California needs more registered nurses. There are long waiting lists to get into nursing education at community colleges. Yet admissions is by lottery, not academic qualifications, writes Lance Izumi of Pacific Research Institute.

Not surprisingly, using a lottery to choose nursing students results in the admission of many students with low-level qualifications and increased dropout rates because such students can’t handle the tough coursework.

Meanwhile, the most qualified students are the most likely to leave the waiting list for other careers. Izumi quotes Sue Albert, dean of health programs at College of the Canyons in Southern California.

Of the 300 students currently on her waiting list, some have only the minimal math and English requirements and a 2.5 grade point average, while others have completed science courses plus core subjects and boast 3.0-4.0 averages. Yet, says Albert: “It is first come, first serve. It is not based on qualifications. No longer are the best and brightest rewarded for choosing nursing as a career.”

Why the stupid policy? Community colleges are required to be open to all students, so they’re not supposed to discriminate, even when there isn’t enough space for all students.

Liz Ditz links to researchers who are studying character development in children. They’re looking for parents with children three to nine years old. Enter “child” as the code, if you’re interested.

Has anybody read up on the FBI crime statistics? Blacks are just plain violent; they are naturally that way. It isn’t poverty – poor Whites and poor Blacks don’t behave the same. Not only are Blacks more violent, they are also more corrupt in the use of power. You can just about count on a Black authority figure making up the rulebook as he goes, with ad hoc stipulations always in favor of Blacks. I’m willing to bet that episodes of Black-on-White violence in the public schools are commonplace and that most of them are swept under the rug. I’ll bet that White-on-Black violence in the public schools is comparatively rare, but the media makes a guilt-tripping extravaganza out of every case they can find. The only reason Courtney’s case was treated differently by the media is that she is handicapped – THAT is what got her sympathy from the liberal journalists.

Daryl Cobranchi says: Don’t let your kids bicycle without a helmet.

In Tucson, BASIS charter school students start taking college-level courses in ninth grade. The small school, which admits all applicants, has the highest AP participation rate of any public school in the country, writes Jay Mathews in the Washington Post.

To graduate, a BASIS student must pass AP English Language & Composition, AP English Literature, AP Calculus or AP Statistics, AP European History, AP American History and two of the three available AP science courses in physics, chemistry and biology. There are also AP courses in computer science and foreign language. The three-hour AP tests at the end of each course are not required at most high schools, but at BASIS students must take the test at the end of at least five of the required AP courses. The middle school students are also accelerated, all of them finishing first year algebra by seventh grade, to prepare them for early AP.

Grades in AP classes are based on AP exam scores. Ninth graders take AP English Language & Composition; 10th graders take AP Calculus and AP European History. The founders, Olga and Michael Block, believe “that even a student who struggles in an AP course and gets a low grade on the final exam is much better off than a student who sails through a typically undemanding average high school course.” Olga Block, a Czech native, was shocked by the lack of rigor in American schools.

They chose AP as their graduation requirement, said Michael Block, who serves as chairman of the school’s board of trustees, “because it gave us this wonderful content, communicated that this is a very high level program and provided an extra check on teaching.” AP examinations are written and scored by outside experts, and can help administrators see which teachers are doing the best jobs, although few schools use them that way.

Block admires Michael Barone’s Hard America, Soft America: Competition vs. Coddling and the Battle for the Nation’s Future.

“We are part of the new hard America,” Block said. “I think our resistance to softness is one of our comparative advantages.”

At least half of students do not have college-educated parents.

Reversing grade inflation would lower graduation rates, write Matthew J. Franck and Gwen O. Brown of Radford University in a National Association of Scholars forum.

Yes, some students, now gliding along learning little, would rise to the challenge of increased academic rigor. But many would fail. That is the inconvenient outcome that no one on the “assessment” bandwagon wants to contemplate, given that graduation rates persist as a standard measure of an institution’s success.

