Lifelong Learning – Page 29 – School Information System

Why Gen-Y Johnny Can’t Read Nonverbal Cues

In September 2008, when Nielsen Mobile announced that teenagers with cellphones each sent and received, on average, 1,742 text messages a month, the number sounded high, but just a few months later Nielsen raised the tally to 2,272. A year earlier, the National School Boards Association estimated that middle- and high-school students devoted an average of nine hours to social networking each week. Add email, blogging, IM, tweets and other digital customs and you realize what kind of hurried, 24/7 communications system young people experience today.
Unfortunately, nearly all of their communication tools involve the exchange of written words alone. At least phones, cellular and otherwise, allow the transmission of tone of voice, pauses and the like. But even these clues are absent in the text-dependent world. Users insert smiley-faces into emails, but they don’t see each others’ actual faces. They read comments on Facebook, but they don’t “read” each others’ posture, hand gestures, eye movements, shifts in personal space and other nonverbal–and expressive–behaviors.
Back in 1959, anthropologist Edward T. Hall labeled these expressive human attributes “the Silent Language.” Hall passed away last month in Santa Fe at age 95, but his writings on nonverbal communication deserve continued attention. He argued that body language, facial expressions and stock mannerisms function “in juxtaposition to words,” imparting feelings, attitudes, reactions and judgments in a different register.

21st Century Skills: The Challenges Ahead

Andrew Rotherham & Daniel Willingham:

To work, the 21st century skills movement will require keen attention to curriculum, teacher quality, and assessment.
A growing number of business leaders, politicians, and educators are united around the idea that students need “21st century skills” to be successful today. It’s exciting to believe that we live in times that are so revolutionary that they demand new and different abilities. But in fact, the skills students need in the 21st century are not new.
Critical thinking and problem solving, for example, have been components of human progress throughout history, from the development of early tools, to agricultural advancements, to the invention of vaccines, to land and sea exploration. Such skills as information literacy and global awareness are not new, at least not among the elites in different societies. The need for mastery of different kinds of knowledge, ranging from facts to complex analysis? Not new either. In The Republic, Plato wrote about four distinct levels of intellect. Perhaps at the time, these were considered “3rd century BCE skills”?
What’s actually new is the extent to which changes in our economy and the world mean that collective and individual success depends on having such skills. Many U.S. students are taught these skills–those who are fortunate enough to attend highly effective schools or at least encounter great teachers–but it’s a matter of chance rather than the deliberate design of our school system. Today we cannot afford a system in which receiving a high-quality education is akin to a game of bingo. If we are to have a more equitable and effective public education system, skills that have been the province of the few must become universal.

Learning Isn’t For Nine Months; It’s Forever

Jay Matthews:

Maybe our whole back-to-school tradition is the problem.
We think of education as a year-to-year thing. Start school in late summer. Finish in late spring. Then repeat. Learning doesn’t work like that. Our fixation on the calendar is getting in the way.
When I was young, I didn’t understand that. I accepted the rhythms set by my parents and teachers. So it was a shock to leave school and discover that when working and raising a family, it no longer mattered so much what time of year it was. I had to get that kid potty-trained, and soon! I had to write that story. I had to convince the foreign editor I could succeed overseas. I had to find a publisher for that book idea. I had to master new skills and absorb new information quickly and competently, or my plans for myself and my family were in jeopardy.
The Post tried giving standard job evaluations, sort of grown-up June report cards, but they didn’t last. My job was to produce stories that interested readers, a real-world test not tied to the calendar.

New college majors for changing needs

Kai Ryssdal:

Some cities up near the fire have canceled the first day of school, it was supposed to have been today.
A lot of college students around the country have either started classes already, or are about to. And as they choose their course loads for the semester amid rising tuition costs, there’s less and less enthusiasm for the old stand-by majors like history or political science or biology. Marketplace’s Steve Henn reports that today’s students want something that sells.
STEVE HENN: Mark Taylor is a tenured religion professor at Columbia University. But he compares higher education to the Detroit Big Three.
MARK TAYLOR: They are producing a product for which there’s no market.
Which wouldn’t be so bad if these students also had skills valued outside academia but…

Student’s visit to Vietnam is lesson in college culture

Ja’Nay Carswell:

The third time proved to be a charm for Adam Croglia of Amherst, a senior political science major at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva.
After visiting Vietnam as a tourist twice before with his family–for a month in 2006 and again in 2007 — Croglia went again for 11 weeks this summer as an intern with the Institute of International Education, an organization in Ho Chi Minh City promoting cultural exchange. Croglia, who returned home earlier this month, said his latest trip was very rewarding and culturally enriching.
“Vietnam is a rapidly developing country with a remarkable desire to globalize,” said Croglia, who traveled through a grant funded by his college. “Living there opened my eyes in a way I couldn’t get from visiting.”
In Ho Chi Minh City, Croglia advised and educated Vietnamese students interested in pursuing an education at American colleges and universities.
“I had the opportunity to reach many Vietnamese students,” he said. “Through my presentations both in Ho Chi Minh City and around the country, I think I presented to a total of about 1,500 people.”
Croglia, 20, gave presentations throughout the country on resumes, personal statements and relationship building. The 2006 St. Joseph’s Collegiate Institute graduate said the students were very receptive and intrigued by American culture and education.

Can Poor Spelling Derail a Career?

Toddi Gutner:

I’m mentoring a young, ambitious engineer in our company. He’s competent and demonstrates his energetic drive every day. However, he constantly makes spelling and grammatical errors in his writings. I’ve asked him to utilize spell-checking and re-read his emails. But mistakes such as confusing “our” with “are” and “there” and “their” aren’t picked up with the computer tools. It’s been over a year and he’s still making these mistakes. What would you suggest as an appropriate next course of action? I am not sure if there are any additional classes he can take to improve his grammar/spell-checking skills.
A: While it is clear you have casually mentioned to your mentee about his spelling and grammatical errors, it sounds like it is time you have a more formal, direct discussion with him about his mistakes. It may be that he doesn’t fully understand the gravity of the problem and the impact it can have on his career. “He needs to know that these mistakes are getting in the way of his success and that his lack of professionalism and inaccuracy is unacceptable,” says Brad Karsh, president of JobBound, a career consulting firm.

Pledge Allegiance to Core Knowledge

Jay Matthews:

THE MAKING OF AMERICANS
Democracy and Our Schools
By E.D. Hirsch, Jr.
Yale Univ. 261 pp. $25
It’s not easy being E. D. Hirsch, Jr. If the inventive 81-year-old had been a business leader or politician or even a school superintendent, his fight to give U.S. children rich lessons in their shared history and culture would have made him a hero among his peers. Instead, he chose to be an English professor, at the unlucky moment when academic fashion declared the American common heritage to be bunk and made people like Hirsch into pariahs.
In this intriguing, irresistible book, Hirsch tells of life as the odd man out at the University of Virginia. Twelve years ago, for instance, he decided to give a course at the university’s education school. As a bestselling author and leader of a national movement to improve elementary school teaching, he thought students would flock to hear him. Instead, he rarely got more than 10 a year. Be grateful for that many, one student told him. They had all been warned by the education faculty not to have anything to do with someone demanding that all students take prescribed courses in world and American history.

College send-off scary — for Mom

Sandy Banks:

I remembered from my first go-round to bring necessities not listed in the college dormitory’s move-in guide: plastic hangers, scented drawer liners, tools to un-jam a balky closet door.
But what I didn’t remember when my daughter and I arrived last week at San Francisco State is how difficult it can be to drop off your kid, leave campus and get on with your life.
I’d been through the drill in 2003 with my oldest daughter. Then, we wandered wide-eyed through every reception and information session that Stanford offered. Two days later, we said tearful goodbyes and I headed home, confident that my child would be well cared for.
This time, my youngest daughter and I joined an endless sea of families jostling for 20-minute parking spots to unload computers and microwaves and cases of water bottles. Then we hauled our stuff up four flights of stairs.

Milwaukee’s for-profit colleges do well during recession

Joel Dresang:

At a ceremonial opening of the Bayshore campus of Bryant & Stratton College last week, Peter Pavone alluded to the ballooning popularity of career colleges.
Nine years ago, Bryant & Stratton had 123 students in Milwaukee, said Pavone, the college’s director of Milwaukee campuses. This fall, local enrollment will be around 2,000, including about 100 at its new site, a 37,000-square-foot suite with a capacity for 750 students.
“We’ve had a nice story,” Pavone told a small gathering in the school’s library, overlooking Bayshore Town Center.
Away from the celebration, down the hall from Pavone’s remarks, Michael Anderson was installing equipment for the school’s information technology lab.
Anderson, who’s 39, first turned to career colleges when he got downsized as a production worker at Master Lock. He enrolled in computer classes at Milwaukee Career College and has stayed on there as an instructor. Now, through an affiliation agreement with Bryant & Stratton, he’s continuing to advance his education.
“For a lot of people, they don’t want to go to a traditional college,” Anderson said. “They want specialized skills. They don’t have a lot of time to go back to school.”

A Reaffirmation of Why I Became an Educator

Gina Greco:

“Impersonal, disconnected, and unfulfilling.” That is how I would have answered if you asked me 10 years ago what I thought of online teaching. As a teacher, I feed off the energy of the crowd and thrive on exciting and entertaining my students to the point of drawing even the most resistant into attending class. When the economy and my growing family necessitated that I teach online as well as in the classroom, I couldn’t have been more surprised by the satisfaction and joy that could come from a distance-learning program.
It is not easy. First there are the students themselves. They are generally older, multicultural, and have work and family commitments. Many are in the military or have a spouse in it. Many are single mothers. Some see this chance for an education as their only chance in life, their last option.
To effectively work in the distance-learning realm, your students need to feel close to their classmates and professors, despite the miles between us. Establishing a bond, a common ground, a supportive arena for thought and expression may mean the difference between a successful, compassionate classroom and a lost, detached one.

To Take or Not to Take AP and IB

Jay Matthews:

The Question:

Is it better for college admissions to take an IB or AP class and receive a C or D or take a standard class and receive an A or B? Our office is decidedly split on this matter. The majority of us feel that it is better to make the grade since GPA is the first cut often for college admissions. We usually advise our students that if they are going to take an IB or AP class they need to get an A or B in the class, and to take an IB or AP class in their strength area.

My Answer:

The high school educators and college admissions officers I know best have convinced me that EVERY student going to college should take at least one college-level course and exam in high school. AP, IB or Cambridge are the best in my view, although a dual enrollment course and test given by the staff of a local college is also good. Students need that taste of college trauma to be able to make a smooth transition their freshman year.
When you consider actual situations, the threat of a bad grade from taking AP or IB fades away. A student strong enough to have a chance of admission to a selective college, the only kind that pays close attention to relative GPAs of their applicants, will be strong enough a student to get a decent grade in an AP or IB class, and a decent score on the exam. If they do NOT get a good grade in the course or the exam, then they are, almost by definition, not strong enough to compete with other students trying to get into those selective colleges. Their SAT or ACT score will show that, even if they don’t take AP or IB, and I suspect their overall GPA even without AP or IB will not be that great. If you know of a straight-A, 2100 SAT student who did poorly in an AP course, let me know, and I will revise my opinion. But I have never encountered such a student in 20 years of looking at these issues.

Second language changes the way bilinguals read in their native tongue

Research Digest Blog:

Do bilinguals have an internal switch that stops their two languages from interfering with each other, or are both languages always “on”? The fact that bilinguals aren’t forever spurting out words from the wrong language implies there’s some kind of switch. Moreover, in 2007, brain surgeons reported evidence for a language switch when their cortical prodding with an electrode caused two bilingual patients to switch languages suddenly and involuntarily.
On the other hand, there’s good evidence that languages are integrated in the bilingual mind. For example, bilinguals are faster at naming an object when the word for that object is similar or the same in the two languages they speak (e.g. ship/schip in English and Dutch).
Now Eva Van Assche and colleagues have provided further evidence for the idea of bilingual language integration by showing that a person’s second language affects the way that they read in their native language.

On the New Literacy

Clive Thompson:

As the school year begins, be ready to hear pundits fretting once again about how kids today can’t write–and technology is to blame. Facebook encourages narcissistic blabbering, video and PowerPoint have replaced carefully crafted essays, and texting has dehydrated language into “bleak, bald, sad shorthand” (as University College of London English professor John Sutherland has moaned). An age of illiteracy is at hand, right?
Andrea Lunsford isn’t so sure. Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students’ prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples–everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it–and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.
The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom–life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.
It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

Artificial life is only months away, says biologist Craig Venter

Mark Henderson:

Artificial life will be created within four months, a controversial scientist has predicted. Craig Venter, who led a private project to sequence the human genome, told The Times that his team had cleared a critical hurdle to creating man-made organisms in a laboratory.
“Assuming we don’t make any errors, I think it should work and we should have the first synthetic species by the end of the year,” he said.
Dr Venter, who has been chasing his goal for a decade, is already working on projects to use synthetic biology to create bacteria that transform coal into cleaner natural gas, and algae that soak up carbon dioxide and turn it into hydrocarbon fuels. Other potential applications include new ways of manufacturing medicines and vaccines.
Dr Venter’s prediction came after scientists at his J. Craig Venter Institute, in Rockville, Maryland, announced that they had developed a new method of transplanting DNA into bacteria, promising to solve a problem that has held up the artificial life project for two years.

