Posts published in March, 2009

Obamas New Plan For Higher Education Is Aggressive

March 11, 2009 9:10 am

Restoring America’s Leadership in Higher Education

Our competitiveness abroad depends on opening the doors of higher education for more of America’s students. The U.S. ranks seventh in terms of the percentage of 18-24 year olds enrolled in college, but only 15^th in terms of the number of certificates and degrees awarded. A lack of financial resources should never obstruct the promise of college opportunity. And it’s America’s shared responsibility to ensure that more of our students not only reach the doors of college, but also persist, succeed, and obtain their degree.

· President Obama’s FY 2010 budget makes a historic commitment to increasing college access and success by restructuring and dramatically expanding financial aid, while making federal programs simpler, more reliable, and more efficient.

· The President will restore the buying power of the Pell Grant for America’s neediest students and guarantee an annual increase tied to inflation. His plan will end wasteful subsidies to banks under the Federal Family Education Loan (FFEL) program, and re-direct billions in savings toward student aid.

· And it will dramatically simplify the Federal Application for Student Aid (FAFSA), making it easier to complete and more effective for students.

· The President supports strengthening the higher education pipeline to ensure that more students succeed and complete their college education. His plan will invest in community colleges to conduct an analysis of high-demand skills and technical education, and shape new degree programs for emerging industries.

Many Colleges Will Be Easier For Admission

March 10, 2009 9:35 am

Declining high school enrollment in many states over the next decade will lower admission standards. This will be especially true for second and third tier private schools. But regional 4 year public colleges in the midwest and mid Atlantic will be scrambling to maintain enrollment. This will send a signal to high school students that they do not need to work hard to get into 4 year colleges. Consequently, we will need stronger messages and signals that the hard part is to complete college, not admission. I have written a lot about clear signals to students, so check out my biography at the top of this blog.

Webinar On College Retention From Noted Expert

March 9, 2009 9:42 am

An Introduction to Student Success & Retention

Thursday, March 24, 1:00 – 2:30 pm EST

Hosted by Dr. Watson Scott Swail, President & CEO, Educational Policy Institute

Attend this webinar and learn the ins and outs of postsecondary Student Retention 101. Host Dr. Watson Scott Swail will present a core overview of retention at the secondary and postsecondary levels and will present a short exploration into contemporary issues related to student success. In doing so, he will introduce his framework for student retention, which illustrates how institutions must consider student background and attributes in order to create effective success strateg ies for students. Dr. Swail will detail the most common barriers to Student Retention as well as successful strategies to overcome these barriers.

Dr. Watson Scott Swail is President and CEO of the Educational Policy Institute and is a well-known expert in the area of Student Retention. He is author of the Jossey-Bass publication Retaining Minority Students in Higher Education and is a frequent keynote speaker and strategic planning consultant to colleges and universities across the US and Canada. Institutions and organizations that have utilized his services include Collin College (TX), Palm Beach Community College (FL), Red River College (Winnipeg, MB), the Ohio Association for Student Financial Aid Administrators (OASFAA), Innovative Educators, NelNet, TG, Canada Student Loans Programs, Northwest Educational Loan Association (NELA), Sallie Mae, ASPIRA, and the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board (THECB).

College And High School Standards Are Very Different

March 8, 2009 11:49 am

Schoolinfosystem.org

Madison, Wisconsin

Degree of Difficulty

Will Fitzhugh

The Concord Review

8 March 2009

In gymnastics, performances are judged not just on execution but also on the degree of difficulty. The same system is used in diving and in ice skating. An athlete is of course judged on how well they do something, but their score also includes how hard it was to do that particular exercise.

One of the reasons, in my view, that more than a million of our high school graduates each year are in remedial courses after they have been accepted at colleges is that the degree of difficulty set for them in their high school courses has been too low, by college standards.

Surveys comparing the standards of high school teachers and college professors routinely discover that students who their teachers judge to be very well prepared, for instance in reading, research and writing, are seen as not very well prepared by college professors.

According to the Diploma to Nowhere report issued last summer by the Strong American Schools project, tens of thousands of students are surprised, embarrassed and depressed to find that, after getting As and Bs in their high school courses, even in the “hard” ones, they are judged to be not ready for college work and must take non-credit remedial courses to make up for the academic deficiencies that they naturally assumed they did not have.

If we could imagine a ten point degree-of-difficulty scale for high school courses, surely arithmetic would rank near the bottom, say at a one, and calculus would rank at the top, near a ten. Courses in Chinese and Physics, and perhaps AP European History, would be near the top of the scale as well.

When it comes to academic writing, however, and the English departments only ask their students for personal and creative writing, and the five-paragraph essay, they are setting the degree of difficulty at or near the bottom of the academic writing scale. The standard kind of writing might be the equivalent of having math students being blocked from moving beyond fractions and decimals.