. . . True believers in assessment never talk about grade inflation. We have both been in consultants’ “workshops” on assessment where the question is asked, why do we have to “assess” student learning in new ways, when that is what we do now, routinely in the classes we teach, when we assign grades. The obvious answer, of course, is: “because we don’t trust the grades you assign to be meaningful.” Heaven forbid that answer, though, for it would open up a discussion no one wants to have.

. . . The unthinking faith in student success means that the advocates of assessment never want to ask students to work harder, learn more, or indeed do anything unpleasant. Instead, the advocates invariably put the onus on faculty to change something or other about what we do as teachers. We should stop playing the “sage on the stage,” and become the “guide on the side.” Or we should assign more group projects, so that students learn more collaborative skills. Or we should provide more constant and more positive feedback to our students, becoming more “accessible” and more “nurturing.”

What surprises me about this advice is that it’s just what K-12 teachers have been told for the last 10 to 20 years. Now it’s being given to college professors, the quintessential sages on the stage. Well, if we’re going to be teaching high school material in college, perhaps the professors will have to learn to emulate high school teachers.

Because it’s so difficult to create an “exit exam” to measure whether graduates have learned enough, many colleges and universities are using the National Survey of Student Engagement , which doesn’t even try to measure what students have learned.

NSSE (called “Nessie” among the cognoscenti), a survey instrument that can be administered in just a partial class period, presumes that “engagement” is a reliable proxy for actual learning, across the board for all students in all disciplines.

But even if NSSE actually does adequately measure the “engagement” of students — itself a dubious proposition — there is no reason to suppose that what it measures is at all helpful in determining whether students learn anything. Some of the questions in the survey ask students about assignments and projects they complete for their classes, or how much time they spend on homework, or whether their classes have “challenged [them] to do [their] best work.” But many of the questions ask students to report on their “social” or “spiritual” growth, or their extracurricular activities, or whether they are satisfied with their academic advising, or whether their teachers were “available, helpful, sympathetic,” or (our favorite) whether they have had “serious conversations with students of a different race or ethnicity than [their] own.”

Academics can claim to be measuring results without actually having to do so.

Here’s a moving story by the NY Times’ Samuel Freedman on ROTC graduation at the University of New Hampshire.

From the second seat in the front row of the auditorium, Rachael Brown rose and marched onto the podium, standing before the flags of her state and her nation. She wore the crisp olive coat and skirt of her Class A uniform, and her black flats gleamed with a spit-shine. As a sergeant strode across the stage and toward her, she raised her right hand to be sworn into the United States Army as a second lieutenant.

Three rows from the back of the same room, Karen Brown gazed on this most improbable spectacle. Here was the daughter she had told about her own days protesting against the Vietnam War, the daughter who had led cross-country ski trips through the White Mountains, the daughter who had made that Bulgarian cheese casserole for the international dinner in her dormitory. And that daughter was culminating four years in the R.O.T.C. program at the University of New Hampshire and taking up what soldiers call “the profession of arms.”

After Rachael, 22, had recited the oath, Karen Brown walked to the podium. She had on sandals and a batik peasant dress, and her corn-silk hair fell straight to her shoulders. At the appointed moment, she pinned the second-lieutenant’s bars on Rachael’s uniform. Then she lightly patted the bars, with a tenderness that suggested she was patting her memory of a little girl she wished to protect.

Rachael Brown, who will work in medical support, exchanges e-mails with a female friend who’s now serving as a military engineer in Afghanistan.

“Pick a Pike” was the theme of this year’s Tech Challenge, sponsored by San Jose’s Tech Museum of Innovation.

The Challenge: Design, build, and operate a device that can find and collect one northern pike fish (one free floating, partially submerged plastic fish) from Lake Davis and place the fish within a collection area on shore. The device must start behind the shoreline near the edge of the lake. The maximum time allowed to operate the device is three minutes.

Extra challenge: We’ll add two “native” fish to Lake Davis! Your job will be to collect only the northern pike.

