The brainchild of Memphis businessman Robert Compton, Two Million Minutes takes its title from the amount of time most students spend in high school absorbing, one hopes, enough math, science, literature and history to compete in an increasingly flat, competitive world.
It contrasts Brittany’s and Neil’s easy suburban lives with those of two Indian teenagers and two Chinese teenagers, making the case that the foreign students are just plain hungrier for success.
“You just want to shake America and say, ‘Wake up. We are falling behind daily,’ ” Compton says.
And Two Million Minutes finds plenty to be worried about: not enough study or homework time, not enough parental pressure, not enough focus on math or engineering. American teens, it argues, are preoccupied with sports, after-school jobs and leisure.
The film repeatedly contrasts foreign students’ drive with what seems like American cluelessness: In one scene, Chinese 17-year-old Hu Xiaoyuan diligently practices the violin — then we cut to bone-crunching rock ‘n’ roll and the Friday night lights of Carmel’s top-ranked football team.
In another, an Indian science teacher explains an experiment to students, then snaps, “Why are you standing simply there?”
But the scene that seems to get audiences worked up most shows Brittany and friends watching Grey’s Anatomy as they study.
Kiddie tax bites many families in ’07 – 18-year-olds off hook for now
If you have a child who turned 18 in 2007, you are in luck, taxwise. But that’s the only bright spot for families burdened by what is called the kiddie tax.
The tax is, in effect, a penalty on parents who saved for their child’s college by putting money into custodial accounts at a time when today’s tax-free education savings vehicles weren’t widely available or used.
“It has ruined wonderful planning people have been doing for years, people who were thinking ahead, who gave their child income-producing assets they would use when the kid went to school,” said Harvey Aaron, senior tax manager at Braver PC in Newton, Mass., and director of tax services at Braver Wealth Management.
Here’s how the kiddie tax works: If a child is under 18, he or she is allowed to have $1,700 in unearned income – nonwage income such as dividends and interest on investments – before the kiddie tax kicks in. (There’s no tax on the child’s income of $850 or less, and the next $850 in income is taxed at the child’s ordinary income tax rate, usually 10 or 15 percent.)
For unearned income over $1,700, the child’s tax is computed at the parent’s tax rate, which can be as high as 35 percent. A child who turned 18 in 2007 isn’t subject to the kiddie tax and will pay 2007 tax at his or her lower rate.
Beware The Second Transcript
For years now, college students have been busy committing themselves to extracurricular activities. On the whole, such commitment can be constructive. It contributes to civic engagement by the young and helps them to develop personal responsibility and character. Meanwhile, college officials claim that would-be employers are now demanding that colleges provide evidence that graduates are prepared to deal with real world issues and conflicts that will arise in the workplace. Many educators are starting to respond to this concern.
In recent days, the president of the University of Wisconsin system has risen to the occasion by proposing to the Board of Regents that students have two transcripts upon graduation. The first transcript would be the traditional one, which would list the classes the student took, and the grades that he or she received. The second transcript would depict what the Wisconsin State Journal described as “the student’s personal development during college, such as whether the student interned for a company, directed a play, or edited the student newspaper.” The University of Wisconsin system would be the national pioneer in this movement. This effort is supported by the Association of American Colleges and Universities, whose vice president recently said that companies seek graduates who can work “with diverse groups and have a sense of social responsibility and ethics,” according to the State Journal story.
According to Reilly, the university needs to institute this policy because business leaders want “workers who can work with diverse groups and have a sense of social responsibility and ethics,” according to the State Journal story. The second transcript would involve more than a typical resume. It would have to be approved by a faculty member, and show how the student’s experiences outside the classroom represented a meaningful application of the student’s classroom work. “We know when students get to the end of their time with us, employers and graduate school admissions officers want to know what you did besides get and A or B in philosophy,” Reilly told the State Journal. “We think this will capture some of the educational experience.”
via Erin O’Connor.
Wisconsin Bill Proposes to Grant Awards to add World Language Instruction in Grades One to Six
Lauren Rosen, via email:
Dear Colleagues,
I am writing to share that Senators Lassa, Schultz and Risser have introduced Senate Bill 466 cosponsored by Representatives Hebl, Musser, Hixson, Sheridan, Berceau, Cullen and Schneider. This bill, currently referred to the Committee on Education, proposes grant awards to school districts to add instruction in world languages other than English in grades one to six. This bill can be viewed at http://www.legis.state.wi.us/2007/data/SB-466.pdf. Please consider reviewing the bill, sharing this proposed legislation with others, and contacting your legislators to share your perspective and assess their position.
=====
I believe this is the golden opportunity for Madison to start keeping up with creating global citzens by supporting a bill that would allow us to request funds to start elementary school language programs. If MMSD doesn’t that too is a message from the school board that they really aren’t so interested in global citizens.
I can only hope that MMSD is willing to act on behalf of the interest of its community members with children in the schools.
The American Freshman: National Norms for Fall 2007
UCLA Higher Education Research Institute:
The responses of 272,036 first-time, full-time students at 356 colleges and universities in 2007 (out of 1.4 million such freshmen), reports that only 17.6% of incoming freshmen considered rankings "very important" in influencing their decision to attend a particular college or university — tenth out of fifteen factors:
- College has very good academic reputation 63.0%
- This college’s graduates get good jobs 51.9%
- A visit to the campus 40.4%
- I was offered financial assistance 39.4%
- Wanted to go to a college this size 38.9%
- College has a good reputation for social activities 37.1%
- The cost of attending this college 36.8%
- Grads get into good grad/professional schools 34.1%
- Wanted to live near home 19.2%
- Rankings in national magazines 17.6%
- Information from a website 17.0%
- Parents wanted me to go to this school 13.0%
- Admitted early decision and/or early action 11.4%
- Could not afford first choice 9.7%
- High school counselor advised me 9.0%
The study includes an interesting look at parent involvement.
Via Paul Caron.
One Dad’s Campaign to Save America
Bob Compton may be wrong about American students losing out to our hard-working Indian and Chinese competitors, but he is astonishingly sincere in his views. Even if his country doesn’t react to the international threat, he will. He has hired special tutors for his daughters, even though they already have top grades at a premier private school.
Compton, 52, is a high-tech entrepreneur and investor based in Memphis. His documentary film, “Two Million Minutes,” has become a key part of a campaign known as ED in ’08, which aims to push the next president toward big changes in U.S. schools. Compton and the ED in ’08 backers, including billionaire Bill Gates, support the growing movement for more instructional and study time. Compton’s message is that American kids are wasting much of their four years of high school–about 2 million minutes–on sports and jobs and television while Chinese and Indians are studying, studying some more and then checking in with their tutors to see what they still need to study.
I am not friendly to Compton’s argument. I think the Chinese and Indian threat to the American economy is a myth. I have been convinced by economists who argue that the more prosperous they are, the more prosperous we are, since they will have more money to buy our stuff. I also believe that prosperity in previously troubled countries such as China and India promotes democracy and peace.
I do, however, like Compton a lot, and agree with him that our high schools need to be much better–not in order to beat the international competition but to end the shame of having millions of low-income students not getting the education they deserve. I admire a dad who applies his arguments to his own life in ways I never would. He is significantly increasing the amount of time his children are devoting to their studies, whether they like it or not.
Minnesota pays to help high schoolers rack up college credits, but CLEP offer slow to catch on
Pass a free exam. Get college credit.
Seems like a sweet deal for Minnesota high school students looking to save money on college. But after operating for more than a year, state education officials are finding a lot fewer takers than they expected for the College-Level Examination Program.
About 900 tests have been taken since the state began paying the exam fee in 2006 – far fewer than the 5,000 initially projected for last year and 7,500 hoped for this year.
Part of the problem, officials say, is that CLEP toils in the shadows of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and other better-known options for high school students trying to get a jump on college credit.
Another issue: While the tests are recognized by some 2,900 schools across the country, including the Minnesota State Colleges and Universities system, the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities grants credit for only a few of the 34 CLEP exams and sets the bar for passing higher than other schools.
Despite low exam participation to date, officials say they’re buoyed by the jump in student interest last year – particularly from schools in greater Minnesota – and are trying to spread the word to high schools and home-schoolers about the opportunity. This school year, students have until June 30 to take as many as six CLEP exams paid for by the state, with the only cost being an administrative fee that runs about $15 to $25 per test.
Ballard Visits Madison
Robert Ballard spoke at Saturday’s Friends of UW Hospital & Clinic’s dinner. Ballard provided an interesting look at his work over the decades, which included some interesting education related comments:
- The joint Woods Hole – MIT Program apparently serves mostly foreign PhD. students (“we are educating our competitors”), which lead to
- The Jason Project,
- an attempt to create science and engineering interest in middle school students. Ballard said that if we’ve not generated such interest by the 8th grade, it is too late.
College: How to Pay the Tax-Favored Way
ENDLESS CHILDHOOD ISN’T GOOD for the psyche — or parents’ pocketbooks. For the second time in two years, the “kiddie tax,” which subjects a portion of children’s investment income to their parents’ rates, has been expanded; it now applies to offspring as old as 23.
The change first goes into effect for 2008 tax returns, so families should vet adaptive strategies now. The greatest impact likely will be felt by wealthy families who’ve transferred assets into their children’s names to take advantage of their kids’ lower tax brackets. But many will get hit simply because they saved diligently in their children’s names for college, says Ed Slott, a tax adviser in Rockville Centre, N.Y.
The kiddie tax doesn’t apply to 529 plans — tax-free investment accounts earmarked for college savings. But it does apply to custodial accounts, which many set up in their children’s names as college-savings vehicles before 529 plans’ creation in the mid-1990s.
Under kiddie-tax rules, a child’s unearned income of more than $1,800 (up from $1,700) is subject to the parents’ tax rates of up to 35% on interest and short-term capital gains, and 15% on long-term capital gains and most dividends. The first $900 of the child’s unearned income is tax-free; the second $900 is taxed at the child’s rates. Most children are in the 10% or 15% income tax bracket, and they would typically be subject to the lowest capital-gains tax rate, which this year has dropped to 0%, from 5%.
More on college expense tax credits here.
ACT required at Monona Grove
College-bound or not, all juniors at Monona Grove High School will spend more than four hours this spring filling in tiny bubbles as part of a mandatory ACT test.
District administrators say the school will be the first in the state to administer the college preparatory test to all juniors, and will foot the $11,000 bill.
Although not a novel idea — five states require the test of all juniors — the idea of using the ACT to better judge proficiency in areas such as reading, math and science appeals to other area districts.
“All students need to have college-readiness skills in areas like reading and math no matter what they plan to do after high school, ” said Bill Breisch, curriculum director for Monona Grove School District. “Graduating with college-readiness skills is no longer just for some of our high school students. ”
By requiring the test of juniors, the district is also offering college-bound students a year to get on track if their scores show them weak in a certain area, Breisch said. That way, seniors aren ‘t blindsided when they take the ACT and find out they have to take remedial math in college, he said.
Good grades pay off — literally
Teachers have long said that success is its own reward. But these days, some students are finding that good grades can bring them cash and luxury gifts.
In at least a dozen states this school year, students who bring home top marks can expect more than just gratitude. Examples:
•Baltimore schools chief Andres Alonso last week promised to spend more than $935,000 to give high school students as much as $110 each to improve their scores on state graduation exams.
•In New York City, about 9,000 fourth- and seventh-graders in 60 schools are eligible to win as much as $500 for improving their scores on the city’s English and math tests, given throughout the school year.
•In suburban Atlanta, a pair of schools last week kicked off a program that will pay 8th- and 11th-grade students $8 an hour for a 15-week “Learn & Earn” after-school study program (the federal minimum wage is currently $5.85).
93 Milwaukee Rufus King Students Present International Baccalaureate Papers
Three things to know about Mohammad Mohammad:
He’s a senior at Milwaukee’s Rufus King High School, he’s a good student, and he’s a big sports fan.
You can serve all that on a silver platter.
At least that’s what Mohammad did this week at a program honoring him and 92 fellow students for completing lengthy research papers as part of their work at the school.
The 3,000- to 4,000-word papers – “extended essays” – are required for students who want to receive the International Baccalaureate diploma. For those who complete such a paper – a process that begins in the spring of their junior years – it is a tradition to present the final product on a silver platter to the teacher who advised the student along the way, followed by the student and the teacher each commenting on what was learned.
The silver platter ceremony was held this week, and the 93 who presented their work are the largest group to complete the formidable research project in King’s nearly 30-year history as an IB school.
The topics they researched included matters from the worlds of science, history, art, religion and beyond. Daniel Gatewood, one of the advisers, said as he commented on one of his student’s papers, “I didn’t learn to write like this until graduate school.”
Mohammad said, “Every time I get one of these papers, I try to incorporate sports into it.” He chose as his topic the effects on American and Soviet psyches of the “Miracle on Ice” victory of the U.S. hockey team over the Russians at the 1980 Winter Olympics.
Links: International Baccalaureate website, Milwaukee Rufus King High School and Clusty search on the school.
Virginia Parents Resist Math “Investigations” Curriculum
A group of Prince William County parents is mounting a campaign to repeal a new elementary school math curriculum, using an Internet discussion group and an online petition to gather support and fuel criticism.
The group, whose members include parents from such elementary schools as Westridge, Ashland and Springwoods as well as teachers from various schools, plans to present the Prince William County School Board in February with its petition, which has about 500 names. Parents in the group, whose Web site ( http://www.pwcteachmathright.com) lists several of their complaints, say that the Investigations curriculum is putting their children behind grade level and is too convoluted.
The group’s formation comes right after the school system presented a year-long study of the curriculum that showed 80 percent of second-graders and 70 percent of first-graders are proficient on all 10 subtests of the Stanford Diagnostic Mathematics Test. The school system wants to continue studying the program and incorporate data from student performance on the state Standards of Learning exams.
School Board member Julie C. Lucas (Neabsco) said in an interview that she wants to examine the program inside a classroom to assess its effectiveness. She added that she has been hearing positive reviews from at least one principal in her district but that she wants to withhold making public comments until she visits schools.
The Investigations program has been undergoing a phased-in implementation since the School Board adopted its materials in 2006. In the 2006-07 academic year, kindergarten through second grade started the program; this year, third-graders began it; and next year, fourth-graders will use the material.
Investigations teaches children new ways of learning mathematics and solving problems. For instance, a student may not need to learn how to add 37 and 23 by stacking the figures on top of each other, and carrying the numbers. They may learn to add up the tens and then combine the seven and three to arrive at 60.
Related:
- Math Forum Audio / Video
- Madison School District’s Math Task Force
- Clusty Search: Math Investigations
- Teaching Math Right website:
Why this website?
…Because our children – ALL children – deserve a quality mathematics education in PWCS!!
In 2006 PWCS directed mandatory implementation of the elementary school mathematics curriculum TERC – “Investigations in Number, Data, and Space” in all PWCS elementary schools. The traditional, proven, successful mathematics program was abandoned for a “discovery learning” program that has a record of failure across the country.
Of all the VA Department of Education approved elementary math text/materials, “Investigations” least adequately supports the VA Standards of Learning. Yet it was somehow “the right choice” for PWCS children. Parents of 2nd and 3d graders are already realizing the negative impact of this program in only a year and a half’s worth of “Investigations.” Children subjected to this program end up two years behind where they should be in mathematics fluency and competency by the end of 5th grade. PWCS is committed to experimenting with our children’s future. We think our children and our tax dollars deserve better.
Employers Want New Way to Judge Graduates Beyond Tests, Grades
Colleges have been scrambling over the past year to respond to recommendations from a national commission that they be clearer to the public about what students have learned by the time they graduate.
