to their own lives.
Kieran Egan quotes Bertrand Russell as saying: “the first task of education is to destroy the tyranny of the local and immediate over the child’s imagination.”
Now, the folks in North Carolina have not completely abandoned their high school history students to American Idol or to only those things that are local and immediate in North Carolina. After all, President Rutherford B. Hayes rarely appears on either local tv or MTV, so it will be a job for teachers to make Rutherfraud seem relevant to their lives. Students will indeed have to learn something about the 1870s and even the 1860s, perhaps, before that time will come to seem at all connected to their own.
But the task of academic work is not to appeal to a student’s comfortable confinement to his or her own town, friends, school, and historical time.
Academic work, most especially history, opens the student to the wonderful and terrible events and the notable human beings of the ages. To confine them to what is relevant to them before they do academic work is to attempt to shrink their awareness of the world to an unforgivable degree.
North Carolina has not done that, of course. If they had made an effort to teach United States history in two years, or perhaps, if they decided to allow only one year, many will feel that they should have chosen Year One, instead of starting with Rutherford B. Hayes. These are curricular arguments worth having.
But in no case should educators be justified in supporting academic work that requires less effort on the part of students to understand what is different from them, whether it is Cepheid variable stars, or Chinese characters, or the basics of molecular biology, or calculus, or the proceedings of an American meeting in Philadelphia in 1787.
Our job as educators is to open the whole world of learning to them, to see that they make serious efforts in it, and not to allow them to confine themselves to the ignorance with which they arrive into our care.
Easy = True How ‘cognitive fluency’ shapes what we believe, how we invest, and who will become a supermodel
Imagine that your stockbroker – or the friend who’s always giving you stock tips – called and told you he had come up with a new investment strategy. Price-to-earnings ratios, debt levels, management, competition, what the company makes, and how well it makes it, all those considerations go out the window. The new strategy is this: Invest in companies with names that are very easy to pronounce.
This would probably not strike you as a great idea. But, if recent research is to be believed, it might just be brilliant.
One of the hottest topics in psychology today is something called “cognitive fluency.” Cognitive fluency is simply a measure of how easy it is to think about something, and it turns out that people prefer things that are easy to think about to those that are hard. On the face of it, it’s a rather intuitive idea. But psychologists are only beginning to uncover the surprising extent to which fluency guides our thinking, and in situations where we have no idea it is at work.
Psychologists have determined, for example, that shares in companies with easy-to-pronounce names do indeed significantly outperform those with hard-to-pronounce names. Other studies have shown that when presenting people with a factual statement, manipulations that make the statement easier to mentally process – even totally nonsubstantive changes like writing it in a cleaner font or making it rhyme or simply repeating it – can alter people’s judgment of the truth of the statement, along with their evaluation of the intelligence of the statement’s author and their confidence in their own judgments and abilities. Similar manipulations can get subjects to be more forgiving, more adventurous, and more open about their personal shortcomings.
Divided Attention: In an age of classroom multitasking, scholars probe the nature of learning and memory
Imagine that driving across town, you’ve fallen into a reverie, meditating on lost loves or calculating your next tax payments. You’re so distracted that you rear-end the car in front of you at 10 miles an hour. You probably think: Damn. My fault. My mind just wasn’t there.
By contrast, imagine that you drive across town in a state of mild exhilaration, multitasking on your way to a sales meeting. You’re drinking coffee and talking to your boss on a cellphone, practicing your pitch. You cause an identical accident. You’ve heard all the warnings about cellphones and driving–but on a gut level, this wreck might bewilder you in a way that the first scenario didn’t. Wasn’t I operating at peak alertness just then? Your brain had been aroused to perform several tasks, and you had an illusory sense that you must be performing them well.
That illusion of competence is one of the things that worry scholars who study attention, cognition, and the classroom. Students’ minds have been wandering since the dawn of education. But until recently–so the worry goes–students at least knew when they had checked out. A student today who moves his attention rapid-fire from text-messaging to the lecture to Facebook to note-taking and back again may walk away from the class feeling buzzed and alert, with a sense that he has absorbed much more of the lesson than he actually has.
New Chef Will Help Pastry Level to Rise
New Chef Will Help Pastry Level to Rise
Restaurants like Charlie Trotter’s, Tru and Per Se all have alumni of the French Pastry School in their kitchens.