My summer at the Woodstock for technologists

Simon Daniel:

It’s not every day you move an atom with a mouse click. But this is precisely what I do one day at the Singularity University, a new institution supported by Google and Nasa, which aims to educate a select group of entrepreneurs and scientists about the rapid pace of technology.
The class of 40 students – who are taking time out of their working lives – has settled into a busy routine. Our 12-hour days are crammed with experiments, visits to technology centres including IBM and Willow Garage, and discussion with experts. The purpose is to open our eyes to the pace of change and future possibilities.
On Wednesday we arrive at IBM Almaden research centre, a series of black glass buildings in the hills near San Jose. Unassuming office doors open to reveal scientists working away in a scene reminiscent of a sci-fi movie. We meet Kevin Roche, who is building complex machines that can deposit thin films of atoms to form nano-scale devices.
This is where, in 1989, the physicist Donald Eigler built a scanning tunnelling microscope and demonstrated the ability precisely to manipulate individual atoms by rearranging xenon atoms to spell out IBM. In homage, we use a similar machine and write SU (for Singularity University) by selecting iron atoms with a mouse and nudging them across the screen.
We open another door and witness magnetic “racetrack” memory experiments. This is the idea of storing data in magnetic field domains that can then slide or “race” along nano-wires so they can be read quickly. The idea may help our future portable devices to store hundreds of times more video.

U.S. school lunch reform may open opportunity menu

Lisa Baertlein:

School lunch is back on the U.S. policy menu for the first time in decades, thanks to President Barack Obama’s drive to make school food more nutritious and healthy.
Like any reform effort in Washington these days, the school lunch overhaul is vulnerable to a growing government deficit. But some companies and investors are getting in the game early with small projects that could some day grow into big business catering to millions of school children.
The U.S. government pays much of the bill for school food. Efforts to replace the processed and nutrition-poor foods still on many student lunch trays come with a higher price tag that many schools cannot afford. Businesses can help close the gap.
U.S. natural foods grocer Whole Foods Market Inc (WFMI.O) has teamed with Chef Ann Cooper — best known for her high-profile partnership with Chef Alice Waters at Berkeley Unified School District — to launch the Lunch Box project (thelunchbox.org/), an expanding online guidebook to help school “lunch ladies” serve healthier food.

What Should Colleges Teach? Or, becoming Alarmed at College Students Inability to Write a Clean English Sentence

Stanley Fish:

A few years ago, when I was grading papers for a graduate literature course, I became alarmed at the inability of my students to write a clean English sentence. They could manage for about six words and then, almost invariably, the syntax (and everything else) fell apart. I became even more alarmed when I remembered that these same students were instructors in the college’s composition program. What, I wondered, could possibly be going on in their courses?
I decided to find out, and asked to see the lesson plans of the 104 sections. I read them and found that only four emphasized training in the craft of writing. Although the other 100 sections fulfilled the composition requirement, instruction in composition was not their focus. Instead, the students spent much of their time discussing novels, movies, TV shows and essays on a variety of hot-button issues — racism, sexism, immigration, globalization. These artifacts and topics are surely worthy of serious study, but they should have received it in courses that bore their name, if only as a matter of truth-in-advertising.
As I learned more about the world of composition studies, I came to the conclusion that unless writing courses focus exclusively on writing they are a sham, and I advised administrators to insist that all courses listed as courses in composition teach grammar and rhetoric and nothing else. This advice was contemptuously dismissed by the composition establishment, and I was accused of being a reactionary who knew nothing about current trends in research. Now I have received (indirect) support from a source that makes me slightly uncomfortable, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, which last week issued its latest white paper, “What Will They Learn? A Report on General Education Requirements at 100 of the Nation’s Leading Colleges and Universities.”

Robert Bobb hits streets to coax students back to school

Corey Williams:

Felicia Harvey has two reasons for sending her children to the Detroit Academy of Arts & Sciences: They are learning at the charter school and she doesn’t trust their education – or safety – to the city’s historically poor public schools.
Detroit Public Schools emergency financial manager Robert Bobb is walking some of the city’s toughest neighborhoods to bring back Harvey and other parents who have abandoned the district by the thousands.
It’s an imposing sales job, especially with the district’s $259 million deficit and his decision to close 29 schools and lay off more than 1,000 teachers before classes start Sept. 8.
“You hear all the negative,” Harvey said this week following a surprise visit from Bobb to her west side home. “My theory is change doesn’t come overnight. I’m not saying I’m willing to put my foot in the door. I have to wait and see.”

Wolfram|Alpha Chemistry 101

Wolfram:

This week the American Chemical Society (ACS) is holding its Fall 2009 National Meeting & Exposition in Washington, DC, USA. In honor of professional chemists, educators, and students, we’re celebrating chemistry this week. If you are attending the meeting and would like a personal introduction to Wolfram|Alpha or the technology behind it, drop by the Wolfram Research booth, #2101.
Wolfram|Alpha contains a wealth of chemistry data, and provides you rapid computations that ensure accuracy and save time. Wolfram|Alpha is also an incredible learning tool, especially for new chemistry students looking for ways to learn, understand, compare, and test their knowledge of chemistry basics. Many of the topic areas found on an introductory or advanced course syllabus can be explored in Wolfram|Alpha.
Need to compute how many moles are in 5 grams of iron? Query “how many moles are in 5 grams of iron?”, and Wolfram|Alpha quickly computes your input and returns a result, along with unit conversions.

Adding Personality to the College Admissions Mix

Robert Tomsho:

For years, colleges have asked applicants for their grade-point averages and standardized test scores.
Now, schools like Boston College, DePaul University and Tufts University also want to measure prospective students’ personalities.
Using recently developed evaluation systems, these schools and others are aiming to quantify so-called noncognitive traits such as leadership, resilience and creativity. Colleges say such assessments are boosting the admissions chances for some students who might not have qualified based solely on grades and traditional test scores. The noncognitive assessments also are being used to screen out students believed to be at a higher risk of dropping out, and to identify newly admitted students who might need extra tutoring.
Big nonprofits that administer standardized admissions tests, including the College Board, the Educational Testing Service and ACT Inc., are also getting in on the trend. ETS, for instance, which administers the Graduate Record Examination, or GRE, recently unveiled a “personal potential index” designed for schools that want to replace traditional letters of recommendation for prospective grad students with a standardized rating.
“There is quite a bit of demand for these [noncognitive] instruments,” says David Hawkins, director of public policy for the National Association of College Admissions Counseling. Educators say the use of such assessments is likely to grow as some schools search for new tools to recruit more minority and low-income students. At the same time, budget pressures are forcing public institutions in states like California and Florida to find new tools for selecting incoming students.

2009-2010 Read On Wisconsin Book Club Reading List

Via email:

Dear Read On Wisconsin! Book Club Members,
Welcome to the 2009-2010 school year!
We are pleased to announce that we have finalized the book selections! Thanks to the hard work of our Literacy Advisory Committee (LAC), we have decided on wonderful collections for all age groups. Each submission was carefully considered, and we feel that our assortment features inspiring books that will both enrich and entertain students. We think that you will all be very pleased with these engaging and inspiring choices!
We look forward to hosting Reading Days at the Residence this upcoming school year. Please check this website often for dates and details. We remind you that for each book, the LAC has developed discussion questions. Please encourage your students to be active participants in the student web log. As always, we welcome any questions or feedback regarding the book club or Reading Days.
On Wisconsin!
Jessica Doyle
First Lady of Wisconsin
Ashley Huibregtse
Assistant to the First Lady

(more…)

Harvard, Ivy Leagues Bust Tuition Cost Bubble:

John Wasik:

A high-priced college may not be worth the price of admission.
As the economy forces more students out of the classroom and graduates into under- or unemployment, a college enrollment bubble may be starting to deflate.
The recession, combined with rising college costs, has accelerated a college affordability crunch that is exacerbated by shrinking family incomes, diminished home equity and reduced household wealth.
As many as one-third of all private colleges surveyed by the National Association of Independent Colleges and Universities (Complete Report) said they expected enrollment to drop in the next academic year.
Almost 40 percent of those colleges said some of their students dropped out due to personal economic reasons and a quarter said full-time attendees switched to part time. Half said families had to cut back their expected contributions as the value of college savings plans dropped 21 percent last year.
The job market is so awful that I have encountered several graduates this summer who weren’t able to line up full-time employment, even though they had sound academic records. Some are even “taking the year off” or doing internships.

Education Secretary Criticizes Steep Rise in College Costs

Jack Kadden:

In an interview to be broadcast on the Tavis Smiley program on PBS, Secretary of Education Arne Duncan predicts that as tuition continues to rise, students will increasingly turn to schools that are “smarter and more creative” about lowering the cost of a college education.

But let me tell you Tavis, what I think is going to happen is parents of students are really smart, and those schools where tuition is going up exponentially high, folks have a lot of options out there. You’ve seen some other universities be smarter and more creative and go to three-year programs, and go to no-frills programs, I think you are going to see them capture a larger share of the marketplace. Again, parents of students are going to vote with their feet and when costs are skyrocketing, we think those colleges are going to pay a price for it.

Mr. Duncan also describes the Obama administration’s efforts to make a college education more accessible, including more money for Pell grants, Perkins loans and tuition tax credits.

Stars Aligning on School Lunches

Kim Severson:

ANN COOPER has made a career out of hammering on the poor quality of public school food. The School Nutrition Association, with 55,000 members, represents the people who prepare it.
A meal from the cafeteria at P.S. 89 in Manhattan does not contain processed food.
Imagine Ms. Cooper’s surprise when she was invited to the association’s upcoming conference to discuss the Lunch Box, a system she developed to help school districts wean themselves from packaged, heavily processed food and begin cooking mostly local food from scratch.
“All of a sudden I am not the fringe idiot trying to get everyone to serve peas and carrots that don’t come out of a can, like that’s the most radical idea they have ever heard of,” she said.
The invitation is a small sign of larger changes happening in public school cafeterias. For the first time since a new wave of school food reform efforts began a decade ago, once-warring camps are sharing strategies to improve what kids eat. The Department of Agriculture is welcoming ideas from community groups and more money than ever is about to flow into school cafeterias, from Washington and from private providers.
“The window’s open,” said Kathleen Merrigan, the deputy secretary of agriculture. “We are in the zone when a whole lot of exciting ideas are being put on the table. I have been working in the field of sustainable agriculture and nutrition all my professional life, and I really have never seen such opportunity before.”

A Last-Minute Dash for Tuition

Melissa Korn:

Weeks or even days before classes start, hundreds of thousands of college students nationwide still don’t know whether they’ll be able to cover their tuition bills this year.
In Michigan, the state legislature continues to battle over the Michigan Promise Grant, a merit award of up to $4,000 given to 96,700 students. The State Senate recently passed a bill to cut it entirely and eliminate another $56 million in need-based aid for this school year.
In Illinois, the need-based Monetary Award Program was halved last month, leaving about 145,000 students without a spring-semester payout. The full award used to total nearly $5,000.
In Utah, the state cut the tuition subsidy to 40% from 75% in its New Century Scholarship, a merit program in which students earn their associates degrees while in high school.
And in Pennsylvania, a state budget impasse is leaving 172,000 students unsure what funding they will get from the state Higher Education Assistance Agency. The maximum award is slated to be $4,700 for students who attend in-state schools.

Lost in Immersion: Speaking French on the Web

Katherine Boehret:

If you’ve ever learned a foreign language, you know the vast difference between completing workbook activities and speaking with others. The latter experience can involve sounding out unfamiliar accents or guttural pronunciations and, though intimidating, is ultimately more rewarding. By immersing yourself in a language and navigating through situations, you learn how to speak and eventually think in that language.
Rosetta Stone has long used visual learning without translations by pairing words with images –one of the ways a baby learns to speak. For the past week, I’ve been testing its newest offering: Rosetta Stone Totale (pronounced toe-tall-A), which is the company’s first fully Web-based language-learning program. It aims to immerse you in a language using three parts: online coursework that can take up to 150 hours; live sessions in which you can converse over the Web with a native-speaking coach and other students; and access to Rosetta World, a Web-based community where you can play language games by yourself or with other students to improve your skills.
Totale costs a whopping $999, so if you aren’t serious about learning a language it’s a tough sell. Rosetta Stone says this program is comparable to an in-country language-immersion school. The company’s most expensive offering before Totale was a set of CDs (lessons one, two and three) that cost $549, included about 120 hours of course work and had no online components.

Connecting Anxious Parents and Educators, at $450 an Hour

Susan Dominus:

If you’re going to do something, do it right.
Such has been the longstanding philosophy of Suzanne Rheault, a 39-year-old mother of two who now lives with her family downtown. A Type-A — make that A-plus — overachiever, even by New York standards, she skated competitively as a kid, finished M.I.T. in three and a half years, and tested out of a chunk of her courseload at Columbia Business School. She conquered the marathon.
She logged long hours and worked on holidays for Morgan Stanley, once flying, with pneumonia and against doctor’s orders, across the country for a technology conference (she paid with a burst eardrum). After marrying and having children, she kept up a grueling schedule, typically traveling two weeks a month.
The key to her success in picking stocks, she always felt, was extensive research. Then came the personal challenge that defied all research, her own Moby Dick: getting her daughter into private school. No Excel spreadsheet would unlock the formula that would guarantee results; all her expertise in statistics and economics failed her.

Study Finds That Online Education Beats the Classroom

Steve Lohr:

A recent 93-page report on online education, conducted by SRI International for the Department of Education, has a starchy academic title, but a most intriguing conclusion: “On average, students in online learning conditions performed better than those receiving face-to-face instruction.”
The report examined the comparative research on online versus traditional classroom teaching from 1996 to 2008. Some of it was in K-12 settings, but most of the comparative studies were done in colleges and adult continuing-education programs of various kinds, from medical training to the military.
Over the 12-year span, the report found 99 studies in which there were quantitative comparisons of online and classroom performance for the same courses. The analysis for the Department of Education found that, on average, students doing some or all of the course online would rank in the 59th percentile in tested performance, compared with the average classroom student scoring in the 50th percentile. That is a modest but statistically meaningful difference.

