Two New Books Harshly Criticize Universities

The debate over American higher education has been reignited recently, thanks to two critical new books.  HIGHER EDUCATION? How Colleges Are Wasting Our Money and Failing Our Kids–And What We Can Do About It (Times Books) by Andrew Hacker, a professor emeritus of political science at Queens College, and Claudia C. Dreifus, a journalist.  The other critical book is Mark C. Taylor’s CRISIS ON CAMPUS: A Bold Plan for Reforming Our Colleges and Universities (Knopf).

As David Kirp observed in his American Prospect review of Hacker and Dreifus said: “Not so long ago, colleges saw their students as young people whose preferences were to be formed, but in these market-driven times they regard students as consumers whose preferences are to be satisfied…Colleges spend scads of money to make their campuses as spiffy as suburbia.  The ratio of administrators to students has mushroomed…Most contentiously, Hacker and Dreifus contend that professors’ research gets in the way of education (by which they mean teaching).

Jobs For The Future Provides Useful Resources On College Completion and Early College Policies

Teacher View On K-12 Tests And College Readiness

I suspect the views below represent a lot of high school teachers perspective.

The Boston Globe

Failure to educate

The Boston school system is churning out illiterate students whose only skills are to pass predictable standard tests

By Junia Yearwood

November 8, 2010

I DID not attend a graduation ceremony in 25 years as a Boston public high school teacher. This was my silent protest against a skillfully choreographed mockery of an authentic education—a charade by adults who, knowingly or unwittingly, played games with other people’s children.

I knew that most of my students who walked across the stage, amidst the cheers, whistles, camera flashes, and shout-outs from parents, family, and friends, were not functionally literate. They were unable to perform the minimum skills necessary to negotiate society: reading the local newspapers, filling out a job application, or following basic written instructions; even fewer had achieved empowering literacy enabling them to closely read, analyze, synthesize, and evaluate text.

However, they were all college bound—the ultimate goal of our school’s vision statement— clutching knapsacks stuffed with our symbols of academic success: multiple college acceptances, a high school diploma; an official transcript indicating they had passed the MCAS test and had met all graduation requirements; several glowing letters of recommendation from teachers and guidance counselors; and one compelling personal statement, their college essay.

They walked across the stage into a world that was unaware of the truth that scorched my soul —the truth that became clear the first day I entered West Roxbury High School in 1979 (my first assignment as a provisional 12th grade English teacher): the young men and women I was responsible for coaching the last leg of their academic journey could not write a complete sentence, a cohesive paragraph, or a well-developed essay on a given topic. I remember my pain and anger at this revelation and my struggle to reconcile the reality before me with my own high school experience, which had enabled me to negotiate the world of words—oral and written—independently, with relative ease and confidence.

For the ensuing 30-plus years, I witnessed how the system churned out academically unprepared students who lacked the skills needed to negotiate the rigors of serious scholarship, or those skills necessary to move in and up the corporate world.

We instituted tests and assessments, such as the MCAS, that required little exercise in critical thinking, for which most of the students were carefully coached to “pass.’’ Teachers, instructors, and administrators made the test the curriculum, taught to the test, drilled for the test, coached for the test, taught strategies to take the test, and gave generous rewards (pizza parties) for passing the test. Students practiced, studied for, and passed the test—but remained illiterate.

I also bear witness to my students’ ability to acquire a passing grade for mediocre work. A’s and B’s were given simply for passing in assignments (quality not a factor), for behaving well in class, for regular attendance, for completing homework assignments that were given a check mark but never read.

In addition, I have been a victim of the subtle and overt pressure exerted by students, parents, administrators, guidance counselors, coaches, and colleagues to give undeserving students passing grades, especially at graduation time, when the “walk across the stage’’ frenzy is at its peak.

When all else failed, there were strategies for churning out seemingly academically prepared students. These were the ways around the official requirements: loopholes such as MCAS waivers; returning or deftly transferring students to Special Needs Programs—a practice usually initiated by concerned parents who wanted to avoid meeting the regular education requirements or to gain access to “testing accommodations’’; and, Credit Recovery, the computer program that enabled the stragglers, those who were left behind, to catch up to the frontrunners in the Race to the Stage. Students were allowed to take Credit Recovery as a substitute for the course they failed, and by passing with a C, recover their credits.

