Getting into college — in 8th grade
College admissions won’t be a hurdle for eighth-grade achievers at Bruce-Guadalupe Community School, a Milwaukee charter that enrolls many Hispanic and low-income students.
Starting next year, would-be engineers with good grades will be offered a spot in Marquette’s engineering school — if they earn high grades and SAT scores in high school.
Career awareness starts early: Third graders from Bruce-Guadalupe tour a construction site in downtown Milwaukee.
“I definitely want to be an engineer,” said Connor Redding, 12. “It’s one of my dreams to help people out and build stuff that benefits other people.”
Marquette will provide “advising, career exploration, financial assistance for qualifying students, the opportunity to shadow engineering students and professionals, and access to academic and career fairs,” the engineering school promises. Financial aid will be critical.
The K-8 school also has partnered with nearby Carroll University’s health sciences program. This year, 10 eighth-grade achievers interested in medical careers received acceptance letters, reports the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. Like the future engineers, students must keep up their academic performance in high school.
Students, many of whom would become the first in their family to attend college, gain exposure to fields in high demand including nursing, exercise physiology, athletic training, physician’s assistant and physical therapy. The program, in turn, offers Carroll the opportunity to diversify its student population, which is 85% white.
The private school hopes to get foundations to help fund scholarships for Preparing and Advancing Students for Opportunities in Science (PASOS) students.
In addition, Alverno College, a Catholic women’s school, is offering early admissions to young female students.
‘Quiet middle’ needs to help to reach goals
As a social studies teacher in Atlanta, Ian Cohen taught ninth-graders who wanted to be doctors, lawyers, and CEOs, or entrepreneurs, chefs, and engineers. But the school’s graduation rate was only 42 percent — even lower for black males.
“Next Generation Men” visit the set of Inside NBA Football.
Males in the “quiet middle” were doing the minimum needed to pass, Cohen writes. They didn’t realize what it would take to achieve their goals.
Cohen and two other Teach for America corps members have founded Next Generation Men) to provide “exposure to different careers and post-secondary options, guidance on how to achieve them, and consistent support.”
If my student wants to be an engineer, but doesn’t know how integral math and science are to that profession, what other reason would he have to be interested in trigonometry or calculus? And if he came from a family without a college graduate, how would he manage to learn about the application process, the importance of school selection, and what the actual experience entails or requires?
Tenth-grade “apprentices” meet with teachers twice a week and visit a different industry each month.
For example, students met the cameramen, audio engineers, writers and producers of one of their favorite TV shows, Inside the NBA, at Turner Studios, writes Cohen. “Now, they understand that there are over 20 careers involved in making that show possible, and that it takes a commitment to mastering a craft or skill set that will enable them to pursue one of those professions.”
Many young people are encouraged to say they want to go to college and say they want to be doctors, lawyers, etc. But they have no clue what they should be doing in school to make those goals a reality.
Escaping the ‘prison house of self’
Freddie Bartholomew as David Copperfield and W.C. Fields as Mr. Micawber in the 1935 movie.
College professors are killing students’ interest in literature, writes Gary Saul Morson, a Northwestern humanities professor, in Commentary. That’s bad for democracy.
Some professors teach a “dense thicket of theory” focused on “the text.” Students look for symbols. Others encourage students to judge the “author, character, or the society depicted according to the moral and social standards prevalent today.” A third interest-killing variation sees literature as a documentary of its times.
These approaches “fail to give a reason for reading literature,” writes Morson.
Reading a novel, you experience the perceptions, values, and quandaries of a person from another epoch, society, religion, social class, culture, gender, or personality type.
Literature provides practice in empathy, he writes. “We follow the life of Dorothea Brooke or David Copperfield moment to moment, and we live with them for hundreds of hours, always living into their experience, growing along with them, approving or disapproving their choices, and perhaps changing our minds as they change theirs.”
Here’s the money quote:
We all live in a prison house of self. We naturally see the world from our own perspective and see our own point of view as obvious and, if we are not careful, as the only possible one. . . . The more our culture presumes its own perspective, the more our academic disciplines presume their own rectitude, and the more professors restrict students to their own way of looking at things, the less students will be able to escape from habitual, self-centered, self-reinforcing judgments.
. . . Democracy depends on having a strong sense of the value of diverse opinions. If one imagines (as the Soviets did) that one already has the final truth, and that everyone who disagrees is mad, immoral, or stupid, then why allow opposing opinions to be expressed or permit another party to exist at all? The Soviets insisted they had complete freedom of speech, they just did not allow people to lie.
“Great literature allows one to think and feel from within how other cultures think and feel,” concludes Morson.
Students don’t judge contemporary art, writes Michael J. Lewis, also in Commentary. They don’t care. “While the fine arts can survive a hostile or ignorant public, or even a fanatically prudish one, they cannot long survive an indifferent one. And that is the nature of the present Western response to art, visual and otherwise: indifference.”
“High Art has removed itself from a conversation with the culture, and now lectures from barren cul-de-sacs to acolytes in sack-cloths,” responds James Lileks.