Sometime in the next several weeks, for example, a national online initiative will be launched that allows families to compare colleges on measures such as whether they improve a student’s critical-thinking skills.
Tools for such measurements were recommended by the national commission, which was created by Education Secretary Margaret Spellings. The group released its recommendations in late 2006.
Now, a sampling of the nation’s employers have weighed in. And they are not terribly impressed.
More Students Head Overseas In Freshman Year
Callie Broughton had an eventful freshman year at Florida State University — in Spain.
Ms. Broughton, now a 20-year-old junior, opted to study abroad in Valencia through a program for first-year students at Florida State. For one year, she lived in an apartment and took classes with other FSU students at the university’s Valencia Study Center. In her spare time, she explored Europe.
There were downsides to going abroad the first year of college. “Missing Thanksgiving and stuff I had never missed in 18 years was definitely weird,” she says. But the benefits outweigh the disadvantages: “You’re getting to see the world at such a young age,” she says. Ms. Broughton, an education major, is now a student recruiter for the program.
Freshman year has typically been considered a time for students to settle in and try living on their own for the first time, plan their course schedules and decide on a major. Now, a growing number of schools are expanding their study-abroad options for first-year students. “This was something that was very rarely done at all up until a few years ago,” says Brian Whalen, president and chief executive of the Forum on Education Abroad and executive director of the Office of Global Education at Dickinson College in Carlisle, Pa.
Spending freshman year abroad presents challenges for younger students: easy access to alcohol, lack of supervision and, given the weak dollar, surprisingly high prices for basic goods and services.
Clarion Call: “Windows on College Readiness”
“Your essay, which I have now read twice, is terrific.
You are way ahead of everyone on this.”
email 17 January 2008 from: Education Reporter Sara Rimer of the New York Times
This is the one she refers to:
The Bridgespan Group, working for the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, has just released a report called “Reclaiming the American Dream.” The study was intended to find out how to get more U.S. high school students prepared for and through college.
Much of the report is about getting kids to go to college, and it finds that if there is enough money provided, and if parents, peers, counselors and teachers say going to college is important, more high school students are likely to go.
The major weakness of the report, in my view, is its suggestions for the kind of high school work that will help students to do college work and to graduate.
One of the concluding statements is that “Inertia is particularly difficult to overcome when people are unaware that a problem exists or that the potential for solving it is real.” What a useful insight. What they recommend for high school students is “a rigorous college preparatory curriculum.” What could be wrong with that?
Two very simple and basic things are wrong with that. Current “college preparatory” curricula, including AP courses, do not include the reading of complete nonfiction books or the writing of serious research papers.
That is almost as if we had a crisis in preparing high school football players for success in college and recommended a standard preparation program which did not give them practice in running, blocking and tackling. ACT found last spring that 49 percent of the high school students it tested could not read at the level of college freshman texts. And the Chronicle of Higher Education reported on a survey in which 90 percent of college professors thought high school students were not well prepared in reading, writing and doing research. A true college education requires reading serious books and writing substantial papers although many schools have watered their requirements down. High school students should be ready for in-depth study.
Two-Year Colleges Go Courtin’ Overseas
Marketing an obscure Wyoming community college to Vietnamese high schoolers presents special challenges. Many have never heard of Wyoming, and, if they have, it’s usually thanks to the movie Brokeback Mountain. So when recruiter Harriet Bloom-Wilson from Northwest College in Powell, Wyo., visits the International High School in Ho Chi Minh City, she focuses on the college’s nurturing, small-town environment. That’s what sold “Grace” Thienan Nguyen, 19. The business major also notes she can transfer to a full-fledged university.
An American Ivy League education has long been prized by wealthy families in Asia, the Middle East, and elsewhere. Now more and more middle-class kids, whose English-language skills won’t pass muster at universities, are discovering two-year programs. Keen to attract these kids and stand out in a crowded field, schools are ramping up their global marketing efforts.
It’s no secret why Nguyen and her peers are descending on community colleges. Besides being easier to get into than universities, they also cost far less. “The notion of smart shopping for international education has really begun to spread,” says Peggy Blumenthal, executive vice-president of the Institute of International Education.
Pioneering research shows “Google Generation” is a myth
- All age groups revealed to share so-called “Google Generation” traits
- New study argues that libraries will have to adapt to the digital mindset
- Young people seemingly lacking in information skills; strong message to the government and society at large
A new study overturns the common assumption that the “Google Generation” – youngsters born or brought up in the Internet age – is the most web-literate. The first ever virtual longitudinal study carried out by the CIBER research team at University College London claims that, although young people demonstrate an apparent ease and familiarity with computers, they rely heavily on search engines, view rather than read and do not possess the critical and analytical skills to assess the information that they find on the web.
Urban Schools Aiming Higher Than Diploma
At Excel High School, in South Boston, teachers do not just prepare students academically for the SAT; they take them on practice walks to the building where the SAT will be given so they won’t get lost on the day of the test.
In Chattanooga, Tenn., the schools have abolished their multitrack curriculum, which pointed only a fraction of students toward college. Every student is now on a college track.
And in the Washington suburb of Prince George’s County, Md., the school district is arranging college tours for students as early as seventh grade, and adding eight core Advanced Placement classes to every high school, including some schools that had none.
Those efforts, and others across the country, reflect a growing sense of urgency among educators that the primary goal of many large high schools serving low-income and urban populations — to move students toward graduation — is no longer enough. Now, educators say, even as they struggle to lift dismal high school graduation rates, they must also prepare the students for college, or some form of post-secondary school training, with the skills to succeed.
MAINE PROGRAM BRIGHTENS COLLEGE PROSPECTS – AT BIRTH
Foundation offers $500 grants to all newborns – provided their parents open a college-savings account.
Just a few days into the new year, Laurie and Keenan Farwell welcomed their daughter Hadley into the world. The hospital staff at MaineGeneral Health in Augusta had the pleasure of delivering not just the baby, but also her first birthday gift: $500 toward her future education.
Hadley is a beneficiary of the new Harold Alfond College Challenge, a first-in-the nation philanthropic program that will give families statewide a $500 starter grant – and assistance with paperwork – to set up 529 college savings accounts for infants.
“It was very exciting to think she’s not even a couple hours old, and she’s already looking at her college fund,” Ms. Farwell said in a phone interview as Hadley patiently sucked on her tiny hand, awaiting a feeding.
Harold Alfond founded Dexter Shoe Co. in Maine in 1958 and shared millions of dollars to promote health and education in the state. After giving many scholarships to college-age students, “he wanted to help build aspirations for college at the front end of life,” says Greg Powell, chairman of the board of the Harold Alfond Foundation. Mr. Alfond laid the groundwork for this legacy before he died in November.
Colleges Turn to Web Tools in Hunt for ’08 Freshmen: Interactive sites aid recruiters, school-shoppers
Once dominated by glossy brochures, college fairs, and campus tours, the college admissions landscape is rapidly shifting toward online social media, as schools blanket the Internet with podcasts, blogs, and videos to recruit wired high school students.
With virtual campus tours, live chats with college students, professors, and admissions officers, and videos about campus life, colleges and universities are increasingly turning to interactive and multimedia technology as recruiting tactics to connect with prospective students who are far more likely to scroll down a Web page than thumb through a college viewbook.
Think of it as College Admissions 2.0, college officials and consultants say.
“Higher ed is really trying to embrace it on all fronts,” said Nora Barnes, director of the Center for Marketing Research at the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth. “There’s no doubt that’s where their audience is.”
What is the Evidence that Acceleration Works?
Belin-Blank Center @ the University of Iowa:
The international educational community needs a comprehensive collection of articles on research and policy in acceleration. To fulfill IRPA’s mission to serve as that clearinghouse, we will use this Web site to organize, reflect on, and make available research on acceleration.
As a starting point, we make available the 11 articles that form the research core of Nation Deceived, provide links to National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) studies on acceleration options for high school students, and list titles of books, handbooks, and book chapters that touch on some aspect of acceleration.
This site is in its infancy. As it matures, it will encompass extant research as well as new work from IRPA and researchers dedicated to providing answers about acceleration.
DOUBLE VISION
When was the last time a college history professor made it her business to find out the names and schools of the best high school history students in the United States?
When was the last time a college basketball coach sat in his office and waited for the admissions office to deliver a good crop of recruits for the team?
When was the last time a high school history teacher got scores of phone calls and dozens of visits from college professors when he had an unusually promising history student?
When was the last time a high school athlete who was unusually productive in a major sport heard from no one at the college level?
Not one of these things happens, for some good reasons and some not-so-good reasons.
Before you think of the reasons however, we should be aware that sometimes the high school coach who is besieged with interest from the colleges is the same person who is ignored by colleges as a teacher. And sometimes the athlete who gets a number of offers from college coaches is the same person who, as an outstanding student, draws no interest at all. Not only do they observe this demonstration of our placing a higher value on athletics than on academics at the high school level, but their peers, both faculty and student, see it as well, and it teaches them a lesson.
Now it is obvious that if college coaches don’t scramble for the best high school athletes they can find, they may start to lose games, and, before long, perhaps their jobs as well.
Best Values in Colleges & Universities
We updated and ranked this list of the top 100 colleges in early 2008. Sort the overall rankings for both in-state students and out-of-state students, cost, quality measures or financial aid measures (how we scored the schools). Then select All States or any number of individual states (hold down the control key as you click to choose more than one), or select All Schools or any number of individual colleges. Clicking on the college names in the table will take you to their Web sites. Most of our data come from Petersons, a Nelnet company
Sade’s Story: An Update
When we last spoke to Sade Daniels, the 18-year-old former foster youth was making nervous preparations for her first semester at Clark Atlanta University. The nervousness would be familiar to any parent who’s ever sent a child to a new school: She was full of questions like, Will I make any friends? Will I like my teachers? Will I like going to a new place? The difference, of course, is that for most of her life Daniels has had to offer the comforting responses to her own questions. The stakes were even higher this time: Daniels was leaving behind everything and everyone she knew in Oakland to pursue a big dream in a new, unknown city. Nationwide, less than 5 percent of former foster children finish college.
Daniels’ first semester proved to be a rough transition. She struggled to negotiate her own class schedule and financial arrangements. “I didn’t feel like [Clark Atlanta University officials] had a lot of sympathy for my situation,” she said. She looked for someone to help guide her on things like class selection but found no one – “There’s not a lot of guidance counselors there, or if there are, they’re hiding,” she said.
Providing an edge in college admissions
Science teacher Rod Ziolkowski is spending his winter break working, just as he did Thanksgiving and practically every evening and weekend since the fall. Ziolkowski, dedicated as he is, is not preparing lesson plans but writing college recommendations for his students at Whitney High School in Cerritos. He expects to crank out 100 or more letters by the time admissions deadlines arrive in January.
He has plenty of company. At public and private schools from coast to coast, teachers are engaged in one of the most time-honored but overlooked aspects of the admissions process.
A strong teacher recommendation can add flesh, bones and personality to a packet of test scores and grade point averages and convince a college admissions director that a particular student would be a valuable asset on campus.
Pushing and Shoving Our Schools into College Readiness
Our nation’s classrooms no longer emphasize substantive expository and persuasive writing built upon strong foundational knowledge. This dumbing down of students’ writing and reading is one of the main reasons that students are not ready for college after graduating from our high schools.
During this last decade, public-school teachers have been forced to teach the personal victimization narrative (with an emphasis on “voice”) to get their students ready for the state-mandated tests which contain writing prompts such as “the importance of understanding your heritage,” “a time you made an important choice,” “the importance of accepting others as they are,” “the affect someone you admire can have on your life,” “whether it is important to seek friendships with people who are different from you,” or “the importance of participating in an activity you enjoy.”
Students have been taught that they will get a higher score on these writing prompts if they will build up a dramatic social injustice, victimization essay even if the personal references are bogus. Correct grammar, spelling, usage, punctuation, and capitalization are not factored into the final score so long as they do not “disrupt” communication; and if the student makes a high enough score on his essay, the questions on the multiple-choice editing/revising section count very little.
New law requires Wisconsin schools to cover cost of AP tests
School districts will pay the cost of advanced placements exams for students eligible for free or reduced lunch under a bill Gov. Jim Doyle signed into law Wednesday.
This bill allows the Department of Public Instruction to apply for federal funds to cover the costs of these exams. AP exams help students earn college credit while still in high school.
Under previous state law, the local school district was required to pay for these exams. The U.S. Department of Education had taken the state’s previous statutory language to mean that only state or local funds should pay for these exams, which has prevented the state from receiving any sort of federal assistance.
“This common-sense fix allows Wisconsin school districts to compete for federal grants to cover the cost of advanced placement exams for low-income students,” said Lehman. “Wisconsin schools have missed out on $140,000 in grants this past year alone.”
Fund for Wisconsin Scholars
Ensuring the opportunity for generations of young people to further their education. The Fund for Wisconsin Scholars (FFWS) is here to help reduce the financial barriers to college and to lighten the debt that most Wisconsin students incur during their college years. The founding gift of $175,000,000 from John P. and Tashia F. Morgridge creates a permanent endowment to provide grants for eligible, lower-income, talented graduates of Wisconsin public schools attending a Wisconsin public post-secondary educational institution.
Insiders’ Guide to AP and IB
The Washington Post sports pages this weekend were full of detailed analyses of our beloved local football, basketball and baseball teams. It was inside stuff, lapped up by readers like me who care about these sports and love to see the latest numbers.
Why can’t we get that excited about what is happening inside our schools? Okay, watching great teachers explain the mysteries of plate tectonics or cultural assimilation is not as exciting as seeing Todd Collins complete a pass to Ladell Betts for a touchdown. But our schools do have some intriguing statistics, just like sports teams. I spent my weekend using them to look inside several high schools in the Washington area and finding some thrilling surprises.
Last week’s column was about the new best high schools list in U.S. News & World Report, and how it compares to the Challenge Index list in Newsweek. That is, as the economists say, the macro part of the school assessment game, the big picture. Today, I want to look at the micro part, the inside-the-school perspective, aided by the latest Challenge Index rankings of this region’s 186 public high schools, coming out in The Post and on this Web site Thursday.
The Challenge Index ranks schools by their college-level test participation rates — the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate and other college-credit exams given at each school, divided by the number of graduating seniors. I do not factor in how well students do on those exams in the main rankings, because I have been convinced by successful AP and IB teachers that even students who struggle with the exams are much better off academically than if they did not take a college-level course and test at all.
Studying math in high school = success in college
Andrew Freeman, via a reader’s email:
Encouraging teens to drive safely, honor a curfew, or simply make good choices is an enormous task. However, there’s something else parents should add to their list — something that can open many opportunities for high school students: persuade them to take advanced math.
Trust me. I know how hard it can be to convince high school students of the importance of taking a course they may not want, particularly when many seem to have an aversion to this subject. However, as a college admissions professional, I’ve seen the difficulties students experience without an adequate math background. I’ve seen how the lack of math skills limits their choices.
Chances are your son or daughter may not want to put down the video game remote to pick up a scientific calculator. They may even believe their deepest aspirations don’t require a lot of math. However, the reality is that more than 50 percent of students change their majors at least once. So, even if the major they choose now doesn’t require advanced math, the odds are good the one they pick later probably will.
And that’s not the only good reason for improving math skills. In high school, you get up to 40 weeks to learn the material. In college, you get about 15. Students who enter college without the necessary math skills are often required to take non-credit skill-building courses. This extra review could mean a crammed first semester schedule or an additional semester in college.
Math doesn’t have to be a teenager’s nightmare. Encourage them to ask questions in class, stay for help, find a tutor, access math Web sites, take advantage of WXXI’s Homework Hotline or find out if your school offers math-specific study halls.
