Monthly Archive for April, 2008

The college con

Published on April 30, 2008 in College. 10 Comments By Joanne

College is a waste of time and money for below-average students and party animals, writes career counselor Marty Nemko in Chronicle of Higher Education.

Among high-school students who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their classes, and whose first institutions were four-year colleges, two-thirds had not earned diplomas eight and a half years later.

Drop-outs leave with little learning and a lot of debt. Those who scrape through “rarely end up in careers that require a college education.”

College benefits competent, motivated and sober students, Nemko writes. But they’re the minority.

Today, amazingly, a majority of the students whom colleges admit are grossly underprepared. Only 23 percent of the 1.3 million high-school graduates of 2007 who took the ACT examination were ready for college-level work in the core subjects of English, math, reading, and science.

Nemko suggests colleges be required to test new and graduating students to show what value has been added by their years in college.

Some of the test should be in career contexts: the ability to draft a persuasive memo, analyze an employer’s financial report, or use online research tools to develop content for a report.

Tests results, broken out by precollege SAT scores, race and gender, would “encourage institutions to improve their undergraduate education and to admit only students likely to derive enough benefit to justify the time, tuition and opportunity costs.”

Would-be late bloomers who start at community college can earn transfer credits or a vocational certificate without piling on debt.

I don’t foresee a mandatory value-added test but I think parents and students are becoming more cost sensitive. A few nights ago, my husband’s college-educated cousins told us they’re pleased that their teen-age son wants to be an electrician. He’s good at electrical work, he enjoys it and he’s going to earn his own way very quickly.

Carnival of Education

Published on April 30, 2008 in Blogging. Closed By Joanne

The Carnival of Education goes on a road trip with Science Goddess as the driver.

Black no more

Published on April 30, 2008 in Education. 20 Comments By Joanne

Black students’ low test scores caused Will C. Wood Middle School to miss its No Child Left Behind goals. But the Sacramento school met NCLB after all by persuading parents of four previously “black” children to let the school reclassify their kids as white or American Indian. Blacks, who are 17 percent of students at Wood according to GreatSchools.net, are now statistically insignificant. Their scores don’t count. From the Sacramento Bee:

Principal Jim Wong reviewed the files of all the students classified as African American on the test, he said, and found that four of them had indicated no race or mixed race on their enrollment paperwork. Wong sent his staff to talk to the four families to ask permission to put the kids in a different racial group.

“You get a kid that’s half black, half white. What are you going to put him down as?” Wong said. “If one kid makes the difference and I can go white, that gets me out of trouble.”

It’s not just Wood Middle School.

Over the past two years, 80 California schools got “out of trouble” with No Child Left Behind after changing the way they classify their students, a Bee analysis has found. The changes nudged their status from failing to passing under the federal law.

NCLB was designed to spot low achievement by subgroups at schools where the majority of students are doing fine. But why teach ‘em when you can disappear ‘em?

The door to Narnia

Published on April 30, 2008 in Children. 1 Comment By Joanne

Thanks to Norm Geras for asking me to contribute to his writer’s choice series. I wrote about my love of fantasy and adventure books, starting with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

We’d been reading and acting out Narnia stories for years before my sister said she thought the book might be a Christian allegory. Being Jewish – or maybe just being in it for the adventure – that hadn’t occurred to us. Aslan dying for Edmund’s sins… Hmmm. Yes.

What I liked most was the idea of the wardrobe, the door to Narnia. Anything, however mundane, could be the portal to another world. But it only happens when you don’t expect it. We kept going around trying to not expect to be transported. And we never were.

Still hoping though.

I’ve also got a piece on the ED in ‘08 blog on the effect of education blogs on the campaign. Not much, I think. But at greater length.

Carnival of Homeschooling

Published on April 29, 2008 in Blogging. Closed By Joanne

Visions of the future is the theme of this week’s Carnival of Homeschooling, hosted by HomeschoolBuzz.

Get the lead out

Published on April 29, 2008 in Education. 3 Comments By Joanne

Los Angeles students who drink water from school drinking fountains have been exposed to unsafe levels of lead, according to a KNBC report. Thirty percent of schools checked had at least one fountain with excess lead in the water. Lead exposure can lead to brain damage, though the safety levels are so set so low that LA kids probably haven’t been affected.

. . . an internal report KNBC obtained shows the district discovered 18 years ago it had at least 356 unsafe fountains, with water that failed to meet the government lead standard. The fountains were made with lead that was leaching into the water. Instead of replacing most of the aging fountains, the district started a “flushing policy” requiring school custodians to flush or run every fountain before school every morning for at least 30 seconds, to flush out lead that accumulated.

Custodians fill out a daily log claiming they’ve flushed the fountains but reporters watching the fountains didn’t observe flushing.

Making science sensitive

Published on April 29, 2008 in Education. 22 Comments By Joanne

Feminists are trying to make girl-friendly — or else – writes Christina Hoff Sommers.