Chicago has long attracted ambitious immigrants from all corners of the world. World champion bakers from tiny Alsatian villages are not usually among them.
Pierre Zimmermann may well be the first when he arrives in August to join the faculty of Chicago’s French Pastry School. Mr. Zimmermann stands out in the tightly-knit and highly competitive international baking scene as the latest in four generations of his family who have run a boulangerie-patisserie in Schnersheim.
Mr. Zimmermann, 45, won the World Cup of Baking as a member of France’s gold medal team at the 1996 Coupe du Monde de laBoulangerie and coached France’s 2008 World Cup of Baking championship team.
The pedigree, and Mr. Zimmermann’s deft touch with a baguette, made him such an attraction that the Loop school pursued him for four years.
That he chose to give up his job as “the little baker of my village,” as he put it in a recent e-mail translated from French, is a testament to Chicago’s importance among food cognoscenti and the French Pastry School’s growing reputation.
Ohio State President Challenges Faculty Tenure
COLUMBUS, Ohio – The leader of the country’s largest university thinks it’s time to re-examine how professors are awarded tenure, a type of job-for-life protection virtually unknown outside academia.
Ohio State University President Gordon Gee says the traditional formula that rewards publishing in scholarly journals over excellence in teaching and other contributions is outdated and too often favors the quantity of a professor’s output over quality.
“Someone should gain recognition at the university for writing the great American novel or for discovering the cure for cancer,” he told The Associated Press. “In a very complex world, you can no longer expect everyone to be great at everything.”
Plenty of people have raised the issue over the years, but Gee is one of the few American college presidents with the reputation and political prowess — not to mention the golden touch at fundraising — who might be able to begin the transformation.
Still, some professors are already skeptical.
The best way to guide your teenager through the high-risk years.
Our last article summarized the current state of research on teens and risk. That research demonstrates that teenagers do not suffer from some special inability to reason. Larry Steinberg and other researchers explain the steep rise in risk-taking behavior that comes with puberty by elaborating the interplay between two brain systems. The social-emotional system, which develops robustly in early adolescence, seeks out rewarding experiences, especially the sensation afforded by novel and risky behavior, and is also activated by the presence of peers. The cognitive-control system, which undergoes its great burst of development in later adolescence, evaluates and governs the impulses of the social-emotional system.
During the years of greatest risk-taking, which peak somewhere around the age of 16 and during which the presence of peers greatly increases risk-taking, the adolescent brain is like a car with a powerful accelerator (the sensation- and peer-seeking social-emotional system) and weak brakes (the risk-containing cognitive-control system). That being the case, it’s clear why some common approaches to reducing risk-taking by teenagers–explaining why drunk driving is dangerous, asking them to pledge to abstain from premarital sex–don’t work very well.
Professor heads for the Hill to promote science education
Influencing practice and policy in science education is what drives ASU’s Julie Luft and has led to her distinguished service to K-12 science teacher education and renowned research contributions to the field. She considers her recent call from Congress to testify about the status and future of science education to be among her most notable achievements.
Luft delivered her first-time testimony before the House Commerce, Justice, and Science Subcommittee at the STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) Education Hearings that took place Feb. 3-4. She was joined by Craig Strang, associate director of the Lawrence Hall of Science at University of California-Berkeley.
The purpose of the hearing was to inform Congressional subcommittee members about the status and future direction of STEM education in the K-12 sector. STEM education is considered vital to maintaining the United States’ leadership in the rapidly advancing world of science and technology. In her testimony, Luft emphasized the importance of inquiry in teacher education and professional development, and the need for more federal funding to support science organizations involved in research and development. She also stressed the unintended consequences of the federal No Child Left Behind legislation, which has limited the amount of inquiry-based instruction in K-12 science classrooms.
Failure rate for AP tests climbing
The number of students taking Advanced Placement tests hit a record high last year, but the portion who fail the exams — particularly in the South — is rising as well, a USA TODAY analysis finds.
Students last year took a record 2.9 million exams through the AP program, which challenges high school students with college-level courses. Passing the exams (a score of 3 or higher on the point scale of 1 to 5) may earn students early college credits, depending on a college’s criteria.
MARYLAND: A model in AP access, achievement.
