Archive for category Public Education
High School’s Last Test
Posted by Jerry in Public Education on January 9th, 2010
By J. B. SCHRAMM and E. KINNEY ZALESNE December 22, 2009
The New York Times
THE federal government is about to make a huge investment in high school. As part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Congress has appropriated more than $100 billion to public schools, including a competitive “Race to the Top” fund that encourages innovation.
But the real revolution, tucked away in the Race to the Top guidelines released by the Department of Education last month, is that high school has a new mission. No longer is it enough just to graduate students, or even prepare them for college. Schools must now show how they increase both college enrollment and the number of students who complete at least a year of college. In other words, high schools must now focus on grade 13.
To be sure, this shift is long overdue. It has been a generation since a high school diploma was a ticket to success. Today, the difference in earning power between a high school graduate and someone who’s finished eighth grade has shrunk to nil. And students themselves know, better even than their parents or teachers, according to a recent poll conducted by Deloitte, that the main mission of high school is preparation for college.
Still, this shift will be seismic for our nation’s high schools, because it will require gathering a great deal of information, and using it. And at the moment, high school principals know virtually nothing about what becomes of their graduates. Most don’t even know whether their students make it to college at all.
What data they have is anecdotal. “Once a graduate happened to drop by and tell us she was struggling with college writing,” Linda Calvo, the principal of Arleta High School in Los Angeles, told us. “We changed our writing curriculum based on what she said. But her visit was a totally random occurrence.”
A smattering of states, school districts and nonprofit educational organizations have begun to gather data about how students fare in college during their first year after graduation, but their progress has been slow and haphazard. Florida has one of the best systems, but even it can’t account for a high school graduate who enrolls in college in another state. The nation is asking principals to deliver students who can succeed in college, without ensuring they know whether what they’re doing is working.
The Department of Education has begun to solve this problem by instructing states on how to keep good records of its graduates’ progress in college. This gives high schools the two pieces of information it most needs: its college enrollment rate and its “college proficiency” rate (the speed with which graduates complete a year of college-level coursework).
But what’s critical is that the Education Department also helps high school principals and teachers learn to use their data to improve student achievement — to find out which of their educational strategies actually result in student success after high school. If the department could do this, and also reward those schools that demonstrate increasing postsecondary success, we’d see high schools begin to truly meet their mission.
Race to the Top has finally established a realistic purpose for high school in the 21st century. If principals can now get the support they need to fulfill that purpose, high school can once again be a top-notch producer of American potential.
The best and brightest take a detour
Posted by Jerry in Public Education on December 22nd, 2009
Recession-wary honor students are using community college as door to elite schools
By Daniel de Vise November 30, 2009
The Washington Post
Kira Cassels applied to 11 colleges and got in to every one. The kitchen of her Laurel home came to resemble a high school guidance office, the breakfast table buried beneath brochures and financial aid forms from destinations such as the University of Virginia and Franklin & Marshall College.
Over two arduous weeks last spring, Cassels sat with her parents and weighed the costs and benefits of each program until the list was narrowed to one: an honors track at the local community college.
Cassels, 18, is one of an increasing number of high school graduates who pass over top-drawer public and private universities to become honor students at community colleges. Recession-wary students are flocking to selective two-year programs, which allow students to complete half of their college education for about $8,000, then transfer to a more prestigious four-year institution.
Cassels attended Atholton High School in the Howard County school system, one of the region’s top college-prep engines. She took Advanced Placement courses, earned mostly A’s, scored more than 600 on each 800-point section of the SAT and found time to start a nonprofit organization that delivers comfort baskets to infants in intensive care.
She learned to expect a certain reaction — surprise and dismay — when telling classmates and family friends that her university admissions journey had ended at a community college.
“You say Howard Community College, and people are like, ‘Oh, community college,’ ” said Cassels, who lives with a younger brother and parents who both work. “But it’s really a lot more than it sounds.”
Honors enrollment at Howard Community College, a 9,000-student campus in Columbia, has risen from 123 to 185 in the past two years. Cassels enrolled in the signature program, Rouse Scholars, which takes 45 high school graduates each year and offers a proven pipeline to four-year schools. The average Rouse scholar has a 3.7 grade-point average and a combined SAT score of 1596 out of a possible 2400 points.
