Thinking and Linking by Joanne Jacobs
As times get tougher on campus, political infighting gets meaner, writes a professor. He calls for academics to rediscover a sense of honor.
Also on Community College Spotlight: Summer bridge programs – intensive remediation plus a “college knowledge” course – are helping Texas students succeed in community college classes in the fall semester.
Rick Perry Is A Higher-Education Visionary. Seriously. So argues Kevin Carey in The New Republic.
The Texas governor is urging university leaders to implement “Seven Breakthrough Solutions for reforming higher education developed by the conservative Texas Public Policy Foundation.
Taken together, the seven solutions are remarkably student-friendly. Four of them focus on improving the quality of university teaching by developing new methods of evaluating teaching performance, tying tenure to success in the classroom, separating the teaching and research functions within university budgets, and using teaching budgets to reward professors who excel at helping students learn. The fifth solution would give prospective students choosing colleges more information about things like class size, graduation rates, and earnings in the job market after graduation. The sixth would make state higher education subsidies more student-focused, and the seventh would shift university accreditation toward measures of academic outcomes.
University teaching is often terrible, writes Carey. Many students learn very little, the Academically Adrift study found.
Some professors don’t do much teaching or research. “At UT-Austin, one group of 1,748 mostly-tenured professors, representing 44 percent of the faculty, generated 54 percent of institutional costs, taught only 27 percent of students, and brought in no external research funding whatsoever.”
Nearly all Texas Democrats have denounced Perry’s plans, Carey writes.
The left-learning Texas Monthly declared that “Rick Perry is waging an undeclared war on higher education.”
. . . The problems that Perry is trying to solve — bad teaching, unaccountable public institutions, soaring college costs — disproportionately hurt the first generation, low-income, and minority students that liberals should be most interested in helping. His call to disrupt traditional business models with low-cost, technology-driven alternatives reflects the ethos of the netroots movement that has come to dominate progressive politics. Yet one Firedoglake writer opined that Perry was “casually sacrificing the human pursuit of knowledge to the gods of a craven capitalism.”
Research universities “are established, wealthy, powerful, and determined to stay that way,” Carey writes. “Progressives tend to be enthusiastic about sticking it to every available Man other than the one who conferred their prized college degree.”
Campus police officers — not principals — are enforcing discipline these days, reports the Washington Post.
Texas police issue thousands of misdemeanor tickets for offensive language, class disruption, schoolyard fights and misbehavior on the school bus. A parent must appear with the child in court. Students may be ordered to perform community service or take a behavior-management class. Fines can total $500.
Six in 10 Texas students were suspended or expelled at least once from seventh grade on, according to a new study. Federal officials say suspensions, expulsions and arrests create a “school-to-prison pipeline.”
“That is something that clearly has to stop,” U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said in Washington alongside Education Secretary Arne Duncan.
It’s not just Texas. In many states, principals are turning to the police to enforce order.
Connecticut is rethinking discipline after students faced court charges for drinking soda, running in the hall and dressing improperly.
A Colorado task force is analyzing school ticketing and law enforcement referrals.
Texas schools adopted ticketing in the 1990′s, the Post reports. As more police officers have been assigned to schools, the number of tickets has soared.
In one highly publicized case a middle school student in Austin was ticketed for class disruption after she sprayed herself with perfume when classmates said she smelled.
In Houston one recent day, a 17-year-old was in court after he and his girlfriend poured milk on each other. “She was mad at me because I broke up with her,” he said.
Ticketing rates vary from 1 percent of students in Pasadena to 11 percent in Galveston, concluded a report by Texas Appleseed, a public interest law center. Children as young as five have been ticketed.
Not surprisingly, students who’ve been suspended, expelled or ticketed are more likely to drop out of high school and get into trouble as adults. But that raises a chicken-and-egg question: Was it the punishment or the crime?
Don’t mess with Texas’ schools. Education Secretary Arne Duncan claimed Texas schools have “really struggled” under Gov. Rick Perry, now a GOP candidate for president. “Far too few of their high school graduates are actually prepared to go on to college,” Duncan said in a TV interview, adding he feels “very, very badly for the children there.”
Texas’ fourth- and eighth-graders “substantially outperformed” students in Chicago, the district Duncan ran before going to Washington, notes Andrew Rotherham in Time. The Texas high school graduation rate of 73 percent is slightly below the national average, but way above Chicago’s 56 percent graduation rate.
Overall, Texas scores are “right around the national averages” in reading and math on NAEP, despite educating many immigrant students with poorly educated, non-English-speaking parents. ACT reports Texas high school graduates only narrowly trail national averages for college readiness.
Duncan’s response to Rotherham:
“Texas has challenges. The record speaks for itself. Lots of other states have challenges too. But there is a lot of hard work that needs to be done in Texas and a lot of children who need a chance to get a great education.”
Duncan’s claim of “massive increases in class size in Texas” is untrue, responds the Dallas Morning News. Primary classes, capped at 22 students, have remained stable. Secondary classes in core subjects are getting smaller.
. . . secondary math classes averaged 20.3 students in 2000-01 and dropped to 18.5 by last year. Average size of secondary English/language arts classes fell from 20.2 students in 2000-01 to 17.8 by last year.
In an e-mail to Duncan, TEA Commissioner Robert Scott added:
– Texas is ranked 13th in Ed Week’s Quality Counts report. Quality Counts gave Texas an “A” in “Standards, Assessment and Accountability,” and an “A” in “Transitions and Alignment” of the Texas system with college and career readiness. . .
– The Texas class of 2011 posted a record-high math score on the ACT college entrance exam. The Texas average math score was 21.5 and was higher than the national average of 21.1. ACT scores from 2007 to 2011 showed increases in all four subjects.
