Time is the enemy of graduation

BY Stan Jones

President Obama's plan to make college more

affordable is noble in intent but misses the

mark in design. If the president and Congress

were to focus on the real culprit of high college

costs — poor college completion numbers — they

could find rare common ground and make substantial

headway on a problem that threatens to

sink U.S. economic competitiveness.

The president was right when he noted that

college is rapidly becoming unaffordable for many.

Yet his threats to reduce federal funding to schools

that don’t cut tuition may open the door for

opponents to push back against reforms by

invoking accusations of “price controls” and

another “big-government takeover.”

College presidents point to what seem like

reasonable arguments for rising tuition: shrinking

state budgets, for one, and the increasing costs of

energy, pensions and health care. But if these

circular arguments simply go round and round, an

important opportunity will be missed.

Data show that time, not tuition, is the enemy of

college completion. Today’s college students are

dramatically different from the archetype of the

U.S. undergraduate: A 2009 Public Agenda study

drawing on Education Department data found that

less than a quarter of U.S. college students attend

full time at residential schools. Most students now

commute to campus, balancing jobs, school and

often family.

Higher education has done little to adjust to the

changing needs of this new majority, with the

result that students are spending longer than ever

in college. The longer it takes to graduate, themore

life gets in the way and the less likely that one will

ever graduate. More time on campus also means

that more is spent on college, adding high costs as

another driver of dropouts. In this instance, time is

money.

All this adds up to a startling fact: Less than half

of U.S. college students graduate, the National

Center for Education Statistics reported last year.

There is a way the federal government can take

on this issue. Because cutting time cuts costs, the

president can achieve the savings he seeks for

students and taxpayers by linking federal investments

to college results and targeting the greatest

obstacles to graduation: failed remediation programs

that waste time and money; broken policies

that make it hard for students to transfer credits;

students roaming the curriculum excessively instead

of following structured, career-focused programs;

creeping credit requirements; and schedules

designed more to please faculty than to help

working students.

Colleges should, of course, become more efficient.

But raising professors’ health-care premiums

or adjusting thermostats won’t boost completion

rates. And appeals to reduce tuition through

higher appropriations are unlikely to fly in

cash-strapped state capitols. The result is that

America will fall further behind: The United States

once led the world in higher-education attainment;

now we trail at least a dozen countries,

according to Organization for Economic Cooperation

and Development data published last year.

Rather than engage in simplistic fights about

runaway tuition, let’s pinpoint the best methods to

reduce time on campus. College completion can be

common ground on which the president and

Congress focus on costs that are directly related to

student learning and success. They should replace

blame shifting with irrefutable facts and seek

data-driven solutions that can be achieved now to

help students afford their dreams while increasing

graduation rates.

Washington should also keep this in mind:

States are not waiting to boost college completion.

Since March 2010, 30 governors have publicly

committed their states to setting graduation goals;

designing comprehensive completion plans; and

moving significant policies to speed student

success, including paying colleges for the students

they graduate, not simply for those they enroll.

Working across party lines, governors, legislators

and education leaders are building a movement.

Their success will strengthen state economies

while taxpayers get a greater return on their

investments and millions more students make it to

graduation day. Washington should follow this

example.

Stan Jones is president of Complete College America, a

Washington-based nonprofit. 

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?

Miscellaneous Common Mistakes Among Advanced English Learners

Dec 10, 2011 Libby Wilson

This article explains small errors which are common among people who speak English well. In avoiding these, the learners will sound more like a native.

 

As stated in an article on common English errors made by Indians, "With all its irregularities, exceptions and rules, English is a very difficult language to master." Even people who speak very good English sometimes phrase their sentences in a way which gives away the fact that it isn't their first language. The following are some of those mistakes, and an explanation of how to say them in a more 'native-like' way.

Compound Adjectives with Numbers

Common examples: a five-year-old boy, a two-week holiday
Nigel J Ross, teacher in the City of Milan School for Interpreters and Translators, concedes that numbers are very frequent in these 'Double-Barrelled Adjectives.' What English learners need to remember is that compound adjectives are invariable. That means that the word after the number does not become plural.