Nevertheless, this past June, in the final year of my teaching career, I chose to attend my first graduation at the urgings of my students—the ones whose desire to learn, to become better readers and writers, and whose unrelenting hard work earned them a spot on the graduation list—and the admonition of a close friend who warned that my refusal to attend was an act of selfishness, of not thinking about my students who deserved the honor and respect signified by my presence.

At the ceremony I chose to be happy, in spite of the gnawing realization that nothing had changed in 32 years. We had continued playing games with other people’s children.

Junia Yearwood, a guest columnist, is a retired Boston Public Schools teacher who taught at English High for 25 years. 

© Copyright 2010 Globe Newspaper Company.

College Board Has New Report On College Prices

Trends in College Pricing 2010
This new report by The College Board provides information on college prices, changing enrollment patterns, and institutional revenues and expenditures. The report indicates that published in-state tuition and fees at public four-year institutions average $7,605 in 2010-11, $555 (7.9%) higher than in 2009-10. Average total charges, including tuition and fees along with room and board, are $16,140, up 6.1% from last year. Out-of-state tuition and fees at public four-year colleges and universities average $19,595, $1,111 (6.0%) higher than in 2009-10. Average total charges are $28,130, up 5.6%. Public two-year colleges average $2,713 in tuition and fees, $155 (6.0%) higher than in 2009-10. Private nonprofit four-year colleges and universities average $27,293 in 2010-11, $1,164 (4.5%) higher than in 2009-10. Average total charges are $36,993, up 4.3% from last year.

Improving developmental education—Opportunities for state policy to support innovation and evaluation

Posted by Mary Perry (Deputy Director) and Matthew Rosin (Senior Research Associate), EdSource. Mountain View, California.

This is the last of three posts drawing from EdSource’s recent study of developmental education in the California Community Colleges, available at www.edsource.org. This post focuses on the relation of state policy to ongoing innovations in developmental education and evaluation of these.

Important work is being done in California and nationally to rethink how developmental education is delivered. Everyone from local college faculty to state policymakers has a role to play in the research, innovation, and evaluation now underway. In the current financial climate, more funding to support pilot projects or increase student support services is probably too much to ask of state leaders, but they can still support these efforts.

On the one hand, despite the pressure to increase completion rates, state policymakers should resist the temptation to act hastily and enact new regulations that codify rigid developmental sequences or approaches. The emerging research makes it clear that there is much to learn on this score and that the most effective programs to date are those that respond to local circumstances and faculty capacity.

On the other hand, state policymakers can and should continue to support the work being done by the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office and other state leadership to standardize the data used to measure student progress and completion. Institutional researchers at colleges throughout the state can help inform and implement shared metrics. They can also help faculty on their campuses develop the capacity to better use such measures to inquire into local developmental programs, the students they serve, and the areas where innovation is most needed.

For the same reason, the state also needs to continue to pursue its goal of developing a comprehensive data system that can follow students from K–12 education through postsecondary education and into the workforce. It should also encourage—and support with additional resources or policy changes where necessary—the kind of system-level cooperation that led to the development of the CB-21 coding rubrics and clarified the definitions of college-level work across the system.

Ideally, this work of innovation and evaluation will result in a stronger spirit of inquiry among all community college stakeholders regarding how to continuously improve the effectiveness of their developmental programs for students.

Improving developmental education—Student course-taking and its implications

Posted by Mary Perry (Deputy Director) and Matthew Rosin (Senior Research Associate), EdSource. Mountain View, California.

This is the second of three posts drawing from EdSource’s recent study of developmental education in the California Community Colleges, available at www.edsource.org. This post focuses on what we learned about student course-taking in developmental sequences, its relation with student outcomes, and some implications for state policy.

EdSource studied the remedial course-taking of the 2002 fall cohort of community college students who enrolled in a remedial sequence in English or math. Our analysis found that most began taking remedial courses during their first year of attendance. We also found that, overall, students who failed or withdrew from their first math or writing course were less likely to attempt a second, more advanced course in those subjects.