Girls Make History by Sweeping Top Honors at a Science Contest
Girls won top honors for the first time in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, one of the nation’s most coveted student science awards, which were announced yesterday at New York University.
Janelle Schlossberger and Amanda Marinoff, both 17 and seniors at Plainview-Old Bethpage John F. Kennedy High School on Long Island, split the first prize — a $100,000 scholarship — in the team category for creating a molecule that helps block the reproduction of drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria.
Isha Himani Jain, 16, a senior at Freedom High School in Bethlehem, Pa., placed first in the individual category for her studies of bone growth in zebra fish, whose tail fins grow in spurts, similar to the way children’s bones do. She will get a $100,000 scholarship.
The three girls’ victories is “wonderful news, but I can’t honestly say it’s shocking,” said Nancy Hopkins, a biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
More here.
Two Marshfield High Students Are Wisconsin’s AP Scholars
The students with the highest Advanced Placement exam scores in Wisconsin are both graduates of Marshfield High School.
Noah Elmhorst and Jamie Robertson, Wisconsin ‘s 2007 Advanced Placement state scholars, were to be recognized at a ceremony at the school, Assistant Principal Elizabeth Dostal said last week.
“We have had past AP State Scholars, but we have never had the top male and the top female in the same year, ” Dostal said. “We were just pleasantly surprised. ”
Marshfield High has 1,385 students and offers 23 AP classes, Dostal said. Elmhorst took 17 of the advanced classes, while Robertson took 13, she said.
Statewide, 25,020 Wisconsin students took 39,811 AP exams in the 2006-2007 school year. More than 68 percent of those students earned a grade of three or higher.
Nationwide, more than 1.4 million high school students took more than 2.5 million AP exams in 2007.
Online Courses Catch On in U.S. Colleges
When today’s college graduates get together for a reunion someday, they may decide to do it by computer. That’s because right now, nearly one in five college students takes at least one class online, according to a new survey.
For professors, the growth of e-learning has meant a big shift in the way they deal with students.
Take professor Sara Cordell of the University of Illinois-Springfield: Her day doesn’t end at 6 p.m., as it does for some college professors.
Cordell sits at her computer in her campus office to chat with a half-dozen students gathered in front of their screens: One is in Tennessee, another in California’s central valley, another in Ohio. They’re all here to talk about Thomas Hardy’s 19th-century novel Tess of the D’Urbervilles.
Young, Gifted and Skipping High School
As Jackie Robson rushed off to Japanese 101, a pink sign on the main door of her college dorm reminded her to sign out. There were more rules: an 11 p.m. curfew, mandatory study hours, round-the-clock adult supervision and no boys allowed in the rooms.
Jackie is 14. She never spent a day in high school.
Like the other super-bright girls in her dorm, the Fairfax County teen bypassed a traditional education and countless teenage rites, such as the senior prom and graduation, to attend the all-female Mary Baldwin College in the Shenandoah Valley.
The school offers students as young as 12 a jump-start on college in one of the leading programs of its kind. It also gives brainy girls a chance to be with others like them. By all accounts, they are ready for the leap socially and emotionally, and they crave it academically.
Last spring, Jackie finished eighth grade at Langston Hughes Middle School in Reston. This fall, she’s taking Psychology 101, Japanese 101, English 101, Folk Dance and U.S. History 1815-1877: Democracy and Crisis.
Matching Top Colleges, Low Income Students
Jim Carlton
Wall Street Journal
Last year, when Amherst College welcomed 473 new students to its idyllic campus, 10% of them came from QuestBridge.
But QuestBridge is no elite private school. It’s a nonprofit start-up in Palo Alto, Calif., that matches gifted, low-income students with 20 of the nation’s top colleges. In return, the schools — including Princeton, Yale, Stanford and Columbia — give scholarships to the students and pay QuestBridge for helping to diversify their student bodies.
The program is gaining in popularity because it addresses a growing interest of private and public colleges: increasing the diversity of their student bodies without relying solely on race. Since some states banned racial preferences in college admissions, many public colleges have begun focusing on income as a means to broaden the backgrounds of their students. Private schools, while not bound by the states’ restrictions, are also eager to admit more students from low-income families.
QuestBridge isn’t the only program that helps schools achieve diversity by focusing on the economically disadvantaged. The Posse Program, launched in 1993 by a New York nonprofit, specializes in sending groups of students who already know each other to top colleges. It got its start after the founder, Deborah Biel, discovered that several of the inner-city youth she had worked with in New York had dropped out of college. When she asked why, one responded that he didn’t have his posse with him.
Another program called Mathematics, Engineering, Science Achievement, or MESA, helps recruit low-income students for the University of California, California State University and other California colleges. Upward Bound, a long-running federal program, feeds low-income high-school students into colleges all over the country. And some colleges, including schools that are partnering with QuestBridge, have begun their own recruiting programs for low-income students.
The efforts come as diversity remains elusive, particularly at elite colleges. According to a 2004 study by the Century Foundation, a New York-based research group, at the 146 most selective colleges in the U.S., just 3% of the students came from families that ranked in the bottom 25% in income, while 74% came from the top 25%.
Best High Schools 2008
We analyzed data from thousands of schools to produce our list of the nation’s best. The top schools are a diverse bunch, and each one has found its unique way to best teach our future leaders.
Wisconsin high schools can be found here. Andrew Rotherham has more, along with Maria Glod.
Certain high schools have a remarkable record of sending their students to elite colleges
As college-application season enters its most stressful final stretch, parents want to know if their children’s schools are delivering the goods — consistently getting students into top universities.
It’s a tricky question to answer, but for a snapshot, The Wall Street Journal examined this year’s freshman classes at eight highly selective colleges to find out where they went to high school. New York City private schools and New England prep schools continue to hold sway — Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., is a virtual factory, sending 19 kids to Harvard this fall — but these institutions are seeing some new competition from schools overseas and public schools that focus on math and science.
The 10 schools that performed best in our survey are all private schools. Two top performers overall are located in South Korea. Daewon Foreign Language High School in Seoul sent 14% of its graduating class to the eight colleges we examined — that’s more than four times the acceptance rate of the prestigious Horace Greeley High School in Chappaqua, N.Y.
No ranking of high schools is perfect, and this one offers a cross-section, rather than an exhaustive appraisal, of college admissions. For our survey, we chose eight colleges with an average admissions selectivity of 18% and whose accepted applicants had reading and math SAT scores in the 1350-1450 range, according to the College Board: Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Williams, Pomona, Swarthmore, the University of Chicago and Johns Hopkins. Some colleges that would otherwise have met our criteria were excluded from our study because information on their students’ high-school alma maters was unavailable. All the colleges in our survey received a record number of applications last year.
UW MS in Biotechnology Alumni Spotlight
Our students’ careers are as diverse as their backgrounds. Here are some student success stories reported since graduating with our program’s biotechnology degree.
Update on Credit for non-MMSD Courses, including Youth Options Program:
At the November 26, 2007 meeting of the MMSD BOE’s Performance and Achievement Committee [18MB mp3 audio], the District’s Attorney handed out a draft of a policy for the District’s Youth Options Program dated November 20, 2007. It is a fine working draft. However, it has been written with rules making it as difficult as possible for students to actually take advantage of this State-mandated program. Thus, I urge all families with children who may be affected by this policy now or in the future to request a copy of this document, read it over carefully, and then write within the next couple of weeks to all BOE members, the District’s Attorney, Pam Nash, and Art Rainwater with suggestions for modifications to the draft text. For example, the current draft states that students are not eligible to take a course under the YOP if a comparable course is offered ANYWHERE in the MMSD (i.e., regardless of whether the student has a reasonable method to physically access the District’s comparable course). It also restricts students to taking courses at institutions “located in this State” (i.e., precluding online courses such as ones offered for academically advanced students via Stanford’s EPGY and Northwestern’s CTD).
The Attorney’s memorandum dated November 21, 2007 to this Committee, the BOE, and the Superintendent outlined a BOE policy chapter entitled “Educational Options” that would include, as well, a policy regarding “Credit for Courses Taken Outside the MMSD”. Unfortunately, this memo stated that this latter policy as one “to be developed”. It has now been almost 6 years (!) since Art Rainwater promised us that the District would develop an official policy regarding credit for courses taken outside the MMSD. A working draft available for public comment and BOE approval has yet to appear. In the interim, the “freeze” the BOE unanimously approved, yet again, last winter has been ignored by administrators, some students are leaving the MMSD because of its absence, and chaos continues to rein because there exists no clearly written policy defining the rules by which non-MMSD courses can be taken for high school credit. Can anyone give us a timetable by which an official BOE-approved policy on this topic will finally be in place?
Links:
- 11/26/2007 Performance & Achievement Committee Meeting Video and Audio
- October 26, 2006: Latest on the Madison School District’s Policy Change Regarding Credit for Non-MMSD Courses
- December 11, 2006 Performance & Achievement Committee Minutes | Additional comments.
- Dual Enrollment, Up From Obscurity
In Praise of “Thought Competition” (Writing, Math and other Academic Competitions)
Monday: After a long day at his New York City private school, Ben, 16, heads to my creative writing lab to work on his heartfelt memoir about his parents’ bitter divorce. Tuesday: Alison, 15, rushes from her elite private school in the Bronx to work on her short screenplay about a gifted, mean and eccentric boy. Lily, 13, pops in whenever she can to polish her hilarious short story narrated by an insomniac owl.
Ben, Alison and Lily, along with another few dozen who attend my afterschool writing program, also attend top-notch New York private schools that cost upwards of $25,000 a year. So why, one might wonder, do these kids need an extracurricular creative writing coach? The answer is simple, though twisted: Their schools — while touting well-known athletic teams — are offshoots of the “progressive education” movement and uphold a categorical belief that “thought competition” is treacherous.
Administrators of these schools will not support their students in literary, science or math competitions, including the most prestigious creative writing event in the country: the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. So we at Writopia Lab help these kids to join the 10,000 young literati from across the country who are hurrying to meet the event’s January deadline, as well as deadlines for other competitions.
For decades now, psychology and pedagogy researchers have been debating the impact of competition on young people’s self-esteem, with those wary of thought competition taking the lead. Most New York parents of public or private school students have felt the awkward reverberations of this trend — which avoids naming winners — when Johnny takes home a certificate for “participation” in the school’s science fair. (Do you hang that one up on the wall?)
But some, and ironically those who attend some of the most desirable schools in the region, feel the reverberations in deeper, more painful ways. “Two years after my son left a school that prohibited him from entering a national math competition,” says one mother, “he still writes angry essays about why the jocks in his former school were allowed to compete throughout the city while he wasn’t allowed to win the same honors for his gifts.” Sam, her son, felt uncool in the eyes of his peers, and undervalued (and sometimes even resented) by the administration.
Mel Levine, a professor at the University of North Carolina and one of the foremost authorities in the country on how children learn, believes the impact of the collaborative education movement has been devastating to an entire generation. When students are rewarded for participation rather than achievement, Dr. Levine suggests, they don’t have a strong sense of what they are good at and what they’re not. Thus older members of Generation Y might be in for quite a shock when they show up for work at their first jobs. “They expect to be immediate heroes and heroines. They expect a lot of feedback on a daily basis. They expect grade inflation, they expect to be told what a wonderful job they’re doing,” says Dr. Levine.
Links:
The Secret Gripes of Professor Klein: An AP-IB Drama
David Klein, a mathematics professor at California State University at Northridge, says he was pleased to review Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate math courses for the Thomas B. Fordham Institute. He respects institute President Chester E. “Checker” Finn Jr., a longtime leader in the movement to improve U.S. schools. Among the views Klein shares with Finn is that overuse of calculators can interfere with students’ mastery of analytical skills.
But their collaboration on Fordham’s analysis of AP and IB did not turn out the way either of them hoped.
On June 4, Klein submitted his report on two courses, AP Calculus AB and IB Mathematics SL. Klein’s analysis of AP and IB math was more negative and his grades lower than what the experts on AP and IB English, history and biology courses submitted to Fordham. He would have given the AP math course a C-plus and the IB math course a C-minus. The other reviewers thought none of the courses they looked at deserved anything less than a B-minus.
Still, Klein says, he got no indication from the Fordham staff of any problems until the edited version of his material came back to him for review on Sept. 28, a week before the deadline for completing the report. Many of what he considered his strongest points, he discovered, had been deleted. He had Fordham remove his name as a co-author of the report, “Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate: Do They Deserve Gold Star Status?” which was released Nov. 14.
After agreeing to the name removal, Finn told Klein in an e-mail: “I imagine we’ll also reduce your overemphasis on calculator use and probably change the grades (upward). Thanks, tho, for your help.” Klein’s grade of C-plus for AP was not changed, but his grade of C-minus for IB got a big jump to a B-minus, meaning the report was saying that IB math was better than AP math, the opposite of what Klein had said.
Related:
- Math Forum
- UW Math Professor Emeritus Richard Askey’s posts (Askey is also a member of the National Academy of Sciences)
- Connected Math posts.
- Math topics on SIS
- Klein’s Evaluation of AP Calculus AB and IB Math SL
- Much more about David Klein
John Kao has a plan to help U.S. compete, regain foothold in science and technology
As important, is the state of science and math education, particularly in the early grades, where young students’ abilities have been in a steady decline. The slip results as much from failings in government priorities as from income and class inequities, Kao believes.
“We are allowing the vagaries of income disparity to waste generations of potential innovators,” he says. “In U.S. schools serving low-income students, 30 percent of junior high mathematics teachers majored in math in college.” In China, the majority of math and science teachers at all levels have advanced degrees in their subjects.
Related: Math Forum | Math Task Force.
Facing Down the Skeptics in Education
Whenever I speak about my book, It’s Being Done: Academic Success in Unexpected Schools, I know I will face at least a few skeptics—and sometimes more than a few. They can easily be identified by their questions and comments. For example, they ask whether the schools I profile in the book are magnet schools or in some way select their students. I patiently explain that they don’t. Or, they will say, “I have unions in my school,” as though that would explain why they can’t make any improvements. Since some of the most impressive schools I profile in the book are in New York, Philadelphia, and St. Paul—all places with very powerful and serious teacher unions—I tell them that unions by themselves don’t seem to be an obstacle. Or, they say, “I have a lot of low-income kids in my district,” allowing that fact to speak for itself as an explanation for why their schools are low-performing.
I always answer as fully as I can, but I know that I probably haven’t convinced them that the schools are as I report them to be—high achieving or rapidly improving with student populations that are mostly either students of poverty or students of color or both. I know many people in my audience simply cannot envision schools that are as good as I say they are or educators who are as uncompromising and frank as I portray them.
Chenoweth recently appeared in Madison.
More students turn to consultants for help applying to college
Just leave it to the experts.
The haircut, the brake job and the 1040 were long ago ceded to the pros by most people. And now families are turning to experts to help their teenagers score an acceptance letter from the right college at a time when institutions of higher education are getting choosier about whom they let in.
Private college consultants have been around for decades — most notably in the eastern U.S. — but their numbers and visibility have been growing locally as more families seek a steady hand to guide them through the labyrinth of college admissions.
Most consultants won’t promise they can get a high school student into an Ivy League school, but they will help students keep track of deadlines, groom their extracurricular lineup and devise a list of schools that could be a good fit.
English, Algebra, Phys Ed … and Biotech
MORE than a decade ago, after George Cachianes, a former researcher at Genentech, decided to become a teacher, he started a biotechnology course at Lincoln High School in San Francisco. He saw the class as way of marrying basic biotechnology principles with modern lab practices — and insights into how business harvests biotech innovations for profit.
If you’re interested in seeing the future of biotechnology education, you might want to visit one of George Cachianes’s classrooms. “Students are motivated by understanding the relationships between research, creativity and making money,” he says.