• Ninety-Mile beach, *Ninety-Miles beach
• A thirty-minute speech, *a thirty-minutes speech

If unsure about whether the word is an adjective, try taking it out and putting something like 'long' or 'short' in its place.

• I was in the train for five hours *I was in the train for long
• It was a five-hour train ride It was a long train ride

Have the Possibility of
While people understand this phrasing, it doesn't quite sound natural! A better phrase to use would be 'had the chance to.'

• *I had the possibility to do an internship in New Zealand
• I had the chance to do an internship in New Zealand

Quantifiers: Much/Many or A Lot?
When to use 'much' as opposed to 'a lot' can be difficult... for those who haven't visited the Woodward Chile site and heard about this simple rule: much is only used in negative sentences, and questions.

*You have done much today!
You have done a lot today!

It is possible to say 'I don't have a lot of friends,' (even Angelina Jolie says it) but it would be more common to say 'I don't have many friends.'

Possessives Using 'The [Noun] of [Name]'

Common examples: The mother of my girlfriend said, this is the car of my brother.
In general, English speakers opt for using the apostrophe+s form of showing possession, as it is a much quicker way to get the message across.

From time to time, especially when expressing more complex relationships, the longer form may be used.
For example, 'That was the mother of one of my students.' However, it is also possible to say 'That was one of my students' mothers.'

Have You Ever ...?

Now is the time to use everyone's favourite tense: the present perfect. Despite being loathed by English-learners all over the world, it is actually a very useful tense for making small talk. So, when striking up conversation with a new acquaintance, don't ask 'Were you ever in Fiji?', but rather 'Have you ever been to Fiji?' When they start coming back with questions, the answer is 'Yes, I have' or 'No, I haven't.'
As Rodger Woodham states on the BBC World Learning English site, the present perfect is often used with adverbs but, in sentences like the ones above, "yet is understood but not used." Therefore, this construction is useful for any situation where a speaker is asking whether, up until this moment in their life, a person has done or tried something.

For example, 'have you ever bungee-jumped?'

Speaking a foreign language is no easy task, and comes little by little. However, by working to eliminate common errors and clearing up doubts about confusing pairs, learners can sound considerably more like native speakers.

Copyright Libby Wilson. Contact the author to obtain permission for republication.

Web Tutors Become Stars Far From Classroom

Web Tutors Become Stars Far From Classroom

By D.D. GUTTENPLAN

Published: December 11, 2011

 LONDON — Not that long ago Salman Khan thought YouTube was only “for cats playing the piano. No place for serious mathematics.” With more than 3.5 million students watching his educational videos every month, the founder of Khan Academy has long since changed his mind.

 

While living in Boston Mr. Khan began the online academy as a way of tutoring his cousins in New Orleans in mathematics. It has grown exponentially, helped by hordes of grateful parents whose dim memories of algebra or trigonometry are not enough to help with their children’s homework. While Khan Academy is the most widely known, there are a host of similar Web sites aimed at students and teachers.

When Bill Gates told the 2010 Aspen Ideas Festival that he watched Khan Academy videos with his children, the site’s traffic spiked higher overnight. At the time Mr. Khan was still making short films out of a closet in his home. Nine months after taking a year off from his job as a hedge fund analyst, he was “beginning to think about polishing my résumé.”

Instead, with backing from the Gates Foundation and Google, whose $2 million donation is paying for his material to be translated into 10 languages, Mr. Khan now hopes to change the way students learn from kindergarten all the way to graduate school. Mr. Khan calls his revolutionary idea “the flip” and the basic premise — that classroom lectures followed by homework followed by exams is a recipe for educational failure — is gaining momentum.

“If I just want to tell you stuff, a lecture is very useful, but if I really want you to learn something it’s not that useful,” said Richard Baraniuk, professor of electrical engineering at Rice University and founder of Connexions , an open source Web site for college textbooks. Though Mr. Baraniuk prefers the term “reverse instruction,” he sees Khan Academy as fitting into an approach pioneered by Carl Wieman, a Nobel laureate in physics serving as an adviser to the White House. In a paper titled “Why Not Try a Scientific Approach to Scientific Education? ”

Mr. Wieman cited data showing that students who take an introductory physics course typically know less physics when they finish — and that “if anything, the effect of taking an introductory college chemistry course is even worse.” Traditional teaching methods simply do not allow “enough time to develop the long-term memory structures required for subject mastery,” Mr. Wieman wrote.