The Adolescent Politics of Virtual Education

Tom Vander Ark:

In 1995, I was sure that the explosion of the web would result in a good deal of online learning competition — and fast. I may have been right about the first but not the second. It took a dozen years for online learning to get big and competitive, but it is finally a force to be reckoned with. Next month there will be close to two million students learning online at home and at school.
Back then I was superintendent in Federal Way Washington, between Seattle and Tacoma. We were a founding district in Microsoft’s Anytime Anywhere Learning initiative and began rolling out laptop programs to all of our secondary schools. The brave new world of education blending the best of online and onsite learning seemed right around the corner.
In September 1996, we opened the Internet Academy, the nation’s first K-12 virtual school. It was a bootstrapped operation; a group of intrepid teachers staying a day ahead of the kids and testing the application of the state’s seat time requirements.
Enrollment quickly grew to over 1,000 students with about half new to public education (i.e., home and private school students) with an even split between students seeking acceleration and those seeking credit recovery. For most of a decade, Internet Academy had Washington’s virtual space to itself.

A Hand Up for Students Facing a Mountain of Debt

Ron Lieber:

The biggest problem for consumers of American higher education is that many of them must take on a mountain of debt to get the degree they want. That intimidating quandary has inspired some unique, though often unsuccessful, attempts to make student loans more affordable over the years.
One of the most innovative sprang from a handful of trailblazers, including an economist who later won a Nobel and some entrepreneurs barely out of school themselves, who tried to persuade undergraduates to sell a portion of their future income to investors in exchange for money for college. Critics fretted about “indentured servitude,” and the idea never amounted to much.
Others have tried to let strangers finance students’ fixed-rate loans via Web sites. The idea of “peer to peer” lending hasn’t gained much traction either so far.

Bullies: They can be stopped, but it takes a village.

Alan Kazdin & Carlo Rotella:

Let’s say you find out that your child is being bullied by a schoolmate. Naturally, you want to do something right now to make it stop. Depending on your temperament and experience, one or more of four widely attempted common-sense solutions will occur to you: telling your child to stand up to the bully, telling your child to try to ignore and avoid the bully, taking matters into your own hands by calling the bully’s parents or confronting the bully yourself, or asking your child’s teacher to put a stop to it.
These responses share three features:
1) They all express genuine caring, concern, and good intentions.
2) You will feel better for taking action.
3) They are likely to be ineffective.

Hong Kong School drug tests will go ahead, Henry Tang says

Martin Wong:

The voluntary school drug test would go ahead in Tai Po as scheduled at the end of the year despite reservations about it in various sectors, the chief secretary said yesterday.
Speaking after attending an anti-drug seminar for secondary teachers in Kowloon, Henry Tang Ying-yen said he had heard the community’s different opinions about the plan.
“Our current goal is still to have [the pilot project] launched at the end of the year,” he said. “We still have plenty of time … when we can discuss details of the programme and how to improve it.”
His comment came a day after the Professional Teachers’ Union said schools should have more flexibility over when and how to conduct the drug-testing programme.
Three youth groups – the Youth Union, the Hong Kong Christian Institute and Ytalk! – have accused the government of not planning the scheme properly and urged students in Tai Po to boycott it. Social workers and the Catholic Church have also raised concerns about the programme, saying more resources should be deployed for it.
Mr Tang said: “We are serious about the scheme and will allocate an appropriate level of resources so it can be carried out successfully.”
Deputy Education Secretary Betty Ip Tsang Chui-hing told yesterday’s seminar she believed many students and parents supported the test.

Format War Clouds E-Book Horizon

Geoffrey Fowler:

Thinking about making the leap to digital books? First, you’ll need to add a jumble of new lingo to your dictionary: .epub, pdb, BeBB, and Adobe Content Server 4, just to name a few.
The burgeoning marketplace for e-books is riddled with inconsistent and incompatible formats. That means there’s often little guarantee that an e-book you buy from one online store, like the new Barnes & Noble store, will work on popular reading devices like Amazon.com’s Kindle or Sony’s Reader.
In fact, most popular reading devices and e-book stores use proprietary formats. Amazon only sells Kindle-format books (called “.azw”), which can only be viewed on its Kindle e-reader and with software Amazon has made for Apple’s iPhone. Barnes & Noble uses a proprietary format (called “.pdb”), which can only be read with software the bookseller has made for PCs, iPhones and BlackBerrys.
That’s why Sony won applause from some e-book watchers by announcing Thursday that its e-book store was switching from a proprietary format called BeBB to Epub, an open standard put together by an industry group called the International Digital Publishing Forum. Sony’s Reader has long been able to open files in the Epub format.

American High Education is Sliding Lower & Lower

Steve Salerno:

You may have heard about Trina Thompson. Unable to find work, she’s suing her alma mater, Monroe College, to recover $70,000 in tuition. The Thompson case may not turn out to be the precedent-setter that some theorize, because Monroe makes unusually bold promises to students about post-college success.
But the sad truth is this: Practically all colleges are failing their students nowadays, and in most cases at far greater expense than Monroe failed Thompson.
Historically, criticism of education in America has targeted grade-school and secondary education. Indeed, perhaps the best thing about the K-12 is that in these polarized times, it is the great uniter: Maligned by liberals and conservatives, Christians and Jews, Red Sox fans and Yankee fans, and just about everyone else in the grand American cultural stew.

Technical colleges foresee big growth

Amy Hetzner:

Technical colleges throughout the state are bracing for a fall enrollment boom, spurred by unemployed workers who need retraining and students looking for affordable alternatives to four-year universities.
The schools got a glimpse of the heightened demand last year when Blackhawk and Mid-State technical colleges were flooded with new enrollment, giving them double-digit percentage increases for the year. Overall enrollment for the Wisconsin Technical College System increased about 3.2% in 2008-’09, according to system spokeswoman Morna Foy.
But that was then.
“I think it’s not going to be too far off to say we’re expecting enrollment increases this year about 10% statewide, and that’s pretty significant,” Foy said.
Final numbers won’t be apparent at the state’s 16 schools until mid-September, when classes have started and students have settled in for the semester.
But most technical colleges are girding themselves based on what they’ve seen so far.

Little Hearts, Big Problems
Few Drugs or Devices to Treat Cardiovascular Disease Are Designed With Children in Mind

Ron Winslow:

Matthew Emmerling was just three days old and barely home from the hospital when his mother noticed his feet were unusually cold to the touch. Hours later, doctors determined that he was born with a critically narrowed aortic valve that prevented his heart from getting an adequate supply of blood to the rest of his body. He was in shock, and without quick intervention, his life was in danger.
To avoid risky open-heart surgery on the infant, doctors figured they could thread a tiny balloon into his heart and inflate it to stretch open the obstructed valve. The problem was that a balloon designed and approved to treat heart defects in patients as tiny as Matthew didn’t exist. Instead, Robert Beekman, a pediatric cardiologist at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, chose an angioplasty balloon that normally serves a different function: opening up clogged kidney arteries in adults.
The adult kidney balloon “is the right size for a newborn’s aortic valve, so we use it,” Dr. Beekman says. But, he adds, using a device in small children that wasn’t designed for that purpose puts them at heightened risk for procedural complications and medical errors.
Matthew’s situation highlights an enduring reality for children born with life-threatening heart defects: Hardly any of the myriad drugs and devices developed for the multibillion-dollar market for cardiovascular disease are designed with kids in mind. Children with heart disease represent too small a segment of that market to justify companies’ investing the time and resources needed to develop specialized products. Litigation worries over products intended for children–and the challenge of conducting clinical trials for treatments often administered to newborns–are other impediments.

Out of College at 17, and en Route to Law School at 19: A Father’s Perspective

Jacques Steinberg:

We’ve published more than 100 comments on our post yesterday about Kate McLaughlin, the California teenager who has already graduated from college and is en route to law school.
Some of you applauded her accomplishments, and her family’s willingness to allow her to fast-track her education. Others saw it as too much too soon. And still others weighed in on whether the law was an appropriate career choice. Many of you wrote that you could identify with Ms. McLaughlin.
Missing from the conversation — other than in the original article in the Orange County Register — were the voices of Ms. McLaughlin and her parents. Earlier today, though, we received a comment sent by Kate’s father, John McLaughlin. We then had a brief phone conversation in which he told me that some of the criticisms posted by readers echoed those that have been lobbed at the family for much of his daughter’s life.

Admissions 101: College Pitfalls for Poor Students

Jay Matthews:

It’s conventional wisdom that talented, but underpriveleged, students are often turned away from college for lack of funds. Jay Mathews tried to dispell that idea in a column this week. He asked for readers to throw out examples of such students. No one wrote in.
Jay wrote the real challenge for needy students is not getting into school, but staying in once the scholarship and aid money runs short. Jay proposed investing money to keep these kids in school. The column has generated a significant amount of email and Jay has thrown the topic open for discussion over at Admissions 101:

Local Program Teaches Teenagers How To Join Workforce

Channel3000:

Despite good news this past week about the nation’s unemployment rate, the job market remains tough.
But one group in particular – teenagers – is facing harder prospects than ever.
In fact, the employment rate nationwide for 16- to 19-year-olds is only about 29 percent, which is the lowest recorded rate for teens in history.
Now a local group, Common Wealth Development, is hoping to change teenagers’ employment fortunes.
One local employed teen, LaFollette High School senior Cieria Childress, finds bagging groceries at Metcalfe’s Sentry to be a pleasure.
In the six months since she landed her job, Childress has learned many life lessons – including simply being thankful to be employed.

As Classrooms Go Digital, Textbooks Are History

Tamar Lewin:

At Empire High School in Vail, Ariz., students use computers provided by the school to get their lessons, do their homework and hear podcasts of their teachers’ science lectures.
Down the road, at Cienega High School, students who own laptops can register for “digital sections” of several English, history and science classes. And throughout the district, a Beyond Textbooks initiative encourages teachers to create — and share — lessons that incorporate their own PowerPoint presentations, along with videos and research materials they find by sifting through reliable Internet sites.
Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet, but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.
“Kids are wired differently these days,” said Sheryl R. Abshire, chief technology officer for the Calcasieu Parish school system in Lake Charles, La. “They’re digitally nimble. They multitask, transpose and extrapolate. And they think of knowledge as infinite.

Toddler to Teen, Decor That’s Not a Chore

Terri Sapienza:

Very soon, parents everywhere will start gearing up for a new school year: plotting schedules, reorganizing desks and going though drawers and closets to remove items their children no longer use. In some cases, parents may find that it’s not only clothes their children have outgrown, it’s their bedroom, too.
Pastels, primary colors, firetrucks and fairy princesses: all sensible choices for a baby or toddler’s room but not so cool for a tween or teen. Unfortunately, a makeover every few years isn’t budget-friendly. Nor is it practical, says D.C. designer Annie Elliott. “If you’re running around with kids, you’re not going to have the energy to update their rooms,” she says. “You’re just going to be too exhausted to want to deal with it.”

F in Exams

Richard Benson:

Q: What happens to a boy when he reaches puberty?
A: He says goodbye to childhood and enters adultery.
Q: How can you prevent milk turning sour?
A: Keep it in the cow.
We’ve all been there. You’ve been studying hard, the day of the BIG test arrives, you turn over the paper, and ‘what the *&%@ does that mean?!’ Not a clue.
Some students, rather than admit defeat, choose to adopt a more creative approach to answering those particularly awkward exam questions.
Packed full of hilarious examples, this book will bring a smile to the face of teachers, parents and students alike – and anyone who’s ever had to sit a test.

Quick! Tell Us What KUTGW Means

Stephanie Raposo:

Kate Washburn didn’t know what to make of the email a friend sent to her office with the abbreviation “NSFW” written at the bottom. Then she clicked through the attached sideshow, titled “Awkward Family Photos.” It included shots of a family in furry “nude” suits and of another family alongside a male walrus in a revealing pose.
After looking up NSFW on NetLingo.com–a Web site that provides definitions of Internet and texting terms–she discovered what it stood for: “Not safe for work.”
“If I would have known it wasn’t safe for work, I wouldn’t have taken the chance of being inappropriate,” says Ms. Washburn, 37 years old, a media consultant in Grand Rapids, Mich.
As text-messaging shorthand becomes increasingly widespread in emails, text messages and Tweets, people like Ms. Washburn are scrambling to decode it. In many offices, a working knowledge of text-speak is becoming de rigueur. And at home, parents need to know the lingo in order to keep up with–and sometimes police–their children.

Milwaukee Public Schools targeted in complaint over instruction of English as second language

Georgia Pabst:

Milwaukee Public Schools is not complying with civil rights law in effectively teaching English to Spanish-speaking students, according to a federal complaint filed by the League of United Latin American Citizens of Wisconsin.
The complaint, filed at the Office of Civil Rights in the U. S. Department of Education office in Chicago, claims MPS and the Milwaukee School Board are not complying with the Civil Rights Act.
The district receives federal funds for teaching English to students who speak another language, and the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that school districts must help such students overcome language barriers so they can succeed in all of their classes, said Darryl Morin, state director of LULAC.
“LULAC of Wisconsin has serious concerns regarding the education theory, programming and resources allocated to these efforts at MPS,” he said.
Morin said MPS has used uncertified and unqualified teachers in the program.
The U.S. Department of Education confirmed that its Office of Civil Rights has received the complaint. Jim Bradshaw, a spokesman for the department in Washington, D.C., said the office is evaluating the complaint to determine whether an investigation is appropriate. The evaluation process should take about a month, he said.
MPS spokeswoman Roseann St. Aubin said district officials can’t comment because they just received the complaint Tuesday and have not reviewed it.