Texas fourth- and eighth-graders aced the 2009 NAEP science exam, Scott wrote. In eighth grade, black Texans were first in the nation compared to other blacks, white Texans tied with whites in high-scoring Massachusetts and Hispanics ranked eighth.
Perry has resisted Race To the Top, so perhaps Duncan’s antipathy is all about education policy. But it looks as though the education secretary is playing presidential politics. That’s not the way to build bipartisan consensus.
Most states don’t match federal proficiency standards for elementary math and reading, a new federal report concludes.
Eight states have raised standards in recent years. South Carolina has lowered its standards, though the new superintendent pledges to raise the bar.
The National Center for Education Statistics compares state requirements to the National Assessment of Education Progress.
In fourth-grade reading, for example, 35 states set passing bars that are below the “basic” level on the national NAEP exam. “Basic” means students have a satisfactory understanding of material, as opposed to “proficient,” which means they have a solid grasp of it. Massachusetts is the only state to set its bar at “proficient”—and that was only in fourth- and eighth-grade math.
The report shows huge disparities among the standards states set when their tests are converted to the NAEP’s 500-point scale. In eighth-grade reading, for example, there is a 60-point difference between Texas, which has the lowest passing bar, and Missouri, which has the highest, according to the data. In eighth-grade math, there is a 71-point spread between the low, Tennessee, and the high, Massachusetts.
A Tennessee eighth grader could be considered proficient without being able to read a graph, while a Massachusetts student meeting the proficiency benchmark “would likely be able to solve a math problem using algebra and geometry.”
Most states don’t match federal proficiency standards for elementary math and reading, a new federal report concludes.
Eight states have raised standards in recent years. South Carolina has lowered its standards, though the new superintendent pledges to raise the bar.
The National Center for Education Statistics compares state requirements to the National Assessment of Education Progress.
In fourth-grade reading, for example, 35 states set passing bars that are below the “basic” level on the national NAEP exam. “Basic” means students have a satisfactory understanding of material, as opposed to “proficient,” which means they have a solid grasp of it. Massachusetts is the only state to set its bar at “proficient”—and that was only in fourth- and eighth-grade math.
The report shows huge disparities among the standards states set when their tests are converted to the NAEP’s 500-point scale. In eighth-grade reading, for example, there is a 60-point difference between Texas, which has the lowest passing bar, and Missouri, which has the highest, according to the data. In eighth-grade math, there is a 71-point spread between the low, Tennessee, and the high, Massachusetts.
A Tennessee eighth grader could be considered proficient without being able to read a graph, while a Massachusetts student meeting the proficiency benchmark “would likely be able to solve a math problem using algebra and geometry.”
Go ahead and cheat on state tests is the Houston school board’s new policy, complains Greg on Rhymes With Right.
Erica Carmouche will not be fired for helping students cheat on the state exam.
A split Houston school board has overruled Superintendent Terry Grier’s recommendation to fire a Lockhart Elementary teacher accused of helping students cheat on state exams in April.
. . . An external investigation had concluded “on balance” that Carmouche helped students on the high-stakes Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills exams. Several fifth-graders reported that she pointed out wrong answers to them.
Grier pledged in July that teachers who cheated would “not be in Houston classrooms this fall.” The school board, however, has the power to accept or reject his proposed terminations.
Thousands of Texas teachers have been laid off, Greg points out. “Surely there is an honest one who can take the place of this cheater.”
Young people need some postsecondary education to qualify for decent jobs, but a bachelor’s degree isn’t the only way to success.
Also on Community College Spotlight: Texas will provide counseling to help college drop-outs complete their degrees.
Nearly 60 percent of Texas students were suspended or expelled from at least one class in middle and high school during a six-year study. Blacks and emotionally disabled students were more likely to be disciplined, concludes Breaking School Rules, a study by the Council of State Governments Justice Center and the Public Research Institute of Texas A&M University.
Schools with similar students in terms of race, ethnicity and socioeconomic status had very different suspension and expulsion rates.
The study didn’t examine whether schools that suspend fewer students have alternative ways of dealing with disruption, nor did it try to evaluate school safety.
Not surprisingly, students who were disciplined were less likely to graduate and more likely to be arrested. Thirty-one percent of students disciplined one or more times repeated their grade at least once.
To balance the state budget, Texas cut 90 percent of funding for the nation’s largest merit pay program, reports the Dallas Morning News.
A Texas Education Agency study of the merit-pay program found slightly increased test scores at participating schools and higher teacher retention rates.
Some districts spread out the bonus money to most teachers, cutting the average payment to $1,361. Other districts gave bonuses to teachers at select schools; the average payment was $3,344. “Generally, larger bonuses produced better test scores and teacher retention,” notes the Morning News.
The movie Bad Teacher, which is getting mixed or negative reviews, features a gold-digging, booze-swilling bimbo who becomes a middle-school teacher (not sure how) in hopes of making enough money for breast implants to attract a wealthy substitute teacher. She stops showing movies in class and tries to teach when she learns of a bonus for high test scores. Not credible, points out the National Council on Teacher Quality.
We must point out that such incentives don’t exist in Chicago, where the film is based. In fact, of the 100 largest school districts in the country, according to our TR3 database, only six offer bonuses on the basis of performance to individual teachers that would be substantial enough to cover the average cost of breast augmentation surgery — around $3,800.
In order for performance pay to make a substantial impact on teacher recruitment and retention, the incentives have to be significant enough to make a real impact in teachers’ lives. Bad Teacher‘s unquestioned premise is more anecdotal evidence that the public, inside and out, overestimates the true role of performance pay in schools today.
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