Mr. Khan agrees. “In a traditional classroom, what’s fixed is the amount of time you spend on a subject. The variable is how well you learn it,” he said during an interview on Skype. “But when you think about all the things you learn outside a classroom — riding a bike, sports, playing an instrument — what you want to achieve is a certain mastery.”

There is nothing flashy about Mr. Khan’s path to mastery. The earliest videos, such as the one devoted to finding the least common multiple , show a blank chalkboard slowly filling with jerky figures while Mr. Khan’s voice explains the problem. More recent examples, like the one on the physics behind hitting a baseball over the Green Monster , the fabled baseball outfield wall at Fenway Park in Boston, move a little more briskly. None of them show Mr. Khan’s face, yet they have made him an object of devotion. “I started getting letters saying ‘My family prays for you every month,”’ he said. “Remember, I was working at a hedge fund.”

The videos, however, are only the beginning. From the start Mr. Khan was writing software that allowed him to track the progress his cousins were making. Underlying the whole enterprise is a “knowledge map ” — a chart offering exercises leading, step by step, from simple addition to linear algebra. In a speech last month, Mr. Khan explained: “Each square is a different concept. The videos are there if you need help. The idea is you keep doing the problems till you’ve mastered the concept, and then you go on to the next concept. It’s how every video game works.”

The software lets teachers and parents see where students excel — and where they need help.
Invited to pilot his approach by the Los Altos, California, public school district, Mr. Khan discovered that students were able to progress further and with more confidence by “flipping” the sequence of activities — asking students to try the problems online before class, and then having teachers work individually or in small groups on just those areas students found difficult.

“But they were all still working in lockstep,” he said, adding that ideally “you would have students all working at their own pace,” helping each other in class and online, allowing the teachers to use class time far more effectively.
Some critics have claimed Mr. Khan is trying to make teachers obsolete. “That’s not what we’re about,” he responded.

Marshall Smith, who served as undersecretary of education in the Clinton Administration, said that technology “gives teachers room to go deeper.” Recently retired as program officer of the Hewlett Foundation, Mr. Smith is an admirer of Khan Academy. But he warned that innovation would not come easily.

“There are a lot of higher education institutions where the teaching just isn’t very good, where the teachers rattle on as they’ve been doing for years, and where, especially in the sciences, the teachers just don’t keep up,” he said.

 

Helping teachers to keep up was one of the driving forces behind PhET, a Web site at the University of Colorado founded by Mr. Weiman that uses interactive computer simulations to teach physics, chemistry, biology and earth sciences. Initially aimed at college students, PhET, which stands for Physics Education Technology, attracts 25 million visitors a year. Like Khan Academy lectures, the simulations “can be used off-line,” said Katherine Perkins, the project’s director. “We have schools in rural Africa where they don’t have an Internet connection, where teachers use our material,” she said. PhET also lets anyone adapt or incorporate their material under a creative commons license.

Mr. Smith said the effect has been “pretty egalitarian. This gives everybody a shot at understanding science, even if they don’t have X dollars to spend.”

He also sees a need much closer to home. “You have community colleges where the students work all day, then drag themselves to class pretty exhausted.”

Mr. Baraniuk argues that anything beyond the first few rows is “distance learning.”

“If you have a class of 250 students, the first three rows are getting a high quality experience,” he said. “Everybody else is just watching.”

For Mr. Baraniuk, a key issue is quality control. “PhEt happens to be founded by a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. So he probably knows physics,” he said. “And if you loved Sal Khan’s algebra you’ll probably love his geometry.

Connexions is open to anybody who wants to submit material” — a strategy Mr. Baraniuk calls “in-reach.”
“We’re enlisting professional societies,” he said.