Naturally, students who have achieved high grades on their high school writing, but at a very low level of difficulty, are likely to be shocked when they are asked to write a 10-20-page research paper when they enter college. They have never encountered that degree of difficulty in their high school careers.

It would be as if math students were taking only decimals and fractions, and then being asked to solve elementary calculus problems when they start their higher education.

I was shocked to discover that even the most famous program for gifted students in the United States, the Johns Hopkins Center for Talented Youth, which began as a search for mathematically precocious youth, and has very challenging programs for bright students in the summer, when it comes to writing, has sponsored a contest for “Creative Minds” to have students do “Creative Nonfiction.” This genre turns out to be like a diary entry about some event or circumstance in the author’s life, together with their feelings about it.

This may fit very well with the degree of difficulty in many if not most high school English classes, but, even if it is done well (and wins the contest, for example) it falls very short of the expectations for academic writing at the college level.

My main experience for the last thirty years or so, has been with high school writing in the social studies, principally history. I started The Concord Review in 1987, as the only journal in the world for the academic papers of high school students. My expectation was that students might send me their 4,000-word history research papers, of the sort which the International Baccalaureate requires of its Diploma students.

I did receive some excellent IB Extended Essays, and I have now published 846 papers by secondary students from 44 states and 35 other countries, but as time went by, the level-of-difficulty in submissions went up, as did the excellence in their execution.

These students who sent me longer and better essays, did so on their own initiative, inspired, by the chance for recognition, and the example of their peers, to raise the degree of difficulty themselves, even as each set of gymnasts, divers, and ice skaters do for the Olympics ever four years. I began receiving first-class 8,000-word papers, then 13,000-word papers from high school history scholars. The longest I have published was 21,000 words, on the Mountain Meadows Massacre in Utah in 1857, by a girl who had also taken time to be a nationally-ranked equestrian, an activity which also features a degree-of-difficulty measure. Students like the ones I publish find themselves mobbed when they get to college, by their peers who have never had to write a research paper before.

We now require too few of our high school students to read nonfiction books—another failure in setting an appropriate degree of difficulty—and we set the degree-of-difficulty level far too low when it comes to academic writing. We should consider giving up this destructive practice of holding the performance of our students to such a low standard, and one that disables too many of them for early success in higher education. Lots of our high school students can and will meet a higher standard, if we just offer it to them.

“Teach by Example”

Will Fitzhugh [founder]

Consortium for Varsity Academics® [2007]

The Concord Review [1987]

Ralph Waldo Emerson Prizes [1995]

National Writing Board [1998]

TCR Institute [2002]

730 Boston Post Road, Suite 24

Sudbury, Massachusetts 01776 USA

978-443-0022; 800-331-5007

www.tcr.org; fitzhugh@tcr.org

Varsity Academics®

Community College Stdents Do Not Take Remedial Courses They Need

March 6, 2009 9:56 am

Although over 60% of community college students who enter from high school need remediation, large numbers shun these courses, and end up dropping out. Data from Columbia Teachers College Center for Community College Research show 36% in math and 27% in English took other courses ,but never enrolled in a remedial course after placement. We need to know more about why this happens, but students cannot complete their programs without passing a developmental sequence.

I visited a Ca community college last week where students complained they could not take a vocational course they wanted until they passed out of remediation. But if colleges let students take what they want, students may never enroll in developmental education. Perhps you have some ideas on how to solve this dilema.

What Is College Readiness??

March 5, 2009 10:38 am

There is no consensus on this term so confusion abounds when it is mentioned. On a recent NAEP panel we distinguished readiness from academic prepardness which means can be measured by some types of tests or assessments.

College readiness is an elusive and multi-faceted concept that has no standard definition. Consequently, there is confusion among terms like “college readiness”, “college culture”, “college preparedness”, etc. This blog will provide some arbitrary definitions based on my judgments from the most appropriate literature. The overall design starts with secondary school student readiness attributes and then moves to cultures in secondary schools that build readiness. It ends with analysis of measuring dimensions of readiness. My themes are how complex readiness is and how many dimensions need to come together in order to embody and help produce readiness.

David T. Conley has the broadest view of college readiness, so it is the best starting point (Conley, 2007- see www.epiconline.org paper on College readiness). He breaks readiness down to four integrated components:

Habits of Mind – patterns of intellectual behavior that lead to the development of cognitive strategies and capabilities necessary for college work. Among these are: intellectual openness, inquisitiveness, analysis, reasoning, interpretation, precision and problem solving. Multiple choice tests cannot measure all these elements.
Overarching Academic Skills – writing, research, English, math, science, social studies, world languages, etc. These include skills such as: evaluate source material, synthesize, access information from a variety of locations, and written argumentation.
Academic Behavior – metacognition, mastery of study skills, time management, note taking, communication with teacher and advisers.
Conceptual Skills and Awareness – this is sometimes called “college knowledge” and encompasses teamwork, communication with others, understanding of college admission/placement, college options, financial aid applications, testing, college cultures, and expectations of postsecondary education.