Complete College America Report

Follow the link in the title to take a look at an interesting report about the status of our colleges in America.

My View: How mentors changed my life

by Ashkon Jafari, Special to CNN

Editor’s note:  Ashkon Jafari is the co-founder and executive director of StudentMentor.org. He has a bachelor’s degree in finance from Santa   Clara University. Ashkon was recently invited to the White House to meet President Barack Obama and talk to officials about mentoring and preparing students for tomorrow’s work force.

My transition to college wasn’t easy. I graduated from high school at 16 and felt thrown into a different world in college. Unlike high school where administrators proactively called my parents if I missed classes, I found out that college professors didn’t hold students to the same level of accountability. Most college professors didn’t stay after class to help me when I was struggling in their classes. I was on my own.

During the beginning of my sophomore year, my situation began to improve. I started visiting the tutoring center to receive help on calculus and physics courses. There I met Dinh, who had already received a master’s degree in my major.  Over the course of the next two years, he not only spent countless hours guiding me through difficult subjects, but he did much more. Dinh and I discussed life decisions, job prospects and career paths, and how I could succeed in my junior and senior years.

Dinh was an amazing tutor, but what I looked forward to most during our weekly Sunday morning sessions was chatting freely and openly about these topics. I may not have labeled Dinh a mentor then, but in retrospect he was an outstanding one. Without his help, I know I wouldn’t have succeeded in college.

During the summer of my junior year, I started an internship at a large tech company and found another key mentor. Although a busy senior manager,  Jack scheduled an hourlong meeting with me for extra training that would be useful in my future career. That meeting turned into weekly sessions in which I learned a lot from Jack about what employers valued and where the industry was headed.

Soon, Jack was asking me to bring in my upper division course list so that he could offer a professional’s opinion on which electives would be advantageous in the industry and which were outdated. We kept in touch as I progressed through my final two years of college and occasionally met for lunch. Jack became an even greater resource to me as I prepared to embark on my career. He was a reference for job openings and graduate school applications. Five years later, we remain good friends, and he is on the board of directors for my nonprofit organization, StudentMentor.org.

Mentors such as Dinh, Jack and many others are the most important reason for my success in college. Despite my rocky start, I graduated in the top 1% of my college class.

There are countless professionals, teachers and peers  who are eager to become mentors.  Whether it’s through informal discussions or structured programs, mentoring is powerful and vastly undervalued.
January is National Mentoring Month. Each year the president encourages Americans to serve as mentors and help young people. As you think back on your life, how have mentors affected you? By adding “becoming a mentor” to your new year’s resolutions, perhaps you can positively change the course of someone else’s life, just as my mentors did for me.

The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely those of Ashkon Jafari.

When an adult took standardized tests forced on kids

By Valerie Strauss
Update 12/12:

QUIZ: Take part of the test that the local school board member took in the story below: Reading Quiz | Math Quiz. Questions come from the Florida Comprehensive Assessment Test (FCAT) for 10th grade.

Update 12/6:
Revealed: The school board member who took standardized test

Original post:
This was written by Marion Brady, veteran teacher, administrator, curriculum designer and author.
By Marion Brady

A longtime friend on the school board of one of the largest school systems in America did something that few public servants are willing to do. He took versions of his state’s high-stakes standardized math and reading tests for 10th graders, and said he’d make his scores public.

By any reasonable measure, my friend is a success. His now-grown kids are well-educated. He has a big house in a good part of town. Paid-for condo in the Caribbean. Influential friends. Lots of frequent flyer miles. Enough time of his own to give serious attention to his school board responsibilities. The margins of his electoral wins and his good relationships with administrators and teachers testify to his openness to dialogue and willingness to listen.

He called me the morning he took the test to say he was sure he hadn’t done well, but had to wait for the results. A couple of days ago, realizing that local school board members don’t seem to be playing much of a role in the current “reform” brouhaha, I asked him what he now thought about the tests he’d taken.

“I won’t beat around the bush,” he wrote in an email. “The math section had 60 questions. I knew the answers to none of them, but managed to guess ten out of the 60 correctly. On the reading test, I got 62% . In our system, that’s a “D”, and would get me a mandatory assignment to a double block of reading instruction.


He continued, “It seems to me something is seriously wrong. I have a bachelor of science degree, two masters degrees, and 15 credit hours toward a doctorate.

“I help oversee an organization with 22,000 employees and a $3 billion operations and capital budget, and am able to make sense of complex data related to those responsibilities.

“I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

“It might be argued that I’ve been out of school too long, that if I’d actually been in the 10th grade prior to taking the test, the material would have been fresh. But doesn’t that miss the point? A test that can determine a student’s future life chances should surely relate in some practical way to the requirements of life. I can’t see how that could possibly be true of the test I took.”

Here’s the clincher in what he wrote:
“If I’d been required to take those two tests when I was a 10th grader, my life would almost certainly have been very different. I’d have been told I wasn’t ‘college material,’ would probably have believed it, and looked for work appropriate for the level of ability that the test said I had.

“It makes no sense to me that a test with the potential for shaping a student’s entire future has so little apparent relevance to adult, real-world functioning. Who decided the kind of questions and their level of difficulty? Using what criteria? To whom did they have to defend their decisions? As subject-matter specialists, how qualified were they to make general judgments about the needs of this state’s children in a future they can’t possibly predict? Who set the pass-fail “cut score”? How?”

“I can’t escape the conclusion that decisions about the [state test] in particular and standardized tests in general are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.”

There you have it. A concise summary of what’s wrong with present corporately driven education change: Decisions are being made by individuals who lack perspective and aren’t really accountable.

Those decisions are shaped not by knowledge or understanding of educating, but by ideology, politics, hubris, greed, ignorance, the conventional wisdom, and various combinations thereof. And then they’re sold to the public by the rich and powerful.

All that without so much as a pilot program to see if their simplistic, worn-out ideas work, and without a single procedure in place that imposes on them what they demand of teachers: accountability.

But maybe there’s hope. As I write, a New York Times story by Michael Winerip makes my day. The stupidity of the current test-based thrust of reform has triggered the first revolt of school principals.

Winerip writes: “As of last night, 658 principals around the state (New York) had signed a letter — 488 of them from Long Island, where the insurrection began — protesting the use of students’ test scores to evaluate teachers’ and principals’ performance.”

One of those school principals, Winerip says, is Bernard Kaplan. Kaplan runs one of the highest-achieving schools in the state, but is required to attend 10 training sessions.

“It’s education by humiliation,” Kaplan said. “I’ve never seen teachers and principals so degraded.”

Carol Burris, named the 2010 Educator of the Year by the School Administrators Association of New York State, has to attend those 10 training sessions.

Katie Zahedi, another principal, said the session she attended was “two days of total nonsense. I have a Ph.D., I’m in a school every day, and some consultant is supposed to be teaching me to do evaluations.”

A fourth principal, Mario Fernandez, called the evaluation process a product of “ludicrous, shallow thinking. They’re expecting a tornado to go through a junkyard and have a brand new Mercedes pop up.”

My school board member-friend concluded his email with this: “I can’t escape the conclusion that those of us who are expected to follow through on decisions that have been made for us are doing something ethically questionable.”

He’s wrong. What they’re being made to do isn’t ethically questionable. It’s ethically unacceptable. Ethically reprehensible. Ethically indefensible.

How many of the approximately 100,000 school principals in the U.S. would join the revolt if their ethical principles trumped their fears of retribution? Why haven’t they been asked?