Brain Emotion Circuit Sparks As Teen Girls Size Up Peers

Science Daily:

What is going on in teenagers’ brains as their drive for peer approval begins to eclipse their family affiliations? Brain scans of teens sizing each other up reveal an emotion circuit activating more in girls as they grow older, but not in boys. The study by Daniel Pine, M.D., of the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), part of National Institutes of Health, and colleagues, shows how emotion circuitry diverges in the male and female brain during a developmental stage in which girls are at increased risk for developing mood and anxiety disorders.
“During this time of heightened sensitivity to interpersonal stress and peers’ perceptions, girls are becoming increasingly preoccupied with how individual peers view them, while boys tend to become more focused on their status within group pecking orders,” explained Pine. “However, in the study, the prospect of interacting with peers activated brain circuitry involved in approaching others, rather than circuitry responsible for withdrawal and fear, which is associated with anxiety and depression.”
Pine, Amanda Guyer, Ph.D., Eric Nelson, Ph.D., and colleagues at NIMH and Georgia State University, report on one of the first studies to reveal the workings of the teen brain in a simulated real-world social interaction, in the July, 2009 issue of the Journal Child Development.

Michelle Rhee: Partnering With City Year DC to Tackle Dropout “Catastrophe”

Alice Korngold:

Washington, D.C.’s public school system has 45,000 students and an abysmal dropout rate of about 50%, typical of large cities. With a goal to remedy this dropout “catastrophe” (Gen. Colin Powell’s term), while being constrained by a tight economy, D.C. Chancellor Michelle Rhee is looking to–in her words–“leverage opportunities for the greatest change.”
To this end, Rhee believes that one of the best investments that D.C. Public Schools (DCPS) has made in the past year is its partnership with City Year DC. In 2008/09, City Year corps members proved themselves in a pilot program in 4 of Washington’s most challenging elementary schools.
Jeff Franco, Executive Director of City Year DC explained that “we offered to help the Chancellor to solve her worst headaches.” After rigorous training, corps members coached, tutored, and mentored children in grades K to 2, and successfully demonstrated that they could help improve children’s reading ability. This achievement will be instrumental in changing the life trajectory of these kids–ultimately increasing the likelihood that they will graduate from high school, go to college, and later, earn greater incomes.
“I’ve been thrilled with the results of this first year,” Rhee told me. So thrilled that she and Franco plan a “feeder pattern” strategy to have corps members continue working with these same children all through elementary school, middle school, and high school, while also expanding City Year’s involvement with additional schools. The end game: reduce the dropout rate.

For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics

Steve Lohr:

At Harvard, Carrie Grimes majored in anthropology and archaeology and ventured to places like Honduras, where she studied Mayan settlement patterns by mapping where artifacts were found. But she was drawn to what she calls “all the computer and math stuff” that was part of the job.
“People think of field archaeology as Indiana Jones, but much of what you really do is data analysis,” she said.
Now Ms. Grimes does a different kind of digging. She works at Google, where she uses statistical analysis of mounds of data to come up with ways to improve its search engine.
Ms. Grimes is an Internet-age statistician, one of many who are changing the image of the profession as a place for dronish number nerds. They are finding themselves increasingly in demand — and even cool.
“I keep saying that the sexy job in the next 10 years will be statisticians,” said Hal Varian, chief economist at Google. “And I’m not kidding.”

Education reforms will never work unless teaching attracts more high-fliers

The Economist:

“I SET up a Fantasy Football competition between some of my toughest pupils,” one young man explains. “They get goal-keeping points for good attendance, and defence points for behaving well. Good punctuation and spelling translate into their midfield performance, and coming up with good ideas, into attack.” Around the room, pens scribble furiously. “Pupil X hated me,” a woman tells the group; she describes how she changed that with weekly phone calls to his parents and postcards praising his (intermittent) good behaviour. More notes are made.
This is the Teach First summer institute: six weeks in Canterbury, a southern cathedral city, at the end of which nearly 500 new university graduates will teach full-time, for £15,000 ($24,500) a year, in some of England’s toughest schools. The 360 who started the programme last year are here too, handing on to the raw recruits their tips for coping with bad behaviour and keeping lessons fresh, and demonstrating to their tutors what they have learned. In another year, those old hands will be qualified teachers, trained on the job and in tutorials and summer schools.
Recruiting the right kind of teachers has been difficult in England for some time, and though recession has brought temporary relief, the task is getting bigger as those hired to teach the baby boom near retirement. Head teachers, worn down by constant official policy changes and an avalanche of paperwork, are retiring early. A study in 2007 by McKinsey, a consultancy, concluded that countries whose students perform well tend to recruit teachers from the top of the class. But a recent report by Politeia, a think-tank, found that the bar for getting into teacher training in England is, by international standards, unusually low. Trainee teachers can resit basic literacy and numeracy tests as often as they like–and 13% need at least three goes at the latter. Around 1,200 each year graduated with the lowest class of degree, a third.

What have private schools done for (some of) us?

Royal Statistical Society: Significance:

Many parents in Britain make huge financial sacrifices to send their children to private schools. Are those sacrifices worthwhile? What return, if any, do they get? Do their children end up in better careers, earning more, than if they have been educated at the expense of the state?Francis Green, Stephen Machin, Richard Murphy and Yu Zhu examine who exactly benefits from the privileges of the Old School Tie.

Via Mrs. Moneypenny.

Federal Tax Receipts Decline 18%, Dane County (WI) Tax Delinquencies Grow

Stephen Ohlemacher:

The recession is starving the government of tax revenue, just as the president and Congress are piling a major expansion of health care and other programs on the nation’s plate and struggling to find money to pay the tab.
The numbers could hardly be more stark: Tax receipts are on pace to drop 18 percent this year, the biggest single-year decline since the Great Depression, while the federal deficit balloons to a record $1.8 trillion.
Other figures in an Associated Press analysis underscore the recession’s impact: Individual income tax receipts are down 22 percent from a year ago. Corporate income taxes are down 57 percent. Social Security tax receipts could drop for only the second time since 1940, and Medicare taxes are on pace to drop for only the third time ever.
The last time the government’s revenues were this bleak, the year was 1932 in the midst of the Depression.
“Our tax system is already inadequate to support the promises our government has made,” said Eugene Steuerle, a former Treasury Department official in the Reagan administration who is now vice president of the Peter G. Peterson Foundation.

Channel3000.com recently spoke with Dane County Treasurer Dave Worzala on the growing property tax delinquencies:

While there aren’t any figures for this year, property tax delinquencies have been on a steep climb the last few years, WISC-TV reported.
Delinquencies increased 11 percent in 2006, 34 percent in 2007 and 45 percent in 2008, where there is now more than $16 million in unpaid taxes in the county.
“It affects us in that we have to be sure that we have enough resources to cover county operations throughout the year even though those funds aren’t here. And we do that, we are able to do that, but 40 percent increases over time become unsustainable,” said Dane County Treasurer David Worzala.
“I can see that there are probably some people that either lost their jobs or were laid off, they’re going to have a harder time paying their taxes,” said Ken Baldinus, who was paying his taxes Thursday. “But I’m retired, so we budget as we go.”
Big portions of those bills must go to school districts and the state. Worzala said the county is concerned about the rise in delinquencies because if the jumps continue the county could run into a cash flow issue in paying bills.

Resolution of the Madison School District – Madison Teachers, Inc. contract and the District’s $12M budget deficit will be a challenge in light of the declining tax base. Having said that, local schools have seen annual revenue increases for decades, largely through redistributed state and to a degree federal tax dollars (not as much as some would like) despite flat enrollment. That growth has stopped with the decline in State tax receipts and expenditures. Madison School District revenues are also affected by the growth in outbound open enrollment (ie, every student that leaves costs the organization money, conversely, programs that might attract students would, potentially, generate more revenues).

Community colleges gaining respect, admissions

Glen Martin:

Because of their emphasis on job skill development and professional certification programs, community colleges have been the traditional province of working people. But as the recession bites deeper, many middle- and upper-class youths are finding their entree to exclusive private colleges or prestigious public universities limited by depleted family funds. The community colleges have become a practical option for the first two years of study for a bachelor’s degree.
Jack Scott, the California Community Colleges chancellor and past president of Cypress College and Pasadena City College, cites the tuition cost differential between the first two undergraduate years at the University of Southern California and two years at nearby Pasadena City College.
“Assuming that you’re taking transferable courses at Pasadena, you can go to USC your junior year after spending no more than $1,200 total tuition for your freshman and sophomore years,” Scott said. “That’s compared with roughly $50,000 for the initial two years of tuition at USC. If you lived at home while attending Pasadena, your savings were even greater.”

The First Big Test: Watching Expenses Some Students Clamp Down as They Gear Up

Jonathan Starkey:

Getting that college tuition and housing bill under control is only the first step. Then comes the comforter and refrigerator and textbooks and — well, the College Board has a list of 118 to-buy items on its off-to-college checklist.
And don’t forget the pizza money.
The bill to outfit a freshman can run to thousands of dollars if you’re not careful, financial advisers say. As recession losses have whittled down college funds and as part-time jobs have become more elusive, families are finding creative ways to stretch each dollar.
In recent weeks, Sharon Okolicsanyi of Manassas has scoured the Web for deals on a laptop for her daughter, Helena, who will be a freshman at George Mason University. They finally found a bargain: It cost $499, marked down from $700. A security and software upgrade cost $100, and a printer cost $30, marked down from $70.

Bay Area is Biggest Little Italy for Preschools

Patricia Yollin:

Abigail Call corrects her mother’s grammar when they speak Italian and has started to teach her father the language, sometimes making up nonexistent words just to toy with him a bit. She is not quite 4 years old.
“When she’s by herself with her dolls, she sings all these songs in Italian,” said Abigail’s mother, Jessica Hall. “I’m a parent, so of course it makes me want to cry – to think that her little brain, in those unprompted moments of alone time, chooses to do that.”
Abigail doesn’t know it yet, but she is part of a trend.
Italian playgroups, preschools and language centers for children are proliferating in the Bay Area these days in a manner unequaled anywhere in the country, according to Marco Salardi of the Italian Consulate in San Francisco.
“It’s just exploding,” said Salardi, director of the consulate’s office of education. “It’s very new. And it’s becoming bigger and bigger. It’s a very nice surprise.”
La Piccola Scuola Italiana on Potrero Hill in San Francisco. Spazio Italiano Language Center in North Beach. The tiny Vittoria Italian Preschool in the Mission District. Girotondo Italian School and Parliamo Italiano, both in Marin County. Mondo Bambini in Berkeley, purchased a few months ago by Girotondo so it can expand to meet a swelling demand in the East Bay.

Online education comes into its own

Carol Lloyd:

As the job market grows softer and less nourishing than a jelly doughnut, reports show more people are returning to school to immunize their careers and feed their souls. But “school” is not necessarily the idyll of leafy campuses and long afternoons arguing philosophy in oak-paneled rooms.
Online education, long an ugly duckling of the ivory towers of the world, is coming into its swan years.
In its annual report on the state of online education, the Sloan Consortium reported in 2008 that online education continues to grow at a much faster rate than its brick-and-mortar competitors. Anecdotal evidence suggests that 2009’s economic woes will only accelerate the pattern.
“We have seen our small university double in size this year,” says Scott Stallings, director of marketing and admissions for California InterContinental University, a for-profit “distance education” university in Diamond Bar (Los Angeles County). “I believe this can be attributed to our low cost of tuition and the large influx of students who need their degrees to remain competitive.”

Lessons Learned in School Can Endure a Lifetime

Sandip Roy:

I hated school. On my first day of kindergarten in Calcutta, India, my mother was late picking me up. I stood on the steps with my bag and water bottle, convinced that it was all an elaborate ploy to abandon me.
Amitava, my new classmate, tall, with sticking-out ears, stood next to me, similarly abandoned. Biting our lips, we stood silently, bound by our common misery. By the time our mothers arrived, we’d become friends. When my father had heart problems, Amitava spent the night at the hospital with me. When I left for America, he drove me to the airport. I flew back to India for his wedding.
It was in school that I learned that some lessons can last a lifetime.
Father Bouche taught me that. A pink-faced Jesuit priest from Luxembourg, he was the prefect at my missionary school. He was the terror of generations – both fathers and sons had gotten a taste of his cane. He would be fired in America. He caned. He smoked. He even blew secondhand smoke on the boys. But he taught me to write, to tell stories simply. We spent hours hanging out in his room, rummaging through his books, begging to see the bullet wound in his knee – a memento of World War II.

Three-Minute Fiction: Our Winner Is…

NPR:

In June, we appealed to your inner author, asking you to send us original works of fiction that could be read in three minutes or less. And, man, did your inner authors respond! We received more than 5,000 submissions to our Three-Minute Fiction writing contest.
Now, series guide and literary critic James Wood of The New Yorker has picked our first winner: Molly Reid of Fort Collins, Colo. Reid is waiting tables this summer, but during the school year, she teaches freshman composition and literature at Colorado State University.
Wood says that Reid was an early entrant whose work held strong against the hundreds of stories that followed. The narrator of her piece, “Not That I Care,” observes a neighbor repeatedly snatching ducks from the street. The missing ducks become part of the narrator’s own reflections on loss.

Wisconsin Governor Doyle going after student performance, federal money

Mark Pitsch:

Gov. Jim Doyle is planning a series of education reforms designed to boost student achievement and help the state compete for billions of dollars in federal school improvement grants.
The changes include better tracking of student performance, using test data to help evaluate teachers and raising high school graduation requirements.
“We’re going to be working very hard in my administration with the Legislature, with educators in the state, to put together really, I think, a transformational application that will help Wisconsin education for years to come,” Doyle said in a recent interview.
But it’s unclear whether the state would even qualify for the federal money — part of a $4.35 billion program dubbed “Race to the Top” — because of a state law that bars using student test scores to evaluate teachers.
Draft rules for the program prohibit states that have such laws in place from receiving the money. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan last week called Wisconsin’s law “ridiculous.”