Over the past two decades, community college honors programs have found a niche among students who were turned down by increasingly selective state universities and didn’t want to pay private-college tuition. Enrollment grew steadily until the recession. Then, it exploded.
Montgomery College in Maryland had a record 275 applications this fall for 25 seats in its Montgomery Scholars program, up from 215 last year. Honors enrollment at Prince George’s Community College rose 28 percent this year to 292 students. A new honors program at Anne Arundel Community College grew from 22 students last year to 33 this year. On the Loudoun County campus of Northern Virginia Community College, enrollment in honors English is up by 50 percent.
The influx of students with good test scores and multiple options for higher education is reshaping community colleges, a class of schools that, although open to all, have been stereotyped as a destination of last resort, sweeping up students with the least money and the weakest academic preparation.
Enrollment in honors programs at community colleges seems to be growing faster than overall enrollment at the schools, which surged by about 10 percent this year in the Washington region, as students of various age groups and socioeconomic levels sought affordable higher education.
“We’ve sometimes struggled to get sufficient enrollment in the honors seminars. Well, recently, we’ve been packing them,” said Beverly Blois, dean of humanities at the Loudoun campus of Northern Virginia Community College. “More and more of what I call the best and brightest are turning to us.”
Building connections
Community colleges can’t match the prestige of a selective four-year college, nor the experience of living on campus. But they can offer small classes, attentive professors, intelligent classmates and inventive course work.
Hajirah Ishaq, a sophomore at Northern Virginia Community College, is studying the architecture of Dulles International Airport and Raphaelite paintings at the National Gallery in a humanities honors course.
Ishaq, 19, said she is going to community college because she is the eldest of 12 children. She describes her honors classmates as “overachievers” with ambitious transfer plans. “They talk about George Washington, Georgetown; they talk about Boston,” she said. “They talk about big schools.” Ishaq hopes to attend Georgetown.
In Maryland, the centerpiece of the Montgomery Scholars program is a year-long course called “Perspectives on World Cultures.” Four professors team-teach a syllabus that covers literature, history, philosophy and music from a global perspective.
“We’re seeing connections between different subjects. I really like that,” said Lucy Bauer, 18, a freshman Montgomery Scholar who said she “never, never ever” imagined herself in community college until she took a closer look at her family’s finances and the school’s offerings.
A recruiting meeting in October for next year’s Montgomery Scholars drew 350 people for 25 seats. Graduates have transferred to Smith, Amherst and Cornell.
Montgomery Scholars is 10 years old and is modeled on the Rouse program, which is in its 18th year. Barbara Greenfeld, a Howard Community College administrator who helped establish Rouse, said she thinks it is partly responsible for doubling the share of Howard high school graduates who attend the community college, from 12 percent in the early 1990s to 25 percent today.
Howard Community College offers study abroad and a formal transfer agreement with Dickinson College, a selective liberal arts school in Carlisle, Pa., in a program cited as a national model for collaboration between two- and four-year colleges.
“If you have a strong honors identity, it’s good for everybody,” Greenfeld said.
Thrift before prestige
In front of a classroom at the Howard Community College campus in Columbia on a recent afternoon, a classmate of Cassels’s announced that she was about to “give you guys a little background on the psychedelic experience.”
She and two other students embarked on a multimedia presentation on pop art as part of a course called “20th Century Arts, Culture and Ideas.” An hour later, the class had moved on to Kurt Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse-Five.”
Cassels and her parents chose the community college with the same sense of thrift that guides them these days at the grocery store or the mall. “We’re not hurting for money,” she said. But she and her parents didn’t feel comfortable committing $20,000 to $30,000 a year in tuition and fees, room and board, the amount they would have owed on top of the five-figure scholarships offered by several four-year colleges.
Turning down U-Va. and Franklin & Marshall was a bit of a gamble: There’s no guarantee that Cassels will get into the college of her choice as a transfer student in two years. She hopes to finish her bachelor’s at Barnard College or Cornell University.
Cassels said it was hard to watch classmates leave home this fall while she stayed behind, as if for a fifth year of high school.
“My other friends, they go away to these other schools, and they come back sometimes, weekends and holidays, and I feel like I miss the college life,” she said. “I don’t know if it’s a shallow thing on my part.”
