In a downturn firms can acquire resources that would be too expensive or unavailable in a boom. This logic applies to human resources as well as brand or hard assets. A recent survey found that hiring stars is among the most effective ways to enhance a firm’s talent pool during a recession.
Research has consistently found that stars outperform average employees. For highly complex tasks, the top 1% of workers are more than twice as productive as the average employee. Top research scientists and software programmers are five to ten times more productive than average. Markets recognize the value of hiring stars. A study of twenty General Electric alumni appointed as CEOs between 1989 and 2001found the hiring company’s stock price increased in all but three cases when the company announced the new hire, boosting shareholder value more than $1 billion on average.
In a series of excellent studies, Professor Boris Groysberg (with colleagues including Nitin Nohria and Ashish Nanda) has demonstrated that a star’s performance often suffers after switching employers. Star equity analysts (i.e., those earning the highest rankings from Institutional Investor magazine) suffer an average decline in performance of 20% when they shift firms, and do not return to their previous form for five years. Groysberg, who also conducted the study on CEOs from GE, found that several of the new CEOs, including Paolo Fresco at Fiat and Gary Wendt at Conseco, failed to create shareholder value in their new firms.
An Economist, an Academic Puzzle and a Lot of Promise
Steven Pearlstein, via a kind reader’s email:
Early in his career, Paul Romer helped solve one of the great puzzles of economics: What makes some economies grow faster than others? His “new growth theory” might one day earn him a Nobel prize.
Then a decade ago, Romer, by then a professor at Stanford University, decided to tackle what may be an even tougher puzzle: Why were so many of his students coming to class unprepared and disengaged?
Romer’s quest began with the proposition that the more time students put into their studies, the more they learn. As Malcolm Gladwell demonstrates in his new book, “Outliers,” that’s certainly true in many other areas of human endeavor — the more you practice scales or swing a club, the better you are at playing piano or hitting a decent golf shot. Why should learning economics be any different?
It took some noodling around, but two years later, Romer raised $10 million in venture capital to start a software company he called Aplia. The idea was to develop interactive exercises that students could do in conjunction with the most widely used college economics textbooks. Students would answer questions, then get immediate feedback on what they got right and wrong, along with some explanations that might help them get it right on a second and third try. Aplia’s team of young Ph.D. economists and software programmers also devised laboratory experiments in which the entire class could participate in simulated markets that give students a practical understanding of concepts like money supply and demand curves.
Locally, the Madison School Board is discussing a proposed technology plan this evening. Ideally, before any more is spent, the Infinite Campus system should be fully implemented, and used by teachers, staff and students. Once that is done, there are many possibilities, including this example.
America’s classroom equality battle
The most ambitious US presidency in living memory hardly needs to extend its list of tasks, you might think. Yet the country’s long-term economic prospects turn on something that is all too easy to neglect, just as it has been neglected in the past. The US is failing calamitously in primary and secondary education. The average quality of its workforce is falling, and its schools are adding to the problem rather than mitigating it.
Much of what ails the country – including growing economic inequality – can be traced to this source. Politicians recognise the fact, and prate about it endlessly. Barack Obama puts improving the schools alongside health reform and alternative energy whenever he lays out his long-term goals.
The trouble is, fixing the schools is not something that a crisis ever forces you to do. The consequences of a third-rate education system creep up on you and, experience shows, can be tolerated indefinitely. Many vested interests prefer it that way. Talk about the issue and move on is the line of least political resistance.
Just how badly is the US school system failing? A new study by McKinsey bravely attempts to come up with some numbers – and its estimates, though arrived at conservatively, are pretty startling*.
According to the Programme for International Student Assessment, a long-term comparison project from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, the US lags far behind the industrial-country average in a standardised measure of maths and science skills among 15-year-olds. It sits among low-achievers such as Portugal and Italy, and way behind the best performers, such as South Korea, Finland, Canada and the Netherlands. It scores worse than the UK, which is about average on both measures.
The Dreaded Grade Appeal
During a routine conversation about the semester, curriculum, and student population, a colleague of mine burst in with a frustrated comment about grade appeals. He thinks that we’re seeing more formal grade complaints than in past years. A dozen contacts at community colleges and universities seem to agree; we’re seeing more and more students going to the administration to complain about individual assignment grades, course policies, and final course grades. On a bad week, I will see more students in my office wrangling over assignment grades than those truly hoping to improve their academic performance. It’s depressing. Like many of my academic friends, I want to blame the generational divide for what looks like an increase in the number of grade appeals. After watching “I Love the 80’s” every night in a week, I want to wail and cry, mumbling that this new generation just doesn’t understand. They have no sense of what’s appropriate. They don’t respect authority. And their sense of entitlement is overwhelming. That, my friend, is what’s causing this increase in grade appeals across the nation.
What impact do high school mathematics curricula have on college-level mathematics placement?
James Wollack & Michael Fish [280K PDF], via a kind reader’s email UW Center for Placement Testing [Link to Papers]:
Major Findings:
- CORE-Plus students performed significantly less well on math placement test and ACT-M than did traditional students
- Change in performance was observed immediately after switch
- Score trends throughout CORE-Plus years actually decreased slightly – Inconsistent with a teacher learning-curve hypothesis
- CORE-AP students fared much better, but not as well as the traditional – AP students – Both sample sizes were low
Related:
- Math Forum
- Madison School District Math Task Force.
- 2004 Madison West High School Math Teacher letter to Isthmus.
- UW Math Professor Open Letter about the Madison School District Math Coordinator position.
[280K PDF Complete Presentation]
China’s boxed itself in
Its emphasis on math and science has certainly fueled its rapid economic growth, but its lack of creative thinking could rob it of an innovative edge.
Which country — the United States or China — will make the 21st century its own?
When President Obama recently called for American young people “to be makers of things” and focus on subjects such as science and engineering, it was partly a nod to China’s rapid growth. Had he lived, taught and consulted in China for the last 33 months, as I have, he might have urged American students first to follow his example and study the liberal arts. Only technical knowledge complemented by well-honed critical and creative thinking skills can help us regain our innovative edge. China’s traditional lack of emphasis on teaching these skills could undermine its efforts to develop its own innovative economy.
I once challenged my Chinese MBA students to brainstorm “two-hour business plans.” I divided them into six groups, gave them detailed instructions and an example: a restaurant chain. The more original their idea, the better, I stressed — and we’d vote for a prize winner. The word “prize” energized the room. Laptops flew open. Fingers pounded. Voices roared. Packs of cookies were ripped open and shared. Not a single person text-messaged. I’d touched a nerve.
In the end, five of the six groups presented plans for, you guessed it, restaurant chains. The sixth proposed a catering service. Why risk a unique solution when the instructor has let it slip he likes the food business?
Asia Seeks Its Own Brand of Business Schools
Business major Lee Sun Kee is happy that he attended Korea University in Seoul. Lee, a senior, took four courses at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School last fall as an exchange student and feels that his university in Korea offers business programs just as good as those at Ivy League schools. “At Wharton, I met talented students and a couple of star professors whose lectures were impressive,” says Lee. “But for other classes, I thought I could have learned better in Korea at one-tenth of Wharton’s tuition.”
Lee is one of a growing number of students appreciating a drastic makeover undertaken at business schools in Korea. Under a campaign to globalize curricula, faculty, and ways of thinking by students, top universities in the country have rebuilt their programs by modeling themselves largely on leading business schools in the U.S. “Globalization is our new mission,” says Jang Hasung, dean of Korea University Business School. While Korean multinationals like Samsung Electronics and Hyundai Motor have been expanding worldwide for years, Jang says his school long had focused too much on national issues and Korean perspectives.
Winning the money game
The economic downturn has made financial aid an even more urgent concern for many families. Reporter Beth Kowitt talked with education financing expert Mark Kantrowitz, the founder of FinAid.org, about how the system works and how to get the most out of it.
Q: How is the recession affecting the availability of financial aid?
A: Colleges recognize that a time of economic distress is the worst time to be cutting student aid. On the other hand, there are many more people applying for aid – applications are up 20% this year. Schools are trying to protect their student aid budgets – they’ve been doing things like laying off faculty and freezing salaries to avoid cutting aid. Some schools that offer both merit- and need-based aid are reducing the academic scholarships and redirecting that money into need-based aid. And they are focusing on the families that need it most. If your 529 plan went down 40% last year, you’re probably not going to get an increase in financial aid, because everybody’s went down 40%. The schools are more likely to offer additional help to parents who lost a job.
The Curse of the Class of 2009
The bad news for this spring’s college graduates is that they’re entering the toughest labor market in at least 25 years.
The worse news: Even those who land jobs will likely suffer lower wages for a decade or more compared to those lucky enough to graduate in better times, studies show.
Andrew Friedson graduated last year from the University of Maryland with a degree in government and politics and a stint as student-body president on his résumé. After working on Barack Obama’s presidential campaign for a few months, Mr. Friedson hoped to get a position in the new administration. When that didn’t pan out he looked for jobs on Capitol Hill. No luck there, either.
So now, instead of learning about policymaking and legislation, he’s earning about $1,250 a month as a high-school tutor and a part-time fundraiser for Hillel, a Jewish campus organization. To save money, he’s living with his parents.
Boring Within or Simply Boring?
In the age of computer-based learning, lecturing gets treated like Model-T Ford. Don’t be deceived; lecturing remains a staple of the academy and it’s likely to remain so for quite some time. University class sizes have swelled in the wake of budget cuts that have delayed (or canceled) faculty searches. A recent study of eleven Ohio four-year colleges reveals that 25 percent of introductory classes have more than 120 students and only a shortage of teaching assistants has kept the percentage that low. At the University of Massachusetts, 12 percent of all classes have enrollments of over 50 and lectures of over 200 are quite common. As long as universities operate on the assembly-line model, lecturing will remain integral to the educational process.
But even if enormous class sizes aren’t the norm at your college, lecturing is still an art you should master. It doesn’t matter how technologically adroit one is or how many non-instructor-directed whistles and bells get crammed into a course, at some point every professor lectures, even if it’s just giving instructions or recapping a completed exercise. (I’ll address online classes in the future, but let’s just say that you’d be wise to incorporate lecture-like components into these as well.)
Lots of new professors harbor anxiety about lecturing, which is understandable, given that it shows up in most top-10 lists of American phobias. The ability to give an engaging lecture doesn’t come shrink-wrapped with your graduate diploma. Nor does it necessarily come with experience; some of the smartest and most seasoned professors I’ve ever encountered are horrible lecturers. That said, lecturing is so integral to successful college teaching that it’s a form of masochism and sadism to not become good at it.
The Instigator: Steve Barr
Steve Barr stood in the breezeway at Alain Leroy Locke High School, at the edge of the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, on a February morning. He’s more than six feet tall, with white-gray hair that’s perpetually unkempt, and the bulk of an ex-jock. Beside him was Ramon Cortines–neat, in a trim suit–the Los Angeles Unified School District’s new superintendent. Cortines had to be thinking about last May, when, as a senior deputy superintendent, he had visited under very different circumstances. That was when a tangle between two rival cliques near an outdoor vending machine turned into a fight that spread to every corner of the schoolyard. Police sent more than a dozen squad cars and surged across the campus in riot gear, as teachers grabbed kids on the margins and whisked them into locked classrooms.
The school’s test scores had been among the worst in the state. In recent years, seventy-five per cent of incoming freshmen had dropped out. Only about three per cent graduated with enough credits to apply to a California state university. Two years ago, Barr had asked L.A.U.S.D. to give his charter-school-management organization, Green Dot Public Schools, control of Locke, and let him help the district turn it around. When the district refused, Green Dot became the first charter group in the country to seize a high school in a hostile takeover. (“He’s a revolutionary,” Nelson Smith, the president and C.E.O. of the National Alliance for Public Charter Schools, said.) Locke reopened in September, four months after the riot, as a half-dozen Green Dot schools.
So Long, Washington, DC School Choice…..
FOR all of the hype that preceded the Tea Parties, the first protest to win some sort of concession from Barack Obama’s administration may have been the protests against the end of Washington’s school-voucher programme. A month ago, the programme’s funding was shamefully struck from the president’s proposed budget. This prompted libertarian and liberal groups to fight back, culminating in a protest yesterday. And today comes news of a compromise of sorts:
President Obama will propose setting aside enough money for all 1,716 students in the District’s voucher program to continue receiving grants for private school tuition until they graduate from high school, but he would allow no new students to join the program.
Actually, that’s not much of a compromise. That’s more of a cover-up. Let’s remember that Mr Obama, who sends his own children to private school, made the following promise during his inaugural address:
Is Barack Obama’s education secretary too good to be true?
IT IS hard to find anybody with a bad word to say about Arne Duncan, Barack Obama’s young education secretary. Margaret Spellings, his predecessor in the Bush administration, calls him “a visionary leader and fellow reformer”. During his confirmation hearings Lamar Alexander, a senator from Tennessee and himself a former education secretary, sounded more like a lovesick schoolgirl than a member of the opposition party: “I think you’re the best.” Enthusiastic without being over-the-top, pragmatic without being a pushover, he is also the perfect embodiment of mens sana in corpore sano–tall and lean, clean-cut and athletic, a Thomas Arnold for the digital age.
Since moving to the Education Department a couple of months ago he has been a tireless preacher of the reform gospel. He supports charter schools and merit pay, accountability and transparency, but also litters his speeches with more unfamiliar ideas. He argues that one of the biggest problems in education is how to attract and use talent. All too often the education system allocates the best teachers to the cushiest schools rather than the toughest. Mr Duncan also stresses the importance of “replicating” success. His department, he says, should promote winning ideas (such as “Teach for America”, a programme that sends high-flying university graduates to teach in underserved schools) rather than merely enforcing the status quo.