Wisconsin Representative Mike Huebsch:

Cut education funding by 3 percent. Check.
Make sure teachers’ raises aren’t jeopardized by the cuts. Check.
Pretend property taxes won’t go up. Check.
Begin dismantling Wisconsin’s School Choice Program. Check.
Jeopardize Wisconsin’s eligibility for new federal education funding. Check.
This is the state of public education in Wisconsin under the leadership of self-proclaimed education governor Jim Doyle and Democrat majorities in the state Senate and Assembly.
Governor Doyle and Democrat lawmakers wrote a state budget that cuts school funding $294 million, raises property taxes $1.5 billion, repeals the Qualified Economic Offer, says local school boards can’t consider the recession, job loss rates, and property values when negotiating teacher compensation and makes politically-motivated changes to the Milwaukee Parental Choice Program (School Choice).
Now the governor shrugs off reports that Wisconsin won’t be eligible to participate in the Obama Administration’s Race to the Top grant program, while Democrat lawmakers remain predictably silent. Approximately $4.35 billion will be doled out to states with plans for reforming public education. Under the proposed application guidelines released by the United States Department of Education last week, only Wisconsin, New York and California would be barred from receiving federal funds.

Is Google Killing General Knowledge?

Brian Cathcart:

General knowledge, from capital cities to key dates, has long been a marker of an educated mind. But what happens when facts can be Googled? Brian Cathcart confers with educationalists, quiz-show winners and Bamber Gascoigne …
One day last year a daughter of Earl Spencer (who is therefore a niece of Princess Diana) called a taxi to take her and a friend from her family home at Althorp in Northamptonshire to see Chelsea play Arsenal at football. She told the driver “Stamford Bridge”, the name of Chelsea’s stadium, but he delivered them instead to the village of Stamford Bridge in Yorkshire, nearly 150 miles in the opposite direction. They missed the game.
Such stories are becoming commonplace. A coachload of English schoolchildren bound for the historic royal palace at Hampton Court wasted an entire day battling through congested central London as their sat-nav led them stubbornly to a narrow back street of the same name in Islington. A Syrian lorry driver aiming for Gibraltar, at the southern tip of Spain, turned up 1,600 miles away in the English east-coast town of Skegness, which has a Gibraltar Point nearby.
Two complementary things are happening in these stories. One is that these people are displaying a woeful ignorance of geography. In the case of Stamford Bridge, one driver and two passengers spent well over two hours in a car without noticing that instead of passing Northampton and swiftly entering the built-up sprawl of London, their view continued to be largely of fields and forests, and they were seeing signs for Nottingham, Doncaster and the North. They should have known.

Scientific Speed Reading: How to Read 300% Faster in 20 Minutes

Tim Ferriss:

How much more could you get done if you completed all of your required reading in 1/3 or 1/5 the time?
Increasing reading speed is a process of controlling fine motor movement–period.
This post is a condensed overview of principles I taught to undergraduates at Princeton University in 1998 at a seminar called the “PX Project”. The below was written several years ago, so it’s worded like Ivy-Leaguer pompous-ass prose, but the results are substantial. In fact, while on an airplane in China two weeks ago, I helped Glenn McElhose increase his reading speed 34% in less than 5 minutes.
I have never seen the method fail. Here’s how it works…

Rent, Read and Return

Stephanie Lee:

Students frequently rent DVDs to watch in their dorm rooms, but soon they may start checking out something much heavier and pricier: textbooks.
Saying they offer an alternative to the textbook industry’s bloated prices, a growing number of companies are renting new and used titles at reduced prices. Among them are Chegg, BookRenter and the Follett Higher Education Group, which will test drive a rental service at campus bookstores this fall. They join a number of colleges that have already started their own on-campus programs.
With all of them, the concept is essentially to pay to check out textbooks as if they’re out of a library — only there are more copies and titles, and they can be used for longer periods of time. Through Chegg, for instance, a student searches for a book and rents it for up to a certain number of days, such as up to a quarter or a semester. Users are promised discounts of 65 to 85 percent off the list price, but if they don’t return a book on time, they are charged full price. The same punishment applies to doodling in the margins, since the books are meant for reuse. As a disclaimer on Chegg warns: “Highlighting in the textbook is OK — to a certain extent. Writing in the book is not accepted.”

Learn how to draw Garfield on iTunes U

iTunes U:

Thanks to the Virginia Department of Education and the Professor Garfield Foundation, you — and your kids, of course — can get an Introduction to Comics on iTunes U. The 15 video episodes encourage children to draw, sculpt, and carve. In fact, Jim Davis — who created Garfield — gets the course off to a great start, showing us all how he draws his famous lasagna-loving feline.

What the SAT-optional Colleges Don’t Tell You

Jay Matthews:

I don’t much like the SAT. When the SAT-optional movement began to gain momentum a few years ago, I cheered. Dozens of colleges told their applicants that if they didn’t want to submit their SAT or ACT scores, they didn’t have to. Some restricted this choice to students with high grade point averages, but it seemed to me a step in the right direction.
In my view the SAT does not reflect very well what students learn in high school. It seems more influenced by how much money their parents make. Indeed, SAT prep classes (such as those offered by Kaplan Inc., the Washington Post Company’s leading revenue source) give kids from affluent families an advantage.
So I was impressed and pleased when the SAT-Optional movement grew so strong that FairTest (the National Center for Fair & Open Testing), a non-profit group that supports the change, noted that 32 of the top 100 colleges on the U.S. News & World Report liberal arts college list no longer require every applicant to submit an SAT or ACT score.
When I started reading Jonathan P. Epstein’s article on SAT-Optional schools in the summer edition of the Journal of College Admissions, I expected a careful history of these developments, with no surprises. Epstein is a senior consultant with Maguire Associates in Boston, who specialize in advising college admissions offices. He is not a journalist, and sees no need to deliver the big news at the top of the story.

Chinese Immigrants’ Kids Play Balancing Role

Claudio Sanchez:

Students whose parents come from China often excel in school, but their educational performance can be affected by cultural tensions at home between their Chinese and American identities.

TEENAGE SOAPBOX

Will Fitzhugh, The Concord Review
30 July 2009
Little Jack Horner sat in the corner
Eating his Christmas pie:
He stuck in his thumb, and pulled out a plum
And said, “What a good boy am I!”
I publish history research papers by secondary students from around the world, and from time to time I get a paper submitted which includes quite a bit more opinion than historical research.
The other day I got a call from a prospective teenage author saying he had noticed on my website that most of the papers seemed to be history rather than opinion, and was it alright for him to submit a paper with his opinions?
I said that opinions were fine, if they were preceded and supported by a good deal of historical research for the paper, and that seemed to satisfy him. I don’t know if he will send in his paper or not, but I feel sure that like so many of our teenagers, he has received a good deal of support from his teachers for expressing his opinions, whether very well-informed or not.
From John Dewey forward, many Progressive educators seem to want our students to “step away from those school books, and no one gets hurt,” as long as they go out and get involved in the community and come back to express themselves with plenty of opinions on all the major social issues of the world today.
This sort of know-nothing policy-making was much encouraged in the 1960s in the United States, among the American Red Guards at least. In China, there was more emphasis on direct action to destroy the “Four Olds” and beat up and kill doctors, professors, teachers, and anyone else with an education. Mao had already done their theorizing for them and all they had to do was the violence.
Over here, however, from the Port Huron Statement to many other Youth Manifestos, it was considered important for college students evading the draft to announce their views on society at some length. Many years after the fact, it is interesting to note, as Diana West wrote about their philosophical posturing in The Death of the Grown-Up:
“What was it all about? New Left leader Todd Gitlin found such questions perplexing as far back as the mid-1960s, when he was asked ‘to write a statement of purpose for a New Republic series called ‘Thoughts of Young Radicals.’ In his 1978 memoir, The Sixties, Gitlin wrote: ‘I agonized for weeks about what it was, in fact, I wanted.’ This is a startling admission. Shouldn’t he have thought about all this before? He continued: “The movement’s all-purpose answer to ‘What do you want?’ and ‘How do you intend to get it?’ was: ‘Build the movement.’ By contrast, much of the counterculture’s appeal was its earthy answer: ‘We want to live like this, voila!'”
For those of the Paleo New Left who indulged in these essentially thoughtless protests, the Sixties are over, but for many students now in our social studies classrooms, their teachers still seem to want them to Stand Up on the Soapbox and be Counted, to voice their opinions on all sorts of matters about which they know almost nothing.
I have published research papers by high school students who have objected to eugenics, racism, China’s actions in Tibet, gender discrimination, and more. But I believe in each case such opinions came at the end of a fairly serious history research paper full of information and history the student author had taken the trouble to learn.
When I get teenage papers advising Secretary Clinton on how to deal with North Korea, or Timothy Geitner and Ben Bernanke on how to help the U.S. economy correct itself, or telling the President what to do about energy, if these papers substitute opinion for research into these exceedingly complex and difficult problems, I tend not to publish them.
My preference is for students to “step away from that soapbox and no one gets hurt,” that is, to encourage them, in their teen years, to read as many nonfiction books as they can, to learn how little they understand about the problems of the past and present, and to defer their pronouncements on easy solutions to them until they really know what they are talking about and have learned at least something about the mysterious workings of unintended consequences, just for a start.
Since 1987, I have published more than 860 exemplary history research papers by secondary students from 36 countries (see www.tcr.org for examples), and I admire them for their work, but the ones I like best have had some well-earned modesty to go along with their serious scholarship.

COCKSURE Banks, battles, and the psychology of overconfidence.

Malcolm Gladwell:

In 1996, an investor named Henry de Kwiatkowski sued Bear Stearns for negligence and breach of fiduciary duty. De Kwiatkowski had made–and then lost–hundreds of millions of dollars by betting on the direction of the dollar, and he blamed his bankers for his reversals. The district court ruled in de Kwiatkowski’s favor, ultimately awarding him $164.5 million in damages. But Bear Stearns appealed–successfully–and in William D. Cohan’s engrossing account of the fall of Bear Stearns, “House of Cards,” the firm’s former chairman and C.E.O. Jimmy Cayne tells the story of what happened on the day of the hearing:
Their lead lawyer turned out to be about a 300-pound fag from Long Island . . . a really irritating guy who had cross-examined me and tried to kick the shit out of me in the lower court trial. Now when we walk into the courtroom for the appeal, they’re arguing another case and we have to wait until they’re finished. And I stopped this guy. I had to take a piss. I went into the bathroom to take a piss and came back and sat down. Then I see my blood enemy stand up and he’s going to the bathroom. So I wait till he passes and then I follow him in and it’s just he and I in the bathroom. And I said to him, “Today you’re going to get your ass kicked, big.” He ran out of the room. He thought I might have wanted to start it right there and then.
At the time Cayne said this, Bear Stearns had spectacularly collapsed. The eighty-five-year-old investment bank, with its shiny new billion-dollar headquarters and its storied history, was swallowed whole by J. P. Morgan Chase. Cayne himself had lost close to a billion dollars. His reputation–forty years in the making–was in ruins, especially when it came out that, during Bear’s final, critical months, he’d spent an inordinate amount of time on the golf course.

Free Program Allows Single Parents to Develop Confidence as They Train for a Career

Emma Brown:

Two years ago, Taishia Jenerette was holding down two jobs, caring for her 6-year-old daughter and struggling as a single mother with too little time and too many bills. Then a friend told her about an unusual Fairfax County program that provides low-income single parents with career counseling and professional certificate courses — free.
“I would have never been able to go to school if not for the Education for Independence program,” said Jenerette, 32, who quit her part-time job at Macy’s to make time for night classes. “I had looked into it so many times, but I didn’t have the money.”
In a ceremony last week at the Fairfax County Government Center, Jenerette graduated with a medical assistant certificate that will help her qualify for a promotion, and a raise, at the Virginia Department of Rehabilitative Services, where she prepares disability cases for review. But more important than the certificate, Jenerette said, the program has given her confidence.
“I was so scared to go back to school because I didn’t want to fail,” said Jenerette, of Centreville. “I said if I can get through this two years, I can do anything.”
That attitude is what Education for Independence is meant to engender, said Lorraine Obuchon, one of two career counselors who work with the program’s approximately 120 participants.

Oregon Symphony’s outreach program falls silent

David Stabler, via a kind reader’s email:

The drums have gone quiet. The gongs no longer shimmer. The bells go unchimed. The instruments that kids in small towns around Oregon used to hit, rub and scrape as part of the Oregon Symphony’s award-winning outreach effort went quiet this summer.
Another victim of the economy.
The Roseburg-based Ford Family Foundation, the program’s primary funder, suffered losses to its endowment and declined to continue paying the program’s $150,000 annual cost, said Norm Smith, the foundation’s president.
Since 2002, the Oregon Symphony has “adopted” a different town each two years: Klamath Falls, North Bend, Redmond, Baker City, Estacada, La Grande, Cove, Tillamook. The idea was to flood the zone with repeated trips by symphony musicians. Break into tactical units and invade the schools, fill community centers, start a jazz band, launch a string orchestra. Then go back the next year to water the seeds.
What made the program unusual was the effort to make music a lasting presence. Unlike in other outreach efforts, the orchestra didn’t just show up, coach a few kids, play a concert and get back on the bus. The focus encouraged local teachers to design a music curriculum for years to come and involved arts groups in adding a concert series to bring performers to town, using Oregon Symphony staff for ideas and follow-up.

Humans prefer cockiness to expertise

Peter Aldhous:

EVER wondered why the pundits who failed to predict the current economic crisis are still being paid for their opinions? It’s a consequence of the way human psychology works in a free market, according to a study of how people’s self-confidence affects the way others respond to their advice.
The research, by Don Moore of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, shows that we prefer advice from a confident source, even to the point that we are willing to forgive a poor track record. Moore argues that in competitive situations, this can drive those offering advice to increasingly exaggerate how sure they are. And it spells bad news for scientists who try to be honest about gaps in their knowledge.
In Moore’s experiment, volunteers were given cash for correctly guessing the weight of people from their photographs. In each of the eight rounds of the study, the guessers bought advice from one of four other volunteers. The guessers could see in advance how confident each of these advisers was (see table), but not which weights they had opted for.

Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research

Mark Bauerlein:

It was sometime in the 1980s, I think, that a basic transformation of the aims of literary criticism was complete. Not the spread of political themes and identity preoccupations, which struck outsiders and off-campus critics like William Bennett, a former secretary of education turned radio host, as the obvious change, but a deeper adjustment in the basic conception of what criticism does. It was, namely, the shift from criticism-as-explanation to criticism-as-performance. Instead of thinking of scholarship as the explication of the object–what a poem means or a painting represents–humanists cast criticism as an interpretative act, an analytical eye in process.
The old model of the critic as secondary, derivative, even parasitical gave way to the critic as creative and adventuresome. Wlad Godzich’s introduction to the second edition of Paul de Man’s Blindness and Insight (1983) nicely caught the mood in its title: “Caution! Reader at Work!” People spoke of “doing a reading,” applying a theory, taking an approach, and they regarded the principle of fidelity to the object as tyranny. In a 1973 essay in New Literary History titled “The Interpreter: A Self-Analysis,” Geoffrey H. Hartman chastised the traditional critic for being “methodologically humble” by “subduing himself to commentary on work or writer”; then he declared, “We have entered an era that can challenge even the priority of literary to literary-critical texts.” A writer has a persona, he stated. “Should the interpreter not have personae?”
Older modes of criticism were a species of performance as well. But they claimed validity to the extent to which the object they regarded gave up to them its mystery. The result, the clarified meaning of the work, counted more than the execution that yielded it. By the late 1980s, though, the question “What does it mean?” lost out to “How can we read it?” The interpretation didn’t have to be right. It had to be nimble.

School spotlight: Apprenticeship provides taste of product engineering

Pamela Cotant:

In between summertime activities, recent Oregon High School graduate Erik VanderSanden is focusing on winter as he helps redesign a device that makes cross country skiing accessible to the disabled.
VanderSanden spent his senior year assisting in the design and redesign of parts and items for Isthmus Engineering and Manufacturing of Madison through the Dane County Youth Apprenticeship Program.
In Dane County, nearly 130 students have participated this school year and into the summer, said Diane Kraus, school to career coordinator for the Dane County consortium of 16 school districts. The county program offers 11 program areas and the most popular right now are health care, information technology, automotive and biotechnology, said Kraus, adding that her program is always looking for more businesses that want to participate.
One of the items VanderSanden worked on for his apprenticeship is a device that allows people to sit while skiing. VanderSanden is now being retained as needed to finish up a prototype, which will be used by Isthmus to manufacture 100 more. The unit was originally designed by UW-Madison mechanical engineering students under professor Jay Martin through the Center for Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology, which is also known as UW-CREATe.
“I tried to optimize what they had already done … and take it a step further than what they had time for in their class,” said VanderSanden said.

A story from the trenches — send me more!; DAVID STEINER ELECTED COMMISSIONER OF EDUC FOR NY; As Charter Schools Unionize; Must unions always block innovation in public schools?; NEA Discovers It Is a Labor Union; So You Want to Be a Teacher for America?

1) If you read anything I send out this year, let this be it. One of my friends responded to the survey I sent around a couple of weeks ago by emailing me this story of his experience as a TFA teacher in the South Bronx a decade ago (though he’s no longer there, he is still (thankfully) very much involved with educating disadvantaged kids). It is one of the most powerful, heart-breaking, enraging things I have ever read — and perfectly captures what this education reform struggle is all about. Stories like this about what REALLY goes on in our failing public schools need to be told and publicized, so please share yours with me:

Whitney,
Thanks so much for putting this survey together. It brought back some memories well beyond the few questions about what it was like to teach in the South Bronx with TFA back in the late nineties. I want to emphasize here that I no longer teach in the Bronx, so I have little idea how things have changed and have seen the current Administration take a number of important steps that may be making a great impact. I’m not close enough to the ground to know, but my guess is that there are still plenty of schools in the Bronx and in every other low-income community in the country that reflect some of the miserable stuff I saw in my school. You should really start collecting a book of stories like these. Among all the people I know who’ve done TFA, these stories are just a few among many sad ones.
As I filled out the survey, I was first reminded of the art teacher in our school. She was truly a caricature of bad teaching. Like something out of the movies. She spent almost every minute of every day screaming at the top of her lungs in the faces of 5-8 year olds who had done horrible things like coloring outside the lines. The ART teacher! Screaming so loud you could hear her 2-3 floors away in a decades old, solid brick building. When she heard I was looking for an apt, she sent me to an apt broker friend of hers. I told the friend I wanted to live in Washington Heights. “Your mother would be very upset with me if I let you go live with THOSE PEOPLE. We fought with bricks and bats and bottles to keep them out of our neighborhoods. Do you see what they have done to this place?” This same attitude could be heard in the art teacher’s screams, the administration’s ambivalence towards the kids we were supposed to be educating and the sometimes overt racism of the people in charge. The assistant principal (who could not, as far as I could tell, do 4th grade math, but offered me stop-in math professional development for a few minutes every few months with gems like “these numbers you see here to the left of the zero are negative numbers. Like when it is very cold outside.”) once told me “I call them God’s stupidest people” referring to a Puerto Rican woman who was blocking our way as we drove to another school. She also once told me I needed to put together a bulletin board in the hallway about Veteran’s Day. I told her we were in the middle of assembling an Encyclopedia on great Dominican, Puerto Rican and Black leaders (all of my students were Dominican, Black or Puerto Rican). “Mr. ____, we had Cin-co de May-o, and Black History Month, and all that other stuff. It is time for the AMERICAN Americans.”
Not everyone in the school was a racist. There were many hard working teachers of all ethnicities who did not reflect this attitude at all. But the fact that the leadership of the school and a number of the most senior teachers was either utterly disdainful of the students they taught, or has completely given up on the educability of the kids, had a terrible effect on overall staff motivation. And many of the well-meaning teachers were extremely poorly prepared to make a dent in the needs of the students even if they had been well led. The Principal told more than one teacher there that “as long as they are quiet and in their seats, I don’t care what else you do.” This was on the day this person was HIRED. This was their first and probably last instruction. He never gave me a single instruction. Ever. And I was a new teacher with nothing but TFA’s Summer Institute under my belt. The Principal proceeded to get a law degree while sitting in his office ignoring the school. When we went to the Assistant Superintendent to report that the school was systematically cheating on the 3rd grade test (i.e., the third grade team met with the principal and APs, planned the cheating carefully, locked their doors and covered their windows and gave answers) she told the principal to watch his back. A few months later, inspectors came from the state. After observing our mostly horrible classes for a full day, they told us how wonderful we were doing and that they had just come down to see what they could replicate in other schools to produce scores like ours. And the list goes on and on.
Like when I asked the principal to bring in one of the district’s special education specialists to assess two of my lowest readers, both of whom had fewer than 25 sight-words (words they could recognize on paper) in the 3rd grade, he did. She proceeded to hand one of the students a list of words that the child couldn’t read and tell her to write them over again. Then she went to gossip with the Principal. After explaining to him in gory detail, IN FRONT OF THE STUDENT, that she had just been “dealing with a case where a father had jumped off a roof nearby and committed double-suicide with his 8 year old daughter in his arms”, she collected the sheet with no words on it, patted the child on the head and left. No IEP was filed nor was I allowed to pursue further action through official channels (I lobbied the mother extensively on my own). I never asked for her to come back to assess the other student.
Our Union Rep was said to have tried to push another teacher down a flight of stairs. The same Union Rep, while I was tutoring a child, cursed out a fellow teacher in the room next door at the top of her lungs so the child I was tutoring could hear every word. When I went to address her about it, the other teacher had to restrain the Rep as she threatened to physically attack me. And when the cheating allegations were finally take up by city investigators, the same Union Rep was sent to a cushy desk job in the district offices. I hear that most of the people I’m referencing here are long gone now, and some of them actually got pushed out of the system, but how rare can this story really be given the pitiful results we see from so many of our nation’s poorest schools and how far the system goes to protect horrible teachers and administrators like the ones I worked with?
At the same time as all of this was happening, by the way, the few good teachers in the building often became beaten down and disillusioned. One of the best in my building was consistenly punished for trying to make her corner of the school a better place for learning. They put her in a basement corner with no ventilation, no windows and nothing but a 6-foot-high cubicle-style partition separating her from the other 5 classrooms in the basement. After fighting the good fight she went to teach in the suburbs. When I got a financial firm to donate 20 computers, the principal said he didn’t have the resources to get them setup for use and refused to allow them into the school. When I had my students stage a writing campaign to get the vacant lot behind the building turned into a playground, the principal wanted me silenced.
The saddest thing about the whole damn mess was that our K-3 kids still REALLY WANTED TO LEARN. Every day they came eager for knowledge. And every day this cabal of cynicism, racism and laziness did everything within their powers to drain it out of them. It was unreal. Don’t get me wrong. There were some good teachers there. And some well meaning, but poor teachers. But in many classrooms, the main lesson learned was that school became something to dread, many adults thought you were capable of very little, and some adults couldn’t be bothered to lift a finger.
I hope if any of the good, hard-working teachers who fought so hard to rid the school of this mess read this, they’ll know I’m not lumping them in with the rest. But the problem was, when I addressed the worst practices in the school at a staff meeting, the bad teachers laughed and the good teachers took it the hardest and thought I was criticizing them.
Thanks again for the survey. Let’s make these stories known.

(more…)

Online Education: Masters of Science in Engineering

UCLA:

The Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science (HSSEAS) at UCLA offers the Master of Science (M.S.) degree delivered On-Line, with the diploma designation “Master of Science in Engineering”.
Courses are now offered in 7 areas of study from 5 departments, with 2 new areas being introduced Fall 2009: Aerospace Engineering and Systems Engineering
The primary purpose of this Program is to enable employed engineers and computer scientists to enhance their technical education beyond the Bachelor of Science level and to enhance their value to the technical organizations in which they are employed. The training and education that the Master of Science in Engineering Program offers are of significant importance and usefulness to engineers, their employers, to California and to the nation. It is at the M.S. level that the engineer has the opportunity to learn a specialization in depth. It is at the M.S. level that those engineers with advanced degrees may also renew and update their knowledge of the technology advances that occur, and have been occurring, at a rapid rate.

WIBA’s Mitch Henck Discusses the Madison School District’s Budget with Don Severson

24MB mp3 audio file. Mitch and Don discuss the Madison School District’s $12M budget deficit, caused by a decline in redistributed tax dollars from the State of Wisconsin and generally flat enrollment. Topics include: Fund 80, health care costs, four year old kindergarten, staffing, property taxes (which may increase to make up for the reduced state tax dollar funding).
Madison School District Board President Arlene Silveira sent this message to local Alders Saturday:

Good afternoon,
Below is an update of the MMSD budget situation.
As you know, the biennial budget was signed into law at the end of June. The budget had numerous provisions that will effect the future of public education that include:

Repeal of the Qualified Economic Offer (QEO)
Decrease in funding for public education by the state of approximately $14720million
Decrease in the per pupil increase associated with revenue limits

The repeal of the QEO will potentially impact future settlements for salries and benefits. The decrease in funding for public education by the state creates the need for a tax increase conversation in order to sustain current programs. The decrease in the revenue limit formula will cause MMSD to face more reductions in programs and services for the next 2 years at a minimum.
EFFECT OF STATE BUDGET ON MMSD

Decrease in state aid: $9.2 million
Reduction in revenue: $2.8 million (decrease in the per pupil increase from $275 to $200/pupil)

Total decrease: projected to to be $12 million
Last May, the Madison Board of Education passed a preliminary 2009-10 budget that maintained programs and services with a modest property tax increase. The groundwork for our budget was laid last fall when the Board pledged our commitment to community partnership and the community responded by supporting a referendum that allowed us to exceed revenue caps to stabilize funding for our schools. Two months later, with programs and staff in place for next year, we find ourselves faced with State funding cuts far exceeding our worst fears.
HOW DID THIS HAPPEN?
We are in this position in part because Wisconsin’s school funding formulas are so complicated that the legislature and supporting agencies did not accurately predict the budget’s impact on school districts. State aid to Madison and many other districts was cut by 15%. In practical terms, coupled with additional State cuts of $2.8 million, MMSD is saddled with State budget reductions of $12 million this year.
This grim situation is a result of a poor economy, outdated information used by the legislature, and a Department of Public Instruction policy that penalizes the district for receiving one-time income (TIF closing in Madison). Federal stimulus funds will, at best, delay cuts for one year. We are left with a gaping budget deficit when many fiscal decisions for the upcoming school year cannot be reversed.
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?
We are working on strategies and options and are looking carefully at the numbers to ensure our solutions do not create new problems. We will evaluate options for dealing with the budget in early August.
To repair our budget, we are working with legislators and the DPI to appeal decisions that have placed us in this position. We continue to look for changes in resource management to find additional cost reductions. We are seeking ways to offset the impact of school property tax increases if we need to increase our levy.
At the same time, we pledge that we will not pass the full cost of the cuts along as increased property taxes. We will not resort to massive layoffs of teachers and support staff, t he deadline having passed to legally reduce our staff under union contracts.
I will be back in touch after our August meeting when we have made decisions on our path forward.
If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me.
Arlene Silveira
Madison Board of Education
608-516-8981

‘Fast Forwarding to Designer Baby Era’

David Washburn:

Beyond the celebration of the 40-year-old lunar landing, the big science news this week came Thursday from a group of Chinese researchers who figured out how to grow healthy mice from mouse stem cells.
The breakthrough is a huge step for research into induced pluripotent, or iPS, stem cells, which is taking adult stem cells and converting them into embryonic stem cells. But the Chinese discovery is causing some to worry that we’re a lot closer to human cloning than we should be.
This story in Friday’s Los Angeles Times frames the debate well.