The findings about the failure rates raise questions about whether schools are pushing millions of students into AP courses without adequate preparation — and whether a race for higher standards means schools are not training enough teachers to deliver the high-level material.
Jay Matthews has more.
Madison High School 2010-2011 Course Catalogs
A Little Fiction
Will Fitzhugh
The Concord Review
February 3, 2010
I got a call the other day from the head football coach at one of the larger state universities.
He said, after the usual greetings, “I’ve got some real problems.”
“Like what?” I asked.
“The players I am getting now are out of shape, they don’t know how to block or tackle, then can’t read the playbook and they can’t follow their assignments.”
“That does sound bad. What is your record this season?”
“The teams we play seem to have similar problems, so all our games are pretty sad affairs, ending in scoreless ties.”
“Also,” he told me, “During breaks in practice, most of them are text-messaging their friends, and almost half of them just drop out of college after a year or two !”
“Have you talked to any of the high school coaches who send you players?”
“No, I don’t know them.”
“Have you visited any of the high school games or practices?”
“No, I really don’t have time for that sort of thing.”
“Well, have you heard there is a big new push for Common National Athletic Standards?”
“No, but do you think that will help solve my problems? Are they really specific this time, for a change?”
“Absolutely,” I said. “They want to require high school students, before they graduate, to be able to do five sit-ups, five pushups, and to run 100 yards without stopping. They also recommend that students spend at least an hour a week playing catch with a ball!”
“That is a start, I guess, but I don’t think it will help me much with my problem. My U.S. players have just not been prepared at all for college football. I have a couple of immigrant kids, from Asia and Eastern Europe, who are in good shape, have been well coached at the secondary level, and they have a degree of motivation to learn and determination to do their best that puts too many of our local kids to shame.”
“Well,” I said, “what do you think of the idea of getting to know some of the coaches at the high schools which are sending you players, and letting them know the problems that you are having?”
“I could do that, I guess, but I don’t know any of them, and we never meet, and I am really too busy at my level, when it comes down to it, to make that effort.”
[If we were talking about college history professors, this would not be fiction. They do complain about the basic knowledge of their students, and their inability to read books and write term papers. But like their fictional coaching counterpart, they never talk to high school history teachers (they don’t know any), they never visit their classrooms, and they satisfy themselves with criticizing the students they get from the admissions office. Their interest in National Common Academic Standards does not extend to their suggesting that high school students should read complete nonfiction books and write a serious research paper every year. In short, they, like the fictional head coach, don’t really care if students are so poorly prepared for college that half of them drop out, and that most of them do not arrive on campus prepared to do college work. They are really too busy, you see…]
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“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
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®
Union officials are disturbingly inflexible toward charter schools
IT IS HARD to square the words of American Federation of Teachers (AFT) President Randi Weingarten with the actions of many of her union’s officials. Even as Ms. Weingarten issues stirring calls for new ways of thinking, labor leaders in places such as New York use their political muscle to block important reforms. Perhaps they don’t think that she means business, or maybe they don’t care; either way, it is the interests of students that are being harmed.
The United Federation of Teachers (UFT), the AFT affiliate that represents teachers in New York City, led the opposition to legislation favored by Gov. David A. Paterson (D) that would have lifted the state’s cap on charter schools. Mr. Paterson, backed by New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, had hoped to better position the state for up to $700 million in federal education dollars. The Obama administration has made clear that states that deny parents choice in where their children go to school by limiting the growth of these increasingly popular independent public schools will be penalized in the national competition for $4.35 billion in Race to the Top funds.
Want To Know More About STEM?
y husband decided to send me a couple of links to various STEM articles which then led me to even more interesting links. If you are interested in this subject from a state and national level, here are some links. Happy reading!
Apparently, Ohio is waaay ahead on this stuff so many of this articles are about different projects in that state.
- From Government Technology magazine, an article about a new STEM school in Ohio.
- From the University of Cincinnati (a key sponsor of a lot of these schools), an article about FUSION (Furthering Urban STEM Innovation, Outreach and New Research).
A Talk with Ellie Schatz: WCATY Founder and Author of “Grandma Says It’s Good to be Smart”
I enjoyed meeting and talking with Ellie Schatz recently. Listen to the conversation via this 17MB mp3 audio file CTRL-Click to download or read the transcript. Parent and activist Schatz founded WCATY and is, most recently author of “Grandma Says it’s Good to Be Smart“.