Nor is this just talk. Mr Duncan did much to consolidate his reputation as a reformer on May 6th, when the White House announced that it will try to extend Washington, DC’s voucher programme until all 1,716 children taking part have graduated from high school. The Democrat-controlled Congress has been trying to smother the programme by removing funding. But Mr Duncan has vigorously argued that it does not make sense “to take kids out of a school where they’re happy and safe and satisfied and learning”. He and Mr Obama will now try to persuade Congress not to kill the programme.
No choice in D.C.
Congress supports vouchers for cars but not schools
Fighting to save the District’s popular school-voucher program, some 1,000 parents, pupils and politicians gathered near Mayor Adrian Fenty’s office on Wednesday to protest Congress’ plans to end school choice in Washington.
That same day, the Senate approved a $4,500 voucher for cars, encouraging citizens to trade in their old automobiles for newer ones that burn less fuel.
So, Congress thinks that vouchers for schools are bad, but vouchers for cars are good.
Slashing school vouchers spares teachers’ unions from competition. On the other hand, car vouchers are supposed to boost demand for cars built by the United Auto Workers. The obvious explanation for this schizophrenia: Congress does whatever helps unions.
A closer look reveals that Congress has it wrong in both cases – which is what happens when lawmakers let interest groups trump common sense.
Five MBA students face up to the economic realities
Over the course of one week, Which MBA? followed the fortunes of five MBA students from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management, graduating into one of the toughest jobs markets in memory.
Day one: Daianna
Last summer, The Economist called business schools “ports in a storm,” (see article) such was the surge in applications from prospective students seeking to ride out the recession. Almost a year on, students have seen an economy that looked bad when they first applied grow much, much worse. As the spring term comes to an end, rumour has it that nearly half of my fellow MBAs are still without summer internships or full-time offers. Fierce headwinds face us as we sail back out into the world.
Whatever the initial motives for enrolling, few go to business school without the belief that an MBA will put them on a fast-track to bigger and better things upon graduation. That’s certainly what I had in mind when I left my job, salary and friends to move to Chicago to pursue a two-year, full-time MBA at Kellogg. I wanted to expand my business skills at a top-ranked school in order to change from a career primarily at non-profit organisations to a more traditional role at a prominent company in the private sector.
Our view paying for college: To stretch education dollars, cut out the middleman
Obama seeks student aid hike, falls short on cost control.
To look at higher education these days, it seems that no one cares about financially strapped students.
On the one hand, colleges have long been raising tuition at a rate faster than the cost of living. On the other, lenders have treated families’ increased borrowing needs as an invitation to easy profits.
To address this, President Obama wants to expand federal Pell Grants for low- and middle-income students. The expansion would be financed by ending the private, scandal-plagued Federal Family Education Loan Program and replacing it with direct government lending.
The obvious question is: Will all this actually make college more affordable? In the past, universities have driven up costs through lavish building, money-losing sports, swelling bureaucracies and a tolerance of professors who barely teach. Simply throwing more money at them isn’t going to prompt necessary belt-tightening.
Writing in Trouble
For many years, Lucy Calkins, described once in Education Week as “the Moses of reading and writing in American education” has made her major contributions to the dumbing down of writing in our schools. She once wrote to me that: “I teach writing, I don’t get into content that much.” This dedication to contentless writing has spread, in part through her influence, into thousands and thousands of classrooms, where “personal” writing has been blended with images, photos, and emails to become one of the very most anti-academic and anti-intellectual elements of the education we now offer our children, K-12.
In 2004, the College Board’s National Commission on Writing in the Schools issued a call for more attention to writing in the schools, and it offered an example of the sort of high school writing “that shows how powerfully our students can express their emotions“:
“The time has come to fight back and we are. By supporting our leaders and each other, we are stronger than ever. We will never forget those who died, nor will we forgive those who took them from us.”
Or look at the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), the supposed gold standard for evaluating academic achievement in U.S. schools, as measured and reported by the National Center for Education Statistics. In its 2002 writing assessment, in which 77 percent of 12th graders scored “Basic” or “Below Basic,” NAEP scored the following student response “Excellent.” The prompt called for a brief review of a book worth preserving. In a discussion of Herman Hesse’s Demian, in which the main character grows up, the student wrote,
“High school is a wonderful time of self-discovery, where teens bond with several groups of friends, try different foods, fashions, classes and experiences, both good and bad. The end result in May of senior year is a mature and confident adult, ready to enter the next stage of life.”
Holding College Chiefs to Their Words
Reed College President Colin Diver suffered writer’s block. Debora Spar, president of Barnard College, wrote quickly but then toiled for hours to cut an essay that was twice as long as it was supposed to be. The assignment loomed over Wesleyan University President Michael Roth’s family vacation to Disney World.
The university presidents were struggling with a task that tortures high-school seniors around the country every year: writing the college admissions essay. In a particularly competitive year for college admissions, The Wall Street Journal turned the tables on the presidents of 10 top colleges and universities with an unusual assignment: answer an essay question from their own school’s application.
The “applicants” were told not to exceed 500 words (though most did), and to accept no help from public-relations people or speechwriters. Friends and family could advise but not rewrite. The Journal selected the question from each application so presidents wouldn’t pick the easy ones. They had about three weeks to write their essays.
The exercise showed just how challenging it is to write a college essay that stands out from the pack, yet doesn’t sound overly self-promotional or phony. Even some presidents say they grappled with the challenge and had second thoughts about the topics they chose. Several shared tips about writing a good essay: Stop trying to come up with the perfect topic, write about personally meaningful themes rather than flashy ones, and don’t force a subject to be dramatic when it isn’t.
Jolly Madison: Why life is still good for business school students … in Wisconsin.
Living and working in the New York region’s financial-media complex in 2009 means daily, compulsory attendance at a gathering of the glum. The economy may be shrinking at a 6 percent annual rate, but finance and media have contracted by about 30 percent. For the past year, the daily routine has meant sitting in a depopulated office (assuming you still have a job); following the latest grim news of magazine closings, buyouts, and layoffs; and commiserating with friends, family, and neighbors. And, of course, the angst extends far beyond directly affected companies. Finance dominates the area’s economy to such a degree that everybody–lawyers, accountants, real estate brokers, waiters, retailers, and cab drivers–have all been affected.
Of course, one can try to get away to sunnier, more mellow climes. But the usual havens aren’t offering much succor. Florida–like New York, except the catastrophe is real estate. Mexico? Um, not now. But last month, I found an unexpected haven: the Midwest. Each semester, the University of Wisconsin School of Business brings in a journalist-in-residence for a week, usually from New York. The theory: Students and professors benefit from the perspective of someone who is chronicling the workings of the world they are studying remotely.
But the benefit was greater for me than for the students. The four days in Madison functioned as a kind of detox. I left thinking the university should turn the Fluno Center for Executive Education into a sort of clinic. It could do for stressed-out financial and media types what Minneapolis’ Hazelden does for the drugged-out: offer a safe, friendly (if chilly) place to escape the toxic influence of New York.
Five Money Lessons for New College Grads
This spring’s college grads are heading out into a world where jobs are tough to come by. The economic outlook is uncertain and all the older people they know are feeling the pain of stock-market losses.
Worse, there are all kinds of nitty-gritty details to deal with: opening bank accounts, choosing health insurance, finding an apartment, lining up transportation and figuring out how to invest. How is a young person supposed to get ahead in this environment?
It’s not easy to master money management during the best times and it’s especially hard to navigate the challenges of a recession. Still, many of the same basic principles apply in good times and bad. And getting a taste of a downturn at the start may make current graduates smarter and more thoughtful than those who graduate during boom times.
Here are five broad financial lessons that can pay dividends for a lifetime:
Easy grades equate to failing grads
Some metro Atlanta public high schools that don’t grade rigorously produce more graduates lacking the basic English and math skills needed for college, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has found.
Many graduates of those high schools are sent to freshmen remedial classes to learn what high school didn’t teach them. As many as a third or more college-bound graduates from some high schools need the extra instruction.
Problems with classroom grading came to light in a February state study that showed some high schools regularly awarded good marks to students who failed state tests in the same subject.
The AJC found that metro high schools where classroom grading appeared lax or out-of-step with state standards tended to have higher rates of students who took remedial classes. And at dozens of high schools, most graduates who received the B average needed for a state HOPE scholarship lost it in college after a few years.
Unprepared high-school graduates are a growing problem for the public university system, where remedial students are concentrated in two-year colleges.
Statewide, the remedial rate has climbed to 1 in 4 first-year students after dropping in the 1990s, said Chancellor Erroll Davis Jr. of the University System of Georgia. The cost to the system: $25 million a year.
Students such as Brandon Curry, 20, a graduate of Redan High in DeKalb County, said they were surprised to learn decent high school grades don’t always translate into college success.
Georgia remedial class database – very useful.
In Favor of Everyday Math; Middleton Cross Plains Math Scores Soar
The most recent research from the U.S. Department of Education shows that American 15-year-olds are behind their International counterparts when it comes to problem solving and math literacy.
The report showed the U.S. ranks 24th out of 29 nations.
But a math program, gaining in popularity, is trying to change that.
The program is called Everyday Math.
Lori Rusch is a fourth grade teacher at Middleton’s Elm Lawn Elementary. This year she teaches an advanced math class.
On Monday, students in Rusch’s class were mastering fractions and percentages.
But her students began learning fractions and percentages in first grade.
“We’ve been incredibly successful with it,” said Middleton’s curriculum director George Marvoulis. “Our students on all of our comparative assessments like WKCE, Explorer Plan, ACT, our students score higher in math than any other subject area so we’ve been very pleased.”
According to Marvoulis, Middleton was one of the first school districts in the nation to use the Everyday Math program in 1994.
“The concept is kind of a toolbox of different tools they can use to solve a problem,” explained Marvoulis.
Related: Math Forum and Clusty Search on Everyday Math.
The Politics of Education and the Perils of Preferment
PLEDGES are shrinking to aspirations; aspirations are quietly evaporating; no more hoodies are being hugged or huskies stroked (or was it the other way around?). The sunny Californian Conservatism that David Cameron once espoused has been darkened by the crunch. His promise of a happier tomorrow now hangs on a few upbeat policies. Chief among them is education reform–which could make Michael Gove, the shadow schools secretary, among the most privileged and pressured members of a future Tory government.
Ed Balls, his counterpart in the cabinet, is an equally important figure for Labour, before and after the next general election. Ire over public services often focuses on bad hospitals: death is more heart-wrenching than illiteracy. But pound for pound (and there have been a lot of them), Labour’s education spending has been less rewarding than its health splurge. It falls to Mr Balls to defend its record on what Tony Blair proclaimed his main priority–and to soften the recession’s impact on teenagers and soothe a rumbling moral panic about harm done by and to children.
10 Tips for Prepping for Final Exams
Well, it’s just about showtime. Soon you will face that grueling week of finals on which the fate of this semester’s GPA rests. Sorry, we can’t make final’s week into a piece of cake. Only your professors can, and we wouldn’t be counting on it. But how well you prepare will, in no small measure, determine how well you’ll do. So here are our 10 best suggestions on how to prepare for those all-important final exams (together with a brief glance into the professor’s mind that will show you why the tips work):
1. Spend a week. Start studying for each exam a week before you are due to take it. This will give you time to divide the material into manageable portions that you can digest over a number of study sessions. This is especially important in the case of a cumulative final in a course with tons of material. Whatever you do, don’t try to swallow the whole elephant–the whole course, we mean–in one cram session. (Works because, in most courses, the prof is expecting you to have processed and digested the material–something you can’t do in one fell swoop).
Muscular Mediocrity
It is excusable for people to think of Mediocrity as too little of something, or a weak approximation of what would be best, and this is not entirely wrong. However, in education circles, it is important to remember, Mediocrity is the Strong Force, as the physicists would say, not the Weak Force.
For most of the 20th century, as Diane Ravitch reports in her excellent history, Left Back, Americans achieved remarkably high levels of Mediocrity in education, making sure that our students do not know too much and cannot read and write very well, so that even of those who have gone on to college, between 50% and 75% never received any sort of degree.
In the 21st century, there is a new push to offer global awareness, critical thinking, and collaborative problem solving to our students, as a way of getting them away from reading nonfiction books and writing any sort of serious research paper, and that effort, so similar to several of the recurring anti-academic and anti-intellectual programs of the prior century, will also help to preserve the Mediocrity we have so painstakingly forged in our schools.
Research generally has discovered that while Americans acknowledge there may be Mediocrity in our education generally, they feel that their own children’s schools are good. It should be understood that this is in part the result of a very systematic and deliberate campaign of disinformation by educrats. When I was teaching in the high school in Concord, Massachusetts, the superintendent at the time met with the teachers at the start of the year and told us that we were the best high school faculty in the country. That sounds nice, but what evidence did he have? Was there a study of the quality of high school faculties around the country? No, it was just public relations.
The “Lake Woebegone” effect, so widely found in our education system, is the result of parents continually being “informed” that their schools are the best in the country. I remember meeting with an old friend in Tucson once, who informed that “Tucson High School is one of the ten best in the country.” How did she know that? What was the evidence for that claim at the time? None.
Mediocrity and its adherents have really done a first-class job of leading people to believe that all is well with our high schools. After all, when parents ask their own children about their high school, the students usually say they like it, meaning, in most cases, that they enjoy being with their friends there, and are not too bothered by a demanding academic curriculum.