Now, colleges pay students who defer school for service

Stacy Teicher Khadaroo:

Colleges are thinking creatively these days about linking two priorities for students: financial aid and public service.
While loan forgiveness for graduates who take service jobs has been common for years, what’s catching on now is the idea of rewarding up front students who defer college to help others.
More than 80 colleges and universities have started offering some matching grants for students who earn tuition assistance through AmeriCorps. At least 1,165 have signed on to match new government grants for veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan. And Princeton University and Dickinson College recently created programs to support public service, expecting that these students will bring a unique dimension to campus after spending time off the education track.
“We’re seeing an upsurge nationally in the number of students looking for alternatives immediately following high school graduation – whether it be a ‘gap year,’ … a two-year community college, or digging deeply into a service or job commitment that will allow them to … define an interest,” says Stephanie Balmer, dean of admissions at Dickinson in Carlisle, Penn.

Pursuing an Academic Edge at Home

Joseph de Avila:

Kimberly Kauer was worried about her 6-year-old daughter’s math skills. Her school doesn’t assign homework, and Ms. Kauer wasn’t sure which math concepts her daughter fully understood.
To quell her fears, Ms. Kauer started her daughter on an online educational program for young children called DreamBox Learning. DreamBox uses interactive games to teach math and analyzes users’ progress as they complete lessons.
“It was really well-geared to her age,” says Ms. Kauer, a 38-year-old stay-at-home mom in Emerald Hills, Calif. “They really tailored their questions to meet her needs.” After monitoring her daughter’s progress, Ms. Kauer concluded that her daughter was up to par for her age.
DreamBox is one of a number of companies, with names like SmartyCard, Brightstorm and Grockit, that are pitching a new generation of online educational products aimed at supplementing students’ education at home. The programs, which parents pay for by subscription, target learners from kindergartners to high-school seniors. The companies hope their interactive programs will draw students wanting to get ahead at a lower cost than hiring a professional tutor.

Chicago Report: STILL LEFT BEHIND

Civic Committee of The Commercial Club of Chicago
June 2009
KEY FINDINGS 150K PDF
Most of Chicago’s students drop out or fail. The vast majority of Chicago’s elementary
and high schools do not prepare their students for success in college and beyond.
There is a general perception that Chicago’s public schools have been gradually
improving over time. However, recent dramatic gains in the reported number of CPS
elementary students who meet standards on State assessments appear to be due to
changes in the tests made by the Illinois State Board of Education, rather than real
improvements in student learning.
At the elementary level, State assessment standards have been so weakened that most
of the 8th graders who “meet” these standards have little chance to succeed in high
school or to be ready for college. While there has been modest improvement in real
student learning in Chicago’s elementary schools, these gains dissipate in high school.
The performance of Chicago’s high schools is abysmal—with about half the students
dropping out of the non-selective-enrollment schools, and more than 70% of 11th
grade students failing to meet State standards. The trend has remained essentially flat
over the past several years. The relatively high-performing students are concentrated
in a few magnet/selective enrollment high schools. In the regular neighborhood high
schools, which serve the vast preponderance of students, almost no students are
prepared to succeed in college.
In order to drive real improvement in CPS and fairly report performance to the public,
a credible source of information on student achievement is essential. Within CPS
today, no such source exists. CPS and the State should use rigorous national
standardized tests. Also, the Board of Education should designate an independent
auditor with responsibility for ensuring that published reports regarding student
achievement in CPS are accurate, timely and distributed to families and stakeholders
in an easily understood format.
Efforts to provide meaningful school choices to Chicago’s families must be aggressively
pursued–including expanding the number of charter and contract schools in
Chicago. Most of these schools outperform the traditional schools that their students
would otherwise have attended; and the choices that they offer parents will help spur
all schools in CPS to improve.

Politically Correct Speech at the Stanford Graduate School of Education

Jay Matthews:

Michele Kerr (she tells me it is pronounced “cur”) is a hard-working educator and Web surfer who is often mean to me. This is probably a good thing. When I post something stupid, Kerr–using her nom de Internet, “Cal Lanier“–is on me like my cat chasing a vole in the backyard.
Her acidic humor is so entertaining, however, and her command of the facts so complete, that I have come to look forward to her critiques. She tends to eviscerate me whenever I embrace anti-tracking or other progressive gospel preached in education schools these days, but I learn something each time.
I wish the supervisors of the Stanford Teacher Education Program (STEP) at that university’s School of Education had checked with me before they decided Kerr’s views and her blogging were inappropriate for a student in their program. They appeared to have decided her anti-progressive views were disrupting their classes, alienating other students and proving that she and Stanford were a bad fit. Kerr says they tried to stifle both her opinions and her blog, and threatened to withhold the Masters in Education she was working toward, based on their expressed fear that she was “unsuited for the practice of teaching.”
Kerr’s eventual triumph over such embarrassingly wrong-headed political correctness is a complicated story, but worth telling. In her struggle with STEP, she exposed serious problems in the way Stanford and, I suspect, other education schools, treat independent thinkers, particularly those who blog.
STEP retains the right to decide if a student is suited to teaching, and can deny even someone as smart and dedicated as Kerr, who has a splendid record as a tutor, a chance to work in the public schools.

A Research Article On “flexible grouping”

Via a kind reader’s email:

“States and Provinces and curricula around the world track students by age. This practice is so common that we do not think of it as tracking. With few exceptions, a six year old must go into first grade even if that six year old is not ready or was ready for the grade one year earlier” (Usiskin 98)
Introduction
One of the many challenges facing schools is the decision on how to allocate students to classrooms. Research confirms the empirical observations of many parents and educators that students learn at greatly varying rates (Walberg 1988). These different learning rates are explained by (among other things) differing learning styles, aptitudes and levels of motivation (NECTL 1994). Unfortunately for visions of “equal outcomes,” due to differences in understanding, among other things, these differences in learning rates tend to increase as the child moves through the educational system (Arlin, 1984, P. 67). Given the wide variations in knowledge, motivation, and aptitude, schools must choose methods of allocating students to classes, and curriculum to classes and students.
Unfortunately, school administrators face not only conflicting messages in regard to the educational implications of various decisions, but significant pressure to base decisions either partly or mainly on nonacademic factors(1) (Oakes 1994 a, b and Hastings, 1992 for example). Hastings declares ability grouping to be wrong as a “philosophic absolute” and declares its use to be “totally unacceptable.” The National Education Commission on Time and Learning, on the other hand, labels the act of providing the same amount of learning time to students who need varying amounts “inherently unequal” (94). They state “If we provide all students with the same amount of instructional time, we virtually guarantee inequality of achievement” (emphasis in original). The Draft for “Standards 2000′ from the NCTM (NCTM 98) calls for increased equity by exposing all students, not just the elite, to challenging mathematics. There is no apparent awareness that many students do not find existing materials, whether consistent with the 1989 standards or not, challenging.

Weighing School Backpacks

Tara Parker-Pope:

Last year, my daughter’s school backpack got so heavy, she would sometimes just drag it behind her rather than hoist it onto her shoulders. Backpacks with wheels are too bulky for her locker, so next year I’m thinking about buying an extra set of textbooks to keep at home.
In its latest rating of the most durable school backpacks, Consumer Reports has conducted its own survey to determine how much weight kids are carrying as a result of overloaded packs. The researchers visited three New York City schools and weighed more than 50 children’s backpacks. They found that kids in the 2nd and 4th grades are carrying about 5 pounds worth of homework and books. But once kids reach the 6th grade, the homework load gets heavier. On average, 6th graders in the study were carrying backpacks weighting 18.4 pounds, although some backpacks weighed as much as 30 pounds.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that a child’s backpack weigh no more than 10 to 20 percent of a child’s weight. Consumer Reports recommends keeping the weight closer to 10 percent of a child’s weight. But one Texas study found that most parents don’t check the weight of their child’s backpack. According to Consumer Reports:

Are teenagers more business savvy than 40-year-olds?

Financial Times:

THE EXECUTIVE
Don Williams
It is a rare joy to see such a stir caused by a document written by someone who resides in the real world and that isn’t based on ubiquitous, spurious statistics. It is terrifying that the glimpse of the bleeding obvious that is Matthew Robson’s report has senior executives going into meltdown. “Teenagers see adverts on websites as extremely annoying and pointless.” I’m gobsmacked! I thought we all went into rapture when screen infestations do their best to disrupt what you’re trying to do. Low price (or no price) seems to be critical to all aspects of teenage consumption . . . really? “Teenagers don’t use Twitter . . . tweets are pointless” – well actually, not just pointless, a smidgeon tragic unless you don’t have anything resembling a life. The near panic caused by Mr Robson beautifully demonstrates that industry is awash with people who try to impose old-world thinking, methods and tools on new-world technology and lifestyles. To make even basic decisions they surround themselves with reports, advisers, consultants and, scariest of all, research. The 15-year-old’s work proves there is a canyonesque gap in the market for a “common sense” consultancy.

Aiming for College, Seeking an Edge

Letters to the NY Times Editor:

Re “Before College, Costly Advice Just on Getting In” (front page, July 19):
Reading this article made me extremely angry. I cannot believe that people have no shame in charging so much for college counseling. It’s too bad that we live in a society whose culture dictates such crazed behavior to get kids into certain schools.
The only necessary ingredients to get into a good school are passion, dedication and good old hard work. There is nothing magical about these counselors other than the spell they cast on bank accounts.
Students should find something, or several things, that they love and care about and work hard to become the best they can be. Kids have gotten into top colleges writing about buying milk, Barbies and, for me, my perseverance with piano. Study hard, maintain a healthy lifestyle and stay positive. That’s it.
S. Susan Zhu
Paris, July 19, 2009

For Difficult Kids, Choice Of Care Can Bring Rewards

Sue Shellenbarger:

Dorothy Flint knew soon after her son William was born that she had a difficult child. He cried often and nursed nonstop. He slept so poorly that Ms. Flint took him on midnight drives in the car to calm him. He had separation anxiety so severe that she rarely left him. “He was really a tough baby,” says the Crofton, Md., mother.
Later she found a silver lining. Ms. Flint took pains to choose an excellent child-care center for William, now 4, and he quickly surpassed other kids, sharing his toys and learning classroom rules. He wins praise from his teacher for his social skills. As high-maintenance as William was, Ms. Flint says, he has also been high-reward.
Working parents struggling with difficult children–marked by excessive crying, fussiness, emotional volatility, fear of strangers and clinginess–often worry about how they will fare in child care. Research has shown that sensitive, vulnerable kids can be at higher risk of problems later if they’re mistreated or face other adversity early.
But new studies are discovering an upside: these difficult babies also have a significantly higher chance of surpassing other kids later if placed in the right kind of child care. The findings offer new guidance for parents in predicting how child care is likely to affect a child.

Education 101: Taking charge of your child’s middle school education

Andrea Hermitt:

Middle School is where parents begin to lose touch with what is going in in their child’s education. The child is old enough to manage his or her own assignments, and also mature enough to suffer the consequences should they not follow through. There really is no need for the parent to continue to manage the students education, right? Wrong.
Middle school is also where students become more interested in having a social life and less interested in getting an education. Without the watchful eye of the parents, the student can begin a downhill spiral that the parents won’t be able to control.
Here are some things parents must do to take charge of a middle school child’s education:
Make your presence known in the school. Speak to teachers and administrators to find where they can use your talents within the school. Whether you have a job or not, make it a point to spend at least one day a month at the school, or perhaps a couple of long lunch breaks a month.

My Totally Unscientific Teacher Quality Survey

My survey:

Based on your experience working in a traditional public school serving primarily low-income and/or minority students, what percentage of the teachers you worked with were (the numbers in the three boxes must add up to 100):

Good/great (you would be happy to have your child in the class)
Fair, but improvement is possible (you would have reservations having your child in the class)
Horrible and unlikely to ever improve (you would NEVER permit your child to be in the class)

46 people responded and here were the results:
Good/great: 20%
Fair: 35%
Horrible: 45%
This is obviously a very skewed group of mostly TFA teachers in the worst schools, but nevertheless I’m shocked that the horrible number is so high. If this figure is even close to being right, then the problem is even bigger than I thought. I’ll have to think about the implications of this, but one obvious one is the enormous importance of changing union contracts (and other factors) that make it impossible to remove horrible teachers — and let’s be clear, everyone knows who they are. There may be some tough calls regarding whether to keep certain teachers in the “fair” category, but horrible ones who are unlikely to ever improve need to find another line of work — but, esp in this economy, they will fight to the death to keep their very nice jobs…
2) Here’s a comment from one person who responded to the survey:
Good/great: 50%
Fair: 30%
Horrible: 20%

I taught in NYC for 5 years, from 2002-2007; I taught 5th grade, all subjects, and I was not TFA, but was NYCTF. One quibble with your survey and its framing: I would not want my daughter in any classroom in my school, regardless of the teacher quality. The curriculum (Teacher’s College reading and writing; Everyday Math, virtually zero science, social studies, art and music) was either bad or nonexistent, and the social environment (harsh, chaotic) was not fit for any child. I agree that teacher quality is huge, but it’s not enough to overcome all other problems. Great schools are great schools when all or most of the moving parts (teachers, administrators, curriculum, accountability, environment, seriousness of purpose, parental involvement, et al) are working. Planes can fly if they lose an engine, even two. They can’t fly on one. At least not for very long.

Madison School Proposed Board Strategic Plan Discussion – Audio

The Madison School Board discussed the proposed Strategic Plan [PDF] last evening. Listen to this discussion via this 85MB mp3 audio file. Much more on the proposed Strategic Plan here. Some recent written questions from the Board to the Administration can be found here.