The best entry grand prize winner at the high school level was a team called Biggest Chicken Dinner made up of Mike Flores and Tejas Bafna of Downtown College Prep, the charter school I’m writing about. This is their fourth time at the Tech Challenge. (The first time they competed, they were eating chicken when they named the team, Big Chicken Dinner.) Mike will attend UC-Santa Cruz in the fall; Tejas is going to Cal Poly.

Update: San Jose’s Channel 7 (ABC) will rerun a story on DCP’s first graduating class on Sunday, May 30 at 7 am. To date, 92 percent of seniors have been accepted at four-year colleges; some of the others will return for a fifth year to better prepare for college. Most students had a D or F average in middle school; about 90 percent are Mexican-American.

Thousands of Americans won’t be graduating from college in the next few weeks. Nearly half of full-time freshmen fail to earn a degree within six years, concludes an Education Trust report, “A Matter of Degrees.” Graduation rates are especially poor for low-income and minority students.

These young people leave our higher education system burdened with large student loans that must be repaid, but without the benefit of the wages that a college degree provides. 

College enrollment has increased dramatically in a generation, with the biggest gains coming from female and low-income students.  In the first eight years out of high school, 80 percent of on-time high school graduates enroll in a two-year or four-year college. However, many students don’t make it very far.

When looking at six-year graduation rates for four-year colleges and universities, the data shows that barely six out of ten (63%) first-time full-time degree-seeking college freshmen graduate within six years.  While the overall graduation rates are low for all students, they are particularly low for minority and low-income students: only 46% of African American, 47% of Latino, and 54% of low-income first-time full-time freshmen are graduating within six years. 

Six-year graduation rates range from less than 10 percent to almost 100 percent. Some colleges and universities do much better than others with comparable students.  For example, University of California at Riverside, the least competitive campus in the elite UC system, “has an overall graduation rate of 66%, 15 percentage points better than the 51% median rate of its 33 peer institutions. . . . success at UC-Riverside is equally distributed across groups. The graduation rate is 65% for white students, 67% for Asian students, and 68% for Latino students.”

Other universities with exemplary or improving graduation rates are: Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina, University of Northern Iowa, Binghamton University in New York, Miami University of Ohio, East Carolina University in North Carolina, University of Florida and Louisiana Tech. Other colleges and universities should study the success of Riverside and others to figure out what they’re doing right.

Atlanta’s public schools have wasted millions of dollars wiring schools, reports the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. (Thanks to Mark Odell, here’s the text without AJC’s annoying registration).

Atlanta Public Schools misspent or mismanaged nearly $73 million from a national program intended to give poor children access to the Internet, an Atlanta Journal-Constitution investigation has found.

With virtually no limit on spending, Atlanta since 1998 has built one of the country’s most lavish computer networks for schoolchildren.

Now, Atlanta says it needs $14 million a year — three times the district’s textbook budget — just to run and maintain the network. And much of the promised benefit to students has yet to materialize.

Signs of the spending spree can be found throughout the school system.

At one elementary school, equipment powerful enough to operate a small school district runs just 20 computers. At another, Atlanta billed the program for electronics for twice as many classrooms as the school has. Millions of dollars were spent at other schools that were closed or demolished within a few years. Elsewhere, boxes of costly computer components, some still wrapped in plastic, gather dust in storage.

At three Atlanta elementary schools, the cost of bringing high-speed Internet access to classrooms reached about $1 million. Suburban Forsyth County, by contrast, paid about $200,000 for the same result at much larger schools.

The district spent money without requiring bids for the best price, with little oversight from school board members and few questions from check writers in Washington who subsidized the work. APS officials defer many questions about spending to former employees.

The national program that financed Atlanta’s extravagance, called E-rate, won’t pay for computers but helps schools pay for Internet infrastructure they might not otherwise be able to afford. Now, amid charges of waste and fraud around the country, the program faces mounting scrutiny in Washington.

Americans everywhere have picked up the tab for E-rate through a surcharge on their telephone bills.

It was Other People’s Money.