With No Child Left Behind, there has been a large effort to discover and report information about the actual academic performance of students in our schools, but the defenders of Mediocrity have been as active, and almost as successful, as they have ever been in preserving a false image of the academic quality of our schools. They have established state standards that, except in Massachusetts and a couple of other states, are designed to show that all the students are “above the national average” in reading and math, even though they are not.
It is important for anyone serious about raising academic standards in our schools to remember that Mediocrity is the Hundred-Eyed Argus who never sleeps, and never relaxes its relentless diligence in opposition to academic quality for our schools and educational achievement for our students.
There is a long list of outside helpers, from Walter Annenberg to the Gates Foundation, who have ventured into American education with the idea that it makes sense that educators would support higher standards and better education for our students. Certainly that is what they hear from educators. But when the money is allocated and the “reform” is begun, the Mediocrity Special Forces move into action, making sure that very little happens, and that the money, even billions of dollars, disappears into the Great Lake of Mediocrity with barely a ripple, so that no good effect is ever seen.
If this seems unduly pessimistic, notice that a recent survey of college professors conducted by the Chronicle of Higher Education found that 90% of them reported that the students who came to them were not very well prepared, for example, in reading, doing research, and writing, and that the Diploma to Nowhere report from the Strong American Schools program last summer said that more than 1,000,000 of our high school graduates are now placed in remedial courses when they arrive at the colleges to which they have been “admitted.” It seems clear that without Muscular Mediocrity in our schools, we could never have hoped to achieve such a shameful set of academic results.
“Teach by Example”
Will Fitzhugh [founder]
Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]
The Concord Review [1987]
Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]
National Writing Board [1998]
TCR Institute [2002]
730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24
Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA
978-443-0022; 800-331-5007
www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org
Varsity Academics®
Boise State professors live alongside students
On the west end of the Boise State University campus, Professor Michael Humphrey lives on the third floor of a residence hall with his wife, 2-year-old daughter, their Labrador retriever Booba – and nearly 30 college students.
Humphrey, a 35-year-old with a doctorate in special education, has lived at the university for the past year as part of a campus housing program created in 2004 to help retain students and enhance their college experience.
The basic premise: If students feel as if they belong, they’ll be more likely to stick around.
Nationwide, about 200 colleges have developed more than 600 living-learning residential programs in an attempt to further engage students outside the classroom and allow them to live on campus with others who have similar interests. In some cases, faculty and academic advisers have offices in the same residence hall.
But an analysis of these programs in 2007 found only 7 percent in the United States integrate faculty into the living arrangements, said Karen Kurotsuchi Inkelas, principal investigator for the National Study of Living-Learning Programs at the Center for Student Studies in Ann Arbor, Mich.
University of Washington to borrow from private financial model
For several months, University of Washington officials had been mum about it. As the state Legislature got closer to slashing UW funding by one quarter, administrators started dropping hints.
UW President Mark Emmert and members of the Board of Regents had been asking themselves, “Is this the privatization of the university?”
This week, Emmert finally said it publicly, in a letter he sent to the UW community: The University of Washington will need to “change its fundamental financial model.”
So, what does that mean?
“When the education is less subsidized by the state, then universities have to be more market-oriented,” Emmert told seattlepi.com. “The university will have to shift to a much more market-driven model than it has in the past.”
Inside the Box
Teachers, students, employees, employers, everyone these days, it seems, is being exhorted to think, act, imagine and perform “Outside the Box.”
However, for students, there is still quite a bit that may be found Inside the Box for them to learn and get good at before they wander off into OutBoxLand.
Inside the Box there still await grammar, the multiplication tables, the periodic table, Boyle’s Law, the Glorious Revolution, the Federalist Papers, Shakespeare, Isaac Newton, Bach, Mozart, Giovanni Bellini, recombinant DNA, Albrecht Durer, Edward Gibbon, Jan van Eyck, and a few other matters worth their attention.
Before the Mission Control people in Houston could solve the unique, immediate, and potentially fatal “Out of the Box” problems with the recovery of Apollo 13 and its crew, they had to draw heavily on their own InBox training and knowledge of mechanics, gases, temperatures, pressures, azimuth, velocity and lots of other math, science, and engineering stuff they had studied before. They may have been educated sitting in rows, and been seen in the halls at Mission Control wearing plastic pocket protectors, but in a very short time in that emergency they came up with novel solutions to several difficult and unexpected problems in saving that crew.
It seems clear to me that a group of ignorant but freethinking folks given that same set of novel tasks would either have had to watch Apollo 13 veer off into fatal space or crash into our planet with a dead crew on board, in a creative way, of course.
Many situations are less dramatic demonstrations of the clear necessity of lots of InBox education as preparation for any creative endeavor, but even high school students facing their first complete nonfiction book and a first history research paper when they arrive in college would have been much better off if they had been assigned a couple of complete nonfiction books and research papers before they left high school.
Basketball coach John Wooden of UCLA was of course happy with players who could adapt to unexpected defenses on the court during games, but according to Bill Walton, when he met with a set of new freshmen trying to make his team, the first thing he taught them was how to put on their socks…Perhaps some of his (and their) success came because he was not above going back into the Old Box to lay the groundwork for the winning fundamentals in college basketball.
Many teachers and edupundits decry the insufficiency of novelty, creativity and freethinking-out-of-the-box in our schools, but I have to wonder how many have realized the overriding importance of the education equivalent of having students put on their socks the right way?
Basic knowledge in history, English, physics, Latin, biology, math, and so on is essential for students in school before they can do much more than fool around with genuine and useful creativity in those fields.
True, they can write about themselves creatively, but if the teacher has read Marcel Proust, and would share a bit of his writing with the students, they might come to see that there is creativity in writing about oneself and there is also fooling around in writing about oneself.
Samuel Johnson once pointed out that: “The irregular combinations of fanciful invention may delight a-while, by that novelty of which the common satiety of life sends us all in quest, but the pleasures of sudden wonder are soon exhausted…”
The pleasures of foolish playacting Outside of the Box of knowledge and skill by students (and their teachers: witness the damage shown in Dead Poets Society) may delight them for a time because they are tired of the hard work involved in learning and thinking about new knowledge in school, but the more they indulge and are indulged in it, the lower our educational standards will be, and the worse the education provided students in our schools.
Novelty and innovation have their place and there they are sorely needed, but the quality of that innovation depends, to a great extent, on the quality of the knowledge and skill acquired while students were still working hard Back in the Box.
www.tcr.org
U.S. Colleges Bask in Surge Of Interest Among Chinese
It’s an admissions officer’s dream: ever-growing stacks of applications from students with outstanding test scores, terrific grades and rigorous academic preparation. That’s the pleasant prospect faced by the University of Virginia and some other U.S. colleges, which are receiving a surging number of applications from China.
“It’s this perfect, beautiful island of people who are immensely motivated, going to great high schools,” marveled Parke Muth, director of international admission at U-Va.
A decade ago, 17 Chinese students applied to U-Va. Three years ago, 117 did. This year, the number was more than 800 out of almost 22,000 candidates — so many that admissions officers had to devise new ways to select from the pool of strong applicants.
The Outlier Finds His Element
I read Outliers and The Element back to back last week.
Net-net is that people aren’t successful from passion alone, usually there are other factors or “flukes” that lead to them living in their element. You may have heard successful people say that what made them great is that they were at the right place at the right time. There is some truth to that but they also had enormous passion, put in many hours and were in their “element”.
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell contends that passion alone doesn’t equate success; the environment, innovation and generational culture shape our success. Below is an Outlier story of my own.
I have two kids. When Rachel started school, she was like a fish to water. She started kindergarten in an accelerated classroom, worked very hard, loved school and recently finished her teaching credential for the sciences. She’s planning to spend her adult life in the classroom teaching.
Anthony on the other hand didn’t like school enough to even pull his completed homework out of his backpack. In middle school he was a strong D-student,and an exceptional pianist. We contacted the school to see if he could remove Orchestra and PE classes from his schedule so he could devote 4 to 6 hours towards piano practice, they said they’d check with the School District because they “do that kind of thing for athletes”. They said, ” No,” so I pulled him out of public school that very day.
AP More Open, But Not Dumbed Down
More than a decade ago, when I began investigating the odd uses of Advanced Placement courses and tests in our high schools, I tried to find out why AP participation was so much lower than I expected in my neighborhood public school, Walt Whitman High of Bethesda. At least one high school in neighboring D.C., and many more in suburban Maryland, had higher participation rates than Whitman, even though it was often called the best school in the state.
That is how I stumbled on what I call the Mt. Olympus syndrome. There were, I discovered from talking to students, a few AP teachers at that school who didn’t want to deal with average students. One of them actively discouraged juniors who were getting less than an A in a prerequisite course from taking his AP course when they were seniors. He only wanted students who were going to get a 5, the equivalent of an A on the three-hour college-level AP exam, where a score of 3 and above could earn college credit. That test, like all AP exams, was written and graded by outside experts, mostly high school and college instructors. The only way that teacher thought he could control the number of 5s was to make sure only top quality students–the academic gods of the Whitman High pantheon–were allowed into his course.
Related: Growing Pains in the Advanced Placement Program: Do Tough Tradeoffs Lie Ahead?
Universities and the Recession
THE class of 2009 will be almost the largest in America’s history. More than 3m students are getting their high-school diplomas in late spring. Those who plan to go on to university have been told for years to expect a rough time: with so many students applying, winning admission to their college of choice will be a challenge. But those who clear that hurdle will find that their problems are just beginning.
College life is an enviable set-up given the job market at the moment. It comes at a price, though: an average of roughly $25,000 per year at a private university, and $6,600 at a state one. That was this year, and next year it will in most cases cost a bit more. That is ominous for students and the people who fund them. Parents have lost jobs, and seen their savings wither. “I think more parents are being emboldened to ask for more money, or to ask for financial aid, period,” says James Boyle, the president of College Parents of America.
Giving Kids a Jump on Technology Innovative Mitchellville Shows Off Its Success
You could see the pride in third-grader Kuron Anderson’s eyes as he jumped from his tiny chair to talk about his technology project. He called it “The Many Faces of the Man,” a digital photo mosaic that he created to celebrate the election of President Obama.
“I worked hard on it, and I did my best,” Kuron said.
He then methodically explained how he used about 1,000 pictures to create his project for the first science and technology fair last month at the Mitchellville School of Math, Science and Technology in Bowie.
“This is the before picture,” the 8-year-old said, pointing to the cutout on the cardboard display. “And if you step back, you will see his face on the computer. It is made up of cell images.”
Primary schoolchildren will learn to read on Google in ‘slimmer’ curriculum
Computing skills will be put on an equal footing with literacy and numeracy in an overhaul of primary education that aims to slim down the curriculum – but not lose the basics.
Children will be taught to read using internet search engines such as Google and Yahoo in the first few years of school, it is announced.
Pupils in English primary schools will learn to write with keyboards, use spellcheckers and insert internet “hyperlinks” into text before their 11th birthday under the most significant reform of timetables since the National Curriculum was introduced in 1988.
The review by Sir Jim Rose, former head of inspections at Ofsted, also recommends the use of Google Earth in geography lessons, spreadsheets to calculate budgets in maths, online archives to research local history and video conferencing software for joint language lessons with schools overseas.
Sir Jim insisted the changes would not replace come at the expense of traditional teaching, saying: “We cannot sidestep the basics”.
He told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We’ve let the curriculum become too fat. We need to give teachers the opportunity to be more flexible.”
His report, which will be accepted in full by ministers, also proposes more IT training for teachers to keep them ahead of “computer savvy pupils”.
John Sutherland has more.
Google (and other search engine) users should be aware of the many privacy issues associated with these services. Willem Buiter:
Google is to privacy and respect for intellectual property rights what the Taliban are to women’s rights and civil liberties: a daunting threat that must be fought relentlessly by all those who value privacy and the right to exercise, within the limits of the law, control over the uses made by others of their intellectual property. The internet search engine company should be regulated rigorously, defanged and if necessary, broken up or put out of business. It would not be missed.
In a nutshell, Google promotes copyright theft and voyeurism and lays the foundations for corporate or even official Big Brotherism.
Google, with about 50 per cent of the global internet search market, is the latest in a distinguished line of IT abusive monopolists. The first was IBM, which was brought to heel partly by a forty-year long antitrust regulation (which ended in 1996) and partly by the rise of Microsoft.
We must also keep in mind the excesses of Powerpoint in the classroom.
Related: Democracy Now on a Google Anti-Trust investigation.
All-Athletics
The Boston Globe has been publishing for 137 years, and the news that it may have to fold has distressed its many readers. Each Fall, Winter and Spring the paper publishes a special section, of 14 pages or so, on notable local public high school athletes and their coaches. There is a mention of athletes and coaches at local prep schools as well.
The latest Boston Globe’s Winter “ALL-SCHOLASTICS” section arrived, with the “ten moments that stood out among the countless athletic stories in Massachusetts.” There are reports on the best athletes and coaches in Skiing, Boys’ Basketball, Girls’ Basketball, Boys’ Hockey, Girls’ Hockey, Boys’ Track, Girls’ Track, Boys’ Swimming, Girls’ Swimming, Preps, Wrestling, and Gymnastics. The Preps and Gymnastics parts consolidate boys’ and girls’ accomplishments, perhaps to save space (and cost).