Within you, without you

Harry Eyres:

Michel de Montaigne, inventor of the essay, could also be seen as the begetter of the contemporary curse of self-absorption. Montaigne (1533-1592) made a move, nearly five hundred years ago, that still seems modern and revolutionary. He reversed the whole direction of study, research, investigation; he turned the lens from the observed to the observer. “For many years now the target of my thoughts has been myself alone; I examine nothing, I study nothing, but me; and if I do study anything else, it is so as to apply it at once to myself, or more correctly, within myself.”
Now you could see this (like other French revolutions) as profoundly dangerous. You could blame Montaigne for the culture of narcissism, the world of endlessly proliferating self-help books, whose sheer number betrays a sense of desperation. Montaigne is indeed the patron saint of self-help books: “You should not blame me for publishing; what helps me can perhaps help someone else.”
Now go back to that first quotation, and pause on the subtle but all-important distinction Montaigne makes at the end of it. What is the difference between applying something to yourself and applying it within yourself? When you apply something to yourself, the two entities involved, the something and yourself, don’t really change; they may work in tandem for a while, but they can be decoupled. But when you apply something within yourself, that implies a profound transformation from within – a more organic, less violent and more permanent process, a silent but momentous shift in the whole machinery of the self.

An unsentimental education

Christopher Caldwell:

Long before the US began shedding millions of jobs last year, American politicians were obsessed with retraining people cast off by the global economy. “The average worker will change jobs six or seven times in a lifetime,” Bill Clinton said in an address to the Cleveland City Club in 1994. That was not much help: how do you train people for tomorrow’s jobs if you do not know what tomorrow’s jobs will be?
President Barack Obama’s call for $12bn (£7.4bn, €8.5bn) of investment in “community colleges” is evidence that the flux Mr Clinton alluded to is ending. Community colleges offer a range of short-term credentialing courses along with two-year and four-year degrees. They are where you go to become a dental hygienist, a cyber-security expert, a nurse or a solar-energy technician. If job-specific training is making more sense, then the job market is probably growing more predictable. The economy may be in a terrible rut, but we are, to a degree, re-entering the world of stable, credentialed work.
Community colleges now accommodate half the nation’s undergraduates. Enrolment has leapt by a million students in the past decade, to more than 6m. Most are funded by individual states, which have had to cut their budgets even as demand for spaces has risen, and no one has picked up the slack. The Chronicle of Higher Education notes that “community colleges receive less than one-third the level of federal support per full-time-equivalent student ($790) that public four-year colleges do ($2,600).”

Intern in the News: Matthew Robson

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson:

Two weeks ago, Mr Robson was pretty pleased at being one of half a dozen London schoolchildren to secure a work experience placement at Morgan Stanley’s Canary Wharf offices.
Such positions usually go to the friends and family members of well-connected bankers. In Mr Robson’s case, the networking was done by his whippet, Rudy, who dragged his mother into conversation with the wife of one of Morgan Stanley’s media analysts while both walked their dogs in Greenwich Park.
After a week of presentations by senior staff, the Kidbrooke comprehensive school pupil felt he had grasped the basics of banking, and was looking forward to a secondment to the European media research desk.
Many a teenage internship has been spent fetching Starbucks orders and being otherwise ignored. But Mr Robson struck lucky when Edward Hill-Wood, the head of the team, asked him to spend a few days pulling together an account of his friends’ media and communications habits. Mr Hill-Wood’s decision to publish the three- page report Mr Robson handed in has made the 15-year-old the world’s most famous intern since Monica Lewinsky.
The report made for stark reading for the bank’s clientele. His peers see advertising, the struggling sector’s congealing lifeblood, as “extremely annoying and pointless”. They “cannot be bothered” to read a newspaper, never buy CDs or use yellow pages directories, and generally try to avoid paying for anything other than concerts and cinema tickets.
While mobile phones are central to their social lives, the friends he canvassed (by text message) avoid expensive handsets for fear of losing them, do not use the mobile internet as it costs too much and prefer games consoles for free chat.

Before College, Costly Advice Just on Getting In

Jacques Steinberg:

The free fashion show at a Greenwich, Conn., boutique in June was billed as a crash course in dressing for a college admissions interview.
Katherine Cohen has a Web site called ApplyWise that puts prospective college applicants through a 12-step presentation.
Yet the proposed “looks” — a young man in seersucker shorts, a young woman in a blue blazer over a low-cut blouse and short madras skirt — appeared better suited for a nearby yacht club. After Jennifer Delahunty, dean of admissions at Kenyon College, was shown photos of those outfits, she rendered her review.
“I burst out laughing,” she said.
Shannon Duff, the independent college counselor who organized the event, says she ordinarily charges families “in the range of” $15,000 for guidance about the application process, including matters far more weighty than just what to wear.
Ms. Duff is a practitioner in a rapidly growing, largely unregulated field seeking to serve families bewildered by the admissions gantlet at selective colleges.
No test or licensing is required to offer such services, and there is no way to evaluate the counselors’ often extravagant claims of success or experience. And Ms. Duff’s asking price, though higher than many, is eclipsed by those of competitors who may charge upwards of $40,000 — more than a year’s tuition at many colleges.

Online Education and its Enemies

Liam Julian:

Holly Bates, an eight-year-old Florida girl, has such bad allergies that being near nuts or nut-based products–or even being near someone who has recently eaten nuts–can trigger anaphylactic shock. With peanut peril ubiquitous, young Holly is not enrolled in a traditional public school; instead, she attends Florida Connections Academy, a full-time “virtual” school that she accesses from her home computer. Her mother, a former public school teacher, loves the program. “The curriculum is unbelievable,” she told the Tampa Tribune in 2007. “It would astound you, the progress these children make.”
The Sunshine State is something of a virtual education pioneer. Since the 2003-04 school year, Florida has partnered with two for-profit companies–Connections Academy and K12 Inc.–to provide pupils with the option of attending school online, full-time, for free. But years before that, Florida was promoting other types of virtual education. Florida Virtual School is a statewide program that allows students to take individual courses online, often in subjects not offered at their local school, like Latin or Macroeconomics. It began in 1997 as a small grant-based project with just 77 course enrollments. Today, Florida Virtual School is its own school district and has an annual budget near $100 million. In the 2008-09 school year, according to Education Next, some “84,000 students will complete 168,000 half-credit courses, a ten-fold increase since 2002-03.” A newly-minted Florida Virtual School Connections Academy, announced in August 2008, will further expand online learning options and access.

Joanne has more.

Connected Kids At Elite High Schools

Alexander Russo:

‘ve been ignoring the UofI clout story for weeks now, feeling like it was more of a higher ed thing than something about local high schools, but this latest story from the Tribune really caught my eye:
Half of the 616 Illinois students who received preferential treatment from 2005 to 2009 graduated from just 22 high schools, all but one in the metro area. Highland Park High had the most kids on the list, with Loyola Academy coming in second. There were only 25 kids on the clout list from CPS schools.

Lifestyle Inequality: The Habits of American Elites

Mark Penn & E. Kinney Zalesne:

There’s always been lots of talk in this country about income inequality, but very little about lifestyle disparities, differences which are pulling American elites farther and farther away from mainstream America.
These disparities can be as profound as any class distinctions related directly to income; they go beyond having a bigger house, a nicer car or fancier vacations. America has always frowned on the idea of an “aristocracy,” but American elites today are increasingly creating their own separate world of activities, removed from the everyday pursuits of average Americans.
As part of a talk I gave at the Aspen Ideas Festival, we compared the lifestyle of the attendees (260 of whom cooperated in a poll sponsored by the conference and one you can take on Facebook) with the changing habits of the American public. The group was drawn from leaders in business, politics, the arts and academia, gathering for a weekend in the Rocky Mountains to examine critical issues of the day.
Forget about huge, sweeping megaforces. The biggest trends today are micro: small, under-the-radar patterns of behavior which take on real power when propelled by modern communications and an increasingly independent-minded population. In the U.S., one percent of the nation, or three million people, can create new markets for a business, spark a social movement, or produce political change. This column is about identifying these important new niches, and acting on that knowledge.
Not surprisingly their income and education levels were very upscale: most had graduate degree and six-figure incomes or more. Most, in this case, had studied in the humanities; few came from math and science backgrounds.

Much more on Mark Penn, who was heavily involved with Hilary Clinton’s Presidential campaign, here.
The article is well worth reading and contemplating.

Teaching Kids About Money the Hard Way

Karen Blumenthal:

It’s getting harder for parents to raise financially independent young adults.
Many banks refuse to open individual checking accounts for 16- and 17-year-olds, requiring parents to jointly own the account, even if the youngsters have a job. Colleges urge parents to link their bank accounts or credit cards to the prepaid cash cards that double as their students’ ID cards, to ensure a regular flow of funds from the Bank of Mom and Dad.
And under the new credit-card law that goes into effect early next year–part of a broader move toward aggressive consumer protection–parents of those under 21 will have to agree to take responsibility for their kids’ credit cards unless the young applicants can show they have the income to qualify.
All of this seems to encourage parents to interfere with–and maybe even bail out–these young adults. And it comes at an age when the youngsters themselves should be taking on personal responsibility and making their own financial decisions.

A Privacy Law That Protects Students, and Colleges, Too

Chriss Herring:

A law designed to keep college students’ grades private often is used for a much different purpose — to shield universities from potentially embarrassing situations.
Some critics say a number of schools are deliberately misreading the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act in order to keep scandals and other unflattering news from hitting the media. “Some schools have good-faith misunderstandings of the law, but there are others that simply see this as a handy excuse to hide behind,” says Frank LoMonte, executive director of the Student Press Law Center, which provides student journalists with legal help.
Legal experts say part of the problem is that the law is loosely defined. In addition, the potential consequences of violating the law — namely, that schools would lose their federal funding — prompt university officials to be conservative in their decisions about releasing information.
Those complaints rankle advocates of student privacy, who say that, if anything, the three-decade-old law should be expanded. “Most of these kids are adults, and they should be able to make their own decisions,” says Daren Bakst, president of the Council on Law in Higher Education.

Teaching Kids About Money the Hard Way

Karen Blumenthal:

It’s getting harder for parents to raise financially independent young adults.
Many banks refuse to open individual checking accounts for 16- and 17-year-olds, requiring parents to jointly own the account, even if the youngsters have a job. Colleges urge parents to link their bank accounts or credit cards to the prepaid cash cards that double as their students’ ID cards, to ensure a regular flow of funds from the Bank of Mom and Dad.
And under the new credit-card law that goes into effect early next year–part of a broader move toward aggressive consumer protection–parents of those under 21 will have to agree to take responsibility for their kids’ credit cards unless the young applicants can show they have the income to qualify.
All of this seems to encourage parents to interfere with–and maybe even bail out–these young adults. And it comes at an age when the youngsters themselves should be taking on personal responsibility and making their own financial decisions.

Weighing Price and Value When Picking a College

Sue Shellenbarger:

Facing shrunken savings and borrowing options, parents and students are making some tough trade-offs in choosing and paying for college, suggesting some shifting attitudes toward higher education may endure beyond the recession.
Old dreams of adult children earning degrees from elite, door-opening colleges or “legacy” schools attended by relatives are falling away in some families, in favor of a new pragmatism. Other parents and students are doing a tougher cost-benefit analysis of the true value of a pricey undergraduate degree. As parents wrestle privately with such emotional issues, many say they wish they’d begun years earlier to assess their values and priorities, long before their children’s college-decision deadline was upon them.
Mustafah Abdulaziz for The Wall Street Journal
Throughout her childhood, Sarah Goldstein imagined attending New York University, says her mother, Rose Perrizo of Sharon, Mass. Sarah’s grandmother is an NYU alum; Sarah lived near campus with her parents when she was small. “In her mind, Sarah was always headed there,” Ms. Perrizo says.

Education Reform

Jeff Nolan:

There is a lot of talk in California right now about how the budget crisis will affect education investments, and I write investments very deliberately because education spending is a form of investment that is supposed to yield future returns. It’s evident that we’ll have to deal with the budget hole by cutting education spending rather dramatically, in fact it is absolutely unavoidable because education spending is about 50% of the state budget and when you include all of the other initiative mandated spending, the state government controls less than 20% of the actual budget… with a $26b hole in the budget the state could cut every dollar spent on things not mandated by voters and there would still be a deficit.
Okay, so we’re going to have a less generously funded school system, a system that already competes for last place in the country in terms of educational quality. There is also the reality that we will dramatically reduce our funding for community colleges and at the same time raise fees, a reality for the California State University system and the University of California system.
While we are going through this fiscal realignment is it not also appropriate to ask what we are getting out of our education system? K-12 is a basket case and parents with economic means opt out of the system while those on lower income tiers are effectively denied something every child deserves, a quality education.

The statistics that colleges hate to share

Penelope Wang:

When you start searching for that perfect college for your child, you might think there’s plenty of information to help you with your decision. Just for starters, every college has a website that will give you all the essentials.
Take Stephens College, a private, four-year women’s school in Columbia, Missouri. A quick tour of its website will tell you that the college offers more than 50 major and minors, everything from English to event planning to equestrian science. Class sizes average just 13 students. Annual costs total $32,250, but nearly all students get some kind of financial aid. And the campus looks nice.
But what you won’t see without diligent searching is that half of Stephens students fail to graduate, even after six years. Not to pick on Stephens, which does mention that statistic deep in its website. Point is, little of the data that colleges provide really tell you much about the value of your investment: the quality of the education, the experience of the students, or how the graduates fare later in life. Instead parents have long accepted the value of the diploma on faith. And many assume that a college that charges $50,000 a year will give their child a better education than one that charges $25,000.

If granny would disapprove, don’t put it on the net

Rhymer Rigby:

No matter how many people come unstuck after posting inappropriate details of themselves on the internet, people just keep on doing it.
We had the case of Sir John Sawers, the UK’s incoming head of MI6 and his wife’s Facebook account. Some of the details we learnt about the new head spook were innocuous enough (he wears Speedos), others less so (the location of his flat and details of friends and family). He is not the only one. From Republicans making racist remarks to bankers slagging off their bosses, it is a long and sorry list.
“Everyone knows that a lot of companies make a beeline for Facebook when they’re looking at potential recruits,” says Charlotte Butterfield, managing director of Law Absolut, the legal recruitment firm. “It’s a form of due diligence and your profile on Facebook should be broadly the same as the person you present at interview.”