But Cassels said she loves her new classes, the professors and the interdisciplinary projects. She feels challenged. If there is more to college, she’s willing to wait a year or two to find out.
“It’s not like I’m really losing anything,” she said, “except the name of a school.”
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Study Finds Growing Work for School Counselors
Posted by Jerry in Public Education on December 6th, 2009
By JACQUES STEINBERG October 20, 2009
New York Times
The struggling economy has taken a toll on those directly responsible for advising students about the college admission process.
Nearly half of public schools have raised the caseloads of high school counselors this year, compared with last year, with the average increase exceeding 53 students, according to a study by the National Association for College Admission Counseling.
At the same time, the report said, the pressures on applicants (and, by extension, their counselors) are growing, as the number of applications to four-year colleges continued to rise, along with the number of students applying to colleges under early-decision programs.
In many respects, the report, “2009 State of College Admission,” seeks to quantify the extent of the frenzy engulfing many of today’s college applicants.
For example, about 22 percent of students who enrolled in college in the fall of 2008 applied to at least seven colleges, up from about 19 percent from a year earlier. Meanwhile, the average acceptance rate at four-year colleges declined slightly, to 66.8 percent in 2007, the last year for which the report provided full data in that category, from 71.3 percent in 2001.
Those applicants who find themselves on a waiting list face tough odds of being accepted. Fewer than one in three on such lists in 2008 were ultimately accepted, according to the report, about the same as a year earlier.
And yet the report included some indications that the pressures on applicants could soon ease. The number of students graduating from high school annually is believed to have peaked this spring, at 3.33 million, according to the report, so competition for places in colleges should diminish over the next few years.
But families of children in elementary school take note: the nation’s collective high school graduating class “is projected to rebound to 3.31 million by 2017-18,” the report said.
Many applicants rely on their school counselors for advice on college admissions, and the report described the rising workloads of those counselors, particularly at public high schools. (While private school counselors are also working harder, in many instances, fewer than 20 percent reported that their caseloads had increased since the last school year, compared with 45 percent of their public school counterparts.)
Among the states with the highest student-to-counselor ratios are California (986 students for each counselor), Minnesota (799) and Utah (720), according to the report, which cited government data for the 2006-7 school year. While Illinois was listed as having the highest ratio (1,172), the report suggested that the figure was probably “the result of a reporting error,” and was most likely closer to about 700.
Sandie Gilbert, a counselor at Highland Park High School in Illinois said in an interview that she had a caseload of about 280 students this year — an increase of about 45, or 20 percent, since she first began working at the school 15 years ago.
“It’s been inching up every year,” Ms. Gilbert said.
About a quarter of her students are freshmen, who have been streaming into her office since school began in late August with any number of “acclimation” issues, she said. Another quarter are seniors, whom Ms. Gilbert must serve not only in one-on-one guidance sessions but by writing college recommendations for each.
“I wrote 43 recommendations before Oct. 15, and that’s at home, at night,” she said, citing the November deadlines for early-decision applications.
“I was really busy every single period, for the first six weeks of school,” she added. “I’m just now eating lunch. It’s been sitting there on my desk. It’s 2:30.”
Dangling Money, Obama Pushes Education Shift
Posted by Jerry in Public Education on August 26th, 2009
The New York Times (Sam Dillon)
Whether you have children in school or not, the federal money earmarked for education funding will affect you. States are scratching their heads and shuffling their feet trying to make a decision to change their rules governing how their schools are run. This in an attempt to cash in on a portion of the billions of dollars promised to them by the Obama administration. Change your rules to fit federal guidelines and the money is yours. Resist the change and find your own funding for your schools. Follow the link to find out more. http://tinyurl.com/lhlhg7
Sharpton, Gingrich, Duncan team up on school reforms
Posted by Jerry in Public Education on August 17th, 2009
USA Today (Mark Slva)
What in the world could bring Sharpton and Gingrich together? One thing is certain. If it is important enough to get these two together, then everyone should stop and listen a while. The success of their cause could literally mean the difference in the United States remaining a dominant world power or slipping into relative insignificance. Follow the link to find out more. http://tinyurl.com/nqvncg