Each full-page section also features photographs of 9-16 athletes, with perhaps a twitter-sized paragraph on their achievements. In addition, there are 30 photos and tweets about some coaches, spread among the various sports. There are 26 “Prep” athletes mentioned, from various sports, but I didn’t see any “Prep” coaches profiled. For each high school sport there are two “athletes of the year” identified, and all the coaches are “coaches of the year” in their sport.
There may be, at this time, some high school “students of the year” in English, math, Chinese, physics, Latin, chemistry, European history, U.S. history, biology, and the like. There may also be high school “teachers of the year” in these and other academic subjects, but their names and descriptions are not to be found in The Boston Globe, perhaps the most well-known paper in the “Athens of America” (Boston).
It may be the case, indeed it probably is the case, that some of the athletes featured in the Winter “All-Scholastics” section today are also high school students of math, history, English, science, and languages, but you would not know that from the coverage of The Boston Globe. The coaches of the year may in many, if not all, cases, also be teachers of academic subjects in the Massachusetts public and private schools, but that remains only a guess as well.
When the British architect Christopher Wren was buried in 1723, part of his epitaph, written by his eldest son, Christopher Wren, Jr., read: “Lector, si monumentum requiris, Circumspice.” If you wanted to judge his interest, efforts and accomplishments, all you had to do was look around you. His work was there for all to see.
The work of Massachusetts high school athletes and coaches is all around us in The Boston Globe on a regular basis, but the work of our high school scholars and teachers is nowhere to be seen in that public record.
If one seeks a monument to anti-academic and anti-intellectual views and practices in Boston today, one need look no further than The Boston Globe. I read it every day, and I will be sorry to see it fold, if it does, but I will not miss its attention to and recognition of the academic efforts and accomplishments of Massachusetts secondary students and their teachers, because there is none now, and never has been any, no matter how many reports on education reform and academic standards it may have published over the years. If you ask how much The Boston Globe editors (and I am sure The Globe is not alone in this) cares about the good academic work now actually being done by high school teachers and their students in Massachusetts, the answer is, from the evidence, that they do not.
Growing Pains in the Advanced Placement Program: Do Tough Trade-Offs Lie Ahead?
In 2002-2003, 1 million students participated in AP by taking at least one exam. Five years later, nearly 1.6 million did—a 50+ percent increase. But is growth all good? Might there be a downside? Are ill prepared students eroding the quality of the program? Perhaps harming the best and brightest? To find out, the Thomas B. Fordham Institute commissioned the Farkas Duffett Research Group to survey AP teachers in public high schools across the country. Perhaps not surprisingly, the AP program remains very popular with its teachers. But there are signs that the move toward “open door” access to AP is starting to cause concern. Read the report to learn more.
A survey of more than 1,000 teachers of Advanced Placement courses in American high schools has found that more than half are concerned that the program’s effectiveness is being threatened as districts loosen restrictions on who can take such rigorous courses and as students flock to them to polish their résumés.
The study, by the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, an educational research and advocacy organization, noted the sharp growth in the A.P. program’s popularity. The number of high school students who took at least one college-level A.P. course increased by 45 percent, to 1.6 million from 1.1 million, from the school year ended 2004 to that ended 2008.
The number of A.P. exams those students took — with hopes, in part, of gaining exemption from some college class work, depending on how well they scored — increased by 50 percent, to 2.7 million.>Dane County, WI High School AP course offering comparison.
Mandated K-12 Testing in Wisconsin: A System in Need of Reform
Mark C. Schug, Ph.D., M. Scott Niederjohn, Ph.D.:
By law public schools in Wisconsin must administer a rigid, comprehensive set of tests. In the fall of every school year students are tested in reading, math, language, science and social studies. Test results from each district and each school are posted on the Internet, passed along to the federal government to comply with No Child Left Behind requirements and are made available to parents. In an era where measurable student performance is essential, it is expected that Wisconsin’s elaborate system of testing will tell us how Wisconsin students are performing. Unfortunately the testing required by Wisconsin state law is not very good.
The purpose of state standards and state-mandated testing is to increase academic achievement. Does Wisconsin’s elaborate system of testing advance this goal? From every quarter the answer is a clear no. That is the consensus of independent, third-party evaluators. Wisconsin’s massive testing program has come under fire from the U.S. Department of Education which said that Wisconsin testing failed to adequately evaluate the content laid out in the state’s own standards. Further, a joint report issued by the independent Fordham Institute and the Northwest Evaluation Association performed a detailed evaluation of testing in every state and ranked Wisconsin 42nd in the nation. The Fordham Institute gave Wisconsin’s testing a grade of “D-minus.”
Perhaps even more troublesome is that many Wisconsin school districts find the testing system inadequate. Over 68% of Wisconsin school districts that responded to a survey said they purchase additional testing to do what the state testing is supposed to do. These districts are well ahead of the state in understanding the importance of timely, rigorous testing.
This report lays out the thirty-year history of testing in Wisconsin and the criticism of the current testing requirement. It is the first of two reports to be issued regarding Wisconsin’s testing program. The second report will show how a new approach to testing will not only meet the standards that parents, teachers and the public expect, but will also allow teachers and policy makers to use testing to actually increase the achievement of Wisconsin’s children.
WKCE Scores Document Decline in the Percentage of Madison’s Advanced Students
For many years now, parents and community members, including members of Madison United for Academic Excellence, have expressed concerns about the decline in rigor and the lack of adequate challenge in our district’s curriculum. The release this week of WKCE scores for the November 2008 testing led me to wonder about the performance of our district’s strongest students. While most analyses of WKCE scores focus on the percentages of students scoring at the Advanced and Proficient levels, these numbers do not tell us about changes in the percent of students at each particular level of performance. We can have large increases in the percent of students scoring at the Proficient and Advanced levels because we have improved the performance of students who were previously at the Basic level on the WKCE, but yet fail to have any effect on the performance of our district’s strongest students. This is the argument that we are improving the performance of our low ability students, but failing to increase the performance of our already successful students. An examination of the numbers of students who are performing at just the Advanced level on the WKCE provides us with some insight into the academic progress of our more successful students.
I decided to examine WKCE math scores for students across the district. While it is not possible to track the performance of individual students, it is possible to follow the performance of a cohort as they advance through the system. Thus students who are now in 10th grade, took the 8th grade WKCE in 2006 and the 4th grade test in 2002. Because there have been significant changes in the demographics of the district’s students, I split the data by socio-economic status to remove the possibility of declines in WKCE performance simply being the result of increased numbers of low income students. Although the WKCE has been criticized for not being a rigorous enough assessment tool, the data on our students’ math performance are not encouraging. The figures below indicate that the percent of students scoring at the Advanced level on the WKCE decreases as students progress through the system, and this decline is seen in both our low income students and in our Not Economically Disadvantaged students. The figures suggest that while there is some growth in the percent of Advanced performing students in elementary school, there is a significant decline in performance once students begin taking math in our middle schools and this decline continues through high school. I confess that I take no pleasure in sharing this data; in fact, it makes me sick.
Because it might be more useful to examine actual numbers, I have provided tables showing the data used in the figures above. Reading across a row shows the percent of students in a class cohort scoring at the Advanced level as they have taken the WKCE test as they progressed from grades 3 – 10.
Percent of Economically Disadvantaged Students Scoring at the Advanced Level on the WKCE Math Test Between 2002 and 2008
| Graduation Year | 3rd Grade | 4th Grade | 5th Grade | 6th Grade | 7th Grade | 8th Grade | 10th Grade |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2005 |
8
|
||||||
| 2006 |
8.8
|
||||||
| 2007 |
11
|
7.7
|
|||||
| 2008 |
5.6
|
8.7
|
|||||
| 2009 |
8.5
|
6.7
|
|||||
| 2010 |
9.2
|
8.4
|
|||||
| 2011 |
12
|
12.5
|
11.1
|
8
|
|||
| 2012 |
9.7
|
10.4
|
9.5
|
8.2
|
|||
| 2013 |
15.3
|
14.7
|
15.1
|
11.7
|
10.8
|
||
| 2014 |
12
|
13.6
|
16.1
|
13.2
|
|||
| 2015 |
20.1
|
15
|
18
|
11.7
|
|||
| 2016 |
15.4
|
17.1
|
18.4
|
||||
| 2017 |
12.9
|
17
|
|||||
| 2018 |
13.8
|
Some colleges checking out applicants’ social networking posts
igh school students, beware! College admissions and financial aid officers in California and elsewhere may be peeking over your digital shoulder at the personal information you post on your Facebook or MySpace page.
And they might decide to toss out your application after reading what you wrote about that cool party last week or how you want to conduct your romantic life at college.
According to a new report by the National Assn. for College Admission Counseling, about a quarter of U.S. colleges reported doing some research about applicants on social networking sites or through Internet search engines. The study, which included 10 California colleges, did not specify which schools acknowledged the practice or how often scholarships or enrollment offers might be nixed because of online postings.
David Hawkins, director of public policy and research for the counselors group, said the moral is clear: “Don’t post anything that you don’t want your mother or father or college admission officer to see,” he said.
Rejection: Some Colleges Do It Better Than Others
Members of this year’s record-size high-school graduating class applied to more colleges than ever — and now, that’s resulting in a heavier than usual flurry of rejection letters.
Hundreds of students at high schools from Newton, Mass., to Palo Alto, Calif., have created cathartic “Wall of Shame” or “Rejection Wall” displays of college denial letters. On message boards at CollegeConfidential.com, students critique, attack and praise missives from various schools, elevating rejection-letter reviews to a sideline sport.
Even with impressive test scores and grades, abundant extracurricular activities, good recommendations and an admission essay into which “I poured myself heart and soul,” Daniel Beresford, 18, of Fair Oaks, Calif., netted 14 rejection letters from 17 applications, he says. Among the denials: Harvard, Yale, Johns Hopkins and the University of Chicago. (He’s bound for one of his top choices, Pepperdine University.) When he “realized it was going to be so much harder this year,” he started calling in reinforcements, asking teachers and friends to open the rejections for him.
2009 USA Today College All-Stars
The nation’s most gifted college students rightly take pride in their academic achievements, be they in the area of environmental policy, medical research or the classics.
But give them the chance to talk about their proudest accomplishments, and a refreshingly eclectic set of extracurricular interests and talents slips into view.
Matthew Baum, a soon-to-be Yale University graduate whose research on Fragile X Syndrome may someday lead to better treatments for mental retardation, is a wrestler on the side and started a club for beer aficionados. Harvard chemistry major Allen Cheng, 20, who envisions a career as a physician-scientist, finds pleasure in kendo, a form of fencing based on the art of Japanese samurai swordsmanship. And when Aaron Krolikowski is not advocating for environmental justice, he just might be on stage with the Buffalo Chips, a collegiate male a cappella group.
“Music has always been an important part of who I am,” says Krolikowski, 22, who will graduate next month from the University at Buffalo and hopes to serve someday in state public office. Writing and arranging music is an escape, he says, and performing is “exhilarating.”
School Reform Talk Is Good, Now Let’s See the Walk
Wall Street Journal Editorial:
Secretary of Education Arne Duncan tells us that “School Reform Means Doing What’s Best for Kids” (op-ed, April 22). His cry for “doing what’s best for kids” rings a bit hollow when he failed to do what is best for the 1,700 low-income kids in Washington, D.C. who were counting on him. Those kids were given a lifeline — a voucher to escape schools that continually failed them, schools in a district to which neither Mr. Duncan nor his boss would send their own children. When crunch time arrived, politics trumped educational freedom, at least when it came to poor, inner-city kids in the District of Columbia.
Mr. Duncan speaks eloquently about how the public education establishment must change. He correctly says “we need a culture of accountability in America’s education system if we want to be the best in the world.” But what greater accountability can there be than that which comes from customers exercising free choices? True accountability in education will only come about when all parents are empowered to choose what they deem is best for their own children, not just those, like President Obama, Mr. Duncan, and most readers of the Wall Street Journal, who have financial means. So my question is, “When will the Obamas, Duncans, et. al. stand up for low-income parents so that they, too, can make choices that are best for their kids?”
Colleges offer no-frills degrees
Kaileen Crane was hardly interested in the hefty price tag that comes with the traditional college experience. So she’s paying $10,000 a year for the Advantage Program offered by Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), a private college.
Forget about campus housing. Or a meal plan, or a gym with a climbing wall. This program is about the basics – core courses at a bare-bones satellite campus. But the price is less than one-third of what it costs for tuition and room and board at the main campus in Manchester.
“It’s close to where I live, it’s close to where I work, and the cost is just so much cheaper than a lot of other places,” says Ms. Crane during a break from classes in an office building in Salem.
China Faces a Grad Glut After Boom at Colleges
Zhang Weidong has been making the rounds at this city’s weekend talent fair for more than a month now and can’t understand why he hasn’t landed a job.
“These companies are looking for employees, and I have a degree,” says the 22-year-old computer major, clutching a plastic organizer stuffed with résumés, business cards and company information. “I don’t know what I’m doing wrong.”
Unemployed university graduates used to be rare in China. But now their ranks are ballooning to critical levels just as the country suffers its worst economic slump in two decades. Up to one-third of last year’s 5.6 million university graduates are still looking for work, and this year will see another 6.1 million hit the labor market. Finding jobs for graduates is suddenly a national priority: Earlier this month, the central government ordered local governments and state enterprises to hire more graduates to maintain China’s “general stability.”
Wisconsin’s Latest State K-12 Test Results, and Related Criticism
Across Wisconsin, educators like Hensgen are part of a growing chorus to reassess the way the state assesses students. Currently, teachers and districts wait five months for WKCE results, so they have little time to react to the findings and adjust their curriculum. The tests eat into a week of class time and are based on standards that, critics say, are too low to give parents and teachers a clear picture of how students measure up globally.