I enjoyed visiting with Ellie and found the conversation quite illuminating. Here’s a useful segment from the 37 minute interview:
Jim: What’s the best, most effective education model these days? Obviously, there are traditional schools. There are virtual schools. There are chartered schools. There are magnets. And then there’s the complete open-enrollment thing. Milwaukee has it, where the kids can go wherever they want, public or private, and the taxes follow.
Ellie: [32:52] I think there’s no one best model from the standpoint of those models that you just named. [32:59] What is important within any one of those models is that a key player in making that education available to your child believes that no matter how good the curriculum, no matter how good the model, the children they are about to serve are different, that children are not alike.
[33:30] And that they will have to make differences in the curriculum and in the way the learning takes place for different children.
[33:45] And I have experienced that myself. I’ve served on the boards of several private schools here in the city, and I have given that message: “This may be an excellent curriculum, and I believe it’s an excellent curriculum. But that’s not enough.”
[34:05] You cannot just sit this curriculum down in front of every child in the classroom and say, “We’re going to turn the pages at the same time, and we’re going to write the answers in the same way.” It does not work that way. You must believe in individually paced education.
[34:24] And that’s why I say the WCATY model cannot change. If it’s going to accomplish what I set out for WCATY to do, it must be accelerated from the nature of most of the curriculum that exists out there for kids today.
Thanks to Rick Kiley for arranging this conversation.
A Tougher ‘A’ at Princeton Has Students on Edge
Jacques Steinberg, via a kind reader’s email:
p>Lisa Foderaro writes in The Times’s Metropolitan section that efforts by Princeton University to curb grade inflation are “now running into fierce resistance from the school’s Type-A-plus student body.”
The university had hoped that other institutions would follow its lead in making it harder for students to earn an A. “But the idea never took hold beyond Princeton’s walls,” Ms. Foderaro writes, adding: “with the job market not what it once was, even for Ivy Leaguers, Princetonians are complaining that the campaign against bulked-up G.P.A.’s may be coming at their expense.”
How much tougher is it to earn an A at Princeton? The percentage of grades in the A range fell below40 percent last year, compared to nearly 50 percent in 2004, when the policy was adopted.
In nearly 100 comments and counting, reader response on the issue of grade inflation has been fierce. For a sense of how one important arbiter — Yale Law School — interprets undergraduate grades, I draw your attention to this comment, from Asha Rangappa, the dean of Yale Law (and a Princeton graduate.) — Jacques
Who Owns Student Work?
A number of years ago, curious about the ownership of student work produced in a class, I asked a lawyer friend who specializes in art and design copyright law if schools had the right to reproduce student work in their recruitment publicity without the students’ permission. He informed me that the student, despite advice from faculty who may have shaped the work, owns the work and that written permission must be secured before it could be reproduced. He also said such works could be considered student records and recruitment results in some benefit to the institution that exceeds any reading of the “fair use” practices of educational institutions (i.e. those that might be applied to the use of lecture slides for a class).
This reading of the law is at odds with the prevailing opinion of many schools that the student would not have produced work of a particular quality under his or her own resources, and therefore, that faculty have some “ownership rights” in the output of any class. Since that time I have been very careful to ask students first about any public use of their work, even in lectures I give at other schools, and I always credit the work with their names and give students the details on the presentation venues for their resumes. My lawyer friend told me that statements in college catalogs claiming that the institution retains ownership of work produced in a class wouldn’t hold up in court; unless the maker is an employee of the institution/company or has signed away rights through some explicit agreement, ownership is retained by the maker. Other attorneys may have different interpretations, and I don’t profess to be a legal expert, but the ownership of work produced by students is certainly something to think about.
Finding the Better High School
On the second page of the Post’s Metro section, and on this Web site, you see the results of the 12th annual Washington Post survey of high school student participation in college-level tests, what I call the Challenge Index.
The ranked list of public schools — both the Washington area version in the Post and the national version in Newsweek each June — gets lots of attention, but the outrage and acclaim usually swirls around the issue of whether ranking schools is good for you. With much support from Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate teachers around the country, I think it is. But how can you use it?