One message in this for community college educators and for state policymakers is that supporting students’ success during their first year is very important. Such support should include effective placement practices and academic guidance when students enroll, as a new WestEd study highlights.

Our and other studies also identify aspects of student course-taking that, if improved, could help students be more successful and ultimately have a better chance of college completion. Our findings can be summed up as follows:

• Students should not delay starting remedial course work or stop midway through.
• Students should attend full time or as close to full time as possible.
• When students are struggling academically, they need additional support so that they can pass remedial classes on the first attempt.

Actors throughout the system should look for appropriate policy levers and changes in local practice that can encourage and support these goals. But our study indicates that such policies should stop short of mandates that assume all students enroll with the same objectives or are best served by the same educational offerings.

The course-taking data we analyzed in our study enabled us to compare groups of students based on how far below college-level they began their remedial sequences in both math and English. We found notable differences among those groups in regard to both their ages and their aspirations. For example, students who started at the lowest levels tended to be older: 64% of students who began in for-credit arithmetic (the lowest math level we examined) were 19 years old or younger, compared with 92% of those who started in Intermediate Algebra/Geometry. Students’ academic goals also differed. For example, 32% of those who started more than three levels below College Composition said they aspired to transfer when they enrolled compared with 54% of those who began just one level below.

Some have urged that the state needs to set a uniform policy that immediate remediation (when needed) be mandatory across the system. The quantitative findings from this study are neither strong enough nor clear enough to support such a policy. But our research does illuminate some reasons students delay remedial courses and it indicates that those delays take their toll. We hope that this issue gets attention from the task force called for in Senate Bill (SB) 1143 to explore ways to improve student success and completion.

Improving developmental education—Implications for academic standards in California

Posted by Mary Perry (Deputy Director) and Matthew Rosin (Senior Research Associate), EdSource, Mountain View, California.

This is the first of three posts drawing from EdSource’s recent study of developmental education in the California Community Colleges, available at www.edsource.org. This post focuses on some key implications of the study related to academic standards in California.

A recent EdSource research study of developmental education in California provides quantitative evidence that the larger national objective of increasing college completions cannot be attained unless more community college students successfully reach the point where they can do college-level work.

Through a series of statistical analyses using student-level data, the EdSource study confirmed other research that points to three areas that are crucial for improving success and completion among students who start out taking remedial courses. Those include reducing the need for developmental education, creating conditions that will help students be more successful in the courses they attempt, and compressing the time it takes for students to get through developmental education.

The study also underscores the extreme variability among California’s community colleges in terms of how they configure their developmental programs and how they place students. At some of the system’s 112 colleges, the approach reflects a thoughtful institutional focus on student needs and the best way to help students succeed. At other campuses it may reflect a lack of attention to developmental education, an accumulation of decisions over many years that have not been re-examined, or a lack of knowledge regarding how to improve.

Accepting that some of these variations are inevitable, greater consistency in some areas could make things better for students.

For example, students need clear information about the academic skills needed for college success. To that end, California’s adoption of the Common Core State Standards—and the work to implement those standards in the next few years—would ideally result in a closer alignment between high school graduation requirements and the readiness expectations of community colleges. That won’t happen without renewed discussions about learning expectations among the state’s K–12 and higher education communities. State policymakers and the leadership in all of the state’s public education sectors will play a crucial role in instigating and facilitating those discussions.

The goals of the Common Core are consistent with the efforts by the California Community Colleges Chancellor’s Office to increase the standardization of the system’s placement tests, which is the goal of the CCCAssess pilot project. That standardization is another linchpin in the effort to reduce the need for developmental education in part because of its power to signal clear expectations to K-12 students and faculty. It could also facilitate state policymakers’ ability, working with system leaders, to create common metrics for measuring student readiness. That’s a first critical step if the state wants better measures of student progress and completion rates. These types of data standardization should improve the state’s understanding of the current performance of the system. They could also enhance local faculties’ ability to evaluate their efforts to reform developmental education programs and adjust their strategies as needed.