Lincoln has five biotech classes, each with about 30 students. Four other public high schools in San Francisco offer the course, drawing on Mr. Cachianes’s syllabus. Mr. Cachianes, who still teaches at Lincoln, divides his classes into teams of five students; each team “adopts” an actual biotech company.
The students write annual reports, correspond with company officials and learn about products in the pipeline. Students also learn the latest lab techniques. They cut DNA. And recombine it. They transfer jellyfish genes into bacteria. They purify proteins. They even sequence their own cheek-cell DNA.
Excuses are not an option
There are casual days at Milwaukee College Preparatory School when it comes to what students can wear. Polo shirts (red for almost all the students and yellow for standouts who have earned privileges) are the uniform for those days. Other days, students have to wear blazers and ties.
But there are no casual days at the school when it comes to academics, even down to the kindergartners.
“Let’s go, let’s go, let’s go, let’s go,” eighth-grade math teacher Edward Richerson exhorts his students as a half dozen head toward the blackboard to solve some equations. They’re not moving fast enough for him.
A couple of them falter in their explanations. “What I’ve told you not to do is get lazy on these equations, which is what you’ve done,” Richerson says. If you’re not getting them, it’s not because you’re not smart enough, he says. “Since we are overachievers,” he begins as he tells them why they have to be as picky about the details of the answers as he is.
In a 5-year-old kindergarten class, children do an exercise in counting and understanding sequences of shapes. Four-year-olds are expected to be on the verge of reading by Christmas.
In national education circles, phrases such as “no excuses” and names such as “KIPP” have come to stand for a hard-driving approach to educating low-income urban children, and that includes longer days, strict codes of conduct, an emphasis on mastering basics and a dedication among staff members approaching zeal. The Knowledge Is Power Program, or KIPP, operates 57 schools in cities around the country and has a record that is not perfect but is noteworthy for its success.
Milwaukee College Prep, 2449 N. 36th St., is the prime example in Milwaukee of a no-excuses school. The charter school, which is publicly funded and was chartered through the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, is not formally a KIPP school, although it is affiliated with the KIPP movement.
Milwaukee College Preparatory School’s website.
UW-Madison Odyssey Project Video
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Watch or download (ctrl-click here for the mp4 file) a 20 minute video on the UW-Madison’s Odyssey Program. |
Thanks to Laurie Frost for obtaining this video.
U.S. students ‘middle of the pack’ compared with world
Click for a larger version of this image.
Greg Toppo:
Educators and politicians these days make a point of saying that U.S. schoolchildren aren’t just competing locally for good, high-paying jobs — they’re competing globally.
A detailed study lets them know just how well kids may do if they really compete globally someday — and it’s not exactly pretty.
Crunching the most recent data from a pair of U.S. and international math and science exams for middle-schoolers, Gary Phillips, a researcher at the non-profit American Institutes for Research (AIR), a non-partisan Washington think tank, finds a decidedly mixed picture: Students in most states perform as well as — or better than — peers in most foreign countries.
But he also finds that even those in the highest-scoring states, such as Massachusetts and Minnesota, are significantly below a handful of top-scoring nations such as Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan.
In mathematics, students in 49 states and the District of Columbia are behind their counterparts in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan and Japan. Students in Massachusetts are on a par with Japanese students, but trail the other four nations. In science, students in Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont and Wisconsin trail only students in Singapore and Taiwan, while performing equal or better than students in the other 45 countries surveyed.
“More than a century ago Louis Pasteur revealed the secret to invention and innovation when he said ‘chance favors the prepared mind’. The take away message from this report is that the United States is loosing the race to prepare the minds of the future generation,” said Dr. Phillips.
Students in the District of Columbia had the lowest U.S. performance in mathematics (they did not participate in the science test). In math, the average D.C. student is at the Below Basic level, putting them behind students in 29 countries and ahead of those in 14 countries. In science, nine states are at the Below Basic level: Florida, Arizona, Louisiana, Nevada, New Mexico, Alabama, Hawaii, California and Mississippi.
Clusty Search: National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) | Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS)
The Pangloss Index: How States Game the No Child Left Behind Act: Wisconsin Tied for #1
This report includes an updated Pangloss Index, based on a new round of state reports submitted in 2007. As Table 1 shows, many states look about the same Wisconsin and Iowa are tied for first, distinguishing themselves by insisting that their states house a pair of educational utopias along the upper Mississippi River. In contrast, Massachusetts—which is the highest-performing state in the country according to the NAEP—continues to hold itself to far tougher standards than most, showing up at 46th, near the bottom of the list.
Wisconsin – especially the state Department of Public Instruction – continues to avoid taking steps to increase the success of low-performing children in the state, a national non-profit organization says in a report released today.
For the second year in a row, Education Sector put Wisconsin at the top of its Pangloss Index, a ranking of states based on how much they are overly cheery about how their students are doing. Much of the ranking is based on the author’s assessment of data related to what a state is doing to comply with the federal No Child Left Behind education law.
“Wisconsin policy-makers are fooling parents by pretending that everything is perfect,” said Kevin Carey, research and policy manager for the organization. “As a result, the most vulnerable students aren’t getting the attention they need.”
DPI officials declined to comment on the new report because they had not seen it yet. In 2006, Tony Evers, the deputy state superintendent of public instruction, objected strongly to a nearly identical ranking from Education Sector and said state officials and schools were focused on improving student achievement, especially of low-income and minority students on the short end of achievement gaps in education.
The report is the latest of several over the last two years from several national groups that have said Wisconsin is generally not doing enough to challenge its schools and students to do better. The groups can be described politically as centrist to conservative and broadly supportive of No Child Left Behind. Education Sector’s founders include Andrew Rotherham, a former education adviser to President Bill Clinton, and the group describes itself as non-partisan.
Several of the reports have contrasted Wisconsin and Massachusetts as states with similar histories of offering high-quality education but different approaches toward setting statewide standards now. Massachusetts has drawn praise for action it has taken in areas such as testing the proficiency of teachers, setting the bar high on standardized tests and developing rigorous education standards.
The Education Sector report and Carey did the same. The report rated Massachusetts as 46th in the nation, meaning it is one of the most demanding states when it comes to giving schools high ratings.
Carey said that in 1992, Wisconsin outscored Massachusetts in the nationwide testing program known as NAEP, the National Assessment of Educational Progress. But Wisconsin is now behind that state in every area of NAEP testing, he said.
“Unlike Wisconsin, Massachusetts has really challenged its schools,” Carey said.
Additional commentary from TJ Mertz and Joanne Jacobs. All about Pangloss.
AP vs. IB vs. Neither: A Plea for Peace and Love
Watch out. Tumultuous days are ahead in the war of advocates for college-level high school courses such as Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate, particularly with the rise of some schools that say their teachers can do a better job without AP or IB.
Insults are flying. Good people could get hurt. I have a peace plan, but first let’s inspect the battlefield.
The AP vs. IB topic on my Admissions 101 discussion group at the Web site has 1,233 posts and more are pouring in. At the same time, educators who want to banish AP from their schools just launched a new Web site, ExcellenceWithoutAP. On Wednesday, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute at edexcellence will release one of the most detailed AP vs. IB comparisons ever: “Advanced Placement and International Baccalaureate: Do They Deserve Gold Star Status?”
The Fordham report looks like a peace-making gesture, since it concludes that both programs “set high academic standards and goals for learning” and provide exams that allow students to “apply their knowledge in creative and productive ways.” But the AP vs. IB combatants will likely squabble over slight differences in the grades Fordham gave AP and IB courses in biology and math. And the ExcellenceWithoutAP people are going to hate the parts of the Fordham report that warn against attempts, like theirs, to make college-level courses in high school more thematic and deny students — at least in Fordham’s view — the solid facts, such as “the names, dates, events, documents and movements important to our history.”
The College Board still dominates the battlefield, with more than 14,000 high schools using its AP program. IB has only about 500. ExcellenceWithoutAP lists about 50 schools that have dropped or never had AP. This is a big jump from the 12 schools identified in this column two years ago. But even this group is made up of schools so small that they produce less that one-fifth of 1 percent of U.S. high school seniors graduating each year.
Dane County, WI AP High School Course Comparison
A quick summary of Dane County, WI High School 2007-2008 AP Course Offerings (source – AP Course Audit):
- Abundant Life Christian School (3 Courses)
- Cambridge (1)
- DeForest (7)
- Madison Country Day (International Baccalaureate – IB. However, Madison Country Day is not listed on the approved IB World website.)
- Madison East (11)
- Madison Edgewood (11)
- Madison LaFollette (10)
- Madison Memorial (17)
- Madison West (5+1 2nd Year Calculus which “prepares students for the AP BC exam”)
- Marshall (5)
- McFarland (6)
- Middleton – Cross Plains (7)
- Monona Grove (7)
- Mount Horeb (5)
- Oregon (9)
- Sauk Prairie (10)
- Stoughton (6)
- Sun Prairie (13)
- Verona (10)
- Waunakee (6)
- Wisconsin Heights (6)
Links and course details are available here.
Related: Dual Enrollment, Small Learning Communities and Part and Full Time Wisconsin Open Enrollment.
Via a kind reader’s email.
Bridging Gaps in Colleges Is Goal: Florida’s State University System is part of a plan to help minority and low-income students
Florida and 18 other public university systems are pledging to increase the number of minority and low-income students who graduate from college. The initiative responds to a wide gap between the graduation rates for minority and low-income students and those for more affluent white students. Regardless of income, black and Hispanic students obtain bachelor’s degrees at lower rates: 41 percent for both minority groups, compared with 64 percent for white students, 2006 U.S. Department of Education statistics show. Schools across the country plan to beef up remedial education and financial-aid programs to cut that difference in half by 2015, participants said during a Wednesday news conference.
If only the good news about Wisconsin education was true
Finally, there was some really good news about education. According to the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, the percentage of proficient readers in the third grade had increased from 64.8% in 1998 to 87.4% in 2005. And this improvement was broad-based – every minority group advanced substantially.
If only it were true
Deception No. 1: Test questions, their scoring and definitions of “proficiency” changed constantly. The number of test items, the kinds of items (multiple choice vs. short answer) and their content varied every year the test was given. The score needed for proficiency dropped more than 40%, from 50 in 1998 to 29 in 2005.
That sleight of hand entailed complex statistics to estimate how hard the revised test might be for the next crop of third-graders. That estimate, rather than criteria for effective reading, became the cutoff for proficiency. Obviously, even if mathematics could prove that two tests are equally hard, changing the questions every year meant that subsequent tests weren’t assessing the same thing. The tests were apples and oranges, and the mathematics a red herring.
Deception No. 2: Reading skills were less important than student guessing, and the test’s margin of error. Fifty-three of the test’s 58 items were multiple choice with four possible answers. So on average, students guessed 13 answers correctly. In addition, the test’s margin of error was six points.
Now remember, only 29 correct were needed for “proficiency” in 2005. So with 13 for guessing and six for test error, we have 19 of those 29 (65%). And that’s only the beginning. The statistical estimates of proficiency contributed additional error margins that were never added to the students’ scores.
Seven Warnings and One Mistake in High School Reform
I receive many reports on how to improve our schools. This is an occupational hazard. Reading them is often confusing, depressing, disorienting and maddening. But there is no help for it. The academic papers, commission recommendations and task force action plans are usually written by some of the smartest experts in the country. They have stuff I need to know, so I plow through them.
It is best that I be vague, however, about what the margins of these reports look like after I have finished with them. I have just gone through, for instance, a paper by two leading experts, W. Norton Grubb of the University of California, Berkeley, and Jeannie Oakes of the University of California, Los Angeles. I looked forward to reading their report, “‘Restoring Value’ to the High School Diploma: The Rhetoric and Practice of Higher Standards. 432K PDF” It was published by the Education and the Public Interest Center at the University of Colorado at Boulder and the Education Policy Research Unit at Arizona State University. They focus on the push for rigor in high schools and argue that the discussion spends too much time on narrow definitions of rigor, based on test scores and demanding courses, and ignores other conceptions, such as more sophisticated levels of understanding and the ability to apply learning in unfamiliar settings.
The authors write well and know their stuff. Nonetheless, here are some of the words I wrote on the margins: “stupid,” “so what?” “no! no!” “recipe for disaster,” “booo!” “who cares?” and a few others I may not quote on a family Web site.
Ordinarily, I would use this column to flay Grubb and Oakes for disagreeing with me on how to fix high schools, my favorite topic. But I am writing this on a lovely Saturday, with the leaves turning and the birds happily washing themselves in the little puddles left by my garden-watering wife. Why don’t I, just this once, write about this report’s good points? They include at least seven astute warnings about sloppy thinking in the high school reform debate. Here they are, plus one mistake in their thinking that I could not resist trashing.
Related:
- High School Redesign Links & Notes [RSS]
- Small Learning Communities (SLC) [RSS]
- Bruce King’s evaluation of the Madison West High School SLC implementation.
New Study Gives Hovering College Parents Extra Credit
Despite the negative reputation of “helicopter parents,” those moms and dads who hover over children in college and swoop into their academic affairs appear to be doing plenty of good.
That’s the conclusion of one of the nation’s most respected college surveys in a report, to be released today, that experts call the first to examine the effects of helicopter parenting.
Data from 24 colleges and universities gathered for the National Survey of Student Engagement show that students whose parents were very often in contact with them and frequently intervened on their behalf “reported higher levels of engagement and more frequent use of deep learning activities,” such as after-class discussions with professors, intensive writing exercises and independent research, than students with less-involved parents.
The 2007 National Survey of Student Engagement (NSSE)
The making of a UPS driver
When big brown found that its twentysomething drivers were flunking out in droves, it had a serious problem on its hands: how to train generation y for a hard blue-collar job.
It’s 9:45 A.M., and at 93 degrees and 1,000% humidity, Saddle Brook, N.J., feels more like the Serengeti than suburbia. I’m in a doorless truck, wearing high-waisted shorts, facing a day full of handcarts and heavy boxes. When I arose at 5:45 this morning – an hour I haven’t seen the daytime side of since … ever – the day had something of the adventurous about it. Like more of my Generation Y peers than one might expect, I’d never worn a uniform, or even properly nine-to-fived it for that matter, and here at last was my chance.
UPS would soon fix me, though. At 8:15, after touring the huge open warehouse of concrete and conveyor belts that is UPS’s Saddle Brook center, I met Vincent “Vinny” Plateroti, a UPS “driver service provider,” or DSP – that’s UPS for driver – of 21 years and my escort for the day. At 8:45, we attended the “pre-work communications meeting,” or PCM – UPS for morning meeting – which included reports from the previous day and a short but detailed lecture on hydration.
A Taste of College Work Provides Just the Spark
Anita Weier
A class started by a UW-Madison professor four years ago to give disadvantaged people a university experience has blossomed, resulting in about 40 of 100 “graduates” going on to college at the University of Wisconsin and elsewhere.
It’s also inspiring the current Odyssey class of 31, who gather every Wednesday night in a classroom at the Harambee Center in south Madison to stimulate their minds and learn literature and writing techniques, as well as history and philosophy.
“These are people who don’t have money but have extraordinary potential. We give them a chance and it’s amazing what can happen,” literature professor Emily Auerbach said before a recent class began. “This gives them a sense of the riches they can find.”
Read more about The Odyssey Project … and consider making an end-of-year contribution.
The Scandal of College Tuition
Given the soaring increases in tuition, students will look for the best deal, and it’s not in Wisconsin. One way to measure that is to look at Pell Grants, which go to low-income students. Wisconsin has a net outflow of Pell recipients, meaning we lose more student grantees than we gain. Meanwhile, the percentage of students from low-income families attending UW-Madison has been dropping for two decades.