I invented the list to show that some schools in good neighborhoods don’t deserve their great reputations, and some schools in poor neighborhoods don’t deserve their terrible ones. Opening up AP and IB courses to everyone who wants to work hard — the philosophy of the teachers who inspired me to do this — is a relatively new idea. Ten years ago, most schools in the United States did not let students take these courses unless they had strong grade point averages or teachers’ recommendations.
Why Students Fail AP Tests
My column last week about how to reveal the secrets of which teacher is getting the best Advanced Placement results received many more comments than I expected. This was, I thought, a topic only for insiders, AP obsessives like me. I forgot, once again, that college-level exams have become a rite of passage for at least a third of American high schoolers, with that proportion increasing every year.
The column provided links to the several local school districts that have posted the subject-by-subject AP results for each school. I was shocked that any were doing it, since five years ago when I asked about this, few school officials had given it much thought. Since the AP tests are written and graded by outside experts, a teacher who does not challenge his students in class is likely to have lots of low scores on that school report, which until now hardly anyone had a chance to see.
Many thought I glossed over the effects of opening up AP courses to anyone who wants to get a useful taste of college trauma, sort of like camping in the back yard before your dad takes you to the Sierras. Enough mediocre students have enrolled in AP, and a similar program International Baccalaureate, to lower average scores even in the classes of the best teachers.
Nokia, Pearson Set Up Digital Education Joint Venture In China
Nokia and education company Pearson have formed a joint venture in China dubbed Beijing Mobiledu Technologies to grow MobilEdu, the wireless education service that the Finnish mobile giant launched in China back in 2007.
Mobiledu is a mobile service that essentially provides English-language learning materials and other educational content, from a variety of content providers, directly to mobile phones.
Customers can access the content through an application preloaded on new Nokia handsets, or by visiting the service’s mobile website and most other WAP portals in China.
According to Nokia, Mobiledu has attracted 20 million subscribers in China so far, with 1.5 million people actively using the service each month. According to the press release and by mouth of John Fallon, Chief Executive of Pearson’s International Education business, China is the world’s largest mobile phone market and the country with the largest number of people learning English.
There are many ways to learn, not all of them require traditional methods or expensive “professional development”.
New Critiques on the Proposed “Common Core” English & Math Standards
via a kind reader. Math 627K PDF:
This document provides grade level standards for mathematics in grades K-8, and high school standards organized under the headings of the College and Career Readiness Standards in Mathematics. Students reaching the readiness level described in that document (adjusted in response to feedback) will be prepared for non-remedial college mathematics courses and for training programs for career-level jobs. Recognizing that most students and parents have higher aspirations, and that ready for college is not the same as ready for mathematics-intensive majors and careers, we have included in this document standards going beyond the readiness level. Most students will cover these additional standards. Students who want the option of entering STEM fields will reach the readiness level by grade 10 or 11 and take precalculus or calculus before graduating from high school. Other students will go beyond readiness through statistics to college. Other pathways can be designed and available as long as they include the readiness level. The final draft of the K-12 standards will indicate which concepts and skills are needed to reach the readiness level and which go beyond. We welcome feedback from states on where that line should be drawn.
English Language Learners in Mathematics Classrooms
English language learners (ELLs) must be held to the same high standards expected of students who are already proficient in English. However, because these students are acquiring English language proficiency and content area knowledge concurrently, some students will require additional time and all will require appropriate instructional support and aligned assessments.
ELLs are a heterogeneous group with differences in ethnic background, first language, socio-economic status, quality of prior schooling, and levels of English language proficiency. Effectively educating these students requires adjusting instruction and assessment in ways that consider these factors. For example ELLs who are literate in a first language that shares cognates with English can apply first-language vocabulary knowledge when reading in English; likewise ELLs with high levels of schooling can bring to bear conceptual knowledge developed in their first language when reading in a second language. On the other hand, ELLs with limited or interrupted schooling will need to acquire background knowledge prerequisite to educational tasks at hand. As they become acculturated to US schools, ELLs who are newcomers will need sufficiently scaffolded instruction and assessments to make sense of content delivered in a second language and display this content knowledge.
English Language Arts 3.6MB PDF
Catherine Gewertz:
A draft of grade-by-grade common standards is undergoing significant revisions in response to feedback that the outline of what students should master is confusing and insufficiently user-friendly.