Mr. Khan has recently broadened his curriculum to include art history, civics, history, and “micro- and macroeconomics, drawing on my hedge-fund experience.” And he has taken a different approach, allowing users to post comments. Urging students to bring “a healthy dose of skepticism — this is just one point of view,” Mr. Khan seems content to rely on the wisdom of crowds. “Our material isn’t just reviewed by Americans, or a few professors. It’s been reviewed by the world,” he said.

Spelling, the Lost Art

Nov 22, 2011 by Sharon Dellorco

Article pulled from http://www.linkedin.com/news?viewArticle=&articleID=932714266&gid=66995&type=member&item=81781747&articleURL=http%3A%2F%2Fsharon-dellorco%2Esuite101%2Ecom%2Fspelling-the-lost-art-a397283&urlhash=IBda&goback=%2Egde_66995_member_81781747

Remembering when shortcuts, spell-checks and self-correction was not available for business/academia and the effectivity of an online spelling program.

As a writer, I am used to dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s; literally. I learned early on…really early on that spelling correctly has its advantages. I mean as early on and as far back as “the typewriter”. Most of you reading this article may have heard of such, and I can almost bet that a lot of you have not “typed” on one. Before the days of the “self-correcting IBM Selectric” (I’m hearing, huh…what is THAT? Never mind, but what an invention!), there were these typewriters. What it did upon the strike of the letter you wanted, was that a piece of metal with that particular letter literally hops out of the machine, and makes an impression of the letter, striking a piece of ribbon that had carbon on one side. When you were typing a letter (as in a document), and if you made a typo, or a spelling error, you had to retype the whole letter. Then, after the wonderful invention of Liquid Paper, you would dab on some white paint-like liquid over the letter error, wait for this to dry, then, try to match up exactly where the mistake happened, and restrike the letter onto the dried patch of paper. Very early on in my career, I worked for a man who would put the document up to a light, or a window and IF there were any patches of Liquid Paper, felt that this was unprofessional and had me retype the whole letter…over and over until I got it right. Without a typo, and without a patch of Liquid Paper; call it Letterwriting Bootcamp!

Spelling Correctly - What a Concept

I suppose my background has me well-trained in this concept called learn to spell. What worries me about the new generation, and by that I mean the very new, text message-oriented generation is that spelling is a lost art. Rarely do you see the word “through” written out; it is now “thru”. One doesn’t even see the word “see” anymore; it is “c”. That’s it. In the interest of time, not only do I understand why this is done, but I practice this method myself. The problem still exists that in the written word; books, newspapers, even e-books, e-news, and SCHOOL, one is still expected to spell - and spell correctly.

How DO You Learn How to Spell?

It is then that I started researching out different methods that children are learning how to spell properly. Is one spelling program or method better than the next? Honestly, I don’t think English is an easy language to spell; like learning how to read, one successful way of learning how to spell is repetitive memorization of words, and sight learning. There are lists of the most commonly used words in the English language; the first 100, 200 and so on. Older kids, younger kids have to learn this way. In my opinion, it is at this younger stage that it’s so important that these “commonly used” spelling words are ingrained. There are certainly phonetic approaches, but when those rules don’t apply, nothing beats just knowing how a word should be spelled. I stumbled across a program called ClickN SPELL by a company called, ClickN KIDS. It is an impressive program that teaches the 800 most commonly used words in the English language. The online program was written by a research professor with impressive accolades, and from what I’ve seen and heard, it works. I tried it myself (because I will try out what I write about), and found the program to be very user friendly, and entertaining enough for kids through 5th grade, as well as any adult with any variation of learning difficulties.

I was very happy to see that there is a spelling program that goes beyond “See Spot Run”, but in fact goes through teaching as many words as they do. I understand that this program is also used in schools, and is aligned with core curricula. I hope that a correctly spelled document always stays important, even if a document doesn’t have to be done over and over until there are no white blots on that piece of paper when it’s put against the light or a window.

Read more at Suite101: Spelling, the Lost Art | Suite101.com http://sharon-dellorco.suite101.com/spelling-the-lost-art-a397283#ixzz1fPUSciJG