In the last decade, as the JS story noted, tuition rose from $2,860 to $6,330 at UW-Madison and from $2, 847 to $6,191 at UW-Milwaukee.
The main reason for the increase is declining state support, which must be made up by hiking tuition. Tuition is the fastest-rising of all taxes and fees in Wisconsin. Though Democrats have been somewhat resistant at times, the bipartisan approach to budget control for at least the last 15 years has been to stiff the students, passing on the highest fee increases to them. Students, you see, are less likely to vote.
“Colleges Bring in More Money, But Tuition Isn’t Going Down: Senators question why cost of education is still increasing”
Colleges and universities raked in money by the billions last year. But their investing success now has a price — a movement in Congress to force the wealthiest schools to spend more of their money to keep down tuition.
In recent weeks, a string of colleges and universities have announced enviable investment results. Leading the way was Yale, which earned 28 percent over the year ending June 30, increasing the school’s endowment to $22.5 billion overall.
Harvard, the world’s wealthiest university with $34.9 billion, beat the market again with a 23 percent return. There also were good returns for smaller schools such as Bowdoin (24.4 percent) and William & Mary (19.2 percent).
When applying to college, it pays to sweat the small stuff.
Most colleges require that applicants write a long essay or write an open-ended personal statement revealing unique experiences or characteristics.
But many also request short essays asking applicants to tell more about why they are applying, or about favorite activities that might not be obvious on the general application.
So while it may be tempting to shut down the word processor after the long essays are finished, remember that short essays are a crucial piece of the college application and should not be taken lightly.
The Common Application, used by more than 300 colleges nationwide (www.commonapp. org), requires a short essay that asks students to elaborate on a favorite activity. Because the essay allows only 150 words (more a paragraph than an essay), students should use only a sentence or two to identify the activity.
I Just Couldn’t Sacrifice My Son
When a high school friend told me several years ago that he and his wife were leaving Washington’s Mount Pleasant neighborhood for Montgomery County, I snickered and murmured something about white flight. Progressives who traveled regularly to Cuba and Brazil, they wanted better schools for their children. I saw their decision as one more example of liberal hypocrisy.
I was childless then, but I have a 6-year-old now. And I know better. So to all the friends — most but not all of them white — whom I’ve chastised over the years for abandoning the District once their children reached school age:
I’m sorry. You were right. I was wrong.
After nearly 20 years in the city’s Takoma neighborhood, the last six in a century-old house that my wife and I thought we’d grow old in, we have forsaken the city for the suburbs.
Related:
- Where Have All the Students Gone?
- This is Not Your Grandchild’s Madison School District
- Promises Betrayed
Megan McArdle has more.
Ten Stupid Ways to Ruin Your College Application
Remember, these are things you should NOT do.
1. Rack up as many extra points as you can for “expressed interest” in your favorite colleges. This particular obsession was new to me. Connolly has encountered applicants who have inundated admissions offices with voicemails, e-mails and snail mail because they have heard that colleges want concrete indications of interest and don’t think you can overdo it. Believe me, you can. “There is a fine line between showing adequate interest in the school and stalking,” Connolly said. “Unsolicited cakes, pies, cookies, sneakers (the old ‘one foot in the door’ trick), a life-sized statue of you holding an acceptance letter, or a painstakingly detailed scale model of the campus clock tower will not make up for a lackluster academic record.” When colleges look for “expressed interest,” that means they hope that you will show up when their college reps visit your school, that you will visit their campuses and sign the visitor logs in their admissions offices and that you will get your application in on time with no loose ends. If you have a legitimate question, they are happy to receive your e-mail or telephone call. Doing more than that just makes you look desperate, and a little scary.
2. Don’t worry about your postings on social networking sites — college admissions officers understand your need for individual expression and will probably never look at them. I know, I know. What you put on Facebook or Myspace is your private business. College officials appear to share that view. They say they do not make a habit of looking up their applicants. But there are enough exceptions to make me think care should be taken when posting photos from your last rollicking beach party. Not everybody loves you. Those who don’t could send anonymous notes to your first-choice school suggesting it inspect a certain Web site. There are no rules that say they can’t.
The Once and Future University
Mike Caulfield points to this video which, he says, “does a nice job of showing what a museum a university education has become.” The large lecture hall shown in that video certainly reinforces the point. Seeing it reminds me of a telling episode this past April. I was writing about Darwin and I recalled something I’d heard in a biology lecture I’d heard the previous spring on one of the Berkeley podcasts.
I went back to the site and wound up referring to the current year’s version of that lecture in video form. As I scrubbed back and forth on the timeline looking for the part I remembered, my daughter — who was then between high school and college — watched over my shoulder. Eventually she said: “So, the students just sit there?”
That was the first of three revelations. The second was my realization that I’d certainly absorbed those lectures more fully on a series of bike rides, breathing fresh air and soaking up sunshine, than had the students sitting in the lecture hall.
The third revelation came when I found the part I was looking for, and realized that it wasn’t as good as last year’s version, which had been overwritten by the current version.
WHEN NONENGINEERS THINK ABOUT ENGINEERING, it’s usually because something has gone wrong: collapsing levees in New Orleans, the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. In the follow-up investigations, it comes out that some of the engineers involved knew something was wrong. But too few spoke up or pushed back — and those who did were ignored. This professional deficiency is something the new, tuition-free Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering wants to fix. At its tiny campus in Needham, Mass., outside Boston, Olin is trying to design a new kind of engineer. Most engineering schools stress subjects like differential calculus and physics, and their graduates tend to end up narrowly focused and likely to fit the stereotype of a socially awkward clock-puncher. Richard K. Miller, the president of the school, likes to share a professional joke: “How can you tell an extroverted engineer? He’s the one who looks at your shoes when he talks to you.” Olin came into being, Miller told me last spring in his office on campus, to make engineers “comfortable as citizens and not just calculating machines.” Olin is stressing creativity, teamwork and entrepreneurship — and, in no small part, courage. “I don’t see how you can make a positive difference in the world,” he emphasized, “if you’re not motivated to take a tough stand and do the right thing.”
Now, as then, everyone says higher education is more important than ever to America’s future. But interesting enough to become a topic of national obsession? Controversial enough to fight a gubernatorial campaign over? Hardly. The kids do have their own war now, but not much of an antiwar movement, much less building takeovers. College campuses seem to have lost their centrality. Why do college and college students no longer lead the culture? Why does student life no longer seem all that important?
Here’s one answer: College as America used to understand it is coming to an end.
For nine years I’ve lived in the shadow of the University of Chicago — as an undergraduate between 1988 and 1992 and again since 2002. After growing up in a suburb that felt like a jail to me, I found my undergraduate years delightfully noisy and dissident. I got involved with The Baffler, the journal of social criticism edited by Thomas Frank, who went on to write “What’s the Matter With Kansas?”; every Sunday, I trekked down to the neighborhood jazz jam session, where ’60s continuities were direct. The bass player was a former Maoist, the drummer a former beatnik.
Early in May of this year I had lunch with the beatnik, Doug Mitchell, who received his undergraduate degree in 1965 and then went to graduate school here and is now an editor at the University of Chicago Press. “I suspect I got in this university primarily because I had a high-school friend who got a pirated copy of Henry Miller’s ‘Tropic of Capricorn,’ ” he said. “I put that on my reading list. And the admissions counselor was utterly astonished: ‘How did you get this?’ It was truly banned in 1960.” He settled into an alienated suburban kid’s paradise. “We had a social life that kind of revolved around the dorm lounge, because that’s where everybody hung out after midnight. And some people got way into it and didn’t survive. They would never go to class. They would argue night and day in the lounge!”
College Application Coaches
Susan Berfield & Anne Tergesen:
Michele Hernandez boasts that 95% of her teenage clients are accepted by their first-choice school. Her price: As much as $40,000 a student
As I listened to my 8th period English teacher drone on for the third time about how Finny, a character in A Separate Peace, was indeed the main character although he was not the narrator, it finally dawned on me that this was not the exciting world of high school that I had hoped for.
Michele Hernandez boasts that 95% of her teenage clients are accepted by their first-choice school. Her price: As much as $40,000 a student
As I listened to my 8th period English teacher drone on for the third time about how Finny, a character in A Separate Peace, was indeed the main character although he was not the narrator, it finally dawned on me that this was not the exciting world of high school that I had hoped for.
This is how Andrew Garza began an essay in his application to Haverford College. It was a 1,200-word piece that established him as an intellectually curious young man. It was crafted to appeal specifically to the admissions officers at the small liberal arts school. And it was the idea of his high-priced college admissions coach, Michele A. Hernandez. Garza attended a private school in Switzerland, and that worried Hernandez: She thought he might appear to be a privileged teenager without much substance. So she advised him to write about why he had left his public high school in suburban New Jersey. “We had to make it seem like he didn’t want to be around so many rich kids. We spun a whole story about him taking the initiative to leave in order to broaden his experience,” Hernandez says. “It was his initiative. But he wouldn’t have written about it.”
Today Andrew is a senior at Haverford, studying sociology and economics. His father, John, paid Hernandez $18,000 for 18 months’ worth of advice. “It is a lot of money,” says Garza, a manager at Abitibi-Consolidated (ABY ) in New York. “But if you look at it as an investment, it’s not a bad one.”
Amazing. Michele’s website. Clusty search.
Penelope Wang:
To improve her chances of getting into a good college, Caitlin Pickavance, a 17-year-old high school senior from Danville, Calif., has been working with a private college coach since her freshman year (cost: $800).
She gets tutored in math ($1,400), takes an ACT prep class ($900) and participates in afterschool enrichment activities ($1,350). Then there’s the good-will mission to Belize she went on last spring ($1,375) and the classes she took this summer at the University of Salamanca in Spain ($7,000) in hopes of further buffing her résumé.
New map for college aid drawn
Overhaul includes grant increases, interest rate cuts, loan repayment program for those who need help
“The financial aid package gets better for those who are eligible for need-based financial aid, since interest rates are dropping,” said Joseph Hurley, chief executive of Savingforcollege.com, a Web site on college financing.
The College Cost Reduction and Access Act, which President Bush recently signed into law, has been called the largest overhaul of aid to college students since soldiers returned from World War II battlefields and headed into the classroom.
While it doesn’t change the strategy and approach that families should take when shopping for college financing, it will give them more benefits to go with the financial aid options that are available.
Major provisions of the new law include:
Will AP or IB Really Get You College Credit?
When the young people who run washingtonpost.com recruited me to moderate the Web site’s new “Admissions 101” discussion group, they said it would be a breeze. All I had to do was come up with a few provocative topics each week and stand back. Our readers would be the ones who would make it interesting. I wouldn’t have to miss any of my afternoon naps.
As proof of both the washingtonpost.com staff’s honesty, and my decrepitude, take a look at this topic on the discussion group list: “Will AP or IB REALLY get you college credit?” I put it up more than five months ago, on May 22. As of yesterday, it had more than 250 posts and was still going strong. How many of those posts were mine? About five. Some of the discussion group members are irritated by my absence from their intriguing debate, for which I offer a couple of lame excuses below.
What this topic has taught me is that the battle between pro-Advanced Placement and pro-International Baccalaureate people is a bigger deal than I thought it was. AP and IB both offer college-level exams to high school students that can earn credit at many colleges. I consider the argument trivial, like comparing a Mercedes to a BMW. They are both very fine cars; whether you choose one or the other doesn’t make much difference.
But I was wrong about the importance of the AP-IB choice to other people. The Admissions 101 debate indicates it is a big deal and is likely to become even more important as IB — at the moment tiny compared to AP — continues its rapid growth. The number of people posting on the issue is relatively small, but they are unusually articulate and well-connected advocates for their point of view. As AP and IB continue to increase their influence over the American education system, the argument is going have an impact.
Employers Offer Help On College Admissions
Companies are rolling out a new benefit that aims to alleviate a big source of stress for many middle-aged employees: help getting their kids into college.
A number of employers are inviting former college admissions officers to lecture and offer advice to employees. Some are contracting with outside consulting firms to guide employees through the labyrinth of testing, admissions and financial aid.
This past spring, Boston-based law firm Bingham McCutchen offered its employees access to a college admissions question-and-answer hotline and one-on-one counseling sessions. Last month, Millennium Pharmaceuticals offered a seminar and individual financial-counseling sessions for employees interested in strategies on how to save for college. And accounting firm RSM McGladrey, a unit of H&R Block, has begun offering a Web-based seminar that gives an overview of college-admissions testing.
SAS CEO Blasts Old-School Schooling; The War of Minds
But that clear and present danger is not here today. It’s a slowly growing problem that we haven’t really faced up to, that we are rapidly losing our lead in this war for minds. The Cold War is over. The arms race is over. It’s now a mind race.
Countries like China, India, and Korea have invested heavily in education over the last decade. They are now producing more scientists and engineers than we are. It is my concern that as we look to the future, innovation is going to come from the other side of the world.
Lacking a clear and present danger, the American education system is not mobilizing to support science, technology, engineering and math. Today’s generation of kids is the most technology savvy group that this country has ever produced. They are born with an iPod in one hand and a cell phone in another. They’re text messaging, e-mailing, instant messaging. They’re on MySpace, YouTube & Google. They’ve got Nintendo Wiis, Game Boys, Play Stations.
Their world is one of total interactivity. They’re in constant communication with each other, but when they go to school, they are told to leave those “toys” at home. They’re not to be used in school. Instead, the system continues teaching as if these kids belong to the last century, by standing in front of a blackboard.
Education has not changed, and that’s a problem. It was a good system when I came through, but today’s kids have changed, and that’s the part that educators are not realizing. It’s the kids that have changed, and our education system needs to change along with them.
Slashdot discussion.
Wisconsin’s Low State Test Score Standards (“The Proficiency Illusion”)
The study found that “cut scores” – the line between proficient and not proficient – vary widely among the 26 states, casting doubt on the question of what it means when a state says a certain percentage of its students are doing well. Those percentages are central to the way the federal No Child Left Behind education law works.
The law’s accountability system, which focuses on things such as whether a school or district is making “adequate yearly progress,” is driven largely by how many students meet the standards a state sets for proficiency in reading and math. The goal is that all students, with a handful of exceptions, be proficient by 2014.
“Five years into implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act, there is no common understanding of what ‘proficiency’ means. . . . This suggests that the goal of achieving ‘100 percent proficiency’ has no coherent meaning, either,” says a summary of the study, issued by the Washington, D.C.-based Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
To illustrate the differences among the states, the study’s authors gave an example in which a fourth-grader in Wisconsin would be regarded as proficient if the child could correctly answer a fairly simple question involving cats and dogs, while a child in Massachusetts would not be proficient if he or she couldn’t answer a formidable question about the meaning of a passage by Leo Tolstoy.
From the Fordham Institute report:
Cats and Dogs vs. Tolstoy
Wisconsin
This is a fourth-grade item with a difficulty equivalent to Wisconsin’s proficiency cut score (16th percentile).
Which sentence tells a fact, not an opinion?
A. Cats are better than dogs.
B. Cats climb trees better than dogs.
C. Cats are prettier than dogs.
D. Cats have nicer fur than dogs.
Massachusetts
This is a fourth-grade item with a difficulty equivalent to Massachusetts’ proficiency cut score (65th percentile).
Read the excerpt from “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” by Leo Tolstoy
So Pahom was well contented, and everything would have been right if the neighboring peasants would only not have trespassed on his wheatfields and meadows. He appealed to them most civilly, but they still went on; now the herdsmen would let the village cows stray into his meadows, then horses from the night pasture would get among his corn. Pahom turned them out again and again, and forgave their owners, and for a long time he forbore to prosecute anyone. But at last he lost patience and complained to the District Court.