Writing groups convened by the Council of Chief State School Officers and the National Governors Association are at work on what they say will be a leaner, better-organized, and easier-to-understand version than the 200-plus-page set that has been circulating among governors, scholars, education groups, teams of state education officials, and others for review in recent weeks. The first public draft of the standards, which was originally intended for a December release but was postponed until January, is now expected by mid-February.
Have things (Math Education) really changed that much? A letter to a friend.
You ask whether things have changed — since math wasn’t being taught well 40+ years ago either. You’re absolutely right on that, but I believe it’s only gotten worse over the years, as more and more math phobic people have gone into the field of education. These people never understood math well, so their teaching had to be based on rote following of procedures, etc. Then came “new math”, which was an effort to reinvent math and make it more accessible. That bombed, and the efforts to reinvent continued.
What happened is that eventually those bright, math-phobic folks took over the education establishment. They reinvented math to be gentler, kinder, and more fun. Some of the hallmarks are: Small group problem solving, with students figuring our their own solutions to challenging problems. Visiting many topics for only a few weeks each year and moving on, regardless of whether any real mastery was attained. The thinking was/is that students will revisit the topics again in successive years, and will painlessly absorb the concepts. This turns out to be an extremely inefficient way to teach math, so, in order to have enough time to do all these hands-on projects in groups, the explanation of the underlying structure of math and and practice with standard algorithms have all been chucked.
Discussing Rigor at Seattle’s Rainier Beach High School
I was reading the comments in an earlier post about the new assignment plan and there were many comments about the rigor or lack there of at Rainier Beach High School. I would like to dispel the myth that Rainier Beach does not offer rigor to the high achieving student. If you have a high achieving 8th grader and are in the RBHS attendance area, here is just a sample of what you can expect:
In math as a Freshman, you will start in at least Honors Geometry with Ms. Lessig who is our best math teacher. Once you get through that, you will take Honors Advanced Algebra with me, then Pre Calculus with Mr. Bird (a math major in college) and then as a Senior, you take AP Calculus with Ms. Day, a highly experienced and skilled teacher. As a bonus, in either your Junior or Senior year, you get to take AP Statistics with me. All of these classes are demanding and well taught by teachers who know what they are doing and are passionate about teaching math.
College Endowments In Jeopardy
David Randall & Asher Hawkins:
College and university endowments in the United States and Canada collectively lost $93 billion during the 2009 fiscal year, according to a study jointly released Thursday by the National Association of College and University Business Officers and the Commonfund, which manages investments for nonprofit institutions. In a sign of how deeply the pain was felt throughout higher education, the study found that the average institution lost 18.7% after fees.
The report’s findings were the grimmest since 1974, when the average college lost 11.4% of its endowment.
Our Flagship Universities Are Straying From Their Public Mission
Public flagship universities provide excellence to students who cannot afford high-quality private institutions. Yet many of these universities direct aid to wealthy students who will attend college without it. Meantime, many high-achieving minority and poor students wind up in lesser institutions or do not attend college at all. In fact, some low-income students who literally cannot afford to attend college without a grant must find a way to finance the equivalent of 70 percent of their family’s annual income. Some flagships are stepping up to the challenge and focusing on access and success. An account of their performance and progress appears at the end of this report.
Study: Online Education Continues Its Meteoric Growth
Online college education is expanding–rapidly. More than 4.6 million college students were taking at least one online course at the start of the 2008-2009 school year. That’s more than 1 in 4 college students, and it’s a 17 percent increase from 2007.
Turns out it’s the economy, stupid.
Two major factors for the soaring numbers in the 2008-2009 school year are the sour economy and the possibility of an H1N1 flu virus outbreak, according to the seventh annual Sloan Survey of Online Learning report, titled “Learning on Demand: Online Education in the United States in 2009.” But, the survey’s authors say, there is a lot more work to be done, and there’s huge potential for online education to expand, especially at larger schools.
“For the past several years, all of the growth–90-plus percent–is coming from existing traditional schools that are growing their current offerings,” says Jeff Seaman, one of the study’s authors and codirector of the Babson Survey Research Group at Babson College. Seaman’s coauthor, Elaine Allen, who is also a codirector of the Babson Survey Research Group, added that community colleges, for-profit schools, and master’s programs have seen significant growth in online offerings.