“It’s widely agreed that the WKCE is a really lousy test that measures lame standards,” said Phil McDade, a departing member of the Monona Grove School Board. “The bigger issue to me in Wisconsin is that there’s a sense of self-satisfaction with our school districts, that we’re doing fine, that we’re Lake Wobegon, that everybody here’s above average.”
The Department of Public Instruction commissioned a state task force on the issue last fall and is reviewing the group’s recommendations, said Michael Thompson, executive assistant to the state superintendent of schools. The state’s current testing contract lasts at least another two years.
Alan Borsuk has more.
“Schools should not rely on only WKCE data to gauge progress of individual students or to determine effectiveness of programs or curriculum”
The ACT Explore test was mentioned in Gayle Worland’s article.
An Unschooling Manifesto
Dave Pollard via a kind reader:
In Grade 11, my second last year of high school, I was an average student, with marks in English in the mid 60% range, and in mathematics, my best subject, around 80%. Aptitude tests suggested I should be doing better, and this was a consistent message on my report cards. I hated school. As my blog bio explains, I was shy, socially inept, uncoordinated and self-conscious. My idea of fun was playing strategy games (Diplomacy and Acquire, for fellow geeks of that era — this was long before computer games or the Internet) and hanging around the drive-in restaurant.
Then in Grade 12, something remarkable happened: My school decided to pilot a program called “independent study”, that allowed any student maintaining at least an 80% average on term tests in any subject (that was an achievement in those days, when a C — 60% — really was the average grade given) to skip classes in that subject until/unless their grades fell below that threshold. There was a core group of ‘brainy’ students who enrolled immediately. Half of them were the usual boring group (the ‘keeners’) who did nothing but study to maintain high grades (usually at their parents’ behest); but the other half were creative, curious, independent thinkers with a natural talent for learning. The chance to spend my days with this latter group, unrestricted by school walls and school schedules, was what I dreamed of, so I poured my energies into self-study.
“Twitter” as a Teaching Tool……
Facebook may be the social medium of choice for college students, but the microblogging Web tool Twitter has found adherents among professors, many of whom are starting to experiment with it as a teaching device.
People use Twitter to broadcast bite-sized messages or Web links and to read messages or links posted by others. It can be used as a source of news, to listen to what people in certain groups are talking about, or to communicate with experts or leaders in certain fields.
Marquette University associate professor Gee Ekechai uses Twitter to discuss what she’s teaching in class with students and connect them with experts in the field of advertising and public relations.
Instructor Linda Menck, who also teaches at Marquette, encourages students to include social media as a strategy in marketing campaigns for clients.
Twitter is helping these professors build community in their classes in a way that appeals to some members of a Facebook-addicted generation. The phenomenon is certainly not ubiquitous, and some professors have found Twitter doesn’t do anything for them in the academic realm.
But others, particularly those who teach in communications fields, are finding that Twitter and other social media are key devices for students and faculty to include in their professional toolbox.
All of these things have their place, I suppose. However, much like the excesses of PowerPoint in the classroom, it is surely better to focus on sound reasoning and writing skills first.
He Wants Subjects, Verbs and Objects
Q. What are you listening for as somebody describes their family, where they’re from, etc.?
A. You’re looking for a really strong set of values. You’re looking for a really good work ethic. Really good communication skills. More and more, the ability to speak well and write is important. You know, writing is not something that is taught as strongly as it should be in the educational curriculum. So you’re looking for communication skills.
You’re looking for adaptability to change. You’re looking at, do you get along well with people? And are you the sort of person that can be a part of a team and motivate people? You know, do you have the emotional I.Q.?
It’s not just enough to be able to just do a nice PowerPoint presentation. You’ve got to have the ability to pick people. You’ve got to have the ability to communicate. When you find really capable people, it’s amazing how they proliferate capable people all through your organization. So that’s what you’re hunting for.
Why do professional paths to the top vary so much?
WHEN Barack Obama met Hu Jintao, his Chinese counterpart, at the G20 summit in London, it was an encounter not just between two presidents, but also between two professions and mindsets. A lawyer, trained to argue from first principles and haggle over words, was speaking to an engineer, who knew how to build physical structures and keep them intact.
The prevalence of lawyers in America’s ruling elite (spotted by a Frenchman, Alexis de Tocqueville, in the 1830s) is stronger than ever. Mr Obama went to Harvard Law School (1988-91); his cabinet contains Hillary Clinton (Yale Law, 1969-73) as secretary of state, Eric Holder (Columbia Law, 1973-76) as attorney-general, Joe Biden (Syracuse University law school, 1965-68) as vice-president and Leon Panetta (Santa Clara University law school, 1960-63) as director of the CIA. That’s the tip of the iceberg. Over half of America’s senators practised law. Mr Obama’s inner circle is sprinkled with classmates from Harvard Law: the dean of that school, Elena Kagan, is solicitor-general; Cass Sunstein, a professor there, is also in the administration.
President Hu, in contrast, is a hydraulic engineer (he worked for a state hydropower company). His predecessor, Jiang Zemin, was an electrical engineer, who trained in Moscow at the Stalin Automobile Works. The prime minister, Wen Jiabao, specialised in geological engineering. The senior body of China’s Communist Party is the Politburo’s standing committee. Making up its nine members are eight engineers, and one lawyer. This is not a relic of the past: 2007 saw the appointments of one petroleum and two chemical engineers. The last American president to train as an engineer was Herbert Hoover.
Madison School District Strategic Planning Update
The Madison School District’s Strategic Planning Group met this past week. Several documents were handed out, including:
- Action plans on: curriculum, misson, beliefs, parameters, organization/systems, resources, staff and student.
- Community Engagement Session (There were four) notes and feedback [5.3MB PDF].
- Proposed additions to the curriculum action plans [380K PDF]. This document addresses a number of simmering issues, including credit for non-MMSD courses, the movement toward one size fits all curriculum, expansion of AP course offerings, among other useful subjects.
This recent meeting was once again facilitated by Dr. Keith Marty, Superintendent of the Menomonee Falls school district. Non-MMSD attendance was somewhat lower than the initial 2.5 day session.
The Grammar Cheat Sheet
When you know the correct way to structure a sentence, the world becomes a scary place – you start to notice how many people get it painfully wrong. The ease of content creation that the web now affords us is making the problem worse, so why not get a basic understanding to help make your text a little more professional?
Before we get into this, let’s establish two things.
1. A lot of these ‘rules’ are different country to country, decade to decade.
The way a proof reader or typesetter might lay out a page in Britain is different to how it might be done in America. How it’s done in 1985 is different than how it might be done in 2005. The styles of typesetting can change over time and throughout different regions.
2. Always be consistent, even if it might not be ‘correct’.
Recession gives ‘take your child to work day’ new tenor this year
Thursday may have been “take your child to work” day, but Paul Holley couldn’t do that. He lost his job in December.
So Holley and fellow job seekers Andy Krumrai and Dotty Posto instead took their daughters along to the Barnes & Noble Café, where they meet each week with other unemployed professionals to encourage and advise one another as they look for new jobs.
It’s a new twist on the annual Take Our Daughters and Sons to Work Day, which aims to expose young people to careers and help them make connections between the classroom and the workplace.
Since last year’s event, 4.5 million more Americans are out of work, according to the latest government numbers.
The scene at the café Thursday – amid Starbucks coffee, cappuccinos and cocoa – was a reminder that unemployment also rattles children.
Clare Posto, 9, said three or four of her friends have parents out of work; one is worried about the parents’ marriage. Clare’s mom, an organizational development manager who left Harley-Davidson as part of a downsizing in February, recently expanded her job search nationwide.
“I don’t really want to move, because I have a lot of friends here,” Clare said.
A Textbook Case of Renting Books
Oh, those text charges. No, not the fees for pecking out text messages on a cellphone, but the cost of every college student’s must-buy: textbooks.
Students spend about $1,000 a year on their texts, according to the College Board. And that most likely will increase: Over the past 20 years, textbook prices have increased at twice the inflation rate, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. One solution may be renting. Several companies offer textbook rentals that could save cash-poor college students more than 50% of the cost of a book.
To see how the process works, we ordered textbooks from three rental companies: Book Renter, Campus Book Rentals and Chegg; and one textbook seller, Textbooks.com, which doesn’t rent books, but offers guaranteed buybacks on some texts, making those books a quasi-rental.
Staff Jobs on Campus Outpace Enrollment
Over the last two decades, colleges and universities doubled their full-time support staff while enrollment increased only 40 percent, according to a new analysis of government data by the Center for College Affordability and Productivity, a nonprofit research center.
During the same period, the staff of full-time instructors, or equivalent personnel, rose about 50 percent, while the number of managers increased slightly more than 50 percent.
The data, based on United States Department of Education filings from more than 2,782 colleges, come from 1987 to 2007, before the current recession prompted many colleges to freeze their hiring.
Neither the report nor outside experts on college affordability went so far as to argue that the increase in support staff was directly responsible for spiraling tuition. Most experts say that the largest driver of tuition increases has been the decline in state financing for higher education.
Stephen Dubner has more.
Charter Schools’ Secret Weapon: Ivy Grads
I am ignorant of many things, but I think I know charter schools, particularly what makes the best ones successful. I have a new book out on that subject. I discuss the issue often in this column. For instance, in a recent piece I sifted reader reaction and concluded the best name for our highest-achieving charters is No Excuses schools, because their teachers believe their students’ impoverished backgrounds are no barrier to learning.
But here comes Steven F. Wilson, one of the savviest of charter school scholars, making me look dumb. He has revealed an important facet of No Excuses schools that never occurred to me. I tried to cover my embarrassment when I read his American Enterprise Institute paper, “Success at Scale in Charter Schooling.”
“Oh, yeah, I knew that,” I said.
The “Most Failed” College Math Course: Math 111
s there any hope for college algebra?
Math 111 has been rumored throughout campus to be one of the most failed classes at Oregon State. Many students go into class with that expectation.
“I heard from everyone that I talked to about Math 111, that it was the number one failed class in the university, so I got in the mindset that I was going to fail, and I did,” said Mark Stockhoff, a freshman in new media communications and business.
The issues relating to this rumor may be caused by the math placement test, poor math education before college, class size and student effort put into the class.
“We have a placement test, which we ask folks to take, and up until last year, only about 50 percent of entering freshmen placed into a college math course,” said Math 111 instructor Peter Argyres.
To address the poor scores, the math department worked to create an online test that wasn’t proctored to allow students to take the test in an easier environment and time frame, but the jump in scores was so significant that it was determined students had cheated on the math test.
Joanne has more.
Education in New York: “The Excellence Charter School”
THE DAY starts in a small office in downtown Manhattan with Zeke Vanderhoek, the principal of The Equity Project, a charter school set to open in the Bronx this autumn. Already the school has attracted national attention—not for its pedagogy, but for its teachers’ salaries: $125,000 annually, plus a performance-related bonus. This pay, easily double or triple what most teachers make, will come out of the school’s grant from the city’s education department—which, as is standard for charter schools, is a good deal less than it spends on its own public schools.
How will he find the money? By hiring great teachers, says Zeke, which will allow him to cut back on everything else: the school will have hardly any non-teaching staff and no assistant principals, just a principal (himself) who earns less than classroom teachers. It will pay for no educational consultants or outside courses: these super-teachers will support each other’s professional development. They will work long, hard days: 8am to 6pm, and each will fill one of the roles normally assigned to support staff, such as chasing up truants. When one is absent, colleagues will cover, rather than the school paying for peripatetic substitutes.
We talk about money and waste in public schools: the programmes started and abandoned; the consultants and other hangers-on, both public-sector and private; the expensive remediation of mistakes made earlier in a child’s education; the even more expensive failure to remediate so that many children leave school having had a small fortune spent on them—and barely able to read.
Diversity Plans Lack Coherence, Shaft University
With the end of Plan 2008, which aimed to improve the diversity of our student body, we are once again facing some serious questions that demand thoughtful answers. And with a new initiative on the horizon, those answers gain an extra degree of importance, since they might very well have an effect on the futures of many prospective University of Wisconsin students.
There seems to be a consensus on the notion that Plan 2008 did not properly meet its goals. Minority student enrollment has risen by 64 percent, with only 12 percent of the current student population composed of minorities. This increase is hardly a departure from the natural increase of the enrollment of minority students. Yet are we really that superficial? One wonders what benefits this campus gains from diversity, if the only gauge of the success of initiatives such as Plan 2008 is the percentage of enrolled minority students.
Let’s not forget that we’re in Wisconsin — a state that is 90 percent white. And if anything, the composition of our current student population closely resembles that of the state population. So instead of trying to create an artificial sense of diversity, we must strive to achieve the equality of opportunity for all students regardless of race. When we look at it objectively, it is almost undeniable that there are disparities in educational opportunities between white and minority students.
New York U. Plans to Make ACT and SAT Scores Optional for Applicants
Starting next year, New York University will no longer require applicants to submit ACT or SAT scores, the university announced today. NYU is not going “test-optional,” however. The university will continue to require all applicants to send scores from standardized exams, but the students will have more options.
Currently, applicants to NYU must submit either ACT scores or scores from the SAT and two SAT subject tests. As of next fall, applicants may choose instead to send scores from the SAT and two Advanced Placement examinations; or scores from three SAT subject tests, excluding language tests; or scores from three AP exams, also excluding language tests.
Students who can demonstrate “an extraordinary accomplishment,” such as publishing a book or winning a national competition, may submit only scores from the SAT, or two subject tests, or two AP exams.