What is a fact from this passage?
A. Pahom owns a vast amount of land.
B. The peasant’s intentions are evil.
C. Pahom is a wealthy man.
D. Pahom complained to the District Court.
Source: Thomas B. Fordham Institute. The correct answers are B for the first item and D for the second.
Fordham Institute Study.
Much more on Wisconsin’s Knowledge & Concepts Exam here [RSS], including a recent Madison School Board Performance & Achievement Committee discussion on using WKCE to “Measure Student Performance“. Clusty Search on WKCE.
Ian Shapira:
A new study of state achievement tests offers evidence that the No Child Left Behind law’s core mission — to push all students to score well in reading and math — is undermined by wide variations in how states define a passing score.
College Admissions: Tense Times in Bronxville
IN THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING last Halloween, Maria Devlin and her mother, Donna, were both wide awake in their apartment in Bronxville, N.Y., scanning an essay that shared Maria’s most profound thoughts on “one or two of her principal intellectual interests.” The buzz from what had become, of late, a 10 p.m. ritual hot chocolate — part soothing balm, part energizing caffeine — had come and gone. Now they were struggling to focus on proofreading that essay as well as some other college application forms due to be mailed the next day. On photocopied pages, they practiced squeezing Maria’s many accomplishments — National Merit finalist, area all-state flutist (honor ensemble), numerous playwriting awards — into the too-small lines scattered throughout the page. Once Maria’s mother found a way to make it all fit, with abbreviations and tiny, neat letters, Maria would commit the list to the official page in clean, precise writing. Around 2 in the morning, a friend sent Maria an e-mail message: What are you doing? Maria told her and fired back the same question. A.P. American history, the friend wrote. Gotcha, wrote Maria. She had already aced her Advanced Placement exams in American history, world history and French, not to mention calculus, a class she took her junior year, one of only four students in her grade at Bronxville High School to do so. It was accomplishments like that, as well as her near-perfect SATs, her near-perfect G.P.A., her in-progress novel and her natural gifts as a studio artist that put Maria, then 17, in line for the scholarship for which she was applying.
That night, she was finishing off her application for the Woodruff Scholarship at Emory University in Atlanta, a full ride that would cover room, board and tuition. Other students worried about just getting into a good school; Maria was worried about getting one of those schools to take her in its arms and give her everything she needed and perhaps a little bit more — money for books or maybe funds for summer travel. Her father’s income as a computer programmer placed the family in that awkward spot, comfortable enough that they couldn’t be sure of comprehensive financial aid but so stretched with three kids in a high-tax town that even a generous scholarship, if it was incomplete, would leave them in difficult straits. In applying to a typically competitive school, her classmates were looking at odds like 1 in 4 or maybe 1 in 10. Maria, in shooting for a full merit scholarship, was looking at odds like 1 in 100. More than 2,600 students were nominated by their high schools to apply for Emory’s scholarship program, for example, but only 23 would be chosen for the Woodruff.
The New Affirmative Action
In another time, it wouldn’t have been too hard to guess where Frances Harris would have ended up going to college. She has managed to do very well in very difficult circumstances, and she is African-American. Her high school, in the Oak Park neighborhood of Sacramento, was shut down as an irremediable failure the spring before her freshman year, then reopened months later as a charter school. Midway through high school, her father developed heart problems and became an irritable fixture around the home. She also discovered that he was not actually her biological father. That was a man named Leroy who, when her mother took Harris to see him, simply said his name was George and waited for her to leave. In Harris’s senior year, her mother lost her job at a nursing home and the family filed for bankruptcy.
Harris somehow stayed focused on teenage life. She earned an A-minus average and she distinguished herself as a debater. Her basketball teammates sometimes teased her for using big words, but they also elected her co-captain. As she led me on a tour of her school and her neighborhood one day this summer, she introduced me around with an assured ease that most adults can’t manage, even if her sentences are peppered with “like,” “you know” and “Oh, my God.” Her bedroom in the bungalow she shares with her parents is a masterpiece of teenage energy, the walls covered with her prom-queen tiara, her purple-and-white basketball jersey (No. 3) and photos of her friends. “The hardest part of high school,” she says, “was to be smart and cool at the same time.” She decided her dream college was the University of California, Los Angeles.
Ten or 20 years ago, Frances Harris almost certainly would have been admitted. Her excellent grades might not have even been necessary, because Berkeley and U.C.L.A. — the jewels in the U.C. system — accepted almost all of the African-Americans who met the basic application requirements. To an admissions officer, Harris would have seemed like gold: diversity and achievement, wrapped up in a single kid.
NAEP Math Results: Ohio and Wisconsin Comparison
The 2007 NAEP results have just been released. There are many interesting results one can learn by looking at this data. In addition to the very serious racial gap in Wisconsin which has been commented on by The Educational Trust [Grade 4 Math NAEP Analysis | 80K PDF ] [Grade 8 Math NAEP Analysis | 80K PDF] and the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction [172K PDF], there are strong indications of other problems in mathematics education in Wisconsin. Consider the following data comparing results for whites and blacks in Ohio and Wisconsin from the first year NAEP results were given by states and the 2007 results. As background, 12 points on NAEP is generally thought to be about the change from one year to the next on a given test. This is not a good estimate when looking over 15 to 17 years, since part of the rise in the test score likely came from changes made in textbooks and in what teachers teach because of the change in the NAEP Framework in the early 1990s.
For example, in Trends in Mathematics and Science Study, TIMSS, fourth grade math was tested in 1995 and 2003, and the results were flat while the NAEP results went up enough to allow statisticians to conclude the increase was statistically significant.
I assume that some of the rise in NAEP over this period is because students are learning more about the topics covered in NAEP, but that this is not the only
reason for the rise in NAEP scores.
The data below is comparison data between the results in two states at two different years, so the point estimate for a year of schooling seems to be a reasonable guideline. If so, Wisconsin has lost about a year to Ohio. Something needs to be done about this.
| NAEP Fourth Grade Mathematics | |||
| Whites | 1992 | 2007 | |
| Wisconsin | 233 | 250 | |
| Ohio | 222 | 250 | Ohio gained 11 points on Wisconsin |
| Blacks | 1992 | 2007 | |
| Wisconsin | 195 | 212 | |
| Ohio | 194 | 225 | Ohio gained 14 points on Wisconsin |
| NAEP Eighth Grade Mathematics | |||
| Whites | 1990 | 2007 | |
| Wisconsin | 279 | 292 | |
| Ohio | 268 | 291 | Ohio gained 10 points on Wisconsin |
| Blacks | 1990 | 2007 | |
| Wisconsin | 236 | 247 | |
| Ohio | 233 | 258 | Ohio gained 14 points on Wisconsin |
A UW-Madison education prof seeks middle school science teachers to participate in a professional development project.
Improving science teaching with hypertext support
Researcher: Sadhana Puntambekar
Email puntambekar@education.wisc.edu
Phone: (608) 262-0829
Link to site: www.compassproject.net/info
News context:
Science Magazine: The World of Undergraduate Education
Previous participants include:
Contacts:
Kelly Francour: kfrancou@marinette.k12.wi.us
Dana Gnesdilow: gnesdilow@wisc.edu
Hands-on science lab activities provide students with engaging ways to learn. But sometimes students don’t fully learn the concepts behind what they’re doing.
A hypertext computer environment being developed and field tested gives students graphical ways to practice learning and relating science concepts like ‘force’ and ‘energy,’ for example.
The program, called CoMPASS, helps ensure that hands-on construction activities leads to student understanding of the underlying deep science principles and phenomena.
UW-Madison education professor Sadhana Puntambekar points out that reading, writing, and communicating are an essential part of science instruction.
Research has pointed out the important role of language in science. Yet informational text is seldom used to complement hands-on activities in science classrooms.
This CoMPASS computer environment gives students a graphical, interactive, hypertext ‘concept map’ to help students visualize concepts and their relations. Navigating these ‘concept maps’ helps student make connections between abstract concepts, and to select text resources based on the relatedness of the documents to each other.
Eighth-grade students using the CoMPASS ‘concept maps’ performed better on essay question requiring depth. On a concept mapping test, students using CoMPASS made richer connections between concepts in their own maps (6th and 8th grades)
The CoMPASS environment helps teachers, too. It gives them another way to observe how well students learn.
The system is being used in inquiry-based curriculum units in sixth and eighth grade science classes. To date, CoMPASS has been used by over 1000 students in sixth and eighth grades in Wisconsin and Connecticut.
Joppatowne High School’s Homeland Security Career Academy
Dedicated to everything from architecture to sports medicine, “career academies” claim to offer high school kids focus, relevancy, and solid job prospects. Now add a new kind of program to the list: homeland security high. In late August, Maryland’s Joppatowne High School became the first school in the country dedicated to churning out would-be Jack Bauers. The 75 students in the Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness magnet program will study cybersecurity and geospatial intelligence, respond to mock terror attacks, and receive limited security clearances at the nearby Army chemical warfare lab.
The new school is funded and guided by a slew of federal, state, and local agencies, not to mention several defense firms. Officials say it will teach kids to understand the “new reality,” though they hasten to add that the school isn’t focused just on terrorism. School administrators, channeling Cheneyesque secrecy, refused to be interviewed for this story. But it’s no secret that the program is seen as a model for the rest of the country, with the Pentagon and other agencies watching closely.
Students will choose one of three specialized tracks: information and communication technology, criminal justice and law enforcement, or “homeland security science.” David Volrath, executive director of secondary education for Harford County Public Schools, says the school also hopes to offer “Arabic or some other nontraditional, Third World-type language.”
Making the Grade: How to Get Your Kid a Good Credit Score
Like many college kids, my daughter Hannah ended up with a credit-card problem. But it wasn’t the problem I feared.
As students head off to college, many parents worry that their sons and daughters will apply for a fistful of credit cards and amass a heap of debt. Indeed, 42% of freshmen have credit cards, and they carry an average balance of $1,585, according to a study by college lender Nellie Mae.
But in her freshman year, Hannah didn’t rack up a single charge — because she had a heck of a time just getting a card.
• Getting carded. To be honest, I don’t really want Hannah to have a credit card. But I do want her to have a decent credit score. And one of the best ways to earn that score is to get a credit card, charge a small sum each month and then dutifully pay off the balance.
Does UW’s PEOPLE program help minorities succeed?
Aaron Olson is confident he’s ready for UW-Madison.
He graduated from Memorial High School last year with a 3.6 grade point average, scored a 28 on the ACT exam and did it all while being an athlete.
But University of Wisconsin-Madison officials continue to struggle to attract minority students like Olson, and even more importantly, to retain them through graduation.
The freshman enrollment of targeted minorities (meaning all of them except foreigners and Asians not connected to southeast Asia) increased from 254 in 1996 to 541 in 2006. Less than 58 percent of targeted minorities who started college in 2000 had graduated by 2006, however, compared to 79.2 percent of students overall.
So what is it that makes it hard for many minorities to succeed at UW-Madison.
Much more on the People Program, here.
“It May Not Matter Much Where You Go to College”
A few weeks ago I had a thought so heretical that it really surprised me. It may not matter all that much where you go to college.
For me, as for a lot of middle class kids, getting into a good college was more or less the meaning of life when I was growing up. What was I? A student. To do that well meant to get good grades. Why did one have to get good grades? To get into a good college. And why did one want to do that? There seemed to be several reasons: you’d learn more, get better jobs, make more money. But it didn’t matter exactly what the benefits would be. College was a bottleneck through which all your future prospects passed; everything would be better if you went to a better college.
A few weeks ago I realized that somewhere along the line I had stopped believing that.
What first set me thinking about this was the new trend of worrying obsessively about what kindergarten your kids go to. It seemed to me this couldn’t possibly matter. Either it won’t help your kid get into Harvard, or if it does, getting into Harvard won’t mean much anymore. And then I thought: how much does it mean even now?
West and Memorial lead state in National Merit scholars
wo Madison high schools easily outpaced any other high schools in Wisconsin in the number of students who qualified as semifinalists for the 2008 National Merit Scholarships. Thirty-one students at West High School qualified and 24 qualified at Memorial in the prestigious scholarship competition.
Schools with the next highest numbers of semifinalists were Mequon’s Homestead High School in Ozaukee County with 17 semifinalists and the University School of Milwaukee with 16 semifinalists.
Four students at East High, two students at La Follette and one student at Edgewood also qualified for a total of 62 National Merit semifinalists from Madison.
Other Dane County high schools with qualifying students include Middleton (10 students), De Forest (5 students), Monona Grove (3 students), Verona (3 students), Oregon (2 students), Sun Prairie (2 students), Mount Horeb (2 students, including a student who is homeschooled), Deerfield (1 student) and Waunakee (1 student).
Student Loans: Reeling in the College Bound
Mr. Meyers’s student-lending niche has exploded into something of the norm as the cost of a college education has skyrocketed. And the company he helped to found 16 years ago, First Marblehead, is now one of the biggest in a $20 billion industry that occupies one of the most lucrative segments of consumer lending.
But such growth — as well as the fact that debt levels for newly minted graduates have more than doubled over the last decade — has drawn the scrutiny of Congress and regulators. Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York State attorney general, has helped expose financial ties between some lenders and colleges — including kickbacks to financial aid officers — that put their own interests ahead of those of students. (First Marblehead was not one of the companies implicated.)
The student loan industry could be in for more jolts. Policy makers and regulators say that there are dangerous parallels between the private student loan and subprime mortgage markets. In both, there have been phenomenal profits, aggressive marketing and, until the recent credit market turmoil, a healthy appetite from Wall Street investors.
And, as was seen in the subprime market, many student loans that were made in the last couple of years are resetting at much higher rates.
Make science easier, examiners are told
Examiners will have to set easier questions in some GCSE science papers, under new rules seen by The Times. A document prepared by the Joint Council for Qualifications (JCQ), which represents awarding bodies across Britain, says that, from next year, exam papers should consist of 70 per cent “low-demand questions”, requiring simpler or multiple-choice answers. These currently make up just 55 per cent of the paper.
The move follows growing concern about the “dumbing down” of science teaching at GCSE and grade inflation of exam results, which critics claim is the result of a government drive to reverse the long-term decline in the number of pupils studying science.
In the past five years, the proportion of students gaining a grade D or better in one of the combined science papers has leapt from 39.6 to 46.7 per cent.
The latest move has been condemned by an education expert. Last night Professor Alan Smithers, head of the Education and Employment Research Centre at the University of Buckingham, said: “Deliberately increasing the proportion of easier questions is a clear example of lowering the bar.”
2007 SAT Scores Released
The College Board announced SAT® scores today for the class of 2007, the largest and most diverse class of SAT takers on record. Nearly 1.5 million students (1,494,531) in the class of 2007 took the SAT, and minority students comprised nearly four out of 10 test-takers.
“The record number of students, coupled with the diversity of SAT takers in the class of 2007, means that an increasing number of students in this country are recognizing the importance of a college education and are taking the steps necessary to get there,” said Gaston Caperton, president of the College Board. “I am encouraged by the greater numbers of students from all walks of life who are taking on the challenge of the SAT and college.
This year’s average score in critical reading is 502, a 1-point decline compared to last year, or a change of 0.20 percent. The average scores in mathematics and writing declined 3 points each compared to a year ago, bringing the scores to 515 and 494, or a change of 0.58 percent and 0.60 percent, respectively.
Wisconsin Results [250K PDF]. 50 State results are available here.
Daniel de Vise:
The Class of 2007 posted the lowest SAT averages in several years, according to scores released this morning. Scores from the second year of an expanded, three-section college-entrance test declined by double digits in Maryland and the District, by five points in Virginia and by seven points nationwide, compared with the previous graduating class.