Georgia Tech president: No guns on campus
G.P. “Bud” Peterson, president of Georgia Tech, sat down with writers at the AJC today and made clear that he did not support the pending legislation in the Georgia General Assembly to allow guns on college campuses. (We talked about other education issues that I will write about later.)
Under a bill in the House, Georgia gun owners with conceal carry permits could bring their guns everywhere except the courthouse and the jailhouse. The restrictions on churches and campuses would be lifted.
Georgia Tech President Bud Peterson says “absolutely not” to guns on his campus in an interview Wednesday with the AJC
“Absolutely not,” said Peterson, who was appointed as the 11th president of Georgia Tech in April after serving as chancellor at the University of Colorado at Boulder and provost at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in New York. In addition, Peterson has held various positions at Texas A&M University and taught mathematics, physics and chemistry in Kansas.
In other words, this man has been around students and on campuses all his life and he doesn’t believe that guns will better protect students.
But let him do the talking.
Lawsuit Challenging the Seattle School District’s use of “Discovering Mathematics” Goes to Trial
Martha McLaren, DaZanne Porter, and Cliff Mass:
Today Cliff Mass and I, (DaZanne Porter had to be at a training in Yakima) accompanied by Dan Dempsey and Jim W, had our hearing in Judge Julie Spector’s King County Superior Courtroom; the event was everything we hoped for, and more. Judge Spector asked excellent questions and said that she hopes to announce a decision by Friday, February 12th.
The hearing started on time at 8:30 AM with several members of the Press Corps present, including KIRO TV, KPLU radio, Danny Westneat of the Seattle Times, and at least 3 others. I know the number because, at the end, Cliff, our attorney, Keith Scully, and I were interviewed; there were five microphones and three cameras pointed towards us at one point.
The hearing was brief; we were done by 9:15. Keith began by presenting our case very clearly and eloquently. Our two main lines of reasoning are, 1) that the vote to adopt Discovering was arbitrary and capricious because of the board’s failure to take notice of a plethora of testimony, data, and other information which raised red flags about the efficacy of the Discovering series, and 2) the vote violated the equal education rights of the minority groups who have been shown, through WASL scores, to be disadvantaged by inquiry based instruction.
Realistically, both of these arguments are difficult to prove: “arbitrary and capricious” is historically a very, very difficult proof, and while Keith’s civil rights argument was quite compelling, there is no legal precedent for applying the law to this situation.
The School District’s attorney, Shannon McMinimee, did her best, saying that the board followed correct procedure, the content of the books is not relevant to the appeal, the books do not represent inquiry-based learning but a “balanced” approach, textbooks are merely tools, etc., etc. She even denigrated the WASL – a new angle in this case. In rebuttal, Keith was terrific, we all agreed. He quoted the introduction of the three texts, which made it crystal clear that these books are about “exploration.” I’m blanking on other details of his rebuttal, but it was crisp and effective. Keith was extremely effective, IMHO. Hopefully, Dan, James, and Cliff can recall more details of the rebuttal.
A lawsuit challenging the Seattle School District’s math curriculum went to trial Monday in King County Superior Court.
A group of parents and teachers say the “Discovering Math” series adopted last year does a poor job, especially with minority students who are seeing an achievement gap widen.
A spokeswoman for the Seattle School District, Teresa Wippel, says it has no comment on pending litigation.
KOMO-TV reports the district has already spent $1.2 million on Discovering Math books and teacher training.
On Tuesday, January 26th, at 8:30 AM, King County Superior Court Judge Julie Spector will consider an appeal by a group of Seattle residents (including yours truly) regarding the selection by Seattle Public Schools of the Discovering Math series in their high schools. Although this issue is coming to a head in Seattle it influences all of you in profound ways.
In this appeal we provide clear evidence that the Discovery Math approach worsens the achievement gap between minority/disadvantaged students and their peers. We show that the Board and District failed to consider key evidence and voluminous testimony, and acted arbitrarily and capriciously by choosing a teaching method that was demonstrated to produce a stagnant or increasing achievement gap. We request that the Seattle Schools rescind their decision and re-open the textbook consideration for high school.