California High school exit exam hinders female and non-white students, study says
California’s high school exit exam is keeping disproportionate numbers of girls and non-whites from graduating, even when they are just as capable as white boys, according to a study released Tuesday. It also found that the exam, which became a graduation requirement in 2007, has “had no positive effect on student achievement.”
The study by researchers at Stanford University and UC Davis concluded that girls and non-whites were probably failing the exit exam more often than expected because of what is known as “stereotype threat,” a theory in social psychology that holds, essentially, that negative stereotypes can be self-fulfilling. In this case, researcher Sean Reardon said, girls and students of color may be tripped up by the expectation that they cannot do as well as white boys.
Reardon said there was no other apparent reason why girls and non-whites fail the exam more often than white boys, who are their equals in other, lower-stress academic assessments. Reardon, an associate professor of education at Stanford, urged the state Department of Education to consider either scrapping the exit exam — one of the reforms for which state Supt. of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell has fought the hardest — or looking at ways of intervening to help students perform optimally. Reardon said the exam is keeping as many as 22,500 students a year from graduating who would otherwise fulfill all their requirements.
MPS juniors get school day to take free ACT college entrance exam
Earth Day is one thing, but for Milwaukee Public Schools high school students, Wednesday was also ACT day.
For the first time, every junior in MPS was given the opportunity to take the ACT college entrance exam for free and on a normal school day. MPS officials said indications were that a very large percentage of them did that.
Terry Falk, the School Board member who initiated the plan, said his goal was to get more students, teachers and administrators to take college-readiness more seriously.
“In the long run, it’s about holding kids to higher standards,” he said.
Falk said he also hoped the step would lead state and local school officials to pay more attention to the performance of students beyond the point early in 10th grade when they take the last round of state standardized tests.
Falk and other MPS officials said the testing Wednesday went smoothly.
A Visit to KIPP Schools in New York City
I AM in Newark, New Jersey’s largest town and long a byword for urban decay. I’ve been invited by KIPP (the “Knowledge is Power Programme”), the biggest and best known of America’s charter-school chains, which has three schools in Newark, with a fourth to open this autumn. Founded by two Teach for America alumni (how familiar that story is getting) in 1994, there are now 66 KIPP schools nationwide, mostly middle schools (ie, with students between 10 and 14 years old). Oddly, none of Newark’s KIPP schools are called that: under the state’s charter law “brand” names are banned, which reflects early fears that big chains would come in and take over. Those fears have dissipated, and Cory Booker, Newark’s mayor since 2006, is a good friend of charters, and wants to see more of them.
I’m actually a bit nervous. KIPP has a fearsome and to my mind not entirely attractive reputation in England for a zero-tolerance approach to discipline–insisting that children keep their gaze on teachers who are speaking, and nod and say “yes” in response to teachers’ requests; giving detentions for minor transgressions; and “benching”–that is, seating naughty children separately in class and forbidding other pupils to speak to them during breaks. A certain type of English politician practically drools when talking about KIPP–the ones who, like many of their compatriots, dislike and fear children, and love all talk of treating them harshly. I’m half-expecting to find dead-eyed Marine-sergeant types with crewcuts barking orders at children one-third their size. If it turns out that the only way to maintain order and calm in a tough urban school is to run it like a boot camp, it will make me very sad.
Seattle School Board Delays New Math Program
Divided on whether to adopt a recommended new high school textbook program Wednesday, the Seattle Public Schools Board of Directors postponed voting on the issue until next month.
The reason? The attending directors, indicating how they planned to vote, split 3-3 on Wednesday. Director Cheryl Chow, who was absent while traveling, could be the tie-breaker at the board’s May 6 meeting.
“This is one of the few times when we have the opportunity to change the direction when it comes to the school district’s instruction,” board President Michael DeBell said.
No official vote took place, but DeBell said he planned to vote against the math-adoption motion.
Up for approval was a policy that would overhaul the Seattle school district’s math program by adopting new textbooks, standardizing its curriculum and renaming its classes. The Integrated Math 2 classes, for example, would become Advanced Algebra, said Anna-Maria de la Fuente, the district’s K-12 mathematics program coordinator.
A Seattle Public Schools math committee, after about six months of investigation and debate, recommended a textbook program called Discovering Mathematics for all of the district’s math classes, except for statistics.
Much more on math here.
Educator offers a radical approach
Michelle Rhee, a national firebrand for education reform, urged Colorado educators and lawmakers Thursday night to continue their efforts to change the state of education.
Rhee — chancellor of Washington, D.C., schools who closed 23 schools in her first year, fired 36 principals and proposed paying more money to good teachers and firing the bad ones — spoke at a meeting of the Democrats for Education Reform in the auditorium of the Denver Newspaper Agency building.
The standing-room-only crowd included Lt. Gov. Barbara O’Brien, state Senate President Peter Groff and U.S. Rep. Jared Polis.
“We have public schools so that every kid can have an equal shot in life,” Rhee said. “That is not the reality for children in Washington, D.C., today or many children in urban cities today. That is the biggest social injustice imaginable.”
Rhee said radical changes are necessary. “Unless we do something massive about this right now, unless we are willing to turn the system on its head . . . then all of the ideals of this country are actually hollow,” she said.
Taking School Choice for Granted
President Obama, Education Secretary Arne Duncan, and most members of Congress have never known the sense of desperation that LaTasha Bennett feels.
Bennett is one of hundreds of Washington, D.C., parents who recently opened a letter from the U.S. Department of Education with devastating news: Her child was no longer eligible to receive a private-school scholarship for the upcoming school year. This sent Bennett and other parents scrambling to find their children spots in good public schools — a challenge in a city where few students read at grade level and barely half graduate from high school.
President and Mrs. Obama faced the same problem when they moved to the District in January, but they were able to afford a private school for their daughters. And for Secretary Duncan and his wife, finding a good school was a top concern when deciding where to live in the D.C. area. They wound up choosing Arlington, Va., a community with good public schools. Duncan recently told Science magazine: “My family has given up so much so that I could have the opportunity to serve; I didn’t want to try to save the country’s children and our educational system and jeopardize my own children’s education.”
George Will has more:
He has ladled a trillion or so dollars (“or so” is today’s shorthand for “give or take a few hundreds of billions”) hither and yon, but while ladling he has, or thinks he has, saved about $15 million by killing, or trying to kill, a tiny program that this year is enabling about 1,715 D.C. children (90 percent black, 9 percent Hispanic) to escape from the District’s failing public schools and enroll in private schools.
The District’s mayor and school superintendent support the program. But the president has vowed to kill programs that “don’t work.” He has looked high and low and — lo and behold — has found one. By uncanny coincidence, it is detested by the teachers unions that gave approximately four times $15 million to Democratic candidates and liberal causes last year.
Not content with seeing the program set to die after the 2009-10 school year, Education Secretary Arne Duncan (former head of Chicago’s school system, which never enrolled an Obama child) gratuitously dashed even the limited hopes of another 200 children and their parents. Duncan, who has sensibly chosen to live with his wife and two children in Virginia rather than in the District, rescinded the scholarships already awarded to those children for the final year of the program, beginning in September. He was, you understand, thinking only of the children and their parents: He would spare them the turmoil of being forced by, well, Duncan and other Democrats to return to terrible public schools after a tantalizing one-year taste of something better. Call that compassionate liberalism.
A Crisis of Ethic Proportions
I recently received a letter from a Vanguard shareholder who described the global financial crisis as “a crisis of ethic proportions.” Substituting “ethic” for “epic” is a fine turn of phrase, and it accurately places a heavy responsibility for the meltdown on a broad deterioration in traditional ethical standards.
Commerce, business and finance have hardly been exempt from this trend. Relying on Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,” through which our self-interest advances the interests of society, we have depended on the marketplace and competition to create prosperity and well-being.
But self-interest got out of hand. It created a bottom-line society in which success is measured in monetary terms. Dollars became the coin of the new realm. Unchecked market forces overwhelmed traditional standards of professional conduct, developed over centuries.
The result is a shift from moral absolutism to moral relativism. We’ve moved from a society in which “there are some things that one simply does not do” to one in which “if everyone else is doing it, I can too.” Business ethics and professional standards were lost in the shuffle.
How to Raise the Standard in America’s Schools
National standards have long been the third rail of education politics. The right chokes on the word national, with its implication that the feds will trample on the states’ traditional authority over public schools. And the left chokes on the word standards, with the intimations of assessments and testing that accompany it. The result is a K-12 education system in the U.S. that is burdened by an incoherent jumble of state and local curriculum standards, assessment tools, tests, texts and teaching materials. Even worse, many states have bumbled into a race to the bottom as they define their local standards downward in order to pretend to satisfy federal demands by showing that their students are proficient.
It’s time to take another look. Without national standards for what our students should learn, it will be hard for the U.S. to succeed in the 21st century economy. Today’s wacky patchwork makes it difficult to assess which methods work best or how to hold teachers and schools accountable. Fortunately, there are glimmers of hope that the politics surrounding national standards has become a little less contentious. A growing coalition of reformers — from civil rights activist Al Sharpton to Georgia Republican governor Sonny Perdue — believe that some form of common standards is necessary to achieve a wide array of other education reforms, including merit pay for good teachers and the expansion of the role of public charter schools. (See pictures of inside a public boarding school.)
The idea of “common schools” that adopt the same curriculum and standards isn’t new. It first arose in the 1840s, largely owing to the influence of the reformer Horace Mann. But the U.S. Constitution leaves public education to the states, and the states devolve much of the authority to local school districts, of which there are now more than 13,000 in the U.S. The Federal Government provides less than 9% of the funding for K-12 schools. That is why it has proved impossible thus far to create common curriculum standards nationwide. In 1989, President George H.W. Bush summoned the nation’s governors to Charlottesville, Va., to attempt a standards-based approach to school reform. The result was only a vague endorsement of “voluntary national standards,” which never gained much traction. In 1994, President Bill Clinton got federal money for standards-based reform, but the effort remained in the hands of the states, leading to a wildly varying hodgepodge of expectations for — as well as ideological battles over — math and English curriculums.
Three Madison Students Among Presidential Scholar Finalists
Three Madison high school seniors are among 12 statewide to be named semifinalists in the 2009 Presidential Scholars program, one of the nation’s highest honors for high school students.
Suvai Gunasekaran and Hannah Postel, both Memorial High School students, and Chelli Riddiough, a student at West, will compete with close to 500 other U.S. semifinalists for the Presidential Scholar title.
The Commission on Presidential Scholars makes the final selection of the 121 academic scholars — one male and one female from each state, the District of Columbia, the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico, and from families of U.S. citizens living abroad. Up to 20 Presidential Scholars in the Arts also are chosen.
Other Wisconsin semifinalists include: Joseph Balistreri, Fox Point; Nicholas Blecha, De Pere; Wyatt Brothers, Oshkosh; Sean Conley, Milwaukee; Anthony Hoffman, Menomonie; Elizabeth Huston, Stevens Point; Evan Liang, Oneida; Philip Streich, Platteville; and Amy Yin, Onalaska.
Cornell ’69 And What It Did
Forty years ago this week, an armed student insurrection erupted on the Cornell campus. I was a sophomore on campus at the time and later wrote a book on the events, Cornell ’69: Liberalism and the Crisis of the American University. To some the drama represented a triumph of social justice, paving the way for a new model of the university based on the ideals of identity politics, diversity, and the university as a transformer of society. To others, it fatefully propelled Cornell, and later much of American higher education, away from the traditional principles of academic freedom, reason, and individual excellence. “Cornell,” wrote the famous constitutional scholar Walter Berns, who resigned from Cornell during the denouement of the conflict, “was the prototype of the university as we know it today, having jettisoned every vestige of academic integrity.”
In the wee hours of Friday, April 19, 1969, twenty-some members of Cornell’s Afro-American Society took over the student center, Willard Straight Hall, removing parents (sometimes forcefully) from their accommodations on the eve of Parents Weekend. The takeover was the culmination of a year-long series of confrontations, during which the AAS had deployed hardball tactics to pressure the administration of President James Perkins into making concessions to their demands. The Perkins administration and many faculty members had made claims of race-based identity politics and social justice leading priorities for the university, marginalizing the traditional missions of truth-seeking and academic freedom.
Two concerns precipitated the takeover: AAS agitation for the establishment of a radical black studies program; and demands of amnesty for some AAS students, who had just been found guilty by the university judicial board of violating university rules. These concerns were linked, for, according to the students, the university lacked the moral authority to judge minority students. They declared that Cornell was no longer a university, but rather an institution divided by racial identities.
The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools
McKinsey’s report, The Economic Impact of the Achievement Gap in America’s Schools, examines the dimensions and economic impact of the education achievement gap. While much controversy exists on the causes of the gap and on what the nation should do to address it, the full range of the achievement gap’s character and consequences has been poorly understood.
This report examines the dimensions of four distinct gaps in education: (1) between the United States and other nations, (2) between black and Latino students and white students, (3) between students of different income levels, and (4) between similar students schooled in different systems or regions.
The report finds that the underutilization of human potential as reflected in the achievement gap is extremely costly. Existing gaps impose the economic equivalent of a permanent national recession—one substantially larger than the deep recession the country is currently experiencing. For individuals, avoidable shortfalls in academic achievement impose heavy and often tragic consequences via lower earnings, poor health, and higher rates of incarceration.
50 Years of Stupid Grammar Advice
April 16 is the 50th anniversary of the publication of a little book that is loved and admired throughout American academe. Celebrations, readings, and toasts are being held, and a commemorative edition has been released.