Education leaders said the modest decline reflected an ever larger and more diverse population of students taking the test. More blacks, Asians and Hispanics took the SAT in this year’s graduating class than in any previous class; two-fifths of test takers are now minorities.
Is Wisconsin’s ACT Rank Inflated?
Last week, we got the annual good news that Wisconsin “scores near top on ACT once again,” as a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel headline declared. Aping her predecessors, state Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster hailed the results as proof of how dandy we’re doing in Badgerland. The “composite score speaks well of our students’ academic achievement and the support they receive from their parents and teachers,” she declared.
But are we really doing that well? A close look at the ACT test data offers some reason for caution. Yes, Wisconsin’s average score of 22.3 was high compared to the national average of 21.2 (with scores ranging from 18.9 for Mississippi to 23.5 for Massachusetts), but the percentage of students taking the test here is lower than in 15 states. While 70 percent of Wisconsin students take the test, the percentage is 100 in Illinois and Colorado, 96 in Tennessee and Mississippi, and ranges from 71 to 82 percent for another 11 states.
Why does this matter? As the percentage of students taking the test increases, you are likely to include more low-attendance and low-performance students in the mix, pushing the average score lower.
Burmaster brags that Wisconsin has maintained its high ACT score even as the percentage of students taking the test rose. But the increase was minimal, rising from 68 percent in 2002 to 70 percent last year. That includes a steady rise in the number of African-American and Hispanic students taking the test, but they still remain underrepresented.
“We allow people in this state to pound their chest while ignoring the fact that Milwaukee has significantly fewer kids taking (the ACT),” Milwaukee School Board member Terry Falk declared in the JS story. (Falk, a former contributor to Milwaukee Magazine, sure knows how to give good quotes.)
As a reality check, I looked at state scores combined with the percentage of students taking the test to estimate which states we might actually trail. A state like Mississippi, for instance, can be quickly rejected: Yes, 96 percent of students took the test, but the average score of 18.9 was abysmally low, worst among all 50 states. Even if Wisconsin tested 96 percent of students, its average score would never drop that low.
Teens exposed to world of biotech careers through partnership
The family culture of Berkeley’s Hernandez clan is a cool blend of Mexican roots and Bay area savvy – jumpy banda music, quinceanera parties, spicy pico de gallo and genetic engineering experiments.
That last part, the biotechnology, has been grafted onto the traditions Roberto and Irma Hernandez brought with them when the family immigrated to California in the late 1980s. Their arrival was timely – a new school program was about to welcome minority and disadvantaged kids to the biotech industry.
Their oldest child, Roberto, was the pioneer at 15 when he took a chance on the unfamiliar subject at Berkeley High School in 1992. Over the years, he has persuaded his brother and two of his three sisters to sign up for the biotechnology classes.
These four children of immigrants are now part of a young generation of biotech initiates whose prospects include some of the best-paying jobs in the Bay Area.
Roberto Hernandez, 30, was one of the first students to join the school program designed to convince disadvantaged kids that biotechnology jobs are a real option for them. The program, Biotech Partners, removes the barriers that often stand between low-income students and the well-compensated positions abounding in their own neighborhoods.
Hernandez and his sister Griselda, 28, work at the sprawling Bayer Healthcare campus in West Berkeley. Their younger brother Jesus just spent the eve of his 17th birthday tossing around terms such as “cell transformation” and “diafiltration” at a celebration for Biotech Partners students like himself who were finishing summer internships.
Biotech Partners Website:
Biotech Partners provides an entry-level biotechnology education and training program dedicated to supporting the San Francisco Bay Area’s robust bioscience industry while providing valuable working skills for local young people.
Biotech Partners has long been recognized as a model for connecting youth who are under-represented in the sciences to the world of biotechnology. A non-profit organization, Biotech Partners owes its success to strong collaboration among local biotechnology companies, secondary school and community college districts, a dedicated core staff and most importantly, the students and their families.
Related: Madison West High School’s Accelerated Biology Program [RSS].
Beloit College’s Mindset List® for the Class of 2011
Most of the students entering College this fall, members of the Class of 2011, were born in 1989. For them, Alvin Ailey, Andrei Sakharov, Huey Newton, Emperor Hirohito, Ted Bundy, Abbie Hoffman, and Don the Beachcomber have always been dead.
# What Berlin wall?
# Humvees, minus the artillery, have always been available to the public.
Cathy Lynn Grossman has more:
For this fall’s incoming college class, “off the hook” could mean “excellent” or escaping blame, but for sure it has nothing to do with telephones.
“Here’s Johnny!” That’s Jack Nicholson in The Shining, not the intro for Johnny Carson’s monologue, according to today’s 18-year-olds.
Professors had best update their lingo if they want to communicate with the Class of 2011 (on the assumption that anyone actually finishes in four years anymore).
Here to help is the 10th annual Beloit College Mindset List, released today by the small Wisconsin liberal arts college.
Madison and State ACT Scores Rise
Madison public school students’ average scores on the ACT college admissions exam outpace those of their counterparts statewide, even as Wisconsin performs well compared to other states.
The average composite score of Madison public high school students on the national test was 24.6 over the 2006-07 school year, the best showing the district has had since it began keeping ACT records 22 years ago. Nearly 70 percent of high school students in Madison took the test last year.
Up from 24.2 in 2005-06, the average score for Madison students compares to 22.3 among students statewide. The average national composite score is 21.2.
Although an achievement gap remains among minority students and their white counterparts in Madison, students from all ethnic groups here perform substantially better than their peers statewide, and nationally. For the second year in a row, all Madison minority sub-groups improved their performance on the ACT.
Where does MMSD get its numbers from?
One of the reasons that I have devoted more time than I should to analyzing the outcomes from the District’s SLC grants (way too much time, given that I don’t get paid for this and given that the District is going to continue on its merry way with restructuring our high schools into Small Learning Communities no matter what the data indicates) has to do with the frustration I experience when I try and find consistency in the District’s data. Frankly, there isn’t any. MMSD is consistently inconsistent with their numbers, see for example my earlier post trying to identify what the District spent in 2004/05.
The District’s latest press release trumpeting the success of our high school students on the ACT is just the latest example of this problem. According to MMSD, the percentage of Madison students who took the ACT is significantly higher than the percentages that are reported by DPI.
The District reports that “Sixty-nine percent of all MMSD 12th grade students participated in the ACT during 2006-07, compared to 70% last year. Over the last 13 years, MMSD participation has ranged from 67-74% (see pg. 2 table).”
ACT Score Comparison by Year
Average Composite:
%MMSD 12th Year Madison WI US Graders Tested 2006-07 24.6 22.3 21.2 69% 2005-06 24.2 22.2 21.1 70% 2004-05 24.3 22.2 20.9 74% 2003-04 24.2 22.2 20.9 70% 2002-03 23.9 22.2 20.8 68% 2001-02 24.4 22.2 20.8 67% 2000-01 24.1 22.2 21.0 70% 1999-00 24.2 22.2 21.0 72% 1998-99 24.4 22.3 21.0 67% 1997-98 24.5 22.3 21.0 67% 1996-97 24.5 22.3 21.0 70% 1995-96 23.8 22.1 20.9 71% 1994-95 23.5 22.0 20.8 70%
According to DPI, a much smaller percentage of the District’s 12th graders have taken the ACT in their junior or senior years. (The table below is taken from DPI)
| ACT Results – Composite – All Students Madison Metropolitan | ||||
| Enrollment Grade 12 | Number Tested | % Tested | Average Score – Composite | |
| 1996-97 | 1,552 | 982 | 63.3 | 24.5 |
| 1997-98 | 1,650 | 1,016 | 61.6 | 24.5 |
| 1998-99 | 1,639 | 1,014 | 61.9 | 24.4 |
| 1999-00 | 1,697 | 1,127 | 66.4 | 24.2 |
| 2000-01 | 1,728 | 1,091 | 63.1 | 24.1 |
| 2001-02 | 1,785 | 1,113 | 62.4 | 24.4 |
| 2002-03 | 1,873 | 1,126 | 60.1 | 23.9 |
| 2003-04 | 1,920 | 1,198 | 62.4 | 24.2 |
| 2004-05 | 2,055 | 1,247 | 60.7 | 24.3 |
| 2005-06 | 2,035 | 1,244 | 61.1 | 24.2 |
| 2006-07 | 1,983 | 1,151 | 58.0 | 24.6 |
An examination of minority student participation in the ACT reveals that the percentage of African American and Hispanic students taking the test has declined over the last three years. Only 20.1% of African American students in the District took the ACT as compared to 34.6% of African American students across the state.
I am more than willing to believe that DPI’s numbers are inaccurate, but don’t they get this data from the District? Several months ago I was attempting to clarify discrepancies between MMSD and DPI in the cost per student data, and that experience is perhaps informative here. I wrote to clarify this issue:
I am writing to ask about the data that the district lists on its web site regarding cost per pupil. The excel spreadsheet t1.xls on the page (http://www.madison.k12.wi.us/re/dataprofile.htm) lists numbers that do not match those listed on DPI’s web site (http://data.dpi.state.wi.us/data/selschool.asp). Specifically, the numbers that MMSD lists as the state average cost per student are greater than the numbers that DPI lists on its site, while at the same time the MMSD cost per student listed is less than what DPI states that our District spends per student.
I am attaching the spreadsheet I downloaded from the District web site, along with the numbers that I got from DPI. If you could help me understand the discrepancy in these numbers it would be most appreciated.
The response that I got back from Roger Price was:
Jeff,
Both data sources are from the DPI. They calculate both tables. I am not sure what the differences are between the two. We utilize the “Basic Facts” data as published by the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance.
Roger
Why the District with its extensive Data Warehouse has to rely on the Wisconsin Taxpayers Alliance to tell it what they spend per student is beyond me, but it doesn’t fill me with any confidence about the accuracy of their data.
Dane County High School Rankings and ACT results
While the rankings of high schools in Madison Magazine (MM) have been out for awhile, they’ve continued to stick in my craw. That may have something to do with my involvement with the school that’s ranked 21st of 21. Top-ranked Edgewood, I’m sure, has a different take on the rankings, which it highlights on its website.
The magazine says it used average ACT scores as one of the two signifiers of academic achievement, which comprise 60% of its ranking formula. This week DPI released 2007 ACT scores for all the state’s public high schools. How do this year’s performances on the ACT by Dane County high schools compare with the MM rankings?
District SLC Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 3
Because the recent MMSD Small Learning Communities (SLC) grant submission failed to include any discussion of the success or failure of the SLC initiatives already undertaken at Memorial and West High Schools, I have been examining the data that was (or in some cases should have been) provided to the Department of Education in the final reports of those previous grants. Earlier postings have examined the data from Memorial and the academic achievement data at West. It is now time to turn our attention to the data on Community and Connection, the other major goal of the West SLC grant.
West’s SLC grant, which ran from 2003/04 to 2005/06 (and highlighted in the tables below), targeted 6 goals in the area of increasing community and connection amongst their students.
- 2.a. Suspension and Expulsion data
- 2.b. Safe and Supportive Climate
- 2.c. Stakeholder Perceptions
- 2.d. Extracurricular Participation
- 2.e. Student Leadership
- 2.f. Parent Participation
The available data suggest that West’s restructuring has not had the anticipated effect on these measures. While I have been more than skeptical about the impact of the SLC restructuring on academic performance, I did expect that there would be positive changes in school climate, so I am surprised and disappointed at the data.
2.a. Suspension and Expulsion data -The final report claims that “Progress has been made overall for both suspensions and expulsions at West High.” We reach a very different conclusion when we examine the data available from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (DPI). I don’t know what to make of the large discrepancies in the numbers reported by West in their final report and those on the DPI website (West reports a much higher number of suspensions), but I am inclined to believe that the data DPI collected from the District is the data we should rely on. That data shows that number of students suspended and more importantly the percentage of students suspended has actually increased over the time course of the SLC grant. Note that percentages are the more appropriate statistic to examine because they take into account the number of students enrolled which has declined over this period of time.
|
Total Suspensions West Final Report |
Total Suspensions DPI WINSS Data |
Suspensions (% of Students) DPI WINSS Data |
African Am. Suspensions West Final Report |
African Am. Suspensions DPI WINSS Data |
African Am. Suspensions (% of Students) DPI WINSS Data |
|
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2000/01 | 280 | 189 | 9.0% | 100 | 71 | 23.1% |
| 2001/02 | 265 | 154 | 7.3% | 145 | 82 | 26.0% |
| 2002/03 | 230 | 142 | 6.6% | 115 | 71 | 24.0% |
| 2003/04 | 255 | 142 | 6.7% | 147 | 79 | 27.6% |
| 2004/05 | 160 | 159 | 7.5% | 90 | 89 | 28.1% |
| 2005/06 | not reported | 181 | 8.9% | not reported | 98 | 34.6% |
Examining the suspension data on the DPI website revealed that the increases in the suspension rates amongst West High students were particularly pronounced for 9th and 10th grade students – the students specifically targeted by the SLC restructuring and implementation of a core curriculum.
| 9th Grade Suspensions | 10th Grade Suspensions | |
|---|---|---|
| 2000/01 | 13.1% | 8.5% |
| 2001/02 | 9.9% | 9.3% |
| 2002/03 | 10.2% | 6.4% |
| 2003/04 | 11.0% | 9.3% |
| 2004/05 | 11.3% | 9.9% |
| 2005/06 | 14.8% | 10.1% |
2.b. Safe and Supportive Climate – This goal was supposed to be assessed by examining changes in ratings of physical and emotional safety and school connected-ness on the District climate survey. Although climate data is supposedly collected from students each year, this data is not presented in West’s Final Report. However, information presented in the recent MMSD proposal suggests that there haven’t been any changes at West. In that proposal, it is noted that 53% of West students agreed with the statement “I am an important part of my school community.” This percentage is essentially unchanged from the 52% of students in 2001/02 whom West said reported feeling attached to their school, when the school applied for their initial SLC grant.
In Hong Kong, Flashy Tutors Gain Icon Status
When Richard Eng isn’t teaching English grammar to high-school students, he might be cruising around Hong Kong in his Lamborghini Murciélago. Or in Paris, on one of his seasonal shopping sprees. Or relaxing in his private, custom-installed karaoke room festooned with giant Louis Vuitton logos.
Mr. Eng, 43 years old, is one of Hong Kong’s best-known celebrity “tutor gods.”
Hong Kong parents are often desperate to help their children succeed in this city’s pressure-cooker public-examination system, which determines students’ college-worthiness. That explains why many are willing to pay handsomely for extracurricular help. Mr. Eng and others like him have made a lucrative business out of tapping that demand. They use flashy, aggressive marketing tactics that have transformed them into scholastic pop stars — “tutor gods,” as they’re known in Cantonese.
Private tutoring is big business around the world. Programs that help people prepare for standardized tests — such as SAT-prep courses in the U.S. — have become a multibillion-dollar industry. Tutoring agencies are also booming in places like mainland China and Japan. Several years ago, Hong Kong’s government estimated that the city’s families spent nearly half a billion dollars a year on tutoring.
Hong Kong stands out, though, for instructors who boldly tout their success rate — and their own images. They pay to have their faces plastered throughout the city on 40-foot-high billboards and the sides of double-decker buses. They’re also known for buying ads that take up the entire front page of newspapers — space more commonly filled by banks and property developers. One local television station is even preparing to launch a fictional drama series based on the lives of the tutor gods.
Fascinating
Bringing Diversity to New York Elite High Schools
by Christine Kiernan
Luis Rosario just completed fifth grade but he already thinks about attending an Ivy League college. And he would seem to be on his way. He won first prize in his district’s fifth grade science fair, scored high on the state math test, gets straight A’s and is fascinated by robotic sciences.