‘Girly tech’ tries to make coding fashionable
A New York City-based startup hopes its programmable friendship bracelet will motivate girls to learn to code, reports Benjamin Herold in Education Week. Jewelbots users will be able to “program their bracelets to light up when their friends come near, communicate in Morse-code like languages, integrate with their social media accounts, and more.”
CEO Sarah Chipps previously founded and led a national nonprofit aimed at teaching women to develop software.
Nancy Butler Songer, dean of Drexel’s education school, told Ed Week that Jewelbots are “very cool,” but don’t require real programming to get started. It’s easy to set up the bracelet to vibrate or light up when a friend is near.
However, motivated users “can download a free app that allows for more complex functionality (think: added colors, coordinating with groups of friends, etc.),” writes Herold. They can also use an arduino, or small microprocessor, “to write and upload their own code to program the bracelet in myriad ways—for example, to light up when your friend posts a photo of you on Instagram.”
Chipps, the company’s founder, compared Jewelbots to the uber-popular computer game Minecraft, in which users can either play in an existing online universe or write their own modifications, create their own worlds, and even set up their own servers.
“It’s a super-profitable game that has taught tens of thousands of kids how to code,” she said. ” We’re trying to do the same thing, just targeted towards girls.”
Some complain that “girly tech” perpetuates stereotypes.
Girls get engaged when they can use programming to solve real-world problems, said Lisa Abel Palmieri, who created a renowned coding- and computational thinking program at a girls’ private school in Pittsburgh.
“The best way to engage girls in coding and STEM is by making learning contextualized,” she said. “We should help them understand what the big picture is and how learning technical things can help improve the lives of others.”
Modern family
Will Saletan (@saletan) tweets: “My son was marked down 5 percent on a high school health test because he chose this ‘incorrect’ definition of family.”
Sanders: “Free” and federalized higher ed
Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination.
State colleges and universities should be tuition free, says Bernie Sanders. “In exchange for billions of new taxpayer dollars, the federal government would enforce a specific vision of what a high-quality college education means,” writes Kevin Carey, education policy director at the New America Foundation. It’s “a terrible idea.”
States would have to promise that, within five years, “not less than 75 percent of instruction at public institutions of higher education in the State is provided by tenured or tenure-track faculty.” In addition, any funds left over after eliminating tuition could be used only for purposes such as “expanding academic course offerings to students,” “increasing the number and percentage of full-time instructional faculty,” providing faculty members with “supports” such as “professional development opportunities, office space, and shared governance in the institution.”
States would be prohibited from using the money for merit-based financial aid, “nonacademic facilities, such as student centers or stadiums,” or “the salaries or benefits of school administrators.”
This is a professor’s dream, writes Carey. There’s “tenure for everyone, nice offices all around, and the administrators and coaches can go pound sand.”
It will lead to “lengthy regulatory guidance” and lots of lawsuits, he predicts. Meanwhile, new models that might be more affordable, flexible and effective would be shut out.
Responding to middle-class anxiety, candidates are proposing “free college, debt-free college, or some combination of the two,” writes Carey. Federal money “will come with serious conditions based on some vision of what constitutes a high-quality college education.”
It’s time to break up the higher education “cartel,” said Republican candidate Marco Rubio, who borrowed heavily to earn his college degrees.
Rubio pledged to create a new accreditation process that would allow low-cost providers — perhaps largely online – to compete with established schools. He has called for colleges to tell potential students how much salary they can expect to earn for a given degree before they commit themselves to a major.
Loan repayments should be based on postgraduate incomes, said Rubio.
From white to black
Sarah Valentine as a girl, with her two brothers.
Raised in a white family, Sarah Valentine was told her “olive” skin color came from her Italian-American mother, who denied she was adopted. As an adult, she learned her biological father was black. “I began the difficult process of changing my identity from white to black,” she writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education.
“Coming out” as black cost me my relationship with my mother and some of my closest friends. It cleaved my sense of self in two.
. . . “You’re making a big deal out of nothing,” my mother said when I tried to impress on her the seriousness of what I was going through. “It’s only important if you choose to make it important.”
. . . In my family, it was understood, even if it was never directly stated, that only people of color “had” race; whites were just people.
Valentine is now an English professor.
I think anyone who discovered they were adopted at 27 would have identity issues.
I know a man who refuses to identify by race or ethnicity because it would deny the importance of his adoptive parents. Of course, they didn’t lie to him.
Too young for Private Ryan?
“When exposing your kids to the deeper, harsher realities, how much is too much, and how young is too young?” asks Michael T. Hamilton on PJ Media’s new parenting blog.
Hamilton’s parents didn’t let him watch Saving Private Ryan till he was in high school. A classmate had watched it 10 years earlier.
That movie can mess you up–it’s supposed to mess you up, in its own constructive way–and it did mess up scores of American veterans who relived their honorable, heroic nightmares at a theater near them. Sure enough, the movie (and many other things absolutely fine for his parents) messed up this kid for a while, too.
“Your kids are going to encounter certain things before you want them to,” he writes. Bubbles always burst. “Converse as much as you can – at meals, in the car – to weave a web of principles, stories, anecdotes, and values” so they can cope when you’re not around.
I think that’s good advice.
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