I won’t be celebrating.
The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it.
The authors won’t be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead. William Strunk was a professor of English at Cornell about a hundred years ago, and E.B. White, later the much-admired author of Charlotte’s Web, took English with him in 1919, purchasing as a required text the first edition, which Strunk had published privately. After Strunk’s death, White published a New Yorker article reminiscing about him and was asked by Macmillan to revise and expand Elements for commercial publication. It took off like a rocket (in 1959) and has sold millions.
Abolish Local School Districts?
Today is the conference for which I’ve travelled to New York. It’s at the Rubin Museum, a small, new venue devoted to Himalayan art, which certainly beats the usual hotel. We see the galleries at each coffee break, and at the end of the day there is a guided tour for those inspired to learn more about the art.
The conference features a stellar cast of speakers: educators, researchers and some hard-headed business types too. Lou Gerstner, an ex-CEO of IBM, enthusiastically pitches his plan for school reform: he wants the 15,000 local school districts abolished and replaced by around 70 (the states plus a couple of dozen big cities), national standards in core subjects introduced, with all children tested against them, and teachers paid much, much more.
Jim Rohr of PNC Financial Services talks about “Grow Up Great“, the bank’s $100m, 10-year investment in early-childhood education, which gives grants to non-profit school-readiness programmes, and sponsors employees to volunteer their time and services. One delegate asks about the lessons learned; Mr Rohr gets a laugh of recognition when he says that the main one is that volunteers face a hideous maze of bureaucratic regulations and permissions–and all because they wanted to help.
The State of Education in New York City
As The Economist’s education correspondent, I’ve been invited by Economist Conferences, one of the businesses in the Economist group, to chair a conference in New York entitled “Global Education 2020“. It’s just one day, but if I’m going to make the trip from London, I may as well stay longer and visit some schools. Those in the city’s poor neighbourhoods have long been known for having serious problems–violence, astronomical drop-out rates and abysmal standards of achievement–but in the last few years exciting things have been happening under Joel Klein, the chancellor of the city ‘s department of education, and I want to see some of the success stories with my own eyes.
Monday morning, and I’m off to Starbucks on 93rd and Broadway to meet Wendy Kopp, the Princeton graduate who in 1990 founded Teach for America (TFA), a non-profit organisation that recruits top-notch graduates from elite institutions and gets them to teach for two years in struggling state schools in poor areas. I know the basics already–TFA been widely copied, including in England. But I quickly realise that I’ve misunderstood TFA’s true purpose.
All three are tired. Their classrooms are not much like the rest of the school where they work, and their heroic efforts are only supported by Chester and each other, not by their co-workers. “The first year was unbelievably bad,” one tells me. “So many years with low expectations meant a lot of resistance from the kids. Eventually they saw the power and the growth they were capable of–but during the first few months we were just butting heads every day.”
World Digital Library Home
The World Digital Library (WDL) makes available on the Internet, free of charge and in multilingual format, significant primary materials from countries and cultures around the world.
The principal objectives of the WDL are to:
- Promote international and intercultural understanding;
- Expand the volume and variety of cultural content on the Internet;
- Provide resources for educators, scholars, and general audiences;
- Build capacity in partner institutions to narrow the digital divide within and between countries.
Schools May Pass High Stakes Tests, But Fail Low Performing Students
Sarah Fine, a 25-year-old English teacher at Cesar Chavez Public Charter School on Capitol Hill, vividly recalls a conference with the mother of a 10th-grader who read at a third-grade level.
“Shawn is a real asset to our class because he’s so well behaved,” Fine told her, “but I think he might need some extra support to get him up to speed in reading.”
The mother said she had heard that before. Shawn had received help in middle school through special education. “But let me tell you, it don’t do no good, because the problem is that he’s plain lazy,” Fine quoted her as saying. “He’s failing every one of his classes. You got a solution to that?”
In an essay for Teacher Magazine last month, Fine said the mother’s response made her want to squirm. “Shawn’s problem is not that he is lazy,” she wrote. “To the contrary, when I ask him to read in class he sits quietly, moves his eyes over the words, and laboriously tries to answer whatever writing prompt follows — despite the fact that the text makes no sense to him. The real issue is that Shawn’s deficits make it impossible for him to pass the DC-CAS test given to 10th-graders in April, and so my school, consumed by the imperative to make ‘adequate yearly progress,’ has few resources to devote to him. He does not qualify for our English Academy program, which targets students whose reading scores indicate that a ‘push’ might enable them to pass the test, and we do not have a reading specialist because there is no funding for one.”
Madison School Board Rejects Teaching & Learning Expansion; an Interesting Discussion
One of the most interesting things I’ve observed in my years of local school interaction is the extensive amount of pedagogical and content development that taxpayers fund within the Madison School District. I’ve always found this unusual, given the proximity of the University of Wisconsin, MATC and Edgewood College, among other, nearby Institutions of Higher Education.
The recent Math Task Force, a process set in motion by several school board elections, has succeeded in bringing more attention to the District’s math curriculum. Math rigor has long been a simmering issue, as evidenced by this April, 2004 letter from West High School Math Teachers to Isthmus:
Moreover, parents of future West High students should take notice: As you read this, our department is under pressure from the administration and the math coordinator’s office to phase out our “accelerated” course offerings beginning next year. Rather than addressing the problems of equity and closing the gap by identifying minority math talent earlier, and fostering minority participation in the accelerated programs, our administration wants to take the cheaper way out by forcing all kids into a one-size-fits-all curriculum.
It seems the administration and our school board have re-defined “success” as merely producing “fewer failures.” Astonishingly, excellence in student achievement is visited by some school district administrators with apathy at best, and with contempt at worst. But, while raising low achievers is a laudable goal, it is woefully short-sighted and, ironically, racist in the most insidious way. Somehow, limiting opportunities for excellence has become the definition of providing equity! Could there be a greater insult to the minority community?
The fact the Madison’s Teaching & Learning Department did not get what they want tonight is significant, perhaps the first time this has ever happened with respect to Math. I appreciate and am proud of the Madison School Board’s willingness to consider and discuss these important issues. Each Board member offered comments on this matter including: Lucy Mathiak, who pointed out that it would be far less expensive to simply take courses at the UW-Madison (about 1000 for three credits plus books) than spend $150K annually in Teaching & Learning. Marj Passman noted that the Math Task Force report emphasized content knowledge improvement and that is where the focus should be while Maya Cole noted that teacher participation is voluntary. Voluntary participation is a problem, as we’ve seen with the deployment of an online grading and scheduling system for teachers, students and parents.
Much more on math here, including a 2006 Forum (audio / video).
Several years ago, the late Ted Widerski introduced himself at an event. He mentioned that he learned something every week from this site and the weekly eNewsletter. I was (and am) surprised at Ted’s comments. I asked if the MMSD had an internal “Knowledge Network”, like www.schoolinfosystem.org, but oriented around curriculum for teachers? “No”.
It would seem that, given the tremendous local and online resources available today, Teaching & Learning’s sole reason for existence should be to organize and communicate information and opportunities for our teaching staff via the web, email, sms, videoconference, blogs, newsletters and the like. There is certainly no need to spend money on curriculum creation.
“Men more frequently require to be reminded than informed.”
Listen to tonight’s nearly 50 minute Madison School Board math discussion via this 22MB mp3 audio file.
Tonight’s Madison School Board Meeting at O’Keefe Middle School
The meeting, which will discuss math (TJ Mertz comments), non-SAGE schools and many other topics. The meeting begins at 6:00p.m.
O’Keeffe Middle School
510 South Thornton Ave. [Map]
Madison, WI 53703
Library Media Center
The meeting agenda can be found here.
How to Raise Our IQ
Poor people have I.Q.’s significantly lower than those of rich people, and the awkward conventional wisdom has been that this is in large part a function of genetics.
After all, a series of studies seemed to indicate that I.Q. is largely inherited. Identical twins raised apart, for example, have I.Q.’s that are remarkably similar. They are even closer on average than those of fraternal twins who grow up together.
If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong. Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has just demolished this view in a superb new book, “Intelligence and How to Get It,” which also offers terrific advice for addressing poverty and inequality in America.
With Finance Disgraced, Which Career Will Be King?
In the Depression, smart college students flocked into civil engineering to design the highway, bridge and dam-building projects of those days. In the Sputnik era, students poured into the sciences as America bet on technology to combat the cold war Communist challenge. Yes, the jobs beckoned and the pay was good. But those careers, in their day, had other perks: respect and self-esteem.
Big shifts in the flow of talent can ripple through the nation and the economy for decades with lasting effect. The engineers of the Depression built everything from inter-city roads to the Hoover Dam, while the Sputnik-inspired scientists would go on, often with research funding from the Pentagon, to create the building-block innovations behind modern computing and the Internet.
Today, the financial crisis and the economic downturn are likely to alter drastically the career paths of future years. The contours of the shift are still in flux, in part because there is so much uncertainty about the shape of the economic landscape and the job market ahead.
California Schools Superintendent Wants to Water Down Academic Standards in Name of “21st-Century Skills”
California State Schools Superintendent Jack O’Connell spoke to the annual EdSource Forum in Irvine today (April 17).
O’Connell, who holds a nonpartisan office, began his speech with political partisanship:President Obama won a mandate for change that has placed him in a position to cause a massive shift in the way our government operates and in the manner in which it serves the needs of its citizens….
In just the first few months of this Administration, I can easily and confidently say that we have seen a dramatic shift in the willingness of this White House to be a partner to states — this is a welcome difference from the previous Administration….There was more, but you get the general idea.
O’Connell then went on to identify “four key areas” that the Obama administration wants states to concentrate on:
2009 Inter-School Scrabble Championship
BroadLearning Education & Mattel:
The Sixth Inter-School Scrabble Championship 2009 is approaching! Being the organizers, Mattel and BroadLearning are delighted to invite all primary and secondary schools in Hong Kong to join our Scrabble Championship 2009.
The Scrabble Championship gives a valuable opportunity for our students to play and learn at the same time in a fun and exciting environment. The Championship has shown great success since its first launch in Hong Kong 5 years ago. Throughout these years, we really wish to see that our students can enjoy the game and develop their interest and confidence in learning the language with fun.
The championship in 2009 will be open for 2 categories: the Senior Primary students (P4-P6) and the Junior Secondary students (F1-F3). There will be the Semi-Finals and the Grand-Final. Details of date and venue will be coming up soon. We’ll start to invite registration for the Scrabble Championship in early January 2009 by email and fax. You may also visit our website http://eclass.com.hk or http://scrabble.broadlearning.net for any updates.
Response to the Madison School District’s Math Task Force Recommendations
To: comment@madison.k12.wi.us
Cc: askey@math.wisc.edu
There are a number of points in the Summary of Administrative Response to MMSD Mathematics Task Force Recommendations which should be made. As a mathematician, let me just comment on comments on Recommendation 11. There are other comments which could be made, but I have a limited amount of time at present.
The first question I have is in the first paragraph. “One aspect of the balanced approach is represented in the four block approach to structuring mathematics lessons. The four blocks include Problem Solving, Number Work, Fluency and Maintenance and Inspecting Equations.” There is a missing comma, since it is not clear whether Maintenance goes with the previous word or the last two. However, in either case, “Inspecting Equations” is a strange phrase to use. I am not sure what it means, and when a mathematician who has read extensively in school mathematics does not understand a phrase, something is wrong. You might ask Brian Sniff, who seems to have written this report based on one comment he made at the Monday meeting, what he means by this.
In the next paragraph, there are the following statements about the math program used in MMSD. “The new edition [of Connected Math Project] includes a greater emphasis on practice problems similar to those in traditional middle and high school textbooks. The new edition still remains focused on problem-centered instruction that promotes deep conceptual understanding.” First, I dislike inflated language. It usually is an illustration of a lack of knowledge. We cannot hope for “deep conceptual understanding”, in school mathematics, and Connected Math falls far short of what we want students to learn and understand in many ways. There are many examples which could be given and a few are mentioned in a letter I sent to the chair of a committee which gave an award to two of the developers of Connected Mathematics Project. Much of my letter to Phil Daro is given below.
The final paragraph for Recommendation 11 deals with high school mathematics. When asked about the state standards, Brian Sniff remarked that they were being rewritten, but that the changes seem to be minimal. He is on the high school rewrite committee, and I hope he is incorrect about the changes since significant changes should be made. We now have a serious report from the National Mathematics Advisory Panel which was asked to report on algebra. In addition to comments on what is needed to prepare students for algebra, which should have an impact on both elementary and middle school mathematics, there is a good description of what algebra in high school should contain. Some of the books used in MMSD do not have the needed algebra. In addition, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics has published Curriculum Focal Points for grades PK-8 which should be used for further details in these grades. Neither of these reports was mentioned in the response you were sent.
Teacher plays ‘exceptional role’
A Canadian researcher who has studied the early education of some of the smartest people in the world has uncovered a link that may confound even the most dedicated parent.
According to the research, the most important quality determining intellectual prowess is not at all connected to familiarity with the latest brainy baby toys, involves no amount of flash-card drilling and may, in fact, have little to do with parental involvement in the child’s early academic development.
After examining the backgrounds of more than 50 Nobel laureates, Larisa Shavinina, a gifted-education expert from the Université du Québec en Outaouais, found that what they all had in common was at least one teacher who played “an exceptional role” and went beyond the ordinary classroom practice. “They all had at least one exceptional teacher who acted as a role model.”