His mother, Judith Pena, wanted to get him into a program to prepare him for one of the city’s specialized high schools. Then she learned about the Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering. ”This is even better,” she said. And so, next month Luis Rosario will join the first sixth grade class of Columbia Secondary, a new select school in upper Manhattan.
Columbia Secondary is aimed at top students like Luis, students who one would expect to attend an elite public high school. But over the years the so-called specialized schools have not attracted a large number of gifted black and Hispanic students. In fact, over the past decade, the percentage of students from the city’s large black and Hispanic population who attend these select schools has decreased significantly.
Under the banner “strength in diversity,” Columbia Secondary School for Math, Science and Engineering will try to change that. The school, a partnership of the Department of Education and Columbia University, is aggressively recruiting black and Hispanic students and plans to try out new methods to achieve a more equitable racial balance.
District SLC Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 2
An earlier posting examined the results of the small school initiative at Memorial high school. This post aims to examine West’s SLC grant. Similar to the Memorial grant, the goal of West’s SLC grant was to reduce the achievement gap and to increase students’ sense of community.
The final report is a major source of frustration for anyone who values data analysis and statistics. Essentially, there are no statistics reported. The data is presented in figures that are cluttered and too small, which makes them difficult to interpret. Changes over time are discussed as trends without any sort of statistical tests being reported. Most of the data presented are no more detailed than what anyone can pull off the DPI web site.
Before examining the impact of West’s restructuring on student achievement and on students’ connection to the school, it is necessary to identify just a few of the components of the West proposal that were never enacted:
- “C.2.c Advocate Mentor. Each student will have an adult advocate from their learning community (LC) who stays with them through their years at West. Students will meet weekly with their advocate to review academic progress and attendance, preview the upcoming week, discuss school or personal issues, etc.” A rather ambitious aspect of the proposal, and considering District finances a totally unrealistic proposal. It was not implemented.
- “C.2.d. Academic/Career Pathways. Beginning early in freshman year, each student will work with their LC guidance counselor and parent(s) to develop an Individualized Graduation Plan (IGP) that includes (1) personal, academic, and career/avocation exploration goals, and (2) academic coursework and learning experiences beyond the classroom that help students achieve these goals. Updated periodically, the IGP will be based on the student’s academic record and a current assessment of their skills and competencies, intellectual interests, and personality.” As far as I know, this never happened, at the very least parents were never involved.
- “C.5.e. Strategies for securing/maintaining staff, community, and parent buy-in. … We will provide frequent formal (e.g., surveys, focus groups) and informal chances for staff and other stakeholders to raise concerns with the project leadership (Principal and hired project staff).” Parents were never surveyed and the only focus groups that I am aware of were two meetings conducted following parents’ uproar over English 10 …
“The SLC Coordinator will also provide frequent progress reports through a variety of school and community-based media (e.g., special staff newsletter and memos from the principal; school newsletter sent home; media coverage of positive developments, etc.). Also our community partners will serve as ambassadors for the project via communications to their respective constituencies.” There were two presentations to the PTSO summarizing the results of the grant. I am not aware of anything in the school newsletter or in the “media” that reported on the results of the restructuring.
- “E.1 Overall Evaluation Strategy
Third-Party Evaluator. … He will develop survey instruments and analyze the formative and summative data described below, and prepare annual reports of his findings for all stakeholder groups. Parents (one of the stakeholders) never received annual reports from the evaluator, and I have no idea about what surveys were or were not developed …
Also the outcome data for West will be compared to the same data elements for a school with similar demographic characteristics that is not restructuring into learning communities.” Rather than comparing West’s outcome data to a comparable school, the final report compares West’s data to the District’s data.
- Finally, one of the goals of the grant (2.f. Parent Participation) was to increase the % of parents of color who attend school functions. This data was to come from attendance logs collected by the LC Assistant Principals. This objective is not even listed as one of the goals on the Final Report, and if attendance at PTSO meetings is any indicator, the SLC grant had no impact on the participation of parents of color. It is interesting to note that the recently submitted high school redesign grant does not include any efforts at increasing parental participation. Given the extensive literature on the importance of parental involvement, especially for low income students (see the recent meta analysis by Jeynes (2007) in Urban Education, Vol. 42, pp. 82-110), it is disappointing to see that the District has given up on this goal.
On to the data…
Summer Reading Programs Gain Momentum for Students About to Enter College
For students starting college, August is the time to quit the summer job, dump the high school sweetheart and, finally, open the book their college has asked them to finish before classes start.
Nationwide, hundreds of colleges and universities, large and small, public and private, assign first-year students a book to read over the summer, hoping to create a sense of community and engage students intellectually.
While there are no reliable statistics on summer reading programs, a recent survey of more than 100 programs by a student researcher at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., found that most had started in the last four years, although a few go back decades.
The range of books colleges use is enormous, covering fiction and nonfiction. Classics are largely absent, with most of the works chosen falling closer to Oprah than academic.
People Gives Students A Leg Up
The UW-Madison PEOPLE program helped Nana Asante struggle against a feeling of non-acceptance at the mostly white Verona Area High School.
Asante, who will be a senior at the high school this fall, said that being able to interact with other academically achieving minorities from other schools through the program helped her confidence grow.
“I had experience with people like myself,” Asante said.
The Pre-College Enrichment Opportunity Program for Learning Excellence (PEOPLE), administered by the School of Education at UW-Madison, encourages racial and ethnic minorities and low-income students to work hard and achieve the grades that can help them attend UW-Madison. Tuition scholarships are offered to those who make the grade.
Cartoonist among role models for high school boys.
Oh, that every one of our high schools had a “AAA” (“African American Achievement”) Team. —LAF
Susan Troller
The Capital Times
8/1/2007
The only guy who can truly hold you back is the guy in the mirror,” cartoonist Robb Armstrong told a group of mostly male, mostly African-American students at La Follette High School on Tuesday.
He is the creator of the nationally syndicated comic strip JumpStart, which focuses on an African-American family and until recently ran in the Wisconsin State Journal. He was in Madison, speaking to members of the African-American Achievement Team, based at La Follette.
Armstrong grew up in a tough West Philadelphia neighborhood with his fiercely ambitious mother and four siblings.
An advocate for education who talks to over 5,000 students a year, Armstrong held his audience spellbound for about an hour as he talked about his family, his friends and the hard choices he had to make to pursue his passion as a cartoonist.
District SLC Grant – Examining the Data From Earlier Grants, pt. 1
The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) recently submitted a five year, $5 million grant proposal to the US Department of Education (DOE) to support the creation of Small Learning Communities (SLCs) in all four high schools (See here for post re. grant application). While the grant proposal makes mention of the two smaller SLC grants the district received earlier, there is no examination of the data from those two projects. One would think that DOE would be curious to know if MMSD’s earlier efforts at creating SLCs had produced the desired results before agreeing to provide further funding. Furthermore, one would think it important to examine if the schools implemented the changes that they proposed in their applications. It is my intention to provide some of that analysis over the course of several posts, and I want to encourage other community members to examine the Memorial grant proposal and final report and the West grant and final report themselves.
We begin by examining Memorial High School’s SLC grant which was funded from 2000-2003. Memorial’s SLC grant is a good place to start, not only because it was the first MMSD SLC grant, but because they lay out clearly the outcome measures that they intend to evaluate and their final report provides hard numbers (as opposed to graphics) over a number of years before and after the implementation of the SLC grant. Memorial had two goals for their SLC grant: 1) to reduce the achievement gap and 2) to increase students’ connectedness to the school.
Examining student achievement suggests mixed results for Memorial’s restructuring. Student GPA’s indicate a slight narrowing of the achievement gap for African American students and essentially no change for Hispanic students when compared to their fellow white students over the period of the grant.
| Difference Between |
2000
|
2001
|
2002
|
2003
|
| White & African American |
1.35
|
1.35
|
1.16
|
1.24
|
| White & Hispanic |
0.75
|
0.87
|
0.74
|
0.79
|
Student WKCE performance can be considered an external indicator of student success, and these data indicate no change in the proportion of students scoring at the Proficient and/or Advanced levels, an especially noteworthy result given that the criteria for the WKCEs were lowered in 2002/03 which was the last year of the grant. I’ve included data up through this past school year since that is available on the DPI website, and I’ve only presented data from math and reading in the interests of not overloading SIS readers.
| WKCE | 99/2000 | 2000/01 | 2001/02 | 2002/03 | 2003/04 | 2004/05 | 2005/06 | 2006/07 |
| Reading | ||||||||
| African American |
45.09
|
54.90
|
36.00
|
33.00
|
40.5
|
45.8
|
42.9
|
29.8
|
| Hispanic |
63.16
|
80.00
|
47.00
|
54.00
|
53.6
|
51.7*
|
53.1*
|
29.3*
|
| White |
93.33
|
85.55
|
86.00
|
89.00
|
90.2
|
86.2
|
89.0
|
84.2
|
| Low Income |
53.33
|
56.36
|
36.00
|
36.00
|
32.9
|
40.7
|
43.7
|
25.7
|
| Not Low Income |
88.00
|
86.9
|
84.7
|
89.8
|
80.2
|
|||
| Math | ||||||||
| African American |
18.00
|
27.45
|
20.00
|
29.00**
|
39.2
|
32.2
|
27.3
|
39.4
|
| Hispanic |
42.11
|
40.00
|
33.00
|
49.00
|
42.9
|
62.1*
|
59.4*
|
36.2*
|
| White |
77.44
|
76.48
|
68.00
|
90.00
|
89.7
|
89.3
|
89.0
|
86.4
|
| Low Income |
18.64
|
16.37
|
16.00
|
29.00**
|
29.4
|
38.4
|
38.7
|
35.7
|
| Not Low Income |
90
|
85.8
|
86.9
|
89.2
|
84.2
|
* note. data for Hispanic students includes 4 Native American students in 03/04 and 2 in the following two years
** note. DPI actually reports higher percentages of students scoring proficient/advanced: 34% and 37% respectively for these two cells
The data from DPI looking at ACT test performance and percentage of students tested does not suggest any change has occurred in the last 10 years, so the data presented here would suggest that Memorial’s SLC restructuring hasn’t had any effect on the achievement gap, but what about the other goal, student connectedness?
U of Chicago Requires 4 PowerPoint Slides with Application
At business meetings the world over, PowerPoint-style presentations are often met with yawns and glazed eyes.
But at one of the world’s top business schools, such slide shows are now an entrance requirement. In a first, the University of Chicago will begin requiring prospective students to submit four pages of PowerPoint-like slides with their applications this fall.
The new requirement is partly an acknowledgment that Microsoft Corp.’s PowerPoint, along with similar but lesser-known programs, have become a ubiquitous tool in the business world. But Chicago says so-called “slideware,” if used correctly, also can let students show off a creative side that might not reveal itself in test scores, recommendations and even essays.
By adding PowerPoint to its application, Chicago thinks it might attract more students who have the kind of cleverness that can really pay off in business, and fewer of the technocrat types who sometimes give the program a bad name.
“We wanted to have a freeform space for students to be able to say what they think is important, not always having the school run that dialogue,” said Rose Martinelli, associate dean for student recruitment and admissions. “To me this is just four pieces of blank paper. You do what you want. It can be a presentation. It can be poetry. It can be anything.”
A dark day. Much more on PowerPoint and Education, here. The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint, by Edward Tufte.
CUNY Plans to Raise Its Admissions Standards: “the math cutoff would be raised first because that was where the students were “so woefully unprepared””
The City University of New York is beginning a drive to raise admissions requirements at its senior colleges, its first broad revision since its trustees voted to bar students needing remedial instruction from its bachelor’s degree programs nine years ago.
In 2008, freshmen will have to show math SAT scores 20 to 30 points higher than they do now to enter the university’s top-tier colleges — Baruch, Brooklyn, City, Hunter and Queens — and its six other senior colleges.
Students now can also qualify for the bachelor’s degree programs with satisfactory scores on the math Regents examination or on placement tests; required cutoffs for those tests will also be raised.
Open admissions policies at the community colleges will be unaffected.
“We are very serious in taking a group of our institutions and placing them in the top segment of universities and colleges,” said Matthew Goldstein, the university chancellor, who described the plan in an interview. “That is the kind of profile we want for our students.”
Dr. Goldstein said that the English requirements for the senior colleges would be raised as well, but that the math cutoff would be raised first because that was where the students were “so woefully unprepared.”
Speaking of Math, I’m told that the MMSD’s Math Task Force did not obtain the required NSF Grant. [PDF Overview, audio / video introduction] and Retiring Superintendent Art Rainwater’s response to the School Board’s first 2006-2007 Performance Goal:
1. Initiate and complete a comprehensive, independent and neutral review and assessment of the District’s K-12 math curriculum. The review and assessment shall be undertaken by a task force whose members are appointed by the Superintendent and approved by the BOE. Members of the task force shall have math and math education expertise and represent a variety of perspectives regarding math education.
How Schools Get It Right
Experienced teachers, supplemental programs are two key elements to helping students thrive
Liz Bowie
Baltimore Sun
July 22, 2007
Tucked amid a block of rowhouses around the corner from Camden Yards is an elementary school with a statistical profile that often spells academic trouble: 76 percent of the students are poor, and 95 percent are minorities.
But George Washington Elementary has more academic whizzes than most of the schools in Howard, Anne Arundel, Carroll and Baltimore counties.
These students don’t just pass the Maryland School Assessment – they ace it. About 46.2 percent of George Washington students are scoring at the advanced level, representing nearly half of the school’s 94 percent pass rate.
An analysis by The Sun of 2007 MSA scores shows that most schools with a large percentage of high achievers on the test are in the suburban counties, often neighborhoods of middle- and upper-middle-class families. But a few schools in poorer neighborhoods, such as George Washington, have beaten the odds.
Statewide, Howard County had the highest percentage of students with advanced scores, and Montgomery and Worcester counties weren’t far behind.
Of the top five elementary schools, two are in Montgomery County, two in Anne Arundel and one in Baltimore County.
Whether they are in wealthy or poor neighborhoods, schools with lots of high-scoring students share certain characteristics. They have experienced teachers who stay for years, and they offer extracurricular activities after school. Sometimes, they have many students in gifted-and-talented classes working with advanced material.
Tests Shouldn’t Be Last Word on State of Writing
Minnesotans got what seemed like great news on the education front last month. The state Department of Education announced that in 2007, 92 percent of Minnesota 10th-graders and 91 percent of ninth-graders passed a writing test needed to graduate from high school.
Cause for celebration? I must confess to skepticism.
These through-the-roof passage rates don’t square with complaints about recent graduates’ writing skills that I’ve heard from friends who teach college or hire for businesses.
Young people’s shortcomings often range, I’m told, from limited vocabularies to difficulty writing clear, serviceable prose.
Nor do the high passing rates square with other test results. In the 2005 National Assessment of Educational Progress test of eighth-graders, 62 percent of Minnesota eighth-graders tested at basic or below in reading. A basic score denotes only “partial mastery” of the skills necessary for proficient performance.
In order to write well, you have to read well. The low NAEP reading scores suggest that Minnesota’s writing test must be easy.
Plenty of evidence
Evidence of weak writing skills is plentiful. Last fall, for example, nearly 50 percent of students entering Normandale Community College in Bloomington were required to take a remedial, or “developmental,” writing course, according to college spokesman Geoffrey Jones. Such courses merely get students ready for college-level work.
Minnesota isn’t alone in its writing deficit. Today, many kids from across the country — graduates of suburban and private high schools as well as inner-city schools — struggle to craft a logical argument, analyze ideas or otherwise convey their thoughts on paper.