The feminist reformers acknowledge that few science departments are guilty of overt discrimination. They claim, however, that subtle, invisible “unconscious bias” is discouraging talented aspiring women. Therefore, the major focus of the equity movement is to transform the academic culture itself — to make it more attractive to women by rendering science less stressful, less competitive, and less time consuming. Debra Rolison, a senior research chemist at the Pentagon’s Naval Research Laboratory and a leader of the equity campaign, describes the typical university chemistry department as “brutal to people who want to do something besides chemistry around-the-clock.” MIT biologist and equity-activist Nancy Hopkins says that contemporary science “is a system where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive.” Kathie Olsen, deputy director of the National Science Foundation, draws the revolutionary conclusion, “Our goal is to transform, institution by institution, the entire culture of science and engineering in America, and to be inclusive of all — for the good of all.” To this end, the National Science Foundation has launched a multi-million dollar grant program, called ADVANCE, devoted to “institutional transformation” through gender-sensitivity workshops, interactive theater and the like. ADVANCE is well named: it is the advance guard, softening up the hard sciences for the coming of Title IX enforcement.

If federal agencies require “gender equity” in university math, science, and engineering programs, they’ll go the way of men’s wrestling teams, Sommers warns.

I can just see the interactive drama workshops in the lab.

Show ‘em horrible poems

Published on April 29, 2008 in Education. 1 Comment By Joanne

I think that I shall never see a worse example of poetry: Hatemongers’ Quarterly’s fifth annual Horrible College Student Poetry contest is underway. You don’t have to be a student to enter.

(The contest) allows everyone to provide a vicious parody of the politically menacing inept blather favored by our nation’s young adults. And nothing — and we mean nothing — matches lame college poetry in its ability to delight: Vapid clichés; tin-eared doggerel; grammatical mishaps; noxious political hectoring.

What’s not to enjoy? So, dear reader, we formally implore you to send us a submission of some wretched verse, composed in the manner of the functionally illiterate college student

The deadline is May 10 (my mother’s birthday!) at 5 pm Eastern.

Wild teachers on the web

Published on April 28, 2008 in Education. 14 Comments By Joanne

Young teachers are discovering that posting sexual jokes, vulgarity, nudity and comments about “retards” in online profiles is not a wise idea, reports the Washington Post.

Click “View Photos of Erin,” and you can see her lying on her back, eyes closed, with a bottle of Jose Cuervo tequila between her head and shoulder. Or click on her “summertime” photo album and see a close-up of two young men flashing serious-looking middle fingers.

“I know that employers will look at that page, and I need to be more careful,” said Webster, adding that other Prince William teachers have warned her about her page. “At the same time, my work and social lives are completely separate. I just feel they shouldn’t take it seriously. I am young. I just turned 22.”

And you’re not at a kegger any more.

Update: Darren defends the right of teachers to live like other adults.

Still a public menace

Published on April 28, 2008 in Education. 10 Comments By Joanne

The real problem with Bill Ayers is not that he tried to plant bombs as a Weatherman 40 years ago. It’s his career as an education professor indoctrinating new teachers, writes Sol Stern in City Journal.

(Ayers) still boasts about working full-time to bring down American capitalism and imperialism. This time, however, he does it from his tenured perch as Distinguished Professor of Education at the University of Illinois, Chicago. Instead of planting bombs in public buildings, Ayers now works to indoctrinate America’s future teachers in the revolutionary cause, urging them to pass on the lessons to their public school students.

. . . Ayers’s texts on the imperative of social-justice teaching are among the most popular works in the syllabi of the nation’s ed schools and teacher-training institutes. One of Ayers’s major themes is that the American public school system is nothing but a reflection of capitalist hegemony. Thus, the mission of all progressive teachers is to take back the classrooms and turn them into laboratories of revolutionary change.

Last month, Ayers was elected vice president for curriculum of the American Educational Research Association (AERA), Stern notes. In the bio distributed to voters, Ayers listed his memoir Fugitive Days, which “includes dramatic accounts of how he bombed the Pentagon and other public buildings.”

Via Betsy.

Update: Let’s hope that Barack Obama doesn’t listen to his former pastor’s views on education. The Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s speech to the NAACP included a recitation of crackpot theories about black-white differences.

. . . in comparing African-American children and European-American children in the field of education, we were comparing apples and rocks.

“European and European-American children have a left brained cognitive object oriented learning style,” Wright said. They’re logical and analytical. African and African-American children are right brained, subject-oriented, creative and intuitive. So whites can learn from reading, because a book is an object, but blacks learn from listening to a person (subject). Blacks descend from story tellers with great memories; whites descend from people who wrote things down. (There’s some Lysenkoism in here.)

That is a different way of learning. It’s not deficient, it is just different.

Golly, let’s stop teaching black kids to read or to think logically and analytically; they’re born to memorize and recite stories and hip hop songs. They have natural rhythm too, says Wright, or at least a different “tonality.” And they clap better. Well, that we knew.