In a paper presented at a conference on academic excellence in Paris last summer, Prof. Shavinina said the laureates all talked about how these formative teachers taught in a way that was enthusiastic, inspiring and used “a playful spirit” that sparked their charges’ enthusiasm for science.
California faces shortage of college graduates for workforce, study finds
With college enrollment rates among the lowest in the nation, California will face a shortage of 1 million college graduates needed for the state’s workforce in 2025, a report released Thursday warned.
Unless policy changes are made, only 35% of the state’s working-age adults will hold a four-year degree that year, even as a college education will be required for at least 41% of job-holders, the study by the Public Policy Institute of California found.
The state’s three public college systems — the California Community Colleges, California State University and the University of California — educate 2.3 million students annually, and an additional 360,000 students attend private colleges and universities. But the numbers mask a huge gap between the state’s youth population and its college-going and graduation rates, the report found.
Only 56% of California’s high school graduates, as opposed to 62% nationwide, proceed directly to college. The state also ranked comparatively low in other measures, including its share of 25- to 34-year-olds with at least a bachelor’s degree and the number of college students who graduated within five years.
Mystery Donor Gives Universities Millions
NPR:
Over the last few weeks, a mystery person or organization has been giving away millions of dollars. Universities have been receiving anonymous donations. Purdue University got $8 million. The University of Iowa got $7 million. Other schools got donations too. Nobody knows who gave away the more than $45 million.
University of Wisconsin junior founded group to help students like herself afford college
When Chynna Haas was about 10 years old, her father asked if she had hopes of one day going to college.
“Yes,” she answered.
“OK, then start saving,” her dad told her.
Haas took that advice to heart and now is a junior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. But making ends meet while coming from a family of modest means has not been easy.
“I’m kind of in this bubble where I don’t qualify for a lot of money, but I don’t have a lot of money — so I’m basically on my own,” said Haas.
To pay for school, Haas works 35 hours per week during the school year and about 60 a week over the summer. Even so, she figures she’ll be about $23,000 in debt when she graduates next May.
It is these financial struggles — as well as an awareness of what money can buy in terms of access to power and opportunities — that prompted her in the fall of 2007 to found a student organization that gives a voice to working-class students at UW-Madison.
The Puzzling Politics of School Choice
George Lightbourn, via a kind reader’s email:
I don’t think it would be possible to make things any more confusing for Milwaukee parents. Their children have become political pawns in a political chess match and it will surprise no one to learn that this group of poor, minority parents is being treated quite shabbily.
The politics that these people are caught up in is being run out of the State Capitol. Governor Doyle went out of his way to tuck a decidedly non-fiscal item into his budget that stands to affect all school choice children. Specifically, he added a long list of regulatory requirements that the schools participating in the Milwaukee’s school choice program would have to follow. Governor Doyle’s list of regulations is torn directly out of the Milwaukee Teachers Education Association play book. After all, MTEA worked hard to deliver a totally Democrat state government and they expect a pay off for their effort. And to the glee of MTEA, Governor Doyle delivered.
Lest anyone be deceived, the aim of MTEA has always been to shut down the private school choice program. They want to get all of the kids back into public schools. Their hope is that these new regulations the Governor put in his budget will make it onerous enough for the choice schools that they will be forced to opt out of the choice program. There is logic to the MTEA reasoning given that choice schools operate on tiny budgets that are already strained.
Are we ‘Good-job!’-ing our kids to pieces?
On a recent soggy morning, Mark Theissen covered a lot of ground fast in his first-grade classroom at Vadnais Heights Elementary School. He sprang from station to station, encouraging students to finish and focus — sound words out, craft Lego configurations mathematically, grip Crayolas in the correct way.
He asked questions but didn’t back-pat; he prodded but didn’t praise. Nor did he carry the ball, merely offering assists. That’s because when Theissen, 36, began teaching in 2000, the backlash against overpraising children was in full swing.
“I try to avoid complimenting them all the time,” he said. “If they get strokes for everything, they expect it, they think everything they do is great — and they don’t want to push themselves. I think they need to develop self-drive and the need to perform for personal satisfaction, not recognition from others.”
1 class increases odds of college graduation for struggling students
A researcher at Ohio State University has developed a course on learning and motivation strategies that actually increases the odds that struggling first-year students will graduate.
Students in academic difficulty who took the “Learning and Motivation Strategies” course in their first quarter at Ohio State were about 45 percent more likely to graduate within six years than similar students who didn’t take the class.
Average-ability students who took the course were also six times more likely to stay in college for a second year and had higher grade point averages than those who didn’t take the class.
“We are taking the students who are least likely to succeed in college and teaching them the skills they need to stay in school and graduate,” said Bruce Tuckman, a professor of education at Ohio State, and creator of the course.
“Just taking this one class has made a big difference in how well below-average students do at Ohio State.”
Colleges Ask Donors to Help Meet Demand for Aid
Faced with one of the most challenging fund-raising environments anyone can remember, colleges and universities are appealing to donors to help meet the swelling demand for financial aid.
Using such demand “as a fund-raising tool totally makes sense in this environment,” said Richard J. Krasney, a wealth manager and philanthropy adviser. “More than ever, people want to know that their money is being used to address current needs.”
Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass., has increased its financial aid budget for the coming school year by 7.5 percent, to $21.5 million, a point its fund-raisers are making to donors.
“The incoming student body for the fall of 2009 will have higher financial needs than in the past,” said Clay Ballantine, Hampshire’s chief advancement officer. “I tell donors these are excellent students and we want to take financial concerns out of their decision-making process, and we’re looking to you to provide a gift that will help us do that.”
Education Standards Likely to See Toughening
President Obama and his team have alternated praise for the goals of President George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law with criticism of its weaknesses, all the while keeping their own plans for the law a bit of a mystery.
But clues are now emerging, and they suggest that the Obama administration will use a Congressional rewriting of the federal law later this year to toughen requirements on topics like teacher quality and academic standards and to intensify its focus on helping failing schools. The law’s testing requirements may evolve but will certainly not disappear. And the federal role in education policy, once a state and local matter, is likely to grow.
The administration appears to be preparing important fixes to what many see as some of the law’s most serious defects. But its emerging plans are a disappointment to some critics of the No Child Left Behind law, who hoped Mr. Obama’s campaign promises of change would mean a sharper break with the Bush-era law.
Education Tuning Shows What Students Learned
Phyllis Safman & Gary Rhoades:
Sure, many students take Psych 101, but do they all actually know the same things?
A new approach at some universities, known as education tuning, will require that degrees reflect a defined set of skills, rather than a list of the courses a student took.
19th Century Skills
13 April 2009
John Robert Wooden, the revered UCLA basketball coach, used to tell his players: “If you fail to prepare, you are preparing to fail.” According to the Diploma to Nowhere report last summer from the Strong American Schools project, more than one million of our high school graduates are in remedial courses at college every year. Evidently we failed to prepare them to meet higher education’s academic expectations.
The 21st Century Skills movement celebrates computer literacy as one remedy for this failing. Now, I love my Macintosh, and I have typeset the first seventy-seven issues of The Concord Review on the computer, but I still have to read and understand each essay, and to proofread eleven papers in each issue twice, line by line, and the computer is no help at all with that. The new Kindle (2) from Amazon is able to read books to you–great technology!–but it cannot tell you anything about what they mean.
In my view, the 19th (and prior) Century Skills of reading and writing are still a job for human beings, with little help from technology. Computers can check your grammar, and take a look at your spelling, but they can’t read for you and they can’t think for you, and they really cannot take the tasks of academic reading and writing off the shoulders of the students in our schools.
There appears to be a philosophical gap between those who, in their desire to make our schools more accountable, focus on the acquisition and testing of academic knowledge and skills in basic reading and math, on the one hand, and those who, from talking to business people, now argue that this is not enough. This latter group is now calling for 21st Century critical thinking, communication skills, collaborative problem solving, and global awareness.
Math on the Madison School Board’s Agenda this Evening
The Madison School District Board of Education will discuss this “Administrative Response” to the recent Math Task Force [452K PDF]. Links: Math Task Force, Math Forum and a letter to Isthmus from a group of West High School Math Teachers.
Facebook fans do worse in exams
Research finds the website is damaging students’ academic performance
Jonathan Leake & Georgia Warren:
FACEBOOK users may feel socially successful in cyberspace but they are more likely to perform poorly in exams, according to new research into the academic impact of the social networking website.
The majority of students who use Facebook every day are underachieving by as much as an entire grade compared with those who shun the site.
Researchers have discovered how students who spend their time accumulating friends, chatting and “poking” others on the site may devote as little as one hour a week to their academic work.
The findings will confirm the worst fears of parents and teachers. They follow the ban on social networking websites in many offices, imposed to prevent workers from wasting time.
About 83% of British 16 to 24-year-olds are thought to use social networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, to keep in touch with friends and organise their social lives.
“Our study shows people who spend more time on Facebook spend less time studying,” said Aryn Karpinski, a researcher in the education department at Ohio State University. “Every generation has its distractions, but I think Facebook is a unique phenomenon.”
Accelerated Math Challenge, For a Student and Her Mom
Anne McCracken Ehlers’s third-grade daughter was not doing well in accelerated fourth-grade math at Whetstone Elementary School in Gaithersburg. Becca was spending far too long on her assignments. She was confused. She was unhappy. Ehlers is a teacher herself, in the English department at Rockville High School. So she was polite when she asked for a change, but nothing happened.
Finally, the 8-year-old in the drama decided that enough was enough, prompting this e-mail from her teacher to Ehlers on the afternoon of Feb. 5: “I just wanted to let you know that math bunch was held today from 1:00-1:30. Rebecca chose not to come. I asked her several times to please join us and she refused saying that she would come next week. We went over rounding, estimating, and adding decimals. We also reviewed word problems that include fractions. Please encourage Rebecca to take part in these extra math sessions. Thank you very much for your support.”
District-Wide Reform of Mathematics and Science Instruction: Case Studies of Four SCALE Partner Districts
This paper is a synthesis of case studies of four districts that implemented multifaceted reforms aimed at offering rigorous instruction in mathematics and science for all students as part of a National Science Foundation-supported partnership. A common theory of action aimed for a rigorous curriculum, professional development delivered close to the point of instruction, monitoring of instructional quality, and system coordination. Immersion units would offer an in-depth experience in scientific inquiry to all students. The theory of action was successful in many ways. Excellent access to top management allowed the partnership to assist with multiple aligned dimensions of instructional guidance. The biggest obstacles were turnover in district leadership, loose coupling across departments, attenuation of vertical alignment through overload of instructional guidance, and insufficient budget for adequate school site support (e.g., coaches). Greater coherence resulted from delivery of instructional guidance closer to schools and teachers, as with science immersion. The study suggests that complete, affordable packages of instructional guidance delivered to the school level district-wide might be the best model for district reform.
Related: Math Forum, Madison School District’s Math Task Force and the significant role that the UW-Madison School of Education has had in Madison School District curriculum decisions (see links and notes in this post’s comments)
In the recession, does advanced education really pay off?
Education pays. That’s the lesson of study after study on the income effects of going to college and graduate school. In general, you make more money if you get a higher degree. Harvard economists Claudia Goldin and Lawrence F. Katz have written that since 1980, “[t]he increase in the relative earnings of college graduates and those with advanced degrees has been particularly large.”
The studies that show this finding typically crunch broad swaths of data. They look at the census, or other large population samples, and show a positive correlation between income and years of education. This means that college and graduate school are generally a good bet. But it doesn’t tell you that every single degree pays off financially at every single point in time.
Comments on the New SAT Policy Regarding Lower scores
Legions of high school students equipped with No. 2 pencils have done battle with the SAT, but a new policy is easing the stress for college-bound teenagers. If they take the test more than once, they can send their favorite set of scores with applications and ignore the rest.
Before the policy took effect last month, students had no option: All their SAT scores were reported when they applied to college.
The first time Gabby Ubilla took the test, she said, she fared well on the verbal section but was dissatisfied with her math score. The College Board’s “score choice” policy will allow her to push the reset button with most colleges. “Now that I know what I need to study and what’s on the test, I can study different types of math questions” without worrying about the old score, said Ubilla, 16, an 11th-grader at Dominion High School in Sterling.
An Interview with US Education Secretary Arne Duncan
What do we know works to improve student achievement in K-12 STEM [science, technology, engineering, and mathematics] education?
A.D.: I’d say great teachers, who know the content.
How do we know that?
A.D.: I think that’s true in any subject area. If you get outstanding teachers, kids learn.
What’s the evidence for that?
A.D.: Lots of evidence points to the fact that great teachers have an impact.
What is it about effective teachers that makes a difference?
A.D.: Lots of factors. It’s not one. In this area, it sounds like common sense, but still, having teachers that truly know the content is critically important. You can’t teach what you don’t know. So that’s a starting point. Beyond that, what do great teachers look like? They are passionate, they have high expectations–this is a calling, not a job. They go way beyond the call of duty to make sure that students are getting what they need. And they are really able to differentiate instruction, to work with kids who are struggling and those who are on track to becoming the next generation of chemists and physicists.
You mentioned content. But there are studies that have found what teachers majored in in college doesn’t necessarily affect their ability to improve student achievement.
A.D.: You’re right. I’m not talking about what you major in. I’m saying that you can’t teach physics if you don’t know physics. You don’t have to have majored in physics. Maybe you come out of industry, or out of some other place. I worry a lot about how many folks are teaching classes in which they are not experts in the content. To me, that’s a big part of the problem. We don’t have enough teachers today who are experts in math and science. This is not just high school, it’s also fifth, sixth, seventh grade.