A study in intellectual uniformity: The Marketplace of Ideas By Louis Menand
As his title hints, Louis Menand has written a business book. This is good, since the crisis in American higher education that the Harvard professor of English addresses is a business crisis. The crisis resembles the more celebrated one in the US medical system. At its best, US education, like US healthcare, is of a quality that no system in the world can match. However, the two industries have developed similar problems in limiting costs and keeping access open. Both industries have thus become a source of worry for public-spirited citizens and a punchbag for political opportunists.
Menand lowers the temperature of this discussion. He neither celebrates nor bemoans the excesses of political correctness – the replacement of Keats by Toni Morrison, or of Thucydides by queer theory. Instead, in four interlocking essays, he examines how university hiring and credentialing systems and an organisational structure based on scholarly disciplines have failed to respond to economic and social change. Menand draws his idea of what an American university education can be from the history of what it has been. This approach illuminates, as polemics cannot, two grave present-day problems: the loss of consensus on what to teach undergraduates and the lack of intellectual diversity among the US professoriate.
Much of today’s system, Menand shows, can be traced to Charles William Eliot, president of Harvard for four decades after 1869. Faced with competition from pre-professional schools, Eliot had the “revolutionary idea” of strictly separating liberal arts education from professional education (law, medicine, etc), and making the former a prerequisite for the latter. Requiring a lawyer to spend four years reading, say, Molière before he can study for the bar has no logic. Such a system would have made it impossible for Abraham Lincoln to enter public life. Funny, too, that the idea of limiting the commanding heights of the professions to young men of relative leisure arose just as the US was filling up with penurious immigrants. Menand grants that the system was a “devil’s bargain”.
Clusty Search: Louis Menand – “The Marketplace of Ideas”.
Honor student world: Where all the students are above average
Here is an interesting op-ed piece by a tenured professor of biology at Piedmont College, Robert H. Wainberg. He is alarmed because he has been told by former students who are now teachers that some schools no longer hold Honors Day to recognize the accomplishments of above average and exemplary students so they don’t hurt the feelings of kids who don’t earn awards.
This piece will appear in the paper on the education page Monday. Enjoy.
By Robert H.Wainberg:I have been a professor of Biology and Biochemistry at a regional college for over two decades. Sadly, I have noticed a continual deterioration in the performance of my students during this time. In part I have attributed it to the poor study habits of the last few generations (X, XX and now XXX) who have relied too heavily on technology in lieu of thinking for themselves.
In fact, the basics are no longer taught in our schools because they are considered to be “too hard,” not because they are archaic or antiquated. For example, students are no longer required to learn the multiplication or division tables since they direct access to calculators in their phones.
Handwriting script and calligraphy are now in danger of extinction since computers use printed letters. A report I recently read disturbingly admitted that many of our standardized tests used for college admission or various professional schools (MCAT, LSAT and GRE) have to manipulate their normal bell-shaped curves to obtain the higher averages of decadtudenes ago.
What we fail to realize is that the concept of “survival of the fittest” still applies even within the realm of technology. There will always be those who are more “adapted” to the full potential of its use while others will be stalled at the level of downloading music or playing games.
Ah, yes. One size fits all education uber alles.
Advanced Pressure
The filmmaker Vicki Abeles features the stories of students and teachers of Advanced Placement classes and the pressures they face in our achievement-obsessed culture.
Freshmen applications to selective area colleges surge
High school seniors are applying to selective colleges around Washington in record numbers this year, particularly to schools with reputations for meeting the full financial needs of admitted freshmen. The trend suggests that the weak economy has driven applicants to schools that offer a bigger bang for the tuition buck.
A surge in applications is not what admission deans expected this year, after a fiscal downturn and a flattening population of college-age students.
But applications to Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore are up 13 percent over last year, with a projected pool of 18,150 students competing for 1,235 seats in the freshman class. The University of Richmond received 8,500 applications for 805 slots, a 9 percent increase. Applications are up 6 percent at Washington and Lee University in Lexington, Va., and 3 percent at George Washington University in the District. The University of Virginia fielded 22,396 applications, an all-time high. The College of William and Mary, too, expects a record number of applicants.
“It shouldn’t be happening, should it?” said Bill Hartog, dean of admissions at Washington and Lee. “My take on it is, financial aid, financial aid, financial aid.”
